The Things We Never Said (21 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

The man at Social Services says he’ll send Jonathan a leaflet,
Access to Birth Records
, and an application form. Jonathan should state on the form where he would like to receive his counselling, and he shouldn’t be surprised if there was quite a wait.

‘But I don’t want counselling. I just want—’

‘Counselling’s compulsory.’ The voice sounds bored, as though he’s heard the same thing a hundred times before. ‘The waiting list is for access to your adoption file.’

‘But it’s my legal right, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ the man sighs, ‘but it has to be
supervised
access. Some of the information can be distressing . . .’

‘Look, I realise—’

‘. . . and you need a social worker to go through it with you. Except there aren’t enough social workers to go round.’

‘So how long?’

‘The waiting list is currently at ten to twelve months.’

Jonathan hangs up.

A quick internet search confirms that there are a number of agencies prepared to find people for a small – or sometimes not so small – fee. He calls one that advertises its rates as ‘from £50’ and speaks to an avuncular man who set up the business when he retired because of his fascination with family history. Tracing someone can take anything from a few minutes to several months or longer, he explains. The cost depends on the amount of work involved, which in turn depends on how common the name is. ‘If birth mum turns out to be a Mary Smith, for example, we could be in for a long slog. The first step is to get hold of your original birth certificate—’

‘I have it,’ Jonathan says. ‘Her name was Margaret Letitia Harrison.’

‘Excellent! That would give me a very good start if you did want to go ahead – there’s bound to be a few Margaret Harrisons, but there can’t be many with Letitia in the middle.’

The man, Bob, goes through some of the possibilities – she might refuse contact, she might have gone abroad, she might even be dead. He advises Jonathan to think carefully about the implications before deciding to go ahead. Sometimes, he adds, as if he can read Jonathan’s mind, sometimes clients discover things they’d rather not know.

‘Bob,’ Jonathan says, ‘I just want to stop
not
knowing.’

*

After scanning the documents and emailing them to Bob, Jonathan lays out the contents of the shoebox on the bed: the little red boot, forlorn without its partner, the thin jersey, the dungarees and the hand-knitted cardigan. Fiona asked him to take in some wool and knitting needles because the woman in the next bed has offered to teach her to knit. Had his birth mother knitted this while she was pregnant, he wonders? They didn’t have scans in those days, but maybe she’d pictured him floating around inside her, maybe she’d wondered whether he would be a boy or a girl; whether he’d be like her, or like his father. A dark cloud looms in his mind every time he thinks about his biological father. He looks at the red boot, the sole slightly worn along the outer side, perhaps because he’d been learning to walk. Why only one? And the pebbles; why had they been sent with him? He shuffles through the papers and pulls out the document from Hastings County Court, then his birth certificate which, having been unfolded and refolded many times in the past few weeks, is beginning to lose its crispness. He was born in Sheffield, and then his mother had taken him to Hastings. Had she returned to the north after the adoption, perhaps to be with his father? Could she still be in Hastings?

Fifteen minutes later, he’s in the car heading for the A21. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when he gets there, but a walk along the seafront will clear his head. He selects a CD, pushes it into the slot and turns up the volume. Fiona hates The Smiths. She says they depress her, but they always cheer Jonathan up because no matter how miserable he’s feeling, Morrissey always seems to feel worse.

