Hope

by Terry Tyler

  23

  No Babies

  When the time comes round for your monthly medical, you report to the waiting room in the medical centre, then go through to a curtained-off section to be weighed, have your blood tests taken, and present your urine sample. Then you go back to the waiting room for however long it takes for these to be analysed. It's best to take a good book. When the results come through, you see the doctor for a cursory assessment, during which he will give you prescriptions for any necessary medication or food supplements. Despite all we have been through and the rubbish diet here, both Kendall and I are fighting fit, apparently, but if the doctor is to be believed, it's a wonder Nick is still alive.

  Nick doesn't believe him, so he keeps not taking the tablets.

  My thirty-third birthday on 23rd March happens to be Medical Day. Other than that, it's good. Nick and Kendall give me chocolates, which makes me cry. Then a couple of women who sleep near Kendall and me―Melanie and Alison―get concerned 'cause I'm teary, and when they find out what day it is, they're super-nice to me and gather some of the other women round to sing ‘Happy Birthday’, which makes me cry even more, because I'm thirty-bloody-three and I'm living in a Hope Village.

  "You've still got us, though," says Kendall. "And your health. And like you always say, this isn't forever."

  "You're alive," says Alison. "Where there's life, there's hope. I mean that, too; it's not just one of those things people say."

  Alison lost her home when her husband died. He left her with a pile of debt and a house on which she couldn't pay the extended mortgage. She had no family to help out and she hadn't worked for twenty years, so she had zero chance of ever finding a job.

  Melanie is a former alky who cocked up her own life, and unashamedly admits that her situation is of her own making.

  I feel suddenly very grateful for the friendship of all of them.

  I eat some of my chocs and treat myself to a new book on Amazon to read in the waiting room. When I go to be weighed and have needles stuck in my arm, though, the nurse asks me the date of my last period, and I have to think; it was in January.

  "Is there any chance you could be pregnant?" asks the nurse.

  I laugh, and indicate my flat stomach. "No way."

  "You might be anaemic. You'll have to go see the gynae, anyway. Go back to the waiting room, and you'll be called."

  An hour later I hear my name, and a medical Becky leads me out of a side door. She takes me down a corridor; it's strip-lit, with no windows. Cheaply tiled floors, bare walls. There is no indication what any of the rooms are for.

  I don't like it down here. The doors are dark blue-grey, all shut. I wonder what goes on behind them.

  It feels dead down here. Cold and dead.

  "What are all these rooms?" I ask the back of the medical Becky's head.

  "Specialist clinics. Cardiology, diabetes, renal."

  "It's very quiet."

  She doesn't look round. "Hope 37 isn't big enough to have its own specialists; they visit as and when they're needed."

  She stops by a door; another, short corridor forks off to the left, ending in a set of double doors with curtains up inside the window. Between the tiny gap in the curtains I can see that there are no lights on.

  "What's that, down there?"

  "Ante and postnatal."

  But there are no babies here. Like the guy said. Only one pregnant woman, the one Bex told us about, and I've never seen her; for all I know, she doesn't exist.

  Like the guy said. No babies at all, in a community of nearly two thousand people? What about the family units? Mum and Dad are curtained off from the kids for privacy, I hear. You'd think that by the law of averages and accident, there would be a pregnancy now and again. Especially when lusty couples are shagging in kitchen store cupboards whenever they get the chance. Kendall tells me that some of Dwork's mates and their girlfriends are doing the same thing, also hoping to be the next Mandy, Khalid and Soraya.

  "There aren't any babies, though," I say.

  She knocks on the door. "No, there aren't at the moment," is all she says.

  A voice on the other side calls, "Come," and we enter.

  The gynae gives me a smear test and tells me my blood test has revealed iron deficiency, and that my periods should regulate themselves in time. I accept the pills, but doubt I'll take them; I'll see if I can get some alternatives from that little shop Nick and I found.

  "I shouldn't think you have much to do around here," I say.

  She looks up, a pleasant smile on her face. "Beg pardon?"

