Helpless (12 page)

‘Marianne, are you listening to a word I’ve said?’ would be one of the regular questions from a teacher who was only too aware of the answer and, dismissing my reply of ‘Yes, miss,’ would fire a question at me that I was inevitably unable to answer.

I would hear her snort of impatience and my classmates’ sniggers and feel a rising blush stain my cheeks. But however much I tried to focus on classes my mind would slip away to thoughts of him.

‘Will he be waiting for me when the final bell rings?’ I asked myself every day. The anticipation of seeing him and feeling special was always replaced by a sinking dread at the thought of his car drawing to a halt in the woods.

Homework became increasingly harder; not only had I not heard most of the lesson of that day but my noisy smaller brothers and sister demanded more and more of my attention.

But changes were about to happen. The first one was when a few months before my thirteenth birthday my mother announced that she was pregnant again. The second change was that my periods stopped.

I
closed my eyes, squeezed them tight much as I had done as a child when I had wanted to both hold my tears in and at the same time shut out the adult world.

I knew I had reached a time when I had to put my story in order, but still I wanted to push those images away.

It was a letter that had arrived one morning, the one that lay opened on my coffee table, which had awoken all those distant and buried memories. A long time ago I had swept them to the corner of my mind, but now one by one they had crawled to the very centre of my thoughts.

When the post had arrived I was sitting at the breakfast table, a slice of toast in one hand and a mug of freshly brewed coffee nearby. My husband had left for work, taking our two sons to school on the way, and I was enjoying the peaceful quiet they had left behind.

A rattle of the letterbox and a soft thud on the hall mat had announced its arrival.

Another bill or some unwanted junk mail, I thought, but curiosity made me go into the hall and pick it up.

It was just a plain white envelope, my name written on it in an unknown hand.

I slowly placed my finger under the sealed flap and took out two sheets of notepaper. Would I, had I known its contents, have opened it so casually? Might I impatiently have ripped it quickly open, or even cowardly left it sealed for ever? I don’t know, but I do remember how without any haste I unfolded it, placed it in front of me and read the first sentence.

It was only six words; six words that leapt out of the page and literally left me reeling.

‘
I think you are my mother
.’

Had I had a premonition or even a half wish that one day this would happen?

Maybe, but still I felt my hand begin to shake and my brightly painted kitchen started to spin as I resumed reading.

‘
I understand
,’ the letter continued, ‘
why you had me
adopted
.’

‘No, you don’t,’ I whispered to the pretty notepaper. ‘No, you don’t.’

My eyes rapidly skimmed the rest of the letter until I came to the last sentence.

‘
I don’t want to disrupt your life but I hope you will let me visit
you
.’ My daughter had finally found me and written.

My fingers gently stroked the sheets of paper as I tried to conjure up an image of the woman my daughter had become. And by that simple act of touching what she had touched so recently, I felt the chasm of the years apart narrow.

‘Who are you now?’ I asked silently. ‘Who has the tiny baby I have not seen for twenty-five years grown into?’

Another question floated into my head then: How long has she known about me?

‘I understand more than you do why you have written,’ I whispered to the presence of my daughter that I felt lingered on the pages. ‘You have questions you want answered. And I know what they will be. Did I once love you? Did I give you away gladly or with sorrow? Have I, when I made my life without you, remembered you? That’s what you really want to know.

‘Oh,’ I continued, ‘when I knew I was pregnant I wanted my body to be free of its burden, wanted it to belong to me again; wanted the intruder who had taken up residence in it to leave. But then as you grew inside me, each time I felt a movement, felt a tiny foot kick, I felt such love for you. Somehow I knew you were a girl. I even had your name ready for you.

‘When the doctor cut the umbilical cord moments before I heard your first cry, that invisible bond, so strong it might have been forged from fine strands of tempered steel, tightened and tied you to me.

‘The first time you were gently placed in my arms all thoughts of the effort of pushing you into the world and the pain I had felt disappeared. I just gazed in wonder at your tiny down-covered head resting against the crook of my arm.

