Sticks and Stones

by Jo Jakeman

  She’d been moved to a new home. If it didn’t work out there, she’d pack her things and leave. She was old enough to look after herself now. She’d give it until Christmas. Maybe a bit longer, because who wants to be on the streets in winter?

  Naomi had been thrown into children’s homes and stuck with foster families. She’d discovered there were two types of foster families. Ones where their kids were grown up, flown the nest, and Mum and Dad had a heap of goodliness going to waste and truly thought they could help. As if sitting down and watching Doctor Who on a Saturday night with a ‘decent’ family was enough to turn a wayward child into a straight-A student.

  The other ones were in it for the money. Naomi liked to make sure this type earned it the hard way. Most of the time they didn’t even need the cash. One family she stayed with lived on a farm in the Peak District, but there were no pigs or sheep, just a barn full of Range Rovers and Mercedes. They had two sons at private school, and Daddy had his own business while Mummy stayed at home and polished her pearls, or whatever the hell she did.

  ‘This is your room – you have your own bathroom and a television.’

  Patricia said ‘baaaaathroom’ like she was one of the missing sheep, but she was just playing posh. Naomi could hear it in her voice and was sure that she said ‘mi duck’ and ‘ey up’ like the rest of them.

  Naomi could tell, from the moment she clapped eyes on her, that the lady of the manor didn’t think much of Little Orphan Annie. Patricia’s upturned nose cranked up another notch and her thin lips fought to meet over her buck teeth, as her eyes rolled up and down the skin-and-bones in ripped jeans.

  ‘I hardly think you need to come out of your room at all, Naomi.’

  And she rarely did, apart from during the Easter holidays, when she slid into bed with the precious youngest son.

  Naomi tried not to think about Nana and Gramps. She missed them in the moments when she forgot to be angry. They had kept her and loved her after her flighty mother, Helen, had taken wing without a backward glance. She had wanted to have Naomi aborted – not that Naomi had a name at that point – but she’d concealed the pregnancy for so long that it was becoming impossible to face. Nana thought Helen would change her mind when she held the squirming bundle but, true to her word, Helen left the next morning on the back of a motorbike and never came back.

  Gramps was so angry that he took all the photos of Helen and burned them. Nana was only allowed to mention her in whispers over the washing line. When Nana died, Naomi had felt a buzz of excitement beneath the heartache. It was like electrical wires overhead; you might not notice it, if you weren’t listening really hard. She hated herself for the twitching dimples in her cheeks, but she couldn’t help but think that now, finally, she would meet her mum. Everyone came back for funerals, didn’t they?

  There were women of about the right age in the church, one even held her eye and gave her a small smile, but none of them were her. And Gramps shouted so loudly when Naomi asked about her mum that she didn’t dare ask again.

  Nana died when Naomi was nine, and then it was down to Gramps to look after her. He said he didn’t know owt about girls, but he knew how to light a fire and grow pumpkins bigger than yer head, and to whistle like a bird, and Naomi couldn’t care less that he couldn’t braid her hair.

  One day Gramps took ill and Naomi nursed him as well as an eleven-year-old could. The bustling busybody from the post office came out to drop off a parcel and Naomi said to her, ‘There’s summat up with ’im. He won’t get out a bed.’

  Hilda Grayson told her not to worry, but by that night Naomi was in foster care and Gramps had tubes up his nose. Three weeks later Naomi was back in the same church, front row again, with people she hardly knew passing her tissues. Again there was no sign of her mum and, with no one willing to take her in, she found herself in the system, surrounded by people who had never heard of Gramps. No one could tell her stories the way he used to. No one knew how she liked her toast cut into triangles. It was as if Nana and Gramps had never existed, and Naomi ceased to exist too. Old Naomi – the Naomi who was loved and cared for – was long gone, buried in the ground between Nana and Gramps. She was reborn into a life where she had to fend for herself.

