The Doorstep Child

by Annie Murray

  She walked out of the hospital carrying a plastic bag containing her few belongings. Nestled inside were the three little coloured mats she had made and some other small toys she had sewn in the OT room, little offerings of her thoughts of them in her absence. She had poured love into every stitch.

  The wind gusted along the Bristol Road as she stood waiting for the bus. Evie felt raw and exposed. Everyone must surely know she had just come out of that place. The warmth of her departure cooled, as if she had stepped naked from a bath. The fragile inner flames in her already felt the force of the cold wind.

  Already she felt so alone . . .

  And now, at last, the door of the school opened. Evie stood back, away from the railings, then wished she had not let go because her legs and hands were shaking so much. She gulped in a breath, praying that no one was looking at her.

  The children were a colourful, jostling surge of movement across the playground’s tarmac. Evie crossed her arms tightly, peering to make out the beloved features of her daughter, her little son. Tracy Rachel Harrison, she found herself reciting inwardly; Andrew Jack Harrison . . .

  Voices rose all around her, mothers greeting children, shouts and laughter, a kid bawling about something.

  Oh my God, Evie thought, what about Shirl? Is she here somewhere? She twisted round, peering out from under her hair. There was no sign of her. Angrily, she thought, why hasn’t she come to pick them up?

  There – was that her? Tracy! She saw hair the right colour, a girl, taller than she remembered – six months! – a ponytail swinging. The child looked thinner, as if she had been stretched. She was waiting by the door of the school. Yes, it was her! There was the blue anorak. Tracy looked quiet, responsible as ever. Evie’s heart hammered. Oh, my girl, there she is! She knew Tracy was waiting for Ann and Andrew.

  The mothers were gathering up their children, ticking them off, moving away with pushchairs with kids clinging to them.

  Tracy turned and looked back into the school. Another group of children was coming out and then Evie saw Andrew. Shock went through her. He too was taller, his dark hair in need of a cut. But his once chubby child’s face had shrunk thin and had grown longer. Tracy went to him to take his hand and he threw her off, but she insisted and he gave in.

  Ann did not seem to be there. Maybe she was poorly, Evie thought sourly. So her sister did not bother to turn out for her two.

  They were coming to the gate, with another bunch of children. Evie did not want to stand right in the gateway. She was too scared, wanted this meeting of her children to be private, for them to catch sight of her, for their faces to light up and them run to her – but all this without anyone else seeing. The moment was coming.

  Another couple of children stopped right in the gateway, blocking it. One of them seemed to have forgotten something, was going back, the mother saying, ‘Go on then, and don’t be all night about it . . .’ All this came to Evie from a distance. My kids, was all she could think. Oh, my lovely, beautiful children . . .

  They were coming nearer. Clasping her hands fiercely together, she stepped forward, waiting for them to look up and see her. She was so close now, only a few feet away.

  Tracy led Andrew out onto the pavement. She looked up for a second, in Evie’s direction. Tracy’s face was serious, preoccupied. Her eyes moved over her mother but her mind seemed to make no connection. Andrew did not even look. Tracy turned away, taking Andrew to the kerb where they waited to cross the road.

  Trace! The cry never made it out of her throat. She watched them hurrying together along the street, Tracy being the big sister, leading Andrew home from school as she had no doubt been doing every day, along to Alwold Road. Tracy who had looked straight at her mother and not recognized her.

  Evie stood, unable to move or call out to them. She didn’t see me. She didn’t recognize me. It was like being dead. She felt the rejection like a blow, taking her breath. She turned away, so full of pain that all she could do was stand there with her face to the railings until all the other children had gone. The gates of the school stood silent except for the wind whipping through the railings in the darkening afternoon.

  Fifty-Five

  Afterwards she could not remember getting to the hostel. She found herself standing outside a tall row of dingy Edwardian houses. A few were in good repair, but mostly they were shabby, with cracked paintwork and grimy windows, some shrouded with nets, others staring at her like dark, hostile eyes.