‘I saw the curve of a plump cheek and ears so delicate and pink they reminded me of miniature shells washed clean by the sea. Your eyes were shut, hidden by lids that appeared almost translucent. And the first words that came into my mind then were “my baby”. Those words have always remained with me in my thoughts, even though you were lost to me. “So small you are,” I thought, “but oh so perfect.” My fingers traced circles on your back as they explored your body; I felt those tiny knuckles of your spine, breathed in the scent of your newness and listened to the soft sigh of your breath. And I was simply swamped with an overwhelming sense of love.

‘Every day for those six weeks that you were mine I held your small form, inhaled that warm baby smell of talcum and milk mixed with the perfume of new skin and felt the beat of your heart so close to mine. And every day I asked myself a thousand times, “How can I ever let her go? She’s mine.”

‘“You must let her go – she will have a better life than you could provide. You know it’s for the best,” was the stern answer from the nurses when night after night I tearfully put that question to them.

‘The days sped by faster and faster. Each morning when I awoke I knew my time with you was running out. “She recognizes me,” I would think, as your eyes, still unfocused, gazed back into mine and small pink fingers with minuscule nails curled around my larger ones.

‘You gained weight, I saw your tummy grow rounder from the milk I gave you and your limbs dimple each time I bathed you. I wanted to spend all those days holding you. And every night as I gently rocked you to sleep I whispered in your ear of my love for you. That love that I wanted you to take with you to wherever you were going.

‘On the forty-second day I handed you over.’

Was it easy?’

As I thought of the answer to that question the years rolled away. No longer was I Marianne, a happily married woman of nearly forty, but the teenager I had once been, standing in the adoption agency holding her baby.

I had dressed my daughter in her new outfit, for I wanted her to look pretty when she met her new parents. I wanted them to instantly love her as much as I did.

That day she fitted so snugly in my arms I wondered despairingly how she would feel when she was taken from them for ever. My breasts felt heavy with milk that she was never going to suckle. Who was going to feed her? What was her new mother going to be like? Those questions flew around and around my head. The woman in charge of the adoption agency moved forward determinedly to take her. She must have done this many times before and she must have known the torment that I was going through. I felt an overpowering urge then to hold my daughter tight and run away with her. I wanted to keep her close to me. Instead I held my baby out and let her be taken – for then there was nowhere to run to.

‘I lost part of myself that day,’ I continued to tell the spirit of my daughter. ‘It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But my choice was made from love, never because I did not want you.

‘Did I think of you? Every day I’ve thought of you. Wondered where you were, who you had grown into, and prayed that you were happy and safe. And every year on your birthday I feel the same overwhelming grief I felt the day I lost you.’

People say time heals everything; I would say that time merely blurs the past. If memories were small squares of cloth then I coloured my happy ones with the bright hues of spring and sun and sewed them into a huge patchwork quilt. The other squares, some as dark as storm clouds in a thunder-filled sky, I have tucked behind them, almost out of sight. Without noticing when it happened, gradually those colours have blended together and turned my past into a more mellow background.

But even then there were still days when I couldn’t fight the tiny arrows that, laced with the poison of melancholy, pierced my mind, almost crushing me with sadness and the memory of my loss. That was when the questions of where you were and how your life was could not be pushed away.

And I know there is one other question you will want the answer to; the one that your birth certificate has not given you. ‘No, it’s not my life,’ I whispered, as I sipped my coffee that had now grown cold, ‘but yours that is in danger of being devastated if you learn the truth.’

‘And will you?’ I asked the one question I wanted answered, ‘if we meet, be able to understand the girl I was then – a girl from another era from you, one who did not have the choices that your generation has now? Or will you see me as I am now, happily married with a family and a life that you were excluded from?’

Against my will I felt the force of the past transport me back nearly three decades until I came face to face with the image of my frightened thirteen-year-old self.

I
was standing in my parents’ living room where the once pretty walls were now stained with damp and the smell of stale food and musky sweat mingled with the sharp ammonia stench of dirty nappies piled high in a metal bucket.