  ‘I’ve got a mum. She don’t know where I am. As soon as I tell her, she’ll come git me. I won’t be here for long. You’ll see.’

  The social worker helped for a while. Helen’s name was on Naomi’s birth certificate, but there was no one of that name on the electoral roll, marriage licences or, thankfully, a death certificate.

  After two homes and three foster families, Naomi’s ideas of her birth mother had soured. She could imagine her saying, ‘I wanted you to have the life I could never give you, blah, blah, blah’, when in fact she wanted the life that having a baby could never give her. Having a baby was a buzz-kill, and that’s exactly what Naomi thought when she fell pregnant with the posh fella’s child. He gave her enough money to make her go through with the abortion and keep her mouth shut. She’d have done it for free.

  The other girls in the waiting room looked ashamed. One woman was older, and kept saying, ‘But I just can’t cope. I got another six at home.’ She wouldn’t stop mithering and making them all feel uncomfortable. Naomi just wanted it over and done with.

  Shown through to their own pristine beds, they were each given a gown and told to strip. Naomi lay on the bed as they slid a cannula into the back of her hand. For the anaesthetic, they said. She tried to read, but the words kept shifting about the page. A nurse told her that they would like to fit a coil while they were in there. Save this kind of thing from happening again.

  ‘Won’t happen. I’m never having sex again,’ Naomi told her. But the nurse looked at her like she’d seen her type before, and they always did.

  ‘They’ll be up to get you in a minute,’ she said. ‘You’re first on the list.’

  She drew the curtains around Naomi’s bed. Naomi lay on her back and the tears fell from her eyes like they would never stop. She wanted her mum: a woman she had never met; a woman who had discarded her as easily as a chip packet. With the start of a life in her own belly, she had never felt more like a child.

  It was the most difficult decision Naomi had ever had to make, but she had no home, no job, no family. She couldn’t have this child, only for it to be taken into care and become easy prey for another foster father or friend of the family.

  She dried her tears. She had to toughen up. Despite her anguish, she was sure she was doing the right thing. For her own mother to have her, then desert her, was the act of a selfish person. Naomi had grown up knowing that she was abandoned and unwanted. How could she inflict that on another? It was time to stop the cycle. She wouldn’t pass on her unlovable genes.

  THIRTY-TWO

  9 days before the funeral

  I walked through the rain, hood down on my coat, umbrella at home. I wanted to be wet and cold; to be anything other than scared of what might have been. My flip-flops paddled beneath my jeans. I’d forgotten to change them for something more suitable. I’d been so desperate to get out of the house, it was a wonder I’d remembered a coat. All my thoughts were preoccupied with Phillip right now.

  He’d spent the morning shouting at us. Mostly he was reiterating what he had written on the wall, but every now and again he let something slip. He was desperate to get out in the next forty-eight hours, but wouldn’t – or couldn’t – tell us why. He clammed up when we probed.

  He tried to get us on our own, then whispered lies about the other two. Promising us the world, if only we let him out.

  We stopped seeing him alone. Stopped seeing him all together. We gave him bottles of water and a pack of biscuits. Told him to help himself. I was meeting Chris Miller in the morning, and until then I just had to keep Phillip out of my head.

  My feet slipped around and squelched against the rubber, slapping at the shallow puddles and the bubbling pavement. It was one of those showers that looked inconsequen
tial but soaked you through in minutes. It was light, soft rain, cooling but not cold. Refreshing me and washing away Phillip’s stench.

  Until I was surrounded by other people, I hadn’t realised how much I enjoyed my own company. We were temporarily safe and, for the first time in two days, we felt able to let each other be alone without fear of retribution from Phillip. I felt free and lost at the same time. I could keep walking or I could be home in ten minutes, and no one would bat an eyelid. With Alistair so far away, I had lost my schedule and my purpose. It felt like I was wearing someone else’s clothes and they were rough and heavy on my shoulders.

