Dear Nobody (11 page)

I don't know how I got back down. My skin had gone out of control like one of those free-hand cartoon characters, but when I pulled myself together and looked up from solid ground I could see the ledge I'd been on, three metres off the ground – if that. I picked up a stone and hurled it against the ledge. The sound was like an explosion, ricocheting along the Edge. White boulders that were slumped under the Edge stood up and skittered away in fright, yelling to each other like sheep. I picked up another stone and flung it, and another and another, ‘Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!' I roared, and my voice was a million miles away. ‘B-A-S-T-A-R-D!'

It took me ages to find my bike. As soon as I started to ride it I hit a stone and the chain came off. It was jammed fast between the top gear and the frame, and I cut my thumb trying to jerk it out. I was swearing at the top of my voice all the time. I felt fantastic, in a loud, sweaty, oily, bloody, furious, sobbing sort of way.

And there was Sheffield, when the road tipped up to it at last, a huge orange glow-with millions of tiny winking lights set into it, and there was Helen's road, and the shops and the school. Our street and our house and the stairs. My room. And bed.

Dear Nobody,

It felt as if it was the last day of my life. Mum can't drive so I had to do it, and she never stopped talking. She kept reading out the street names as we passed them, and advertisements on hoardings, and even the registration numbers of the cars in front of us. It was as if she was frightened of silence. And all the time she was jabbering, I was forcing this into my head: this is simply an operation to remove unwanted cells from my body. That's all it is.

When I parked the car in the grounds of the hospital there was a dead bird on the grass verge, a tiny, skinny thing without feathers.

Mum sat with me while I was weighed and checked and then I had to change into a nightie. She put all my clothes into her bag. She was going to spend the night at her sister's, whose house was just down the road from the hospital. Auntie Pat would drive us back tomorrow. It was all carefully planned.

A doctor came in with a social worker and they sat and talked to me, and asked me if I was absolutely sure that this was what I wanted to do. My mouth didn't work properly. I wondered if they hated me. I wonder why they worked there. Then Mum held my hand and
told me how brave I was being, and how I'd be able to go back to school at the end of the week and everything would be back to normal again. And then she couldn't bring herself to kiss me goodbye. I'd have put my arms around her if she had. I'd have asked her to stay with me because I was afraid.

The bed was high and the sheets were so stiff it was like lying between postcards. I lay on my side with my eyes closed and with my knees pulled right up to my chin and I tried to imagine what you looked like. You were twelve weeks old. You would be like a little pink tadpole. I'd looked you up in a medical book before we came. You would be about nine centimetres long. You weighed about fourteen grams.

I thought of myself on Nab's back, being thrown about like a doll, and I thought of you, a tiny thing, clinging on. You didn't think about anything and you didn't know anything and you clung on.

And when I was lying there, in all that silence, I felt as if it was me who was clinging on, as if you were my tiny self. I felt as if you knew something that I would never understand. And I felt as if I had become two people.

I was still trying to focus on you, trying to see through my fear to what it was that I was really frightened of, when the nurse came in with a trolley. She came too soon. I wasn't ready yet. She didn't speak to me. She held a syringe up to the light, and I felt hot and scared. I was just on the edge of panic then. I asked her what it was for and she told me I was going to have my operation.

I wanted Chris.

I told her I needed to talk to someone, and she told me to hold myself still, that it wouldn't take a minute, that it wouldn't hurt, that it would all be over soon. I could hear her voice; I could hear mine in my head but I couldn't make the words come out. I was sobbing out loud. I was pushing her arm away. She said if I needed to talk to someone she'd better get someone. As soon as
she was out of the room I felt as if I could breathe again. I slid out of my bed and put my slippers on. There was nothing in my locker except my little tapestry shoulder-bag and my sponge-bag and I picked them both up and went out. I thought at first that I was going to hide in the toilets but when I heard the nurse coming down the corridor talking to somebody I went straight past the toilets and found myself in the reception area. The receptionist had her back to me, looking for something in the filing cabinet and I walked straight past her and out through the doors into the car-park. The keys were in my shoulder-bag and my hands were shaking but I managed to get the car open and to drive it out into the road. I once saw a film that started in black and white and then went into full colour. All of a sudden I noticed that the leaves on the trees were full green. People had scarlet tulips blazing away in their front gardens. When I pulled up at the traffic lights the woman in the car next to me glanced across and then said something to her passenger, and they both looked at me then and laughed. I don't blame them for laughing. I chuckled back at them. I liked that nightie, but I would have liked to tell them that usually I sleep in a long tee-shirt. No wonder I found it hard to drive; my slippers had bendy feet. I put a cassette on and wound down the windows and sang.

The worst bit came when I got home and had to walk over our pebbles in those bendy slippers.

