by Amy Lloyd
When it is time I make my way to the Customer Services desk and I introduce myself.
‘Hello,’ I say. ‘I am Charlotte Donaldson.’
Am I? I wonder. It feels uncomfortable, like a blazer that’s too tight on the shoulders. The police had come to the centre and slid my new passport across the table towards me. I looked at the picture and I saw myself: the too-short hair and the thin lips held straight. The name didn’t match.
‘Charlotte,’ I said out loud. ‘Donaldson. Charlotte Donaldson.’
I tried to make the name match the picture. I imagined a friendly voice calling, ‘Charlotte, Charlie, Sharl.’ Sharl. That is what people say when you’re called Charlotte. It sounded like the noise a trapped animal might make.
‘Are there any other names?’ I asked the police officers. ‘I don’t know if I am a Charlotte.’
They shared a look. It’s a look a lot of people share when I’ve said the wrong thing, or I’ve said exactly the right thing but it turns out it’s not OK to say it.
‘Love,’ one started, leaning in. ‘Have you ever heard the phrase “Beggars can’t be choosers”?’
Sometimes people ask questions that they don’t really want you to answer. Now I am Charlotte.
‘I need to see Neil, the manager,’ I say now. ‘It’s my first day.’
‘Yeah, no worries, you can just go round if you like,’ the girl at the desk says. I remain where I am, unsure what she means. ‘The door?’ she says. ‘Behind me?’ She turns and points and I make my way around the long counter, through the doors and into the staff area.
Inside there are lockers and round white tables with coffee stains and crumbs on them. The people bent over their mobile phones look up briefly to see who has come in but when they realise I’m a stranger they look back down and say nothing. They seem young, teenagers, perhaps twenty-one- or twenty-two-year-olds. I realise, suddenly, that I am lonely. I realise how much I had hoped that I would make new friends at work but now I can see that I don’t fit in here, either. I take a seat in the corner, no phone to stare at, and feel stupid for expecting anything to change.
‘Charlotte,’ Neil calls as he comes in, the doors swinging behind him. ‘I hope you’re ready to get started?’
Neil pairs me with a woman named Dawn. Dawn has worked here for fifteen years. She has two terriers called Pepper and Frank and she had to go back to work when her husband got cancer. She has brown hair with grey roots and her shoes look like they are designed for comfort rather than style. Dawn is too old to be a friend. Perhaps I am being unkind but it’s true. What could we ever talk about, me and Dawn? Besides, in the hour in which we rotate the stock in the poultry station she asks me only two questions about myself.
Not that I could tell her about me, anyway. I couldn’t say, ‘Well, Dawn, the truth is that I have spent eighteen years in controlled care, I have a new name and a new history and this is the first day of my new future and so far I don’t like it at all.’ I couldn’t say, ‘I wonder if I am a monster, like they say, or if really I am a normal person who did a bad thing like others say.’
No. I’d have to tell her about Charlotte, the new me. The story I practised and repeated until it came out halfway natural. The kind of story people forget. Not like the real one.
‘Now we take this lot back and mark it as reduced,’ Dawn tells me, nodding towards the piles of chicken we found that are on their sell-by dates. ‘When we bring them back out: you watch. Vultures.’
I smile like I understand.
We go back into the cold warehouse-type area and Dawn shows me how to use the sticker gun. This is the kind of task I enjoy: repetitive, rhythmic, soothing. Dawn is talking about how her husband worked for fifty years, never missed a day, and how his employers won’t help him now he’s sick. He’s not ‘entitled’ to anything, she says. I like the click of the gun, the mounting pile of reduced chickens to my side.
‘Meanwhile, you’ve got people who never worked a day in their lives and they get everything handed to them on a plate. The system is broken. Work doesn’t pay any more.’
I nod, even though it feels as though she is talking about people like me.
We wheel the trolley back into the shop but we are barely out of the doors when people start to push and shove past each other, grabbing whatever they can.
