September Starlings

by Ruth Hamilton

  Please write to me soon.

  God bless you,

  Confetti.

  I smiled at Confetti’s words of encouragement, then passed the letter to Frank. ‘Do you think I’ve got this post-natal depression thing?’

  His eyes sparkled. ‘No sign of that last night, old girl. I think you’re just having a bit of trouble getting used to motherhood, that’s all.’

  My feelings for Gerald were similar to those I’d had for dolls. I didn’t want to play with him, wasn’t struck on showing him off in his pram, didn’t enjoy dressing him up and going for walks with him. I did all these things, but they required a great deal of energy and were founded not in what I recognized as love, but in willpower. I made an act of will each morning, then every day I worked hard at being a good parent.

  ‘He should have stayed in the cardboard box. I wouldn’t have minded looking at him through cellophane. Oh, Frank, I feel so bloody awful. This poor little lad. Just look at him, will you? All that lovely blond hair turning brown, those beautiful eyes staring at me all the time. Does he know, Frank? Does he know how I feel about his dad?’

  ‘Stop it, Laura.’ He took a step towards me, folded his arms around my neck, dropped his chin and smiled at me. ‘It will come. Your love for this baby is just buried under a few other things.’

  Like rape and a broken leg, I thought. Like rice pudding and a broken heart. Thick pudding dripping down the wall and a man shouting for me, ordering me to lie beneath him so that he could hate me properly, fully. ‘I’m not normal,’ I insisted. ‘I don’t like myself. Someone else should be Gerald’s mother, someone kind and loving.’

  ‘Stop it, sweetheart.’ His hair looked really peculiar, was starting to grow. Although he kept it short, the roots looked bright pink compared to the lifeless greeny-brown that was cropped close, too close for the fashion of the day. ‘Keep your hat on,’ I advised yet again.

  He laughed. ‘When I take it off, I tell any onlookers that I used to be an actor and that my latest bit part required a cripple with brown hair. They are all waiting for the film to come out, but they’re in for a very long wait. I’ve called this non-existent epic The Luck of the Devil. I hope there isn’t one coming out with that title.’ He stepped away, pulled on the old-fashioned trilby, tipped it over one eye. ‘I can always look sad and say that the brown-haired cripple is on a cutting-room floor.’

  I didn’t think of him as a cripple. He was the kindest person I had encountered for ages – with the possible exception of my pen-pal, Confetti – and I loved him with a passion I had not expected to discover in someone of my nature. I was a cool person, humorous but detached, a watcher rather than a doer. I remembered telling my cousin Anne that I wanted to be a doer, but things hadn’t turned out that way for me. I was a collector, a gatherer of people. Often, I wrote people in a little book, wondered vaguely whether I would ever find the energy to write novels or short stories.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ asked the man in my life.

  ‘Becoming a writer.’

  He didn’t laugh. Frank never laughed at people’s hopes and dreams. ‘Yes. I can see you scribbling at a desk in some quiet attic. Try it.’ He gathered up his briefcase and kissed the top of my head, tickled Gerald under the chin. ‘See you later.’

  I watched as he drove away in his brand-new Ford, waved until he disappeared round the corner. Gerald, whose bloom of health was even rosier this morning, was sitting propped up by cushions in his pram. He stared at me solemnly. This was a serious baby who took in everything that went on around him. He frightened me, because I guessed that he felt my lack of love. ‘Smile,’ I said to him. ‘Come on, give Mummy a smile.’

  He had lovely eyes of a soft grey-blue, and hair whose colour was either dark blond or light brown. His crowning glory was shiny and thick, had begun to thicken shortly after birth. At almost four months of age, he was solid, crammed with nourishment, deprived of real love. He continued to stare at me until I walked away.

  We were living in a village just outside St Helens, a tiny place that nestled amid some of Lord Derby’s rich crop fields. It was safe enough, I mused as I washed the breakfast dishes. We were surrounded by emptiness, attached to half a dozen cottages that housed labourers from tenant farms. No-one ever came here. He would not find me, I insisted while drying the cups and saucers.

  The telephone screamed at me. It was an angry-looking red thing, was attached to a wall in the kitchen. I lifted the receiver, inhaled deeply to prevent my heart from forcing its noisy way up my throat. ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s only me.’

