by Roma Tearne
Lydia
17
APRIL 12TH. FIRST SESSION.
‘You might as well begin at the beginning,’ she says.
Her voice is softly modulated and I dislike it instantly. There is no sound in the room except for the clock ticking. I swallow. Okay.
‘My name is Lydia,’ I say. ‘I’m fifteen years old, I’m at school studying history, geography, English. I want to read archaeology at Sussex University one day…is that the sort of thing you want me to say?’
‘Well, it’s a start.’
She is clearly not going to help me in any way. I feel my voice wobble. What craziness had brought me here? Oh, get on with it, I tell myself.
‘My surname is Robinson,’ I continue. ‘It’s my mother’s name. Her maiden name; she never married.’
‘Did your father not want you to have his name?’
I take a deep breath; and then I tell her.
‘Until very recently I thought I was a donor baby,’ I say, and I look her full in the face. There, I think, see what you make of that!
If I was expecting a reaction, I wasn’t getting it. She’s too cool for that.
‘How do you mean, exactly?’ she asks.
Cool, cool. Sophisticated bitch, Ms Know-all, I think. I hide my anger, knowing she would love to see it. These types always do. It gives them the perfect opportunity to say, ‘Ah, look, she’s screwed up!’ Well, I’m not giving her the satisfaction, let me tell you.
This is all Miranda’s idea. Miranda is my aunt. She’s also my legal guardian, along with Uncle Jack. He’s the man from hell. Anyway, they’re supposed to be looking after me. They were the ones who took me in, were ‘very generous to me’, as the other rellies like to think. Maria Robinson, my mother—they all called her Ria—died in a car crash when I was thirteen. It was not her fault. It was the drunks in the overturned car in the middle of the road. She swerved to avoid them and hit an oncoming lorry. Trying to multi-task, she was, and failing. We girls are supposed to be good at it, but not my ma. Not this time, anyway. So she died and Uncle Jack was adamant: her ashes had to be spread over the estuary. I didn’t care where they went. They could have spread them on toast, for all I cared! I was too busy thinking about what it would be like without her. I went into a black hole afterwards. It took a year before I even realised I was in one, and then I still didn’t care about anything much.
But to begin at the beginning, I had what you might call a repressed childhood. It wasn’t the 1950s or anything like that, but it might as well have been for all the skeletons in our family cupboard. When I was very small, Mum and I were close in the sort of physical way that mothers and very small children are. She looked after me, fed me, taught me to read, took me to the dentist for check-ups, even taught me to swim in the river at the bottom of our garden. She was dead keen on swimming, actually.
‘I don’t want you to get drowned,’ was what she said.
She was a good, conscientious mother. I wasn’t neglected, don’t ever think that. Later on, she would always check my homework, make sure my hair was combed before I left for school, and she was always at home when I returned.
‘Well, that was because she worked from home, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, it was. But I mean she never went out at the time I was due back from school, never went shopping or visited her horrid friend. She was always there waiting, there was always food when I got in.’
I think for a moment, frowning. She used to ask about my day, how the maths homework was received, what the English lesson was like, that sort of thing. She never quite looked at me, never smiled. I can’t say I noticed any of this at the time, but now I’m having to think about it I wonder if it would have made a difference? Well, it’s no good worrying about that now.
‘She never asked me about how I felt. She was scared to.’
The therapist, her name is Stephanie, looks at me. She has this trick of simply looking, saying nothing, trying to unnerve me. She almost succeeds. I wish I hadn’t given so much away. And in any case, it was a bit disloyal to poor old Mum, who couldn’t exactly defend herself. I shut up for a moment.
After a few minutes Stephanie breaks the silence. I s’pose she has to earn her money.
‘Did she hug you? When you came in? Touch you?’