  The one she had been sent to stood alone, behind a low front wall and a couple of scrubby bushes. A wooden sign jutting from the wall announced ‘Lincoln House Hotel’. It was very large and imposing looking, but wore a mantle of drab sadness.

  Evie stood outside with her plastic bag in the cold dark, sick with nerves. There was one light on in a downstairs room behind pale curtains and she thought she saw the shadow of someone moving inside. It looked bleak and grim.

  It looked exactly what she deserved.

  The landlady was thin and scraggy, not old exactly, but goodness knew what age, dyed black hair scraped up into a coiled nest. Narrow, calculating eyes peered out from a face tan-coloured with powder. She was wearing pale green overalls over her clothes and men’s slippers, pushed out by bunions.

  ‘You come from the hospital?’ she asked, looking Evie up and down in the dimly lit hall. She had a loud, grating Birmingham voice. ‘They said you was on your way.’ As Evie nodded, she stood back. ‘You’re at the top with Ethel. I’ll show you in here first, though.’

  Evie could see that it was one of those places where the feeblest light bulbs were used at all times. She was hit by a variety of smells, the most pungent of which was burnt toast, but with strong undertones of unwashed human bodies and lavatories. She started to feel even queasier. Who else was living in this place? She thought it was supposed to be a hotel.

  ‘The lounge is here.’ The lady pushed on the door to her left, from where Evie must have seen the light coming outside. A strange sight met her. Through the blue-tinged air she saw four men in a row in upright chairs with wooden arms, side by side and rigidly straight against the wall to her right. Despite the fact that they were a variety of ages: one grey-haired and bearded, one solid with mucky ginger hair, two younger men, one skeletally thin with shaven hair, the other wearing a black and orange woolly hat – a Wolves supporter, Evie thought – they all looked somehow the same. They were not doing anything, but sat side by side staring in a dazed way across the room as if waiting for a bus. It was like being in the hospital again. A telly in the far corner was blasting out Crossroads but no one was taking any notice of it.

  In the hearth squatted two other people, a man and a woman, both middle-aged and plump. As Evie and the landlady came in they jumped back from the gas fire, bits of scorched toast impaled on blunt-ended knives. Flabby slices of bread lay scattered on the floor.

  ‘You’ll set fire to the whole house if you go on like that,’ their landlady shouted over the boom of the telly. It seemed to be more of a statement of resignation than an attempt to stop them.

  ‘Sorry, Mrs T.,’ the man said, giggling. He was round-faced with a pudding basin haircut. The woman, with long brown hair hanging round her face and rabbity front teeth, sat frozen as if in terror, a piece of toast dangling from the knife in her hand.

  Mrs T. shut the door on them and led Evie up two flights of stairs, both clad in a thin pretence of carpet, its colour impossible to guess.

  ‘Here we are, Ethel, I’ve brought some company for you.’

  By the light of another dim bulb with a meagre paper shade, Evie saw a room in which two black metal-frame beds, two chairs and two small wonky chests of drawers, both licked over unevenly with white paint, had been crammed in onto the bare floorboards.

  Someone, who had been lying flat out on the bed to her right as they came in, sat up very slowly, like a statue coming to life. Evie saw a sagging figure with grey hair in tufts about her head looking up at her with alarmed eyes. The
room smelt of sweat, but the bottom of the sash window was open a good two inches, cold air pouring in, so it was fresher than it might have been and perishing cold.

  ‘Hello,’ the woman called Ethel said.

  Evie was reassured. She looked odd – though God knew, she had seen enough odd sights in the past six months for nothing to be all that alarming – but she sounded friendly enough. Most people she had met in the hospital were not mad exactly, just very sad, or shut in on themselves as she had been. Ethel was wearing some sort of dress in dark wool which rode up over thick white knees. Below she had on blue football socks with the tops turned over.

  ‘You settle in then,’ Mrs T. said. ‘Dinner in fifteen minutes.’

  Her scuffing tread disappeared and Evie put her bag on the bed. There was a pale green candlewick bedcover. The bed sagged badly in the middle.

  ‘Dinner! Huh! That’s one word for it,’ Ethel chuckled grimly. Her accent sounded as if she came from somewhere up north. ‘Welcome to Hotel Invalidity Benefit.’

