We love you lots and are missing you.
Mum xxx
I type back:
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Hola!
Would you rather I was at home having wild drug-crazed orgies and trashing the house? I’m missing you too.
Hxxx
At some point I doze off because what seems like the next minute I’m woken by a knock on the door.
I get up and answer it, and sure enough it’s Gloria, carrying her shoes in one hand, a bag of chips in the other and wearing a pair of deely boppers.
‘Thank God!’ I say. ‘You got back okay.’
‘Well, of course I did. Rachel walked me back. We sang songs.’ She giggles as she slumps down in the armchair in my room. I climb back into bed and put my glasses on to look at her properly.
‘Gloria, you’re wearing deely boppers.’
‘I know,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘Look at them go!’
‘And they’ve got – oh, God! Are those pink glittery—’
‘Penises!’ exclaims Gloria, delighted. ‘Aren’t they splendid?’
‘No!’ I say. ‘Ugh.’
And then I think about how my reaction to the bobbing glittery penises is really VERY Susan indeed. So I say grudgingly, ‘Did you have a good time?’
‘I had a simply splendid time,’ says Gloria. ‘What a hoot those girls were. Rachel invited us to join up with them tomorrow. They’ve got a burlesque dancing lesson and then cocktail-making and then punting.’
‘You did tell her you couldn’t go, didn’t you? You did remember that we’re going tomorrow?’
‘Yes. Such a shame.’ She looks so disappointed that I feel bad.
‘Still, it’ll be great to get to the Lake District, won’t it? The next bit of our journey? The next bit of the story.’
I let the words hang there in the hope that Gloria might tell me why we’re going there, but she doesn’t take the hint.
‘And why are we going there?’ I say it casually, hoping to catch her off guard.
Her face changes.
Oh yes, she remembers that all right.
‘I went there a long time ago,’ she says.
‘Is it part of the story?’ I ask. ‘Has it got something to do with what happened? To you and Sam? The baby?’
I can tell I’ve gone too far. The shutters come down.
‘What baby?’ she says, looking me in the eye. I know perfectly well she hasn’t forgotten. When she’s really forgotten, she does her best to cover it up; there’s a tiny glimpse of panic beneath the surface. This isn’t that. Stuff from the old days doesn’t slip away like new memories do. Every detail of it is stored away – for now at least. She’s just reminding me that she doesn’t have to tell me anything if she doesn’t want to. I know from the set of her jaw and the way the sparkly willies are trembling belligerently above her head that she is all ready for an argument and I think, What’s the point? She’s warning me not to push it so I don’t.
After Gloria’s gone I lie back and think about what she’s said. I look at my watch – nearly two thirty a.m. The thought of getting up early tomorrow and getting everything packed ready to leave isn’t appealing. But moving on must mean finding out what happened next in Gloria’s story, and getting an answer to some of my questions. What happened after she found out she was pregnant? Did she even actually have the baby? Or did she take the risk of a backstreet abortion and get luckier than the poor girl who Dr Gilbert talked about, who died? I shiver just thinking of her. I wonder what her name was, this anonymous bit-part player in Gloria’s story, used as a cautionary tale by an old grey-haired doctor. I try to imagine how scared and desperate she would have had to be to have tried such a brutal, dangerous way to end her pregnancy. If I’d been born fifty years earlier I wouldn’t have to imagine it. That’s the choice I’d be facing myself.
I force myself to turn my thoughts back to Gloria and the next bit of her story. Why the Lake District? Could she and Sam have run away there together? But no, she said she never saw him again. And then I open my eyes wide in the darkness because I’ve had a brilliant, wonderful idea. Could it be that she wants to see him now?
Could Sam be in the Lake District? My heart beats faster at the thought of it. Is that it? A reunion, after all these years?
My head swims as I try to remember everything that Gloria has told me so far. There are so many gaps and things I don’t quite understand. But I will. I just have to be patient and let Gloria tell me in her own time.
The next morning we set off early because I’m so worried about having to drive all the way to the Lake District, and we stop at a motorway service station for breakfast. Gloria is in a very bad mood, I’m guessing because she has a hangover.
