501

by Robert Field

  Dad gasps, ‘Marie.’ And Diva fumbles for the chair behind her and then her face is in her hands.

  ‘No. Oh no.’

  Her crying is more like retching and she says over and over again, ‘I knew. I knew. I knew,’ as though this is all her doing.

  I must be a hard-hearted bitch because there’s a core of happiness glowing inside of me and I’m already planning for her leaving. There’ll be me, Dad and Aubrey: a bonny little family in our own little home.

  Then Diva stands up, slips away Dad’s arm like she’s peeling off her cardigan, and heads up the stairs. Dad doesn’t move, I don’t move, as we hear her drag out the suitcase from under their bed. Then, in minutes, she’s down the stairs and the front door is closing gently behind her.

  ‘Dad?’ I say and he says, ‘Not now, Marie. Not now,’ and his voice is choking him.

  In the quiet after the storm Aubrey starts to grizzle for my milk and Dad says he’s got to open up the club. It seems he’s shocked, dazed, and he leaves without a look to me or Aubrey.

  So this evening, after all that’s happened, I sit alone with my baby and the radio for company.

  Dad comes home really late and I know he’s pissed because he scratches for the keyhole, clatters the milk bottles off the step, and then falls through the door. I wait in the dark for his footsteps up the stairs, across the landing, the pause by my door. I’m so quiet I can hear him breathe. But then he says, ‘Oh fuck it,’ and he’s past my room and into his, the door slamming loud enough to make Aubrey stir.

  I lie awake for another hour, waiting to see if there’s going to be a soft tap on my door. Once I even put my feet to the cold lino, almost make the running. I so want it to come from him but tonight seems like it’s too soon, like it would be wrong because of Diva. If it’s a guilt, it doesn’t last long because two nights later we’re loving like Bacall and Bogart. And it’s a desperate, clutching love that afterwards has him cradling me in his arms like the child I’m not.

  He talks gently to me, tells me how much he loves me and Aubrey in a soothing of words. I’m looking up at him, his so handsome face, and watching his mouth talk.

  But then I’m listening, really listening and I’m stiffening in his warm strong arms because he’s saying that this is wrong, that what we’re doing is wrong, and we must stop.

  I’m saying, ‘No, Dad. No.’

  And then he says, ‘No,’ and it’s like he shuts the arguments away, pushes them out of his mind, and he’s stroking my hair and telling me I’m beautiful and I look so much like Mam.

  And we’re safe here in this world we’ve made with the door locked on reality.

  But two weeks is all we get, just two weeks before paradise ends.

  Back in this hospice for the dying I take another swig of water – the morphine seems to dry my throat – and I want to hurry this part, this fortnight that’s oh so sweet and oh so bitter. And I want to draw the curtain behind the telling, rolling up the past behind me for the last time.

  So those fourteen days are passed over, glossed over in, ‘The happiest time of my life, Katja; me, Dad and Aubrey.’

  But I can’t stop the images, the pictures of a sixteen-year-old me nursing my beautiful wee bairn, with Dad’s arm around my shoulders, sitting there for hours on end as daylight fades into evening.

  I’m crying now, hard old me crying for a past that’s been dead for well over fifty years, but Katja’s not asking if I want to stop, is she? She’s listening to this, she wants to know this story in my life.

  She takes my glass away, wipes my mouth and waits.

  Dad’s at the club when Diva comes in the front door. I’m mopping the kitchen floor and the windows are open and a warm breeze is drifting through the house. Aubrey, my lovely Aubrey, is asleep in the front room. I’ve tied my blonde hair back with a scarf and I’m humming along to the radio.

  So she’s in the house, with a newspaper in her hand, and she’s saying, ‘I need to talk to you, Marie.’

  She’s skinnier than when she left and her eyes seem darker, bigger.

  I say, ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

  Then she looks at her watch and says, ‘Your dad’ll be here in a minute.’

  That throws me. ‘Dad. Why Dad?’

  Diva says, ‘We’ve got to sort this out.’ Her lips are tight together and they hardly move when she speaks.

  She’s baffling me but in my heart there’s a whisper of dread, and if anything ever seems unreal it’s the next two hours of my life.

