Dear Nobody (13 page)

All the while she was talking to Chris I felt as if I was
squatting inside his head listening to her, and feeling tense and uncomfortable and happy for him, all at the same time. I wandered round, looking at her photographs. She had them all over the walls. She gave me one because I took it down and asked her about it. It was a long kind of spiny ridge of mountain, and it sloped down to a lake. She said it was Catbells, above Derwent Water in the Lake District. It had a wonderful, calm atmosphere about it, and it was almost a double image because the whole thing was reflected in the lake, mountains upside-down, sky turned to water. It was nice of her to give it to me. I want to go there, but I'll wait till you can come too. That's daft, isn't it? I mean, you come everywhere now. One day I'll take you in a rowing boat right out to the middle of the lake, and you'll look up at all the ridges and fells around you.

‘These are for you, little Nobody,' I'll say. ‘I'm giving you the world.'

I can't even think what's going to happen next. But that photograph is like a bridge, somehow, taking me over to the other side of a black chasm of nothingness.

On the journey up, Chris had said that he wasn't going all that way just to say how nice the lentil soup was and to tell her where he was going for his holidays. He said he wanted to tell her about the most important things in his life, and we both curled up when he said that, you and I, we both felt warm and safe for a bit. I laugh at Chris sometimes when he's like that, and I get impatient about it and tell him off for being romantic and I get embarrassed, too, in case anyone else can see the way he looks at me. But I'm glad.

And it
was
lentil soup. I couldn't look at Chris when she brought it in. It was lovely, though, brown lentils with onions, and lots of thick bread with bits in it. And when she said, ‘Have either of you made any holiday plans yet?' just to make conversation, and Chris smiled and hesitated for one second, I came straight out with it. ‘I don't think I'll be going anywhere,' I said. ‘I'm having a baby in the autumn.'

I wish I'd waited till we'd finished the soup.

‘Oh, I see,' she said, and she kept looking from one to the other of us as if she was trying to catch us out. Some people have their feelings written all over their faces. I had no idea what she was thinking. Her bloke had just put a spoonful of soup into his mouth and he choked on it. We all sat in total silence with lentil soup dripping off our spoons and him making little spurting noises at the back of his throat because he was trying not to cough out loud. His face was going scarlet and his eyes were watering, and he was swallowing in tiny, fast gulps with his mouth shut tight and his Adam's apple poking up and down over the hairs at the neck of his tee-shirt.

‘For God's sake get a drink of water, Don,' she snapped, and he jumped up and ran into the kitchen with his hand over his mouth and soup dribbling down his chin. He coughed out loud as soon as he was out of sight, more like barking really, and he didn't come back to the table again. He was probably embarrassed because he thought he'd made a fool of himself, after all that posing about he'd done with his hairy legs. I once went out with a bloke before I met Chris. He was older than me, and I was impressed because he was a systems analyst. He took me out for a meal at a restaurant. I thought we were just going in for a coffee and I didn't like to tell him that I'd already had my tea. He ordered fresh salmon for us both. I'd never had fresh salmon before, and I didn't know about the bones. With tinned salmon they're just little scrunchy things, a bit like chunks of Edinburgh rock. So I put a forkful into my mouth and then found it was full of bones that I couldn't bite or chew or swallow, and I didn't know what on earth to do, and this bloke kept looking at me and talking to me really earnestly about computer programs all the time, so I couldn't spit them out. My eyes were streaming, just like her hairy husband's. In the end I just stood up and went to the ladies and got rid of them. I stood there for ages, daring myself to go back in and face the rest of the bones, and then I opened the wrong door and found I
wasn't back in the restaurant but out in the street. So I caught a bus home. I suppose it was an awful thing to do, and I hope I never bump into him again. I suppose I could offer to pay for the meal. But he was very boring. And he hadn't even asked me whether I wanted salmon.

