Pagan and her parents

by Michael Arditti

  ‘That was when she told me that the same thing had happened to her.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She said that her father – her adopted father – had interfered with her.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’ I won’t believe it … It is all too believable. Is that why you never named Pagan’s father? Is he yours? Are the sins of the fathers alive in the wombs of the daughters? The idea is absurd; it defies both credence and chronology … when Pagan was born, you had not seen him for ten years. Or had you …? My thoughts turn on surprise visits and forced entries. The future contracts and the past fills with fearful possibilities.

  ‘She said she’d never told anyone, as though I’d feel honoured. But we’d just met. I couldn’t take it in. It was my day off.’

  I spin in a spiral of betrayal; the ties of a twenty-year friendship have slipped loose. In despair of romance, I romanticised our relationship; but what was it worth when you denied me the most fundamental fact of your being? Were you too ashamed? Did you picture yourself as a Lilith or Lolita luring him to destruction? Did you take on yourself all the stigma of woman and the depravity of men? For the first time, the wrist-slitting side of your character makes sense. Is that what you feared: not that I would fail to understand but that I would understand too well … that I would lay you on a threadbare couch and analyse away your mystery? Now that child abuse has filled the place of original sin, were the associations too banal?

  ‘I wish she’d never told me … is that cruel? I’m sorry. I wish you’d never told me; I have a home to go back to tonight. What did she want from me? I know the answer. But how could I be a second mother to her? I couldn’t even be a first. I had two daughters, Sheila and Louise. They were fourteen and twelve, on the brink of everything. I had to protect them. And me … what sort of life do you think I had stuck in the shop all day? Varicose veins and corns, in a word. I couldn’t even put my feet up at night; there was always something to cook or clean. And then there was Andrew. He knew nothing … he still knows nothing. I always meant to tell him, but it was never the right time. Until, after a time, it became impossible; it would have made our whole marriage seem like a lie. Do you think I did wrong?’

  ‘It isn’t a case of right and wrong.’ I resent her plea for sympathy.

  ‘But, if I’d kept her with me, none of it would have happened.’

  ‘What about your father? Parents can abuse their children, whatever the circumstance. You’re the proof.’

  ‘But hers used it against her. She mentioned a time when she was a kid, just six or seven years old. She was trying to push him away, so she told him that he shouldn’t touch her. It wasn’t right; he was her daddy. And he said it didn’t count because she was adopted. They weren’t related; they didn’t share the same blood.’

  I excuse myself and head for the lavatory, clinging to the wall as though aboard ship. Once inside, I turn the taps on full blast and shriek. I forget about the concealed cubicles and am startled by a flush. I loudly clear my throat to appease the emerging occupant, trilling a couple of scales as he washes his hands. Unconvinced, he peers in the mirror as if to determine whether I am musical or mad. I flash a smile, and he cowers as though it were a penis. He hurries out, leaving me the freedom of the basin. I splash my face, but I fail to clear my head, which is bursting with memories of you.

  I see you lying, sprawled on scarcely ruffled sheets, your naked breasts gilded by the hazy Venetian sun. ‘Sex is nothing to write home about,’ you declare; and I picture my mother reading the postcard. ‘Who wouldn’t swap the squelch and sweat of sex for the warmth of friendship?’ … I realise now that this is no guff to console me for my impotence but a cry from the heart.

  ‘Sex is power,’ you say later, months later … years later, as both a caution and a creed. ‘Your mistake is to confuse it with love, or even with passion.’

  ‘What about with pleasure?’

  ‘You’re squandering your most valuable asset. You should take pleasure in what you can do with sex, not in the sex itself.’ I wince as the wit curls with desperation. I flinch from your bitter smile as you scrawl ‘premature ejaculation’ in response to a Cosmopolitan questionnaire on what a woman most looks for in a lover. Is this what your father has done to you? At last, I understand the men who take the law into their own hands and shoot their children’s attackers, although, in this case, he should turn the gun on himself. I start to think in tabloid headlines. I want Old Testament morality with New Testament modifications … not just an eye for an eye but a head on a plate.

