The M Word

by Eileen Wharton

  We’d have played hide-and-seek in the rubble; we’d have cheeked the warden and run rings round his stout belly as he tried in vain to catch us; we’d have fooled the butcher into giving us extra pigs’ feet; we’d have dreamt of bananas, yellow and exotic as half a sun.

  Part of me feels angry at Mother and Father for separating us. And part feels angry at you for contracting TB. Though I know in my rational moments that it’s not your fault and that you didn’t want to be separated, either. I know you were too ill to make the train journey and though the air here is probably better for your chest (but judging by smell alone, you wouldn’t think so. The whole place smells of shit. Cow dung, horse manure, dog dirt), I understand why Mother wished you to stay there. I just wish she’d let me stay, too, until you were well enough for us to travel together.

  Perhaps the Mister and Missus might be kinder if you were here. There’s safety in numbers. Perhaps you could talk their daughters into being civil to me. One look at your smile and they’d be soft as cow muck in your hands. As it is, they are beasts. They pull my hair and spit in my food.

  At least the food’s better here. We get fresh eggs from the chickens and rabbit stew. The rabbits are caught by the local boys and swapped for eggs and milk. There’s a never-ending supply of fresh vegetables from the allotments. We don’t get fruit unless it’s nicked from old Mrs Flanagan’s orchard. Those apples taste sweeter than any I’ve ever known. Not as sweet as the sight of your face will be when you get off the train at Durham station. I will come and meet you, if the Missus will let me away from my chores. My list is endless. Cinderella has nothing on me.

  The other kids make fun of the way I speak. They say I’m posh and la-di-dah. Bloody hell’s fire! Posh and la-di-dah is something we’d never be called at home.

  Counting the days until you get here,

  Love,

  Alice

  Dear Alice,

  I don’t know whether you’ll get this, but Mother says I can write to you, and she’ll post it. Sorry you’re having a hard time down there. It ain’t the best here, yet strangely, we’re all pulling together and the atmosphere’s electric. I’m feeling much better, and hopefully, I’ll soon be coming to meet you.

  There was an air raid last night, and we were all shunted into the underground station. We were packed in like sardines. We were next to the Irish family from our street. Mr McKinnon played tunes on his accordion, and we all sang along. We could hear the bombs echo down the lift shaft which was the washing facilities and toilets. We were worried they would burst a water main and we’d get flooded, but the singing took our minds off it.

  When we were allowed back above ground, whole streets had disappeared and, in their place, lay smoking piles of rubble. We heard that Charlie White’s whole family had been wiped out, and only Charlie was left. We all clubbed together and bought him a Meccano set. I’ll never forget the forlorn look on his face as he clutched the gift while he was bundled into a coach and sent off to live with relatives he’s never met. Cor blimey, the kid looked like he’d lost a pound and found a penny. Wish you were here.

  Your loving brother,

  Michael

  I can’t believe Mother had a brother and told us nothing about him. She always maintained she was an only child. To say I’m stunned is an understatement.

  Letter number two:

  14th September, 1940

  Dear Michael,

  I wish you’d hurry up. The kids round here are all dunces and scatterbrains. Every time I speak, they mimic me. It’s pathetic. The boys would run a mile if you were here to take my side. I’m sure you could melt the icy hearts of the Mister and Missus. My God, they are miserable folk. You’d think that living in the countryside would make people cheerful. I always imagined them all whistling along to the birds and milking cows with a cheery song bursting from their fresh-air-filled lungs. He mainly grunts, and she shrieks with the pitch of broken chalk on a blackboard. Never does a smile sit on their lips, never a laugh escapes from their bellies.

  I go to sleep imagining what fun we’ll have. What larks.

  Yours,

  Alice

  Tucked between the next two letters are yellowing pages torn from an exercise book. I recognise the handwriting immediately. It’s mine. Where and when did Mother get hold of my diary? I can’t believe she kept it all these years.

