Dear Nobody

by Berlie Doherty

  It was nearly midnight by then. I went back downstairs. Dad was sitting with his feet up on the settee watching a late film.

  ‘You shouldn’t be watching this,’ I told him. ‘It’s rude.’

  ‘I close my eyes when the naughty bits come on.’

  ‘Dad,’ I said. ‘What happened to you and Mum?’ I’d had no idea I was going to say that just then.

  The woman on the television screen smiled knowingly and murmured to me. I thought Dad hadn’t heard me at first, the way I’d blurted it out. If he’d asked me to repeat it I wouldn’t have been able to.

  ‘You know what happened.’ He seemed to be waiting for the woman to speak again. ‘She walked out.’

  ‘I mean, why?’

  Dad looked at me sharply as if he was going to tell me to mind my own business. I wouldn’t have blamed him. Then he pulled a face. He swivelled himself round on the settee into a sitting position as if it was all a great effort, as if he was an old man stiff with lumbago these days.

  ‘She met a feller, didn’t she, and he was younger than me with a bit more hair on top and he wore natty jumpers and he read a lot of books. And she decided she liked him better than me and off she went.’

  We watched the screen for a bit. The woman had a thin face like a snake. She flickered her tongue when she laughed.

  ‘She just went, just like that,’ Dad went on quietly. ‘Went off. I came home one night and I’d done a shift, I was dead tired, you know, and there she was standing in the hall with her coat on and this feller was with her.’ He bent down and put one of his shoes on. ‘Tying his shoe laces or something, hiding his face, that’s what he was doing. And she told me she was leaving.’

  ‘Did you know him?’

  Dad blew out his lips. ‘As a matter of fact, I did. Not well, of course. But he’d been round a couple of times.’

  We both stared at the television. I didn’t dare look at my dad. It was as if, now he’d started, he couldn’t stop. It was as if he was talking to himself almost. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him stroking his lip. I daren’t move. The television voices murmured on.

  ‘Didn’t suspect a thing. That’s what your mother hated most about me, of course. She said I’d got no imagination.’ He laughed briefly, a sharp bark of a laugh. The couple in the play were rowing now. A close-up of the woman showed that she was crying.

  ‘Are those tears real?’ Dad said. ‘I bet they use some kind of oil or something. Her make-up’s not running, and she’d have to be wearing some with all those lights.’

  ‘She’s not wearing much else.’ I could feel my voice breaking into a nervous giggle.

  ‘Funny,’ Dad said. ‘I didn’t know how much I loved your mother till she told me she was leaving me. You’d think I would have hated her. I did later. No one likes to be rejected, you know. I hated her because she didn’t want me. And I hated her because she was splitting up a family. I didn’t want that to happen, and I was powerless to stop it. How old were you then?’

  ‘Ten. Guy was six.’

  ‘You see. Guy cried for his mum every night. How could I explain to the kid? And you… “where’s Mum, where’s Mum”… every five minutes. How could I explain to you that she wasn’t coming back? So it helped, being able to hate her. But I’ll tell you something else, Chris, and this’ll shock you a bit. I used to wish that she was dead.’

  The drama on the screen was suddenly interrupted by noisy adverts. A smiling troupe of mushrooms danced its way across a table and dive-bombed into a bowl of soup.

  My dad leaned forward in his chair, intent on the mushrooms. He was fiddling about with his watchstrap as if it was suddenly too tight for him, twisting it and twisting it on his wrist, tugging hairs with it. ‘If she’d died, you see, I could have got it over with. There’s ways of dealing with death. There’s funerals and flowers and crying. It would have been terrible, but I would have known absolutely certainly that she wasn’t going to come back and that I was never, never going to see her again and somehow I’d have got on with my life and with you kids. But whilever someone’s alive there’s always a chance that they’ll come back again, so you never quite let go. I wanted her back, however much I hated her for going.’

