by Amy Miller
She made her way to the Blackbird Café – passing a busker playing the guitar – and pushed open the door. The inside was rustic in style, with sanded floorboards, wooden tables and chairs, and industrial lights hanging from lengths of exposed cord. The café’s logo of a blackbird had been stencilled on the wall and was surrounded by old-fashioned maps of the surrounding area and large vintage mirrors that made it seem bigger.
She chose a table near the window and tried to calm down. Breathing deeply, she made circles with her neck, which made faint clicking noises on every rotation. Catching sight of herself in one of the mirrors, she sighed. Weeks of not being able to sleep properly had caught up with her.
‘What can I get you?’ a young waitress asked. ‘Coffee? Anything to eat?’
‘Just a coffee thanks,’ Heidi said, fumbling for her purse in her bag, her fingers resting on the tape measure that Johnny used to carry around, ready for measuring up jobs. Just the feel of it made her miss him terribly.
The waitress put down the coffee and Heidi thanked her. Sipping the warm liquid, her lips quivered. It was time to accept that Johnny’s photograph was meaningless. It was time to do the inevitable; accept he had gone.
‘Oh, Johnny,’ she said out loud, blinking away the tears threatening her eyes. The man on the table next to her glanced up and gave her a quizzical look.
‘I’ve just lost my husband,’ she burst out.
‘Oh,’ the man said jovially, misunderstanding her. ‘I hope you find him again soon. He’s probably in the bookies!’
Heidi forced a smile, but Johnny never went anywhere near the bookies – and she hated the man for even suggesting it. She didn’t know what she was doing in the café and chastised herself for coming.
With a sigh, Heidi finished her coffee and placed three pound coins on the table. She thought of the busker outside; he might well have been one of the last people to see Johnny. Had he seen him fall to the ground? She wondered if she should ask if he remembered.
‘Stop… just stop this,’ she muttered to herself, lifting her hands to either side of her head, trying to still the thoughts spinning out of control in her mind.
She tucked her chair under the table and turned to thank the waitress. The café had filled up – and waiting staff were serving hot food and drinks to customers.
She opened the door to a blast of cool air that made her eyes water. At the same time as she was leaving, a couple were coming in. She moved aside to give them space, still holding the door open, and caught sight of the profile of a man in the opposite corner of the café. A waiter, he was placing cups of coffee onto a table for two women.
Heidi gasped and froze. Other customers glared at her, wishing that she would hurry up and close the door. But she couldn’t move. She knew that nose and that chin better than any other. Those broad, strong shoulders.
‘Johnny?’ she whispered, incredulous, as the waiter returned to the kitchen with an empty tray, oblivious to her stare. Staggering outside, her heart threatened to burst from her chest. Either she’d found a key, or she really had lost her mind.
Five
One Saturday morning, when Heidi was sixteen years old, a doorknob changed her life. Rosalind had sent Heidi to Johnny’s family’s ironmongery to source the right size screws for a brass doorknob and backplate that had come loose on the bathroom door. Heidi was pleased to take a break from her O level revision and knew that Johnny, a boy from school that she secretly liked, worked there. He was alone in the shop that day, and when Heidi walked in, carefully dressed in a striped dress and cropped denim jacket, and placed the brass doorknob down, he flamed every shade of red.
‘I need to get a screw for…’ Heidi said, blushing madly at the connotation.
‘For the doorkn—’ continued Johnny, letting the end of the word hang suspended in mid-air.
‘Yes,’ she said, stifling laughter. They had clocked each other at school – and blushed when they bumped into one another – but were not in the same classes and had never said more than two words to each other.
She watched as he turned away and searched through the incredible drawer unit behind the counter. Whatever was inside each drawer (keys, screws, nails, hinges) had been handwritten on the front – it was a spectacle. The whole place, in fact, was a treasure trove. Above her head, wicker baskets, buckets, ropes and doormats hung. There were stainless-steel tubs, fire pokers and sweeping brushes, keys and bicycle wheels, spades and bread bins. The air smelled of boot polish and sawdust – and something else. Right Guard body spray.
