501

by Robert Field

  Danny’s laughing out loud and he splutters the words out.

  ‘The five of spades, Pete. The five of spades.’

  There’s a pause and then Pikey Pete gets it.

  ‘You’re a fucking twat,’ he says to Danny.

  I’m laughing now, long and hard, cos suddenly it seems the funniest thing in the world. I’m laughing in this old-style pub, in this tatty old chair with the sticky arms and the damp cushion under my bum, and Katy is looking at me, at the floor where a puddle is forming, and she’s saying, ‘I’ll phone Dandy for you, Lena.’

  Dandy comes, leads me out of the pub to the car.

  ‘The seat, Dandy; I’m all wet.’ I think I’m crying.

  Dandy says, ‘It doesn’t matter, Lena. It doesn’t matter.’

  Then, as we drive, he asks me if I’m all right. Then he asks again and again and then I tell him Danny’s joke and he doesn’t ask anymore.

  Then I say, ‘Have you phoned Mum?’ and he says he has and she’ll try and get over. Then I want to ask him what was it like speaking to her after all this time, telling her that her daughter was going to give birth to your child.

  But I can’t. I couldn’t.

  Now I’ve seen, and probably paid too much attention to, childbirth on telly. There’s always a lot of screaming and a lot of blood and it’s always touch and go. But now I’m bed, in hospital, I’m not worried like I was. Although I haven’t got Mum, I’ve got a nurse and a midwife and Dandy’s holding my hand and he’s worrying that they might think he’s my dad.

  I tell him that would be really weird considering it’s his baby and this makes me laugh again and I think I’ve laughed more tonight than in a long time.

  And so I give birth to Andy, little Dandy.

  Okay, I know it drags on for hours and it’s painful but it’s not a screaming screeching pain. It does make me grunt a bit and bite my lip and it is so undignified that I don’t think Dandy will ever fancy me again.

  Then it’s done and I’m holding a slippery, mucky bundle of life that latches onto my huge boob and sucks like Dandy does. That thought makes me feel a bit odd and it seems pervy to imagine it now, but I’m already thinking about getting my figure back, getting me back. After all I’ve just lost eight pounds in four hours.

  Then I’m tired, so tired my eyes won’t stay open, and Dandy is kissing me on the forehead like I’m the child and it’s bedtime. (I suppose if he’d married Mum I would have been.)

  ‘Get some rest,’ he says.

  Dandy and Andy leave me to a dreamless sleep that I wake up from with a desperate need to see my baby.

  I’m in a wheelchair with a towel between my legs and a nurse pushing me along a corridor and she’s saying, ‘He’s in here.’

  And behind the glass window ‘here’ is a Baby Ward: a dozen cots in three rows of sleeping offspring. Right in the corner, with the light falling on them, are Dandy and Mum. I can see her slim figure, her perfect hair, and how close she stands to Dandy.

  And I can see that her shoulders are trembling, like she’s crying.

  Their backs are towards me as they lean over child and grandchild. Now they’re huddled together like they’re sharing a secret and, as I’m watching, Dandy’s hand slips around Mum’s waist.

  And then it’s their hands, their fingers, twining together, weaving into each other. It could be their bodies, their flesh, and that thought kicks the breath out of me.

  I can’t, I won’t see this. I say to the nurse, ‘Take me back.’

  She says, ‘But your baby...’

  ‘Please, just take me back.’

  She hears what’s in my voice, my voice that sounds on the edge of unreason, and she turns me back to my bed.

  And it’s there I wait until Dandy and Mum come and sit by each side of me. It makes me think that I’m piggy-in-the middle. Well, at least the shape is right, and big fat me is between slim, lovely Mum and so handsome Dandy.

  And Mum says this is a flying visit just to see I’m okay and she can’t stay long because Mikey is on his own, and Dandy says he’d better walk down with her because the car park is dark and you never know who’s about this time of night. So Mum says she’ll come to see me when I get home and then she and Dandy leave.

  Together.

  Monday night in a Glasgow hospital in

  the month of March.

  Scottie Dog.

