by Jane Rogers
“Well she doesn’t drive me up the wall.”
“No – obviously. With those riveting tales of life in the carpet shop –”
“Woolshop,” corrected Carolyn.
“– and what colour Nellie’s woolly combinations are going to be, I’m not surprised. I can hardly wait for the next instalment.”
Carolyn was almost offended. “That’s just the way she talks. It doesn’t matter. You let it wash over you.”
“Well there you are. Your poor old Mum, rushes home from work, gobbles her tea, huffs and puffs down to catch the bus and then when she gets here dashes down miles of faceless corridors to get to you for seven on the dot, so she can sit next to your bed and not be listened to for an hour. You should give her an evening off.”
Carolyn shrugged. “She enjoys it.”
Carolyn couldn’t tell if Clare was serious. It would be impossible to ask her mother not to come, although she did occasionally go on about what a scramble it was to get here on time (she was always on time, waiting there when the doors opened) and how nice it would be when Carolyn was home and there were evenings again. Her mother’s conversation didn’t wash over her any more. It tormented her. It went on and on like a dripping tap, from one inconsequential boring subject to the next. And there was no escape, she couldn’t walk into the other room or pick up her schoolbooks or start to make the tea. She was captive, here.
Her Mum harped incessantly on what Carolyn would do when she came home. She brought a prospectus from the technical college, and a pamphlet about adult education evening classes, and another about courses run by the WEA. Then she started bringing the evening paper, and pointing out the Classified Employment columns.
“There might just be something that takes your fancy – I thought, since you’ve got all day lying here, you could have a look. It might give you an idea, that’s all.”
Pause.
“Look Carolyn, you’ve got to pull yourself together you know. There’s nothing worse than self-pity. You can’t lie moping here, just think of all the poor people who’re worse off than you. You’re nearly better now. You’re lucky to be able to think about a job and what you’re going to do. I bet there’s plenty of people in this hospital would give their eye-teeth to be going home soon. Come on now, love, make a bit of an effort for goodness’ sake.”
Lying there, Carolyn hated her. She didn’t want to look at the prospectuses and papers. When her mother left she shoved them in her locker and slammed the door, and they piled up on top of her clothes in a slippery heap and shot out all over the floor every time the door was opened. Meg opened it to put in some biscuits she’d brought her, and was shocked by the mess. “That’s not like you Carolyn, my goodness, fancy letting your things get in such a state.”
Listening for her coming down the ward, the first and quickest set of footsteps, always, Carolyn told herself, I’m not going to listen. I’m not going to talk to her, I’m not. And when she saw her mother’s bright hopeful smile and eager-to-please presents and heard her first cheery comments about what so-and-so had said to her and what a funny little boy she’d sat next to on the bus, she was filled with a stifling guilt and tried to smile. But her face was as stiff as cardboard. She could hardly bear to see her mother, couldn’t meet her eyes to say hello. And the less she could say, the more Meg persecuted her with “What’s wrong?” and “What have you been up to today, then?” and “Have you lost your tongue, Carolyn?”
When the swing door gave its final thud after she had left (sometimes she came back even then, with some vital message like “I met your friend Mandy in the Co-op and she sent you her love, I nearly forgot. She’s coming to visit you soon. That’ll be nice won’t it?”) there was peace. Carolyn lay with her eyes fixed on whatever spot their gaze had fallen on, and let her head gradually fill up with silence. She didn’t think – couldn’t concentrate, didn’t want to think about what would happen when she got out. They still didn’t know when it would be. She didn’t know how long she’d been here, it was interminable. Partly she didn’t dare believe she would get out, and felt superstitiously that the more she handled the idea and imagined and planned, the less likely it would be to happen. Which made her mother’s insistence on jobs and courses and pulling herself together all the worse. It was calling for trouble.
I don’t have to think about it, she told herself. I could be dead. I could easily have died, and then I wouldn’t have to think about it at all. Or it could have not happened. It could have simply not happened.
