All the Good Things

by Clare Fisher

  I didn’t see a thing for a while after they caught me; then, all I saw was the end.

  The end means nothing matters; nothing can get any better or worse than it already is. Which is why I said whatever they wanted me to say: Yes, I meant to do it. Yes, I meant to run away. Yes, I’d been in a firm mental state. No, I had nothing to add. No, yes yes yes, no. You can be honest, said my lawyer, about your mental health issues. But I didn’t want any ‘extenuating circumstances’, or any other circumstances. I was bad. 100% TM certified bad. I needed to be punished. It’s only now, two years and all these words later, that I see: having a difficult story is not necessarily bad.

  19. Knowing that whatever else changes, you will get up at the same time every day

  When Erika told me she was going away for three weeks, I was silent for ages. Then I said: ‘I can’t do it. I thought I could but I can’t. It’s too big. Too heavy. No one wants me.’

  ‘I’m only going on holiday,’ she said. ‘And it’s to see my sister. In Canada. I warned you about this a long time ago, remember?’

  I didn’t want to remember because remembering that she had a sister and a husband and three children and a house and maybe even a dog or a guinea pig or a goldfish meant remembering that she was only listening to me because it was her job. She cared but she was still paid to be here and there was a difference.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, come on now, Beth.’

  ‘And Linda’s gone.’ I’d thought that not speaking or writing about this would make it less real. I thought that if it was less real, it would hurt less. But as soon as the words dropped out of my mouth, I knew this was wrong. Some things hurt, and pretending they don’t is only going to make them hurt more.

  ‘They ghosted her to DeerView. I waited for her in library hour. Waited and waited. She didn’t turn up and at first I was pissed off, especially since I was about to read her the ending, the part when the big mistakes are made and everything fucks up; I wanted to see how she’d react. Later, I asked the Lee what had happened to Linda, was she in solitary or what, and she laughed and said, “Oh, you really do live in your own world, don’t you?! She’s been ghosted. DeerView. And she won’t be the last one, you mark my words.”’

  Sadness swamped my throat. ‘Story of my life. I’m just getting settled when, bam, it ends. The ending has nothing to do with me; it’s never when I choose. Didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye. That’s it. Gone. And I can’t write to her because she won’t be able to read it and I bet there won’t be anyone to read it to her, either.’

  I didn’t tell her that part of me saw her disappearance, and the fact it had come just before the end of the book, as a Sign: a Sign that no one wanted to hear the next part of my story. No one would stick by me if they did.

  ‘How did you feel when you read to Linda?’ asked Erika.

  ‘When I was reading to her, I didn’t worry about anyone or anything. I felt . . . needed. Special. Good. Now I just feel . . . And my mum hasn’t replied to my last letter, she’s probably changed her mind about contacting me, and now you’re fucking off . . .’

  I was losing my appetite, too. Almost like it had been ghosted away with Linda; I like to imagine her in the dining room in DeerView, scoffing every last crumb with an appetite for two. Telling Erika this would have been a good idea but something stopped me.

  ‘Beth. How long has it been since you wrote to your mum?’

  ‘Umm . . . Six days.’ Saying this out loud made me feel a bit silly. It felt like ages. It felt like about a year.

  ‘Right. And how long am I going away for?’

  ‘Three weeks.’

  ‘And you know I’m coming back, right?’

  I shrugged. The new, grown-up part of me, the part that’s getting bigger and stronger as I write this, it knew she was right. But the other part, the part that told me not to tell her about the ghosted-away appetite thing, or the believing in Signs thing, it kicked up a fuss. Oi! it yelled. She’s not coming back. This is just a repeat of the bad things that happened before. You thought you could escape but you couldn’t; you never will . . .

  ‘There are other things you like about being in here. Other things besides me. And Linda.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why don’t you write them down. Add them to your list.’

  ‘OK.’

