by Morag Joss
WERE YOU BORN 1955 AND ADOPTED? Lady in country house seeks contact with her brown-eyed baby boy given (out of necessity but reluctantly) to adoptive parents, south of England, aged 3 weeks. All papers since lost. Mother longs to trace. Replies to Box No. only, treated in strictest confidence.
By the time she had printed out another copy to keep, filled in the form, calculated the cost, written out her cheque, and sealed everything in the envelope and addressed it, she was shaking slightly, and her coffee was cold. She wondered about ordering more but she had already spent half of her week’s money on the advertisement and the stationery, and she was worried that if she delayed even to drink a cup of coffee she might be overtaken by objections (although from where she was not sure) to what she was doing. Her courage was fluttering and growing restive, like something trapped and uncomfortable. Her heart started to bang inside her chest, and in her throat. People were looking at her. Oh God, could they hear it? Did it show on her face, how terrified she was? She had to get home. She tried again to stop shaking and could not.
‘Excuse me, are you all right?’
So it did show. She had to get home. Now she was certain that all the people here, drinking from foaming cups and talking about their shopping, indeed every one of the thousands of people walking in Bath this morning, would stop her if they could. They would form a mob, a huge furious mob, and stop her. Already this woman at the next table was ignoring what her friend was saying and looking at Jean with what she wanted her to think was concern, but was really suspicion.
‘I’m fine. I just need to get home. It’s rather warm in here. Thank you.’ Jean shrugged herself back into her coat, recovered enough now to see the woman noticing how good and expensive it was. With the woman’s eyes still upon her, she crossed the road to the post office and posted the envelope. She stood by the post box until she felt calm again.
Briskly she crossed back and walked into Waitrose, because it had struck her suddenly that a house needed flowers, especially in January. She spent very nearly all of the rest of her money on lilies, roses and freesias, and also picked up a leaflet about Waitrose’s home delivery service, hoping that she could place an order by telephone without having to use a credit card. She had never held with credit cards nor, it had to be admitted, had she ever been invited to own one. She had assumed before she arrived that while on this assignment she would go out and do her food shopping once a week or so, as she normally did. But the strain of being away from Walden had proved too great, she realised, walking as fast as she could back to the bus station with her armfuls of flowers. She would not risk it again.
* * *
Across town, at the moment when Jean was boarding her bus home, Michael was standing before the magistrates. The Bench- one kind-looking lady, one hard-faced one with dandruff and a man with sloping shoulders- had just re-appeared after having retired to discuss his case, and the hard lady was telling him again how disappointed they were to see him. Michael nodded in sad apology and submitted to another telling-off with the hangdog expression that the magistrates liked. He was lucky to be avoiding a period in custody, he heard, and he caught on the face of the kind lady a look of triumphant magnanimity which told him that he had her to thank for that. He answered in a hoarse voice their intrusive but by now expected questions about his earnings and outgoings. It was noted that he still was not working. Did he not have some experience of bar work? Michael gulped and tried to explain about the depression. So had he consulted his GP? They recommended that he see his GP again, leaving unasked the question of whether or not, after a string of missed appointments, his GP would see him. The mess that Michael was making of his life was expanding and filling the room, pressing down on the shoulders of the magistrates, who all now seemed to be sagging, and leaving Michael short of enough breath for explanations. But it was not the exposure of his squalid life that suddenly touched him and made his chin wobble as if he were still a snotty kid; it was the novelty of being questioned. He should be used to the way the magistrates went on by now, but every time it took him unawares. When they asked him about himself, sounding as if it really mattered, he found himself wanting to cry. For a moment he nearly allowed himself to believe that these motherly, judging women cared about him. But he glanced up at the flaky shoulders of the hard-faced one, and remembered that it was not his poverty, nor his upbringing in care, nor his bare little flat, nor the absence of friends and prospects that concerned them. All they cared about was getting money off him, first for driving the van without insurance or tax, and then an extra load for falling behind twice with the payments. Tears of self-pity filled his eyes, and when the hard lady went on to tell him that they were not imposing a community service order on him in view of his health, but increasing his fine and generously re-scheduling the payments, he lowered his head further and his tears spilled down the lapels of the jacket that he had worn to encourage the magistrates’ leniency. If he kept up to date with the payments from now on, he would clear his debt in four years. Michael opened his mouth and closed it again. There was no point in saying anything. It wouldn’t work. Any institutional sympathy for a child brought up in care was exhausted long before that child had become a struggling adult of forty, so he would not mention it. Now they were asking if he would be able to keep up with the payments this time. He gave the expected yes. And as he was being told that they hoped never to see him again, the kind lady started writing something and did not look up when he left the court.
When Michael got back to the flat it was still freezing, but he was worried about the electricity bill so it was going to have to stay that way. He thought about going across to Ken’s, where it was always hot, but this would mean listening to Ken and he was not up to it in his present mood. A thread of guilt tightened inside him. Ken didn’t see many people; he ought to go. But not now. He might look in later and see if Ken wanted anything doing. And if he did, if he asked Michael to get him a paper or cigs from the shop at the top of the road or something, or fill him a hot water bottle, it would make Michael feel a bit better about asking if he could have a bath. Ken’s bathroom, with the hoist, the handrails and all the surgical what-have-yous on the window sill that Michael couldn’t bear to study too closely, gave him the creeps, but the water was always hot.
