Dear Nobody

by Berlie Doherty

  At six o’clock I went back into town to collect my bike. It was brilliant. I picked up some wine on the way back and we invited the girls over to eat with us. And in the evening that crazy disco started up again on the island and we went over to it.

  It was fantastic!

  July 23rd

  Dear Nobody,

  It’s a month exactly since I finished with Chris. It isn’t any easier. I can’t stop thinking about him. I’m surprised I never bump into him; he doesn’t live that far away from me. He seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Sometimes, Nobody, I used to feel years older than him. Sometimes I used to feel really impatient with him for being so romantic, so impractical. I know now that that’s what I miss most about him. He would think that if he just put his arms round me and loved me, everything would be all right again. Sometimes, now, I almost believe that’s true.

  I talked to Mum this evening, at last. It wasn’t easy. Dad was out with his band and Robbie was digging a hole in the back garden because he’s decided we should do something for the environment and he’s going to make a pond. The room was yellow with sun, I remember that. I asked Mum if she’d like a glass of sherry, which amazed her, but she giggled and said yes. I had orange juice, of course, piled with ice cubes. No alcohol for you, little tadpole!

  I told Mum that I’d finished with Chris for good. I let the hurt come out then, in front of Mum, when I was telling her. She listened quietly. She didn’t hug me, or anything, of course. She doesn’t know how to. I was glad she didn’t. I wanted to be in control of this.

  I told her that I didn’t want to get married or live with him and I didn’t think Chris and I should tie each other down. Most of all, I told her, I did it because I thought that Chris would be crazy to give up his university place. I didn’t want to be responsible for that, I told her. The easiest way to do it was to make the break now. I know that speech off by heart.

  Mum sat very quiet for a long time, sipping at her sherry as if she was kissing the glass almost, just damping her lips with it. She asked me again to think about having you adopted and I said, very firmly, as I say every time, no. You kicked a bit then. I’m sure you can hear what I’m saying. And she just nodded and sighed a little but there was none of that other stuff, that emotion and stuff

  ‘Then what are you going to do?’ she asked me, and I told her that I would try for a university or college place in Sheffield to do a music degree when you’re old enough to go to the crêche there. Maybe they would even let me re-apply to Manchester to do Composition one day. She pulled a face as if she thought I was mad to think such things are possible. But they are possible. I just know they are. A baby isn’t the end of everything. It’s the beginning of something else. Then I said that I knew she wouldn’t want me to live at home once you were born, and that Grandad had said I could have a room at his house if I wanted it. Her eyebrows shot up then. She hardly ever goes there. I don’t think she likes her mother. Or maybe she doesn’t like her the way she is now, an old woman before her time, day-dreaming the years away. Well, that’s what I thought. I found out that it was something much deeper than that, something much more powerful, that kept her away.

  ‘That’s no place for a baby,’ she said.

  And then I told her what Nan had said.

  I‘d spent days rummaging through all the papers in Mum and Dad’s box files, trying to find my birth certificate and their wedding certificate. I don’t know where they’d hidden them. I felt like a thief in the night, touching forbidden things. And after a bit, when my search was fruitless and yet I searched again and again in the same places, I began to feel quite feverish about it, as if part of my life was lost and would never be found again. And because she sat there, so still and shocked, sipping at an empty sherry glass, I asked, brave as anything, Nobody, if I was born before she was married. She closed her eyes and shuddered, as if she was suddenly cold to the bone. We could hear Robbie outside, singing as he was digging. He would be so hot, out there. Any minute now he’d come in for water and would flop onto the settee, legs sprawled out in front of him, staring from one to the other of us, knowing he was missing something. Somewhere in the room a bluebottle was buzzing. I think it was trapped in the curtains.

  Mum said no, of course not, they’d been married for two years before I was born. She picked up a letter that was lying on the table in front of her and started fanning herself with it. ‘This dreadful heat,’ she said.

  I was a dog on the scent now, digging away, sending all the muck flying up. ‘But there was a baby, wasn’t there? Nan said, “Like mother, like daughter.” What did she mean?’

