Kiss My Name

by Calvin Wade

  “Look Nicky, you and our Jason may think you are grown up, because you’re at an age when you start doing grown up things, drinking and smoking and the likes, but really you’re still kids yourselves. You’re both only sixteen years old. Not legally old enough to drink or smoke but according to law, somehow considered old enough to have sex. You and our Jason have made a mistake and to be honest, I don’t really give two hoots about whose mistake it was, we just need to act now, to stop a silly little mistake by two kids becoming a major mistake with lifelong consequences.”

  “Who mentioned an abortion?” I asked again.

  “Arthur, it’s common sense!” Mr.McLaren spoke with real assertiveness, it could have almost been mistaken for a bullying tone.

  “They’re kids!” he continued, “They don’t want to be changing nappies and pushing prams at their age. They are barely out of nappies themselves. They’re bright kids, Arthur, they have their whole future ahead of them. They don’t want to ruin it all by having a child.”

  “Have you asked them?”

  “I’ve asked Jason.”

  “Have you asked Nicky?”

  “Arthur, I don’t need to ask her. Even if she thinks she can handle it all, the truth of the matter, when it comes down to it, will be that she can’t. If Nicky has this thing, she will always regret it. Her future will be ruined. An abortion is best for them both.”

  The reference to ‘this thing’ again, only served to antagonise me further.

  “And for the baby? It’s best for the bay, is it, if it is pulled out of Nicky’s womb and murdered?”

  Mrs. McLaren was back in the game.

  “Don’t be so melodramatic, Arthur” she said haughtily, “it’s a cluster of cells, not a full term baby.”

  “There is a baby alive inside my daughter.”

  “Are you trying to brainwash the child into going through with this?” Mrs.McLaren asked.

  “I am doing nothing of the sort, Mrs.McLaren. Ultimately, the decision lies with Nicky. Not you or I, just Nicky.”

  “And Jason” Mr.McLaren added.

  “No,” I pointed out, “just Nicky.”

  Nicky didn’t agree.

  “Dad, it isn’t just down to me. It is down to Jason too. We love each other. We won’t be forced into having the baby by you and we won’t be forced into having an abortion by Margery and Derrick. We will do what’s right for us and our baby, Dad.”

  As Nicky uttered the words, ‘our baby’, I looked across at Mr.McLaren and I swear to God that I saw him flinch. Flinch at the mere mention of the word ‘baby’. Nicky would not allow me to brainwash her, nor would I have ever tried to, but that lad, who barely managed ‘Hello’, ‘Thank you’ and later ‘Goodbye’ throughout the course of their visit, had been brainwashed in good style by Mr.&Mrs.McLaren. Jason wanted to kill his own offspring, I was sure of it and somehow, I knew, I had to work out a way to stop him.

  NICKY – June 1992

  I was thirteen weeks pregnant, just coming out of the constant nausea stage. For a couple of months, if Dad and I ventured out anywhere in the car, half the time I would make him pull over so I could throw up. That nauseous stage was starting to ease, but my physical imbalance was now being replaced by a mental one. Jason and I had created an awful mess by conceiving a child, but the solution my father wanted and the solution Jason’s parents wanted were diametrically opposite. Dad wanted me to have the baby, he pretended he would support me either way, but abortion did not sit well with his religious beliefs. The McLarens though, were certain abortion was the best way to move on.

  My Dad, God love him, wanted to find a way of persuading Jason that having a child at sixteen years old was a marvellous idea! Dad had arranged a meeting with the McLaren family at our house, which passed with Dad concluding Jason’s parents were dead against the idea of a grandchild. He also concluded that Jason was only marginally opposed to becoming a Dad and was more open to a change of heart. Dad latched on to this and wanted Jason to come to our house more often. Admittedly, I was open to this idea too, I was becoming increasingly sure that I wanted to keep the baby and it was easier having Jason around at our house, where Dad would treat him like an old friend, than me going to Jason’s, where his Mum and Dad would treat me like a scarlet woman. Bread was one of the most popular sitcoms of that era and I remember saying to Jason that his Mum and Dad treated me like ‘Lilo Lill’. Mrs.McLaren never uttered the immortal words, ‘she is a tart’ to my face, but I am sure it was uttered many times behind my back!