‘This is what you need,’ he said, putting a box of screws down in front of her. They both noticed his hands were trembling.
‘Is this your dad’s place?’ Heidi asked, not wanting to leave.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It was his grandfather’s, then his dad’s and one day I guess it’ll be mine. If it wasn’t for my O levels I’d work here full-time. How are you getting on with the revision? You’re alright, you’re clever. School’s not my thing, but I’m good with my hands.’
They both blushed again, interrupted now by another customer clearing his throat. Heidi was desperate to keep the conversation alive.
‘I could help you revise?’ she said. ‘If you’d like? I mean, if you needed help?’
‘Alright then, yes,’ he said. ‘I’d like that. Thanks.’
So, one evening a week, Heidi would go over to Johnny’s house to study, but though he’d initially make an effort with revision, he would spend more time taking photos of her with his dad’s old camera than revising. She tried to ignore the camera, focusing on trying to explain the themes in a text, but secretly she was flattered by the attention. He wasn’t like other boys she knew. He actually admired her brains and ambition. He listened, rapt, when she told him she wanted to be the first person in her family to go to university. ‘I want to get away from this place and do something with my life,’ she said earnestly, before apologising for offending him.
‘Don’t worry,’ Johnny said, grinning. ‘I want to stay here. This is my home.’
They studied in Johnny’s small bedroom, and one evening, when the rest of his family were out, Heidi felt acutely aware of how attractive Johnny was and how much she wanted to kiss him. Suddenly brave, she leaned over to him and pecked him on the cheek, watching his face turn from pink to flaming red – and his expression of nonchalance turn to sheer delight. She grinned.
‘You’re spending a lot of time with this boy; don’t let him take advantage of you,’ Rosalind warned when Heidi talked about how much she liked Johnny, to which Heidi would think but not say: He’s mad about me. We’re mad about each other. Nobody’s taking advantage of anyone.
Feeling more daring the next time they met, Heidi reached for Johnny’s hands and pulled him close in his cramped bedroom. This time she kissed him on the lips. They clashed teeth. Neither of them closed their eyes, which made both of them laugh. They were unsure and tentative but enthusiastic learners.
During the summer holiday after O levels, Heidi and Johnny became inseparable. They went on adventures together, catching the public ferry from Poole Harbour to Brownsea Island – an island owned by the National Trust – and wiled away the hours sunbathing on the secluded beaches, arms and legs draped over each other, feasting on doorstep cheese-and-salad-cream sandwiches. They didn’t talk much about what was happening in the wider world at the time; they were too focused on each other.
When Johnny worked in his parents’ shop – which he’d confided was hanging on by a thread since the opening of DIY superstores – she would sit and watch him play the piano that they randomly kept downstairs in the cramped shop basement, with a selection of odd pieces of furniture.
She loved the way he was in the shop and admired the way he dealt with customers, winning over the older generation with his gentle charm. Her feelings for Johnny grew stronger. Love was mentioned. As soon as it had been said once, it was said daily, twice, three times, more. When they started a sexual relat
ionship, they were sensible, but one day, an accident happened. When, after Christmas, Heidi dared to tell Rosalind she was pregnant, her mother’s reaction shocked Heidi to the core. Normally kind and loving, Rosalind seemed to turn to stone.
‘How could you let this happen?’ Rosalind said, all the colour draining from her face. ‘Oh, Heidi, I had such high hopes for you. University. A career. But you’re just as bad as one of the silly young trollops you see pushing a pram around the town! I brought you up to be better than that! I’m so disappointed.’
Her mother’s disappointment was a slap in the face. She knew she wouldn’t be happy, but she had expected and hoped for support and comfort. Her father, Alan, seemed bewildered and immediately took a back seat, deferring to Rosalind. He gently explained that her mother was just worried – and couldn’t express how she felt. But Heidi’s world collapsed. She felt alone, frightened and stupid – but she also felt furious with herself and Johnny. Heidi had high hopes for her own future. Were those hopes now dashed because she’d made a mistake?