My belly protruded from my slight form, my body ached and my head was full of just one emotion: fear. In front of me stood a steely-eyed social worker, a woman in her early thirties wearing a navy-blue duffel coat and a grey pleated skirt who, alerted to my condition by the school, had knocked on the door just a few minutes earlier.

A grimace of distaste that she did not bother to hide crossed her unmade-up face as her gaze took in the room.

The breakfast dishes had not yet been cleared away. Egg-smeared plates and crumpled grease-stained newspaper still lay on the table and there was a drift of bread-crumbs scattered on the floor around it.

All the kitchen work services were hidden under the remnants of many congealed spillages. Clumps of dry tea leaves clung to the sides of the tannin-stained sink, while on the draining board, next to some chipped cups left to dry, dark hairs clung to a grubby pink plastic comb.

My eldest brother and my sister were at school while the youngest child, a red-haired boy of nearly three, still dressed in the grubby pyjamas he had slept in, was sitting on the floor. Paying scant attention to our visitor, he continued playing with what passed for toys: a grubby rag, a broken doll and a rusty toy car. Clutched in one of his plump hands was a crust of bread that he was gnawing in preference to the aged teething ring lying on the floor.

My mother, her belly larger than mine with her fifth child, watched the social worker and me with eyes that the years of hardship and disappointment had sucked all life from. Childbirth and lack of care had thickened her once slender body, a body that before her hasty marriage had attracted more than its share of male admiration. Unsupported breasts hung slackly under a stained jumper, thickened veins drew blue marks on the white skin at the backs of her legs, while her swollen feet were pushed into worn carpet slippers.

As I watched the social worker’s gaze take in the squalor that we lived in, with a sudden painful clarity I saw what she saw: a filthy room, a pregnant teenage girl with a slut of a mother and a drunkard for a father; just another sad, sordid case, one of many, in the files of an overworked social worker.

She could not see all the bruises on my mother’s body of yet another beating. But she recognized the signs and drew her own conclusions.

She had never witnessed my mother’s despair when, on the days my father had drunk and gambled the housekeeping away, there was no food to put on the table. Nor had she heard my mother’s screams when, with an alcoholic’s loss of self-control and rationality, my father had struck her in his drunken rage at the lack of a hot dinner waiting for him on his return.

The social worker, with her car parked outside and her job which gave her independence, could never have understood how years of poverty and repeated abuse had worn away every vestige of pride from a once-attractive woman and turned her into the greasy-haired slattern who viewed the scene unfolding in front of her with complete indifference.

There was a photograph on the mantelpiece of my parents when they were young. I suddenly wanted the social worker to look at it and see that my mother had not always been like that. Once she had been pretty, with a smile that lit up her face as she looked out at the world with the happy confidence that life might be good to her.

Instead I could sense the social worker’s impatience to leave as quickly as she could. But she needed first to ask that one important question. I did not know then that how I answered would determine what arrangements she would have to make for my future. I could only feel her distaste for me.

‘Who is the father?’ she asked.

The truth stuck in my throat and fear turned into a hard lump that blocked not only my voice but my breath as well.

My mouth opened, then closed, then opened again, until finally I managed to say the same three words I had said to my headmistress.

‘I don’t know.’

With that she turned to my mother and curtly told her that she would arrange for me to go into a home for unmarried mothers.

‘We then arrange for the baby’s adoption,’ she informed her. I felt my tears well up at that bald statement, made to my mother, not me. The baby was mine, but I already knew that I was too young to have any rights.

Two months later the social worker returned to take me to the home.

I looked at my mother, hoping for just one word of comfort, just one word that expressed some love, some understanding, but her eyes refused to meet mine. Instead she put her cigarette into the corner of her mouth and bent down and picked the red-haired boy child up.

‘He needs changing,’ she said unnecessarily and turned away.

I picked up the battered suitcase that contained a change of clothes and my worn-out nightdress and followed the duffel-coated woman to her car.

It was not until much later that I realized what at thirteen I had not noticed: that never had my mother asked me that one question that both my teacher and the social worker had thought so important.

‘Who is the father?’