  With this Ethel sagged back and lay on her side, supporting her head on one hand, reaching to tug at the hem of her dress, in an attempt to cover her knees. Evie sat on the bed and looked at her. Now she was taking Ethel in more closely, Evie saw that chunks of her hair were missing. She guessed Ethel was in her fifties, but she could have been any age from forty to sixty.

  ‘Where’ve you just come out of then?’ Ethel said it as if it was what you asked, not because she really wanted to know.

  ‘Rubery Hill.’ Evie didn’t feel like talking. She wanted to sink down onto the bed and go over what had happened today, the school, that moment when . . . But Ethel was watching her. She made an effort. ‘You don’t sound as if you come from round here.’

  ‘Me? Oh . . . I don’t. From Hull once upon a time. I’ve been in and out of those places since I was twenty. Thirty years this year. Rampton was the first.’ She sounded almost proud. Seeing Evie’s blank expression, she went on. ‘That one’s near Nottingham. Eight year in there. I’ve just come out of Whalley. Where next? I thought. They said to come down here. Everyone’s going to Birmingham – there’s these hotels.’ She gave a mirthless grin. ‘Meks it sound like a seaside holiday, eh? Got all the pills in a cupboard, she has, in the kitchen – dishes them out like sweeties.’ Another grim laugh. ‘This is one of the better ones, I believe.’

  She sat up with a groan and belched softly several times.

  ‘Time for some of her muck to eat. Soup – that’s all she ever does. Out of a packet. Thin as yoo-rine at that.’ She pushed her feet into her shoes and shuffled to the door, the smell of body odour wafting from her.

  Evie was glad to be left alone. She could not bear to hear any more. At that moment, thinking of Dr Rose’s tired, kind eyes, his fatherly manner, she wanted to run back to the hospital and beg them to take her in again.

  She didn’t go down to eat anything. She wasn’t hungry and she didn’t want to see anyone else. Once Ethel had taken herself off in her baggy frock and clumping shoes, Evie crept down to the floor below and followed the smell to a big, old-fashioned lavatory at the end of the corridor. The stink was awful. On a string hung the last scraps of a roll of Izal lavatory paper.

  She rinsed her hands in cold water and ran up to bed, climbing in on the screeching springs without undressing. Now she was alone, her mind played the day’s agony over and over. Again and again she saw her two children in her mind, hurrying along the street away from her. They didn’t know me. Their own mother. They don’t need me anymore.

  The tiny flames of hope she had been nursing inside her, carried from the hospital, all blew out in this one savage moment.

  Her mind hurled thoughts at her, poisoned arrows. Tracy and Andrew were living with Mom and with Rita and Shirley. They had told them terrible things about her. Your mother’s in the loony bin. They would have turned Tracy and Andrew against her. And it served her right, didn’t it? Hadn’t she just deserted them – disappeared without a word of warning? What kind of mother was she? What were the poor kids to think? Six months was an eternity. How had she let this happen?

  When Ethel came up again later, she pretended to be asleep, even though she was as far from sleep as it was possible to be. She had to grip the metal edges of the bed to stop herself jumping up and smashing her arm through the window, if only to feel some other pain than that which raged inside her. She thought about cuts and blood, the release of it. But she did not do it. She imagined going back to her kids swathed in bandages, like something in a horror film. No . . . No. Because she had to go back – somehow.

  She heard Ethel wander over and stand looking down at her for a moment and she felt a prickle of alarm, but soon Ethel was thumping her way to the door to switch off the light and then to her own bed.

  Evie turned onto her back and lay with her eyes open. There were no curtains, but the windows faced over the back, so that very little light reached the room from the dark winter night. Once or twice a gust of wind laden with rain buffeted the window.

  After a time, she heard Ethel say, ‘You awake?’ She didn’t answer.

  All night she lay with her heart thudding, her blood hammering through her. What was she doing, here in this horrible place, when she had dreamt that tonight she would be with her children? And over and again came the memory of Tracy’s face looking through her, seeming to have no idea who she was . . .

