The Queen of Bloody Everything

by Joanna Nadin

  Because I am the biggest question of all, aren’t I: a walking punctuation mark trailing ‘how’s and ‘why’s and ‘what if’s in my next line. How did you conceive me? Why did you keep me? What if you hadn’t?

  But I never articulated any of them, preferring to piece together my own truth from your intermittent pronouncements on pregnancy, and abhorrence of other people’s children. And the answer? I am lucky, I deduced, though luck was not the word I would have chosen for my life at the time. But a miracle, maybe, that you decided to keep me. Because it wasn’t love, was it, Edie; an instantaneous connection with this odd peanut of a creature growing inside you? How could it be, when I stretched your stomach and split your skin, leaving slivers of silver to mark my work? How could it be, when I made you sick not just in the mornings but every waking hour? How could it be, when you knew you would have to drop out of university for me, make sacrifices for me, lose friends for me? No, I decided, the only things that had prevented my termination were your morbid fear of hospitals and an equal determination to upset your parents.

  I can’t imagine how you must have felt when you first found out; knowing how it had happened, and what it meant. I can’t imagine how discovering you are carrying a child, however it is conceived, and at whatever age, feels at all. But I know others who do.

  Harry is pregnant, or so the pink lines claim.

  ‘It could be a false positive,’ I try, desperately scrabbling for a scrap of hope.

  But Harry’s rose-tinted glasses are shut away in the same drawer as the pills she forgot to take. ‘That’s three in a row,’ she says. ‘You can’t get three false positives in a row.’

  ‘Tina says her cousin’s mate’s girlfriend had four positives in a row once, plus the one they do at the doctor, and then it turned out she wasn’t after all.’

  But this she dismisses as bullshit.

  ‘Is it . . . his?’ I ask.

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘You know,’ I almost whisper. ‘Mr Macdonald.’

  Mr Macdonald: the newly qualified and entirely useless music teacher who spends most of our pitiful lessons playing Ultravox samples on a Casio keyboard whilst eyeing Harry through a curtain of studiously messy hair. Yet so lacking is our school in dynamic father figures that he has already shot into second place of teachers you totally would, ranking behind only part-time PE teacher and full-time perv Mr Thomas who once came third in hurdles in a national athletics competition about a billion years ago.

  I never understood the older guy thing. Couldn’t see the attraction in a man with ten years on me or even twice my age: a man old enough to be my father. I know pop psychologists and tabloid tattlers would have me and others like me – the poor fatherless brats that we are – ruthlessly pursuing sugar daddies, subordinating ourselves to the rich but wrinkled in some kind of twisted compensation for all those lost years when we should have been sitting on their corduroy knee playing ‘Grand Old Duke of York’. But the idea of it was beetles on my skin, so unthinkable I would shudder to brush them off my spine where they had begun their steady crawl.

  Harry, however, had no such compunction.

  ‘Oh God, Di. He’s so bloody . . .’ She trailed off in apparent reverie, before coming to make her final pronouncement on the subject. ‘I think I might love him.’

  ‘You said that about Gary,’ I pointed out – and about five other boys before that, I thought, uncharitably.

  ‘Yeah, well, I hadn’t met Ewan then,’ said Harry in her defence.

  ‘Ewan? Seriously?’

  ‘What? I like it. Better than Gary. God, he was such a . . . child.’

  ‘So is it him?’ I ask again now. ‘Mr Macdonald – Ewan, I mean.’ My imagination is already conjuring up a variety of school scandals, aided and abetted by the knowledge that Harry has been to his flat several times after school, on the pretence that he is teaching her piano.

  ‘God, no!’ she protests. ‘I only let him use his fingers. Worse than that.’

  ‘Worse than a teacher? So whose, then?’

  She looks sheepish then, apologetic, though how any answer could possibly be worse than the music teacher is hard to fathom. ‘Denny.’

  ‘From the video shop?’

  She nods. And I realize she is right. Somehow it is worse. I picture him – his white shirt undone to reveal a gold chain and carotene-tablet tan. His highlights. His insistence that George Michael is in no way homosexual. But he is three years older and drives a Datsun, which to Harry is better lubricant than KY.

