by Annie Murray
‘What did Fred say?’ I ask Pat.
Pat looks sheepish. ‘I didn’t really tell him.’
‘I haven’t told Ian either.’ We both laugh. ‘Mad, isn’t it?’
‘Shall we begin with a few stretches?’ Hayley suggests. I can see she’s starting to feel cold.
‘I don’t think I can do it.’ I’m suddenly full of panic. ‘I don’t know why I said I’d do this. I’ve hardly done any of this sort of thing since I was at school.’
‘Yes, you can,’ Pat says with sudden firmness. ‘Come on – you come with me, Jo. Hayley, you go with Sunita.’ I find my arm being taken by Pat. ‘All it is, is putting one foot in front of the other. You can do it. We’ll start by walking fast, OK?’
‘That will probably finish me off,’ Sunita says, so gloomily that we all laugh.
The path hugs the edge of the park, a wide, flat, grassy space with a few scattered trees. No big hills, anyway, I think, as Pat and I start off in front, walking faster and faster, in fact needing to just to keep warm. I feel the pull on my thighs, the strangeness of being aware of my body. Pat matches my pace. I feel comfortable with her. Since the day she confided in me about her baby, we have not talked about anything like that. We’ve met for a coffee a few times, kept it light. But we know these deep things about each other and there’s a quiet understanding. Behind us, Hayley is making encouraging noises to Sunita.
‘Now, we’ll take this up to a jog – just for a while,’ Pat says. She must have been a good mother, I think. She is gentle, positive.
And we are running. Not fast, in fact very slowly, like lumbering little bears – but we’ve begun.
‘You’re running, Sunita!’ Hayley cries, like a cheerleader.
‘I know,’ Sunita grumbles. ‘And I can feel my bottom – it is wobbling like a jellyfish.’
Pat and I look at each other and laugh and we can hear Hayley giggling. ‘You mean a jelly?’
‘Jellyfish, jelly – it’s all the same,’ Sunita mumbles. ‘Very wobbly.’
My grin is almost as unfamiliar as the air stinging in my nostrils, the sudden awareness of how much the ground pulls you down, the effort needed to drive myself forward. It feels all right for a few minutes and then my lungs start to pull, my chest seizing up. But I’m doing it . . . I’m running. The guilt comes again, the bitter waves which wash through me: here I am, alive – if running isn’t a testimony to feeling alive what is? – feeling really alive, for the first time since . . . While he lies in the dark, cold earth . . . My chest tightens unbearably as the rush of emotion takes over again and I need to stop. I’m about to gasp that I can’t carry on, when I am saved by Sunita.
‘Oh! I am stopping now,’ she groans wheezily. ‘Let me walk – my heart is pounding!’
I stop immediately, panting, bending to rest my hands on my thighs. With a huge effort I manage to get a grip on my emotions and just breathe. Not now – I don’t want to do this again. Not here . . .
‘You OK?’ Hayley asks as Sunita and Pat walk on ahead.
‘Yep.’ I straighten up and ram my face into a smile. ‘Just needed to get my breath back.’
A few minutes later Sunita, suddenly full of enthusiasm, turns and calls to us, ‘Right, let’s run again!’ And I find that once I have got my breath back, I’m bouncy in these new trainers and keen to go too. I feel suddenly as if I’m overcoming something, reclaiming myself.
‘We’re training,’ I hear Sunita say with definite proudness and I find myself smiling.
I’m doing it. I’m talking to Paul in my head as I jog along with Hayley. I’m doing it, love – for you and for that boy. I feel now that I can hardly distinguish the two. It feels as if the boy is Paul.
We walk a bit, jog a bit and so on and it doesn’t feel all that long until we are back where we started.
‘Well –’ Pat beams at us both – ‘that didn’t go too badly for a first try, did it?’
‘But six miles,’ I groan.
‘We shall pretend we are in a film,’ Sunita announces. ‘You know, like . . . Oh, I can’t think . . .’
‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner?’ Pat says, grimacing.
‘Chariots of Fire?’ I suggest.