  One evening, Jason was around at ours for tea and the three of us were sat around our kitchen table. Dad had treated us to a Viennetta, which at the time, was really pushing the boat out. Each time Jason visited, Dad would drop little nuggets of wisdom into the conversation to work on Jason’s mindset. This particular evening, he was in great form.

  “What are we watching on TV tonight then?” Dad asked.

  With only having one television, we tended to put it to a vote.

  “I’m not bothered,” Jason replied, “I’ll watch anything.”

  “The Bill?” Dad suggested.

  “No, I hate The Bill,” I moaned.

  “Well, get the Radio Times then Nicky and see what’s on BBC or get Ceefax up.”

  “I’ll get the Radio Times. Please may I leave the table?”

  “Of course.”

  Dad had always taught me to ask whether I could leave the table. As far as I remember, it was commonplace for children to ask their parents back in the eighties. I doubt it is commonplace now. Most families don’t even eat at a table together. I left the table and went to look for the Radio Times in the magazine rack in the lounge. I deliberately left the doors open so that I could still hear the conversation. I didn’t trust Dad around Jason.

  “Do you ever watch documentaries, Jason?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What types?”

  “I dunno...sports ones mainly.”

  “So you didn’t see the one on slavery, on BBC2, the other night?”

  “No.”

  Now I have to say, at this point, that I subsequently checked old editions of the Radio Times and I don’t believe there was a programme on about slavery that week or the week before. Dad, the manipulative sod, was just directing the conversation down a route that formed part of his pregnancy plan!

  “It was excellent, Jason. Do you know much about slavery in America?”

  “I know white people had black slaves and the American Civil War had something to do with that, but not much else, no.”

  “You should read up on it then. It’s fascinating stuff. Fascinating but disgraceful that one set of human beings could treat another set of human beings like that, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “You should really read up on it, Jason. In the 1850s, there was a very famous case, where the US Supreme Court voted, by a huge majority, seven to two I think, that black people should not be considered to be legal people in their own right. They were just the property of their owner.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “What that meant was, that if you, as a white man, owned a black man or a black woman, you could sell them or even kill them and that was permissible within the boundaries of American law. A whole group of living people had no rights just because of the colour of their skin. Awful that, isn’t it?”

  “Terrible.”

  “More recently in America, have you heard about the Roe versus Wade case in the 1970s?”

  “No.”

  I had heard of Roe versus Wade, we’d been taught about it in American History. Jason wasn’t studying History for GCSE so he would not have known. I knew it was to do with American abortion law. The crafty sod was bringing up my pregnancy again!

  “Dad, stop it!” I shouted through. I was on my hands and knees looking for the Radio Times otherwise I’d have gone back into the kitchen and given him a telling off face to face.

  “Stop what, love?”r />
  “I know what you’re doing, Dad. Roe versus Wade was about unborn babies not being treated as legal entities in their own right. They were classed as the property of their mother, at least until they could survive on their own in the final trimester. I know exactly what you’re doing, Dad!”

  “What?”

  “You were about to ask Jason if it was wrong to discriminate against black people in the nineteenth century because of their skin, is it not wrong in the twentieth century to discriminate against unborn babies, just because they are not yet old enough to make decisions for themselves?”

  Jason told me Dad’s face broke out into a wide grin.

  “She’s smart your girlfriend, isn’t she?”

  “Very.”

  “The point is, Jason....”

  “Dad,” I warned, “Jason doesn’t want to hear the point.”

  “No, go on Mr.Moyes, make your point.”

  “As a Christian, I just think it was totally wrong for white people to have the legal power to kill black people a century or so ago, but it is also wrong for parents to be given the legal right to kill their healthy children now. Whether you are a religious person or a scientific person, you have to agree, once the sperm and the egg come together, a fertilised cell called the zygote is created and from that moment forward, a new individual is formed. Do you think it should be legal to kill that individual? I don’t.”

