The Girl on the Pier

by Paul Tomkins

  But being unwanted and unloved in life runs it close.

  * * *

  Six-years old, I took my seat on the train, clutching a shabby teddy bear to my lap: dear old Monty. Unconsciously I fingered the fabric of his bow tie, gripping it between index and middle digits, stroking rhythmically. It soothed in a way that would make more sense if I were the one being caressed. I felt excited, but also apprehensive: a strange woman sitting opposite in the carriage had me draw closer to my mother, seated beside me in her prim, pink two-piece suit, the skirt of which stopped just above her knees. As she spoke her breath oozed peppermint, which she used to take away the taste of tobacco. July, 1973. Mankind again voyaged those hundreds of thousand miles to the moon; we departed East Croydon, bound for Brighton.

  Leaving her bag at my side, my mother told me to sit still as she went to find the on-board toilet. Her hand brushed my hair, with a kind of ruffling movement – neither fully mussing nor tidying; her hand lingering for a split second. I did as she said, and looked out through the grubby window – my fingerprints highlighted by a shaft of sunlight fragmenting through a lattice of trees. I traced a finger through the film of grime, drawing a picture: a smiling face. In just over an hour I’d be seeing my father, whom I had not visited for several months, and to whom I felt no great connection. With guilt, I wondered whether I indeed loved him, or instead simply thought I loved him. In truth, I did not really know him.

  A shrill whistle sounded. It reverberated around the carriage and echoed in the distance somewhere outside as the train pulled away. My excitement – trapped in my chest and throat – ebbed down and out through some unnamed hole in my body as I saw my mother on the platform, her features set fast in a neutral expression. No wave, no smile. Nothing. Dead eyes. I flung myself against the cold pane, pounded the glass with my tiny fists, and her head turned ever-so-slowly, mechanically, as the platform began to slip into my past, out of my life. As she shrunk her expression remained unmoved: her still, white-powdered face delicate and doll-like.

  The train shuffled and bumped to the left as the track curved, and I did not get one last look at the platform.

  I felt frantic, hollowed-out by abandonment. A baby cried in the next carriage, and I heard myself in its pain. Always insistent on being regarded as a ‘big boy’, I was reduced to a screaming infant. No knowledge, no understanding, just instinct.

  I sat alone in the carriage, but for the middle-aged lady; the spectral mist of my mother’s perfume a third presence. I answered her questions about my name, but could not explain why my mother had left the train. Eventually the woman suggested we open the handbag at my side. We found it empty, but for a silver St Christopher on a chain. This lady – whose name I did not even think to ask – would not leave my side until we met my father on the concourse at Brighton station, never to be seen again; but for that hour she became my family, my support system, as the train clunked and rattled its way south. The longest journey of my life – one giant train-ride for boykind. On that seat the distance to the south coast stretched 238,712 miles.

  Amidst the terror and confusion I found comfort in the knowledge that my father waited at the other end of the line, and how he could make everything right – take me back to my mother, take me home. I may not have known whether or not I loved my father, but he was a grown up, a fixer of things broken. At least, that’s what I thought.

  Pale, gaunt and drawn, with perpetually greasy, greying hair and a moustache that never quite filled in, my father was neither a man’s man nor a lady’s man; he just bumbled through life, offending and impressing no one. Not that these failings occurred to me at the time.

  The seaside should evoke happy childhood memories. Not for me. It transports me to the walk down to the beach with my father, hours after my mother abandoned me. Still teary, my hysteria passed with tiredness. Exhausted and dehydrated, I merely sobbed and spluttered. We wandered down the hill, my hand tiny in his; I can still sense it now, still feel those long thin fingers. From a vendor beside a Punch and Judy show he bought me an ice cream, but not even its sweetness could distract from my distress. Everything about that day is etched in a sensory bank that links to my mind’s eye with searing precision. The overpowering lavender in the fug of the train compartment. The taste of vanilla in my dry mouth. The harsh shrieks of the gulls. And the smell of seaweed that squalled around us.

