by Jane Rogers
Clare looked at Caro, who was bright red and agitated with the effort of arguing.
“You really think a woman should be forced to have a baby if she doesn’t want it?”
“Not to keep it – of course not. Have it and give it away. Plenty of people want new babies.”
“You think she should be pregnant for nine months and go through all the agonies of giving birth, and then give it away?”
“I – I’m not sure – yes, I think so.” Carolyn hesitated. “It seems – to me – the least she can do, really. She’s started the child off – it didn’t ask to be born. Once she’s started it she should let it grow in her – until it can survive on its own.”
“For fuck’s sake!” screamed Bryony. “What d’you think she is? An incubator? What if she doesn’t want to be swollen to the size of an elephant with a bleeding parasite kicking her in the guts day and night? She didn’t make it on her own. What about the man?”
Carolyn shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, he can’t do anything can he? You can’t make him responsible, at that stage.”
“If it’s aborted early on,” said Clare, “you really couldn’t call it human. There’s hardly anything there.”
“But – it’s – but –” Carolyn stammered and stopped. “But it’s got a will to live. That’s what’s there. A decision to live.”
“But Caro – carry that to its logical conclusion and you don’t believe in contraception. Because every time someone screws they could make something with a will to live. If you’ve got a coil you’re just making your womb into such an uncomfortable place that the little things with a will to live can’t actually live there.”
“Yes,” said Carolyn simply.
“Yes what?” Bryony was nearly apoplectic.
“Yes, I don’t know about contraception. I’m not sure about abortion. I need time to think about it. That’s why I don’t want – I’d better not fold the paper – until I’ve worked out my ideas a bit more.” And she went out of the room, leaving Clare and Bryony facing one another over two thousand five hundred sheets of paper that had to be folded by Friday. Not only did she not help; in the time when she could have been helping she did things like lining the kitchen cupboards with flowery paper, polishing the brass door knocker, ironing tea-towels and shampooing the TV room carpet. Clare was relieved to be able to share Bryony’s anger.
“Caro, for God’s sake, if you haven’t got anything better to do why don’t you help us? There’s no point in cleaning that carpet, it’s covered in coffee stains – nobody minds it. It won’t look any better when you’ve finished. You’re wasting your time.”
But Carolyn carried on. Not only doing unnecessary jobs, but actually creating work by transferring cooked food out of saucepans into dishes before serving it, decanting milk into a jug and margarine on to a saucer. She discovered a tablecloth which she started to use. On a Formica table it was so patently stupid that they left the shaking and washing and ironing of it to her in contempt.
The winter was long and hard work. Carolyn tried to get on with them; listened to them, read their magazines, had things explained by Clare. But it was not easy to fit in, as she had hoped.
She was alive. She had survived the accident, and all that mess afterwards. She had made a change in her life, broken away from her mother. She wanted to fit in here more than anything, to be part of their household. But she was not the same as them, she could not pretend to be. As time went by, she seemed to be more and more different. The things they believed – and did – were so complicated: she had to stop, and think, and ask questions – and still she wasn’t sure. . . . She saw shades of grey where they seemed to see none – complications, contradictions.
It was exhausting and she did not know enough to analyse each problem properly. And she knew she was annoying them whenever she questioned their assumptions. If she did not do what they wanted then they managed to make her feel wrong or stupid. How was it her point of view was never right? And they were very untidy. The house was always littered with things, papers, books, children’s toys, piles of clothing on their way to or from the launderette – it was terrible. They didn’t seem to mind at all. Carolyn remembered the way her mother would whizz round the room with a can of spray polish and a duster, after tea, and say, “Well I just can’t settle if the place isn’t tidy.” Here, you were lucky if you could see any surfaces to dust. She didn’t know where half the things went, but she tidied them up and put them in piles on the stairs so people could taken them up to their rooms when they went, and the kitchen looked nice and tidy. Sylvia tripped over some clothes as she was coming downstairs one day and Sue went mad.