‘No, no,’ Sunita says. ‘Something with a bit of glamour . . .’
‘The ladies of Hollywood run round their park,’ Hayley says.
‘Hollywood? Bollywood?’ I say. ‘Maybe we should have our own song? The Creak and Groan song.’
‘Hollywood-Bollywood.’ And Sunita rises up on her toes, humming and singing something none of us can understand but which is obviously from Indian cinema. And the next thing is she’s whirling round, doing arm movements and making exaggerated faces, one minute thunderous and sulky, the next smiling as if at the love of her life. Sunita, tubby and dressed in the baggiest of clothes, is not a bad mover. Her hands, as I watch, are beautiful and expressive.
‘Sunita – you’re great at dancing!’ Hayley cries. All of us are laughing in amazement and Hayley goes and dances beside her, trying to imitate the moves.
‘You like dancing?’ Sunita stops. Hayley looks suddenly embarrassed. ‘Yes – well, sort of. I used to dance at school.’
‘We need our own songs,’ Sunita says. She seems really enthusiastic, amused by the idea. ‘Our own Hollywood-Bollywood. I will think of a song – or we can make them up.’
‘Oh, I’m no good at that sort of thing,’ Pat says.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Sunita insists. ‘You say that about everything. What about thinking positive, eh? I’m no good at running but I’m doing it, aren’t I? And,’ she adds, ‘I’m going on a diet. No more Granny with her bottom stuck in the chair. Next year I will be sixty and if I don’t do something I will just go on eating cake and getting bigger and bigger and . . . one day I will not be able to get into the shower!’
As she says it her eyes protrude with horror at the thought and she looks so funny that we all end up laughing.
I realize, surprised, that Sunita is only a couple of years older than I am and younger than Pat. She seems to think of herself as an old woman – or that’s how it has looked up until today. I find myself feeling inspired. Pat looks pretty lit up as well.
‘Good for you,’ I say, as we walk back across the car park. And with a lightening feeling, I think, we’re going to do this.
‘So we went for our first run round the park this morning,’ I say.
Dorrie looks at me over her teacup. As ever, she’s in her chair by the fire and somehow she seems even smaller. I see her every day, often more than once, but for some reason I notice this today.
‘You went running round the park?’
‘Yes – four of us. I’ve met some nice women here.’
Dorrie replaces her cup on the saucer. ‘I don’t know why everyone has to rush about so much these days. If you want to give money to charity, what good’s running round the park? Why don’t you just give them the money? You’ll wear yourself out.’
‘I think it’s just . . .’ Again, I can’t really explain properly. It’s wanting to do something, be involved somehow, but Dorrie, though active, has never been one for expending unnecessary energy. She comes from an age when people literally worked themselves to an early death, never mind going for runs around the block.
‘Why that, anyway?’ she says. ‘I mean, there’re all these charities these days – so many . . .’
‘I s’pose . . .’ It’s hard to explain. I don’t feel like telling her about the boy, the picture. It all sounds a bit mad. I think about what Pat said, about things getting under your skin. ‘It’s a bit like . . . You know what Bogey says in that film, Casablanca? “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” It’s just how it goes – some things just get to you.’
Dorrie nods, slowly, as if this makes some sort of odd sense.
‘So,’ I say, ‘they’re coming about the stairlift on Wednesday?’
Dorrie nods, stiffly. ‘If you
say so.’
My heart buckles. I know Dorrie doesn’t want to admit how difficult she’s finding things, that even getting up to bed at night is a tortured ordeal.
‘It’ll make everything easier,’ I say gently. ‘You’ll soon get used to it and you’ll be glad you’ve got it, Dorrie – I’m sure you will. It’ll mean . . .’ I try to find a tactful way of saying it. ‘You can stay here, in your own bed for as long as . . .’
Dorrie nods but she’s staring ahead of her, a blank look on her face as if she doesn’t want to talk about it.
‘I was thinking,’ she says. ‘Of how no one remembers now – about how things were.’
‘That’s because most of us aren’t old enough to,’ I point out.