  I hear Dad’s car and I’m at the threshold and hissing, ‘She’s here,’ before he’s even in the door.

  ‘I know,’ he says and he sounds so tired and he looks beaten; it’s like he’s shrunk.

  ‘Dad, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Marie,’ he says and he hugs me tightly, lovingly, and I can feel a trembling in his body.

  In the front room Diva says, ‘We’ve got to be civilised about this, Marie.’

  Dad says, ‘Please, Marie,’ like he recognises what’s coming.

  I’m looking at them, knowing they’ve been meeting, talking, deciding, and that whisper of dread is growing louder and louder.

  Dad starts to speak but Diva says, ‘I’ll do this, Canny.’

  She’s moved to the table and she opens the newspaper and taps the headlines of the page.

  ‘See this, Marie.’

  She prods the words.

  Man jailed six years – incest.

  There’s a whole story underneath but it doesn’t need telling because it’s all in those five words.

  ‘Is this what you want, Marie? Do you want this for him?’

  Aubrey is grizzling in his pram and I’m thinking that this is his feeding time and I should be changing his nappy and… and doing anything except reading those words of reality.

  Dad’s slumped in a chair and I’m going over to hold him, to stroke his hair. I take a step, just one step, and Diva starts, ‘No, Marie. You’ve done enough.’

  There’s a difference to Diva; she’s not the woman who dragged her case from under the bed and crept out the front door like a thief in the night; she’s filling this room and she’s pinning me like a butterfly.

  Dad just sits there. He’s not arguing, he’s not saying anything.

  Diva says very quietly, ‘If you don’t leave us, Marie, give us our life back, I’ll get the police. Then we’ll see.’

  In this present I’ve got to take another drink now, catch my breath. Who would have thought that talking could be so tiring? Katja takes my glass again and I say, ‘I wish it was something stronger.’ She laughs and calls me a hopeless case and smoothes the sheet around me. You know, if I’d had a daughter I would have wanted her to be like Katja.

  But I didn’t; I had a beautiful baby boy who grizzled in his pram while Diva decided our lives. And now I’m lying in this bed and reliving that time and I’m not going to plead the innocent; I knew what we were doing, what we did, but once we’d started there was no stopping. And this is what Diva knew, that there would be no broken promises; because there were to be no promises.

  So now I have to go back to that sunny afternoon with a warm breeze sifting through the house where they’re waiting for me.

  Me with a scarf tying back my blonde hair.

  Dad, with his face in his hands.

  And her, Queen of the fucking dance, Belle of the ball, with cruel right on her side; the law on her side.

  I know what’s coming, I know what she wants and she doesn’t need to drag through out all the reasons why.

  I say, ‘Dad?’ and he says that there’s no other way. That it’s got to be like this.

  And there is such sadness, such acceptance, in his voice that I scream at him, ‘No, Dad. No.’

  ‘Yes, Marie. Yes.’

  Diva is nodding to his words like she’s pulling the strings. Then she starts again, saying Dad could be put away for ten years. All it would take was for her to say something, then there would be the
police, a blood test and I’d be in a home and Aubrey would be taken.

  But if we do it her way, the only way, the secret stays just that and if I don’t agree she’ll tell because without Dad her life means nothing.

  ‘If I can’t have him,’ she says, ‘then no one will.’

  She means it; there’s a black flame flickering in those dark gypsy eyes and her face is set into ‘all or nothing for me’.

  I hate her then and I know I’ll hate her as long as I live.

  But on this warm sunny afternoon she’s not finished destroying my life. She wants Dad and she wants the child she never had. She wants my family. She wants my Aubrey so it really is all or nothing for her.

  And for me and Dad there’s:

  No prison.

  No child of incest put away.

  No state institution for me.

  Och, I can blame my big mouth but I know that sooner or later this day had to come; I just made it the sooner and my Aubrey, my beautiful Aubrey, must stay for him. This is what’s been bargained in meetings behind my back.

  This is it, she says.

  ‘Is this what you want, Dad?’ Now I’m crying, sobbing. ‘Is this what you want?’

