The Outside Child

by Nina Bawden

  Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie hardly ever quarrelled. I leaned out of the window. “Hey,” I said. “Hey! I’m here. I’m not a tree or a plant. I’ve got ears. What’s it all about?”

  They both looked up and saw me. Aunt Sophie walked down the garden and stood under the window. She said, “I thought you went to see Plato.”

  Her voice was reproachful. I said, “I came back.”

  “So I see.”

  She was frowning. I said sarcastically, “Do you mean I ought to shout and stamp about when I come in, just in case you’re talking about me?”

  She said, “Hush, dear. Of course not.” I saw her glance at next door and wondered if Pig Maureen was listening. That turned me cold. I slammed down the window.

  *

  I lay with my face squashed in the pillow. Aunt Bill sat on my bed. She said, “I’m sorry, pet. My poor pettikins.”

  She stroked my hair and I jerked away. “Don’t pity me,” I said. “I’m not a baby. I’ve got all my mental faculties. I just want to know.”

  “Sophie said she did her best to explain.”

  I said, through gritted teeth, “SHE doesn’t want me to see my own brother and sister. So you don’t want me to see them, either. Why not? Are you afraid of HER? Does she hate me? How can she hate me if she doesn’t know me?”

  I swivelled round on the pillow and reared up a bit. I could see my red face in the mirror, screwed up and blotchy. My hair looked nice, though; sun-streaked brown, thick and shiny. I sat up properly and combed it with my fingers and shook it round my shoulders. Aunt Bill watched me with a sad expression. I wished I could squeeze out a few tears, but my eyes were quite dry. I put my head on one side and made my voice shake a bit. “I honestly don’t understand.”

  “Then don’t try. It’s not worth it,” Aunt Bill said, still looking sad but sounding much brisker. “It’s nothing but silliness. Ordinary human silliness. Nothing more.”

  And I knew that was all she was going to tell me.

  *

  Plato’s mother answered when I rang Sunday morning. She said in her waily voice—waily, partly because she is foreign, but mostly because she is that sort of person—“Oh, Jane, I cannot disturb Plato while he is doing his homework.”

  That was rubbish, of course. Plato could do the soppy kid’s homework they are given in his class in a blindfold and strait-jacket and still hold six separate conversations and play a game of chess on the side. The fact was, Mrs Jones couldn’t bear anyone to divert his attention from her at weekends; she would keep him away from school during the week and make him play Scrabble with her all day, if it wasn’t against the law.

  I said brightly, “That’s all right, Mrs Jones, I quite understand, and it doesn’t matter. I’m going to a gig with Aunt Sophie and we’ll be passing your block, so I can easily drop a note in for him.”

  I wrote, DIER PLETU, NU LACK ET HUMI. BIGON UPIRETOUN TACKIR.

  A simple vowel substitution code was quite complicated enough to fool Mrs Jones. I didn’t put LUVIJENI all the same. Even someone whose brain had been softened with television soaps could crack that!

  I put the letter in an envelope and wrote PLATO JONES VERY PRIVATE AND PERSONAL in huge letters. Then I stuck just the tip of the flap down very lightly so that Mrs Jones could open it easily. I had no evidence that she was given to spying, like Plato, but it seemed wise to make sure.

  Aunt Sophie and Aunt Bill sat in the front seats and I got in the back with the drums. I had to sit with my knees jammed against my ears, and when we got to Plato’s block I could barely move. This gave me a good idea. I crept up the path to the front entrance with my right leg collapsing beneath me, shoved the letter through the slit, pressed the Jones’s buzzer, and limped back to the car. “You all right, pet?” Aunt Bill asked, observing my crab-like approach.

  “Fine,” I said, with a grave, martyred smile. “Just a tummy ache. I expect it’ll go off in a minute.”

  I made to open the rear door, and winced. “I don’t want to miss the gig,” I gasped. “But I don’t want to hold you up, either. It’s only one of my cramps. It always gets better if I walk for a bit.”

  I knew the Aunts were too polite to question me about this. Aunt Sophie looked thoughtful, as if she were checking out a few dates in her head, but Aunt Bill was simply concerned. “You all right to walk home alone? Want me to come with you?”