  On the seafront he bought me a red balloon, which, like a beaten finalist, I carried as a worthless consolation prize. It bobbed at my side as we walked. And then it somehow slipped from my sticky-fingered grasp, its helium pulling it swiftly out of reach. I didn’t even want the damned thing, and there it went, taunting as it jigged away on the breeze. Somehow my tear ducts found fresh moisture.

  We ended up on the West Pier. My father led me straight past the giddy array of amusements lining the walkway inside the entrance. In no mood for entertainment I made no complaint. We moved into the Concert Hall Café, located a table. With great austerity he sat me down. I think he knew something like this might happen. He seemed so unsurprised. He’d brought me here to explain things, but at first we sat in silence. Tea and scones arrived, then my cola. I didn’t feel hungry, but forced down my scone and sipped at my drink.

  “She’s ill”, he said, as I chewed the cola-tasting straw. “Your mother. She’s ill.”

  I remember thinking that there seemed nothing physically wrong with her, although some mornings she wouldn’t get out of bed. “Don’t worry though,” he added. “She probably thought you were old enough to travel on your own. Y’know, a big boy now. You’ll see her next week.”

  A day passed before we got the news: my mother had thrown herself under the next train to speed through East Croydon station.

  I don’t know why, but I tell those who don’t know me – don’t know my story – that my father was the one who abandoned me.

  Actually, I tell a lie – I do know why. There is a normality to that scenario: fathers are known to do that kind of thing. There is no shame attached, unlike when a mother acts that way. That is personal. I mean, what could I have possibly done to drive her to leave me?

  My father soon abandoned me, too. I was just eight-yearsold when he died.

  NINE

  After two refusals I finally accept the call from a withheld number. My aunt’s solicitor gets to break the bad news.

  “I’m afraid it’s terminal – she’s dying.”

  News of my surrogate mother’s cancer echoes on a patchy cellular signal, forty years after losing my true mother. But how shocked am I, at her age? Of course it upsets me, but it pales in comparison to the trauma of 1973.

  An unusually warm weekend in a spring of murk, I sit on the grass overlooking the Art Deco lido at Saltdean, chlorine carrying on the breeze as I move to a more upright position upon hearing the news. Here to re-engage with my past – something I’ve found myself doing a lot lately – it’s fitting that Kitty was already on my mind. I hear the man’s words, but find myself lost in the sights of young people in the water, where once I stood. Back then, my aunt was the one at a distance, keeping an eye on the open-air pool from beyond its perimeter wall. Now it’s me, looking not at someone I am expected to protect but at a vision of myself, in tight woollen trunks, all skin and bone in the shallow end, too scared to wade into deeper water.

  “How long?” I ask, aware that the silence is mine to punctuate.

  “Well, the doctors can never be sure. Months, if she’s lucky. She’d like to see you, if that’s possible?”

  “Sure,” I say, instantly flinching.

  “She had a fall a while back – nothing too serious – and was moved to a nursing home. Maybe you could go and see her there?”

  “Of course, not a problem,” I say, relieved that I won’t have to go to the cottage. “I’ll visit her tomorrow.”

  These days I reside at a modest rented flat within earshot, if not sight, of the sea, not too far from the centre of Brighton; close enough to have visit
ed my childhood home, and my elderly aunt, on many occasions, but I retain a strong aversion to that part of my past.

  And yet explanations now seem vital. Over the years I’ve wondered about my mother, and why she left me in the manner she did. But life got in the way; there was always an excuse to put off trying to find definitive answers. However, the last known connection to the person she was –– beyond my own vague memories –– lies in the balance, hovering over her own exit. I can’t back out.

  * * *

  After a pause, as the echoing electronic chimes fade, the door opens to my aunt, although at first I see only her walking frame. As it’s slowly revealed, her face bears the scars of time and illness. Shrunken and gaunt, she wears the clear yellow sheen of jaundice. Bags sag under eyes, webbed and veined with wrinkles. Puckered lines draw in around her lips. Ripples curve from eyelid to cheek, dimples forming further pathways. I am shocked at her pallor – death foreshadowing its arrival in sallow tones. Her hair, once thick and black-grey, hangs thin and bright white. Always so stoic in late middle-age, tears well in her eyes as I cross the threshold. It seems natural to meet in a hug, even though such contact never existed in my childhood. The weight of thirty years pushes down on us.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” I say, looking around the tiny apartment. “I was held up with work, and I was going to leave it until tomorrow… but then I’d left things long enough.”

