by Sophie Duffy
Bob and I are back in Torquay the following night. As Linda drives us along the front, the lights remind me of Niagara, but only slightly as Niagara is far more like Blackpool than our sedate town. They remind me how far away Canada is. How pleased I am to be home. To know where Helena is. To know she loves me even though she hasn’t exactly shown it. I might never quite get to the bottom of it but I am just about old enough to know I am not going to keep looking back. And wise enough to realise this will be unavoidable.
Linda picks us up from the station. She looks washed-out and – I am not sure if it is the shoulder pads – more than a little tense.
‘Hard day at the office, dear?’ Bob asks, trying to cheer her up, presumably hoping for a welcome home massage.
‘Don’t,’ she says, in a way that suggests absence hasn’t made her heart grow fonder.
When Linda leaves us at the shop that night, we don’t see her again. It turns out Princess has been having an affair with some bloke she’s got to know over the airwaves. The engagement is off, though I am ever hopeful things can be patched up between her and Bob. In April, this dim hope shines a little brighter. A British task force that includes Linda’s son, Clive, sets sail on a 7,500 mile journey to liberate a small group of islands we’ve never heard of; Linda might need Bob again. But that would be to underestimate Linda, a woman of substance. She doesn’t ask for Bob’s comforting arms. And Bob doesn’t offer them. There is only one woman he wants to hold. And that is not Linda.
April is also a trying time for the Queen. While her boys are off defending an outpost of her empire, she is in Ottawa, proclaiming an Act of Parliament that will sever all remaining constitutional and legislative ties between Britain and Canada. This is the last straw for Bob who sinks into the wet sands of depression that only Valium and long walks across Dartmoor can pull him out of. So it is just as well I am not going back to school until September. Someone has to help Patty. Someone has to get up at the crack of dawn and sort out the papers (and paperboys). Someone – me – has to grow up. But I am not sure I am quite ready for that yet.
2006
I’m the grown-up now. I’m the mother. But I still need reassurance. The cardiologist does his best to do that and he has now left us alone. I feel a wave of peace lapping at my ankles, enough to know it is there, a possibility.
The cardiologist has confirmed there is a problem with your heart. They need to do some further investigations but he suggests it will be a condition that may sort itself out. If not, the doctors will fix the hole in your heart. As for the one in mine, you are the one who can mend that. Which is probably too much to ask of you. Too much for any mother to ask of her child.
It will mean more hospitals. More doctors. More treatment. And I’ve been there before. And not just for Lucas.
But right now I need power and knowledge. So I read the leaflet that has been left for me.
A person with a hole in the heart is born with it – this is called a congenital condition. Most of the time it’s not known why the person has the hole in the heart. It happens when a baby's heart does not develop normally in the womb. There is no specific cause for this condition, but some things increase your risk of being born with the problem. For example, if the mother had German measles or toxoplasmosis (an infection that is passed through contact with cat faeces) during pregnancy, or if she has diabetes, or if someone else in your family was born with a heart complaint.
Is it me? Did I have German measles and not know it? Was it the cats, Valerie and Leslie? Or is someone else to blame for passing this on?
Chapter Fourteen: 1984
University Challenge
The end of the world hasn’t come so far but two momentous events do occur during this potentially apocryphal year. One day in the spring, our old arthritic Andy curls up for the last time under the bush in the backyard. Lugsy is out there having a fag break when he discovers him. He carries poor Andy inside, tears in his eyes, and I am the strong one who has to decide what to do.
‘Get Bob,’ I tell him. ‘And a cardboard box.’ Then I disappear upstairs and fetch my yellow baby shawl. I’ll have to find somewhere else to keep Helena’s letters.
When I come back into the kitchenette, Wink is handing out brandy all round. I have a slug and then prise Andy from Patty’s arms and wrap him up in my shawl. Bob pulls himself together and gently takes Andy from me and lays him in the box, tucking in the shawl, making him comfortable.
