‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘It’s great. It’s just, I can’t take it from you.’
I pushed the bag back towards her but she held her hands up, refusing to accept it. ‘Please, Birdy. Take it, honestly. As I say, it’s just my old one. It’s got heaps of credit on it so it would be a shame for it to go to waste. And I just can’t bear the idea of not being able to get hold of you if I needed to.’
‘Well, if you’re sure …’ I said, my stomach somersaulting with the excitement of it all.
At some point around this time I realised that even when Bert and I weren’t together, she’d still be on my mind. It wasn’t always a concentrated, conscious kind of thinking, but it was fairly constant. She was just always there somewhere – I’d wonder what she was doing, I’d replay conversations we’d had that’d made me laugh. Or, more importantly, where I’d made her laugh. I’d store up things I’d seen or thoughts I’d had, ready to tell her the next time we were together. I worried about her too, hoped she was OK and not getting into any trouble. I had to keep reminding myself that she’d managed for fifteen years before she met me.
I know it’ll sound very strange if you haven’t been in the situation yourself, but I suddenly felt that I knew what it must be like to have a religion. That sort of reassuring sense of always having someone on your side. A focus. A sense of meaning at last. ‘What would Jesus do?’ asked big black letters on one of Nan’s old chipped mugs. What would Bert do? I found myself wondering, anytime I had to make a decision. And it couldn’t have come at a better time, because at home, things were worse than ever.
Granddad’s vagueness, his tendency for random comments or repeated questions, seemed to step up to a new level. He wouldn’t just ask a question and repeat it half an hour or so later, he’d now started asking the same question over and over again, incessantly. ‘When are we going home?’ he’d say, fidgeting irritably in his chair.
‘You are home, Granddad,’ I’d say, trying to use a light tone, one that suggested this kind of question was perfectly normal and that we all forget where we are from time to time.
He’d leave it for a minute or two, but then he’d ask again. ‘When are we going home? I told them, I want to go home.’ He’d also started calling me Bridget – my dead mum’s name. This had happened once or twice before, but had always seemed more like a slip of the tongue than anything more troubling. Now though, he’d call me Bridget more often than Frances and it felt like he truly believed I was his dead daughter. This made things really uncomfortable, not just because it showed that Granddad was definitely losing his grip on reality but because for as long as I could remember, it had been one of Nan’s rules that we do not talk about Bridget.
These days I wouldn’t dare mention her, but I remember even when I was small, if I asked questions – what did Bridget look like, where did Bridget live – Nan would shut me down. She’d pretend she hadn’t heard, change the subject. Granddad though … sometimes he’d mention her from time to time – always when Nan wasn’t there. He didn’t generally go into any detail or take long rambling trips down memory lane, but sometimes, occasionally, he’d drop in a detail here and there: ‘Bridget couldn’t stand blackcurrants either,’ he’d tell me after I’d turned down a glass of Ribena. ‘Bridget had a lovely singing voice, you know,’ he’d mutter, almost to himself, as we passed a lady busker in town. I decided that if I wanted answers, Granddad would be more likely to provide them than Nan, so one afternoon, when I was about nine, I brought up the subject.
I waited till Nan was at the shops and Granddad and I were in the garden sorting out his tools. We’d emptied all three of his toolboxes onto an old sheet spread out on the lawn and we were carefully cleaning each one with an old sock before placing it back in its proper place. I can’t remember if it was deliberate but it was probably good timing – Granddad was sitting on the ground with his legs stretched out in front of him and his creaky old knees would’ve made it too difficult for him to just up and leave to avoid the question.
‘Why don’t we talk about Bridget?’ I’d blurted it out quickly, before I had time to chicken out.