The idea dawned on her gradually, filling out and getting clearer over days. The imagining of it was an escape from pressure like a hole punched to let out steam. If. If it hadn’t rained. If I hadn’t gone out with Mandy. If I hadn’t run so fast. Or if I’d run faster . . . If I’d had an errand at the shops. If.
She tried it again and again in her head, cranking and rewinding the jerky film, making cuts and substitutions. If. With concentration, with sheer mind-force, she could push it through until she was there, on the kerb at Leap Lane in the pouring rain, glancing left and running over
and hearing startlingly close behind her the whoosh and splash of a vehicle from the wrong direction. It scared her. She turned and screamed, “One-way!” at the idiot red van, but she couldn’t see the driver through the streaming steamy windows. Stupid pillock.
When she got home she was soaked to the skin and shivering, partly cold and partly shock from the near miss. God, it was a near miss too. That maniac could have killed her. She ran a hot bath. Climbing into it was exquisite pain, once her icy feet were in she crouched slowly, allowing the hot water to creep inch by inch up her body. The room filled with steam. Her mother always insisted on the window being opened to stop condensation ruining the wallpaper. Carolyn relished not opening it when her mother was out.
After her bath she wrung out her blouse and put it in the dirty-clothes, and hung her skirt over the bath to drip-dry. She stuffed her sandals with newspaper and hid them in her room. Her mother would be cross if she saw them. Her skin was glowing all over from the heat of the water, it felt wonderful. She sat on her bed, facing the mirror, and started to comb out her wet hair .
It was perfectly convincing. At nights Carolyn touched it with her thoughts, gently, testing it for durability.
One day they told Clare that she’d be going home that week. The possibility had not entered Carolyn’s head, although Clare had been up and about for several days.
“What about me?” she asked Martinet.
“You’ll have to ask Doctor,” said Martinet. “But it’ll be a couple of weeks yet, I should think.”
Clare, who was only too obviously delighted, said “Come on, smile! At least you can, without danger of your face splitting at the seams.” She touched her cheek scar gingerly. “Shall I come and visit you?”
Carolyn hesitated, then said, “Yes please.” She knew it would be awful. Clare in the next bed was an ally, her only friend. Clare the visitor would be someone strange and difficult to talk to. Probably she’d look like those women who came to visit her.
She had studied Clare’s visitors many times, as she nodded and half listened to Meg. No one came regularly, but there were quite a few who came more than once. They were all young. She had asked Clare where her parents were. “My father’s in Edinburgh. And my mother in California. I think.” Clare didn’t seem inclined to talk about them. The two who visited most regularly were the women Clare lived with, Carolyn knew. Both were vaguely scruffy, one with long red hair and the other with a wide jack-o’-lantern face and such short hair it bristled. She didn’t much like the look of them. Student types.
Now she wanted to know more about what Clare was going back to. “Is it just you three who share your house?” She thought it odd that none of them was married.
“There’s Sue’s kids, Robin and Sylvia.”
Carolyn didn’t like to ask what had happened to their father. “Are you a student?” It was absurd that she didn’t know, afte
r lying next to Clare for all these weeks. But it had been completely irrelevant.
Clare laughed. “I wish I bloody was! No, me dear, my student days are over. I have to work for my living.”
Carolyn was pleased. “What d’you do?”
“Refuge for Battered Women.”
“Oh.” Carolyn was baffled. She could think of nothing to do with battered but fish or Yorkshire pudding. And Refuge Assurance. She felt so stupid she didn’t dare ask anything more.
Already conversation between them was awkward. Clare seemed to become short and brisk. She was moving away, back to the real world. Back to her complicated grown-up life that Carolyn didn’t understand; leaving Carolyn behind. On the last day she watched in miserable silence as Clare dressed.
“Shall I leave you my books?”
“OK.”
Clare transferred a heap of unglossy, boring-looking magazines and five or six books on to Carolyn’s locker, and packed the rest of her stuff into a big canvas bag.
“Well.” Carolyn was going to cry.