I can’t believe I’m doing this, sitting here with this cow. I want to shout and cry at the same time. I feel the age-old rage envelop me. Then I feel weary. What the hell, the bitch can only get to me if I let her. Believe me, I’m far more cunning than she is. I’m not going to tell her how it really was between us. I’m not going to tell her how we communicated, without saying a word, or how I felt I understood everything about how she was let down.
‘No,’ I say calmly. ‘We weren’t a touchy-feely family.’
I make my voice as sneering as possible. Instinct tells me she’d like that expression. That’s why I use it. Instantly she writes furiously in her pad, and I want to yell with delight. Bull’s-eye!
‘But,’ I say, holding up my index finger, giving her a crumb, ‘we were close in other ways.’
‘How?’ she pounces. ‘Tell me.’
‘Well,’ I say, pretending to look thoughtful, resisting the urge to throw something at her, ‘she would read her poems to me.’
This was absolutely true, as it happens.
‘She used to read to me a lot when I was little…till I stopped her one night.’
I could see Stephanie trying not to ask another question, so I rewarded her for her silence.
Mum had read me one of her poems at bedtime.
‘I wrote this before you were born,’ she said.
I remember she’d been sitting on my bed with her arm around me.
‘What was the poem about?’ Stephanie asks.
‘“Too rushed to ask…/ I have stolen something precious from you…” Something like that…’
‘Did you know she was referring to your father?’
I glare at her.
‘Maybe.’
‘What happened then?’
Bitch. You know what happened. Miranda’s told you.
‘She started to cry.’
Stephanie is looking at me expectantly. Her face is a comic question mark.
‘I pushed her away and told her I hated her poems.’
‘What happened then?’
Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Bitch!
‘Did she read to you again?’
‘Yes, of course—stories.’
‘She never read you her poems again?’
I shake my head. I really want to kill this woman.
‘There was another time, though, when she did?’
I hesitate. Actually, I’m quite tired.
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me.’
So I do. Who cares?
It had been an odd sort of day.
‘Go on,’ Stephanie says.
Blank-faced bitch.
There’d been no school, and I’d been over at the farm, helping with fruit picking. When I got back, hot and slightly cross because I was tired and starving hungry, my mother was sitting in the kitchen. I somehow knew something was wrong. She wasn’t crying or anything. There was a letter on the table, I remember. A thick, fat, airmail envelope.
‘What’s that?’ I asked idly.
Really I was more interested in finding something to eat. I began opening the pans and looking in the fridge.
‘Oh, it isn’t anything,’ my mother said vaguely and, preoccupied though I was, I knew she was lying.
The moment passed, she offered to make me a sandwich. I caught a glimpse of a photograph in the envelope and then she put it away.
‘Weren’t you curious? After all, you were only eight or nine?’ Stephanie asks.
‘Well, I might have been, but I was really starving.’
She’d made me a ham sandwich, thick and full of freshly cooked ham, a little mustard, chunky bread, and I’d wolfed the lot down.
‘She was a
fantastic cook,’ I say.
I haven’t thought about that incident for a long time. But thinking about it now, I realise how edgy she had been for the rest of that day and for days afterwards. Unusually, she had read me the poem she was working on and then, that night, we had gone to the cinema together. Afterwards we had supper in a local café.
‘I used to come here a lot before you were born,’ she had volunteered.
I remember how her face had changed as she spoke. She had very blue eyes and they suddenly filled up with tears. I panicked and did what I always do. I changed the subject. Her face changed again. She looked frightened. And then we talked of something else. Later, I mean a long time later…
‘How long?’
‘I can’t remember. I talked to my friend Sarah.’
‘Your mother probably had IVF treatment,’ Sarah had said.
Sarah knew about these things.
‘You could be a donor baby!’ Sarah had whispered excitedly. ‘Think of that!’
‘Well…I think she met him.’
‘They do sometimes. Sometimes both parties strike a bargain. Meet once, do the deed, pay up and never meet again!’
It was possible, I remember thinking. Poor old Mum, buying a sperm to make a life! That’s how much she must have wanted to have me. Sarah was looking expectantly at me.