He parks on the seafront, and the wind bites his face as soon as he opens the door. It’s the sort of wind that flings wet sand and salt at your cheeks, burrows into your ears and rips across the surface of your eyes. But he turns up his collar, puts two pounds in the ticket machine and heads up into the Old Town. He wanders along George Street with its trendy vodka bar and arty little giftshops, then High Street, which is full of antiques and dusty second-hand books, and then back along All Saints’ Street, with its narrow passageways, stone steps and sloping Tudor cottages. Through habit, he counts as he climbs the East Hill Steps, losing count after a hundred or so and panting by the time he reaches the top. The wind batters him and his ears hurt, but he loves the view from here. He looks down at the fishing boats, nets piled up around them, and at the wooden net huts, mostly fresh fish shops now, with the day’s prices chalked in blue and pink on blackboards outside. Beyond the Stade, a restless gunmetal sea throws huge waves inland, each thudding heavily on the shore. Had his mother taken him onto that beach, let him play with the pebbles, pointed out ships on the horizon? It’s starting to rain. The houses below are built at angles, little rows facing this way and that, all on different levels. Seagulls stand on the blackening rooftops looking majestically out to sea, their feathers ruffled by the wind. He watches the gulls swooping and gliding above the net huts, incandescent white against a rapidly darkening sky. Women are putting up umbrellas and hurrying home out of the rain. Could Margaret Letitia Harrison be one of them? The rain’s getting heavy now, so after one last look at the view, he heads back down the steps in search of fish and chips, checking his phone as he walks – he’s paranoid about it now. Three missed calls from Malcolm; must have been while he had the music on in the car. He calls back but it goes to voicemail.

Sitting in a shelter on the promenade, he eats the steaming cod and salty chips with his fingers as he listens to the rain drumming on the roof and watches it bouncing off the tarmac. Bob had sounded confident. He’d start with the marriage records – apparently young girls who’d given up their babies often married within three to five years. If she was alive, Bob said, he’d find her. Jonathan is quite sure Hutchinson would be able to find her if he gave him his birth certificate and the court documents, but whatever there is to discover, Jonathan wants to know about it before the police.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a woman pushing a baby in a buggy. He screws up the empty wrapper and stands as the woman approaches. It’s a very old lady, using the ancient pushchair for support. Strands of yellowed grey hair stick out from under her red baseball cap and a pair of cheap-looking earrings blow around the sides of her head like a pawnbroker’s sign in a gale. She’s wearing brown woollen tights and men’s shoes.

‘Don’t you touch my baby,’ she scowls at Jonathan.

The ‘baby’ is a life-sized plastic doll, dressed in blue leggings and a sunflower-yellow knitted coat with matching mittens. Its sparse nylon hair has been woven into tiny plaits, with coloured beads threaded onto the ends.

‘It’s all right,’ Jonathan says, keeping his voice low, as though soothing a child. ‘I’m not going to hurt your baby.’

She looks at him blankly. ‘Fuck off and leave me alone,’ she says and, oblivious to the downpour, continues her laborious progress along the promenade towards the pier.

As he watches her walk away, he thinks of his mother, and how unforgiving he’s been of her often sharp tone and distant manner; and of Gerald, and how he’s hated him at times. A memory flickers into his mind, of being in hospital at the age of six after having his tonsils out: there was Gerald, sitting beside the bed, feeding him ice cream and reading him a story. As a child, he’d often wished for different parents; he hopes to God his own child will never do the same. He watches the old lady shuffling along, the hem of her dress hanging below her filthy coat. He’d taken care how he spoke to this fragile person; it probably wouldn’t have occurred to him before. From now on, he will keep his voice gentle, no matter what he discovers. As he throws the empty wrapper in the bin, a seagull lands in front of him, fixing him with its eye and screeching at him in outrage. He looks at the huge bird, then his mobile rings and the creature flies away. Malcolm.

‘Have you heard from the Fawcett yet?’

‘Have I heard . . . ?’

‘Obviously not. Mate, I call bearing good news.’

Jonathan smiles. ‘That makes a change. What’s happened?’

‘Ryan Jenkins has admitted it. His father brought him into school this morning – dragged him by his ear, from what I heard – and he stood in front of Linda Fawcett and admitted you never laid a finger on him.’