  “It’s so good to see you, Patrick,” she says, offering me a seat on the sofa. “I still think of you as a boy. Silly, really. Look at you! A grown man.” Her voice sounds brittle and crackly, but the pace of her words remains unchanged from my childhood.

  “I’m ever so sorry to hear your news. The cancer, I mean.”

  “At my age? Good heavens, I’ve got nothing to complain about. I’ve had a good innings.”

  “Are you receiving any treatment?”

  “No, deary. I don’t want any of that. What’s the point? I can’t go on forever.”

  “But––”

  “No! No buts. I feel okay, most of the time. I don’t want that dreadful poison they give you, hair falling out, all of that. I’ve maybe got a few months left. I prefer it this way. I have these lovely nurses who come to attend to me, so I’m okay for the time being. I expect they’ll move me to a hospice or a hospital in due course, but for now I’m fine here.”

  “I’m sorry I never came to see you. It wasn’t you. It was… everything.”

  “There’s no need to apologise. With what you went through, I’d have run away too. You had a rough start to life.”

  “I miss Mum,” I say, tears now in my eyes.

  “I do too. She was a good woman. She just... I don’t know. She got lost along the way. Life wasn’t kind to her, either.”

  “I want to know more about her, Kitty. I never knew her, not really. Not like you did.”

  “I’ll tell you, deary, but not tonight. It’s late and I’m tired. I get tired so quickly these days,” she says, fishing around in a drawer. “Here, the keys to the cottage. Take them, Patrick. It’s yours now.”

  “Really? I’m not sure I can?”

  “Take them. Please. Sell the place if you have to. I’ve no one else to give it to. It’ll go to you anyway, it’s in my will.”

  “Are you telling me I have no choice?”

  “Indeed I am, deary. Indeed I am.”

  “Thank you, Kitty.”

  “Your mother and I grew up in that house. She lived there for a while on her own, too. There are probably bits of her life still there, in amongst my old rubbish in the wardrobes. Oh, and under the bed. Take a look, see what you find.”

  TEN

  A giant horse-chestnut tree stood a stone’s throw from the lake that dominated the grounds to Kitty’s cottage. Once a year, to my great excitement, it transformed into a toy dispenser: its autumnal branches filling with clusters of conkers – spiky green hand grenades – waiting to fall and explode. Those that landed intact I rolled with the sole of my shoe to break apart; careful not to damage the precious nut within. Even now, I can split the shell of any conker and my childhood will spill out. The richness of the reds and browns – swirling blends of carnelian, maroon and mahogany – remains a signature to that time in my life, when I studied each imperfect sphere as if a precious jewel or a miniature Jupiter.

  Mid-October, 1975 – my first week at the cottage. Brilliant low late-afternoon sun stretched across the garden, its light more golden than at summer’s peak, although a definite chill could be felt in the shade. I’d scattered the patchwork quilt of green, yellow, red and amber leaves, and the quarter-shells of blackened and withered horse chestnut segments, in the hunt for hidden gems. The insides of the fresh shells looked and smelled of apple; tentatively I tasted a piece, but it spiked bitterly on the tongue. I spat it out, wiped my mouth on my sleeve. The nuts – so plump and lustrous when first forced from their protective casing – puckered and hardened within days of placement on the windowsill, their skins tautened, and browned like old blood.

  Then there was the broad broken oak, its bough split in two; sundered decades earlier, judging by the foliage growing over the tear, the wood darkened and weathered. No matter what nature had in mind, to me it was the perfect climbing frame.

  Fortunately the cottage and its surrounding land provided this entertainment, as Kitty didn’t have a lot of time for me. It can’t have been easy for her, to have chosen a life without children and all the tiring responsibilities they bring, only to end up with little alternative but to adopt someone else’s, whom she can’t have loved like her own. I didn’t find her cruel, but she wasn’t the slightest bit maternal either, and in its own way that felt just as unhelpful. Nothing I did appeared to make her happy, but then she seemed to take so little pleasure from anything. In that way she resembled my mother; perhaps they shared a genetic depressiveness, or experienced the same childhood trauma; each wearing their weariness like a trench coat.