‘At least let us get out of the doors! Move back!’ Dawn is yelling. She shouts like she’s annoyed but she looks like she enjoys it.
I don’t. The trolley pushes against my stomach and soon it feels like I can’t breathe. Someone shoves me with their shoulder and people are stumbling and staggering as they fight for the reduced chickens. I let go of the trolley and go back through the doors, into the cool. I hear the crash as the trolley topples to the floor. At least in here it’s cold and I can breathe; it’s dark, I’m alone.
‘I warned you,’ Dawn says when she comes back through. ‘Animals. They’re worse than animals.’
At the end of my shift I take my bag from the locker and I’m rooting through it as I head for the door. Neil is suddenly in front of me, his arm a barrier between me and the exit.
‘Could you step aside for a minute, Charlotte?’ he says. His smile doesn’t go with his eyes. The direction he guides me in ends with a security guard, a fat one whose jaw works on a piece of chewing gum the way a cow chews grass. Because his mouth is occupied he breathes through his nose and every now and then he makes a noise like a snorer. He looks everywhere but at me, his hands clasped behind his back.
‘The way we do things here, Charlotte, is that every day we select random members of staff to have their bags checked as they leave,’ Neil explains.
‘All right?’ the security guard says, as if he’s only just noticed we’re there.
I pull my bag further on to my shoulder and wait for Neil to say more.
‘It’s only a cursory look, always by myself or one of our boys from security. It doesn’t mean we’re accusing you of anything.’ Neil laughs. ‘But we’ve had some issues in the past so in the interest of not singling anybody out we just perform random checks. Is that OK with you?’
I nod. Neil knows I’ve been in care, I think. He doesn’t know who I am, but he knows where I have come from.
‘So if you pass your bag to Dan …’ Neil says.
I pass my bag to the security officer. He pulls out the newspaper I bought earlier and a sanitary towel falls to the floor. Quickly, I bend to the floor and pick it up, squeezing it in my palm. My face must turn red because Neil is talking again, laughing in a way even I recognise as uncomfortable.
‘You don’t need to worry about any feminine items! Dan’s seen it all before, haven’t you, Dan?’
‘And worse,’ Dan says, his thick fingers rifling through my few possessions. When he’s finished he hands me back the bag. He almost seems disappointed.
‘We’ll see you next time then, Charlotte. Thanks for all your hard work today,’ Neil says. We shake hands and I leave, feeling their eyes on my back.
On the bus back to the house I look at the streets of the town I’ve been sent to. On the high street we pass a hairdresser’s, a Poundstretcher, a Ladbrokes. The shops are already closed for the night and the unlit windows look depressing. The place where I live is close to the city but still feels like a whole different world. I think they call it suburban: streets lined with oak trees, a park with a lake and a café and pedalo boats that look like swans. My support worker, Sarah, and I walked around the lake the first time we came here.
‘Aren’t you lucky,’ she said. ‘All this right on your doorstep!’
I didn’t say anything. The thing about nice places is that they’re much nicer when you’ve got someone to share them with.
I told Dr Isherwood that I didn’t want to leave the institution. I didn’t want to be alone again.
‘You have to try new things,’ she said, trying to sound encouraging. ‘You’ll make new friends, eventually.’
‘Like last time?’ I
asked. I was being sarcastic and she knew this.
‘You know better this time,’ she said.
So instead of my own flat, my own house, like last time, they put me in a shared home. A halfway house. I think they thought I wouldn’t feel as lonely, but here the other women are either the kind who keep to themselves, or the kind who should, but don’t. Some are escaping from abusive relationships, or have been evicted from their homes, while others, like me, have been released from rehab centres, prisons and institutions, and have nowhere else to go.
Being surrounded by people doesn’t make you any less alone. I know this now. That isn’t why I felt better at the institution. I felt better there because I was me. Or at least, if not me, I wasn’t Charlotte. There wasn’t a life I never lived that I had to remember. If there had been, no one would even ask. Inside, people simply were. They didn’t need to explain why they were who they were and they didn’t ask it of you.