  *

  Besides Erika and Linda, here are some other things I like:

  1. College. Five hours a day. English, Maths, ICT, Science. Some of the lessons are boring. Others are stupid. But a lot of them are interesting. I put my hand up and I answer questions and often, I get them right. If I get them wrong, no one looks at me like I’m a bad thing. No one laughs. For those five hours, I’m not a prisoner; there’s a ‘no crime talk’ rule, so I’m not a person who’s done a bad thing, either; I’m just a person who’s trying to learn things. Best of all, I can learn them; I think and I read and I think and I try and if I make a mistake I just shrug and carry on and eventually, I find the answers. They say I’m on track to get As and A*s. After that, I’ll train to become a library orderly.

  2. Getting up and eating and sleeping and going to college and getting letters and not getting visits and exercising and having association at the same time every day, every week. On the mornings when I wake up with my heart thumping up my throat because I’ve forgotten then remembered then freaked out about where I am, knowing that breakfast will be at this time, Maths at that time – it’s a comfort.

  3. Reading books which make me laugh and books which make me cry and books which make me feel a bit more OK about who and where and what I am.

  4. Having people who, even if there’s a lot you can’t say to them, even if a lot of what they say you don’t understand, you can laugh and sit side by side and eat with.

  5. Looking up at the sky in the exercise yard just as a bird is swooping over our heads; wondering what it would feel like to stroke its feathery belly.

  6. Running on the treadmill so fast that the other women on the weights and the cross-trainer stop and say rah, look at that, she can run you know; running until I can’t see the mould on the gym ceiling or the tiny barred windows or the other machines; closing my eyes and pretending, for a second or two or however long my heart can stand it, that I’m climbing to the top of the world’s tallest hill; everything is spread out before me; I’m free.

  20. When a baby bites your nipple like it will never let go

  It was ages before I could walk instead of waddle, ages before my body stopped dripping blood and milk. The nurses and the health visitors kept giving me leaflets with titles like Managing Pain After Birth: Top Tips! I didn’t read them. Unlike the pains that lurk in the places no doctor will ever scan, body-pain has a beginning and an end and who would want to forget what was the beginning not just of pain, but of a whole new human being?

  All we did for the first weeks of your life was stay in bed. Every now and then, the sun would shine through the window, and I’d think that maybe I should take you out and show you what kind of world you’d been born into, but waddling to the bathroom was as tiring as running ten miles. Holding you against my chest, feeling your warmth and your unbelievable softness and your dribble seep into me – all this was so good, there didn’t seem much point in anything else.

  Days, nights, probably lifetimes went by, and all I did was stroke your cheek. Kiss your toes. Sniff your flaking scalp.

  The wind would smash shouts against our window, and I’d pull the duvet up over our heads, pressing you tight against me, not wanting anyone or anything to come between us.

  The first time you bit my breast, I yelled, it hurt so much, but I didn’t mind. You sucked and sucked; my boobs swelled and oozed and ached and so I didn’t even have to look at them to remind myself that my body was making another human being grow.

  Even now I have nights when your cries wake me up; your hands struggle out of the dark, all tiny and smooth, as if they’re made of something way better than
skin, and I reach out but they’re gone. I’d do anything to go back to when it was just you and me, me and you, me figuring out how to make your pain go away, because as long as I could do that – as long as the crying eventually stopped – there was no way you’d leave me because how could you leave when I was the only one who could give you what you needed?

  Health visitors came and health visitors went. They plopped you into a bowl-sized silver weight which dangled off a spring. They smiled. I smiled back. They asked questions like, was I happy? Did I have people looking out for me?

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, lots and lots. Yes, I’m really happy.’

  They smiled some more – where they got their unlimited supply of smiles from, I don’t know – and told me I was a natural. They’d never seen anyone take to breastfeeding so easily. I thought they might give me some gold star stickers like other kids got in school, but they didn’t; they just left me some vouchers for nappies, reminded me to go on regular walks to the park, said keep up the good work, and left. With their words, I tucked us even tighter into bed: a natural. Not naturally bad or mad or weird; a natural mother. A person who was made to make other people – not just babies, but big, healthy grown-up people. I didn’t know what was going to happen but what I did know was that even if some voodoo occurred and I ended up discovering the cure for cancer or some other clever-clogs thing, this was the one I’d be most proud of.