  "You're a gynae. There aren't any babies here. Or pregnant women. So give or take the odd smear test, I don't suppose you have much to do!" I say this in a jocular manner, like I'm just making a passing observation.

  Her smile doesn't falter. "Gynaecologists are concerned with all aspects of women's health. Ante and postnatal care, and conception issues, are just a part of it."

  Of course. Silly me.

  "Of course." I mirror her bright smile. "Still, it must be something to celebrate when there's a baby born here!"

  "Indeed it is." Still the smile, but now she's looking back at her screen.

  "So when was the last one?"

  "A while back." She pauses, and looks at me kind of sharply. "Although we endeavour to make Hope Villages as comfortable as possible for all our residents, you'll understand that they're not the ideal places to bring up a child, and women take steps to ensure that pregnancy does not occur."

  Er, no, not all of them, they don't.

  The smile gets wider. "I think we're done here now, Lita. I've booked you in for another check in three months' time."

  I'm sure I see her glance at the Becky; a quick meeting of the eyes.

  I don't know what to deduce from it, though.

  Kendall's depressed because she gets her period at the beginning of April, too.

  "Dwayne's saying there must be something wrong with me because he's proved he can father kids. I know I can get pregnant 'cause I had that termination, but he's saying it must have damaged me." She's really upset. "I'd hate that, Lita. If I couldn't. Like, if I got to about forty and hadn't got any children. It'd be awful."

  I suggest she goes to see the gynae, who tells her that there is nothing wrong with her and she must just be patient, but still she frets.

  The first flush of romance hasn't taken long to wear off. Four months into their relationship, Dwork now clears off with his mates to throw/kick balls into nets as soon as dinner is over, while she flops around the lounge looking fed up. Then he picks her up at nine-thirty so they can go for their bunk-up in his mate's family unit. She told me that her ex, Wes, used to go out with his mates on Friday and Saturday nights, then turn up at her mum's at midnight, kebab in hand. If she complained he was most affronted, because he'd been thoughtful enough to bring her a kebab. In other words, she's used to this sort of treatment.

  Aside from Sunday, every day is the same here, but, unlike a prison sentence, we don't have a release date.

  Every Sunday, Nick contemplates just not going back. The other day we were in the canteen when he suggested it yet again, and I had this ghastly sensation of panic, welling up in my chest; I could hardly breathe. Usually I'm so rational, but that day I lost it.

  I told Nick to shut up, just shut the hell up and stop going on about it, because we'd only have a week or so before our money ran out, and what would happen then?

  "What would we do for food? Beg? Go through bins?"

  Melanie told me that you can't claim any sort of benefit if you don't have at least a semi-permanent address; we wouldn't last long.

  "And you know what Brody told me―if you reject a place, or leave without going through their proper processes, next time you get slung into one of those awful ones. We'd be picked for vagrancy, and that's where we'd end up." And that made me think of Brody again, and I covered my face in my hands. I couldn't stop crying. People were looking, and Nick and Kendall leapt to my
aid; it felt good to have their arms around me but at the same time it didn't make any difference at all, because there is no way out.

  How have we come to this?

  24

  Beautiful Sunday

  It's the first Sunday in May and the sky is a heavenly blue; the smell in the air makes me feel happy for the first time in ages. As soon as we've eaten as much breakfast as we can cram into our stomachs (rubbery, tasteless eggs, cheap baked beans, soggy white toast), Nick and I head for the hills.

  We pass the 'sports compound'―a fenced off rectangle of tarmac where Dwork types play with their balls (take that whichever way you like), and concrete slopes for skateboarding. Next, the bag search/scan/identification rigmarole. Like they don't recognise us; we're two of the only few who ever bother to go out, and we haven't tried to smuggle back weapons of mass destruction, smack or a crate of the finest Beaujolais yet. Still, I suppose there's always a first time.

  The sun's warmth is gentle and cheering, and we almost run in an effort to get as far away from the bloody place as we can. Over the fields we hurry; when we flop down for a rest, I know what Nick's going to say even before he opens his mouth.