“Can’t you leave our stuff alone? You’ve made a bloody death trap on the stairs. It’s our mess, we live in it. For God’s sake stop fussing around and find something sensible to do.”
It was always with a sense of relief that Carolyn escaped to the greenhouse to water her seedlings. Nearly all of them had germinated, although it had taken them weeks and weeks to do so. When she had watered them she often sat on the ledge, simply staring at their thin greenness and absorbing the peace of the place. It was secure there. Gradually she came to realize that it was reminding her of her father – her father and the allotment. It wasn’t just the smells of dug earth and the friendly shapes of garden implements which she associated with him; it was the sense of escape the place gave her. Patiently she examined her memories. It was years since she had spent time alone with her father. Yes, literally, years. When she was too little to be anything but a nuisance on shopping expeditions, her mother had left her with her father on Saturday mornings. Carolyn had always resented being left behind, and clamoured for the shops with their sweets, toys and new clothes. Her mother talked and instructed and bustled until the minute she left the house. Then suddenly it would be very quiet. It seemed to Carolyn (perhaps her memory exaggerated) that her father never spoke at all. But it was a warm peaceable silence. They would put on their old trousers and wellingtons, and go down to the allotment, to the damp-smelling shed where her father kept his gardening things. She would play in the dark shed, where there were millions of daddy-long-legs, or stand about watching him while he dug. Sometimes he would call her over. “Want to see this worm Carrie? He must be near nine inches long.” “Hold this twine for us lass, will you?”
Yes. She would hold the end of the twine while he walked away from her backwards across the freshly dug earth, unwinding the ball of twine slowly and deliberately, crouching at the other end to peg it into the earth, then coming back to stake her end too.
“Thanks lass.”
She remembered the smell as he tipped out the bag of manure he got from Tandy’s every now and then, and the way she would hold her nose and shout “Pooh!”, and he would laugh and call her Miss Dainty Socks. In summer he let her cut a bunch of flowers at the end of the morning, to take home for the table. She was allowed to fetch the scissors herself from the drawer in the shed. She remembered hesitating, choosing, picking the biggest and bluest cornflowers, and him looking up from his planting and saying quietly, “If you pick the ones as aren’t quite open yet, they’ve a chance of lasting longer, maybe.” She remembered with strange clarity the concentration she had put into cutting the flowers; how she had hoped her father would think she had chosen the right ones.
Peace. Peace from the frenzied pressure of her mother’s attention. She had not valued it. She had leapt joyfully at the chance of going shopping, when she reached the magic age of usefulness.
Sitting in the greenhouse with her seedlings, she was safe from the frantic activity in the house. But it was childish really, she told herself. It was high time for practical things, it was time to get a job. Her mother had had a fit when Carolyn admitted that she was living on social security. “Scrounging off the dole – after all those years of schooling – it’s wicked, that’s what it is, wicked.” It wasn’t wicked, Carolyn knew – but she couldn’t hide in here forever.
Then Lisa, one of the su
pport group for the Refuge, moved away. The phone rota was redrawn so that the week was divided between five, not six. Clare asked Carolyn, casually, if she was interested in taking on a few hours a week. Carolyn was dismayed; she had found the place very frightening on her previous visits. It was a dilapidated terraced house, the only one in its row that wasn’t boarded up. Inside it was overcrowded and primitive, with no hot water and an outside toilet. The seven children there had seemed more like seventeen. Although Clare spoke lightly about it, Carolyn understood that it mattered, and that Clare wanted her to get involved. She had discovered that it wasn’t a proper job (as she called it to herself) since none of them was paid for going there or being on the rota. It was only much later that she came to understand that the place was in its infancy. Clare, Bryony and the others had squatted the old council house and campaigned for support for battered women through their Women’s Paper. The Council had just agreed to rehouse women who stayed there, and had promised larger, more permanent premises for the Refuge itself. The idea was that the women should run the house themselves, but there was a series of crises (husbands discovering the address, a fight between two of the women, harassment from a gang of local kids – and the children themselves to be looked after) which meant that a couple of the support group had to be around most of the time. It would have been difficult for the women to explain their cases to DHSS officials and lawyers, with screaming children in tow.