  22nd September, 1979

  Dear Diary,

  I wish I had never been born. School today was hell on legs. Amanda Grimshaw and her cronies took the piss out of my shoes. ‘Look at Gallbreath in her fake Pods and knee-high socks. Can you not afford a proper pair? Knee-high socks are for babies.’ When I asked Mother for a proper pair of Pods and ankle socks, she slapped my face and called me an ungrateful wretch. She said, ‘Other kids would be glad of those shoes. Kids in Africa have to walk miles to school in bare feet.’ They’d have been welcome to my fake Pods. I didn’t say this, as I imagined Mother would strike me again. She’s got a hard hand. I still have the red handprint on the back of my thighs where she struck me last week for throwing my Brussels sprouts over next door’s wall. It seems their dog is allergic, and the Hamptons have been faced with a huge vet’s bill that Mother must contribute towards. How was I to know the stupid mutt wasn’t vegetarian? Mrs Sheldon’s dog will eat anything.

  Felicity doesn’t understand. She doesn’t have it as hard as I do. Mother’s friend, Theresa, has a girl a bit bigger than Felicity, and she gets all her old clothes. She goes to a different school, too, so no one knows Fliss wears hand-me-downs. The mean girls and the popular girls like her because she fits in.

  The teasing about my clothes was one thing but humiliating me in front of Alistair Cockburn, when they knew I had a crush on him, was just cruel. Mother’s coming, so I need to put the light out.

  More later,

  R

  14th February, 1980

  Dear Diary,

  It pains me to tell you about the Alistair Cockburn thing, but who else can I tell? I sent him a Valentine card. I’ve never sent one before, but I really like him. I daydream about holding his hand and sitting beside him on the bench at lunchtime. The bench is where all the people with boyfriends sit. Kind of showing off to the rest of the school that they’re not sad and single. Except the ones who’ve been going out for yonks, and they go behind the gym. Not sure what they do there, but it’s definitely stuff that they can’t do on the bench. Gary Wilson stands guard, and if any of us get too close, he calls us perverts and threatens to beat us up. I don’t want to go behind the gym. I’m a bit worried about what happens. I wouldn’t have a clue what to do. Where do you learn this stuff? Are there classes somewhere? If there are, no one’s ever invited me. I feel like everyone in the whole school knows something I don’t.

  Anyway, back to Alistair and the Valentine card. I don’t know how to act in these situations. There are so many unwritten rules. The only time you put your name on a card is if you’re already going out with the person. How was I supposed to know this? So, I sent the card and signed it, “love from Roberta.” There was a handwritten verse inside. I love you, I love you, I love you almighty. I wish your pyjamas were next to my nightie. Don’t be mistaken, don’t be misled. I mean on the clothesline, not on the bed. How was I to know he’d show the card to his friends who would pass it round all the mean girls? I couldn’t have known that they’d spend the rest of the day taunting me about it and singing the verse.

  I hate them all.

  I can’t tell a teacher. I can’t tell Mother. I just have to suffer.

  More later,

  R

  28th February, 1980

  Dear Diary,

  Stupid mean girls are still singing the song from the Valentine card. Why won’t they just leave me alone? I’m sitting in front of Mother on the hard floor having my hair raked with the nit comb when she asks me what’s wrong.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ I say.

  ‘Tell your face that,’ she says.

&nb
sp; ‘Just having a bit of trouble with some girls at school,’ I say. I’m hoping for a hug, some kind words, maybe. I don’t know why I’m wishing that. It’s never happened before. Perhaps she’ll march up to the school like Sharon Kell’s mother, bowl into assembly and swear at the teachers until they cane “the little bastards who are picking on” her daughter.

  ‘You’d better stick up for yourself,’ she says, tugging my hair as hard as she can. ‘Don’t let them pick on you. Do you hear? If I hear that you’ve let them pick on you, I’ll leather you, do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’ Thanks for the compassion.

  The next time they launch a campaign of ridicule and hatred towards me, I vow to do as Mother says and stand up for myself.

  More later,

  R

  I remember thinking I was very sophisticated keeping a diary. I first got the idea from a Judy Blume novel where the heroine, Margaret, talks to God about her problems. I thought I’d kept the blue exercise books well hidden. I wonder when Mother had found it, and why she’d kept it?