I had a bath. I put a CD on really loud downstairs and left the bathroom door open. I hope you like music.

Then I got dressed in that lovely velvet skirt that I got from the fifties' shop and that I'm going to look terrible in soon, and drove to the library to find Dad. He was in the Local Studies section helping a student to find something. I felt nervous when I saw him. I sat down and watched him, waiting for him to notice me. He had his hands clasped behind his back, and his fingers were moving one by one, as if he was practising piano scales. Maybe he was. He stoops a lot. He's so thin. He's such a quiet man.

The student said something that amused him and Dad put his hand up to his mouth and coughed gently, and then he saw me. He excused himself and came over, almost tiptoeing.

‘What are you doing here?' he asked me.

I gave him the car keys.

‘Mum's at Auntie Pat's,' I said. ‘She'll be ringing you up soon. She wants you to drive her home.'

‘I don't know what you mean,' he said. ‘She said you'd both be at Pat's for a couple of days.'

All I wanted was for him just to take the car keys. But his face was full of questions. So I told him. ‘I haven't been to Auntie Pat's at all,' I said. ‘I'm going to have a baby.'

He looked so shocked and hurt that I took hold of his hand in both of mine. I told him about the abortion clinic. He tilted my head back and stared down at me as if he didn't recognize me; such a bewildered, anxious look. In a strange way I felt as if I was the one doing the consoling.

One of the library assistants came over and hovered just beside us, and when Dad noticed her he took his hand away from my chin and rested it on my shoulder. The librarian told him that his wife was on the phone. He followed her without looking back at me.

It was three o'clock when I left the library. I walked to Chris's school, taking a short cut through the park. It was full of young women with prams. I've never seen so many prams in my life before. The women all smiled at each other as they passed, as if there was some kind of conspiracy between them, as if they were members of a secret society.

Chris was one of the last to come out of the sixth-form block. He looked as if he'd been up all night. He was on his own, and he walked with his head down and his bag slung over his shoulder, as if he was miles away. He would have walked right past me if I hadn't called out to him. He went white when he saw me. I went up to him and waited for him to put his school-bag down, and when his arms were round me, I told him.

Little Nobody. I won't let go of you now.

‘What do we do now?'

It was all I could think of asking, and when Helen said, ‘I don't know. You think of something,' I suggested that we should run off to our cave on the Derbyshire moors. It was meant as a joke, really, to make her smile again.

‘That's just your trouble, Chris.' Her voice was tired and strained. She'd been through a hell of a lot that day. ‘You're too romantic, We've got to be practical about this.'

‘I've got twenty pounds,' I said. ‘And a birthday coming up in August. I'll get a summer job.'

There was nothing going round here, and I knew it. Most of the people on my street hadn't got jobs at all, at any time of the year, let alone in the summer. I'd have to go down south to get anything, and then where would I live?

‘And after that?' said Helen, in a quiet voice. ‘When the baby's come? What do we do then, Chris?'

When I got home that night Dad and Guy were in the room, looking through a box of old photographs together. They were mostly of my gran and grandad, who'd both died before I was born. There were some of my dad when he was a little boy. I slumped in the cat's chair and watched them sorting through them. Dad was telling Guy the stories behind the photographs; we'd heard them lots of times before. I let their voices come and go; I was half-asleep, or half-drowning. Their voices were like pieces of driftwood keeping me afloat. ‘I looked like you when I was your age, Chris,' Dad said. ‘Just look at this one.'

I didn't want to look at anything. I didn't even want to open my eyes. Guy walked over to me on his knees and tugged my arm. I knew which photograph Dad was talking about even without looking. It was the one his father had taken of him in army uniform – short haircut, proud excited
smile, off to do National Service. He did look like me. I used to look at it and think of him as a man. He wasn't. He was a boy with a fresh face and a shy smile.

‘Was it in the war?' Guy asked.

‘Was it heck!' said Dad. ‘I'm not that old. Besides, I wouldn't have been grinning my socks off if I thought I was setting off to get blown to pieces, would I?'

He leaned across and took the photograph back, and looked at it curiously, wiping the surface with the tip of his finger as if he was trying to touch that boy's face from the past.

‘Don't know myself!' he laughed. ‘It feels like another lifetime. Thought the whole world was mine, in those days. Just like you do, Chris.'

I closed my eyes.

‘Only your chances are better than mine ever were,' Dad went on. Helpless, I floated away from his voice. ‘Make the most of them. You can never start again.'

Dear Nobody,

When she came home from Auntie Pat's my mother, your grandmother, walked past me as if she didn't know me. I was sitting in the kitchen waiting for her to come and when I heard the car I went to open the door. I'd made myself look nice for her and I'd started the tea. She walked past me and went upstairs, and on her way up she said, without looking at me, ‘You've let me down, Helen.'