  One of the grievances that Mr.&Mrs.McLaren had with my pregnancy was that Jason may not get the opportunity to fully utilise his talents. He was, and still is, a clever lad. I didn’t doubt his ability, even at sixteen, to come back with a measured response. He did not let me down.

  “Mr.Moyes, I am not a Christian. I am not religious at all. Personally, I think religions were for semi-intelligent people two thousand years ago, who were trying to discover the meaning of life. Science has subsequently taught us a lot of what’s within the pages of the Bible cannot possibly be true.”

  “Like what?”

  “Jesus healed many men possessed with demons.”

  “That’s just historical interpretation, Jason. The people could have been mentally or physically ill.”

  “Mr.Moyes, the point is, I prefer science to blind faith. Going back to what I was saying...”

  “That’s the problem with kids these nowadays, you don’t have faith in anything. Not in God, not in yourselves, not in anything.”

  “Dad, let Jason speak,” I shouted through again, before picking myself up off the floor and returning to the kitchen clutching the Radio Times.

  “The thing is, Mr.Moyes, despite not being religious, I do value life. I really wish Nicky wasn’t pregnant at this stage in our lives, but now that she is, I understand that there is a living child inside her body, not just a collection of cells as my Mum and Dad made out, our living child. It would be easier for me if Nicky did not have the baby, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want her to have it. I am more than happy to support Nicky in any way I can if she has the baby, but if she decides not to have it, Mr.Moyes, I am not going to be telling her that she killed our child either.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “Good, you can stop dropping hints now then!”

  “Jason, I have no idea what you are talking about! Come on Nicky, love, Jason and I want to know what’s on BBC!”

  I went over to Jason and squeezed his hand to acknowledge I appreciated everything he had just said, before opening up the Radio Times on the kitchen table.

  “There’s a documentary on BBC1 about someone with Tourettes syndrome, whatever that is and on BBC2, there’s ‘A Bit of Fry and Laurie’.”

  “Don’t fancy either of them,” Dad moaned.

  “Dad, look, you watch ‘The Bill’ and we’ll go and listen to some records in my room.”

  Gone where the days that taking Jason up to my room would create concerns about sex and its consequences.

  “OK, thanks love.”

  Jason stood up from the table.

  “Thanks for tea, Mr.Moyes. Nicky and I will come down and do the dishes later.”

  “No problem, Jason. Call me, Arthur. You’ve made an old man very happy today, Jason.”

  “Get away with you, Dad! You’re not that old!”

  “Old enough to be a grandfather, love! I’m old enough to be a grandfather!”

  SIMON – August 1992

  A new shop had opened in Chorley called Penny Pinchers. Largely, it sold a load of cheap rubbish, plastic toys, brushes, frying pans that looked like the handle would fall off whilst your pancake was in mid-air, but it also sold the best cream for acne that was ever known to man and it was only 50p a tube! Zeitkila was made in Taiwan, like most other items in that shop, but it’s clear, magic gel attacked spots like no other cream I had ever bought. It actually left scorch marks on your face, which probably looked as bad as the spots themselves and was withdrawn on safety grounds in 1994, but when I was nineteen, I was buying a tube a week.

  On this particular Monday, after my window cleaning round, I had walked back up into town in desperation, as my previous tube of Zeitkila had run out on the Friday, but when Mum had given me a lift into Chorley on the Saturday, they were out of stock and awaiting a delivery first thing on Monday morning. It felt like Christmas Day when I saw Penny Pinchers had re-stocked and I gleefully grabbed six tubes of the liquid magic, determined to never run short again. As I was heading to the counter, I saw Nicky Moyes, dressed in dungarees that looked like they have been stolen from a circus clown. I watched her for a few seconds and noticed her head was bowed and she was sobbing into the baby section. Her baby bump was pushing out against her weird clothing.