Carolyn did not want to go, but felt miserably self-critical for her reluctance. On the first morning when she went with Clare the place was very quiet. The older kids were at school and two of the women had taken the younger ones to the park. A new woman with two children had been brought in by Jacky in the night. She was sitting on the sofa holding a baby, with her little daughter beside her. She was thin, with a bony face and bulging, frightened eyes. Clare and Jacky conferred briefly in the kitchen while Carolyn stood awkwardly smiling at the woman. Then she heard Jacky calling goodbye, and Clare came back into the room with some mugs of coffee.
“Hello, Maria,” she said to the woman, and “Hello,” to the little girl. She handed out the coffee and sat down.
“Would you like to tell us what happened, Maria?” she asked. “Jacky’s told me a bit of it – and then we could think about what to do next.”
“I’m not going back,” said Maria.
“No, all right, you don’t have to. Would you like – d’you think your little girl wants to go and play with –”
“No,” Maria interrupted her, “she’s staying with me.” The child, who looked terrified, was clinging on to her mother’s arm.
Clare nodded quickly “All right love – look, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, now. Would you like to tell me about it?”
Clare seemed completely different, motherly and unselfconscious. It was the first time Carolyn had heard her without that note of irony in her voice. Maria glanced around the room with her scared eyes. Carolyn noticed that her thin white legs were bare, and that she had a pair of fluffy pink mules on her feet. The skin above her heels was purple.
“He came home after closing time. He said – he –” Maria stopped.
“Is he your husband?” asked Clare. “Are you married?”
Maria nodded, staring straight at Clare with her bulging eyes. “He gets mad when Gary doesn’t sleep, he says it’s my fault, he says I make him do it – and –” She stopped again.
“How old’s Gary?” asked Clare, after the silence had lasted a little while.
Maria looked down at the baby. “Eleven months. He doesn’t – he’s never – he doesn’t sleep nights, I can’t help it. I can’t do anything with him, only hold him.”
“So what happened?” said Clare gently. “Was Gary awake when your husband came in?”
“He gets pissed and he doesn’t –” She started to cry, weakly. “He’s all right. He’s been good to me. He’s a good man. Only when he’s been drinking he just – he –”
“Did he ask you to put Gary to bed?”
Maria shook her head convulsively. “He was shouting at me. Calling me. I asked him – I told him ‘Shut up or you’ll wake Cathy too’ and he got madder – he – he thinks – he says I keep them awake so – so – so I don’t have to go to bed with him.” She stopped speaking abruptly and stared at Clare with a look of fixed terror in her eyes.
“He thinks you don’t want to sleep with him, so you keep the kids awake as an excuse?”
Maria nodded. “He – I knew what would happen – last time he – he started – he got Gary off me and left him – in his cot, he was screaming, he were scared – he was rough you see he gets rough when he’s drunk, he doesn’t think –”
Clare nodded.
“So I was upset I said I didn’t want to, I was crying and it made him madder.”
She stopped.
“Did he hit you?” asked Clare.
Maria nodded, almost impatiently. “Oh yeah, he hit me. But he – he –”
“Did he force you?”
“Yeah.” She turned her face away from Clare, looking down at Gary who was sleeping peacefully enough now. Carolyn could see that she had her right hand clasped around the fingers of her left, and was squeezing so tightly that the finger ends were white and bloodless. She looked up apologetically at Clare.
“I was scared. I never thought he would – would’ve done that. He was calling me all the time – awful things. He put his hand over my mouth so I couldn’t breathe –”
“That was before, did you say? Last time? What happened last night?”
