by Jane Davis
They gave my grandchild away.
She wouldn't talk about it.
I was interrupted by the doorbell. As I reluctantly walked down the stairs, photographs still in hand, I heard Lydia yell, 'Yoo-hoo,' through the letter box. After it clattered shut, the outline of her head appeared in the frosted window.
'Hello there!' she said as if surprised to find me at home. 'Thought I'd drop by and see if anything needs doing. Haven't seen you these last few days, love.'
'Here I am.'
'You busy? Shall we have a cuppa? I've brought some milk and biccies.'
I could tell that she wasn't going to take no for an answer. To tell the truth, I liked Lydia's motiveless fussing. We had no particular history and there was no reason for her to drop round other than neighbourly concern, but she had picked an awkward moment.
As we stood in the hall, I watched her eyes register the changes that I had made to the framed family tree. I could see that she was trying not to frown.
'Oh, I see you've . . .' She nodded, ending the sentence with an explanatory cough.
One evening, I had taken the family tree out of its frame and inserted the date of my parents' death. It had seemed a respectful thing to do at the time. Seeing Lydia's reaction, I wondered if I had been right.
'You don't think—' I began.
'No, no,' she butted in, 'it's just seeing it there in black and white. Bit of a shock, that's all. Wasn't expecting it.'
I stood in the hall looking at my handiwork while she unloaded a carton of milk and some chocolate digestives on to the kitchen work surface and filled the kettle. I tried to visualize the next update and couldn't think for the life of me how to make the entry for my mother's son – my half-brother, if what I was beginning to suspect was true.
She changed the subject. 'It's lovely out. You should have a once-round the park if you get the chance.'
'Can't. I've started tidying my parents' room.'
She looked at me with a mixture of surprise and distaste. 'Isn't it a bit early for that, love? Surely it can wait until the dust has settled.'
'Actually, no.' I took a seat at the kitchen table and looked downwards. 'The house has got to go on the market to pay for Nana's care and, because of what's happened, everyone wants it looking as impersonal as possible.'
'Who's this everyone?' She puffed herself up with outrage. 'This is your home, love! Where will you go?' She sat down on the chair next to mine. My mother's chair.
I shrugged. What happened to me seemed unimportant in the scheme of things.
Her hand folded over mine. 'Are you even working at the moment?'
'No, but they keep on paying me.' I tried the lighthearted approach.
'And this has all been decided, has it? I could murder your lot, you know,' she added as an aside, clawing at fistfuls of air with her hands. 'You've agreed, have you?'
'There was no choice.' I found myself trying to pacify this normally happy-go-lucky soul, but my bravado failed and the tears came.
'Well, it's a proper shame, that's what it is. Ah, come on now.' She circled me with an arm. 'It's more than one soul should have to bear all at the same time. Don't get me wrong, love.' She squeezed. 'I'm so proud of the way you're coping. But it's not what your parents would have wanted for you. I can't do much for you, but I'll have a bed made up for you at ours any time you want it. We've a spare room going to waste and we always like a bit of company. Now let me get you that cup of tea, love.'
To change to subject I asked her how she had met her husband, Bill.
'He was down "sooth" visiting for a weekend. He came back to see me the two weekends after that, and on the third he proposed. I didn't think twice about upping and leaving for Sunderland.'
'That sounds like love at first sight.'
'It was love at first listen, more like. I loved the way he spoke. He called me his bonny lass, his pet. No one had talked to me like that before. How was I to know that was how they all spoke up there?' She nudged me and cackled. 'But I had no regrets. Bill was my rock, you see.
'You know that Kevin's not actually mine?' she twittered. 'My Bill and I got along famously, don't get me wrong, but for some reason we never really hit it off in the bedroom department. I mean, we gave it our best shot, as Bill would say, but nothing happened. So we put in for a child and ended up with Kevin. Two years old, he was. Funny little lad, all these dark curls and a cross little face, like he thought he'd been hard done by. Talking of love at first sight! You grow up thinking that the big love of your life is going to be a man, so it comes as a complete surprise that it turns out to be a child. That you are capable of so much love for one person. I don't give a twaddle that he's not my own, I really don't. I couldn't love him any more than I do.
