by Helen Walsh
‘So? Joe’s debut on the high seas, eh?’
‘I’d say he’s more than ready. Aren’t you, little sea dog?’
We get Joe snuggled up in his buggy and he fixes his eyes on us as we lock up the flat and carry him downstairs at a fifty-degree angle. His little face seems excited, full of expectation.
It is bone-jarringly cold outside.
‘Jesus! They weren’t messing, were they? I reckon there’s snow in that sky.’
‘Might even last till Christmas, Radio Four reckons. You still want to walk it?’
‘Yeah, come on. Joe’s used to it. Soon warm up if we get a bit of a speed up.’
So we head off down Belvidere and cut down towards the river path where the wind stops us dead in our tracks. I make sure Joe’s fleece blanket is packed right around his neck. Dad slaps his gloved hands together. I feel like hugging him. He’s so old suddenly – so perishable.
‘I don’t know if the ferries will even run in this, you know!’
‘If you want to head back, just say the word.’
‘Never!’
And it’s not that bad, really, once we work up a decent head of steam. In no time at all we’re passing the deli on the dock, then the Arena, trundling over the footbridges and gangways of the Albert Dock. I get a weird, unearthly shudder as I pass the Tate once more. Was that really me?
The ferries are running fine, though they’ve long since ceased the trips to Seacombe, Egremont and Woodside. Nowadays it’s more of a tourist route, the ‘Ferry Across The Mersey Experience’, complete with cheesy commentary and Merseybeat soundtrack. We chug out into the spume and Joe and I just stand there at the prow, watching the seagulls swoop and dive. I’m dragged from my reverie by the commentary over the tannoy – monks setting sail in the 1200s, Birkenhead Priory and eventually, inevitably, the Fab Four. Just hearing the word sends me reeling again.
‘Social work? Darling! That’s . . . fab!’
I turn to find Dad, my eyes flashing, spoiling for a fight again over his mystery ‘scallywag’ loiterer, but the sight that greets me knocks me flat. My father – my dapper little daddy in his fitted tweed coat and his cashmere muffler – is stood against the ferry’s railings, weeping gently. I park Joe inside between two rows of wooden benching and wedge a newspaper under the buggy’s wheels to make double sure, and I go to Dad. It’s only as I’m right on top of him that I twig today’s significance. Friday, 3 December 2010. Fifteen years since Mum died. I hang my head in sadness – and shame.
*
Later, warming our hands on mugs of hot chocolate back at the ferry terminal’s café, I try to gauge Dad’s mood. Without anything really happening out there on the tossing and turbulent river, without much being said, it seems like we’ve crossed a divide. I feel close to the old man in a way that I haven’t since childhood. I want to hold him and make him better. But there are things that I have to know. Joe is sound asleep, of course – it’s daytime, and I’m wide awake – and somehow I feel that I want to broach the subject of his father with my father while his eyes and ears are closed. I wait and pause and hesitate and in the end I just sigh out loud and go for it.
‘So . . .’ How many confessionals start with that little softener, I wonder. ‘I’m thinking you’ll have guessed who his daddy is? Joe’s.’
Dad looks like he used to when he’d dozed off on the sunlounger in the garden, and I woke him up by jumping on him: a little stunned; a tiny bit cross.
‘No.’ He says it as though I’ve accused him of something bad, and seems to realise his mistake straight away. He forces a chuckle. ‘I mean, I was rather hoping you might enlighten us.’ Again, the pained look, quickly banished with a smile. ‘Let me in on the secret one day. But other than that? No. I haven’t the foggiest idea.’
He sits back, not even making the kind of eye contact that indicates he’s waiting for an answer. If he hadn’t begun self-consciously stirring his hot chocolate I’d have reckoned he really wasn’t that interested. But now there’s a little glance upwards and I swoop on the moment. It’s right. The timing is right.
‘It’s Ruben.’ An eye-jerk so slight as to be barely perceptible, and then a smile to acknowledge . . . what? That I’d got him? I’d done him, fair and square. ‘You never did like him, did you?’
‘Ruben?’
‘Ruben.’
‘I never knew him long enough or well enough to form an opinion either way. I only found out his name from your mother.’