Granddad looked at me for a second. Then he touched my cheek with his grubby hand before going back to cleaning his hammer. I thought that was it – that he wasn’t going to answer me at all. But then he started to talk:
‘We never thought we’d have a baby, your nan and me. We wanted to, of course we did. Nan especially. But we waited and waited, year after year, and it just didn’t look like it was going to happen. Until your mum came along, right when we were least expecting it. We were getting on a bit by then and we’d long given up hope, so we were delighted, Frances. We were beside ourselves! Your nan set about with all the preparations straight away – cribs, prams, teddies, you name it. We weren’t well off but Nan was adamant – our baby would have everything. Everything. And then she was born, the baby. Bridget. Beautiful little thing, she was. Dark hair, brown eyes like chocolate buttons. Our little princess.
‘She was naughty though, wilful. She was always that way. But that was fine, she made us chuckle. Nan lost her rag with her from time to time when she wouldn’t eat her tea or put her shoes on to go to school, but they’d always make it up. They both had tempers so sometimes they’d …’ Granddad pushed his fists together at the knuckles, like two bulls fighting each other. ‘But they’d always sort it out.
‘But then, Bridget got older. Thirteen or fourteen I think she was when she started staying out. Not all night, not then, but later than she said she would. And we tried to talk to her but she wasn’t having any of it – we were too old to understand, she’d say. Past it. And that really got to your nan ’cause that was her big hang-up, you know – that we were old. Out of touch. Doing it wrong. Your nan so badly wanted to get it right, Frances, to be a good mum. But Bridget just … Bridget was wilful.’
Not for the first time in my life, I found myself feeling angry with Bridget. Who did this girl think she was, turning up, creating havoc, making everyone feel bad?
‘Then it got harder,’ Granddad went on. ‘Bridget got older. Out more and more. In with a bad crowd, boys, drink … all of it. And you can’t make someone, Frances. You can’t make someone do what you want even if you know it’s best for them. And Nan tried, believe me. Even locked her in her bedroom once! But she just went out the window. She’d stay out for longer and longer – two nights, four nights, a whole week. She’d come back a mess. Drink. Then drugs too. Every time we’d worry. We’d call the police but they didn’t care, not really. She was known to them by this point. Just another tearaway teenager. No good.’
Granddad breathed out hard. He frowned and scrubbed at the blade of his palette knife.
‘Then, when she was sixteen, she didn’t come back at all. Two weeks went by, three weeks. A month. Three months. We looked, of course we did. The police said they were helping but I couldn’t tell you to this day what exactly they were doing. She was a runaway. It was our fault she’d gone. They didn’t say as much but you knew they thought it. We’d walk the streets for hours, asking everyone. We had leaflets – Nan got them all done up proper in the print shop. We took the bus all around. Even did a week in London – Bridget always talked about London – but where do you start with a place like that?
‘We hadn’t seen her for exactly one year when Nan flipped. I’d been expecting it really, in a way. I just came home once and found her sitting on the floor. Smashed glass everywhere. All the pictures, all the baby photos, first day of school, blowing out the candles on her ninth birthday, roller-skating on her eleventh … all broken. And Nan, just sitting there, cuts on her hands. Crying. Crying her heart out.’
Granddad’s voice cracked then. I looked at him, alarmed, but he dragged his sleeve across his eyes and seemed to pull himself together.
‘So I picked her up. I tidied away the photos, in albums, in drawers, tucked away for when she wanted them again. Then I washed her hands in the sink and tied them up with bandages and when
I was doing it Nan says, “She’s gone, hasn’t she? She’s gone.” And she had, Frances. Bridget had gone from us. And that was it. No more searching, no more tears, no more photos.’
I’d never seen Nan cry. I couldn’t even imagine it. I didn’t want to. ‘Poor Nan,’ I said quietly.
‘You’ve never known your nan how she was, Frances love. You never saw the best of her. What she is now … she’s not the same. She’s just a shell. When we found out Bridget had died, there were no tears, even then. Not from Nan anyway. She’d already accepted it. I hoped that when we got you home, it would … I don’t know, snap her out of it. Give her a second chance or something. But it was too late. She’d already shut down.’
I looked at my hands then and swallowed hard. I was just so angry. That stupid cow Bridget. She thought she was so special but she was horrible. She’d ruined everything. She’d broken Nan. She’d broken them both.