'I often wonder what he remembers of those first couple of years before he came to us. He'd been fostered but it hadn't worked out. Put with a man with a violent temper on him. They were worried that it might leave him scarred. But I said, "Give him to me and I'll sort him out," and Bill said, "Aye, she will an' all," and they let us take him. He hid behind the armchair in the corner when we got him home. It was as much as I could do to coax him out with a slice of cake. It was about two months before I got a smile out of him and another six months before he let himself go and had a good old belly laugh. I hadn't really noticed that Kevin hadn't laughed until I heard that noise for the first time.' She nudged me. 'Filthy, it was. And the first time he took my hand in his, instead of me having to grab hold of him to cross the road . . .' She sighed and smiled. 'That little hand wrapped around my big, old, clumsy sausage fingers. It was one tiny step at a time with him. He's never been much of a talker – my Bill wasn't either. But when Bill said something, it made you stop and listen. Like it really meant something. I kidded myself into thinking he'd always be there. After he was gone, nothing was right any more. Kevin and me was out of sorts. Sunderland wasn't home without him, so we came back here and lived with my sister for a couple of years while we got our bearings again. That was before we moved in down the road.'
She had been tapping my hand that was covering the photographs. 'That's quite enough about us. What've you got there, then?'
I had to talk to someone and there weren't too many people who dropped in – unannounced or otherwise. She had caught me at a moment of weakness.
'I'm not sure,' I said, taking my hand away to reveal the photos.
'Well, let's have a butcher's.' Lydia took the pile and looked at them one by one, starting with the pictures of the baby on his own. 'Oh, look at the wee bairn.' Her face widened into a smile. 'Who's this little fella? You?' I shook my head and shrugged. 'Oh, what a poppet. Good set of lungs on him, by the look of it and all.' I let her continue but the comments soon subsided. 'Did your mother have a child before she was married to your father?' she asked.
'She was pregnant again when I was quite small. Uncle Pete gave me a photo recently and it was obvious. He said the child was stillborn.'
'Uncle Pete? Now, he's your godfather?'
I pointed to the man in the photos. 'Oh,' she mouthed silently.
'I don't understand why I can't remember.'
'You wouldn't at that age, love. I bet you'll find that you can only really remember the odd few things until you are least five. I know I can't.'
'I have a vague memory,' I started, warming my hands on the sides of the mug of tea. 'I thought it was a dream, but now I'm beginning to think it actually happened. I can't remember everything in detail, it was more the feeling that something was wrong. I was woken up by my mother in the middle of the night and bundled into the car, wrapped in a blanket. I was half asleep, so I don't think I asked where we were going, but I did ask if Daddy was coming with us. She said, "Not this time." After that I only pretended to be asleep. We drove what seemed to be a long way, before my mother pulled over. I heard her say, "I can't do it, I can't do it," a few times before she hit the palms of her hands against the steering wheel and then started crying. I think she sai
d, "I have to do it," at that point. I asked her what was wrong and she said it was nothing and that she would figure everything out. Then she locked me in the car while she went to use a phone box saying that she'd only be a minute.
'She was long enough for me to start to panic that she wasn't coming back for me. I thought that she meant to leave me. I was cold and tired and soon I was crying out for her and banging on the windows. When she came back she told me that we were going home, and that we would have to be very quiet because Daddy was sleeping and we didn't want to wake him up. After she put me to bed, I heard my dad asking where she had been. It wasn't like he was cross. I think he just woke up when she got back into bed. My mother told him that I hadn't been able to sleep so she had taken me out in the car for a drive because that always worked. I knew that my mother had lied to my father and I didn't know why. I can remember feeling sick to my stomach.'
'And you think that this might be the reason?'
'I don't know.' I shook my head. 'I just wonder if everything was quite as perfect as I thought it was.'
'Oh, your parents loved each other.' Lydia dismissed my doubts. 'That much was obvious to everyone.'