  I had to find out, Nobody, for you. It seemed to be part of your past, and part of our future.

  ‘If it wasn’t me, who was it? Where is it now?’

  She said it was none of my business, and calm as anything, feeling that deep inside I was the same person as she was, just as you’re the same person as I am, just as she is the same person as that quiet, sad old woman staring all day and all life out of a crack in her bedroom curtains, I told her that I thought it was my business.

  ‘What are you trying to ask me, Helen?’ she said at last, and I told that from what my nan had said it sounded as if I’d been born illegitimate. I was sure that was what she had meant. I told her the words: ‘bad blood’. It was a hard thing to say. ‘Like mother, like daughter.’ I was hurting myself, too. I was hurting you.

  ‘Do you imagine I’d do a thing like that?’ she said then, her voice gone cold and shaking. ‘A dirty thing like that?’

  No. After all I couldn’t imagine it. Not if she thought it was dirty. How can love be dirty? If she’d said sinful, or silly, or thoughtless, it wouldn’t have hurt so much as that word ‘dirty’ did. For a minute I was sidetracked. I asked her if she’d ever been in love, then, which I suppose was a bit of an impertinence. But she’s so difficult to talk to. She’s such a closed-up, tight woman at times. I can’t imagine her being the same age as me, ever. She won’t give anything, just as she won’t take anything from me.

  ‘Well. Were you in love with Dad when you married him?’ Why couldn’t she answer that, at least, instead of sitting there with her mouth all pursed up, fanning herself with her eyes closed, locked away from me? I wanted to see Alice, the girl that she was, the me in her at eighteen or so. And she couldn’t answer that question, or wouldn’t. Does that mean she did or she didn’t? I remembered Mum then as she used to be when I was a kid, at Christmas time perhaps when she’d had a drink or two. I remembered watching her once, shimmeying round the kitchen in an odd, flappy dance that had made Robbie and me laugh. My dad was watching her, too, in a half-proud, half-disapproving way, and she had danced up to him and put both her hands on his shoulders and danced just for him, holding his eyes in hers, and both of them gone quiet as night, till I’d felt embarrassed and locked out. Things like that didn’t happen any more.

  And then, just when I’d given up and I was about to go out of the room she said, ‘If you must know, Helen, I’m the one who was illegitimate, not you.’

  The bluebottle had gone still. Even Robbie had stopped his maniac singing. ‘I was born out of wedlock, as they say. Born in sin. And I’ll never forgive my mother for that.’

  That was when the talking started, little Nobody.

  ‘I don’t even know who my father is,’ she said. ‘Except, Helen, that he was a dancer in a night-club. It was your father who found that out.’

  I was utterly shocked at this news. I walked over to the window and watched Robbie at his digging. One of his friends had come round to help him. They’d stripped off their tee-shirts. I could see how their shoulders were looking pink and sore already.

  ‘So Grandad isn’t really…’ I couldn’t take it in. I felt closer to my grandfather than to any other member of my family; always had done.

  ‘He married her when I was about nine. And that, I can tell you, was a brave and generous thing to do. In those days an unmarried mother was
no more than a slut. Her child was a disgrace. My mother’s family wouldn’t own her. She was an outcast, and so was I. A bastard, that’s what you were called if you didn’t have a father. That’s what I was called, when I was a child at school. That’s the start I had in life.’

  It was as if she’d taken all the guilt of it on herself, all the family shame, and tried to put things right all through her life. I understood her then, for the first time in my life. I understood her commitment to that word ‘decency’ which was a word she cradled as if it was a gem, a precious legacy from another age. I was more shocked and confused by all this than if she’d told me what I thought had been the case, that I was born before she was married, or that she’d had a baby before she had me, or anything like that. Because what she was telling me was something that she had had no choice about, and that she wished had never happened. We have no choice about being born, little Nobody. I’ve made up your mind for you.

  It’s not a stigma any more, not like it was when Mum was a child. No one will be calling you names.

  But I hope you’ll forgive me, all the same.