Granddad must’ve seen me looking strange and assumed I was upset because he put down his dirty rag and held my hand. We stayed like that for a minute but it started to make me feel funny, so I wriggled free and placed my screwdriver in the drawer at the top of the red toolbox.
‘Have we got time to have ice cream before Nan’s home?’ I’d said, forcing myself to be bright and cheery. I didn’t want Granddad to say anything else. I didn’t want to hear any more about Bridget, not ever. She’d taken up enough of everyone’s energy as it was.
‘I expect so, love.’
At first, we’d ignored it when Granddad got my name wrong.
‘Hello, Bridget love, how was school?’
‘Get Bridget to help you with the sweeping.’
Once though, I caught a look at Nan when he did it and I saw the expression in her eyes – a brief flash of something that looked a lot like alarm. Panic, almost.
Then, one evening, we were sitting in the living room after dinner watching some awful quiz programme, and Granddad turned to me and said, ‘Turn it up, would you, Bridget? Can’t hear a word over here.’
All of a sudden Nan leant forward and turned the TV off. ‘That’s enough,’ she snapped. ‘That’s enough of that rubbish. Come on, time for bed.’
‘Is it?’ Granddad asked. ‘Already?’
‘Yes,’ Nan said firmly. ‘It’s late.’
It was barely nine o’clock, but Granddad nodded obediently and shuffled out of the living room. Nan didn’t move for a minute. She just sat in the chair, staring at the blank TV. I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t want to move.
Neither of us said anything for a minute or two, then Nan spoke.
‘She tried to kill you too, you know,’ she said, her eyes still fixed on the empty TV screen. ‘Never told you that. She dissolved some of those pills into your milk. Tried to get you to drink it. You wouldn’t though, of course. Even a baby knows that’s not right. Never told you that, did we?’
Her voice was strange. It was completely emotionless. It was scary. Much more scary than any of the angry, shouty outbursts that erupted when I broke one of her many house rules. I felt very much like I was in trouble, like Nan was saying this was all my fault somehow. But I didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to do about it.
‘No,’ I replied quietly. ‘You never told me that.’
12
My friendship with Bert started to affect my marks at school. It wasn’t always dramatic, but it was enough for me to notice. Maybe I should’ve taken that as a sign to take a step back from her for a while, but the thing was, the impact wasn’t all bad so I thought, on balance, it didn’t matter too much.
In maths and science, my grades took a bit of a nose dive. Bert didn’t have any time for those subjects. I’d always got on quite well with them. I liked the certainty, the right answers. Not to mention the fact that they were subjects you could mostly get on with on your own without the need for all that horrible group work that teachers are so keen on but that can be a real headache if you’ve got to scrabble around for someone to work with before you can get going. But Bert declared them ‘boring and nit-picky’ so we spent most of those lessons at the back of the class, talking quietly when we could get away with it, passing notes when we couldn’t.
In art, though, I suddenly found my grades perking up. Cs, Bs … even the odd A. Art was Bert’s favourite subject and her enthusiasm was infectious. Mostly because she was every bit as excited about my efforts as her own work.
‘Oh, Birdy!’ she said once as I put the finishing touches on a charcoal drawing of a stallion. ‘That’s just beautiful. I love the look in his eyes … he’s so wistful and wise. Can I have him, once he’s marked and everything, of course?’
I just shrugged and smiled a shy smile, the way I always did when Bert piled praise on me like this.
English was another subject where I found things improving. Although I’d always liked to read, I’d always felt a bit confused by English as a school subject. I liked spelling and grammar – stuff with rules – but all that woolly, creative business was a mystery to me. I suppose it just always seemed like such a strange way to spend study time.
Miss Lily, our English teacher, was a vague, drifty kind of woman and she’d usually set us vague, drifty kinds of tasks to complete. For example, once we had to ‘describe the inside of a horse chestnut’. Another time, she told us to ‘write a diary from the point of view of a snowflake’. I mean, I felt that I probably could do these things if that’s what she really wanted, but I just wasn’t quite sure what the point of it all was. I always felt a bit like I was missing something, or that those kinds of tasks were some sort of psychological test and they were going to use what we wrote to make a judgement about our character. I always approached those assignments a bit cautiously, being careful not to write anything too unusual or creative in case it gave anyone the idea I was not quite right.