‘These places,’ she says, shuddering and pulling her coat around her. ‘I always imagine hell as some variation on the motorway service station theme, don’t you? But without the motorway, obviously.’
‘Shall I get you a coffee?’ I say brightly. ‘Or a sandwich if you’re hungry?’
‘They exude a kind of pointlessness, don’t they? A kind of empty desperation.’
‘Perhaps a pain au chocolat?’
‘Just look at them all,’ Gloria says, gazing around at the people sitting at other tables. To be fair, the grey-faced, shiny-suited man sitting at next table, staring blankly at his mobile phone, does look a bit fed up. Gloria stares at him.
‘You can almost hear the silent screams of their tormented souls.’
I cup my hand to my ear. ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ is playing tinnily from somewhere nearby. ‘Nope,’ I say. ‘All I can hear is Kylie.’
‘That’s one good thing about this wretched disease,’ she says. ‘It won’t be long before all memory of motorway service stations will be expunged from my memory. The sooner the better, quite frankly.’
‘Don’t start that again.’
‘Tell me honestly it doesn’t make you want to end it all.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t. It makes me want to buy a hazelnut latte and possibly a breakfast bap. But if you’d rather sit there being bloody miserable, be my guest. Just don’t moan later that you’re hungry because you were too busy staring into the abyss to eat. Anyway, you’re the one who wanted to go to the Lake District and Whitby. I suggested the Maldives, if you remember. No motorway service stations there.’
In the end she relents and says I can buy her an espresso, as if she’s doing me a massive favour.
In the queue I get a text from Reuben.
How’s the road trip going? Don’t go driving off any cliffs now xx
I reply: That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me ;) x
I get Gloria an almond croissant too, which she says she doesn’t want but eats anyway. I’m still hungry after my breakfast bap so I get a blueberry muffin. I’ve never felt so hungry. Eating for two, I suppose. I push the thought away. Enough time to think about that after Whitby. The appointment is only a few days from now, I realize uncomfortably.
As we sit there eating, my phone buzzes with another text from Reuben.
Just thinking of the wellbeing of the great-aunt babe ;)
Gloria watches me as I read it.
‘What?’ I say.
‘That was him, wasn’t it? The one who—’ She inclines her head delicately in the direction of my womb.
‘Yes.’
‘Thought so.’
Something in her face makes me feel defensive.
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘I need to get some petrol and then we’d better get back on the road.’
The closer we get to the Lake District, the more I wonder why it is we’re going all this way. Is it something to do with Sam? Or the baby? I try to steer Gloria back to her story.
‘I’ve worked it out,’ I say. ‘Why you never saw Sam again.’
She looks up sharply.
‘Really?’
‘It wa
s your father, wasn’t it? He threatened Sam, told him he’d kill him if he ever saw him with you again. Or Vinnie. God, they didn’t really do it, did they? They didn’t really hurt him?’
I think of the hatred on Gloria’s face when she talked about Vinnie. Was that why? Had he scared off Sam? Threatened him? Beaten him up? Or worse? Vinnie sounded like a nasty piece of work but surely—
‘No,’ Gloria says, her voice flat, without emotion. ‘They didn’t.’
There’s something about the way she says it that makes me think she’s not telling me the whole story. I watch her, trying to find some clue about what she’s hiding. Whatever it is, I’ve got a right to know. Vinnie was my grandfather, after all. But maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s because he’s my grandfather that she doesn’t want to tell me. If he was a violent racist, perhaps she thinks I’d rather not know. I think about it. It’s a pretty uncomfortable thought. But I never knew him. It’s not like he was someone I cared about, or even someone that Dad cared about, for that matter, because he died before Dad could even remember him.
‘So then why—’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
I was right. There’s definitely something she’s not telling me.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Then tell me why we’re going to the Lake District.’
I half expect her to argue, to refuse, to change the subject.
Instead she says: ‘It’s where St Monica’s was.’
I stare at her blankly.
‘The Mother and Baby Home,’ she says. ‘It’s where I had my baby.’