  I felt my throat tightening. I wished Dad would stop now. I wished he’d stop talking. I wished I could switch off the television but I daren’t. I was afraid of the silence and of having to look at him again and talk normally. I sat with my head back and my eyes closed tight. Even then I could see the dance of light from the flickering screen: flash, and flash, and flash. Dad’s voice was a dull monotone.

  ‘I used to think of her enjoying herself with this natty bloke with all his books. And I knew that she couldn’t be happy. Not really. I knew she’d be going through hell. Don’t tell me any woman can walk away from her own kids and carry on as if nothing had happened. I think she went through hell.’

  There was some fancy guitar music on the screen. The man and woman were walking hand in hand along a beach. I thought it might be Brighton.

  ‘You think you’re the only one in the world it’s happened to till you go down the pub and talk about it. Makes you wonder. What’s it all about? Love? I don’t know what love is. It’s a con trick to keep the human race going, that’s all it is.’

  ‘Why didn’t you get married again or something?’

  ‘Ouch!’ Dad shook his hand as if his fingers had been burnt. He switched off the television abruptly as the snaky woman pouted out her lips for another kiss, and went into the kitchen. I could hear him filling the kettle.

  ‘Ovaltine, Chris?’

  I sauntered into the kitchen. I leaned on the door jamb casually, my hands deep in my pockets.

  ‘I just wondered, Dad. You don’t happen to have Mum’s address, do you?’

  Dad lifted two mugs from the cupboard. He’d made them himself, down in the cellar. One day he planned to give up work and make a living ‘pottering about’ as he called it. As he spooned Ovaltine powder into them he spilled some and carefully wiped it up, and wiped the whole surface and the kettle before he answered me. ‘I should have. Somewhere.’

  I passed him a bottle of milk from the fridge. The cat strolled over to him and eyed him patiently.

  ‘Why?’ Dad asked. He eased the cat out of the way with his foot and returned the milk to the fridge.

  ‘I was thinking I might go and see her some time.’ I kept my voice light and casual. ‘ ’Night, Dad.’ I took my cup and went upstairs slowly, sipping at it while I walked. I couldn’t even begin to explain why I wanted to see my mother after all those years, except that maybe it was something to do with Helen. I would have liked my mother to meet her, I suppose.

  I listened to the tape again. My head was full of Helen now; brimming with her. I lay in bed and couldn’t sleep for thinking of her. A new verse for the song started buzzing in my head, and I decided to go downstairs and have some toast and marmalade and write it down.

  And there was Dad, still sitting in the front room with a cup of cold Ovaltine in his hands, just staring at the way the sleet pattered and slid against the window panes.

  February

  * * *

  I don’t think I would have dared to ask those questions about my mother if it hadn’t been for what had happened between Helen and me. I felt as if I was peering through a door into another room in my life. I wanted to know now what kind of a person my mother was; even if it hurt, I wanted to know. Once upon a time she and my father had loved each other, when he was a young man and she was a girl. I knew that this house that we lived in was the house he had been born in, and that he had looked after his parents here till they died. What must it have been like for my mother, coming here as a new wife? I knew she was younger than him. Had the house been full of ghosts for her? Old furniture, faded carpets, brown photographs; Grandad’s carver chair; Grandma’s teaset; the polished wooden cutlery canteen; the chiming clock. I never knew my grandparents, but their presence is here, all right. But when
I tried to imagine my mother here, it was as if I was holding up a candle inside a darkened room and noticing things for the first time because they looked so different now. There were no ghosts of my mother in the house. None at all.

  It had taken me days to write the letter to her. Helen had helped me, and then we had started it again and rewritten it several times.

  ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’ Helen asked me. ‘You won’t bring her back, you know. Not after all this time.’

  But I didn’t want to bring her back. I wanted to meet her again, that was all. I think I just wanted to believe in her, if you know what I mean. The mother in my memories was someone who read stories to me at night and held my hand to cross the road. She didn’t fit in anywhere now. It was as if she wasn’t real any more.