‘Things were . . . Everything was so dirty. And food – there’s so much food now. People went without for days sometimes . . .’
I feel a prickle of unease. Dorrie does not seem herself this morning. She seems frail and wandery.
‘You lived through amazing times,’ I say. ‘And Dorrie –’ I lean towards her – ‘I’ve so enjoyed reading about your memories. I’m sure Ian would love to see them – and Cynthia. I read the bit you wrote about how you met Tom, Ian’s dad. It’s lovely – what you said and everything.’
‘Tom.’ Dorrie seems to come back to herself. ‘My Tom. Yes, Tom Stefani was my husband. Husband for four years – that was all. He was a good man, Tom was, ’til they did that to him . . .’ Again she trails off, sinking into her own world.
There are all sorts of things I want to ask her, but I feel shy. Dorrie has never been one for dwelling on things or talking about herself. I have read nearly all of her pages of writing now. What started off quite fluently, written when she was younger, has become more and more scrappy – odd things she must have jotted down, the handwriting different, shakier. There are also big gaps in what Dorrie chose to write about. Among the descriptions of her childhood, she often says she is about to write about something – her mother, for example – and then she doesn’t, or at least if she ever has, it is not there among the pages that she gave me.
The trip to the zoo with Aunt Beattie is there, though next to nothing about school. Nor about what she did when she left school, except that eventually, at some point in her twenties she met Tom Stefani in a pub, where she must have been working. It’s not quite true that I have read absolutely all of it. Lately I’ve found myself resisting going on with it, somehow worried that I might find something I don’t want to read. I’m still wondering what it is that Dorrie is trying to tell me by giving me the pages.
‘Til they did that to him. What does that mean? Yet in a way I am not sure I want to know.
‘Are you a bit tired today, Dorrie?’
She fixes on me again, seeming to shake herself. ‘Ar, bab, sorry. I didn’t sleep very well last night. Feel a bit anyhow today.’
‘Well, let’s get you a bit of dinner and then you can have a nap, eh?’ I say.
At home I take out Dorrie’s sheaf of papers again and turn to the pages near the end.
Twenty-One
I met my Tom when I was 26. Over the hill of course according to my dear mother. She was full of charming remarks about how I was an old spinster.
The thing was I never really said anything much to her about Frank, who I wasted three years of my life on. I lived in hope, being a yes woman and walking out with a man who could never keep a promise. Many a bitter tear I shed over Frank, the handsome so-and-so. I don’t know now why I put up with all his nonsense for so long but you do when you’re young.
It was in the Adam and Eve that I met Tom, one fine summer day. In he walks, on his dinner break. He was working at one of the factories in Bradford Street then and he had a pal with him. Life was mostly work back then, there wasn’t much free time.
‘Hello,’ he says, and even his voice sounded just right, funny how something just feels right, his eyes, face . . . I liked him straight away. I was dark in looks myself of course, dark-eyed and black hair and I think he thought I must be an Eytie as well which I’m not of course. But it felt like looking in the mirror and seeing someone I recognized. I probably did recognize him because he grew up not far from us in Bartholomew Street where a lot of the Italians were, but it was more than that. He felt it too. As if we’d known each other before somewhere almost in another life and met again. We were chatting away within minutes and he asked me out. And that was that.
Tom was the greatest bloom of my life – with my children of course, though in my mind they all go together. It surprises me looking back how much I loved Tom, coming as I did from such a loveless household. The heart must know what to do of itself.
I started to catch the rose-scent of Tom right from the word go. We went out that night and never stopped talking. It felt as if we never stopped talking until he died. He was that sort of man – open and friendly and gave of himself. And we clicked and that was that.
‘Dorrie,’ he said, when I told him my name. He was Brummy born and bred, as were his mom and dad, but his accent was still tinged with his Italian grandparents who lived with them as he was growing up, all crammed into their little house near the viaduct. Old Man Stefani had come over a like a lot of the Italians, in the 1870s, sent over by one of the padrones, men from the district who’d been abroad somewhere, here or America, to make their fortune and gone back.