  I still sought Kitty’s approval, although without any great desperation. She had a way of saying “that’s nice” that conveyed so little emotion; dismissive, meaning Okay, I’ve heard you out, now leave me alone. Like my mother, she had an absent air about her, her thoughts almost always elsewhere. She never laughed, and rarely smiled; showing no sign of being truly in the moment. Perhaps her distance suited me, as I didn’t want to get too close either. In part I craved stability and reassurance, but I already knew only too well that with attachment comes an increased impact from any subsequent abandonment. So I spent much of my time alone, collecting conkers, skimming stones across the lake, clumsily climbing trees and drifting off into reveries that involved conquering the vast, verdant landscape.

  * * *

  Keys in hand, I leave the nursing home at dusk and drive the handful of miles to the cottage. Pulling into the short driveway – the grand horse chestnut visible on the left flank of the property – it strikes me how little has changed. All alterations lie within me. I can still taste that conker shell. I feel quite nauseous, fearing being dragged back to the person I’d once been, as if the location, and not my age, and the passage of time, define who I am. I have grown, changed, matured. But what if it all unravels and dissolves, like a salt crystal placed back into the sea?

  The plan had been to head home after seeing Kitty, but having been given the keys to the cottage and the incentive of possible information about my mother, I found myself set upon a new course. As I step out of the car I’ve already concluded that I‘ll move in, possibly doing so as soon as the coming weekend. The lease on the tenancy to my studio flat is due for renewal, and, perhaps due to my restless spirit, I’ve always taken a flexible approach to where I live. I also work wherever that happens to be, which keeps things simple. In easing the key into the lock, I am already home.

  The door swings open to an undisguised past. So much of the cottage survives from my childhood, almost preserved – like the houses of historical figures – as a museum. Kitty seemed to lose
the urge to keep up to date when still relatively young; she simply gave up on following life’s fashions. The nursing home doesn’t have room for most of her furniture, but she is yet to get rid of it, so the majority remains where it always stood.

  There exist concessions to the 21st century dotted about the place, but mostly where unavoidable: old appliances and furniture replaced with new after breaking or becoming obsolete, and the occasional relatively recent invention, like a microwave oven. The television set, however, was not even new when I left home, decades earlier. In the kitchen, the same linoleum floor and preponderate AGA sit with the table and chairs of my childhood, the legs of which still harbour bite marks from the mongrel Kitty took in during the 1970s. In the living room, the imposing grandfather clock, whose inexorable quarter-hourly chimes, and their particular notation, evoke long-lost images. Framed photos, either sepia or black and white, all faded and cracked, line the walls to every room; none apparently taken within the last fifty years, although there are some additions since last I was here. In between the array, a handful of empty spaces; dark delineations of pictures my aunt had taken to the home. On one wall hangs a stunning picture of the lake at sunset, photographed from the veranda: the silhouetted head and shoulders of a woman – probably my mother, judging by the curls – rising from the waterline as the surface shimmers with white streaks and flaring ripples.

  I make my way upstairs. My old bedroom retains the same ancient furniture – bed, chest of drawers, wardrobe – although I removed all of my personal possessions the day I left home. I head to the window and look out over the lake; I could be fourteen or fifteen again, daydreaming. Aside from the further growth of trees and bushes, I experience the exact same view, framed in the exact same way.

  And then, the spare room: Genevieve’s room. Long gone – gone well before I ran away – I still sense her electric presence. Walking through the door an image jolts me; a vision of her, clear as day, sat on the bed with her back to the wall, scribbling in her diary. It flashes vividly in my mind, in a memory that also includes the posters on the wall, the records strewn across the floor, the clothes piled on the dresser: the objects of her story. And then it fades; I see the space only as it now is, stripped of her personality. The dreams and desires, flights of fantasy, borne of these walls. Where is Genevieve, a lifetime later?