  I shook my head gallantly, backing away from the car, waving and grinning. Aunt Bill poked her head through the window and shouted the usual instructions about going straight home and being careful crossing the main road. I stuck my thumbs in my ears and waggled my fingers to show that these boring messages had been received and understood, and she smote her chest with her fist and rolled her eyes, miming her apology for being so fussy.

  As soon as Rattlebones had clattered round the corner, I straightened up and sped home. Aunt Sophie had drawn the blinds against the sun and the light inside the house was watery green. I saw myself in the long hall mirror and thought I looked like a mermaid under the water. I swam with my arms and swayed my hips, keeping my legs pressed together to make a tail.

  I was embarrassed about what I was going to do. Since I had been old enough to put my own clothes away, neither Aunt Bill nor Aunt Sophie had opened my cupboards or drawers. I had never needed to worry about leaving a diary or a notebook lying about; they would never look at something private, not even a holiday postcard that was not addressed to them! They would be horrified to think I might behave differently.

  Aunt Sophie’s desk was in the music room. It was very neat. Each drawer was labelled—HOUSEHOLD EXPENSES, INSURANCE, GIGS, CAR DOCUMENTS—and as far as I could tell had the right papers inside. There was a drawer labelled EQUIPMENT that had boxes of staples and rolls of sticky tape and packets of pens. And one labelled PERSONAL that was locked.

  That surprised me to start with. Then shocked me. No one locked drawers—or doors, except the bathroom door—in our house.

  I knew what was in the drawer because I had often seen it open when Aunt Sophie was busy at her desk. She kept letters from friends there, birthday cards that people had sent her, a brown envelope that had a piece of my baby hair inside tied with red ribbon, and my mother’s wedding ring in a flat velvet box, which she was keeping for me when I was older. What else? What was it she didn’t want me see? She would never lock the drawer against Aunt Bill. She trusted Aunt Bill.

  I felt my face growing hot. Well, she was right not to trust me, it seemed. And yet, as I thought about it, the fact that she had locked the drawer made me feel less ashamed. Since she didn’t trust me, there was no need for me to feel bad about behaving like someone who wasn’t trustworthy.

  The more I thought about it, the more indignant I felt. I had never before looked through Aunt Sophie’s private things and she should have known that. How horrible of her to lock her drawer as if I were that sort of prying person. That I was prying now was nothing to do with it: she had thought about it before I had done it!

  I wished I could pick the lock. Plato had told me that he knew how to open locks with one of his mother’s credit cards, but Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie refused to use what they called ‘plastic money’. Except for the bills that came through the post, like gas and electricity, they paid cash for everything.

  Besides, if I had had a credit card I wouldn’t have known how to pick a lock with it. My education in that sort of skill has been severely neglected.

  I rattled the drawer a few times but it wouldn’t budge. I thought the top of the desk looked somehow different. Emptier. Something missing. The telephone was there, and the blotter, and some sheets of music with Aunt Sophie’s latest composition half-finished, and her beautiful glass paper weight that had a waterlily pattern inside it, and the wooden foot roller that she used to massage her feet when she had been standing a long time and drumming, and the red leather diary I had given her as part of last year’s Christmas present.

  Of course, that was it! The diary w
as there, but not the matching address book. When I wrote to my father, I sent the letter to the ship, but if he had a wife and children then he must have a house or a flat …

  And Aunt Sophie had guessed I would want to know where!

  I chuckled as I went upstairs. “Start by assuming he lives in London until we’ve proved otherwise,” Plato had said. “Near the London docks, not too far from Southampton. Lots of big ships used to dock at Tilbury, some cruise ships still do. Plenty of sailors living in the East End of London. Missions to seamen.”

  Aunt Bill’s room is always higgledy-piggledy and smelling of turpentine. The thistle picture was on the easel and I thought it was lovely; yellow and glowing as if there were a light behind it. (I wish I could paint like Aunt Bill, or compose, like Aunt Sophie, but I am hopeless at music and art. All I can do is write stories.)