  It’s a Monday night and a few weeks ago I was in the George with the girls; now I’m in this fucking hospital in a ward of no-hopers, six beds filled with end-of-liners. There’s always moaning and groaning and the young woman opposite me sobs softly to herself. Most of them can’t make the bog anymore and there’s always the whiff of shite in here. I’m plugged into a morphine drip and I give the line button a quick press every time that cowing pain shoots through my guts.

  It’s raining on this Monday night, sweeping fine Scottish rain that gathers on the window and dribbles down the glass, like it used to all those years ago in Dundee. When I watch the rain I could be there again, nose against the cold pane, waiting for Mam to come rolling home.

  But I’m not that girl with all my life in front of me; I’m loose skin, a scrawny neck and red rims of eyes with that forever weep; I’m a bag of old bones only fit for the knacker’s yard.

  There’s a crowd of visitors filtering in and that means scraping chairs and conversations of, ‘How yer feeling?’ as if a fucking miracle could happen. They all have visitors, these wasting people, and I have to look away when the young woman’s children, not more than bairns, climb onto her bed. Her husband – he only seems to be about twenty – holds her hand and she starts to cry again.

  I’ve had enough of this and I ring for the nurse and ask her to pull the curtains around my bed.

  She says, ‘No one comes to see you, Marie?’

  ‘Haven’t got anyone, Katja.’

  She’s foreign, this nurse; I think she’s Polish, and she’ll always have a chat. She seems to want to talk. I tell her she’s practising her English on me.

  She laughs. ‘I thought you were Scottish.’

  We’re inside our curtained room, shut away from the ward, and Nurse Katja says again, ‘You sure there’s no one, Marie?’

  Now, in this Macmillan hospice there’s time for all of us in sitting down chats, tea, and biscuits when we want (when we can eat them), and time is relaxed here, drawn out into the last few weeks of life.

  So Katja asks me if there’s anyone and I tell her that there’s no one I can find. And then I say I had a son once but it was a long time ago.

  Katja says softly, ‘Tell me, Marie.’

  And I shall tell her because nothing really matters now.

  But before I came in here – was brought in here – I searched for Aubrey; I walked the streets of that time and found that semi in suburbia. I knocked on the front door and asked for my past.

  But all I get is a blank look from the man of the house and he says, ‘You’re talking about before I was born. I canna help ye.’

  The accent is Dad’s and I try to peep by the man to see into the hall, to see if there’s any remnant of that lost time.

  But this man’s giving me a strange look and he’s closing the door on me as a woman’s voice calls out, ‘Who is it, Jamie?’

  I just catch, ‘Some daft old bat,’ before the door slams shut.

  The night comes early this far north and by the time I’ve made it back into town the streetlamps are on and the shop windows are lit up. But now the pain in my guts is cutting me in half. Every now and then I’ve got to stop, catch my breath, lean on a wall. This pain is bad, a devil twisting a knife in my stomach, slicing me from the inside. I’m thinking hospital; I don’t want to die in the street. Then a taxi drives slowly by, ignoring this drunken old lady hanging onto a brick wall for support. I try to wave him down but he’s not stopping.

  ‘Bastard,’ I mouth at his tail-lights.

  Then my bones turn to rubber and I sink onto the pavement with th
e whole of the night swirling around my head.

  But in this now time Katja says, ‘Tell me, Marie.’ She settles onto my bed, this fair-haired nurse, who can’t be much more than twenty-five.

  ‘Och, it’s all a long time ago,’ I say. ‘It’s too late to find him.’

  Katja talks about the Internet, about Facebook, about a world I don’t really understand. ‘It’s not difficult now, Marie. It’s not like it used to be.’

  But she’s losing me and, above the curtains, the ward clock is pushing half past eight and I’m thinking it’s Monday night and the girls – well, except for Irish and me – will be down the George getting a few drinks under their belts before the game. These thoughts make me maudlin and I’d give anything to be lining up on the oche, listening to Danny chopsing behind me, or Irish cursing the cartwheel every time one of her darts bounce out.

  ‘You’d think the tight bastard would pay for a decent board,’ she says loudly for Danny’s benefit.

  Danny mutters that if she don’t like it, why don’t she fuck off back to Paddyland.

  Irish says if he doesn’t watch his mouth she’ll send him a letter-bomb.