The woman who opens the door is a thin-lipped nun with eyebrows that want to meet in the middle, stretching towards each other across her nose. I’m too tired and nauseous to say anything much; I just stand there, taking in the gloomy hallway, dark wood, trying not to gag on the overpowering smell of wood polish and boiled cabbage, trying not to let the tears leak from my eyes.
‘You’ve missed dinner,’ the thin-lipped woman says, critically, and despite my hunger I can’t help feeling relieved. ‘We put some aside for you but it’ll be cold by now.’
‘It’s fine. I’m not hungry,’ I say, trying to keep my voice strong. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’ve got to eat, dear,’ she says. ‘You can’t go skipping meals in your condition.’
But I don’t eat.
It’s strange being surrounded by girls in the same state as me, some younger, some older, but all with swollen bellies, or else already with babies. There is a solidarity among the girls, they sit and smoke and play cards together in the evenings or chat and knit bootees for their babies, but I can’t join in. I keep myself to myself and spend as much time as I can in the dormitory I share with three other girls.
‘It’s a relief, you know, talking to the others. You should try it.’
I look up and see it’s the tall, smiley northern girl whose bed is the one next to mine.
‘D’you mind?’ she says, and sits down on my bed without waiting for me to answer.
I pretend I’m not listening, concentrating hard on folding the baby clothes Mum packed. Little white matinee jackets. She couldn’t have knitted them, Father wouldn’t have let her and she wouldn’t have done it in secret; wouldn’t have risked him finding out. Must have been mine when I was a baby, maybe Gwen’s, too. I press one of them to my face. It smells faintly of lavender and soap. She’d kept them all this time, folded away somewhere, safe in a drawer. I stop folding and turn my head away from the northern girl – Edie wasn’t it? – so she can’t see my face.
She reaches out and puts her hand on mine.
‘Eh,’ she says. ‘Come on. It’s not so bad.’ She squeezes my hand but I still can’t look at her. No one except Gwen has seen me cry since I was six years old. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘There’s always at least two of us in tears. We joke about it. It’s being in the family way does it, in’t it?’ She takes out a clean white hankie from her pocket and hands it to me. I take it and wipe my eyes quickly, and then I scrunch it up in my hands, uncertain whether to hand it back or not.
‘Keep it,’ she says and I look up at her briefly, grateful. She must be about my age, maybe a year or two older. Pretty. Dark hair. Looks like she’s about to give birth any minute.
‘Listen,’ she says. ‘Before you come in here you think you’re the only one. It’s the same for all of us out there.’ She jerks her head towards the window. ‘Everyone looking down their nose at you and shaking their heads. All the neighbours pulling that face.’ She sucks her cheeks in and turns her mouth down severely, tilting her head back and looking so far down her nose at me she goes cross-eyed. I know she’s trying to make me smile but I can’t, I just look down at the damp hankie in my hands. ‘You know the face I mean,’ she says. And the funny thing is that it does look a bit like how Mrs Onions and goody-flaming-two-shoes Brenda Onions looked at me that time in the shop after Edna-next-door had overheard Father raging at me that time and blabbed it all along the street. Brenda had looked pointedly at my middle and then she’d pulled her fluffy white cardigan tight round her like she was trying to protect herself from my sinfulness and whispered something to her mother, and then they’d both stood there, giving me the look.
I’d turned and smiled sweetly.
‘Six months gone, if you must know,’ I said. ‘And I’ve still got more of a waist than you’ll ever have, Brenda Onions.’ Well, she’s always hated me, Brenda has, ever since I cut one of her pigtails off when we were four.
And then I’d marched past them, head in the air, hoping I looked just the tiniest little bit like Rita Hayworth, and not like a schoolgirl whose face was puffy with hormones and heat, who’d had to let out her skirt with elastic. Not like a girl who had woken up that morning before it was light, nauseous and panicky and alone, and cried until her eyes were sore and swollen, but quietly, silently, so that no one would hear her, no one would know she was scared.
‘Ten Players, please,’ I’d said, as Gwen’s hand clamped on my arm from behind and she hissed in my ear, ‘Why, Gloria, why do you have to be like this?’