Wink, Patty and I watch from the window while he and Lugsy dig a hole under the canopy of the unidentifiable bush. It is a warm day and you can see the sweat glistening on Bob’s head, on Lugsy’s forearms. Then they suddenly stop. Bob reaches into the hole for something. When he straightens up, I can see a smaller box in his hand. A chocolate tin.
‘Don’t!’ I scream.
‘He’s got to,’ soothes Wink, patting my arm. ‘Andy’s gone.’
‘No, it’s Lucas.’
There is a stunned silence.
‘Lucas?’ Wink whispers.
But I’ve gone into the yard and am at Bob’s side, snatching the tin from him. It takes all my courage to stop myself, as I have just stopped Bob, from taking the lid off. It is too soon.
‘We can’t open it yet. Not for a long time. Not till I have children.’
At this point, I remember no more. Nothing till I wake up inside on the sofa. Till I am told that the tin is safe once again in its place, near Andy, a rose bush planted above him so he’ll live on.
The next event is slightly happier and a lot more unexpected. A few months later, I pass my A-levels and, though not the best grades, they are good enough for me to get into Portsmouth Poly.
Cheryl left a year ago, to go to Bristol University to study medicine. She wants to be a doctor! The very thought of all that blood and guts makes me want to spew. But I can’t help admiring her and feeling slightly ashamed of my desire to study English Literature, though there’s been one or two occasions when books have saved my life.
Cheryl will be in a different world to mine, her days filled with papers on medical advancements and the latest in scientific knowledge. Her week will revolve around doctors and nurses and patients and the substance of the Hippocratic oath. She will be conscientious about attending lectures and seminars and tutorials. In her spare time (what little of it there is) she will attend balls and charity dos and push hospital beds down and up the steep hills of Bristol whilst swaddled in bandages like an Egyptian mummy on loan from the museum.
I, on the other hand, will only have a few compulsory hours of education a week; the rest is up to me to put into some kind of responsible structure which I manage with only limited success. I do spend a fair amount of time reading, as students of literature should of course do. But more often than not I can be found listening to The Smiths on the jukebox, along with the other sweet and tender hooligans, down in the Student Union.
The Student Union is a whole new world. I’ve never been in a place with so many young people, not even when I was at school (where they were all girls anyway). They talk in accents that I’ve heard enough times in the Bay in the summer months but it is somehow different here and now, all of them muddled together, one babbling mass of youth dressed in slogan T-shirts and denim.
The Student Union also contains a bar. Alcohol has fortunately lost its allure for me and cigarettes contain too many memories as well as tar and nicotine and goodness knows what other chemicals, probably ground-up glass and arsenic for all I know and I know quite a lot about them. So I stick to pool and darts – my time spent in Bernie’s garage paying off – and within weeks I’m on a team for both.
During an early match in my darts career, down in the Union, I am pitted against Adele who looks more suited to glamour modelling than bar sports but who has drawn quite a crowd as she’s decided to leave her bra at home. Despite this distraction, I manage to get down to a double first. But unfortunately the burden of winning is closing over me, causing my hand to shake and scuppering
my chance to shine. As the arrow leaves my hand I know I am way off target, not just my nerves but because I’ve been barged into by a bladdered philosophy student from Worthing. The dart quivers through the air, watched in slow motion by everyone in the bar, except the one person that it is aiming for: the big strapping lad wearing a donkey jacket, decorated with a vast and colourful array of badges which – as luck would have it – form a barrier as effective as a bullet proof vest and prevent the arrow from piercing his heart.
Instead, the arrow bounces off his chest as if it were made of rubber and lands by his Doctor Martens. He is so immersed in his own world that it only just dawns on him that he has nearly been stabbed by a girl from Torquay who is currently offering to buy him a pint as recompense whilst being shrieked at by her team mates to get on with the game in hand.
‘Another day,’ he says, bending down to retrieve the arrow. ‘I’m on my way to a meeting.’
‘Tomorrow, then?’