  ‘I thought he was going out with Suzanne Nichols?’

  ‘He is.’

  Bollocks, I think. But I am a faithful best friend, and it is not our job to agree with worst-case scenarios, so I grasp at straws again in a bid to make it better. ‘Maybe . . . maybe this is just your body reacting in a panic to the possibility of it. You know, phantom pregnancy. I read . . . I read this thing where a horse thought it was—’

  ‘A horse?’ She is incredulous. ‘I’m not a fucking horse. God, Di, you’re such a bloody . . . you always look on the bright side. Only there isn’t one. I’m pregnant. That’s all there is to it.’ She sounds almost defiant, her insistence that she is right outweighing her desperation to be wrong. But as she drops this third white stick into our bathroom bin, pushing it down under used cotton wool and tampon wrappers, her shoulders sag and she sits down abruptly on the edge of the bath next to me.

  ‘Shit, Di. What am I going to do? What the fuck am I going to do?’

  And then it comes to me. I know precisely who will have the answer. God knows she can’t be bothered with homework, and she’s not much help with stomach bugs because of the horrible sick, or the flu, because it’s so bloody boring, but teen pregnancy, this is so her bag. And so, for the first time in an emergency, I actually do what the children in stories always did: I ask my mother.

  I ask you.

  Harry is nervous when she tells you. But not as nervous as she would be if it were Angela, and her apprehension is tinged with relief that you know about these things, and will not judge her. After all, you have let her smoke in the kitchen, given her condoms, taught her how to put them on with the aid of a banana. Maternal advice you’ve clearly not bothered to follow yourself, and the kind I would rather chew off my own arm than have to endure first-hand. I, however, am suddenly terrified. What if you tell her to keep it? You kept me, after all. What if she decides to go through with the whole thing and has a baby at the age of, what, eighteen, in the middle of her A levels, and it is all, all your fault?

  But if I was hoping for a no, a ‘don’t even think about keeping it’, when I get it I am thrown further than I thought possible.

  ‘Not my decision, darling, but if you want my advice you’ll get rid. Or you’ll end up stuck in this shitty town and you’ll turn into . . .’ You trail off, knowing you are about to overstep a mark, which for you is self-restraint on an unprecedented scale. But then you go and ruin it.

  ‘Just don’t do what I did,’ you say. Then turn to me: ‘No offence.’

  ‘None taken,’ I lie.

  ‘But will it hurt?’ Harry asks.

  ‘The abortion?’ you ask. ‘Yes. But only for a bit. It’s like period pain, that’s all.’

  It takes me a few seconds, because at first I’m thinking about Harry having to have a knitting needle or whatever they use these days poked sharply into her womb. But then I understand what you’re saying, and I feel the truth drip coldly down inside me. This isn’t second-hand knowledge from Toni – of course not from Toni, because how would a child have even got in there in the first place, save for that one time she shagged a man?

  You are talking about yourself. Not about me, not about keeping me. But about getting rid of another child. A child that could have, would have, been my brother or sister.

  ‘When did you have one?’ I demand. ‘An abortion, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, ages ago.’ You flap your hand dismissively.

  But that doesn’t answer th
e question. ‘Before or after me?’

  You purse your lips, a habit I have noticed you indulge in when you are about to actually tell the truth. ‘After,’ you say.

  I feel my right leg begin to shake, and start to tap my foot in a bid to stop it, to fool it into believing I am fine. But I just succeed in looking strange and agitated, and you can see it.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ you say. ‘But it wasn’t a good time. And anyway, how could I love anyone as much as you?’ You laugh, trying to lighten the leaden words, but it’s strained, desperate. And when you try to touch my arm, I pull away.

  But this drama is minor, it seems. My own fragile existence and the non-existence of my sibling a matter for another time, or not at all. Because you, you do not want to talk about it. And Harry? She is, inevitably, oblivious.

  ‘So can we book it then?’

