Things to Make and Mend

by Ruth Thomas

  But the scream is even louder here. It is more a series of screams. And then I realise it is not coming from a baby at all. It is coming from a young child, about three years old, who has her head stuck in the walkway railings. Her parents are crouching on the walkway beside her, white-faced and resigned. They are not attempting to ease her head out; they have presumably already tried and failed. They have curious expressions on their faces: a mixture of fear and fatigue. The girl’s older sister stands next to them, twisting a huge, illegally-plucked banana leaf between her fingers. The three-year-old continues to howl. In the jungly surroundings, it is like the sound of a monkey.

  I am not sure what to do.

  ‘Is there anything we can do?’ I ask the child’s mother as we approach. The mother looks up. There are tears in her eyes. She looks only a few years younger than me.

  ‘They’ve phoned for the fire brigade,’ she says.

  The little girl’s father has his hand through the railings and he is stroking his daughter’s hair. All I can really see of the girl is her mousey hair and her pink anorak. The father looks withdrawn, as if he has mentally removed himself from the proceedings and is sitting in some café somewhere, reading the football scores.

  ‘We could –’

  ‘No, we’re fine, thank you,’ says the mother.

  And I want to say something comforting, something to help. I know what it’s like, I want to say. You have to watch your children doing these things. It starts so young. And you just have to watch them.

  ‘In twenty minutes it’ll all be over,’ is all I can come up with. I reflect that this is exactly what the midwife told me when I was giving birth to Joe. I remember that I didn’t believe her.

  The woman looks at me. ‘Oh God,’ she says.

  ‘Well, if we can be any help,’ Kenneth says, ‘we’ll be in the next room.’

  And the three of us hurry, as fast as we can, away from the scene where we are not needed. Three mature people who don’t get themselves into scrapes. We go into the Aquatic Room, where we stand, silently, and look at dozens of tiny fish vacuuming themselves to the side of the tanks, their mouths perfect grey Os.

  ‘Poor little girl,’ I say. ‘Poor woman.’

  ‘They’ll be dining out on that for years,’ Kenneth says. ‘The day little Susie got her head stuck in the railings.’

  ‘Did I ever do that?’ Joe asks. Sometimes he still asks the kind of questions he would have asked at the age of eight.

  ‘I got my head stuck in our banisters once,’ Kenneth says. ‘My dad had to saw one of them off. I don’t remember it.’

  ‘Fortunately.’

  ‘Blanked it out.’

  ‘They shouldn’t be more than four inches apart,’ Joe says.

  We remain in the room with the little glass-kissing fish for quite a while. Maybe ten minutes. Tranquil fish. Zen aquatic snails. After a while there is the wail of a siren in the gardens, and a fire engine appears and stops outside. Men run in with equipment. There is the buzz of cutters, the clang of a felled railing, the wails, the sobs, the murmurings and finally the gradual, gradual cessation of noise.

  When we emerge discreetly from the Aquatic Room, the little girl is sitting in her buggy, still as a statue, transfixed, but still managing to suck a lollipop.

  Burden

  END OF TERM REPORT, DECEMBER 1979

  Geography. Effort: D. Attainment: D

  Sally will have to pay much more attention and complete her homework assignments if she is to qualify for her course next year.

  English. Effort: D. Attainment: C

  Sally’s absence from class is beginning to form a pattern. If she were here more often, she might understand the difference between irony and sarcasm.

  Mathematics. Effort: E. Attainment: E

  Sally’s grasp of algebra and trigonometry remains tenuous in the extreme. Correct answers seem to be arrived at haphazardly.

  Needlework. Effort: A. Attainment: B

  What a difference! Sally has worked really hard in the past few weeks, completing her blouson and skirt before the end of term. Her work is invariably neat and methodical. Well done, Sally!

  The teachers were not supposed to refer to ‘the situation’ at all. They were not supposed to mention it. But Miss Button, trendy Miss Button did.