  Joey Neill had told me that Nicky was pregnant back in May. He had found out via his mother and had specifically phoned from Polytechnic to break the news. I think he did it to be spiteful really, as he knew how much I thought of her.

  “You’ll never guess what,” he taunted, “Nicky has only gone and got herself up the duff.”

  It felt like a death to me. In a way, it was a death, the death of the perfect future that I had always imagined. I had always pictured Nicky floating out of Euxton Parish Church, in a perfect virginal white wedding dress with a magnificently long train, walking down the slope with me, arm in arm, being showered in confetti by the gate at the bottom, whilst the whole village looked on and applauded. Jason McLaren had made his move and now she was having his child, they would be together forever. The day Joey told me, it felt like my dream was over.

  In Penny Pinchers, whilst Nicky continued to sob, I stood and stared at her bump. I had no first hand experience of pregnancy, no-one I knew had been pregnant since Mum had had Colin and I had no recollection of that time, so I couldn’t tell how pregnant Nicky was. I knew she wasn’t about to give birth, because sometimes you saw women walking around town whose pregnant stomachs looked enormous and Nicky’s looked neat and tidy, so I made an educated guess that she was about halfway into her pregnancy. Bizarrely, as it turns out, I wasn’t far wrong. The other thing that kept crossing my mind was that Jason McLaren had been lucky enough to have made love to Nicky. I thought he must have felt like a lottery winner. I approached her slowly as she continued to sob.

  “Hi Nicky!” I tried to speak softly, “are you OK?”

  Nicky was facing the shelves, so she turned ninety degrees to see who it was that had spotted her breaking down.

  “Oh God, Simon it’s you! No, I’m not OK. Look at me, my life is ruined. Why I ever let my Dad talk me into having this baby, I’ll never know. I should have just gone with my instinct and had the baby aborted.”

  My heart sank a little when Nicky said this. There were two reasons really. First of all, I had spent several years developing a strange crush on a girl three years younger than me. I had grown to idolise her and to hear her sound so in despair and broken saddened me. Secondly though, it was also a savage and un-Nicky like thing for her to have said and my dream like, perfect image of her was shattered in that moment.


  “You don’t mean that, Nicky.”

  “Don’t I? I’m a pregnant sixteen year old girl. Everyone from school thinks I’m a slut. I have just dumped my boyfriend after discovering he went to a party in Brinscall on Saturday night, got hammered and ended up in bed with Vicky Lancaster and her massive tits. What sort of father is that, Simon?”

  “Not a very good one.”

  “A crap one, Simon. A really crap one. I kidded myself he was going to be alright too, that he was going to be there for me and the baby, but he isn’t. If I’d have had an abortion, it wouldn’t really have mattered, but now, now I feel like my world is ending, Simon.”

  Nicky really went for the crying then. It was proper sobbing, so much so her nose started running and she fidgeted around in search of a tissue that she didn’t appear to have.

  “Look at me, Simon! I am a fat, snotty, unwanted mess. I hate myself. I absolutely hate myself.”

  I wished in that moment, that I hadn’t come to Penny Pinchers. I wished I didn’t have an addiction to Zeitkila and a small part of me wished that I hadn’t run into Nicky. I think that part of me wanted to go on imagining that she was perfect. I didn’t know how to cheer her up. I wasn’t a counsellor for teenage mothers. I was a nineteen year old window cleaner. A nineteen year old window cleaner who, despite everything that he had heard, was still in love with the fat, snotty nosed mess beside him.

  “Nicky, let me go and buy my things. I’ll buy you a packet of tissues too and then let me take you for a cup of coffee somewhere. I haven’t seen you for ages and I hate seeing you looking so sad.”

  “Thanks, Simon. Do you know if they have a toilet in here?”

  “I don’t think they have a customer one. If you ask, with you being a pregnant lady, they may let you use the staff one.”

  “Forget it, I’ll nip to the public toilets in the main car park and sort my teary self out. I’ll meet you outside here in five minutes and then we can go and grab a coffee.”