I sat at the table grinning about it and started tucking in to my lentil soup before it went cold, and Chris's mother leaned forward and began to drill me with questions, how old was I and was I sure and what arrangements had I made, and in the end I felt like crying and I blurted out, ‘It's Chris's baby too!' She laughed out loud, a cold sharp laugh, and fished her cigarettes out of her pocket. I can't stand people who smoke when you're eating. It's all you can taste. So I asked if I could have some more lentil soup because it really was lovely, and then I wandered outside with it and sat on a bench in her garden to eat it. I stopped boiling up inside after a bit. I felt warm and sleepy in the sun. I could hear her and Chris talking, and their voices were coming in and out like waves because I was nearly asleep, and then I heard him telling her that he wasn't going to give up his degree.

I went into the kitchen and made a lot of noise washing up my soup bowl and dropping spoons on the floor and looking for something else to eat. I was famished. Fancy letting people come all that way and not cooking a proper meal for them. Not even people. Your own son, for goodness' sake. I could have wept for Chris, I was so disappointed for him. I looked in the fridge and saw four plates of cheese salad and took one of them outside. Chris and his mum were still talking by the time I'd eaten it so I took two of the other plates and put them on the table in front of them. Chris would be starving. We'd left home at six. I pretended I was a waitress in a café, discreet and dumb, and Chris glanced up and put his hand over mine and squeezed it.

‘I'll be in the garden,' I said.

I helped myself to a yoghurt and wandered out again. She followed me out a bit later. Chris was washing up in
the kitchen. She looked a bit surprised to see me eating a yoghurt and I realized that they probably hadn't been meant for pudding after all. I finished it, anyway. Yoghurts don't cost much.

She sat on the grass watching me, pursing her lips now and again to blow out smoke. Her fingers were tap-tap-tapping ash on to the lawn. She looked composed and at ease with herself, but I've got a feeling she was nervous and at a bit of a loss. It must have been a strain for her, seeing Chris again after all those years. I bet she was knotted up inside, in spite of looking so calm and easy. I bet she went to bed with a headache as soon as we'd gone. I wonder if she usually smoked as much as that. I coughed and she moved her hand away so the smoke spiralled up behind her.

‘Christopher tells me you're in the sixth form, too, Helen,' she said. She has a nice voice. Posher than Chris's or his dad's. I think she must have married beneath her, as my mum would say. Isn't that daft? How can someone be less than somebody else just because they say their words in a different way or they come from a different part of town? What if they were brilliant at playing the flute or dressmaking or growing tomatoes or building cupboards? I thought of Chris's dad, bending over his potting wheel, his breath thick and thoughtful and satisfied, and his big hands shaping those lovely jugs and pots he makes. I'd rather have him than Hairy-legs, any day.

I told her that I didn't go to Chris's school because they didn't offer music in the sixth form.

‘Music?' she raised her eyebrows. I'd been through her pile of CDs. She's really into Mozart. ‘That's nice. What else are you doing?'

I told her, General, because everyone has a go at that, and Maths, Latin and Dance, and she raised her eyebrows again and I went quiet. It isn't your fault, little Nobody. I don't think about Dance any more. I've put my leotard away in a drawer. It's better if I don't see it again, that's all.

‘Music, Latin, Maths and Dance,' she murmured, as if it was a line from a poem. ‘You like patterns, then.'

I thought that was a really good thing to say. I love it when people think sideways.

‘And your exams start next month?'

I thought she hadn't understood me, then. I thought she'd forgotten about you. Nothing's happening between now and you. It's a void. A tunnel. When I think about it I slide down into it myself. I turn myself inside out and find myself in the dark tunnel with you.

‘I hope you do well, Helen,' she said. Her smile was so warm and encouraging that it made me like her again. ‘You owe it to yourself, and to your mum and dad.' She leaned forward and patted my stomach, and it was such an odd and intimate and cheeky thing to do that I laughed out loud with surprise, and so did she. ‘And you owe it to this little thing.'

Did you feel that, Nobody? Did you hear it? That was your grandmother talking. Bet she doesn't like that, the idea of being a grandmother. Funny how grandmothers in stories are white-haired and whiskery and keep losing their hearing-aids, and yours is slim and pretty and is a well-known climber.