  ‘Dad.’ I felt the tension running out of me, almost heard the stiffness cracking as it melted in my shoulders. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ He paused. I knew that he had covered the handset, could hear muffled words as he talked to someone else. ‘Laurie?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is Frank there?’

  ‘No, he went to work a few minutes ago.’

  Dad left me hanging on again, this time failing to cover the phone. ‘Look, Freddie, just go out and buy another bloody gallon of it.’ To swear, John McNally needed to be at the end of his tether. ‘And tell them out there that I’ll be cutting their wages if they spill any more. That stuff’s four pounds a quart.’

  ‘Dad?’ By this time, my nerves were on edge again. ‘Is it Tommo? Has he been up to see you?’ Tommo had threatened my parents with everything from a law-suit to physical pain, was causing not a little gossip in my father’s village.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Sorry, love. It’s a bit hectic here today. I wanted to talk to Frank. Have you any idea where he is?’

  I flicked through the schedule on the cork notice-board next to the phone. ‘Formby, Ainsdale, Southport.’

  ‘Right. I’ll try one of the shops on his route, get him to call me back.’

  ‘Why?’ I shouted. ‘Is it business or is it Tommo?’

  ‘Both,’ he answered softly. ‘But there’s nothing to worry about. Really, Laurie, don’t start getting yourself upset.’

  ‘He’s been round again, hasn’t he?’ Gerald was grizzling and I needed to go to him. As a dutiful mother, I did not leave my infant to cry on his own. Most of the time, I cried with him, was uneasy when Frank was out, couldn’t cope by myself. I was not a coper. I was useless, no good—

  ‘Laurie?’

  ‘I’m still here.’

  ‘Look, I’ll get away tonight when it’s dark. Fix up the bed in the spare room and get a nice meal together. Do you need anything?’ He often did our shopping, filled up freezer and cupboards at least twice a month. ‘I can get off early and pick up some things in St Helens.’

  ‘No, Dad. You do too much already.’

  ‘Only for you, Laurie-child. Oh and Liza’s moaning again about never seeing her grandson.’

  ‘Don’t bring her,’ I yelled. ‘Please don’t bring her.’

  He laughed, though the sound contained little humour. ‘That’s my other ear-drum punctured,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s done my left in, and now you’ve completed the set. See you later.’

  I rang off, spread the tea-towel to dry, gazed through the window at the endless flatness of the fields. It was a boring place. I hadn’t thought about it before, but now I missed my own undulating countryside. Perhaps movement in the land made for interesting people, because this lot round here were surely the dullest crowd I had never met. They hadn’t even bothered to introduce themselves after we had moved into the house at the end of the terrace. Flat land, flat folk. I closed the window, went back to my son in the living room.

  He had slipped sideways, so that his little head was resting on the side of the pram. I walked round to him, reached out to lift him into a more comfortable position. My hands froze in mid-air. Gerald’s skin was a pale blue-white, and there was no movement in him. My baby was dead. My baby had died from lack of love. I backed away from the tiny embodiment of my mortal sin, crouched down in a corner of the room, scream
ed and yelled for help until the house threatened to burst open.

  It did burst open. The woman in the doorway was short and fat, with red hands and a pale face, but her face wasn’t as pale as Gerald’s. Needing my neighbours was becoming a habit. I should not have called the people hereabouts flat and dull, because there was nothing placid about this rounded lady. And I shouldn’t be thinking about neighbours, shouldn’t be cataloguing folk for my collection when my baby had just breathed his last. The newcomer’s work-scalded hands plucked my child from his pram and turned him upside down. ‘Water,’ she snapped at me as she pummelled the little body. ‘Hot and cold, sink and bowl.’

  I ran out, chanted in my head, ‘hot and cold, sink and bowl’, filled the sink, filled the bowl, called to the woman, ‘I’ve done it, I’ve got the water.’

  She rushed into the kitchen, dunked Gerald in the bowl, clouted him, immersed him in the sink. ‘He’s right now,’ she said. ‘Must have got a bit of a temperature, love. It doesn’t mean he’ll always have fits, but you’d best see a doctor all the same.’ She unveiled my son, pulled the towel from his face. And he smiled at me. The cheeky little rascal grinned so widely that his face was almost in two halves.