  The bad thing wasn’t me and it definitely wasn’t you; it wasn’t your spookily long eyelashes or the tiny mole on your left shoulder or the way your face wrinkled up like an old man when you yawned.

  It wasn’t the way you’d blow spit bubbles when you were having a five-star dream. It wasn’t the way you’d bite my nipple like you never wanted to let it go.

  It wasn’t your little round belly, your pin-prick nipples or your wide blue 100% TM certified human eyes.

  No, the bad things were outside of us.

  It was not having anyone to hold you while I peed or showered or just stood on the balcony for a few seconds trying to remember who I was.

  It was dropping my phone down the loo while trying to stop you crying and pull my trackie bottoms up at once, then not really caring because who was going to ring me besides robots telling me I’d won loads of money or people in call centres who sounded like robots telling me I owed loads of money and if I didn’t pay it they’d do who knew what because I always hung up?

  The bad things were these sticky clouds of . . .Well, I don’t know what to call them but they were the opposite of pain and the thing they made me feel was the opposite of alive. Every time I tried to do some supposedly-normal thing, like get washed or dressed or eat or speak, the clouds would crowd around me, so I held you as close as I could but my body was so numb that sometimes I had to squeeze you until you cried to make sure you were still there.

  The harder I fought the clouds, the thicker they grew; some days they grew so thick that even when I managed to get us both to the park and the sun was out and every other face said, life is good, I’d wheel my pram into people without realizing it. I’d open my mouth to apologize but my mouth was full of clouds and on their faces would be scribbled those same old words: bad person. bad mother. bad . . .

  The bad things were the memories which lay behind the clouds. Mum leaving and Cal leaving and Phil leaving and OK so maybe Chantelle didn’t leave, maybe if I managed to get outside and fix my phone, I’d find a ton of messages from her, but I didn’t really believe that and even if it turned out to be true, there was no point seeing her because she wouldn’t be able to see me through the clouds and sooner or later she’d realize I wasn’t worth it, and she’d leave.

  The bad thing was the pay day loan. How, before you were born, they’d called and asked if I wanted to ‘roll over’ what I owed; this would mean I’d pay them back next month instead of this month, and I’d said yes. You do realize this will mean you pay more interest overall? they asked. I said yes. I didn’t hear when they said more; all I heard was later. Later was good. Except I never thought your dad would keep refusing to admit he was your dad. I never thought later would turn into now and good to bad.

  The bad thing was spending forever trying to stuff you into a Babygro and then an all-in-one baby coat which said ‘Easy On!’ and was a very bad joke if you ask me. Then strapping you into the pram and pushing it to the door, only to realize that I wasn’t wearing any shoes. Then getting out of the flat and finding the lift was broken and having to bump-bump-bump you down too many steps to count, by which point you’d be screaming, you weren’t having any of it and I didn’t blame you, I shushed you and kissed you and stroked my favourite soft spot in the middle of your forehead, I promised that one day we’d move somewhere with a lift that worked, or, better still, I’d fix it myself, I’d learn how to be a handyman and we’d have this 100% brilliant life together where everything worked. The bad thing was that you hadn’t been in the world long enough to understand words, and so you kept crying, and so I shouted or cried or, if the clouds were really thick that day, I just let go of the pram and stared. And in other people’s eyes, even friendly people who tried to start conversations in the park, I saw nothing but bad. And so by the time I made it to whichever appointment I was meant to be going to, I’d be so late and so angry and so far inside the cloud that I’d either spew out a lot of words that were as bad as the things those people’s eyes said about me or nod and shrug and say the nothing that the cloud was making me believe I was.