“Well, how do I look? Fancy me, do you darlin’?”
Carolyn laughed.
“I’ll see you. I’ll come back and tell you what it’s like out there – whether the natives are friendly. Take care.” Clare pecked her on the cheek and left.
Chapter 6
Once Clare had gone Carolyn spoke to no one. She simply lay and stared. She liked the first part of the night, when people stopped walking about. They turned off the fluorescent lights between ten-thirty and eleven, and then the ward was dimly lit by a small safety light over each bed. They were yellow electric bulbs, their wattage so low that their light seemed thick and dusky, full of texture and shadow. It did not shine, it seemed almost to be dark light, at which you could stare and stare without dazzling your eyes, but rather as if it was pulling your sight into it, by its soft luminous attraction. She heard the sounds of the building vibrating around her: footsteps in corridors, doors swinging and thudding, clink of glass or metal, the swishing wheels of a trolley. They were all sounds of quiet, contained efficiency.
She remembered the times when her Dad had taken them out in Harry’s car, when he’d serviced it for him – when she was little. It was a big old-fashioned square black car, like a taxi or a hearse. On nice days you could roll back part of the roof to reveal a rectangle of sky framed by black. If you sat with your head back, staring up, you saw a strange moving picture above you: clouds, sometimes blue sky, and sudden intrusions of branches and leaves and lampposts, as if they were on the same plane as the sky – the black edges of the picture cut them off from earthly contact. She remembered the ache in her stiffening neck, and not wanting to turn her head down even for half a minute. It was too hypnotic.
Now she only wanted to stare. Stare and stare and not think. Everything was too much effort. Nod and smile at them if they ask something, because then they’ll go away sooner and leave you in peace, to lie still and blank, watching without seeing, sunk down deep inside yourself, wrapped and wrapped inside curling layers of tight wordless thoughts, like the tightly enfolded petals of a bud.
And when it was completely peaceful, sometimes if she lay very still and empty-headed, the film would begin to run again. It stuck and jerked a few times when it started up, or went too slowly, making those dreadful groaning noises. But if she held herself right back (it was like not frightening away a wild animal) it would get going, and once it was well-started it carried on of its own accord. She could not interfere with it. It told its own story. If she was quiet, it let her watch.
Once school was over, Meg fixed Carolyn up with a job at Jean’s friend’s shop, the ‘Craft Basket’. “You might as well be earning money while you decide what you’re going to do with yourself,” she pointed out. “Any experience is good experience, when it comes to looking for work.”
Carolyn was pleased to be earning money, and quite happy to postpone decisions about greater things, at least until the results were out. Although when they came (two Cs and an E) she still didn’t know what to do. She and Alan saw each other nearly every day over the summer.
Before Alan left for university at the end of September, Carolyn slept with him. Her reasons for doing so were complicated and made her feel bad, because, romantically, she wanted it to be simple. It should be because she loved him enough. She argued miserably with herself that she did love him enough. But she was afraid of him meeting someone else at university. If she slept with him, he wouldn’t have the excuse that she hadn’t done. He would also, she knew, feel a lot worse about dropping her. She coldly analysed her motives, and called one of them emotional blackmail, and felt then that she was glad she’d done it because now she knew that if he did do anything nasty (meaning go out with someone else) she deserved it.
Sunday morning in November, seven o’clock. The house is quiet and will be for an hour or two, while Meg and Arthur lie in. Carolyn finds that she isn’t going to burrow down into bed and sleep again, she’s going to lie quite still on her back with her eyes open. It’s dark outside and the street is quiet. It could be much earlier. There’s a train going by all in a rush, in this house they always make her want to poke her finger in her ear to clear it, because they are so quiet and faraway. She is going to be sick. Perhaps not, if she lies completely still, it might fade away. She lies completely still, and feels the sweat prickling her armpits, and her throat trying to flex itself in readiness. No. Slowly and cautiously she sits up, her stomach gives the first spasmodic heave, and she presses her lips together and runs to the bathroom.