He stops himself.
‘But if I’d brought him home? If I’d introduced him, presented him to you as my boyfriend?’
‘Yes?’
I bite my lip and shake my head, eyes welling up.
‘You would have hated that – wouldn’t you?’
Dad seems shocked. Worse. Whatever he’s thinking and feeling, it goes beyond hurt – he’s devastated. He takes off his spectacles, gropes for words.
‘Rache . . .’ He reaches across the table, takes my hand. He stares directly into my eyes, his own bulging slightly, glistening with a kind of resigned disappointment. He takes a deep breath, looks away for a second. Then he’s back, full of resolution. ‘Rachel. Love. Whatever this is—’ he breaks off, exasperated. ‘Whatever it is, I’ve always overlooked it, you know? I’ve never confronted you. Never challenged some of the frightful things you’ve hurled at me. But you’re thirty now, darling. You’re a mother yourself. And this has to stop. Yes?’
I stare back at him.
‘What has to stop, Dad? What?’
‘This thing you have that you fall short of some elusive expectation I have of you.’ He takes my hand again, squeezes hard. ‘I am so in awe of you. On every level. You fill me up.’ His lip starts quivering again. ‘Without you, Rache – I’d never have got over Mum. I revere every single thing, every choice you have ever made.’
Now he’s crying freely. I want to comfort him. I want things to be right. But I know something. I wish I didn’t – but I know it.
‘And your reverence – that applies to boyfriends, too? To boyfriends who happen to be black?’
The look he fires back at me is wild – bewildered.
‘What? Yes!’
I nod, slowly.
‘Right. Which only leaves me wondering why you intercepted and destroyed every letter Ruben sent me when my heart was torn to shreds without him.’
Dad is staring at me like I’m howling at the sky, but I can’t stop. I carry on howling.
‘I could have killed myself, Dad. I am like I am today – mainly – because you did what you did, back then.’
‘What? What did I do, Rachel? What did I do?’
‘You know what you did. You burnt all his letters.’
His face betrays the purest astonishment. He lets go of me, pushes himself away. It dawns on him at the same time it smacks me in the face, hard, wet and fast.
I get up from the table and walk, very calmly, out of the café and over to the river. I clutch hard on the railings and stare out over the tossing river to the spot where we were when she told me.
I need you to be very brave, darling.
Mother. Please. How could you do that to me?
35
It’s not Joe that keeps me awake tonight, but a ravenous gnawing in my stomach, a primal stabbing that has all my senses genuflecting to one throbbing compulsion. Hunger. I haven’t eaten all day. I haven’t eaten a proper meal, with relish, since Joe was born.
I crawl out of bed, every creak and shuffle acknowledged with a murmur or a snort or a flicker of stirring from the crib. I plan each tender step, strategising my route with absolute precision. One false move and Joe will wake and summon me back to my cell. With minimal movement I manage to make it off the bed, taking up the displaced weight from the mattress with my hands and gradually, gradually letting it bounce back up. In creeping, cartoonesque steps I forge on forward and out of the bedroom door, treading on the outer reaches of the carpet lest those creaky old floorboards snare me. I tiptoe downstairs
, again keeping to the very sides of the steps, and make it through to the kitchen, suppressing giggles at how I must look. I’m filled with a merry devilment, a childish satisfaction that I’ve outsmarted the mini-dictator, even if it’s only till his next reveille.
Afraid that the ping of the microwave might wake him, I scan the fridge for ready-to-eat alternatives. I slice the unaffected middle out of a slab of cheese I hadn’t wrapped properly, throwing the hardened rind in the bin. I make a crude sandwich with hard, knobbly butter and my hunger abates with each mouthful. I’m just starting to feel that first swell of satisfaction in my belly – not yet replete but no longer famished, either – when I hear the dry, hacking cry from above:
‘Ak-ak-ak-ak-ak!’
I freeze. The sound splutters away to nothing, but the reminder that he’s just up there, dangling me by a thread, twists me inside out. I fumble the last fragments of my crappy snack into my mouth, all enjoyment blasted away now. Joe has fastened on to some sixth sense telling him he’s been abandoned and he wants his just deserts, now.