  I carried the letter round in my pocket for a few days and in the end Helen posted it for me. After a couple of weeks I stopped looking out for a reply. I was nothing to my mother, after all. I was a speck of dust, and I had blown away. But when her letter came after nearly a month all I could think about was showing it to Helen. We were going out together that evening, out to the moors in the dark, and then for a drink. My letter was a warm secret in my pocket, waiting to be shared.

  It was the night of the total eclipse of the moon, which had been promised for 6.52. It was all a great disappointment, the whole thing. The sky was completely covered in cloud that night, it was drizzling, and Helen was in a rotten mood.

  We had taken a bus out to Fox House so we could see the eclipse away from the orange glare of the city lights. We walked up the track towards the moors, below Stanage Edge. In the darkness sheep rustled through the sodden ferns.

  ‘I can’t tell which direction we’re supposed to be looking in, even,’ moaned Helen.

  ‘Try up.’ I put my arm round her. ‘A quarter of a million miles up.’ She tensed away from me. It’s not like her to be moody.

  ‘I’m cold and I’m fed up and I’ve missed my tea for this.’

  ‘It’s supposed to look like a ball of blood,’ I told her. ‘That would be something to see, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yuk,’ she said, and started to walk down the track, which was so rough and stony that she kept losing her footing. I could hear her grumbling away to herself. ‘Are you staying out here all night?’ she called.

  I caught up with her and held her hand in my pocket, snug as a glove. ‘Imagine seeing the dawn from up here! Why don’t we do that one night?’ I felt warm at the thought of it. She was scuttling along with her head down and I stepped right in front of her so she had to stop close up to me. ‘We could bring a tent, Helen, and we could watch the sun go down, and see the moon and stars coming out. And the next day we’d watch the dawn… Imagine watching it spreading pink and golden across the sky…’

  ‘And then we’d stagger into school for registration and tell my mum that we’d missed die last bus home.’

  ‘We could come in June. We could just sleep out in the heather – we wouldn’t need a tent, then. There’d just be us…’

  ‘And a few sheep nibbling at us.’

  ‘We could come on the longest day. There’s a cave along the edge – we could sleep in there.’

  ‘Meanwhile, let’s go home and have some beans.’ Helen pushed past me. ‘I’m famished, Chris. Actually, I feel sick, I’m so hungry.’

  When we were on the bus I showed her the letter. I’d been waiting for the right moment to share it with her, but I gave up on that. I kept looking at her, waiting for her to show some of the excitement I’d felt when I found the letter on the hall floor that morning. I’d known who it was from even before I looked at the post mark. I think I even recognized her writing, which is the sort that looks really artistic from a distance and is just a scrawl of shapes when you get close to. It had arrived just as I was setting off for school, and I’d pushed it into my pocket quickly before my dad saw it. I didn’t want him to be hurt, whatever happened. I had read it at school during form period and, predictably, my mate Tom had seen me reading it and had snatched it off me. He’s so infantile at times.

  ‘Chris’s got a love-letter,’ Tom had said, waving it in the air.

  ‘Get lost,’ I told him. He was trying to taunt me into having a scrap with him for it, but then I think he must have recognized something’ in the way I looked at him. I really hated him at that moment. I wasn’t laughing.

  ‘Hand it over, Wilson.’

  ‘Can’t read it, anyway.’ He just dropped it on the floor for me to pick up. It was a bit screwed up by then. So was I, to tell the truth. During the day I kept stealing furtive glances at it. She really does have terrible handwriting. I’d had to guess at most of the words. I tried to put a picture of my mother in my head, and couldn’t. I remembered a blue coat with little velvet buttons, and how it smelt of cold air when she came in at night.

  ‘Want to see this?’ I asked Helen on the bus. I handed it casually to her as if it didn’t matter really whether she did or not, and waited for her expression to change. She peered at the letter and handed it back to me.