Jonathan can hear the sea, the shrieking gulls, the traffic noise behind him. ‘What? He’s actually—’

‘Yep! Down to Chloé Nichols, apparently – she confirmed it to Ryan’s dad. Who, by the way, turns out to be a decent bloke. Divorced from Mum, had Ryan for the weekend and accidentally read a text Ryan had got from Chloé asking him to own up to “getting Robbo done” – seems she has a conscience after all. Anyway, Dad duly confronts Ryan, and Ryan spills the beans.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Indeed, my friend, indeed. So, that’s that. There’s probably a message from Linda on your landline. She’ll tell you more, obviously, but it’s definite. It’s all over the school.’

*

On the drive home, he doesn’t put the radio on or listen to CDs, he just focuses on the rhythmic sweep of the windscreen wipers and the clattering of rain on the roof. He should be ecstatic, but instead he feels flattened out, empty.

As Malcolm predicted, there’s a message on the landline. Ryan’s father has also contacted the police, Linda says, and Ryan and Chloé are both making statements. The school’s own investigation will naturally be dropped and Ryan will be excluded for an unspecified period. Jonathan would be welcome back in school the following day or may want to take a further day or two to ‘readjust’. Jonathan deletes the message. He wants to ask why Ryan won’t be permanently excluded. But that can’t happen, can it? Because Ryan has a ‘right’ to an education, whereas Jonathan is merely a teacher, which means he has no rights. Linda sounded like she expected him to thank her, but if anyone deserves thanks, it’s Ryan’s father. No matter how badly your child behaves, Jonathan supposes, he’s still your child. As he replaces the receiver, the phone rings. It’s his solicitor. The police are dropping the case, she tells him, and he might like to know that the CPS threw it out anyway, as she’d predicted.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Infection. The word sounds so nasty, so dirty. It haunts Maggie’s thoughts. When she lies down at night, she sees the letters dancing around, jumbling up and re-forming in her mind. She shakes her head but then starts to hear the word. First it’s in the doctor’s voice, like a stage whisper, blowing into her ears. Then it’s in the sound of the waves, washing over the shingle as she walks on the shore. She hears her mother, scolding her when she was little for picking at a scab:
Don’t do that, you’ll get an infection.
And then the higher, accented voice of George, the head chef at the Grand after she’d turned up for work once with a cough.
Crazy girl; you crazy come here with zis infection
. Another voice drowns out the others, a rich, booming sound:
I don’t want you spreading the infection
. Clive, the director who’d thought she showed promise as an actress. He’d sent her home once because he thought she had ’ flu. The voices merge so that all she can glean from the cacophony is that it is her fault her baby is dead, that she as good as killed Elizabeth by allowing her to pick up an infection.

Soon, Maggie cannot escape the word at all. Even when she tries to concentrate on other words, ‘infection’ is the only one she can see or hear. One day, she picks up a newspaper, but when she looks at it, she finds the word on every page, in every paragraph, in every line; when she turns on the wireless for
Listen with Mother
, instead of the usual nursery rhymes and stories about teddy bears, every song, every rhyme is saturated with infection. If she goes out into the street, the word is on billboards, on road signs, on the sides of buses. She starts to see it even in her dreams, where infection mutates from a proper word made up of black letters and white spaces into a spiky red, crab-like creature that beds down in her belly and then bursts open, disgorging hundreds of tiny replicas of itself. The little red things force their way out through her pores, scurrying from her body in search of new flesh. They approach the cot, swarming over her babies and marking their perfect skin with their long, prong-like fingers . . .

Maggie wakes with a scream dying in her throat.

Jonathan is awake and crying. She moves instinctively to the cot and is about to pick him up when she remembers; she is suddenly quite certain that if she touches Jonathan, those little creatures will get at him, infecting him all over with their red spots. She must not touch him with her bare hands, not under any circumstances. She hesitates. Jonathan is wailing, fat, shiny tears spilling from his eyes as he holds out his arms. ‘No,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘No, you don’t understand.’ And then she runs from the room, along the passage and into the kitchen. She pulls open the door of the built-in cupboard, praying that what she needs is there. She moves aside bottles and jars, pulls out a box full of dusters, a spare mop, a polythene bag containing bandages, lint and gauze. Jonathan’s cries become more insistent and Maggie’s search more frantic, then at last, she sees what she’s looking for. First, she scrubs her hands and forearms with the carbolic soap. Then, she runs fresh water into a bowl, adds Dettol (double what it says on the bottle, just to be on the safe side) and stands with her hands completely immersed for two full minutes until she is sure she is clean.