Michael heated up a tin of soup and took a mug of it to bed. The backpack, empty and gaping open, sat on the bedroom floor next to the row of books against the skirting board. Mr David at Sulis Curios and Objets d’Art had taken the kneelers yesterday for twenty-five quid for the six, which he had counted out and handed over with a dirty look. Bloody act of charity, he had said. Don’t try this kind of thing on me again, all right? But they had both known that Michael would. The trouble, Michael decided, spooning up his soup, was his lack of a fallback position. He could not afford to walk away from even the meagre money Mr David put up, because there was always something that made his need for cash immediate and desperate: a bill, the rent, his fines, buying food, something. Every single time he did business with Mr David he came to the transaction with impending disaster at his back, unable to imagine how his life could go on if Mr David was not (as he sometimes pretended) in the mood to buy. Michael no longer thought it anything other than natural that when he went to Mr David he brought along with him a huge, palpable need to sell, like some outsized, embarrassing relative who had been foisted on him for the day.
If anything it was all getting worse. Michael was now further than ever from being able to build up enough stock to run his stall again at Walcot Market, further away now even than he had been on the day last year when everything had been nicked from the back of the van. True, the van doors had been held together only with twine and a twisted coat hanger, but Michael had thought that he had tied enough elaborate knots to put anyone off having a go. Since then he had not made enough on any deal to buy stuff to get the stall going again. He was managing, badly, from one deal to the next. That meant he had to take whatever Mr David offered him, and it w
as clear from how very little he did offer that Mr David was well aware of this.
Michael had more or less promised him the alabaster figures, and Mr David had more or less promised to give him five hundred for them. That would have been enough for Michael to clear a few debts and start getting some stock together again, so that by Easter he might have the stall back and be well placed for the summer. But he had not got the alabaster figures. And meanwhile, the last mouthful of soup was stone cold, and even if he did get them another day, supposing he dared put himself through all that again, Mr David would sell them on for at least two, possibly three thousand. He tried not to think too hard about that. Mr David had contacts, and you needed the contacts. Contacts of the right sort were just another of the many things that Michael did not have. With this thought he dropped his empty soup mug on the floor, settled under the bedclothes and pulled them around himself.
When he woke it was already after six o’clock, and pitch dark. At least he was now warm enough. If he was lucky he would soon fall asleep again and not wake up until tomorrow.
* * *
In the Kiddies’ Korner at the back of the beer garden next to the car park of The Masons Arms, Jace was about to hit Steph. There were no kiddies around to see him, it being half past six on a Wednesday night in January; there was nobody to see him at all, a fact that Jace knew perfectly well, and that was worrying Steph. She had miscalculated again. It would have been smarter to head straight for the car and wait while the sight of it calmed Jace down; he loved his stupid Renault 5 Turbo with the stupid alloy wheels and the stupid paint job, and once he was driving along with the sound system thumping he wouldn’t hit her. But instead she had run off across the car park and ended up here. The trouble was that when she was pregnant her mind didn’t work that way, thinking things out in advance- she just did things, or just came out with them. It was no good trying to tell Jace that, though. He wouldn’t know a hormone if it jumped up and bit him on the leg. He was so mad with her for ‘showing him up’ he had started shouting even before they got outside. He was still shouting at her. Now it appeared he was angry with her not just for ‘showing him up’, but also for getting him angry. He was definitely working up to something, and since it was she who had made him angry, it would be her fault if he did give her a slap. Steph calculated that it would probably be just the one. But it would be a further miscalculation, she remembered in time, to try to stop him by saying he shouldn’t hit a pregnant woman, because reminding him about the baby was never a good idea. It was the baby that had made Jace inclined to hit her in the first place. It was the baby’s first kick that ten minutes ago had caused Steph to clutch her belly and squeal out in the public bar Oh! Oh bloody hell Jace I just felt it! It just kicked me! And if it hadn’t been for the barmaid getting sentimental about the time she had her first, and three complete strangers laughing and going on about it, asking when it was due, Steph thought Jace might have let it pass with a grunt. But he had blushed with fury and embarrassment, picked up his car keys and told her to get outside.
She was standing next to a plump, lavishly graffitied, moulded resin elephant whose hollow insides were filled with cans and empty crisp packets that someone at some time had tried to start a fire with. She looked away, and with her head lowered she scraped with one fingernail at some peeling grey paint on one of the elephant’s ears, finding that she was managing to turn the growing bare patch into a very good likeness of Marge Simpson. She could draw a pretty good Marge Simpson, and an excellent Homer. She had thought at one time of being a cartoonist, until her art teacher had told her cartoonists have to create original characters and not just copy things. She had actually come up with one or two quite good characters of her own, but then found that they refused to cooperate. They just looked at her from the paper. She had not been able to make them say or do anything.