  I return to your mother, who is gazing like a gypsy into her teacup, although, on inspection, the cup is empty and her eyes are blank. She sniffs a smile at me.

  ‘I had to make myself hard. I had to act as though Mother was the last name anyone would call me. I was scared. I told her the truth to get rid of her but she seemed to feel closer … like we’d been through something together that we’d been through apart … like she wanted me not as a mother but as a sister.’

  ‘She was able to adjust that quickly?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean blood, but like women talk about in lectures, in London. She poured out her heart and I wanted to listen, but I was expecting the girls home from school; all I could hear was the clock. As it turned out, Sheila walked in just as she was leaving. “Who was that?” she asked; and my brain went like a sponge. So I said she was selling cosmetics. “Looks like she could do with some herself,” she replied … well, of course, her eyes were red and black from crying. And I slapped her, hard across the leg. She looked at me in amazement … believe me, I never raised a finger to my girls. I slapped her, and, the way she looked at me, I was sure she knew. For weeks – or was it months? it felt longer – I lived in fear of every knock at the door. But she said she’d say nothing to anyone and she was as good as her word. That was the only time I ever saw her. I came across some of her pictures in a magazine; I cut one out and stuck it on the fridge. But Andrew took it down. He doesn’t like anything gloomy. He says he gets enough of that at work.’

  ‘So how do we stop it happening again to Pagan?’

  ‘There are people: doctors, policemen, social workers … they didn’t have so many people when it was me.’

  ‘No one believes me. They think I’m out to make trouble. But if you told them what she’d said to you.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t. You promised … one meeting.’

  ‘Your husband need never know.’

  ‘What about letters and papers and … no, you’ve no right. It was forty years ago – next year’ll be forty years – I met her for two hours in forty years.’

  ‘Pagan is six years old; Pagan is today and tomorrow.’

  ‘What can I tell them? Joan … Candida is dead. I have no proof … no authority.’

  ‘You have a mother’s authority.’

  ‘I’m not her mother! I’m just the woman who gave her birth.’ She looks down. ‘I’ve never been to court in my life.’

  The waiter brings a pot of fresh tea, which he pours with extended ceremony. He leaves; neither of us lifts a cup.

  ‘I’d best be going. I have to catch the six ten. I’ll be back in time to fetch Andrew his supper.’

  ‘Does he know you’ve come … shopping?’

  ‘He thinks I’m staying late with my father. He’s in a home in Huntingdon.’

  ‘You still see him?’

  ‘I’ve told you. I go every week.’

  ‘I don’t understand how you can.’

  ‘He’s eighty-five; I’m all that he has. He never touched me after … after…. He never even kissed me on my wedding day. There’s a picture of him and my mum outside the church and all you can see is their clothes. Andrew likes him. They used to play chess and argue about the news. He said he should move in with us when my mum died, but I was having none of it. Not with –’

  ‘Sheila and Louise?’

  ‘When things got too much for him to manage on his own, he went into the home. And
I go by every Thursday, so that they don’t start taking him for granted. No matter what they’ve done, no one should be taken for granted.’

  ‘But you’ll miss this week.’

  ‘I popped in yesterday after I’d finished in Stamford. He was in disgrace; he’d misbehaved in a game of charades.’

  ‘Cheated?’

  ‘Worse. He’d taken off all his clothes to demonstrate Naked Video. I didn’t know where to look.’

  ‘You were there?’

  ‘When the matron was telling me. It was during the WI afternoon on Sunday. The ladies were very shocked. He’s eighty-five.’

  ‘So you said.’

  ‘Such a silly title, when there are so many others to choose from. It has to be TV for the old folk. So why not Through the Keyhole or Surprise Surprise?’

  ‘I suppose they thought they were safe with the over-eighties.’

  Her face darkens. ‘No one’s ever safe.’

  ‘And yet you still visit him?’

  ‘He’s my father; I’m his daughter. That’s all that’s left.’