*

After that, as she tells the health visitor, Miss Knowles, she is careful never to touch Jonathan unless she is disinfected. She washes her hands with Dettol, she pours it in her bath and even gargles with it.

Miss Knowles scribbles in her big blue notebook, her busy little head bobbing away as she writes. ‘And why do you think you need to gargle with Dettol?’

Maggie doesn’t answer immediately; isn’t it obvious? Since Elizabeth died, Miss Knowles has been coming here too often, looking around and generally poking her beaky nose in. Maggie doesn’t like her; doesn’t like her expression, her stupid questions.

‘Well?’ The health visitor looks over the top of her heavy-framed glasses, a false smile loitering on her face.

‘It’s so I don’t pass on any infection. It might be in my mouth, mightn’t it? Then it might escape when I speak.’

Miss Knowles’ smile is wearing off now. She tilts her head, looks at Maggie oddly and writes something down.

Maggie follows her eyes as they stray from the grubby lino and stained rug to the nappies drying over the chair backs and the saucer doubling as an ashtray on the arm of the settee. Maggie knows the room is in a bit of a mess, but she’s more concerned with keeping herself clean for when she has to touch Jonathan. After all, she is the source.

‘I can smell it,’ Miss Knowles says.

‘What?’ Maggie jumps up from her chair and looks around. ‘What can you smell?’ She thought she could smell the infection herself this morning, but then she realised she didn’t know exactly what it smelled like.

‘Dettol. It’s ever so strong. Doesn’t it get on your nerves?’

Maggie sighs and shakes her head. ‘Of course not.’ Leonard’s mentioned the Dettol smell; he doesn’t like it, but he’s hardly ever here these days, so why should she worry? If he’s not at work he’s with his new girlfriend, Sheila, at her bedsit in Bexhill. Maggie has asked Leonard not to bring Sheila to the house; Sheila didn’t have measles when she was a child and so she could have it now, couldn’t she? And she could pass it on to Jonathan. Dr Cranfield says not; he says Jonathan will be immune for life, but Maggie knows he’s lying just to pacify her. And anyway, there’s always the risk of some other infection. That was what killed Elizabeth; a
secondary infection
. The words are loud in her head, as though someone is shouting them.

‘Well.’ Miss Knowles stands up. ‘I’ll pop back and see you again quite soon.’

‘Why?’

The woman smiles her fake smile. ‘Why? What a funny question! I like to keep an eye on all my ladies, especially when they’ve been through . . .’ She looks uncomfortable. ‘Especially when they’ve . . . er . . .’ She stuffs her notebook and papers into her bag, a cross between a doctor’s bag and an ordinary handbag. ‘Ladies, families who’ve . . .’

Maggie catches a glimpse of the other notes in the bag, names and addresses of other people this woman has visited; other families, other children who are ill, dozens and dozens of nasty, germ-riddled people. The words in her head get louder still, several voices shouting:
Infection; secondary infection
. They are so loud that she cannot hear what the woman is saying any more, she can only see her mouth moving, her lips, opening and closing, and suddenly she knows what the voices are trying to tell her: this woman is not a health visitor at all; she is dangerous, and she must be stopped. Maggie hesitates for a moment, but then she knows the voices are right because now she can see those little red infection creatures coming out of the woman’s mouth. There are hundreds of them, pouring out in a torrent, scurrying all over the floor and up the curtains and across the ceiling. She looks around for something to swat them with; she must do something, because Jonathan is asleep in the room along the passageway, and the woman is walking towards the door, her whole body a heaving, crawling mass of infection.