  ‘That stupid girl,’ Miss Button said one day when Rowena was away at an antenatal appointment. ‘What a waste of a good brain.’

  *

  Rowena would sometimes look at Sally from across the playground. And sometimes, despite her monstrous betrayal, Sally wanted to run across and hug her, say ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, I forgive you.’ I knew, really, she wanted to say, I knew deep down, when we bumped into you in Woolworths.

  Because she missed her. She missed her so much that her eyes welled up with tears when she thought about her. But now there was this thing, this bulge, this result of reproduction which only a few months ago they had sniggered about in Biology lessons. There it was, turning Rowena Cresswell into someone else. Puffing up her face. Thickening her waist. What have you done, Rowena? And inside her was Colin’s child. Sally’s boyfriend’s child. Even her betrayal faded in the light of that.

  Within just a couple of weeks, their estrangement had become too frightening, too established to do anything about. Sally was at a loss to know what to do. She was so shocked she couldn’t even properly hate her. She pretended to be ill and stayed away from school for a whole week, embroidering a frog on a lily-pad, until her mother marched her to the bus stop one rainy morning. (Rowena had not been at the bus stop: her mother had started driving her to school in their Volvo.) And when Sally got to school she discovered that, in her absence, Rowena had been scooped up by two motherly sixth-form girls – girls who had always had that irritating, serene look on their faces when they went up to the altar during Communion. Now Sally would see them at break, plodding about the playground in their sensible shoes, Rowena between them, duplicitous as a cuckoo.

  *

  Nobody really knew what to say. There was no precedent. This was a nice school. It was not ‘that awful comprehensive’ down the road. What was the best course of action? Expulsion? Or understanding? It was 1979. The teachers took so long wondering what to do that it became 1980, and Rowena’s pregnancy was becoming undeniable. She wandered around the playground with her sixth-form minders, untouchable, her stomach beginning to swell beneath the blue nylon of her school blouse. She was somebody else now. Not Rowena. And now Sally did start to hate her, particularly after she had her hair cut – a short, brutal cut, like a signal of contempt. No more prissy perms and wedges for her. It seemed she had abandoned her taste in wishy-washy hairstyles. She seemed, Sally thought, almost triumphant, flaunting her pregnancy, her short hair like a flag. Her school skirt, the fastening undone to accommodate her stomach, grew tight around her legs. By late winter, when the rest of their class – chaste, good girls – were wondering if she would become one of those extraordinarily huge pregnant people – God, maybe she would die giving birth! – she left, never to return. It was the most exciting departure anyone had ever made. Even more exciting than dying.

  Nobody seemed to know who the father was. Nobody except Sally. She sat quietly, without Rowena, in Needlework, meticulously hemming the cuffs of her blouson. Needlework had become a kind of solace. A consolation. She could bury her head in the material; she could watch the push and pull of the needle, and make the pinking shears purr. She could comfort herself with the feel of silk, with the words voile, georgette, organza, petersham, linen, wool.

  *

  At home her parents sat, non-plussed, on their Dralon sofa.

  ‘What’s going on, Sally?’ asked her father.

  ‘What do you mean, what’s going on?’

  ‘You used to get good reports.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what they’re all on about. I haven’t done anything different.’

  ‘At least she’s good at Needlework, Bill. Maybe …’ her mother
began, and then stopped, confounded. She sighed, bent, and picked up a piece of fluff from the carpet.

  ‘I haven’t done anything different,’ Sally said again, and she stood up and left the room. She went upstairs to her bedroom where she sat, listening to the tapes Rowena had recorded for her and staring at all her belongings: her Pierrot doll, her cheap guitar, her Jackie magazines, her make-up box, her basket of threads. For years, she and Rowena had sat there together; Rowena had sat on that bean-bag, talking about everything, from God to leg-warmers. And latterly, Sally thought – it slowly dawned on her – they had talked a lot about Colin. Rowena had even blushed; had looked shifty at the mention of his name.

  She was sleeping with him! She was having sex with him!