  Dear Diary,

  I learned a new word today: Menstruation. Menstrual cycle. It’s nothing to do with men, however. Why didn’t my mother tell me about periods? It would have been easy. She could have explained that women lay eggs (a bit like chickens, but we don’t make omelettes from them). She could have said, as Julie Dinsdale’s mother said, that each month girls have something called “the curse”. Where you bleed for five to seven days, but don’t die. She could have told me that Mother Nature sends a plague. Anything to warn me. Instead, I’m left screaming from the toilet cubicle that I’m going to die, and when I’m found there by Amanda Grimshaw and Theresa Duff, I’m shaking like an epileptic having a fit. They kick the door which swings wide open to show my bloody knickers round my ankles and my head in my hands.

  ‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’ Theresa asks.

  ‘I’m bleeding.’

  ‘You got your period,’ she says.

  ‘My, what?’ I say.

  ‘She doesn’t even know what her period is,’ says Theresa spitefully. ‘You really are a retard, Gallbreath.’

  ‘How can you not know?’ Amanda says, looking at me like she’s just stood in something nasty.

  It wouldn’t be so bad, but they tell the whole class by the end of break time and the whole school by the end of the day.

  ‘We’re gonna call you Carrie from now on,’ Amanda says.

  ‘My name’s not Carrie,’ I say, remembering Mother’s warning to stand up for myself.

  ‘You really are a retard,’ Theresa says.

  I hate the stupid, spiteful little cows, Diary. I wish they’d never been born. If I knew where to get a weapon or how to use one, I’d kill them. I’m now reading a chapter in the Judy Blume novel which tells me about puberty and periods. If only I’d read it yesterday!

  I’m sitting in my bedroom listening to the Bee Gees, and my eyes have sprung a leak. I feel so alone. Fliss is at a party that everyone but me is invited to. Mother asked me why I wasn’t going, and instead of telling her I wasn’t invited (because I had nettles in the back of my throat, and my eyes had pins and needles, and if I spoke about how unpopular I am, I might burst into tears, and Mother will slap me and tell me to stop causing a drama), I said I had lots of homework to do. She shouted at me that I shouldn’t let the homework build up, and if there were any bad reports on parents’ night, so help her God, she would leather me.

  The Bee Gees are making me cry even more. My life’s a bloody tragedy. I’m all alone, and I’ve got no soul.

  3

  Reading passages from my diary takes me back all those years, and when the doorbell calls me back to the present, I notice my cheeks are wet, and I’m sobbing for my teenage self. I wonder if any of those toxic girls lie awake at night and feel guilty about the crap they put me through. I heard Theresa Duff was up the duff before we even got our O-Level results. I imagine her living on a council estate with a man named Sid who drives a Corsa and signs on the dole. She has six kids and spends her days watching Judge Rinder and reruns of Sixteen and Pregnant.

  I wonder whether Mother felt guilty reading what I’d gone through. Why had she never mentioned it? If I’d read something like that from Carolyn or Shoni’s diary, I’d have felt terrible. Wouldn’t I? I need to make more effort with my kids. I need to be more maternal. I realise, even though I pretend to be a strong, confident, independent woman, all I’ve ever wanted is a man to love me. What’s that about? I will never admit that to anyone. It’s pathetic. I’m pathetic.

  I shove the letters into a bag, wipe my eyes and open the door. Tammy shoves past me. ‘How are you?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m an orphan,’ I say as she plucks a bottle of Prosecco from her bag. ‘A single, sad-sack orphan who’s going to be alone forever.’

  ‘Oh dear, we are feeling sorry for ourselves. I’ll pour us a drink.’

  ‘I have to find a decent date for the company ball or Mick will be smug for the rest of his sad little life. I can’t bear it.’

  She pops open the bubbly, pours us each a glass and passes me mine, clinking her glass against it and muttering, ‘Cheers.’ I can see her mind ticking over as she slurps the yellow liquid. She’s one of those friends who is always setting you up with her friend’s brother or her brother’s friend. She was the one who made me join Match.com.