Arrangements for an adoption were made, and Heidi was forced to temporarily drop out of school, to study for her A levels at home with a private tutor. She was not permitted to see Johnny, but he wrote to her instead.
‘We could live together at my house,’ he wrote in one letter. He drew a diagram of his bedroom – and how they could move it around to fit in a double bed and a cot. ‘I can look after us. You, me and the baby. I love you and always will.’
Rosalind found one of his notes, threw it away and phoned Johnny’s mother to tell her to keep Johnny away from Heidi because Heidi had a bright future ahead of her. The letters then changed in tone. ‘Maybe this is for the best,’ he wrote dully. ‘I’m sorry.’
Heidi didn’t want to live in Johnny’s bedroom. That seemed laughable. But she also didn’t want him to have given up so easily. A few cross words from her mother and he’d backed down – what did that say about him? Was he really that spineless? If he really wanted the baby, he would have fought a bit harder, wouldn’t he? Heidi didn’t know what she wanted. She only knew that she felt a combination of terror and instinctive protectiveness over her body and a sense of bewildered awe about what was happening.
Close to her due date, Rosalind decided it would be best for everyone if Heidi went to stay with her great-aunt Joanna who lived a few miles away on the Dorset coast. Heidi had stayed with her when she was a small child and loved her house overlooking the sea. When Heidi arrived, Joanna showed her upstairs to the spare room, which was small, simple and flooded with sunlight. There was a single bed with a padded headboard, a dark wood bedside table and matching set of drawers. And in front of the window was a beautiful spoon-backed chair with an embroidered seat of bright red and pink roses on a background of black and with gold braided trimming. She lowered herself into the chair and it seemed to hold her up, like a strong, warm hand. Staring out of the window, she could see the glimmer of the sea in the distance – and she longed to be in it, floating on her back, staring up at the bright blue sky.
‘How are you feeling?’ Joanna said, coming into the room and setting down a tray of apple pie and milk. She hugged Heidi and explained that, when the baby was born, she could spend a few days with him or her if she’d like to before it went to the adoption agency and new parents.
‘Yes, please,’ Heidi managed to say, her heart constricting.
‘You’ll be alright, my love,’ Joanna said gently before leaving Heidi alone in the room. ‘You’ll be home soon.’
But Heidi didn’t know what home was anymore. If home was where the heart is, the only heart that mattered was the tiny heart beating inside her womb. Without it in her life, would she ever have a home?
When she wasn’t sitting in the rose chair, reading, she walked deserted stretches of the south-west coastal path. Parts of the route, after a night of rain, were treacherous. With her pregnant belly making it difficult to manoeuvre along the narrow, cliff-edge routes as waves crashed against the cliffs hundreds of feet below, she felt as if she was all alone in the world. She saw dolphins leap in and out of the water, travelling in the same direction as she was. It had felt like a gift – as if nature was looking out for her or saying: this way; come this way.
On the route she walked, there was a small bay, with a deserted sandy beach, and she carefully climbed down the rocks to the water’s edge, where the sea lapped at her toes. One morning, Heidi decided to go into the water. There was nobody around, so she took off her dress and walked into the sea in her underwear, gasping as the cool water tickled her skin.
‘That’s not too cold for you, is it?’ she asked her belly when the baby did a somersault. Inching into the water, bending her knees and enjoying her weightlessness, she went deeper – and deeper still until she was swimming. Being in the water was a great relief, and she sensed the baby enjoyed it too. It was their private time together – a beautiful shared secret.
Clambering out inelegantly, she pulled on her clothes and walked back to Joanna’s house, hanging her underwear out to dry from her window.
Did you really want this baby? she asked Johnny in her thoughts, perched on the rose chair, stroking her vast belly. She tried to imagine them, as a couple, raising a baby, but a clear image would never take shape.
She ricocheted between hating Johnny for not having to deal with any of this, to physically longing for him. Sometimes, she would pick up Joanna’s phone and start dialling his number, but she would hold the receiver to her ear and listen to the dialling tone, before placing it back down in its cradle. She knew she was on her own in this; a lone sailor navigating the world’s oceans, with only a dolphin to guide her.