  Bryn gave me a Barry Hines book that she’d just finished reading. I said I knew him because he lives in Sheffield. I don’t really, but I’ve seen his photograph in The Star. It was a goodbye present, she said, because we were heading off for Burgundy that day. ‘Maybe we’ll see you there,’ she said. ‘I hope we do.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  So we left the Dordogne for the day to whip down to the Auvergne and spent it looking at mountains and taking photographs while Tom talked on and on about Menai. That night we camped on the top of a windy hill. It was bitterly cold, especially for me, minus my sleeping bag. We seemed to be a million miles away from civilization. The camp-site woman had eyes like a cod and Tom christened her the Fish at the End of the Universe. ‘I want Menai!’ he kept saying. ‘I can’t live without her.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe in love,’ I reminded him. ‘You always told me changing girl-friends was as easy as changing your socks.’

  ‘That was before love gave me blisters. I’m bleeding for her, Chris.’

  ‘Get stuffed,’ I said. ‘Love’s about as much use as a flat tyre on a mountain bike.’

  I think, at the time, I meant it.

  July 27th

  Dear Nobody,

  Today Mum and I went to town together. ‘I want to buy you something nice, Helen,’ she said, just as simply as that. It was really hot and you didn’t help – you kept doing a limbo dance, waving your hands about or something. We went to Cole’s first and looked at the materials there. ‘D’you like this?’ she asked me, stroking some blue, soft material.

  ‘It’s lovely, Mum,’ I said. We have that in common. We both love fabrics and colours. When I was little she used to make all my clothes for me.

  ‘Then I’ll buy it,’ she said. ‘And we’ll make a loose dress for you, to keep you cool.’

  She could have bought me a maternity dress; any number. But it wouldn’t have been the same, and I knew it.

  We went to Atkinson’s then, to the chocolate bar that Chris and I used to go to. I half expected to see him there. I half didn’t want to go. In a way it was like exorcizing a ghost, walking into the place, sitting down, taking in his absence for a fact. We had toasted tea-cakes and hot chocolate with cream floating on the top.

  ‘I used to come here with Chris,’ I told her. I said it because at that moment I felt close to her. We used to have days like this together, years ago, when I was about eight. She would leave Robbie at home with Dad and she would take me to town to look at the shops and to buy materials for my dancing shows.

  ‘I expect you did,’ she said. ‘There used to be a place like this near the old station that your father used to take me to, years ago.’ She smiled. ‘There used to be a jazz trio playing there. We spent hours there, holding hands, making one cup of chocolate last all afternoon.’

  Chris and I used to listen to rock on my personal stereo in here, both sets of headphones plugged in. He used to forget himself sometimes and sing out loud to it. Or perhaps he did it on purpose, just to make me laugh.

  On the way back to the bus-stop I saw Jill. She didn’t recognize me at first and I didn’t really want to speak to her, in fact I felt deeply embarrassed, remembering what had happened last time I saw her. How could I have done that to you, little Nobody, that monstrous thing? I was another person then, slightly mad, I think, a frightened little girl, an animal in a trap. I was embarrassed about what she’d told Chris and me about herself, too, that precious, intimate secret. I wanted to tell her about my escape, our escape, from that clinic place. Well, I suppose she could tell, actually. She only had to look at me to know about you.

  It feels as if a thousand years have passed since I last saw her. I didn’t know how to introduce her to Mum, either, because she was so much part of my guilt and secrecy, and I was part of hers. I think she realized I was embarrassed so she chatted away about the horses at the stables and then, when our bus came and she was just about to walk away, she said, ‘I had a postcard from France this morning. He’s having a great time, isn’t he?’

  So that’s where he is. Doesn’t he care, then? Can he just go on holiday and forget about us?

  My head was tumbling with all kinds of confused emotions. I didn’t understand myself. I wanted to run away and hide, be on my own somewhere, open up my thoughts like a locked room and wander about in them. The day was spoilt, and all that lovely warmth that had been growing between Mum and me had gone. I was too wrapped up in myself to talk. I’d gone kind of tongue-tied, couldn’t think of anything to say, couldn’t bring myself to answer her questions about anything. I know she was disappointed. I was too. I didn’t know what to do with myself. We sat in the garden for a bit and then she went in to cut out the dress for me. We should have done it together.