It was the same with English literature. ‘What is the significance of the fire in Lord of the Flies?’ Lily would write across the middle of the board and I’d feel a sinking feeling as I realised we were going to have to spend the next hour – if not the next term – discussing something which as far as I could see was neither here nor there. Does it really matter? I’d think, looking around at the other people in my class to see if they were wondering the same thing. It’s a work of fiction, isn’t it? I doubt even William Golding himself was particularly interested in the significance of the fire. He probably just stuck it in there to give the boys something to sit around. And actually, these kinds of questions annoyed me too. I mean, what a way to ruin a good book! Picking stories to pieces like that. Spelling it all out. It was like having someone explain the punchline of a joke to you – it just didn’t really work after that. Once, when I was looking for some past exam papers online, I found a copy with the examiners’ marking notes attached. ‘Examiners are encouraged to reward any valid interpretations,’ it said. I knew it, I thought to myself. Just like I always thought: Any old rubbish will do. I felt a bit better then, less like they were trying to catch me out. But still, it seemed a very bizarre thing to be studying at school.
With Bert though, I tried to approach English with a new enthusiasm. After all, I thought, she seems to love it, so there must be something I’m missing. Like me, Bert was a reader – I guess most people who’ve grown up without many friends are – but unlike me, she loved nothing more than to spend hours talking over the motivations and personality traits of the characters. And to my surprise I found that, with Bert, I quite liked it too. It was fun with her. She had interesting ideas. She wasn’t like drippy Miss Lily, head on one side, eyes getting all misty at the drop of a hat. When Bert talked, she was so passionate; it sometimes did feel like we were talking about real people. She was sparky. She made me laugh.
By this time, we were well into Bert’s first term and the boys who’d been initially sniffing around her seemed to be losing interest. I think on the whole they just found Bert a bit too odd.
Once a scrappy little boy called Tom Coleman sidled u
p to her. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you know what? I think there might be something wrong with my eyes. I can’t take them off you.’
Bert spun round and looked Tom straight in the face – the poor kid probably thought he was in with a chance for a minute – but she just stood there, staring at him intently.
‘What?’ he said, backing away. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Checking your vision.’ She held up a finger. ‘Can you see this? Can you follow it with your eyes?’
Tom had batted her hand away and slunk away, muttering, ‘Nutter,’ under his breath.
I don’t know for sure if those kinds of reactions were genuine – if she really was so out of practice when it came to teenage flirting stuff that she just didn’t know what was expected – or if it was a bit more contrived than that, and playing the innocent was her way of letting people down without upsetting them. I wasn’t really bothered either way, just as long as she kept turning them down. Even though I was pretty sure that Bert and I were quite solid friendship-wise by this point, I still didn’t really fancy the idea of being ousted by some annoying boyfriend type.
The one boy who’d really stuck around despite Bert’s slightly odd knock-backs was Jac Dubois – of index-finger salute fame. He was one of those who enjoys playing the role of the joker, whatever the situation. The whole act got a bit annoying at times, but he was harmless enough. He was the son of a French couple who owned the Parisian bistro in town and he was bilingual – a fact which lifted him a bit above the class clown status he’d assigned himself, I always thought. I used to like to hover around nearby when one of his parents picked him up from school and listen to them babble away in French together. How lovely, I always thought, to have another language that you could just slip into like that.
Jac would loiter around us in registration, trying to engage Bert in banter, alternating between outrageously sexist teasing and shameless flattery. I couldn’t tell for sure what Bert felt about it but the whole thing made me nervous. He wasn’t technically spoken for, but he was quite popular with the girls in general. I was worried someone might step forward to stake their claim if it looked like Bert was getting too involved, which might lead to tension all round. Luckily though, Bert managed to knock any romantic ideas on the head herself, one day in early November.
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