‘Well, what does it matter? I’ll never meet him anyway,’ I said.
‘Oh, oh!’ Sarah said, her mouth a perfect rosebud circle of interest. ‘You do know what they do, don’t you? They go to this clinic and…’
Sarah was allowed to watch far more television than I was. She was allowed to stay up and watch as many reality shows as she liked, whereas my mother thought they were disgraceful.
‘You do know what I mean, don’t you?’ Sarah asked again.
‘Yes, of course,’ I said.
I didn’t want the details or I might have punched Sarah. Poor old Mum, was what I was thinking. Anyway, I’d a vague idea, as we had once caught the local flasher Frank doing it to himself on our way home from school.
‘Isn’t it the case that your mother thought she couldn’t have children?’ Stephanie asks, butting into my thoughts.
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
I glare at her. I just know she wants me to cry.
‘Wouldn’t she have wanted to talk to you about your father?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Weren’t you curious, too?’
‘No,’ I lied.
Of course I was curious, stupid. I didn’t tell her that one night I heard Uncle Jack, who was visiting us, shouting at Mum, saying, ‘Why did you do it, then? Why couldn’t you be like normal people?’ Mum was crying like anything. They must have thought I was asleep. Anyway I didn’t want her to cry like that, again. Who cared about the donor? And then, a year later, when I might have asked her, she was dead. Sarah moved to another area entirely, and that was that. I no longer wanted to be friends with anyone else in the way we had been friends.
‘Did you see Sarah again, after she moved?’
‘She came to the funeral.’
She had come back to Orford, quite by chance, on the weekend that my mother had been killed. One of her aunts lived in a village close by, Sarah and her mother were visiting her. We had texted each other a few days before. Both of us missed the other far more than we wanted to admit and we’d sort of planned what we would do when she came back. It was a Friday in June. Nothing special; hot, but not too hot. We’d had an exam in school that morning and I told my mother I would be back early.
‘I’m going into Ipswich,’ she had said. ‘I’ve got to see the lawyer about something.’
As long as I could remember, my mother used to see a lawyer about something. When I was very small I used to have to stay with Jack and Miranda while she went up to London to see a lawyer about something. Both my uncle and aunt disapproved of these trips, and when she returned Mum was always bad tempered. I had no idea what it was all about. There were so many other pressing things going on that ‘seeing a lawyer about something’ never grabbed my curiosity. Anyway, that morning, before I left for school, she warned me she might be late. It was fine by me. As I hardly ever had the house to myself I looked on her absence that afternoon as a treat. So I didn’t worry when there was no sign of her at three o’clock or at four. At five thirty Sarah rang to say they had stopped off at her gran’s for tea but hoped to be at her aunt’s house later that evening. I could hear from her voice that she was disappointed. We had planned a trip up to Eric’s farm and we were going to take the smaller boat out on the river. We never did, of course. We never went up that river together again.
‘When did you hear?’ Stephanie asks, very quietly. ‘About your mother?’
I say nothing.
‘Lydia? When did you get the news?’
‘At ten to six.’
They had rung. Then they came round. One policewoman and a policeman. I hadn’t been scared. It was like reality telly. You don’t get scared by reality telly. One half of me was watching the other half of me. Curiously.
‘Detached?’
‘Hmm, detached.’
They had asked me if my dad was in, first. Well, that was a laugh. I wondered if he’d been traced and was in trouble. Would I disown him? Tell him what a shit he was for not giving a damn about Mum all these years.
The police invited themselves in and wanted to know if I was alone. I said I was, but that it didn’t happen often because my mum was very careful to be there when I got back but today was different because of the exam and the lawyer and stuff.
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, love,’ the policewoman said. ‘We’re not worried about that.’
She seemed a tiny bit odd and suddenly, for no reason at all, I was afraid.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Is there any relative nearby?’
‘No, just a good friend.’