‘The baby will be well looked after,’ Joanna assured her. ‘Try not to worry.’
Try not to worry. She repeated this to herself in the hours when she couldn’t sleep at night. Her pregnant belly too stretched, her heart rate too fast, it was impossible to get comfortable. At 5 a.m. on 24 June 1983, her seventeenth birthday, she went into labour, with Joanna by her side, holding her hand. Joanna called Heidi’s parents to let them know and they sent a message to her to ‘be brave’.
‘Oh!’ Heidi gasped, when the baby was placed into her arms and she was shown how to feed him. ‘He’s perfect.’
‘He is,’ said Joanna, beaming. ‘What will you call him?’
‘William,’ said Heidi, enjoying the softness of what was her late great-uncle’s name, which brought a tear to Joanna’s eye.
Immediately, Heidi loved the baby. He looked like a minute, wrinkled-up version of Johnny, like a photograph of him screwed into a tiny ball. He had tufts of black hair the same colour as Johnny’s. Full lips. Round eyes. Thick eyelashes. Long piano-playing fingers. He was utterly perfect, and he was hers, for a few days.
Her aunt had a Polaroid camera and took all eight pictures in the film; including one of Heidi in her nightdress sitting on the rose chair holding William in her arms and another of William carefully propped up on a cushion on the chair, swaddled in a cream blanket. There was one of the chair, with a Babygro folded up on it, and the others were close-ups of William. Joanna gave Heidi two pictures; the one of her holding William and one of him on the chair. The others would go to his new parents.
Later that day Joanna gave her a parcel that had come for her in the post. She didn’t open it straight away. She waited until William had fallen asleep, his tiny fingers curled into fists, his head to one side. Then, taking off the brown paper and opening a box, she lifted out a gift from Johnny. It was a musical trinket box, of a dancing clown, with a small drawer at the bottom. The clown was behind a layer of glass, and when you opened the drawer, gentle, tinkly music played, and the clown danced. He’d written a note with ‘love from J’ on it.
Heidi sat in the rose chair, with William by her side in a Moses basket, and opened and closed the drawer over and over, watching the little clown dance, listening to the happy tune. The drawer was small, but she rolled the Polaroids slightly
and put an elastic band around them, then placed them safely inside. She knew she would keep it until the day she died.
And then came the day she had to say goodbye. Heidi tried to tell herself that she was doing the right thing. Before she handed him over, Heidi breathed in the scent of baby William and locked it into her heart. After he’d gone, she couldn’t get the sound of his cry out of her head, nor how warm he felt in her arms.
‘It will get easier,’ Joanna consoled her. ‘Be brave.’
Heidi nodded and tried to be brave. And although she could still hear William’s cry in her ears, she tried with all her might to imagine him sleeping soundly under the loving gaze of his new parents. It was all she could do.
A few days later she returned home to continue studying for her A levels. Rosalind had thawed and was more loving again and told Heidi to think only of the future and not of the past. Alan was quiet but kind, encouraging her to rest and relax, as if she was getting over a bug. Heidi hid the trinket box under a jumper in her wardrobe, sometimes pulling it out to listen to its tune and remember sitting on that rose chair, the sun fading, baby William sleeping calmly. She didn’t see Johnny at all, and as the weeks became months, she knew she had to move on. She had no choice. But every day, many times a day, she was struck by the same, overwhelming and paralysing thought: Somewhere out there, I have a son.
Six
When Heidi finished her A levels, she got a place at Nottingham University to study English Literature, and for a while, she relished living on the university park campus, attending lectures and trying out being a different, more confident version of her old self. She got a tattoo at the base of her spine. A rose. She concentrated on not looking back. She worked as a waitress in Joe’s, an American-style diner. It was very popular for its cheap, mountainous portions – and the plates were piled so high it was almost impossible not to shed fries or onion rings as she moved from kitchen to table. The staff were friendly and the tips good. For a while, she convinced herself that she was okay.