  And obviously they were not even using his free condoms.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about the consequences of sex. It had changed Rowena totally. Pregnancy had turned her into a navel-gazer; someone who no longer cared about the outside world. Someone who no longer spoke to Sally. She wished she could ask her what it was like. Was she happy? Or scared? Did her mother condemn her or cosset her? Had she taken her to see someone at the Marie Stopes clinic or knitted her tiny pastel-coloured cardigans? And how did it feel, what was it like, to have a stomach with a baby inside it? A baby that moved? She’d heard that they moved around in there! And sometimes you could see little outlines of hands and feet through the skin! Was that true or was that some myth? Sally patted her own flat, uncaressed belly and tried to imagine. At school she went to Biology classes where they were having sex education lessons, and from which Rowena, already educated, was excused. She learned about the reproductive life of a frog, its sad little body splayed out on a wooden board.

  Colin, she didn’t actually care about so much. His importance had shifted, like the ace in a pack of cards. From highest to lowest value in one switch of games. He had vanished, in any case; had disappeared overnight, sidling away through the night-black suburbs to who knew where – Reading? Scunthorpe? Italy? – and there was nothing Sally could do. She missed him of course, she missed him physically, in her chest, as if a part of her had been wrenched away with him. A sudden, awful hurt. And visions of Colin floated around her head: there he was, at Razzles. There he was, in his beautiful, awful coat. There he was, lying on the lion statue at Trafalgar Square. But then, after just a few weeks she couldn’t picture him clearly any more. His face began to grow hazy and indistinct, and this struck her as the saddest thing that could happen to someone: the forgetting of a loved one’s face. She couldn’t picture the exact contours and angles any more, the curve of his lips or the colour of his eyes. His face was a vague shape, a memory of something loved. It was a deprivation. It was not fair. But Rowena had known him better than she ever would.

  The town was empty, a void. She walked past the Cresswells’ house and couldn’t bring herself to look up at the lit windows. She told the teachers that, no, she couldn’t give Rowena the lesson notes she had missed. She dialled her number and then put the phone down when her mother answered. She dialled Colin’s number and sat with her ear against the receiver, listening to the single, continuous, humming tone on the other end of the line. She imagined his empty flat above the kebab shop. She lay on her bed on top of her old, lanolin-smelling sheepskin rug, staring up at the ceiling. Apart from that, she did nothing. She just lay there.

  After a while she wondered if her relationship with Colin had been some sort of elaborate joke. She looked at herself in her parents’ wardrobe mirror and saw herself reduced; not a mysterious young woman but a schoolgirl with gangly legs. Of course, of course this would happen. How could he have found her attractive and Rowena not? But that could have been me! she kept thinking. That could have been me, with that stomach and that baby!

  A ‘To Let’ sign appeared outside Colin’s flat, and she couldn’t help observing, childishly, how it would have said toilet if there had been an i in it.

  Sometimes she used to imagine she would bump into Colin. Surely it was inevitable? And maybe when she did she would forgive him. Or perhaps he would fall in love, unrequited, with the wise, witty beauty she had become. He would be some unspectacular thirty-two-year-old man, balding, possibly fat, and she would be twenty-five, gorgeous, talented, cruel. Maybe she would bump into him at a swing-park one day. He would be wearing a hideous two-tone padded anorak and pushing his awful snotty child back and forth, back and forth on a swing, and she would not even recognise him until he uttered the words How could I have let you go …?

  *

  Rowena gave birth four months after she left school. It was early April, a day full of pink and white blossom. Sally discovered on the grapevine that the baby was nearly a month early, a five-pound, five-ounce boy whom she named Joe. Rowena had given him her own surname. Joe Cresswell.

  Occasionally Sally would see Rowena pushing Joe Cresswell around in a pram, up East Grinstead High Street. Or sitting in the Me-n-U café with her mother, the baby in her arms, A-levels abandoned, the punk hairstyle grown out too. Sally’s heart always blanched when she spotted them. The baby looked tiny and pink, like a prawn, its head flopping as if there was something wrong with it. Rowena and Mrs Cresswell always seemed to be arguing.