  The bad thing was that even when people smiled, even when they said things like ‘what a cutie’ and ‘good job’, the cloud stopped them from reaching my heart. When I made it to the high street, when there was enough cash in my purse and enough me in my brain to remember to buy things like nappies and wipes and paper towels and food, I didn’t always remember to use these things. You ate from my boob but even though the doctor and the nurses and the health visitors kept reminding me to eat more than usual, eating was a thing I couldn’t bring myself to do. I got as far as moving a few spoonfuls of beans from the can to my mouth, but they tasted wrong and then they hung around in my belly, yet another weight that I didn’t need. If I stood up very quickly or rushed across the room to pick you up, the room would wobble. If I’d known that in hurting myself I was hurting you, I’d have marched to the fridge and stuffed my face with whatever was in it straight away. But the clouds made the emptiness in my belly feel like the only one that was right.

  The cloud didn’t protect me from fear. Fear of the letters I hadn’t opened and the calls I hadn’t answered, fear that, now my phone was dead, they’d come, heavy-booted and heavy-armed, to take everything I had which really wasn’t anything but you. Every time I heard footsteps, I’d freeze, clamp my hand over your mouth. I’d keep the lights off just in case.

  More than the loans, I was scared of the cloud. Scared of the world. Scared I was turning into my mum or that she wasn’t my real mum or I wasn’t a real human.

  It’s hard to say how long this went on for because the thing about the cloud is, it pisses all over time, but according to the calendar, it was two months. Two months.

  Then there was a knock at the door. Not an imaginary knock; a real one. I hugged you to my chest. Another knock – a bigger one. You scrunched up your eyes and opened your mouth and cried.

  ‘Shut up,’ I hissed. ‘There’s no one there.’

  But there was. And you knew it. And so I had no choice but to go to the door.

  ‘Miss Mitchell?’

  I clamped my hand over your mouth but that only changed your cry into a scream.

  ‘We can hear your baby crying, you know. Look, we ain’t going to hurt you. Just open up.’

  With the chain still on, I opened the door wide enough to see a slice of bald head, bloodshot blue eye and stubbly chin.

  ‘You know why we’re here, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on, Miss Mitchell, even you can’t be that thick.’

 
; A thump at the door. ‘Let us in.’

  I leaned on the door but they kicked it towards me and I staggered back and then a big hairy hand slid around the edge of the door and undid the chain.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ they said, as they stomped down the hall.

  I closed my eyes and hugged you tight and whispered to the both of us that everything was going to be all right. I couldn’t see the bailiffs but I could hear them; they were flinging things around, laughing and yelling what a dirty chav I was, how the flat stank.

  ‘She ain’t even got a telly!’

  ‘Or a phone!’

  ‘What about this? These are pricey, you know. My Michelle –’

  ‘Shut it. Let’s go.’

  I opened my eyes to find them squished into the hall, your 4x4-style pram in the hairy one’s hands. ‘This don’t count towards your payment,’ he said, breathing cheeseburger breath all over my face. ‘But it does buy you time. Three days. Three days and you’ll pay up or . . .’

  ‘Or you don’t want to know,’ said the one without the pram. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse us.’

  Then they were gone, but the memory of them was everywhere: in the big black footprints up and down the hall, in the bag of rubbish they’d emptied all over the sofa, in the upturned mattress and the tin of beans they’d tipped on to the kitchen surface just because. Even when you’d stopped crying, when I got us huddled under the covers, when I closed my eyes, I could feel them. They were pacing up and down on the grass outside my flat, messing up the Africans’ football game, working out how to fuck me over next.

  *

  The next afternoon, there was another knock. ‘Please, you said three days. It’s not even been two.’ I tried to shout this but it came out more like a whisper. Then I put my head under the duvet and tried not to notice the knocks getting louder and faster, until I heard a voice: ‘Oi, Bethany, earth to Bethany! You in there? Skinny bitch?’