  ‘I’m Hetty Hawkesworth,’ she stated defiantly. ‘No jokes, please. They call me Hetty the Hawk because I miss nowt.’ She thrust the wriggling bundle that was Gerald into my arms. ‘Get out of me road,’ she ordered, launching herself at the telephone. Within ten seconds, a taxi was on its way. ‘I’ll not mither the ambulance, because this is no more than an infantile convulsion. Don’t look at me as if I’m daft, I’ve done more than enough auxiliary nursing in my time.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He was beautiful. He was beautiful and he was smiling and I had nearly lost him and I didn’t love him.

  Hetty the Hawk dragged some clothes from a pile in the corner. ‘Give him here. Now get shaping, go and make yourself ready. Take him to the Provvy, tell the sisters that I sent you.’ Although she was plump, Hetty deserved to be likened to a bird of prey, because her nose was definitely hooked.

  I stood in the doorway and tried not to look at the predatory nose. ‘The Provvy?’

  ‘Providence Hospital, love. Nuns run it. If you’d rather, you can take him to Whiston – or all the way to Alder Hey Children’s. The Provvy’s the nearest.’

  Nuns. I liked the sound of that, trusted it. I realized that day that I would always run to the sisterhood when I was troubled. There was Confetti in the post and there was a convent in St Helens. They would find me wherever I went, the sisters.

  Gerald was weighed and measured, played with and cosseted, fussed over by half a dozen women in hospital white and the usual veils. The doctor was a layman, of course, and he expressed the opinion that this had been a one-off, a sudden rise in temperature, probably caused by a passing virus, and that Gerald had shaken off his fever in the age-old way, by having a short fit. ‘There’ll probably be no more,’ said the doctor. ‘A fine boy, a credit to you.’

  The nuns walked me to the door, asked after Hetty, told me to keep an eye on her. ‘She’s had a bad bout of illness, can’t work any more. Tell her we’re thinking of her.’

  I waved from the taxi, blinked against my filling eyes, remembered the charabanc with the awful orchestra and the puny choir, saw Sister Agatha’s face when ‘her girls’ assassinated a perfectly innocent piece of music. Love. It was all about love.

  He was clutching my finger all the way home, holding on to me, willing me to look at him and be his mother. At some traffic lights, the driver turned and stared at me, took in the sight of my tears dripping down onto my son’s head. ‘Eeh, that’s a picture,’ he said contentedly. ‘There’s no mistaking a mother’s love, is there?’

  So this was mother-love, was it? This feeling of relief that had replaced my terror? Was this it? Or had my anguish sprung from guilt, was it the same emotion I would have experienced had a dog almost died of my neglect?

  ‘Da,’ said Gerald.

  I dashed a palm across my moist face. ‘You’re too young to talk, Gerald Thompson. People do not talk until they have teeth and a proper backbone and no holes in the middle of their skull.’

  ‘Da,’ he said.

  I touched the spot where the four sections met, where Mother Nature had left room for my child’s brain to grow before closing its container. He was going to be clever. That was why he stared all the time. Like me, Gerald would be a collector, an assessor of things or of people. ‘Silly,’ I said aloud. ‘How on earth can I tell what you’re going to be? As long as …’I paused, because the thought was frightening. ‘As long as you don’t turn out like your dad.’

  He grinned wetly, toothlessly, the bright red gums seeming sore and swollen. ‘Da.’

  And I hugged him all the way home.

  By the time my father was due to arrive, my toothless son had four thin wafers of bone in his mouth, two in the upper storey, two in what Frank called the balcony seats. ‘Teething,’ said Frank. ‘It can drive them nuts, give them all kinds of peculiar symptoms.’

  ‘Not fits.’ I clutched the baby to my bosom, refused to leave him out of my sight even for a second.

  ‘You can’t keep taking him to the bathroom with you,’ said Frank. ‘Come on, Laura, this has got to stop.’

  Dad entered by the front door, was immediately accosted by me. I told him about the fit, the neighbour, the hospital. Dad wasn’t unduly impressed or worried. ‘Those things happen. Get him off to bed, Laurie. He’ll be exhausted after producing four incisors in one fell swoop.’