  I hadn’t told the others where I was going, only that I had to go. Now that Phillip was back under my roof, there was no more talk of either of them leaving and I needed some space to breathe.

  My safe space – the place of silence and calm – was calling to me. I slipped through the gap in the hedge to the spot where I came to talk to Iris. There was a small bench that I had placed there, under the outstretched arm of an oak tree, and I sat on it now. The field sloped down and away into a valley. Ahead of me were sparse and thin trees angled over a shallow stream. They were beautiful on a summer’s day but, in the rain, they were raggedy and lachrymose. Sheep huddled in the far corner and, in the distance, lines of blue and red appeared as cars sped by on the bypass, but they were far enough away that the sound of engines was buffeted by the rain. The patter of the raindrops on the ground rolled over me like a meditation CD in a spa; a place where women padded about beneath fluffy gowns, drinking freshly squeezed juices in between glasses of Prosecco.

  The rain dripped off the branches overhead and struck the ground, popping like bubble-gum. I shook wet hair out of my eyes and huddled in my cocoon, shivered against the damp. If I’d had the energy, I would have cried.

  I buried my head in my hands and dug my elbows into my knees.

  The games Phillip played drove me insane. There was always something to hold over me. So much that I didn’t understand.

  He wasn’t one to shy away from low blows and base comments. Everything he did was calculated to hurt. He would never change, and I could have laughed at myself for ever thinking that he would. My biggest problem, our biggest problem, was what to do with him, now that he was ours. We would start with a restraining order, but we needed more. We needed to make sure he could never hurt us again.

  Phillip had made our lives a nightmare in ways we were only just coming to realise. Things we had blamed ourselves for – problems we thought we could have avoided – were all down to him. He had isolated us, stopped us from making friends, but he hadn’t realised that, by doing so, he would create a commonality between us: a bond that not even he could break. I was lucky to be able to count Rachel as a friend, but neither Ruby nor Naomi had mentioned anyone they could count on.

  I could have sat in the rain until the night smothered me and I still don’t think answers would have come. Usually it would ease my mind to sit on Iris’s bench, but today I couldn’t feel my way.

  There was too much going on in my mind. I couldn’t shy away from the thought that Ruby, the woman who had turned on Phillip last night and given us the upper hand, was responsible for the accident that killed my unborn child. Forgiveness was a gift to those who gave it, as much as it was for those who received it, but I was struggling to be that kind.

  Only Rachel understood why I came here. Anyone else would find it morbid. They would be forgiven for thinking of this as the place where I lost my baby. But I viewed it as honouring the last time we were together. I remembered telling Iris about the stars, and my dreams for her future. A good memory. A strong memory. That last walk I felt so happy to be pregnant. What came next didn’t stop that from being a happy time. I never got to push Iris in her buggy or carry her in my arms, but I got to carry her in my body and that was as good as it was going to get.

  Rain funnelled into rivulets that set off down the hill. I couldn’t tell whether it was heavier or just sounded that way, as it tried to find its way through the canopy above me.

  I needed a drink. My ribs hurt as I stood up. If anything, they hurt more now than when Phillip had first attacked me. It was a reminder, in case I needed it, of Phillip’s need to control everything around him; to have the last word and come out victorious.

  The rain had become more persistent since I’d been sitting on the bench. The wind had picked up and was throwing needles sideways into my face and my uncovered hands. I pulled my hood up, folded my arms around myself and walked back to the pavement. My feet slipped on the mud and I was pleased to feel tarmac under my flip-flops once more. The traffic was slow and light. Windscreen wipers swiping at the rain like giant metronomes.

  I put my head down against the rain and walked quickly. A car, driving too close to the kerb, hit a pothole, throwing dirty rainwater over my jeans. I gave out an involuntary shriek and turned away too late.

  I turned to glare at the car, considering showing him my middle finger, until I saw that it had stopped and was reversing towards me. I almost ran, but held my ground; it was about time people started apologising for the way they treated me.