At the home I’m in now (the ‘the’ is important, it is not our home, it doesn’t belong to us. Rather, we belong to it) women watch and they wonder. They ask questions and try to work you out. I can tell them all about Charlotte, about where she grew up and when she left school and how she ended up homeless after a bad relationship. I’ve been given enough detail to avoid suspicion, not enough to trip myself up.
But there’s not enough of Charlotte to fill me up. There’s still me, trapped inside. I feel me shaking in the hot core of myself and there’s nowhere for me to go. I want to forget it, I want to forget me but no matter what I try I’m still there.
4
Her: Then
The first time I left the institution I was only eighteen. They gave me my own house and I didn’t have to work. Or they thought that I couldn’t work because I lacked certain social skills and didn’t do well in my exams.
All this was OK at first and I was happy, kind of, with my own TV and my visits to Dr Isherwood, who moved so we could continue the therapy. But then there were long nights and days where I didn’t see or speak to anyone and the loneliness was like a screaming in my ears that kept me awake and drowned out music and books and TV and every other thought in my head.
I started to drink but the drinking only made me want to talk more. In the silence of my empty house I said things out loud to no one and the words seemed to hang in the air and fall down like layers of dust disturbed by the wind.
So I drank and I went out. I went to bars and looked over at the groups of friends who laughed and spoke so easily together. How did you get in? How did you become one of them?
A man touched my shoulder and asked if I wanted a drink. His face was red from alcohol and his hot beer breath felt clammy against my cheek. I nodded. The man asked me questions and I answered them and each time I asked him the same question and it felt like learning to ride a bike, at first so frightening and new and impossible but then like second nature. He kept buying me drinks.
When I felt the dizzy sickness of too much vodka I told him that I wanted to go home and he offered to come with me. I felt too stupid to say no. How had I not realised that this was why he was speaking to me? Not friendship but sex. It seemed so obvious, then. On our way out I looked again at the group of friends and one of the women looked up and smiled and I smiled back before the man opened the door and the cold air outside hit my face and cooled my red-hot cheeks.
It went on like this, for years. When I was lonely I went out and the men bought me drinks and we talked and then we would sleep together because that was the unspoken deal. For a while I would feel less alone but somehow still lonely, still barely there at all.
One morning, the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday, I woke up with that familiar taste in my mouth: old alcohol, the tongue and skin of a stranger still lingering in my saliva. I felt a weight beside me shifting on the bed and saw a man I did not recognise. I realised I was naked and quickly rubbed a hand between my legs to see if I had been careful or not. My hand came away dry and when I smelled my fingers I recognised the scent of a condom. Relief washed over me.
I got out of bed slowly, trying not to wake him. I wasn’t ready to talk yet. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to. On my way to the bathroom I grabbed yesterday’s clothes off the floor and slipped silently out of the room. It was summer, a heatwave, and the small house was stuffy and stifling. When I moved the hangover became worse than I had thought. My legs shook as I walked to the bathroom and I thought I might faint. I had to drop to my knees and crawl to the bathroom where I vomited as soon as I reached the toilet, closing the door behind me with my foot.
When there was nothing left inside me I flushed and ran the cold tap, splashing my face, holding my mouth open beneath the water and letting it run over my dry tongue. I didn’t brush my teeth. Not then. I didn’t want the man to kiss me, so I left myself sour and dirty.
Before I went downstairs I peered into my bedroom where the man was lying flat on his back, his head to one side, a leg emerging from the sheets. By then there had been many men, many mornings just like this, and yet it would be this one that stuck so vividly in my mind.
I never told Dr Isherwood about the men, or the drinking, or the times I’d nearly said too much about who I really was. Sometimes it was as if I was standing on the edge of a cliff, moving one foot closer to the precipice, daring myself to jump.
Downstairs, memories of the previous night came back to me all at once. A powder wrapped in torn toilet paper, swallowed with Red Bull and vodka. A man with brown hair and tight jeans whose hand kept crawling underneath my shirt.