  Sally left school herself a few months later, her life haphazard, insubstantial, papery as a sewing pattern. She stayed at home, cloistered behind the safe, fern-leaf-splattered walls of her parent’s house. She sat in front of the television on Thursday nights, watching Top of the Pops and The Generation Game and eating too many Ritz biscuits. She had unfinished O-levels in five subjects. She did not have a single friend.

  Her father sat on the sofa beside her sometimes, marvelling at the discordant noises emerging from the bands on Top of the Pops. (‘Is this singing? Do they think this is singing?’)

  Her mother used to come quietly into the living room, walking across their squeaking autumn-leaf carpet, bearing trays of Bourbon biscuits and cups of tea. ‘Here y’ar, darling,’ she used to say, frowning. There was something wrong with her daughter but she didn’t know what it was.

  ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’ she asked one evening.

  ‘No, Mum,’ Sally replied tetchily – by now her grief had turned into a kind of permanent tetchiness. She reached forward for another biscuit. ‘I am not pregnant.’

  It was not Colin she missed, after all. It was Rowena. It was Rowena she thought about. Alone in the kitchen, she would go to the phone and dial Rowena’s number again. She knew Rowena’s number better than her own. But she would put the phone down before the first ring, imagining their silence, or their anger, or the wail of Joe Cresswell in the background. Three times their own phone had rung and it had been Rowena; but Sally’s mother had answered and Sally had pretended to be out.

  Eventually Rowena and her son moved away – to London, Sally heard – to live in some flat in Maida Vale. And then on to somewhere else. While Sally continued to drift around the house, collapsed on the furniture.

  ‘Come on,’ her mother used to say. ‘You’ve got to buck your ideas up.’

  Her mother wanted her to snap out of it, whatever it was. She plumped down beside her one afternoon, a month or so before Christmas, and said, ‘What are you planning to do with your life, then? Eh?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Because you can’t hang around doing nothing, can you?’

  ‘S’pose not.’

  ‘What happened to Rowena? You never talk about her these days.’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Can’t you think of anything to do?’

  ‘Nope.’

  So she found work. She began to work at the Country Kitchen, donning her mob cap and her puffed sleeves every morning. And in the evenings she came home and picked up her canvas, her needle and her thread.

  Cross

  There are many ways in which a girl’s life can go wrong.

  Or, there are a few ways, but the ways are like waves, building up momentum as they progress. Gathering u
p seaweed, rubbish, shipwrecks, oil slicks, dubious sailors in their wake. Sailors with tattoos on their arms proclaiming undying love.

  *

  My son has always made friends easily. He used to bring some of them home for tea back in England: big, space-invading schoolboys in smelly shoes. I remember all their names: Luke, Max, Chris, Simon. I remember the things they used to like eating, their obsession with trainers and small electronic games. When they were very young they called me Mrs Cresswell. When they grew older they didn’t call me anything. They looked at my smooth skin and unmotherish figure and some of them blushed.

  Usually I don’t worry any more about the potential pitfalls in my son’s life because he is past the age of stupidity. The time to worry about male stupidity – physical stupidity – is over. He is twenty-seven. He has always been more academic than sporty in any case; not one of those boys that goes abseiling or potholing or freefalling. He has never been interested in situations involving sheer drops or tight spaces. But he could always run fast, do trigonometry, clear the high jump.

  Another reason not to worry about him: his appearance. He is a nice-looking man, his features even and open. He does not have the hang-ups that I used to have; that all the girls at my school seemed to have. When he was younger he never even seemed to care very much when he got spots. I remember caring a lot. I remember the hours Sally Tuttle and I used to spend in front of mirrors, fretting and wondering. About our spots and also about our hair. Was it better like this, or like that? Better with a side parting? Or a middle parting? Or no parting at all?