The Old Man – Giuseppe – was no child when he came. He brought his wife Theresa and worked as a hawker before they set up that fish and chip shop – ‘Stefani’s’ near Scratchem’s Corner – it was very popular, was there for years. All of them were clever with food – sweets, ice-cream – it was a good part of town to be in.
But there wasn’t much love lost between the men in the Stefani family. Tom was already living in a lodging house a few streets away to get out from under his own father Luigi Stefani – my father-in-law as he became. He was always all right to me but then I didn’t have to live with him. There were too many kids to share the business, Tom was one of nine, and he went out and got other work. When we married he took a job over at Smethwick for the wages. They weren’t the wages of sin, but death came along with them all the same.
He was lovely to me, Tom was. That’s the only way to say it. I found a man who was good and kind and there was love between us all right. I couldn’t wait for him to get home of an evening – almost as if every night was a date, even if all we were doing was staying in, in our little house with our few sticks of furniture. But it was a palace to me. I remember saving up for a scrubbing brush – two and nine it cost and I saved my pennies until I could go and get it. I had a lot of pleasure out of that – simpler times they were then. People waited more for things.
It’s no good wishing to turn the clock back, but time and thorns stole my love from me. It left me a widow at the age of thirty, with my small boy and another baby on the way.
The very last page is a sheet of plain paper, but slipped in front of it is another, smaller scrap, from a cheap, lined writing pad that I hadn’t noticed before. At a glance it seems nothing to do with the rest – it’s yellowed at the edges and the writing on it looks almost like someone else’s. But the first line tells me that it could only be Dorrie who wrote it.
He’s gone, taken from me my Tom my husband . . .
The writing is much steadier, younger. The writing of the heartbroken Dorrie of 1959:
He’s gone, taken from me my Tom my husband. I loved him I loved him I loved him. I don’t know what to do. What am I going to do? It didn’t have to be like this. None of it should ever’ve happened. Someone should hang for what they did to him my poor husband. But what can I do? No one will pay any heed to me. I’ve got nothing – who am I? But he’s gone and I’m all alone and my baby will never know its father. What can I do?
Under it, several lines are scored across, cutting into the page. It’s the last thing in the folder of papers.
‘What did actually happen to your father – how did he die?’
We’re at the table that evening: stir-fry, bottle of soy sauce, Ian’s bottle of Budvar. Red peppers shiny with oil glow in the gloom, seeming weirdly colourful and out of season in an English February.
‘Why?’ Ian sits back, putting his fork down. His eyes meet mine, then flicker away. I can’t tell what he feels about me asking but he does not seem hostile. Head back, he takes a mouthful from the bottle.
‘Just something Dorrie said.’
Lowering the bottle, he looks at me. ‘She OK?’
‘Yes. I’d tell you if she wasn’t, wouldn’t I? It’s not that. It’s just, somehow we’ve just never really talked about it.’
And why am I picking that out among all the other things we’re not talking about, Ian and I who used to talk about everything?
‘New trainers?’ Ian said when he came in and saw them in the hall.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I just wanted something more comfortable. It’s fine you taking the car most days but I do a lot of walking here – to the shops sometimes, to yoga.’ I have not told him about the running yet. Why? I hardly know, other than that any change feels as if it is loaded, threateningly, on top of too many others.
‘Well, I think he had a heart attack.’ Ian sits back, holding the bottle to his chest. He looks puzzled. ‘I can only just remember him. He was in hospital – or at least . . .’ He pauses. ‘I never got taken to the hospital to see him, but that’s where he was, I think.’ He glances at me, vulnerable. ‘I dunno. That’s what she told me. It all feels a bit of a muddle in my head. I can only remember him before, just a bit, sat by the fire, smoking – laughing.’ He smiles. ‘No bad memories, just, well, that’s about all there is. He was all right, though, my dad.’
‘He sounds more than all right.’
‘Has she been talking about him?’
‘A bit.’ Why do I not tell him about Dorrie’s writing? I feel awkward that she has shown it to me first. ‘You know – good memories. He sounds like a really nice man. I wish I’d known him.’