  In Aunt Bill’s drawers, socks and underwear and sweaters were all tangled together. I tugged at the toe of a pair of green tights and most of the things in the drawer came tumbling out, clothes and papers meshed up like a huge, untidy bird’s nest. Right at the bottom there was a postcard of Brighton from me, sent years and years ago one summer Aunt Sophie and I had gone to the sea on our own. It was written in pencil, in joined-up letters, but before I could spell. ‘Deer Rnt Bill, I am hevin a nic tim. I hope you r well.’

  I thought it was sweet of Aunt Bill to have kept this juvenile effort, although there was nothing else in her drawers to remind her of me; no other postcards or letters, not even a photograph. This surprised me for a minute because Aunt Bill never threw anything out in the ordinary way. Then I remembered that every now and again, when Aunt Sophie went on a cleaning binge, Aunt Bill would heave a lot of stuff into a cardboard box and carry it up to the attic.

  “Out of sight, out of mind,” she would say, because Aunt Sophie hasn’t been up to the attic for years, not since the time she found a family of bats living there. “Dear little creatures,” Aunt Bill called them, but Aunt Sophie was terrified they would fly at her and get trapped in her hair.

  Where bats are concerned—and mice, and spiders, and snakes—I come midway between Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie. I am not frightened, but I can live without them quite happily. So I was relieved, on the whole, when I creaked open the door of the attic and nothing scurried or fluttered. It was very peaceful; dusty light shafting in through the dormer window, and the only sound a soft ticking from the water tank in the corner. There was a dressmaker’s dummy that had belonged to Aunt Sophie’s mother. Otherwise, everything in this little room under the rafters belonged to Aunt Bill: suitcases with broken catches, old picture frames, stacks of canvases, a trunk labelled OLD CLOTHES USEFUL FOR GARDENING and, of course, lots of brimming full cardboard boxes.

  There were boxes of Aunt Bill’s old shoes—running shoes gone at the toes, and leather sandals that had lost straps or buckles. There was a box with a dead-looking fur squashed into it, a coat someone had given Aunt Bill that she wouldn’t wear because of cruelty to animals, but had thought it unkind to refuse; several boxes of coloured pebbles from the sea shore, and others with cracked jugs and plates that she sometimes used when she was painting a still life. The rest were full of a jumble of rubbish; bits of string, half-used packets of gardening labels, and dried-up tubes of paint, as if she had emptied out an untidy drawer in a hurry when Aunt Sophie was on the war path. There were photographs, too; some old and yellowing, some still in the envelopes as they had come from the chemist.

  “Look for clues,” Plato had said. “Clues to your past.”

  I wasn’t sure I would know a clue when I saw it. But I had plenty of time. I sat on the floor, emptied the boxes around me, and looked through the things carefully, sorting them out a bit as I put them back because, although I am nowhere as neat as Aunt Sophie, I don’t care for muddle.

  I had seen most of the photographs before. The most interesting ones were pictures of Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie when they were babies held by their mothers—the twin sisters who were exactly alike—and of their two fathers, who were not alike at all. Aunt Bill’s father was a huge man with short arms, a bit like a bear. Aunt Sophie’s father was wispy and delicate. There were pictures of the Aunts as little girls, years ago in the war, with the fathers in uniform and the mothers in hats, and pictures of them paddling at the seaside with their dresses tucked in their knickers. The only pictures of me were discards. Either the light had got in, or I had moved out of focus. Aunt Bill, who had taken them, had stuck all the good ones into the album that was kept with the World Atlas and the Encyclopedia Britannica and other tall books on the bottom shelf of the bookcase in the sitting room.

  *

  And that was where I found the first clue to my past. Not locked away, not hidden at all, but where it had always been, where I could always have found it if I had known where to look. Or known there was something to look for.

  *

  Aunt Bill had always taken a picture of me on my birthday, which is the second of May, beside the cherry tree that was planted the year I was born and has grown up with me. Whenever we looked at these pictures, she always remarked on the tree, how much faster it grew than a human child, and I suppose that had stopped me from seeing the clue that had been under my nose all the time.

  Even now I didn’t see it immediately. I was just flipping over the pages. My first birthday, my second birthday, my fourth birthday, my fifth birthday (wearing my new school clothes and carrying a new satchel), my sixth birthday (with a gap between my front teeth), my seventh birthday …

  It was only then that I realised. I turned back to check. My third birthday was missing.