  "Fuck it, let’s just keep walking. We'll make it, somehow."

  Not again. "I can't. For the reasons previously expressed, and I can't leave Kendall."

  "Fuck Kendall. You can't babysit her forever. If it's not Dwork it'll be some other loser. I've always thought it was weird that you were mates with her in the first place. She's not exactly your intellectual equal, is she? And she seems to have lost any sense she ever had, these days."

  "You're not wrong there."

  "I know. I mean, we were close when we were in the flat, the three of us, but now―we don't owe her anything. Times change."

  I get what he's saying, but I can't leave her. I don't want to; she's my friend. I haven't got many of those.

  We lie back in the long, damp grass and gaze up at the sky, silent for a while.

  Then Nick speaks.

  "Did you ever think we might get together? You and me?"

  He props himself up on one elbow. Those serious, dark eyes of his are waiting for an answer.

  Does he want honesty? I think he does.

  "It occurred to me when we first met, but we missed the moment. We kind of swerved, didn't we?" I make a gesture with my hands, coming together and just missing each other.

  "Yeah, that's exactly right! That night we first met, in that pub―when you walked in, I thought, oh nice, just my type, and I'd made up my mind to go for it, but you seemed―I dunno―" He looks down, and starts pulling up bits of grass.

  "What?"

  "You've got a wall round you." He gives me a lopsided grin. "Like, you were funny and friendly and interesting, but―it's hard to explain. I couldn't see how to move things on from a nice matey chat to a situation in which we might contemplate getting naked. So I stopped trying, and settled for matey."

  I frown. "Is that how I seem? The wall?"

  He takes off his hat, ruffles his hair and looks up at the sky. "Not now, with me, and not with everyone. Like, not Brody, I'm guessing." The raised eyebrow. "And then of course there was Andy. My mate. Who succeeded where I failed."

  "Andy was nothing to me, and I was nothing to him. It was just one of those things that came together because the right planets aligned for a couple of weeks." We smile. "You mean more to me than he ever did."

  "But not as much as Brody."

  I don't reply.

  There was no wall when I met Brody, apart from the one we fucked against the first night we went out. We met outside a supermarket, of all places, on a dark, rainy night. I dropped my bag and was trying to stop the tins rolling away under cars; he was just coming out and helped me, then he offered me a lift home, we hit it off, and exchanged numbers. Met for a drink the next night, and didn't even get as far as my attic room at Seth and Lucy's; hence the wall. It was a dark, hidden-away bit round the back of the pub, I hasten to add. But the chemistry between us was explosive and immediate, whereas with Nick it was more do I fancy him? I think I might, but I'm not sure.

  "Maybe we did fancy each other but it wasn't quite the right place and time," I say, in the end, to stop myself thinking about fucking Brody up against walls.

  He likes this. "Yeah! I dunno, though; it's not just about whether or not we fancy each other now, is it? It's more than that." He puts his hat on again; his security blanket. "You're the most important person to me in the world, if I think about it."

  That brings tears to my eyes. "You're important to me, too. Very."

  He bites his thumbnail, then looks at me and grins. "Is this the part where we have a slightly awkward snog?"

  I grin back. "I don't think we should."

  "No, probably not." He jumps to his feet, and holds out his hand to me. "I would still like to shag you, though."

  I take his hand, and scramble up. "Course you would. You're a man and I'm a woman. It's your biological inclination to spread your seed."

  Which is when I think again about the no babies thing. Of course I've told him about my visit to the gynae, but I didn't mention how evasive she was about the lack of pregnancies, because I know what Nick's like; he'll start investigating, and looking up sites he's not supposed to, via all his clever secret squirrel methods that I'm not convinced are a hundred per cent bulletproof, and we could find ourselves popping up from under a radar we'd rather avoid.

  Now, though, I tell him what I saw, what the gynae said, and what I thought, more because he's the only person in the world with whom I can have a proper conversation, than anything else.