'I know.' I thought of them giggling in the car like teenagers on that last day. 'I'm just not sure what happened along the way.'
'Life!' Lydia said. 'It's what happens to all of us. Throws up all sorts of nasty surprises just when you least expect them, I'm afraid.'
Chapter Eleven
My parents hadn't been religious, but the question of whether to have a Christian funeral divided relatives into two distinct camps. Grandma Fellows felt that my father had been raised as a Christian and did not accept that his decisions to marry in a register office and not to have his daughter christened meant that he had rejected his religion. Aunty Faye felt exactly the opposite. Nana, given her presumed state of mind, was not consulted but both sides insisted that she would have given them her full support. They also found my failure to come down for or against either option deeply frustrating. Frankly, I thought that they were all wasting their breath. Nothing could alter what had happened. If there was a God, a concept that I was not very receptive to, and he worked on the basis that how we behave in this life affects our chances in the next, what difference did it make how those of us left behind said our goodbyes? Besides, if I had anything at all to say to God at that time, it certainly wouldn't have been a prayer in the traditional sense of the word.
A black limo collected our party from Aunty Faye's flat, as she felt it best that Nana did not return to the 'family home'. Nana looked immaculate in a black suit, with a pashmina around her shoulders and a pillbox hat. She was so beautifully turned out that it was difficult to remember that she was not quite with it.
'Now, Mum, do you remember where we're going today?' Aunty Faye asked, adjusting the collar of Nana's jacket.
'Tom and Laura's. We're going to Tom and Laura's.'
Aunty Faye looked at me, widening her eyes and raising her eyebrows.
'We used to live together, you know,' Nana confided in me as we walked to the car, showing no sign of recognition. I tucked my hand under her elbow. 'This is my other daughter, Faye. I never had any sons, but I had a grandson once.' It seemed that I had been completely wiped out. Maybe she was aware that there was a delete button to be pressed in the recesses of her mind, but she had hit the wrong one.
As we approached the line of limos, I halted as the twin coffins came into view. An abundance of floral tributes could not disguise them. Suddenly it was all too real. I couldn't pretend this was happening to someone else. In those coffins were the bodies of my parents. And after today even their bodies would be gone. I felt as if I was rolling down that bank at the side of the motorway. I instinctively moved my hand from Nana's arm to my throat, afraid to close my eyes in case I saw the image of my mother that most haunted me. I jumped at the unfamiliar touch of Aunty Faye's hand on my shoulder. 'Deep breath,' she said, her own eyes red and raw. I could only nod.
'There're always people parked in the residents' parking bays.' Nana was chattering. 'My daughter can never park anywhere near her own flat. Taxi!' she called out to the funeral director, who took off his top hat and opened the door of the second limo, sleek and black. 'That was a stroke of luck. I'm not well, you know,' she explained to him. 'I shouldn't be out in the cold air too long. Tell him, Faye.'
We sat on either side of her and each took one of her tiny, cold hands. It was those hands I tried to focus on. The protruding veins, the loose skin, the lines. The inappropriate nail varnish.
'Number 44, Westbrook Road,' she directed.
But as we drove in silence, through my own tears, I saw that she too was weeping, and she didn't question why we pulled into the grounds of the cemetery. There was a part of her that knew what the day was about, even if every fibre of her body was fighting it. A small party waited for us outside the crematorium. Before I could do anything to warn him off, Uncle Pete stepped forward to help Aunty Faye from the car. I held my breath, waiting for the storm, but she allowed him to take her elbow and put his arm around her back, steering her towards the door. I saw him whisper closely in her ear and she leaned in towards him. They looked comfortable with each other, intimate almost. I was glad that some good seemed to have come of the day, even if it only meant a temporary truce. He returned to escort my grandmother, who held on to the crook of the arm that he offered, bent down to her height.
'I thought I told you to bring her straight home,' I heard Nana say crossly as I followed closely behind.
'She's home now, Brenda.' Uncle Pete patted one of her hands. 'They've beaten us to it.' Turning to kiss the top of my head, he asked softly how I was, but his eyes followed Aunty Faye as she greeted the semi-circle of guests who had gathered a short distance from the entrance waiting for instructions.