It was very easy to forget after it had happened. She felt fine. She felt like curling up and going back to sleep in the still-warm bed. It was nothing. And although it occurred to her to mention it when her mother asked the regulation “Sleep well?” at breakfast, for some reason she didn’t.
On Monday morning at seven o’clock she was woken by her parents’ alarm, and knew as soon as she woke, I’m going to be sick again I’m pregnant Oh God. And she ran to the bathroom and was.
Her mind ferreted at it all day as she sold embroidery silks and painting-by-numbers sets. It was impermeable and immovable, like a meteorite that had landed in her head. Pregnant. Not me. I’m not that sort of girl. Pregnant at eighteen. Not me. Why not? Look at Libby and Sue, and Tracy at fifteen. Yes, not eighteen. No one is at eighteen. It’s impossible. He used those things every time. What will he say? He’ll go mad. We’ll have to get married. I’ll be fat. What will Mum? What will I? Pregnant. I don’t believe it. Not me. There was nothing she could do. She went on being sick quietly every morning and flushing the toilet as she was, and she opened the new packet of Tampax on the bathroom shelf and took out a handful to throw away. It was all she could think of.
Her mother’s conversation became more and more surreal. She found it impossible not to listen to her. Everything that Meg said dropped in vivid disconnected pictures into the blank space of her head. Purple was going to be in, this autumn, and they’d already sold a lot of that lovely heather-mix wool. She’d taken some steak back to the butcher’s because it was so tough, and she’d paid nearly a pound a pound for it, they thought they could get away with murder. Next door had used some chemical weedkiller on the path, the idle devils, and some of it had blown over on to the garden so Arthur thought, because there was a nasty yellow stripe right down their side of the front lawn. Some people had no respect for other people’s property. Words and phrases rang in Carolyn’s ears when she had gone. “They think they can get away with murder.” What did it mean? The idle devils. Id–dle–dev–vils. I–dledev–ils. She saw the letters which spelt the words, but little glowing devils too, with pronged forks and forked tails. A fork like that isn’t that sort of fork though, she thought.
Clare came to visit. Although she had outdoor clothes on, her patchy hair and her scratched white face made her welcome and familiar to Carolyn. She came in the afternoon. “Hope you don’t mind – but I can’t compete with your Mum. I told Martine
t I work evenings.” She pulled a chair up to the bedside and sat down. “God you look awful,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve brought you some dried apricots to chew.”
Carolyn laughed.
“When’re you going home?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to.” Carolyn was interested to hear herself say that.
“Don’t want to go home?”
“No. Not really.”
There was a pause. “Well don’t,” said Clare briskly. “We’ve got a spare room. Come and stay with us if you like.”
Carolyn stared at her.
“You can – if you want. That’s what you meant, isn’t it? Or d’you mean you like it so much here you want to stay for the rest of your life?”
Carolyn laughed weakly. “Could I?”
“Sure. No problem.”
With a great effort Carolyn visualized her room at home, with its new carpet and new bedspread. It belonged to a different life.
“Ring me, when they give you a date, and I’ll come and get you.”
As if there was nothing simpler or more ordinary, than that Carolyn should go and stay in their spare room. Carolyn stared at her.
“All right? It’s a nice room too, it’s got a sloping roof. On the top floor.”
“Good.”
“Well.” Clare looked round. “I can see it’s as jolly as ever in here. Have you read my books?”
“No. Some. No.” Carolyn admitted.
“You should try this,” said Clare, and pulled a paperback from the pile. “I’ve just reread it. It’s wonderful.”
The book looked boring. The cover was black, and the author’s name in big letters was DORIS LESSING. Carolyn was surprised that Clare read books by someone called Doris. It sounded like the Archers. “OK.” She wanted Clare to go so she could think.
“Getting you down?” said Clare.
She nodded.
“Want me to go?”
In relief, Carolyn smiled.
“All right, I know when I’m not wanted. Look Caro, I’ll write my number in the front of this book. OK? Give me a ring when you know when they’ll let you out.”