  I obeyed reluctantly. As I placed him in his cot, Gerald ‘Da-ed’ again, chuckled loudly when I tickled his ribs. ‘Listen, you little monkey,’ I said. ‘There’ll be no more of this caper, right? If you want a bit of attention, just yell “Da”.’

  ‘Da,’ he repeated.

  I crouched down and looked at him through the wooden bars. ‘Why didn’t you say something about those nasty teeth, kid? How the hell am I supposed to read your mind? Couldn’t you just have stuck your fingers in your gob? I mean, you don’t even give clues, do you?’

  He laughed again, obviously found me amusing. He was so alive, so pretty, that I forgot all about meals waiting downstairs, cleared my mind of threats that had been issued by the so-called natural father of my son. Gerald and I got through The Three Bears, Rumpelstiltskin and Little Miss Muffet before I remembered that there were other people in the house. But it was a good feeling, a positive change for the better. I had just learned how to be a reasonable, if not an excellent parent.

  My meal awaited me. I sat down in the kitchen, picked up my fork, tackled the chicken casserole that Frank had served on my plate.

  ‘Is he settling?’ asked Dad.

  I nodded, swallowed some food. ‘He’ll be OK.’

  My father looked at Frank, at me, at Frank again. ‘Tommo’s in trouble,’ he said carefully. ‘He’s … been charged with rape.’

  The fork hung in mid-air for a split second, then clattered onto my plate. Some other poor woman, some other poor girl … ‘How old was she?’ It was important that his victim should be mature, capable of understanding what had happened to her, capable of anger. Though, whatever her age, any woman would be shattered by such an experience.

  ‘No name has been issued, but the folk around Deane think they know the girl. She’s eighteen. Laura, you may be called upon to answer questions.’ He held up a hand to still my clear apprehension. ‘It’s more than likely that the questions will come from a doctor. You won’t be required to give evidence in court against your husband. But the rumour is that Tommo’s … out of control.’

  ‘Insane.’ I did not lift up the second syllable, did not need to frame questions about Tommo’s state of health. I knew now. Since Frank, I knew about my husband’s sickness. ‘Is she … is the girl all right?’ Damned silly thing to ask, but I was so concerned for her.

  ‘Well, she’s in hospital,’ answered Dad. ‘He knocked her about a bit, cracked a couple of ribs.
Rumour also has it that Tommo’s insisting that the girl consented, that all the injuries were accidental. It’s going to be his word against hers.’ He paused, sipped at his glass of water. ‘That’s if the girl decides to testify at all. Raped women do tend to get a raw deal sometimes. He may even get off scot-free. Unless you tell this doctor that Tommo needs some kind of treatment for his problems.’

  I realized that I was shaking like a leaf. Frank came to my side, knelt on the floor, held my hands until the ague passed from me to him. Our eyes locked until he had absorbed my terror. ‘Laura, you don’t need to do anything unless you want to.’

  ‘He’ll find me. If I talk, he’ll find me.’

  Dad pretended to busy himself by cleaning his glasses on a paper napkin. Obtusely, I thought of Mother, wondered how she would react if she learned that her daughter used paper serviettes. ‘Any answers or opinions given to a doctor will be kept secret,’ he said. ‘Tommo won’t know anything about it. But the medical folk in Bolton were not fooled by your story, Laura. Didn’t you insist that you had fallen down the stairs?’

  I nodded mutely.

  ‘But …’ My father paused, dreaded the pain he would suffer if I spoke the whole truth about my leg. He placed his spectacles on the table, steadied himself, cleared his throat. ‘But he hurt you.’ He jumped up from his chair and paced about. ‘Sometimes, people can be really stupid. When you had the broken femur, I wondered, I worried. But I wanted so badly to believe your version … I believed what suited me, Laurie. Because I couldn’t have coped with the truth.’

  I watched him as he travelled back and forth across my kitchen. ‘It’s over now,’ I said. ‘And I would like to help that girl. But I don’t want to think about him, don’t want to talk about what he did to me. I’m sorry.’

  Frank shook his head. ‘Talking might help you, love.’

  ‘No. I’m not ready.’