I attempted a smile. 'I've had better days.'
'Excuse me a minute.' He squeezed my shoulder absently.
'My beautiful girl. He was the one to take her out. He should have brought her home,' Nana was saying. 'If you say you're going to do something, you should do it.'
We followed the pall-bearers, Uncle Pete among them, into the tiny chapel and were seated a few feet away from the coffins. If I had wanted to, I could have reached out and touched the bare wood, felt the grain, lifted the lids. As the words of the service washed over me, I became obsessed with this one thought, and yet my arms were leaden. It was as if I was affected by sleep paralysis, brain signals reaching my limbs, but my body having forgotten how to process them. I couldn't have moved even to save my own life.
I was not prepared for the moment when the curtain was drawn, blocking our view of the coffins. For the mechanical whirring sound. For the whoosh. For my grandmother's strangely distorted wailing as she cried for her daughter, 'Laura! My beautiful girl! Laura! Laura!'
'Wait,' I said blindly as I felt someone take my elbow.
'It's over now.'
'I can't.'
'Say goodbye now.'
I wanted the excuse of my grandmother's dementia. Memories tangled up in time. Shuffled, then laid out on the card table. Incapable of looking after herself. Not responsible for what she was saying. I wanted the excuse of being a small child. Selfish. Self-absorbed. Not expected to understand or to behave.
'Come on, now,' I heard a soft voice say and felt something brush against my shoulder. I wiped my eyes to find Kevin, Lydia's adopted son, standing beside me. 'Time ter go.'
Part Two
Peter's Story
Chapter Twelve
It makes me so angry, the idea that we can reinvent ourselves by having a haircut or changing our clothes. The truth is that we reinvent ourselves with the stories that we tell and retell, justifying our actions to ourselves and to others. Actions are so often without thought, but because we want to give them meaning we analyse and analyse, arriving at a conclusion of what we must have been thinking at the time. We are not animals, after all. Anything less is unacceptable
. I see it time and time again in my game. A suggestion of, 'I put it to you that you were acting in revenge,' draws only a blank look from the accused. The jury may pick up on the suggestion, but not the poor sod on trial. No prosecutor ever says, 'I put it to you that you weren't thinking,' because it is his job to prove that a crime has been committed. To commit theft, there must be the intent to deprive permanently. To commit murder there must be malice aforethought, not just some idiot who is vaguely wondering what would happen if he were to pull this little trigger. Without thought, we would be left with a civil wrong or manslaughter at best. Most criminal lawyers would be out of a job and the general public would be up in arms because they want to feel that justice has been done so that they can sleep soundly at night. That's how the system works. How society functions.
And then we have the man with good intentions he can never live up to. He fits his story around his original intentions and in the end they become more important than the facts. Sometimes we repeat a story so often that we even manage to convince ourselves that our revisions are real. Take the example of a feud between brothers. Add twenty years of grudge-bearing and you may find that the people involved can't even remember what high-minded principle it was that started their argument. They have no idea how to make amends because they simply can't remember what it is they would have to forgive to be the bigger person. Far easier to carry on with the feuding than admit to any human frailty.
The other thing that I have become increasingly aware of is that there is not just a single version of events called the truth. Life is not nearly as simple as that. Each of us brings to the table our own beliefs, backgrounds and experiences and we all have the potential to interpret a single event differently. One person's experience is a truth of sorts, but it is never the whole story. There is a separate truth for each one of us. The brain is such an incredible organ that if we repeat things often enough, we come to believe them. It can be the use of the phrase, 'I'm not a good sleeper,' that creates the insomniac., the repetition of prayers that creates faith. After almost thirty years of working in the legal profession, I have lost confidence in a system that looks for a single set of facts by relying on the evidence of others based on something as elastic as memory, and labels it as truth. The plain fact is that I wouldn't want to be judged by twelve of my peers, let alone by a higher being. Let's hope that if there is a God, he takes a greater interest in what is in our hearts than our actions, otherwise I fear we're all for the high jump.