‘Alright,’ he says. ‘I’ll meet you here, same time. But try not to kill me, alright? You should take up a less dangerous sport… crocodile wrestling perhaps, not that I’d condone it. It’s cruel.’ And he smiles a cheeky grin that makes it clear to both of us we will only ever be friends.
He is there the next night, same time, same place. He leaves his group of weird-looking mates to come over to me and let me buy him a pint of lemonade. We find a couple of chairs in the corner and by the end of the evening we’ve traded much of our histories and eaten our way through four packets of Wotsits, a mound of KP nuts and a Curly Wurly. His name is Joe and he is studying Social Policy. He is a few years older than me, having had time out of education working, among other things, as a truck driver. He has an HGV licence, an attainment that is much more impressive than knowing your way around a cash register. Joe tells me he comes from Penge (Beckenham borders actually, but he tries to play that down) which he pronounces as if he is French (ironically, of course) which gives a little aura of the exotic to an otherwise drab London suburb.
At last orders he offers to drive me home – he can borrow a car off a comrade. He can’t quite believe I’ve been stuck over on the Paulsgrove estate, miles from all the other students. He seems quite keen to see the place so I say thanks a lot, that’d be great.
As he drops me off he says he’ll be in the bar the next night. There is going to be a meeting for something or other I don’t quite get the gist of. I can tag along if I want.
‘Or we could just get some chips afterwards,’ he suggests, sussing I am probably happier sticking to darts.
‘Game on,’ I say.
It is nice having a friend again. A friend who also happens to be a boy. He even reminds me slightly of Lucas – which is odd as he is tall and chunky and dirty-blonde. Not that Lucas would have been a card-carrying member of NOLS (the National Organisation of Labour Students). As if that isn’t enough, Joe is also a member of SSIN (Socialist Students in NOLS) which isn’t half as exciting as the name suggests. (The politics of the Student Left are puzzling.) Lucas wouldn’t have known anything about SSIN – or sin for that matter. And the only card he’d have carried would be a library one which he would’ve kept guarded in his wallet whilst walking dreamily amongst the glittering spires of Oxford. For Lucas would surely have left me behind eventually – whereas there is something about Joe and I that is similar, other than our mutual love of bar snacks. Maybe he was also in the Slow Readers at school – though he certainly has a way with words now, particularly evocative catchy phrases such as ‘Smash the Tories!’.
By the end of the evening he is on his way to becoming my new best friend which is such a relief as I don’t want a boyfriend. I don’t want to kiss him or go out with him or have him say slushy things to me. I’d rather sit in the bar, matching my pints to his lemonades, listening to this charming man.
Over the next few weeks, Joe tries to persuade me to use my political conscience but I am not actually sure I’ve got one. While my Jiminy Cricket is off collecting money in a bucket for the miners outside his local Spar in Southsea, I am left behind at the Union, trying to double the black ball in the middle pocket.
I spend a lot of time in the Union which, although it resembles a barracks left over from some war or other, makes a welcome break from the at-times-oppressive atmosphere of my digs. There are not enough places in halls of residence for first years and being one of the youngest they decide to lump me in with Mr and Mrs Raby.
Mr and Mrs Raby relocated from London some years before (like me!) and have somehow ended up in a post-war council house on the aforementioned Paulsgrove Estate. They take in students to supplement their pension. As well as me, they’ve also managed to squeeze in Susannah from somewhere-in-the-Cotswolds. Susannah doesn’t even make it to the end of Freshers Week.
I, on the other hand, am used to sharing my life (and the bathroom) with people from all walks of life. I actually quite like Mr and Mrs Raby but not enough to also share my free time with them even if their house does have a garden and a view of the Isle of Wight on a good day. They eat their dinner at three o’clock in the afternoon because Mr Raby used to be a boatman on the Thames and has never got out of the habit of eating when he got off shift (or should that be watch?) in the middle of the afternoon when most people are still digesting their lunch and only just beginning to think about having a cup of tea. Mrs Raby keeps my food warm in the oven till I get home at around six. It is always meat of indeterminate origin with some combination of tinned veg coated with a thick layer of congealed Bisto, unless Mrs Raby is in a creative mood in which case it would be a thick layer of congealed cheese sauce.
