The White Family

by Maggie Gee

  First she registered she wasn’t much hurt.

  Winded, stung. But she could move her ankle.

  Then she began to scrabble for her things.

  But someone was coming, two feet in Nike trainers, big black and white trainers moving quiet and fast, and she looked up to see an enormous black man looming out of the rain, panting, gasping, his golden eyes boring into hers, and she shrank back, covering the money with her skirt, as the pantherish face swooped down towards her.

  ‘Help,’ she cried feebly, still out of breath, and then ‘Help,’ louder, but no one would hear her, and she thought, in that instant, knowing she would die, please God take care of Alfred and the kids.

  20 • Shirley

  We were nearly always well-behaved, as children, well-mannered, hard-working, not answering back. Darren, being the oldest, had tried it on. He staged his rebellion and had it crushed, brutally, wrestling hand to hand with Dad, because Dad was tough, he was small but tough, he was very fit from his life outside. The women stood in the kitchen sobbing, me and Mum, with our arms round each other. ‘Call the police,’ I begged her, as they shoved and grunted. ‘He’ll kill my brother. Call the police.’ ‘He won’t kill him,’ she said, but she didn’t sound sure. There were horrible sounds of fist on flesh, bone on wood, thumping, yielding, sounds I have never been able to forget. ‘I’ll break you,’ I heard Dad shout, insanely. All of a sudden, they stopped exhausted. Darren knelt on the floor, wiping dribble from his mouth, sobbing, ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it, I’m sorry.’ Then he ran from the house. I ran after him because I thought he would never come back, because I thought he would kill himself: ‘Darren, Darren!’ I couldn’t catch him. I could never run fast and I had the wrong shoes and no coat in winter and people looked at me as though I was crazy. I probably was crazy, with fear and grief.

  How did we ever get over that? How do families ever recover? And go on to seem normal. A lovely family. People congratulated Dad on his family …

  ‘Madam?’

  ‘Sorry, I was dreaming. A cappuccino. And if you could bring some cakes?’

  ‘Certainly, madam. With grated chocolate?’

  ‘Oh plenty of grated chocolate, thanks.’

  When Mum had another baby late in life I wanted to protect him, the little blond scrap, his thin pale face and his frightened mouth, from what had happened to the rest of us. Poor little Dirk. Is that why I loved him?

  ‘Leave him alone!’ It was suddenly easy to stand up to Dad on Dirk’s behalf. So perhaps that was the gift Dirk gave me. Perhaps it wasn’t all one way.

  He had spilled Dad’s beer. An accident. It was his second beer, it was Sunday lunch. That second beer had often spelled trouble. I stood up to Dad. My heart was bursting –

  ‘Coffee, madam. Excuse me.’

  I hadn’t heard the waitress. She stands there smiling.

  ‘Your cakes are on their way.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ – Nearly twenty years later, my voice is still shaking.

  My father hit me in the mouth. ‘You mind your own business, how dare you,’ he yelled, beside himself, insane with temper.

  Then Dirk was crying and begging him. ‘Please don’t hit Shirley, please don’t hit Shirley, it’s my fault, Daddy, I’m sorry, I’m sorry –’ Lying on the floor. Submission posture. Trying to make his father less angry. I had learned about that in psychology, I was studying then, I was different then, I thought I was going to be a teacher, before things went wrong, before my life went wrong, but perhaps it had already all gone wrong, being brought up in that house of torture.

  And Mum in the kitchen, her low frightened voice. ‘Don’t, Alfred. Please don’t, Alfred. She’s only nineteen. He’s only seven.’ But very quiet. Too scared to speak up. Too scared to come into the living-room and help us.

  Later she crept upstairs after me and stood on the landing outside the bathroom. Dirk had been sent to bed for making trouble. Dad had slammed out of the house for a walk, off to the Park where he always went after there was a row, as if he couldn’t bear it – But it was all his doing, wasn’t it? He made the rows, didn’t he? It was his fault. If he didn’t enjoy it, couldn’t he have stopped it? This time he left in the middle of things, so the horror wasn’t over, the lump in the throat, the lead weight in the belly, the fear of worse to come. Mum hissed at me through the rickety door. ‘Shirley. Darling. Are you all right?’