  "It is weird," he says. "Maybe we shouldn't dismiss the words of Mr Meth-Head. Just because he was off his trolley, it doesn't mean he wasn't right."

  "D'you think so?"

  "The evidence suggests that he had a point, doesn't it? Might be worth keeping an eye on, at least."

  He takes my hand as we walk off. Conversation moves on from Hope, because it's a depressing subject and the sun is shining; we want to feel like we're still Nick and Lita, not The Homeless. He talks about why he never had a girlfriend all the time we were in the flat, though I haven't asked; it's clear he just wants to tell me.

  "It's because I lived with you. I didn't feel lonely. Living with you was the best of both worlds, like having a girlfriend, but I could still play video games until the early hours and wear the same socks for four days running without being moaned at. The only downside was that we weren't shagging, of course." We laugh. "But there was Claire and Jessica. I didn't do too badly."

  I feel happy walking along with him, hand in hand. It feels right. Are we just friends clinging together in a storm, or could there be something more? I can't work it out.

  A gust of wind chills me, for a moment, and I shiver; I get that odd feeling again, like months back when I was on Brancaster beach with Brody, when everything had started to go bad and I didn't want to tell him. Like there's not much time left. I don't know why, but I tell Nick.

  We don't do feelings, generally; our conversation tends to revolve around observation, snark, and taking the mickey out of each other. But we're close today, so I open my mouth and let the words come out.

  "A sense of impending doom, eh? That's just general anxiety. Mum used to get it all the time, when I was away." He shakes his head, and smiles to himself. "She'd convince herself that I was going to be involved in a fatal accident abroad, or that she would be diagnosed with a terminal illness and peg it before I could get back to hold her hand in her dying moments. The doctor gave her meds and she went to a therapist―didn't work. Then I came home, she met twat-face Gazza, and it disappeared of its own accord. I think she was just lonely, and didn't have enough to do. At the time, though, she was sure something catastrophic was about to happen."

  Nick's got this way of making me feel better about stuff. The dark clouds lift.

  We reach 'our' shop.

  "Hello, you two!" says Friendly Shop Lady. "W
hat can I get for you today?"

  Nick stocks up on nuts, trail mix and flavoured water for our return journey, and I chat to her about the fact that she's always open on a Sunday.

  "There would be a few complaints if I wasn't. We're so far off the beaten track; there's not so much as an off-licence for miles, and it means people can buy fresh veg if they've forgotten something for their Sunday lunch." She nods her head at her small selection of vegetables, some of which are sprouting roots. "The business has been in our family for fifty years. People appreciate having a real village shop, not another Nu-Mart Local, especially the older folk who remember a time before everyone had to drive out to those monstrosities on the dual carriageway, just to get a bag of groceries." She busies herself filling up the bagged sweets display. "You two from that Hope place, are you?"

  I glance at Nick, and he laughs.

  "Oh dear, is it obvious?"

  She smiles. "Well, you don't live around here, and I only see you on Sundays, so I guessed. It's alright, that's your business. I don't need to know why you're there. I've seen plenty of you out this way since it opened, ooh, about four years ago, now."

  I smile. "We thought we were the only people who came out this far."

  "No, no, not at all. There was one couple, I can't remember their names now―she used to talk to me about what had happened to them. Such a sad story. He'd lost his job, they couldn't pay their rent, none of the family were prepared to take them in long-term; that's the trouble, isn't it? These days, you get a bit of bad luck, and it's a downward spiral."

  I nod. "And once you get on that downward spiral, it's impossible to get off it."

  "Well, the Welfare State's all gone to pot. And of course they're knocking the council houses down to build new apartment blocks on the sites, hundreds of rabbit hutches, four storeys high―that's what this chap who works for the local council told me, anyway. Don't know who's going to be living in them. And there aren't the jobs any more, are there? You go into a supermarket, you have to serve yourself. I go to the bank, I pay the week's takings into a machine. You need help from an advisor, you have to press a button and talk to some bloke on a screen, except it’s not even a human being! My son told me; they’re just those computer people, like on video games, aren’t they? But they look so real!”