‘It’s my birthday tomorrow,’ I had said, pushing his hand away. ‘Not my birthday. My real birthday.’
Jump, I told myself.
He wasn’t listening. His hand squeezed into my jeans, pressing against my bladder.
‘I’m not who you think I am,’ I told him. ‘I did something bad but I’m not really a bad person.’ Jump and it will be over.
‘You can be bad,’ he said, pushing me against the wall. We were under a bridge; the railway above us was quiet and dark. The light flickered and it smelled of dried piss.
‘I don’t want to be bad,’ I said. I pushed him away and when he stepped back he started to undo his belt. The feeling faded and I stepped away from the ledge. ‘Can we just talk? Can we lie down in the grass and talk?’ My skin felt hot and the breeze was so good and my blood rushed through me faster than I knew it could flow.
‘Now?’ he asked but I was already walking away, searching for more music, more sensations. When I looked back he was peeing against some graffiti.
I must have met the man in my bed sometime after I had left but the memory was lost to blackness.
In the kitchen I got a cold can of Coke from the fridge and ran it over my forehead, my cheeks. For a second my headache stopped; but then it came back, along with the ache in my jaw from grinding my teeth.
My phone buzzed on the counter. I almost didn’t answer because the screen read No Caller ID, which usually meant it was my parole officer or a social worker. But I felt a fluttering in my stomach, like the possibility of something unexpected. These are the moments that make me believe in something magical, something more than what there is, because somehow I just knew that this was a moment that would change things.
I answered. There was just silence, the type of silence that only exists between two people. I waited. It felt like someone was pulling me through the air towards them. I don’t know how long the silence lasted before they finally spoke.
‘Happy birthday, Petal,’ the voice said.
I realised I had been holding my breath. When I exhaled I tilted my face away from the phone so he couldn’t hear. I didn’t want him to know that I felt anything. I could hear him smiling. I could hear his lips against a cigarette while he inhaled. It was him and I already knew it.
‘Are you surprised?’ Sean asked. ‘You shouldn’t be. We’ll always find each other, won’t we, Petal?’
5
Her: Now
&n
bsp; I look up and realise I’ve missed my stop. I press the bell and walk down the aisle, swaying like a sailor on a ship in rough seas. It takes ages for the bus to stop and when it does nothing looks familiar and I’m not sure how to get back to the home.
Across the street there’s a little Tesco and I press the button at the crossing and wait for the green man. Outside the shop is a group of teens, rowdy, and I wish they weren’t there. A girl shrieks and jumps backwards as a boy sprays something at her from a bottle and when we almost collide she apologises. One of the boys says, ‘Sorry, love,’ and they all giggle but I don’t know if it’s at me or something else. Love. Like he’s a middle-aged man.
Inside, the fluorescent lights make everything look more appealing: all the colours, the crisp packets and the chocolate bars and the cans in the glass-front fridges. I pick up a basket and choose three chocolate bars for one pound twenty, a peanut butter KitKat, a Double Decker and a Twirl. I get thick-cut white bread, a block of cheddar cheese and a tin of beans.
At the counter, while I pack my things into a plastic bag, I ask the man the best way to get back to the area I’m living in. ‘I’m not from here,’ I add, unnecessarily. ‘I’m only visiting.’
‘Left at the end of the road, through the underpass. There are signs from there. About five, ten minutes’ walk.’
My stomach sinks.
‘Underpass? Is there another way?’
‘No,’ he says abruptly. ‘Unless you want to go way, way out of the way.’ He laughs.
‘I don’t mind,’ I say. ‘I could do with a walk.’
‘You’ll have to ask someone else, love,’ he says, bored of me. ‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, taking my bag as I leave.
Back outside I almost ask the teenagers but I change my mind at the last second and turn away. Behind me, I can hear their noise as I walk away. It is the kind of noise that says they are free, that they don’t feel the eyes of the world on their backs like I do.