And Mrs Hawkins who’s known me since I was born and used to sneak me extra sweets when they were still rationed, she does give me the cigarettes, but she gives me the look as well, the look that Edie’s doing again now, as if you were a disappointment, and maybe even a little bit dangerous.
‘You do know, don’t you?’ Edie says, watching me. ‘I knew you would. We all do. That’s why it’s good being in here, with other people like you. They understand.’
I look at her. ‘They’re not like me,’ I say. ‘I’m not like them.’
I expect her to get annoyed but she just smiles. ‘How d’you know if you never bloody talk to ’em, eh, Mrs High and Mighty?’
‘Miss High and Mighty, you mean,’ I say, half smiling. ‘That’s rather the problem, isn’t it?’
‘Out there maybe,’ she says. ‘Not in here. Come on. Come and have a game of cards downstairs.’
‘This isn’t how I remember the Lake District at all,’ I say to Gloria, looking through the windscreen at the mountains ahead of us, purple and green, the late-afternoon sun lighting the peaks in gold and casting dark shadows. Throughout our family holiday mist and clouds had hidden the mountains, so that everything was a claustrophobic fog of grey. This, along with soggy sandwiches, ill-fitting wellies, and being damp right down to my underwear, are my main memories of that holiday.
Gloria doesn’t reply.
‘It’s incredible, isn’t it?’ I say, trying to catch her up in my excitement. ‘It’s all so big. So free.’ Exhilaration surges inside me as I drive. I feel so far from home in this wild, ancient, unfamiliar landscape. Maybe we are like Thelma and Louise after all, albeit in a Ford Fiesta instead of a 1966 Thunderbird, and still lacking a Brad Pitt.
‘Hmmph,’ says Gloria. She’s been unusually quiet on the way here, looking watchfully out of the window.
‘Are you okay?’ I say. I think of everything she’
s told me, about arriving at the Home, about Edie. How must it feel for her, coming back here?
‘Of course I’m okay,’ she snaps. ‘I just wish we’d hurry up and get there. I want a smoke.’ She says this rather accusingly, as though I’m being completely unreasonable for insisting she doesn’t smoke her foul-smelling cigarillos in the car.
‘Well, we’re not far now. Should be there in about ten minutes.’
‘It’s incredible, isn’t it?’ she says, the girl, whatshername. Hetty. Harry. Damn. I reach into my bag for my notebook. There she is: Hattie.
As she drives I watch her face, from behind my sunglasses so she can’t see. Her eyes are wide. She sees mountains and sky and possibility. She wants me to see it too.
I can’t. This place doesn’t mean possibility to me. It means fear. I never thought I’d miss home, but I did when I was here. I wanted terraced streets, and kids playing outside, and motor cars and buses. I wanted Mum and Gwen. ‘It’s good you’re going so far away, isn’t it?’ Gwen said. ‘No one will ever find out.’ Was she trying to protect me or was she ashamed of me? Vinnie had told her he didn’t want her to see me while I was pregnant, that it was bad for their reputation. But by the time I left it was obvious I was pregnant anyway, and being sent away felt like a punishment. I was being banished. The mountains seemed threatening, looming and dark.
I didn’t let my fear show, of course. I was a good actress, even then. But it was there all the time, a cold ball of terror hidden inside me. I was afraid of giving birth. I was afraid of the other girls with their swollen bellies or their tiny babies. And I was even more afraid of the babies. Even now when I hear a newborn baby crying it takes me back to St Monica’s. I can hear it now, the sound of the babies in the nursery, screaming. I close my eyes, but I can’t make it stop.
There’s a baby crying. Screaming. That desperate, breathless cry of a newborn. Not my baby. My baby is still safe inside me. It is Edie’s baby, Ted.
I’m in the nursery at St Monica’s, late afternoon it must be from the low slant of the orange autumn light streaming in through the large, draughty windows. In the distance, through the window, I see the hills against the sky. I’m looking after the babies with one of the nuns, but she’s had to hurry off because one of the girls has gone into labour unexpectedly.
How Not to Disappear Page 18