  ‘Of course,’ you say. ‘Let’s do it now. I’ll come with you. We both will. It will be a day out!’ You clap your hands as if you’re promising a trip to the theatre or the zoo, with ice cream and balloons and a clown act if we’re good. When even I, who know nothing about these things but the little that has been whispered around the upper-school toilets or gleaned from the Dear Deidre column, realize that the obstetric wards of Addenbrooke’s are far from a tourist attraction and the procedure neither a party nor a picnic.

  But Harry, it seems, is delighted with this solution, because when I look over to offer a raised eyebrow of apology, her face is painted with relief and the lip-biting tic of potential adventure.

  In the end, I do not come. It’s scheduled for a Friday and you think it will raise suspicion if we’re both off school. The plan, instead, is that Harry will leave during free period and you will drive her to the hospital and then home again – home to ours – where she will stay the night – a sleepover already countenanced by Mrs Trevelyan, who thinks we’re rehearsing for our roles in Macbeth: a bloody-handed murderess and one-third of a coven getting into character. (Roles we will eventually play with such authenticity and empathy that Harry will win the hearts of half the upper sixth, while I will court the attention of the unofficial goth society.)

  For something you have cooked up, it surprises me by tick-tocking along like clockwork. When I burst through the door just fifteen minutes out of double English – my palms sweating, my heart marching with the fear of what might have happened, and the guilt of pretending to Tom that nothing is going on – you are both lying on your bed, with a blister packet of paracetamol on the bedside table and drinks in your hands.

  ‘Gin,’ you say. ‘I thought it was appropriate. A kind of celebration present. And useful, too. Want one?’

  I shake my head slowly, focusing now on Harry, who lies palely on your pillow, looking for all the world like she is trying to channel some consumptive Brontë heroine and yet still managing to exude glory.

  ‘Are you . . . ?’ I begin, then change my mind as to which question I will ask first, jostling as they are for attention. ‘Did it hurt?’

  Harry shakes her head, weakly, in contrast to the enthusiasm that decorates her voice. ‘No. It does now a bit but the tablets are helping. And it wasn’t gross or anything, was it?’ She looks at you then, and I feel an unfamiliar prick of jealousy, a momentary desire to be the one who has been through this rite of passage, with you by her side.

  Then I remember what you have done, and what you could have done to me.

  ‘Good,’ I say. ‘Brilliant. That’s . . . that’s brilliant.’

  If I sound like I’m struggling, it’s because I am. I don’t know what to do with the way I feel about you, about what is and might have been, about Harry being the girl I am not, about me being the girl I am. And so I do what I always do when confronted by this level of confusion.

  I eat.

  And I eat.

  And I eat.

  I sit at the kitchen table, working my way through two packets of Bourbons, seven custard creams, half a block of cheddar and then, at my lowest point, four unbuttered slices of white bread, which is so dry I can barely swallow.

  Then, as Harry sleeps, and you drain the dregs of her gin, I throw it all up at the bottom of the garden, heaving into a bush between sobs that rack through me like imagined contractions.

  A Little Love Song

  August 1986

  Can you hear the music, Edie? Can you?

  You loved this band, and, God, how I hated you for it. They belonged to me, I thought; I knew. Their sullen, sunken shoulders, the lyrics dripping with melancholy and the damp of bedsit walls, the jangle of guitars like a death rattle. Only they could possibly understand the misery I felt, the tragedy that tore through every day, every hour that I wasn’t with him.

  It’s a cassette, one I made decades ago. You’d recognize the songs: God knows I played it enough times that the plastic is scratched and the tape held together in two places with Sellotape. You can still read the faded black biro on the title sticker though: For Tom, it says. Goodbye, Essex. This is just a copy, though, a simulacrum that meant we could lie on our beds, 156 miles apart (of course I checked, with two maps), both listening to Dylan and Waits and the syrup-sweet sound of Nina Simone lamenting that we don’t know what it’s like.