  I didn’t answer. I was sponging my face, pressing cold water against the bone, where I felt so bruised, where I felt so hurt, for he’d never before hit me in the face. It was too personal; it almost felt sexual –

  ‘Shirley. Please.’

  ‘Just go away.’

  ‘Shirley, dear. I have to see.’

  ‘Come in and see then.’ I flung the door open. There was a little cut, from his watch, I think, and a red-blue mark was steadily deepening. ‘I hate him, Mum. I’ll have to kill him. How dare he hit me. I’m nineteen, I’m grown up!’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling.’ She took the flannel and gently pressed it against my skin.

  ‘It hurts.’

  ‘I know. You shouldn’t get involved.’

  ‘Oh great.’ I turned and pushed her away. ‘So I let him hurt my brother, do I? That’s your policy, never get involved.’

  ‘It is his house. You might be better away.’

  ‘Then who would stand up for my little brother? Not you. You’re … disgusting. You’re hopeless. You’re a coward.’ I spat it at her, tears bursting, flowing. At that moment I hated her as much as him.

  And then of course Mum started crying. She sat beside me on the edge of the bath, and I pushed her away, but she held my hand, held on to it grimly as I tried to shake her off, and then I gave up, and we sat there crying.

  ‘I think you could cover it with make-up.’

  ‘Yes.’ Cover things up; we always did.

  ‘I’m sorry, Shirley. I feel afraid.’

  ‘It’s all right, Mum.’ I was sorry for her. Sorry for her, for Dirk, for all of us.

  We went together to peep at Dirk. ‘Do you want some milk before your father gets back?’

  He was under the blankets, curled up in a ball, his blond hair sticking out on the pillow, and then he uncurled, we saw his red blurred face, streaming with snot, a baby’s face, the face of a boy turned back into a baby by having his courage beaten out of him – (I would never hit a child; never, never. Perhaps it’s as well that I’ve never had one. They say you always pass it on.)

  ‘I’ll kill him,’ he sobbed. ‘I hate him. When I’m bigger, you wait, I’ll smash him’ – but that was my father talking, you see. Those were Dad’s words, when he got mad. Dad liked to think he could smash people. People were things when they got in his way.

  And he had turned Dirk into a kind of thing, all smeared and swollen and unlike himself.

  In fact, Dad met his friend George on the walk and went back to George and Ruby’s for tea. By the time he came home, he was over it. He was almost shamefaced, though he never said sorry, but he came and talked to me, unnaturally friendly, asking about my work at college, something he didn’t know anything about, and he watched TV with Dirk on his lap, stroking his hair, which made me want to throw up.

  And Dirk went along with it. Dirk was grateful. That was the most sickening part of it. Dirk always idolized our father.

  (And he’s never grown up. I think he still does.)

  The row was over, but I couldn’t stay at home. I had to get out of the house that evening. I went to a party at Alison Green’s, a party I never meant to go to, at the house of someone I didn’t like, though she was in the same group at college as me. (She kept her hair in a fat French pleat, and wore very short skirts, though she claimed to be religious, with a crucifix and a polo-necked sweater that showed two decks of bosom and bra. I can see her so clearly; her plump pink lips, her enthusiastic questions in lectures, her grey eyes gleaming with real passion, for she was so eager to be a teacher, to go to Africa, like her paren
ts, and then come home and ‘teach the underprivileged’. I thought, my family is underprivileged, but save me Lord from Alison Green.)

  I wanted to teach then with my whole heart. But it didn’t happen. I messed things up. I had my chance and messed things up. People from our class don’t get two chances.

  Alison’s parents were some kind of missionaries (‘Taking the faith to the savages in Kenya’, but I never even noticed the way they talked.) And they were both abroad that spring, and it was her birthday, in their strait-laced house with its fussy rugs and dried-flower arrangements and pelmets and flounces and Roman Catholic pictures. I arrived early. It looked utterly grim. But I helped her switch off most of the lights, and put red crêpe paper over the others, and hide the worst of the holy pictures ‘in case people spill their drinks on them’. She had laid in plenty of bread and cheese and a great many bottles of cider. We all clubbed together to buy some wine, six bottles of a warmish white that I thought delicious, and impressively French – vin de table, probably, mere vin de table, but the vowels on the label looked strange and sweet and a world away from the bottles of beer on which my father became obnoxious –

  ‘An éclair, madam?’ the waitress asked, her pale peach apron tightly wrapped around an unreasonably tiny waist. ‘A millefeuille, perhaps? Or the tarte tatin?’