  She couldn’t go back there. Not yet. She had to get better, had to find a place for them before she went and tried to see them. She must get a job. She could not go back to Kalamazoo, could she? That seemed like another life now. All she had left of it were the few things in her bag – her work skirt, blouse, shoes which she had been wearing that day. Her purse with a couple of quid.

  She needed a place to go. She couldn’t stay here. It was worse than the hospital, this ‘hotel’ packing in the sick and desperate. She thought about Ethel, lying there across the room. If she tapped Ethel, a great gout of suffering would come out – a life in and out of asylums, cruelty, punishment, imprisonment. She had heard it from other older women in the hospital and she could not face it again.

  That’s going to be me, she thought. If I stay here. In and out of the loony bin forever. No. Please God, help me.

  Where could she go? The only person she could think of, because she had given her her address, was Melly Booker. For a moment, she longed to see Melly’s friendly face. She might see her mom, the rest of the crowd from the old end in Aston. But no. Her mind shied away from that. How could she turn up like this? Shame washed through her. They had been nice but they had always been people to look up to, who were a proper family. Better than her and better than her shameful mom. But she didn’t deserve them – not proper people like that, leading proper lives.

  As the first hint of light began to seep through the windows, she eased herself out of bed, clenching her teeth in her desperation to be quiet. All she had to do was to pick up her bag, her anorak and shoes and feel her way out to the staircase . . . The upper stairs squeaked as she placed each of her feet at the far end of every tread. The second staircase was easier. She leaned on the greasy banister and half stepped, half slid to the bottom, expecting to hear Mrs T. – she didn’t even know the woman’s proper name – shout at any moment, in her grating voice.

  She fumbled along the hall, and in the end found a light switch near the front door. There were bolts, a key to turn. Nothing to worry about. She was not trapped. Seconds later she was closing the door behind her and walking out onto the dark street, to find the only person she deserved or could dare to turn to – someone who had always been like her.

  Fifty-Six

  She walked through the gloom of the Dudley Road. It felt strange and nerve-wracking still, being out of the hospital, but at least there were not many people about. The half-darkness felt like a place to hide. After a while it dawned on her that the buses were running and she climbed on one into town and then another out along the Bristol Road. She
got off near the railway station in Selly Oak.

  The air was damp, though it was not actually raining. She turned off along the Dingle, a little path running down to the cut. Once on the canal bank it was darker, away from the street lights. A mist hung over the water, blurring everything in the seeping morning light. She pulled the zip of her thin coat up to the top and hugged her bag to her. Both the oily stink of the water and the shadowy path frightened her. Who knew what might be lurking down here? But apart from a dog barking somewhere and the early morning trains, it was quiet. And it would soon be properly light.

  Pearl, Gary had said. There were hardly any boats down here in any case. The cut seemed deserted. She walked for what seemed ages without seeing anyone and a cold sense of hopelessness came over her. It was months since she had met Gary. He said they were at Selly Oak somewhere but he might have moved on weeks ago. She passed a couple of joey boats with no cabins, filthy with coal dust and half full of rubbish.

  The sun was burning off the mist. The rain of the night before had blown away and it was turning into a fair day with only a haze of cloud. She started to feel the sun’s warmth on her cheeks. The water in the cut was low, black and filthy with scum and bits floating in it, but the sunlight made even that look more cheerful.

  She reached Cadbury’s, the grand-looking factory on her right, and stopped. The sun was higher. She seemed to have been walking for ages, though she realized she must have come a couple of miles. She was starting to feel really hungry, but now she had come this far, she couldn’t think of anything else to do except keep walking.

  A few minutes later, in the distance, she made out the dark front end of a boat and a bulky-looking figure standing on the bank beside it. Walking on, she could make him out better – and she knew him. Although he was grown-up now he had not changed – this big bear-like man who was also a child, who had always looked the same. He wore a parka and was flapping his arms back and forth across his body to get warm, clouds of steam unfurling from his lips. Evie couldn’t help smiling at the sight of him. Little Carly. And if Carl was there, Gary must be there too.