  Or so I imagined. I’m not sure what happened to Tom’s original; lent out, lost to travel, maybe, or left behind in a drawer in one of a string of raftered bedrooms, along with the flotsam and jetsam of youth: the gig tickets, the button badges, the hastily written confessions and promises on sheets of torn A4. But mine was as precious as Charles, as my absurd stuffed raven, and so it survived, stored in the suitcase of treasure, to be brought out when I needed to remember, or forget.

  This next song – side two, track two – is the most worn of all. After each listen I would eject the cassette from my Walkman, and painstakingly rewind with a Bic Cristal biro (the orange ones weren’t quite fat enough and slipped irritatingly, making an already tedious process unbearable) and listen again, and again, as ‘Song to the Siren’ called out to lost loves, or unrequited ones, and sent Elizabeth Fraser’s voice soaring and tears cascading; thick, black Rimmel mascara running in rivulets down my cheeks.

  It is the summer of 1986 and music is everywhere: waking us with the tinny pop of clock alarms set to Radio 1, sending us to sleep with the mellow melancholy of a copied Leonard Cohen cassette. And in between, soundtracking our every waking moment: our meals eaten standing staring into the open door of the fridge, our skulking in parks, our walks to work if we have to endure the inconvenient necessity of a holiday job. Then comes the torture of an eight-hour shift in silence or, worse, the indignity of the mum music of Radio 2 with its endless procession of Bonnie Tyler, Elton John, Rod Stewart; songs that have nothing to say, at least not to us, because we are young and gifted and, though we may be white, we wear our Anti-Apartheid badges with pride. It is a time when the land of comfortable slacks and slippers and staid Sunday lunches seems half a world away. Instead we spend our days off dressed in bikinis and band T-shirts, lying on the lawn of the Lodge with a stack of Just Seventeens, a bottle of Hawaiian Tropic, and Our Tune on the radio, not for a minute recognizing our hypocrisy, not once realizing that our obsession with true love will likely lead us straight up the garden path to suburban mediocrity after all.

  ‘Seriously? Spandau fucking Ballet? That is so third-year disco.’ Harry rolls over onto her stomach in disgust and props herself up on her elbows. ‘If it was me and Sean, it would be Chrissie Hynde, “3,000 Miles”.’

  ‘“2,000 Miles”,’ I say automatically.

  Harry lifts her sunglasses and gives me the look. ‘Fine. “2,000 Miles”. It’s the tragic story that matters, anyway.’

  ‘What tragic story?’ I’m not being devil’s advocate, I’m honestly stumped, because as far as I know she’s been with Sean Shattock for all of six weeks, and the only tragedy is that this is the song they first did it to, because the only cassettes he has in his mum’s Mini Metro are a double edition of Fif
ty Festive Favourites.

  ‘God, Di.’ She sighs, as if I am something – a fool – to be tolerated. ‘The tragedy that he’s signing up as soon as he gets his results and I’m stuck here for another two years. They’re bound to play it. They love a soldier.’

  I think for a moment. ‘Are they still called soldiers in the navy?’

  ‘Jesus. Sea-whatever. I don’t know.’

  Sailor, I think. But I don’t say it, because I am sidetracked into imagining a song for Tom and me and a story to go with it, one that will make Simon Bates’s plastic DJ heart melt and guarantee an on-air dedication that Tom will hear in the warehouse up at the shuttlecock factory, put down his . . . whatever it is he does, and cycle the mile from the industrial estate to the back garden to declare his undying love for me.

  Or not.

  ‘This is such a load of bollocks.’

  I start at the sound of his voice, spilling a glass of water over the soft folds of my stomach, and clutch a baggy black T-shirt to me, half mopping, half covering myself up.

  Harry in contrast merely raises a practised eyebrow. ‘Is not.’

  Tom flops down on the towel in between us, picks up a magazine and drops it as quickly in seeming disgust. Most things disgust him right now for their latent racism, sexism or homophobia, or just their obvious middle-classness.

  ‘It so is. I bet it’s fake. I bet no one even writes in. Why would you? As if playing some bullshit ballad is going to fix anything, or make . . . any meaningful difference to the world. I mean, how bloody sad is that?’