  ‘Is she a doctor or something? I can’t read a word of it.’

  ‘It says, “Dear Christopher,” ’

  ‘Christopher! That’s a bit formal.’

  My voice was shaking a little as I read on. I cleared my throat and took a breath. ‘ “Thank you for your letter. It was a great surprise,” I think it says. “I’m sorry I didn’t reply straight away but I’ve only just returned from the Alps. I don’t know if you know but I’m a professional photographer. I’ve been working on a commission to illustrate a mountaineering book. I climb too, of course, with Don.” ’ I put the letter down for a moment. My breath seemed to have left me. I blew out my lips and carried on. ‘ “This has been a wonderful job for me, and is going to take up several more months, I should think. Yes, do come and see me. It would be lovely. With best wishes, Joan.” ’

  ‘Joan!’

  ‘What else could she have put? With love from Mummy?’

  I gazed down at the letter again. I’d been looking forward to sharing it with Helen. All day I’d imagined showing it to her.

  ‘What d’you think?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t like her.’ Helen took the letter from me again. She really was in a mood.

  ‘You’ve never even met her.’

  ‘I don’t like the way she calls you Christopher, for a start. What’s wrong with Chris? Christopher’s so formal, as if she’s never met you in her life. And then she goes and calls herself “Joan” at the end.’

  ‘I thought that was brilliant. It’s a way of saying, our relationship is different now, let’s be friends.’

  ‘Great!’ said Helen. ‘I’ll just disappear for eight years while you’re an annoying brat and let’s be friends now you’ve grown up.’

  I stared out of the window. I could feel my neck burning red. ‘Anything else you don’t like about her, while you’re at it?’

  ‘I don’t like the way she goes on and on about being a photographer and a climber and having commissions and all that.’

  ‘She doesn’t go on and on.’

  ‘She sounds like a show-off. She hasn’t said a thing about you. How’re your A–levels? How’s your dad? How’s Guy? Have you still got the cat? All she’s interested in is herself.’

  I took the letter back and folded it up slowly. I sat with it still in my hands, staring out at my own reflection and, beyond that, into the darkness.

  ‘ “My dear Lady Disdain”,’ I muttered.

  ‘She makes a point of saying she hasn’t got time to see you.’

  ‘All right. All right.’

  ‘You asked me. I’m only telling you because you asked me.’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t shown it to you now.’

  Helen touched my hand. ‘I don’t think you should try to see her, Chris. You’ll get hurt. I’ve thought that all along.’

  ‘That’s my business, isn’t it?’ The bus swung suddenly into
the glare of house lights. I stood up. ‘I’ll come back with you.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘I’ll come back with you.’

  We walked along in silence, holding hands. I felt angry and upset, as if we were on the verge of a row. I wish I knew what was going on in her head. I can’t fathom her sometimes. That’s what’s exciting about her, but she’s never like this usually. It was as if all the warmth had gone out of her. We’d had our first row last month, and even that hadn’t been like this. The first row had been my fault, I admit it. It had started when we had bumped into her best friend, Ruthlyn, and as she passed us she had said in a loud whisper, ‘Behave yourselves this time!’

  ‘What’s she on about?’ I had asked. Ruthlyn’s the sort of girl who loves to embarrass people.

  ‘What d’you think?’ Helen had teased.

  ‘You never told her!’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  I couldn’t believe that, you see. I felt betrayed. ‘Not everything?’

  ‘She’s my best friend,’ Helen had said, as if that explained everything.

  ‘What’s that got to do with us?’

  ‘I bet you told your mates. All boys brag about what they do with their girl-friends.’

  I’d bragged often enough about nearly doing it. As a matter of fact I’d often casually given the impression that I’d done far more than I actually had done. But I couldn’t have told anyone about that special night. I imagined Tom bawling it round the classroom at school. I imagined the words he’d have used about us, reducing us both, cheapening it. There’s no way I could have told him. It was too important to share.