  By the time we got to Burgundy Tom and I were beginning to feel we’d had enough. Some wino with a voice like a bassoon had fallen over my tent in the night and yanked all the guy ropes out, and rather than put it up in the dark I’d crawled in to Tom’s. He was right about not changing his socks any more. They stank to high heaven. In the end I’d rolled them up in a ball and hurled them out of his tent. We found them in a pool of water the next morning.

  ‘At least they’ve had a wash,’ I told him.

  We cruised at last into a little village that was surrounded by fields full of white cows, and looked for the camp-site.

  ‘What wouldn’t I give for a bed,’ Tom moaned. ‘Have you heard of those things, Chris?’

  ‘What things?’ I said. I’d seen something that he hadn’t. A familiar tent. Two girls lying on their stomachs, reading.

  ‘Wooden frames with mattresses and sheets and pillows. Widely used as an alternative to canvas stretched over mud and stones, apparently.’

  He saw them too, then. He raised his fist to me and I raised mine. We couldn’t stop grinning.

  That night we sat in the dark, all four of us, drinking wine and looking up at the stars. We gave them names like Flash-Harry and Sparky, Skylight and Brillo Pad and then we went through them in French and Bryn translated them into Welsh. She wants to be a writer. She’s doing English next year, too, in Leeds. It’s odd how much she reminded me of Helen, yet she was nothing like her at all.

  We were supposed to be carrying on to the Alps the next day but we didn’t. We didn’t even talk about it. It’s what old Tom called fate, I suppose. If only we’d gone to a different camp-site.

  Instead we went for a walk in absolutely sweltering midday heat, all along narrow winding cart-tracks and past fields that were full of corn.

  ‘It’s made of gold, today,’ Bryn said. She looked up at me and away again, biting her lip. ‘I don’t want it to end, ever.’ She told me a poem in Welsh and started to explain about the complicated rhyming pattern of Welsh poetry. We were having a hell of a laugh trying to make up a poem in English that would work the same way
and we suddenly realized that we’d lost Tom and Menai and that we hadn’t a clue where we were. The heat was so intense that it was like walking through a furnace, and there were crickets all round us, chirring away incessantly. The air was heavy with the noise of them, a kind of intense clamouring. We walked down through some trees for shade and there was a river, like something from a dream. Bryn stripped off and jumped straight in. I couldn’t believe it. Helen would never have done that, never in a million years, and there was Bryn just peeling off her clothes as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do and laughing back at me and splashing into the water. There wasn’t a sound, except for insects humming and those crickets, chirring away.

  ‘Come on, Chris,’ Bryn called.

  There were some cows paddling further down and some suspicious-looking brown stuff floating on the top so I didn’t fancy it, but she kept trying to splash me so in the end I jumped in too. We swam up to the cows and they all turned their heads to look at us, all in a row, all big sad eyes. There were huge green and blue dragonflies zipping round us. Bryn said they were demoiselles. We climbed out and lay in the sun. I was almost afraid to look at her.

  She told me that she and her boy-friend had packed up before she came away, and that she had never thought she’d be happy again, and that today had been fantastic. I told her about Helen.

  ‘What’s she like?’ Bryn asked me.

  Like a poem, I wanted to say, like a star, ‘She’s brilliant.’

  ‘Oh,’ Bryn laughed, ‘too clever for you, then.’

  I would have liked to tell her about the baby but I couldn’t. I told her that Helen had said she didn’t want to see me again, and she asked me if I was very hurt about it, and I said yes, very, and my voice cracked a bit then. We lay there without saying anything and the grass was full of poppies and butterflies and these huge green demoiselles and I was wondering what the hell I was going to do about the way I was beginning to feel and she just kind of rolled over in the grass towards me and put her arms out and began to kiss me.