  The window slid down and a man’s face appeared, ‘Christ, I’m so sorry, Imogen. Would you let me give you a lift? Please? It’s the least I can do. I feel just terrible.’

  It took a moment for me to recognise him out of context, and to place him where I’d last seen him – at the school gate. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and I realised it was Ethan’s dad.

  ‘Tristan?’

  ‘I didn’t see the pothole. Here. Get in.’

  He opened the passenger door for me and I scrambled inside the warmth without even wondering if it was a good idea. I was making his plush seat wet, but seeing as the fault was his, I didn’t care.

  ‘God, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought it was you, and I was trying to get close to see if it was. Didn’t mean for that to happen at all. Where are you off to?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I was wet already. I was just out for a walk to clear my head.’

  I put my hood down and smoothed back my hair, before turning to him and smiling. His hand was on the gearstick, about to put it in first and drive away.

  ‘Christ! What the hell happened to your face?’

  I considered the usual explanations of tripped over the cat or walked into a door, but I was beyond covering up for other people, as if their actions reflected badly on me. I wasn’t to blame for what they did.

  ‘This?’ I pointed to my nose and my now-blackened eyes. ‘That’s nothing, you should have seen the other guy.’ I laughed, but Tristan didn’t.

  ‘Imogen?’

  ‘I’m okay. It was my ex and, believe it or not, this isn’t even the worst thing he’s done in the last twenty-four hours. Can we go somewhere? Not home – I don’t want to go there just yet.’

  He drove for five minutes, not saying much except, ‘Talk, if you want to. But if you’d rather not … Whatever you need, Imogen. Whatever you need.’

  He pulled onto a drive on a new estate. Golden-bricked houses with gleaming white window frames and navy-blue doors. It was still a building site at the end of the road, as the houses multiplied over fields and wasteland, creating dwellings for future lives and loves.

  By the time I had untangled my coat from the seatbelt, Tristan had opened the door for me. I let him take my hand to pull me out of the low car and into his house.

  ‘You’re shivering,’ he said.

  At the front door I kicked off my flip-flops and wiped my bare, wet feet on the doormat. The carpet was plush and cream. I melted into it and stood looking at my dirty toes. There was a shoe rack and a low table with a telephone: old-fashioned, with a circular dial. Tristan took my sodden coat without a word and hung it from a stag’s-head hook on the wall.

  ‘Come through,’ he said.

  The open space at the back of the house was a kitchen-cum-diner-cum-snug. This was obviously where most of the living took place.
The wall by the fridge was one large black-board of drawings and doodles, and notes of love you Daddy and reminders for shampoo, milk and bread.

  There were beanbags and sofas in deep moss-green and purple. A retro record player stretched across the back wall, a haphazard stack of vinyl showing that it was more than an ornament. A breakfast bar was teamed with tall dark-wood stools. On the top was a folded-back newspaper, a cafetière with an inch of murky brown liquid and a mug that awarded the drinker the accolade of World’s Best Dad.

  Tristan draped a blanket over my shoulders and rubbed my arms. ‘You warming up?’

  He was looking at my face, taking in my bruising. He quickly dropped his gaze. It pained him to look at me. I knew I looked a sorry state, but I was too tired to be embarrassed.

  ‘Drink?’ he asked as he straightened his arm to present the sofa to me. I nodded, pulled the blanket around me and fell onto the sofa, which sagged more than I expected and shot my knees higher than my hips. There was a sky-light above me in the sloping roof, letting in the light but no prying eyes. There were no curtains, only sky. I rested my head backwards and gazed up at the glass. The rain had stopped. In patches, there was a silver clarity. A brightening that promised the sun was still there, if only I could stretch that far.

  I listened to Tristan move about the kitchen and watched birds dart through my field of vision and out again. Swooping, playing, rapturous in the ceasing of the rain. I smiled slowly and let my eyelids close. Just for a minute.