The crying starts up again.
He can’t be hungry. I snatch a look at the wall clock: barely an hour since his last feed. Don’t go to him, I tell myself. Leave him. He’ll be fine.
‘Ak-ak-ak-ak-ak!’
There’s a frightening certitude to his cries – entitlement as well as despair injected into those rising, quavering sobs. But I’m not having it, not this time. I’m not giving in. I’ve been steeling myself to the reality that, sooner or later, I’ll have to be cruel to be kind, and that moment has just arrived. Joe’s not stupid – he’ll soon get the message. And as though word of my tough new stance has been hotwired directly to his psyche, Joe ramps up his lamentations. The pitch and timbre of his sobbing goes demented, and he knows I just can’t stand it.
‘Rrrrrr-aaaaaaaah! Rrrrrr-aaaaaaaah!’
Awful. Unbearable. I swallow too fast and gag on that last mouthful, refusing to rise to him, dogged in my determination to stay put. And then silence. Minutes pass. A dim slat of hope begins to take seed in my forlorn and aching guts. Has he? Can he have?
All those cocky mothers in the clinic’s waiting room the other day, peppering their smug chit-chat with ‘sleeping through’ and ‘let him cry it out’. None of them really listening, all just awaiting an opening to jump in and boast or mock-complain about their own baby. How can that be normal conversation, trotted out with such self-assurance? ‘Cry it out’. They said it in that throw-away manner, like ‘cry it out’ is as everyday and absolute an outcome as you could get, like piss follows a bottle of wine.
Well, maybe my baby’s going to ‘sleep through’, too. Maybe I sat back and braved up and let him ‘cry it out’. Isn’t that what just happened, there? I dare not even think it, let alone believe it. I sit, utterly still. I barely breathe. And faintly, rhythmically now, Joe’s fitful sobsnoozing pricks the silence. I’m tingling with pleasure at myself – so strong. Such a strong, self-reliant mum.
This is a cause for celebration. There’s a miniature bottle of M&S cava chilling in that fridge and, now that I’ve visualised it, there is nothing I want more, need more, than a mouthful of bubbles. Gingerly, I pad back through to the kitchen. The fridge door will not open; it has somehow vacuum-sealed itself closed. I yank the handle with a bit more force. Doesn’t budge. If anything, the door sucks itself even tighter shut. Fuck it – I wedge my foot against the wall, lean right back and heave with all my might. The door flies open, my foot goes with it and I crash backwards on to the kitchen floor. Before I’ve even got myself into position to push myself up, Joe’s hurt and bitter cry starts up. Her back to the kitchen wall, Jan sits on the floor grinning at me.
‘He rules you, you idiot! The little man has got you sussed.’
‘Fuck off, you sour, childless bitch! You beat my boy. It was you that bruised him. You hit him!’
But, as quickly as she arrived, Jan has gone and I’m sat there blinking back the tears because I know she is right. He does. Joe rules me. He divines my every thought. His tiny one-track mind has wired itself to screen my feelings, my fears, my darkest guilty fantasies. Even with me sat here and him up there, he can smoke me out, as though we’re linked by the ghost of some eternal umbilical cord wrapped not around his neck, but mine.
When I can stand the noise no longer, I crawl on hands and knees to him, edge my head around the door. He’s roaring, incensed, the whole crib rattling with the force of his fury. Joe is hell-bent on punishing me for my selfishness, for daring to leave him like that. But I’m helpless, now. I’m hopeless.
Unable to go to him I curl up into a ball, right there, and put my hands to my ears and squeeze tight.
‘Look, son. Look at what you’ve done to me! What I’ve become.’
An angry banging from below snaps me out of it; the rap of a broom handle so strident against the ceiling that I feel it through my backside, through my spine. This is something that has never happened, not once, since I’ve lived here. So it’s come to this – my absolute incompetence as a mother has even been noted by my louche and feckless neighbours. I go to Joe. I swear he’s staring me out. His eyes are hot and he’s glaring at me with real hatred, two livid lamps fixed on me like a vice. His forehead is wrinkled and ugly and old. He’s wizened, evil. Possessed. With wild red eyes boring right into me Joe holds his breath till his face is choked up tight – then lets out another deafening scream. Vicious. Unearthly. This shriek cannot have come from a twelve-pound mite. The noise is alien and disorientating, and I can hear the naked terror in my own voice.