  Chapter Four

  Although I rang and rang, Plato’s number was always busy, and so I had plenty of time to work out what to say in Backspeak. When I finally got him, I said it, “On emit klat ni edoc,” and heard him giggle.

  He said. “That’s okay, she can’t hear. But I’ve got no time for games, either. I’m trying to work through the phone book while she’s in the bath. There are hundreds of Tuckers. Nineteen E. Tuckers. Does he have another initial?”

  “I don’t know.” I felt silly, admitting this. I said, “I can ask the Aunts when they come back from the gig.”

  “Give me patience!” he said, “You don’t need to ask. Look for your birth certificate, dopey! That might give us a clue about where he lives, too. It would say where he lived when you were born, anyway. He might not have moved. Or not far away. Hang about—I think I can hear the bath water.” He lowered his voice and said, putting on a Welsh accent, “This is Jones the Spy signing off. Over and out.”

  *

  Typical Plato! So keen to say what he had been up to that he left no space for me to say what I had found out. Just as talking in code was only a “game” when he was too busy to play it. Or too busy playing his own game. Jones the Spy. That was because in the Welsh valley his father came from there were so many people called Jones that they had to be set apart from one another. The postman was Jones the Post, the fishmonger, Jones the Fish, and Plato’s Uncle Emlyn, who was a teacher, was Jones the School.

  I was fed up with myself as well as with Plato. I should have thought of my birth certificate. The stupid thing was, I had seen it last year when Aunt Sophie had sent off for my passport before I went to France on the school camping holiday. But I hadn’t looked at it properly. I hadn’t been interested. I wasn’t suspicious, like Plato. I hadn’t needed to be, until now.

  My passport was in my room, but Aunt Sophie had kept the birth certificate. Since I hadn’t seen it when I went through her desk, it had to be in the PERSONAL drawer. Which was locked.

  I looked at my passport. Beside Place of Birth, it said London. As soon as I saw this, it seemed that I had known it all along, and I could have kicked myself for not remembering it earlier. I must be such a dim, unnoticing person! Plato would be right to despise me! Though he would be glad to know he was on the right track, wading through the London telephone directory.


  I rattled the knob of the PERSONAL drawer but it wouldn’t budge. I pulled out the drawer above. There was a piece of board beneath it, covering the locked drawer, but there was a gap at the back and my hand was small enough to slip through. I could feel the edge of a plastic folder and the edge of an envelope. The folder was too wide and too stiff to come through the gap but the envelope was softer and narrower, and although I scraped my knuckles quite badly, I managed to wriggle it out without tearing it.

  It was a plain brown envelope marked MARGARET’S PAPERS.

  Margaret was my mother. Margaret Alisoun Tucker. I had always thought it odd that my father had not given me one of her names to remember her by. Perhaps he had thought it would be unlucky, when she had died so sadly, so young.

  Her birth certificate was there, her marriage certificate, and her death certificate. There was nothing wrong in my seeing these things, but because I was snooping I felt uncomfortable and only glanced at them quickly. Her driving licence was there, and a couple of library tickets, and a piece of paper that said she had passed her bronze life-saving medal. I thought this was an odd assortment of things and I wondered who had put them into the envelope; the writing on it wasn’t my father’s and it wasn’t Aunt Sophie’s. I shook the envelope and several more tickets fell out—green ones and white ones, like tickets from the cleaner or the shoe repairer—and, last of all, my birth certificate, folded up small. When I opened it, I saw that it had been torn into quarters and then mended with sticky tape. I wondered who had done that and why, and then I remembered that the certificate Aunt Sophie had sent to the passport office last year had not looked like this one, patched and grubby, but clean and new with the words typed instead of handwritten.

  This certificate must be the original one and the other a copy. Perhaps Aunt Sophie had thought the old one too messy. Or perhaps she hadn’t been able to find it. I thought that the court must have wanted my birth certificate when I was adopted, so it was possible that Aunt Sophie had been to Somerset House where the records are kept and had the copy made then.