  ‘I don’t understand anything any more.’

  ‘Best not to try. All I know is that time’s so short … Andrew retires in three years; my next-door neighbour’s already made her Christmas pudding. I have four grandchildren; I want to be able to enjoy them growing up.’ She stands. ‘I’d better go now. You’ve no idea what a thrill it’s been for me to meet you. I just wish it could have been … well, you know. If I told my friends, they’d think I must have won a competition. Not that I can tell them. It’s another secret. I’ve lived with so many secrets. I used to think they’d tear me to pieces; now I feel they’re holding me in place.’

  A moment later, there is nothing to show for her presence but some crumbs by her plate, a smear of lipstick on her napkin and a confusion in my mind. I picture your family tree turning in on itself like a weeping willow. Images coalesce of you and Pagan and your father … your two fathers: the one stripping off in the residents’ lounge and the other clutching Pagan in the swimming pool … ‘Open your legs. Kick like a dog. Close your mouth. The water’s to swim in, not drink.’ He strides in further; she screams. ‘It doesn’t count,’ he insists, ‘we’re not related.’ I watch helplessly from the edge as he drags her into the deep end. ‘Don’t be a baby. Open your legs …’

  3

  December 1993 … March 1994 … June 1994 … even March 1995: your pills have outlived you but not their potency. I empty a bottle in my hand and weigh the prospects of deliverance. I have an irresistible urge to taste one: to enjoy a foretaste of oblivion: to suck on the teat of death and swallow the sweetness. I wish that I had faith and could believe that, by taking them, I would be somewhere else tomorrow; I wish that I could believe that tomorrow was already somewhere else today; I wish that I could translate my sense of the continuity of life into the eternity of God. But the hopes of my childhood now sound as hollow as the hymns.

  I toy with the concept of rebirth. I would be happy to trust to karma and come back as a lama in Tibet or even a llama in Peru. Then I remember Imogen in her Buddhist incarnation chiding you for swatting a fly.

  ‘It might be your mother.’

  ‘Don’t tempt me,’ you say and redouble the attack.

  Memories cloud my mind … and my purpose. I promised that when your life became irreversibly horizontal, when it shrank to a round of bed-baths and pans and sores, I would feed you the pills. Death would be the final bond of a lifelong friendship, murder the consummate act of love. But, when the time came, you were unable to signal your wishes. I refused to risk all on the ambiguity of an eyelid; defying your desires, I demanded that the doctors found ways to keep you alive. With no hope of cure, I pinned my hopes on remission. It was not so much your death that I could not face as my life without you. Is this the chance to atone for my betrayal?

  I turn to Pagan. How many pills would it take to release her, while leaving enough for me? To miscalculate would be too dreadful to contemplate. I feel sure that this is what you would want … and yet the last time that I heard your voice – your own voice and not the synthesised sibilance of the computer – was when you saw her stretching for some capsules which I had left on the chest. She was counting them out like jujubes. I rushed upstairs just in time to prevent her putting them in her mouth. Your head was writhing on the pillow, your lips were blue and covered in spume. It was as if so much strength went into that final warning that you never uttered another sound.

  I need to hear your voice again; I need a sign. Will you make the leap from my memory to my imagination? Will you prove that there is an after-life, if only in my mind? Help me. Give me a flash of inspiration so extraordinary that I know that it can only come from you.

  Nothing … I sit and wait but there is nothing; my imagination is as empty as my life. I have not felt so helpless since Donald Coombes used to lie in wait for me at the school gates and my mother told me that I was big enough to fight my own battles. But what can I do about Pagan’s? No one will let me take up arms on her behalf. I have failed her … I have failed you. You should have entrusted her to Tristan and Deborah or Fergus and Penny or any of the other couples who offered. With them, she would have been protected by the law; with me, she is denied basic justice. I have no right of appeal. My morals are despised, my motives compromised. How can someone so limp-wristed point a finger at anyone else? Since meeting your mother, I understand better than ever why you left Pagan with me; but the very thing that made me safe in your eyes makes me suspect to the rest of the world.