‘Go to sleep now,’ I tremble, as I fitfully rock the crib. ‘Go to sleep, darling.’
His screams rage on and move upwards through the gears, hysterical now, a mean creak of vindication coughed up in each hitch of breath between sobs. I fade out, dizzy with wonder at how the room splits into fragments, whirling darts and strobes of colour throbbing right at me and into me. I pull myself back. He’s crying, crying, crying. He will not shut up. I’m frightened. Terrified of him – of me.
‘Shut up.’
I say it slowly and with menace, in the full belief that he hears and comprehends the command. I am not in control. I am nothing; I have no plan, no method for dealing with this. I slide down the wall and rock myself backwards and forwards, leaving Joe flailing wildly in his cot.
Wild, deranged, he screams louder. I lurch towards him, snatch him up and hold him by his flimsy shoulders.
‘FUCKING SLEEP!’ I shriek.
And my head feels so tight I want to drive it into Joe’s face till he stops. Snatches of messages bombard me, in and out, echoing and distorting.
‘She was just like that.’
I put Joe down on his changing mat, hide in the corner and cover my ears. once more. The blood booms in my eardrums. There’s another voice now. Mine. I have to get out of here, before I start listening to it.
I place Joe gently but firmly back in his cot, tuck his blanket in tightly all around him and I close the bedroom door and walk. I walk away from his cries, down the stairs and out of the flat. I go down to the front door, walk through it and am immediately shot through with an awesome rush of cold night air. I hunch myself against the freeze, turn left on to Belvidere and march as quickly as I can, up towards the Boulevard. The navy sky is spattered with stars, lighting up the silent cathedral, its hulking great mass standing sentinel over the city. I turn hard left on to Parliament Street, hoping and praying it’s a kid serving at the all-night chemist.
36
‘How old is the child?’
‘She’s seven,’ I say with alarming ease. ‘Well, nearly eight.’
If I were the pharmacist I’d see right through this. Tone too flighty, too much information too readily volunteered. But this pharmacist has no such qualms.
‘Is she on any other medication?’
‘No. Nothing.’
She doesn’t even ask the patient’s name or that of her GP or medical practice. I hand over the
money, pocket the big bottle of Dozinite and go back outside. Yet I don’t head home. I don’t want to – not yet. The shocking cold blast driving in off the river is shot through with the icy promise of winters long gone; the brutal, gorgeous chill of all those Christmases I’m no longer able to feel or find. Hands thrust deep into my pockets, head bowed down against the cold, I lurch on down Parly, away from home, away from madness, away from Joe.
A yuppie couple pass me heading back up the hill, and there’s something about their overtly ‘at ease’ gait and their forcefully engrossed conversation that immediately says they’ve strayed too far from Hope Street’s safe and sanitised bohemia. I’m a solo white female but they give me a dramatic side-step, the woman shrinking into her husband’s shoulder as they pass. Something makes me want to lurch out, laugh in her face, but I can’t slow down now, nothing but nothing is going to break my stride. Each step that puts distance between me and Joe starts to lift me, and as I pass the end of Gambier Terrace I’m overcome with a tingling euphoria, a blinding sense that it is all going to be fine after all.
I’ve done this on my own, I’m doing this on my own, I feel good about me, my strength, my grit in seeing this through. And yet . . . And yet, up there, in a little garret, maybe even now gazing out over the vista of the city, there sits Ruben. Joe’s father. And . . . I don’t need him, I don’t want him. But I want to tell him. I want him to know, now.
My hand trembles as my blunt fingertips try to punch his name up on my phone. It’s just the cold, just the deep, numb gnawing of the cold – but I’m light-headed as I press the green button. No turning back now. No turning back.
Three rings. I’m suddenly terrified and I want to hang up when there he is.
‘Hello?’
He sounds caught out – and there’s a little bit of something injected into this one short word. I can’t say he sounds posh, but there’s a defensive timbre, like he’s waiting to be challenged.
‘Hi, Ruben. It’s me.’