  ‘You’re never going to get fixed up, because you never go anywhere. And before you say anything, the laundrette and McDonalds don’t count.’

  ‘I bet some people have met their other half in Maccy D’s. Love among the limp lettuce, bonking over burgers, frisky with fries.’

  ‘You need a high-born man of quality. Someone with class.’

  ‘I used to go out with a maths teacher,’ I say.

  ‘Not that kind of class,’ she says. ‘Who wants to talk about the square on the hypotenuse when you’re about to climax?’ She needn’t have worried. I haven’t climaxed once. ‘I’ve got it,’ she says.

  ‘Chlamydia?’ I ask.

  ‘The answer to your love life.’

  I throw her a disbelieving look.

  ‘We need to get on Tinder.’

  ‘What’s Tinder?’

  ‘You are so Victorian,’ she says. ‘It’s a dating app.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I say. ‘I’m still recovering from the last round of internet dating.’

  ‘This is different.’

  ‘You said that about PlentyOfFish, and I nearly drowned.’

  ‘You’re so dramatic. We have to get back out there, or we’ll never find our soulmate.’

  ‘Humpft. I don’t want a soulmate.’ A lie. I do. I just don’t want to put myself out there and risk getting hurt. Again.

  ‘I’m serious, Roberta. My biological clock is ticking.’

  ‘Er, I think it’s safe to say that clock has already stopped.’

  ‘It’s alright for you. You’ve had the pleasure of having three children.’

  ‘What bloody pleasure?’

  ‘Come on, you must have enjoyed some parts of it.’

  ‘It was ok when they were at school.’

  ‘You don’t mean that, Roberta. I bet you loved them when they were little and newborn, dressed in white babygros and smelling of innocence.’

  ‘I only remember them smelling of sick and crying all night.’

  That wasn’t altogether true. There had been difficult times when they were babies.

  My ex-husband, Andy (who shall henceforth be known as Knobhead) used to disappear and leave me alone with them for days on end while he went fishing or camping or golfing. He liked things ending in -ing. Screwing Terri-Ann from Thomas Cook being one of them. But there had also been happy times, proud moments, fun times until Knobhead ruined it all.

  All I seem to remember are the bad times. Crying myself to sleep while he and the bitch took my kids away for the weekend and bought them presents. That feeling of utter dejection and emptiness when he drove off,
and the kids didn’t even wave out of the back window of the car. And when they came home, they’d be full of how wonderful Terri-Ann was. I imploded with jealousy.

  ‘Come on, Roberta,’ Tammy says, bringing me back to the present. ‘Even if we meet someone to bang.’

  ‘I had more bang from last year’s Christmas crackers than I’ve had with internet dating. And I bought them from Poundland. They were floppy and soggy. Story of my sex life.’

  ‘I’m telling you,’ she says, putting down her drink and picking my phone up from the coffee table, flicking through the apps. ‘Tinder is what we need.’ She spends the next ten minutes swearing at the screen while she downloads the app and then sets up a profile using my Facebook page.

  ‘You might want to rethink your profile pic,’ she says. ‘Let’s do a sexy one. Pull your top down.’ She tugs at my cami to reveal more cleavage. ‘And do a sexy pout. No, the pout’s not going to work. You have a resting bitch face.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Smile instead,’ she says, pointing my own phone in my face. ‘People like to see a smiley face. It makes you look more approachable. Hmm, no, you look like you’ve got wind.’ She clicks a few times then flicks through the pics. ‘I could work with that one,’ she says. ‘I’ll download an app to touch it up a bit. Make you look a bit more human. A bad profile pic means an immediate left swipe.’

  ‘Left swipe? Dare I ask?’

  ‘People swipe to the left if they’re not interested and to the right if they are. A left swipe is the equivalent of being left on the bench at the school disco. I imagine you know what that feels like?’

  ‘Remind me again, why are we friends?’ I ask.

  ‘Because no one else likes you,’ she says.

  ‘Again, cheers.’

  ‘Only I know that your bark is worse than your bite.’