  My fears take flesh as I watch Pagan toss in her sleep, clenching her fists into powerless punches. I wipe beads of sweat off her forehead and blow wisps of hair from her eyes. ‘Forward … fast forward,’ she shouts; once again, the late-night video is whirling. Is it fanciful to speculate on the films that she is seeing? Are they suitable for all or do they demand parental guidance? Who shot them? Who is showing them? Who has censored them? What home horror movies are playing on her mind? As she bangs her teddy bear on the pillow and flings it out of bed, I visualise the daddy bear disturbing her dreams.

  I take her in my arms and try to clear her head without waking her. She shies away as though she senses my maleness before she identifies me … as though your father has filled her with an indiscriminate fear of men. I cannot let her go through life with your confusions, fixed in her sexual distastes by the age of six.

  ‘Men are animals, Leo. They fuck women and fight each other. The processes are the same; they just involve different parts of the body. I realised when I went to the bare-knuckle boxing with Brian.’

  I identify seven stages of sexual awareness: curiosity; naughtiness; game; passion; obsession; depravity; incapacity. The ideal is to settle in the middle. But what of those who start too young or peak too soon?

  I fear that your parents are taking steps to stop me seeing Pagan. Their latest complaint concerns our visit to the paediatrician, which she let slip, in spite of all my warnings, when your mother took her to the doctor to find out why she was not eating and she said that she had already been to one the week before with me … This evening, when I go to fetch her, I am attacked.

  ‘You have no right to take her to see anyone without our permission.’

  ‘I was concerned about her; I wanted a professional opinion.’

  ‘So you creep off to a doctor?’ Your father sneers as though at a schoolboy sneak.

  ‘And would you like to know what he found? She had a bruised and dilated anus and scars on her hymen.’ Your mother covers Pagan’s ears; she squirms as though they were pincers. ‘It’s not Pagan’s ears that are hurt.’

  ‘Patience! Patience!’

  ‘There’s a word for men like you,’ your father says, ‘who foul up your own lives and see foulness everywhere, who sully our decency with your perversions. It’s a word that begins with a “c”.’ I think of the obvious. ‘Cad!’ He takes me by surprise.

  ‘What’s dilated?’ your m
other asks. Pagan slips free and runs to me.

  ‘Dilated like a gaping wound; dilated like something’s been forced inside.’

  ‘Suppositories,’ your mother exclaims in triumph. ‘Patience has been constipated and I gave her suppositories.’ I have never seen a suppository and try to picture the size. ‘I used to give them to her mother and uncle. Ask William, he’ll tell you.’

  ‘Gladly. Will you give me his number?’

  ‘And as for scars … she fights when I try to insert them. I have to force her. I may have caught her with my nails. You see,’ she turns to Pagan. ‘I told you not to wriggle. Now look at all the trouble you’ve caused.’

  ‘So who applied them? You or your husband?’

  ‘Me, of course. Father has never so much as changed a nappy. He can’t bear anything to do with the t-o-i-1-e-t.’

  ‘Pagan will say otherwise, won’t you, darling? Just tell your grandmother what you told me.’ She stands quaking. ‘No one’s going to punish you. You can say whatever you like.’

  ‘They most certainly will punish her if she tells lies.’ Your father cracks his knuckles like a whip. ‘She has to be taught to tell the truth.’ She starts to cry.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ I accuse him.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ your mother accuses me. ‘Patience, come to Granny.’

  ‘Pagan, stay where you are.’

  She shrinks from us both and runs from the room.

  ‘See, she can’t face the truth,’ your father says. ‘She’s trying it on. She says the worst thing she can think of because she knows you’ll believe it. It’s what you want to hear.’

  ‘How does she know what to say? She’s six years old!’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he put her up to it,’ your mother says, ‘putting lies in her mouth to try and scare us and then repeating them to the lawyers. Well it won’t work.’

  ‘Can’t you see how unhappy she is? Doesn’t that worry you, if nothing else?’