There was no one. Only Eric, of course. Jack and Miranda and the cousins were in Sicily. It seemed the police had been to Eric’s farm, but there was no one there. That was why they had then come straight here. I completely forgot to mention Sarah and her mother who would be over in Orford later that evening. In any case, I was thoroughly frightened now.
‘What is it?’ I asked again.
They knew, of course. They could see the panic in my eyes. I’ve often wondered afterwards what I must have looked like. Anyway, one of them sat me down and then took a seat next to me. The other sat on my other side and held my hand.
‘It’s your mum, love,’ she said. ‘She’s had an accident.’
‘Is she dead?’ I asked.
But I already knew the answer to that.
The funny thing about bad news is that you never respond in the way you might have thought you would. It isn’t a bit like reality TV. That isn’t real at all; this was. I didn’t cry, or faint. I didn’t behave like a Gwyneth Paltrow or Kate Winslet. It was not my Oscar performance; no, I hardly made a sound. The policewoman was freaked out by it.
‘You all right, luv?’ she kept asking me over and over again. ‘Would you like a glass of water?’
I shook my head as if to clear an obstruction.
‘I don’t want any.’
But she gave me some anyway and I sipped it. The water was tasteless, invisible, like whatever it was that was going on in my head. Actually, there wasn’t anything in my head at all. I looked down at my feet and they seemed to have grown to enormous proportions. I frowned. I had no recollection of having taken my shoes off. What had I been doing before the police? I looked into the concerned face of the policewoman. She was about my mother’s age.
‘Can I see her?’ I asked.
I saw her and the policeman exchange looks. I heard the crackle of their radio. Then with a clatter of wings a flock of geese flew over the river. They did this every day in spring and early summer. Then they stopped in the autumn and returned again the following year. Well, I remember thinking, a
group of birds returned, but were they the same ones? The thought just popped into my head. I had no idea why. The policewoman was speaking again and I tried to concentrate but her face was going in and out of focus. I must have looked a bit odd because she suddenly had her arm around me. Her face was very close. I could see she had a lot of open pores and the roots of her hair, near her ears, were all grey. I could see the weave of her uniform and smell a faint perfume that reminded me of cut grass in early summer. I did not cry.
They carried on talking to me and I must have answered because they nodded and asked me another question. I could no longer work out what they were saying but thought it best to agree. The policeman squatted on his haunches and peered at me as if he was trying to see inside my head. I felt laughter bubble up but I didn’t let it out either. So there I was, not laughing or crying or speaking.
‘She’s in shock,’ someone said.
I turned my head but there was no one else there.
‘When will Eric be back?’
How did I know? Why weren’t they asking my mother? At that, someone seemed to throw cold water over my face because I stood up calmly and told them I was ready.
We went out and got into the waiting car. I still didn’t have a clue as to where we were going. The sun was setting in a nasty yellowish orange glow. I was surprised that I had never noticed before how tacky sunsets are.
‘Why d’you say that?’ Stephanie asks, interrupting my train of thought, making me angry again, just when I’m feeling calmer and enjoying the story.
I have never told the story in quite this way before, partly because most people know about what happened anyway. Most people don’t want the bother of being reminded of me. Anyway, Stephanie is waiting. I ignore her question and continue. I’ll decide what to answer and what not to.
‘We drove to the hospital in Ipswich,’ I say.
I had been to Accident and Emergency before; the time I’d got glass in my foot and the time I’d had the asthma attack and no one knew why. I’d been to the maternity wing of the hospital when Sarah’s baby brother was born and the nurse let me hold one of the babies. But this time we didn’t go in the usual way. This time we went along a long winding route, over speed bumps and past a zebra crossing where a group of people stared at the police car curiously. The car radio was crackling and the driver was talking into it. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. The policewoman kept squeezing my hand. She looked as if she was going to cry at any moment. I wanted to tell her it was my mother and not hers. No, really, it crossed my mind to say, look this isn’t the telly. I suppose I was in a curious state of mind.