Chris and I were very quiet, going home on the train. He put his arm round me and I snuggled up with my head lolling under his shoulder. I think he thought I was asleep. But I wasn't. I was plotting my revision timetable. I'd ring Ruthlyn tomorrow and get her to come round and go through some maths with me. I was okay with Music and Latin. Can't revise for General. Dance. Well, Dance would depend on how I feel. But I feel fantastic. I'll talk to Doctor Phillips about it, and see what she says. It's not too late. I've already got my full offer at the music college. One day I might go there still. I could feel a kind of excitement bubbling up in me. It's not too late. I said it over and over again in time to the train. Tantivvy tantivvy tantivvy. There's time there's time there's time.

We'll do it together, little Nobody.

It was the weirdest experience, meeting my mother again, seeing her not as a ghost or an ogre or as some wonderful enchanted being but as a woman. She was prettier than I expected her to be. I don't know why this surprised me; maybe it's because my dad is such an ordinary-looking bloke. And she was very nervous, too. The air was electric. I think Helen was the only calm one among us when we first arrived, and she kept prowling round the room like a lion in a cage, noseying through my mother's books and CD collection, taking down the photographs from the walls. The meal was really uncomfortable. It's bad enough eating in front of strangers at the best of times, but when that stranger is your own mother it's a kind of torture. It gives you something to do with your hands, I suppose, but it blocks up your mouth.

I could tell Don didn't want to be with us at all. It must have been worse for him than for any of us. I thought he was very sensitive, the way he sat back and let my mother do the talking, not trying to butt in or ask questions – just supporting her, I suppose. Then Helen blasted them with a bombshell and the poor bloke couldn't take it. He used it as an excuse to get out of the house altogether, and it must have been a relief for him. It was certainly a relief for me. And then it all seemed to be a bit much for Helen and she wandered out into the garden. So we were alone together, my mother and I. That was when the talking really began.

‘I admire you for coming,' she said. ‘It was brave of you. You're braver than me.'

‘I've been wanting to see you for ages,' I said. ‘Before, you know, before Helen was… you know.'

‘I think of you as a little boy often with a passion for model trains and Batman, with a little high voice and a freckly face, and I meet a young man who is in love and who is fathering a child.'

Even without the lentil soup I found swallowing hard.

‘What will you do?' she asked.

‘I don't know,' I said.

‘What do you want to do?'

‘Everything.' I kept trying to swallow. ‘I want to do my degree at Newcastle.' I looked down at my hands. ‘And I want to be with Helen. I don't really know what she wants. She doesn't know.'

‘Christopher,' she said, ‘I did a terrible thing when I left your father.'

‘I know.'

‘But before that I had done an even worse thing, and that was to marry him in the first place.'

My eyes were smarting. I couldn't look at her then.

‘Can I tell you about it?'

‘If you want to.' I didn't know whether I wanted to know or not. Was this what I'd come for? I'd no idea.

‘I was probably younger than Helen when I met Alan. My dad died when I was twelve. My mum couldn't cope after that. Sometimes things like that give people a strength they didn't know they had; sometimes it takes all their strength away from them. I was brought up by my grandmother, and she loved my sister best. But then, everyone loves Jill best. I left school at sixteen, though I was clever enough to do other things, they reckoned. I'd had enough, you know. I needed to be myself by then, prove myself – you understand that. We do the wrong things for the right reasons sometimes. I met your father at work. He was one of the labourers and I was an office girl. He used to come and sit by me in the yard at lunch-break and talk to me. Do you know, I think he reminded me of my dad? I think I thought I loved him, and all the time it was because he was bringing my dad back to me. He was ten years older than me, and very quiet and sensitive. He thought the world of me; he adored me. He made me feel special again, and wanted. And he had a house. He begged me to marry him. It was my escape. And I thought I loved him. Maybe I did, but it wasn't the right kind of love.'