“I didn’t want him – I didn’t want him to come near me – so I locked myself in the bathroom, with Gary – I didn’t know what else to do. He was shouting. I didn’t know what to do, he was banging on the door and Gary were crying – then I heard Cathy –” She shook her head desperately. “He started shouting at her, I could hear her crying, so I unlocked the door. I didn’t know what to do – I opened the door and he got Gary. He was pulling him, trying to get him off me – he threw him – he just threw him at the bed – I knew he was all right, he were screaming but I couldn’t –they were both screaming, Cathy and Gary both, and he got me by the throat. He was shaking me calling me a slut and a whore and saying they weren’t his kids – everything, I don’t know, I couldn’t breathe – he were choking me –”
“And did he let you go? You were afraid he was going to rape you again?”
She nodded quickly. “He were choking me. I must’ve blacked out. When I looked then at first I couldn’t see, it was all – you know – black like inside my eyes, but I knew they were open and I could hear the kids yelling – and when I got up he was lying on the sofa, snoring – he must’ve just dropped me and let me where I lie –” She stopped and Clare sat quietly waiting. “So I just – I got the kids out of the house – ‘n’ I rang this number.” She gave a shaky little laugh, holding out her skinny forearm to display the number written there in blue biro. “I saw it at the doctor’s on the board – an’ I wrote it down after last week – I didn’t know what else to do. It was two o’clock in the morning.”
“And Jacky came to fetch you.”
“Yes. I’m not – he can’t come here, can he? I’m not going back again.”
“It’s all right,” said Clare. “He can’t come here. He can’t find out the address. You can stay as long as you need to.” She hesitated. “Can I – do you mind, Maria, if I just look at your neck – to see if he’s left bruises? You see, we might need a doctor to testify that you’ve been hurt.”
Maria gave the baby to her daughter. She gathered her straggly hair into a bun at the back of her head, holding it with her left hand while she pulled down the polo neck of her thin jumper. Her neck was mottled with bruises: several that Carolyn could see were the exact shape and size of thumb prints, yellow, dark purple and red. The woman sat quite still, displaying her neck without embarrassment. Carolyn felt sick.
“Thank you,” said Clare ge
ntly. “I think you ought to be examined by a doctor, Maria. Shall I make an appointment for you?” Maria nodded. She seemed limp now – exhausted.
“How old is Cathy?” The little girl was still holding the baby, cradling it and smiling into its face.
“Five.”
“Does she go to school?” Maria nodded. “Well we’ll get her into school with the children here, for the time being. We’ll get her started tomorrow. Have you got enough clothes for them, Maria? What did you bring with you?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I were afraid of him waking – I didn’t bring anything.”
“Does he work?”
She nodded, yes.
“So he’ll be out today? You could get what you need – pack a case. It’s all right, I’ll come with you –” as Maria started to protest. “You’ll need some clothes for you and the children, some things of your own. . . .”
As Clare went on arranging things in her calm quiet voice, Carolyn lost concentration. She heard Clare talking about the DHSS, a lawyer, an injunction, all sorts of different things, while Maria sat silent in front of her, head drooping slightly on her injured neck.
Carolyn found the days at the Refuge terrible. She felt quite inadequate to help anyone there – and almost scared of them, as if the pain and horror of their lives were contagious. It was so ordinary. They all took it for granted; men hitting their wives and children, men raping their wives and trying to kill them. The women lived with it – some of them came here for a week and then went back to it. Often when women rang the beds were full and no more could come in. There was nowhere else for them to go.
Although Carolyn told herself she respected Clare, and the others, for the work they were doing, she was repelled by it. She hadn’t known. . . . The women’s stories and miseries haunted her, filled her dreams; the desperation of their situations made Carolyn herself feel trapped and frantic, so that she dreaded going to the Refuge and was tongue-tied when her help was most needed. Their injuries seemed to violate her.