Are you listening to me, you two-ton cow? As she looked up, Jace’s hand cracked off the side of her head, which hit the grey elephant wall like a sounding gong. It was such a weird noise, so unexpectedly deep and grand that Steph, leaning against the vibrating elephant’s side as the sound died and the singing in her ears became an echo, wondered about laughing. Instead she lowered her head once more and made her way over to the car, where she waited at the passenger side while Jace unlocked the doors with a single, bad-tempered click of his keys in mid-air. Steph understood that he intended only to unlock the driver’s door for himself. She understood that it was nothing to him if the click happened to unlock the other doors at the same time because (and it made no difference to him) she could get in or stay out; she could spend the whole night inside the kiddies’ elephant with the fag ends and crisp packets for all he cared. She got in.
***
It took me a day or two to get over the trip. Not for a moment did I feel sorry I’d done it, of course not. What took it out of me was having to be out there again, I mean on the outside, where nobody knew who I was. It made me feel angry that nobody was able to see that inside I had become so much more myself.
I was angry in the way I was when Father died. Father and his clock that became my clock, and the anger I felt apparently towards him but really, even before I found out he wasn’t to blame, towards myself. I haven’t gone over the clock business in my mind for such a long time. When I do think of it, I tend to remember the way Father would sometimes give me one of his kind looks when Mother was not in the room, and nod towards the dining room and the direction of the ticking and say never you mind, that clock’s yours when I go and I would look upset and then he’d say you’re not to mind selling it. It’s to see you through college, you sort yourself out and you be a teacher, now. Like your Dad. He had been an English teacher, I think not a very good one. It was another of the things Mother kept ready in her mouth, seldom said but ready to sting him with, how hopeless he was not to have made it even to head of department, let alone headmaster. I thought I would like to teach history.
So he always meant me to sell the clock, to see me through university. I think that’s why he never really explained to me how beautiful it was, how wonderfully it was made. He never showed me its workings or pointed out what made it so rare, so fine and valuable, for fear that he would not be able to hide from me how much it meant to him. If only he had! If only he had given me eyes to see his clock for what it was, and the words to understand it. I wouldn’t have been so deceived over it later if he had just let me see it as he did. I wouldn’t have spent so long cursing his memory and thinking he was as big a cheat as Mother.
After I went on the bus to Bath that day to do all that was necessary to place the advertisement, I resolved not to go out again. How it rained in the week that followed! But on the next fine day I found some paraffin and made a bonfire at the side of the orchard. I burned my old navy coat, and then all my other old clothes. Standing out there watching the clothes go up in flames I went on thinking about Father and the clock, and I remembered another of the things he would sometimes say if Mother was not in the room. I suppose it was the nearest he came to letting me see the clock as he did. I can’t remember the exact words he used, but it was something about time passing painfully- so this must have been in his last year, then, though by some trick of memory it seems to me that he said it at times all through my life, even if time had to pass painfully, even if your minutes and hours offered up nothing but indiscriminate and bigger doses of pain, it was still consoling in a way to have time measured so beautifully, on a clock like his.
And as I watched the old clothes burn I thought how solitary I must look, a woman standing by a bonfire in an orchard in winter. Yet I was not lonely, for I knew that the house and all that it contained would be company enough until such time as my son should come to me.
February
A few weeks later a stale sense of familiarity with what he was doing surfaced in Michael’s mind. He had had times like this before, times when dark and light became the same, when a part of him seemed to absent itself from the wo
rld that his body lived in and inhabit some ditch all of its own. Such times could come upon him without warning, but usually they followed something difficult such as his court appearance. And they were worse in the winter because around the end of the second week, when he might be feeling that he could wash or get out of bed, he would then have to overcome the cold and this extra battle could, as it had this time, delay him by several more days.
He was even thinner, because eating, like washing, was another thing that required unimaginable effort. When he absolutely had to, he would manage to trudge up to the shop and buy a half dozen or so cans of soup and a packet of bread. Over the next few days, as and when he became aware of a need to put something in his stomach, he would eat soup straight from the tin, cold. Neither the sweetish, half-rotten vegetal smell that came from it, the sticky feel of the soft lumps in his mouth nor the message his stomach would afterwards send, of being sickened rather than satisfied, seemed to have much to do with him. Nor did the accruing pile of opened and unfinished tins by the side of his bed, whose metallic stink soured the room.
As if bitterly half-in and half-out of an affair with death, he lay for days waiting to see if it would come to him, in the belief that he would let it. Uninvolved, he would put up no resistance, but nor would he seek it out. So he thought about being dead without planning suicide, which would have required of him a degree of inventiveness and purpose of which he was incapable. To engage with the problem of his body for long enough to bring about an end to its improbable beating, breathing, filling and emptying seemed overwhelmingly effortful; even the smallest deviation from habit required what felt like impossibly original thinking. And it was that, rather than pride or even a vestigial notion of decency, that made him get up when he needed to pee. Dimly he realised that a wet mattress might eventually force him to get out of bed and stay out, but his torpor was so deep that he would put off the moment until he could barely stand up straight and then, with a nearly bursting bladder, he would stumble to the bathroom.