  Danny reckons she’s too thick to spell his address properly and Irish says she’ll just write Cunt on the envelope and it’ll be sure to find him.

  I’m laughing now, thinking about this, and Katja asks what’s so funny. I tell her it’s an old joke and then she’s straight back onto my case, like I’m her mission in life.

  ‘About your son,’ she says.

  About my son, my Aubrey, whom I only knew for the briefest of summers before my big mouth determined all our futures. You know I can still feel his warm, firm little body, still feel his eyes following me around the room. Still see that first smile on his face. Christ, I’ll be making myself cry in a minute, then I taste the salt on my lips and realise that I am.

  So this is what I tell her; this is the story. Of course it’s not word for word. Of course it’s told in half an hour, but this is what I say, and in the telling the time is real, the hours are real.

  And the loving and the hating and the hurt are real.

  Again, I’m sixteen years old and it’ll soon be spring in the city, and mine and Dad’s little secret isn’t so little anymore. It wakes me in the night, plays football in my belly.

  So there’s Diva’s silent treatment to me, and Dad, unsure of his status in this strange household, spends most of his time at the club; sometimes he even sleeps there.

  And sometimes he sneaks away from Diva and holds me and tells me that he loves me.

  ‘You’ll always be mine, Marie.’

  He’s got his head on my belly, my swollen naked belly, and we’ve been sharing a slice of afternoon delight. I’m drawing my fingers through his black hair and thinking that if only this hour could last forever and ever. But of course it can’t and Dad, with one eye on the clock, starts to get dressed.

  ‘You too, Marie,’ he says and adds, casual like, ‘Diva’ll be back soon.’

  And he says it like a father, not a lover.

  It fires me up and I tell him to bog off and I’ll get up when I’m ready, and if he’s worried about his precious Diva finding him in my bed perhaps he ought to…

  ‘Whoa,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t whoa me, I’m not a fucking horse.’

  He laughs at my anger, says I’m like my mother, and that makes it worse and I say that I don’t give a shit if Diva does find us like this. I just don’t care.

  Dad says it’s got to be a secret, a secret forever, and I say that if we moved far away where no one knew us we wouldn’t have to hide.

  And then for the first time Dad doesn’t give me the reasons not to, he just says, ‘We’ll see, Marie. We’ll see.’

  My heart’s in my mouth and later those words wake me in the night. I repeat them to myself, this promise of considering, then I drift into a dream of me and Dad and the Bairn (he’s not Aubrey yet) and of me being a housewife and Dad coming home from work to tea on the table and me rocking Bairn in the pram. So he’s promised and I hug that promise to me so tightly that I must be stifling it.

  I bring it out for comfort when Diva’s in one of her sharp moods, when she’s pissed off.

  ‘Do I have to do everything around here? I’m not a slave.’

  That’s in front of me but with Dad she softens, she watches for his moods and curbs her mouth about me. To him it’s, ‘Canny, let’s go for a meal tonight.’

  It’s a Tuesday and the club is closed midweek and, although it’s only six o’clock, Diva’s dolled up and ready to go. She flicks her dark hair, smiles up to her dark eyes.

  Dad says, ‘What about Marie? She’s…’

  But Diva’s into that like a polecat.

  ‘I’m sure she won’t mind staying in.’ She looks sweetly at me. ‘Will you, Marie?’

  Of course I mind. I mind her treating Dad like he belongs to her, but he’s looking at me and saying, ‘You sure you’ll be all right, Marie?’

  So they go, dressed up like a couple of film stars, and when I watch them from the window Diva’s arm is tucked through Dad’s.

  I give them an hour, just to get settled, then I phone the restaurant and ask for Dad.

  ‘Marie,’ he says,’ what is it?’

  I make up some cock and bull story about pains in my stomach and I say, ‘I’m frightened, Dad; I’m scared.’ I suck in my breath, put a tremble in my voice.

  ‘Please come home, Dad. Please.’

  And of course there’s no choice, is there?

  Diva isn’t best pleased and she cuts me daggers as soon as she steps in the door. When Dad hugs me I look over her shoulder and give her the sweetest smile I can muster.

  She can’t help herself then and she snaps.