  ‘I’ll have the eclair.’ These days it means nothing, French or English, we’re European –

  There were several boys that I didn’t know. Two of them were friends of a cousin of Alison who looked confusingly like her, but more so, with bigger bosoms and more prominent teeth and a shorter skirt and higher heels … however, Kate didn’t wear a crucifix. And the boys she was with were very attractive, both of them tall, with well-fitting jeans and coloured shirts and narrow ties. Alison had told me they were all students. Classy students, not people like us. Trainee teachers couldn’t hope to be classy. Whereas these were university students.

  ‘I’m not religious,’ Kate announced to me, pouring the wine with impressive freedom. ‘My family are. I think they’re cracked. Alison is. Do you know her well?’ ‘Not very well.’ I felt disloyal, but repressed it. I wasn’t particularly Christian then, and Alison was not a close friend. I wanted to be glamorous and fun, like them. I wanted something I had never known. I wanted to be taken away from my family, away from littleness, away from rules. The boys were tall and slim and dangerous. One of them was swaying his hips as he danced, narrow and definite and sexual. My cheeks felt hot. I wanted him. My eye still throbbed where my father had hit me, how dare he hit me, I’d never forgive him –

  His name was Ivo. Imagine! Ivo. Not Ivor, as I first thought, which is just Welsh, but Ivo. Unbearably aristocratic. I soon found out that the other boy was Kate’s. He’s mine, I thought. Ivo is mine. I had the haziest idea of what to do with him, but I started by dancing with him, decorously, watching him closely, which was easy enough as he liked to dance with his eyes half-closed, immensely cool, looking at the floor, making strange little sallies to left and right which at the time seemed like the acme of dancing. I wasn’t really sure he was dancing with me, but when the music slowed down he took hold of me, and started massaging the tops of my arms, my trembling shoulders, my neck, my hair –

  ‘Watch him, Shirley,’ shrieked Alison, in passing, over David Bowie’s ‘Aladdin Sane’. ‘Oh, I’m all right,’ I told her, airily, trying to be airy and failing, failing, because his hands had found the toggle of my zip, because he was gently kissing my eyebrows, and no one had kissed my eyebrows before.

  Soon I was swimming. We were swimming together, through shoals of limbs and warm wine and music. Breathing was hard. Swimming through space, and someone had put on ‘Ziggy Stardust’, flying out further, too far to come back, ‘Ground Control to Major Tom … Ground Control to Major Tom’ … and now I was drifting with Major Tom, out across a Milky Way of pleasure, shivering stars of electric feeling as his fingers brushed the smooth ridge of my spine, going lower, lower as I flew higher, above the crowd, above the voices of my mother and father saying, not too far, don’t go too far, and Ground Control was getting fainter and fainter …

  There was an ugly screech like a demented bird as Alison stopped the record-player. ‘It’s too slow,’ she yelled above a chorus of complaint. ‘I want to have fun. I want to – rock!’ It sounded as if she’d read it in a book, but she meant it from the bottom of her heart; her eyes gleamed frantically behind her glasses, her dress had slipped down low on her chest, a film of sweat lit up her breasts. I thought that Ivo would notice them, but he was burrowing into my neck, breathing hard, one hand down my back, caressing the last few points of my spine. The silence was odd; I heard his heart beating, or my heart beating, or both our hearts, and his embarrassingly heavy breathing. ‘Upstairs,’ he said, as Alison’s favourite Rod Stewart record roared into life behind us and everyone started to jump like monkeys. ‘Let’s go upstairs. I can feel you want to.’

  I don’t think I did want anything much except to go on in this dream forever, being stroked and held and dissolved by him, being carried so far away from home, so far away from pain and anger. I wanted more wine. He fetched more wine.

  But dreams don’t last. We went upstairs. I can’t imagine how I got upstairs. I have lived this evening over and over and I still can’t remember going upstairs, I still can’t remember deciding to go. That’s more important, if I ever decided.