When Joe calls round to see me one evening, having braved the journey out of town and across the motorway, he pretends to be quite at home in these working class surroundings but I notice the brief look of despair when Mrs Raby offers him a Scotch egg (he is a vegetarian) and when Mr Raby offers him a pale ale (he only drinks at weddings and tries to avoid such patriarchal celebrations wherever possible – unless absolutely forced into it by his mother). It takes all his NOLS/SSIN training to fit in, though I’ve primed him not to mention his far left views as, true to their roots, Mr and Mrs Raby wouldn’t dream of voting anything other than Tory. They love Mrs Thatcher almost as much as they love their Queen and Country. If they only knew what Joe said about the Prime Minister (‘Maggie-Maggie-Maggie! Out-Out-Out!’), they would feel completely justified in chucking him in the Solent.
‘So, Joe, what do you do at the polytechnic? Is it English like Philippa?’ asks Mrs Raby, in her pleased-to-meet-you voice.
‘No, Social Policy.’
‘Oh… that must be interesting.’
Mr Raby looks up from his copy of The Sun and says, ‘I hope they’re not teaching you any of that Commie filth.’
Mrs Raby is standing in her apron, arms folded, looking down on Joe and I, perched side by side on the grubby couch which is at an awkward angle to Mr Raby, sitting in his chair by the window with its glorious view of Pompey laid out before him (where you can see what a mess has been made by a succession of town planners trying to clear up after the Luftwaffe). I have to call on all my psychic powers to try to stop Joe responding in his usual way.
‘No, Mr Raby,’ he says cricking his neck to try and make some sort of eye contact. ‘They offer a balanced curriculum.’
Mr Raby is unsure of this answer, suspecting a subversive message in there somewhere. He suspects Joe could quite possibly be the enemy within. He suspects – quite rightly – he has a Trot in his home. A Trot in league with the devil himself, aka Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers. But there is nothing he can do without entering into a full-scale confrontation and Mr Raby would rather go back to the television page. He likes to highlight all the programmes he and Mrs Raby could have watched during the day but were too busy watching other ones instead. A man after Wink’s heart if ever there was one.
‘Have a sausage roll,’ offers Mrs Raby.
&nbs
p; ‘No thanks,’ says Joe. ‘I’ve just eaten my tea.’
‘I’m sure you could manage one, a big lad like you,’ she says, amazed at Joe’s restraint.
And Joe is restrained. He could’ve informed Mrs Raby that meat is murder but it will be a few months yet before we hear Morrissey sing these words at the Guildhall. Thus he spares Mrs Raby’s feelings and avoids a conflict which normally he’d thrive on.
Joe is most definitely becoming my best friend. It takes a special someone to know when to speak out and when to shut up. But what I like most about him is his humanity which is somehow more profound than his political persuasions. When he paints statements onto placards to hold up on marches, feeling like a soldier with his banner riding into battle, he believes in COAL NOT DOLE and THATCHER STOLE THEIR MILK NOW SHE’S STEALING THEIR BREAD. He believes in every heckle he shouts from the back of the hall during union meetings. Joe even believes in every last word of Billy Bragg’s protest songs. But it is more than words. Actions do speak a lot louder as far as he is concerned.
This becomes clear to me one day when we are sitting in the Union. He is reading the Morning Star when he comes across a photograph of a boy, the same age or thereabouts as his little brother Michael who is a sixer in his local cub pack and likes to collect first day covers.
‘Look at this,’ he says, nudging me out of the depths of Middlemarch. ‘Can you see what this kid has been forced into by this government?’
I look at the picture and can see that this boy has other things on his mind than woggles and stamps. Other things that he has to do. He is crouching on a tip, sifting coal through the grill of a shopping basket to take home to his mum to put on the fire, to do his bit to help keep his family warm through the long, hard winter ahead, with a dad out on strike and a community struggling to hold itself together.