  ‘You seem all right now.’

  I tell her I feel a lot better and again I smile sweetly at her, like she smiled at me earlier.

  Her mouth twists out a silent, ‘Little cow,’ to me before she slams out of the room and up the stairs.

  I say, ‘I didn’t mean to spoil your evening, Dad.’ And he says, ‘Didn’t you, Marie?’ But then he’s kissing me, holding me, and it’s so delicious, this taste of him.

  Upstairs Diva is crying herself to sleep while in this front room in a Glasgow semi Dad and I are loving as only we can.

  And this is my life, our lives, as that long-ago winter ends.

  Aubrey, my beautiful baby boy, is born on the tenth of March and, because he’s a first child, I have him at the hospital. He’s born with a full head of his father’s hair and skin so smooth I want lick him like an ice cream.

  Dad comes at visiting time – Diva never does – with a couple of magazines and a box of chocolates. Aubrey – he is Aubrey now – is asleep in his cot by my bed.

  Dad stands over him, watches his sleeping son/grandson. On Dad’s face is a strange, strange look. It’s like he’s shocked, like he’s just realised something terrible has happened. He looks at me, looks at Aubrey and he whispers, ‘My God, what have I done, Marie?’

  It’s not what he’s done, it’s what we’ve done, and I’m glad, so glad, because now he has to be mine, not hers; that dark skinny cow with her gypsy eyes.

  At least that’s what I tell myself.

  But all the same, when I’m feeding Aubrey in the middle of the night, my mind leaves that quiet ward and wanders into their house, into their bedroom where they’re curled up together, sleepy and warm.

  And I have to imagine that for ten long nights, and each night I hate her more.

  So I come home after that time of not setting eyes on Diva and straight away she starts her chipping at me, talking about the cost of keeping me and Aubrey, about the stench of nappies in the kitchen, and tutting every time Aubrey cries for his feed.

  ‘For God’s sake, Marie, give him some milk.’

  I tell her she could take a turn if she had any tits and she tells me I’m a coarse tart, so I call her a barren cow and she says at least she’s
married and not a mother to a little bastard. I think it’s a good job Dad comes in then because I was ready to draw her one off.

  He’s heard half of what’s been said and he says can’t we get on because we’ve all got to live together?

  My big mouth jumps in with, ‘For now, Dad.’ And Diva says, ‘What do you mean, Marie? For now?’

  She’s asking me but looking at Dad and then he does a terrible thing; he shrugs his shoulders like he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

  I go mad. ‘Tell her, Dad. Tell her.’ My voice must be approaching scream level and Diva’s taken a step back.

  Now in this present day, in this ward of cancer sufferers, I pause for breath and a swig of cool water. Katja says, ‘You don’t have to go on, Marie.’

  But I do. I have to put myself back into that time for the last time. I’ve got to be that sixteen-year old girl again with a baby in her arms and a lover who’s turned his face from her. Okay, I know my hormones are all over the place, my thinking is as twisted as a snake, and logic and consequence are out the window, but I held such a power in my young hands and I didn’t realise it.

  And that power is what I threw away and that’s what Diva caught.

  Diva says to Dad, ‘Tell me what, Canny?’ Her voice is so soft, so quiet, so sad. She’s on the edge of tears and it’s like a question that she knows the answer to but doesn’t want to hear. I almost feel sorry for her. Almost.

  Then Dad, shaking his head like he’s in a terrible dream, says to Diva, ‘I can’t. I can’t tell you this, Diva.’

  And Diva says, ‘Then don’t say it, Canny. Just make her go. Make her go.’ The sadness is out of her voice now and it’s fear and panic that scrabble from her mouth.

  ‘Make her go, Canny.’

  Dad says, ‘I can’t.’

  Diva, desperate Diva, says, ‘You must. You’ve got to.’

  Her nose is dripping and her eyes are flooded and she clutches at Dad. Her face is into his face.

  ‘Whatever it is, Canny, it’s her fault. You’ve got to make her go.’

  So this is where my big mouth comes in and I say, ‘He wants me, Diva, not you.’ I add, ‘He wants me; me and Aubrey.’

  There, I’ve said it and it’s done; the unsaid has been said.