  Dad says that there’s no choice and it sounds like a plea for acceptance, almost saying, ‘No more, Marie.’ It’s like he’s cutting me adrift.

  I say, ‘Not Aubrey, Dad. Not Aubrey.’

  I know that I’m shaking my head and my voice is breaking into fragments and my hair is tumbling down my face.

  Diva says, ‘It’s the only way,’ and it’s hard and unyielding.

  I say, ‘For you. For you two.’ Then I realised I’ve paired them, put Dad and Diva together.

  Then Diva says the words that are on her face.

  ‘All or nothing for me or you, Marie.’

  She’s juggling our futures between her hands, and I’m trying to catch just one of the balls.

  I scream, ‘What about me?’ and the room goes quiet and no one answers.

  It’s like I’m not there.

  I say to Katja, ‘And that was it.’

  ‘It?’ she says.

  And it was it. I walked out of that house the next morning with twenty-five pounds in notes and the clothes I stood up in. I didn’t take a suitcase and I didn’t take my baby.

  But I took the train to Dundee to Mam’s old haunts, to Mam’s old friends, to Big Ben, to Mam’s old life. I became Mam for thirty years. These are the words I say to Katja and I cover that time after in the blink of an eye, because I don’t want to explain the drag of the years, the peeping into prams, the watching of children through the school gates. Or the long, long nights that men and drink couldn’t dull. Oh, I could tell a hundred tales of rooms that reeked of sweet smoke and sex.

  I could tell of a life apart.

  I say to Katja that I’ve had enough for now, that I want to sleep.

  And sleep I do and of course I dream of Dad and Aubrey, and in that dream there’s no Diva; she’s not in my life.

  When I wake it’s late and the bed opposite me is empty and at visiting time there’s no boy-husband and no young bairns clambering on the covers. It’s done for the young wife; another one ticked off the list.

  I look around the ward and wonder who’s going to be next, who’ll be the next empty bed. And then I think I’ve got as good a chance as anyone and that sobers me up.

  When Katja comes she asks me if I’d like Father O’Hallaron to come and talk to me. I tell Katja that it’s too late to save my soul, and that I’m too old to be abused. She laughs and squeezes my hand and then she says, ‘I shall miss you, Marie.’

  That means she’s not like the doctor who comes on the morning round; he raises his eyebrows and says, ‘Good day Mrs ----’ and looks surprised to see that I’m still here.

  But it’s not going to be that much longer because the grey on the edge of my vision grows deeper, closer each hour. It’s starting to cloud in on me like it’s shutting down my sight, my life.

  You know I never thought dying would be like this; slow and quiet, and with more morphine in my veins than blood. I always said I wanted to go with my boots on and a glass of whisky in my hand. Quick. Sudden. Like, all over in a flash. But it’s not that bad, gently unfolding my memories, closing the door on each one in turn. Och, I’ve had a life; good and bad, sweet and sour.

  So I lose time, all sense of it; a minute could be an hour, an hour a week, and every now and then I hear Katja, see her blurred face.

  ‘Hold on, Marie,’ she says. ‘Just a little longer. Hold on.’

  I can feel her gently squeezing my fingers.

  ‘Marie, can you hear me?’

  I squeeze back because words are difficult to get out now and in my head there’s a strange sound, like water slowly dripping into a deep well.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  ‘Marie.’ Katja’s voice is ebbing and flowing and…

  and then I’m a young girl and I’m seeing the waves drive up the beach and then there’s a pause and then they fall back and the shingle’s singing and Mam and I have wet feet and Mam’s laughing fit to burst and she hugs me and says, ‘Marie, my bonny little hussy.’

  She takes my hand, leads me up the pebbles and onto the sand of the beach. And on that sandy beach there’s Dad and he’s sitting with a dark-haired toddler on his lap.

  ‘Marie,’ Dad says, ‘say hello to Aubrey.’

  Mam has her arm around Dad’s shoulders and she says, ‘Yes, say hello to your little brother.’

  The boy turns, looks at me, and then says so clearly out of his child’s mouth, but in Dad’s voice, ‘Hello, Mum.’