  I hope I did it for some kind of purpose. I hope I wasn’t just another stupid girl who slept with a man because she was tipsy. I hope I wasn’t just a stupid cow. I hope my life had some pattern, some point.

  Because that evening changed it forever. He pulled off my dress and stroked my back and held my breasts one by one in his hands, and told me I was beautiful, and I thought, yes, he is mine, this is bliss, we shall be together forever like this. Then he pulled down my pants. I know I protested, partly because I wasn’t sure I was clean, or clean enough for whatever he intended. I think I felt sad I could no longer hear the music or be with the other young people dancing, young people, not grim old parents with their rules and habits and desperation, young people in the world we would make, all of us free and unfrightened and happy.

  ‘Let’s make love,’ he said, and kissed me. Just ‘Let’s make love,’ but at least he asked. I don’t think I heard that as sexual intercourse, although my pants were round my ankles, although his penis stood up like a candle. I heard it as love, and as a request. I heard it as tender, and infinitely hopeful. And I did have a choice, and I did say ‘Yes’. I did make a choice, even late in the day, I did make a choice, even if it was the wrong one. I didn’t just – let people do things to me.

  And with that choice, I changed my life. Because I got pregnant, with that first sexual act. It seems amazing now, impossible now, it seems bitterly, unfairly enviable now. It lasted three minutes, and he didn’t walk me home, and I lied to my mother that the party was boring, and I waited five weeks or so for him to phone, and I waited three months for my period to come.

  And then I went to the doctor in terror, and he was definite, and grim.

  I saw Alison in the Refectory next day. It was September; the party had been in June. ‘Have you heard from Kate, at all, since the party? You haven’t heard from Ivo, have you?’ ‘I hate my cousin now,’ she said. ‘It was Ivo and his friend who were smoking cigars and made burn marks on our carpets. You haven’t fallen for him, have you?’

  When I told her the problem she went very pale and her long ugly jaw wobbled in horror. ‘But you’d only just met him,’ she complained. ‘And you must have seen they were different from us. Kate’s an atheist. She told me so. And Ivo wouldn’t help with the washing-up … Besides, they’re modern linguists. They’ve all gone away to France for a year.’

  Total despair. I can feel it still. He had gone away, he had gone to France. I was nineteen years old and I’d never been abroad, and if I had a baby I knew I never would –

  ‘May I offer you more cakes,
madam? Perhaps the religieuse?’

  ‘No more thank you. I’d like the bill.’

  I make mistakes, then pay for them.

  Alison put her arm round me, I remember. It felt heavy, and out of place. ‘Oh Shirley,’ she said, ‘what shall we do?’ But I didn’t want her pity. And we weren’t the same. I couldn’t bear her thinking that we were the same. I wanted to be the same as Ivo, tall and slim and sexy and selfish. I wanted not to be Shirley White, the sort of silly booby who’d get herself pregnant.

  I tried to be mature. I went back to the doctor. I said I had discussed things with the father-to-be. Neither of us was ready to make the commitment. I wanted an abortion. He looked at me.

  ‘Do you know what it means, a late abortion? You’ll go through labour, with a dead baby.’

  Oh God, I thought, I’ve got a Catholic. ‘It isn’t a baby, not to me.’ But for some reason then I burst out crying. I couldn’t bear the sound of the words, ‘dead baby’, I don’t know why not, it was stupid of me, and only encouraged him to give me a lecture.

  He talked about adoption, and I laughed in his face. I didn’t know that one day I’d try to adopt, that one day I would be accepted to adopt. Kojo and I had just been accepted when he started to get ill, and the dream collapsed.

  ‘I can’t have this baby. I’m at college. I’m studying.’

  I suddenly saw in a sickening flash that I’d have this baby, there was no escape, I had started to walk down a long straight tunnel that led to a room full of absolute pain, and after that I could see only darkness.

  What happened was messier, more tortuous. My doctor reluctantly agreed to a termination, but there was muddle and delay until somehow I was already four months pregnant. I rejected all knowledge of the life inside me, but whatever was growing refused to be rejected. One day I had woken to feel it stirring, a gentle tickling, a gentle stroking. I didn’t care. I went ahead.