  But then this world jolts, freezes, dies…

  and I’m back in my bed in the Macmillan Hospice and Katja is squeezing my hand.

  ‘Marie, can you hear me?’ Her voice is soft and distant. ‘There’s someone here.’

  I feel a different grip on my hand, a hesitant grasp on my fingers, and then a thick Glasgow accent says, ‘Hello, Mum.’

  If I could cry I would cry now because all this is too late, much too late, and my window on life is closing over and then I can’t feel his fingers on mine. I can’t feel anything and this night is as black as pitch.

  And then there’s nothing anymore.

  And it’s all done.

  All finished.

  A Wednesday night – for a change – in March.

  Maggie.

  I’ve had this mood on me all day; Kayleigh reckons I’ve become a real Grumpy Gran.

  ‘Honestly, Mum,’ she says, ‘it’s about time…’

  ‘About time what, Kayleigh?’

  ‘I don’t have to say it.’

  And she doesn’t because it’s all been said before a dozen times. But she’s wrong, anyway, because it’s not about Ken, not about getting used to being on my own. It’s not that.

  I tell Kayleigh that I’ll have a hot bath and an early night and she says that’s a good idea; it’s freezing outside and the talk is of heavy snow sweeping in from the north.

  We share a pot of tea and then Kayleigh goes home, and my house sounds so quiet, so empty.

  I take the radio into the bathroom and while I’m soaking I listen to an hour of depressing news that makes me yearn for a bit of laughter, some light-hearted humour. So while I’m getting dressed I switch on the telly but it’s East Enders and someone’s been murdered, someone’s been beaten up, and the rest of them are wearing faces as long as horses’.

  I give myself a pep talk, decide that I need to get out of the house.

  Right, what I’ll do is go down to the George, see if any of the girls are in. Even Big Nellie will do for company tonight.

  When I step out, a blast of bitter wind hits me and before I’m halfway to the pub snow starts to fall. It’s not much to begin with but by the time I reach the George it’s swirling like a mist in the light of the streetlamps. God, I’m cold, and I’m looking forward to warming myself in front of Danny’s fireplace.

 
And inside the empty bar the fire is blazing away and Danny’s got his back to it.

  ‘Just warming my ars… bum,’ he says, smoothing his trousers behind him.

  I ask for a shandy but he says I need something warm inside me on a night like this. He serves me a rum and Pep and says, ‘On the house, Maggie.’ Then he says, ‘I think I’ll join you.’ And he joins me in a drink and pulls up a chair to the fire as well.

  I say, ‘Thanks,’ and he says he’s got to look after his only customer.

  We sit for a while, talking about the darts and our chances of winning the league, and I buy another rum for me and him and he asks how I’m managing. I tell him it’s hard at times and he says it must be because I’m still a fine-looking woman. I don’t quite know what he means by this but the rum’s warming me inside, and it’s so nice to have someone to talk to.

  Danny goes to the window, says he doesn’t think we’ll see anyone else about tonight. I tell him I’ll drink this one up and then I’ll go and he says, ‘There’s no rush, Maggie. I’m glad of the company.’

  He says it in a way that makes me think there’s a depth of truth to it.

  And he must be a bit younger than me but he’s got that lived-in face of too many late nights, too many years of hard drinking. He’s still got most of his hair and… stop there, Maggie.

  You know I’ve been doing this a lot lately, sort of looking at men – not like that – but sort of considering them. Kayleigh said I was staring at the butcher the other day and she gave me a sharp nudge.

  ‘Mum, he’ll think you fancy him.’

  I tell her it’s no such thing and I was thinking about his offer of a Weekend Special Sausage. She raises her eyebrows at this and we both have a snigger.

  Anyway, here in this snowbound pub Danny picks up my glass and says, ‘Another one, Maggie?’

  I say that I shouldn’t really and he laughs and says he won’t tell if I don’t.

  He’s turned off most of the lights. ‘Can’t waste electric when there’s no bugger here.’ He sets the jukebox on play and he asks me if I’ve any old favourites.

  I say, ‘Something from the seventies, Danny.’ (I’m worried that seventies came out sounding like the sheventies, but if it does he doesn’t say.)