Dear Nobody

by Berlie Doherty

‘Now why should she want to do that?’ Jill asked.

  I couldn’t answer her. I looked towards the house. My throat was a ball, a small spidery ball that hurt and stretched itself and curled up again.

  ‘Something’s very wrong, Chris. Am I right?’

  My bike was on its side, its wheel still spinning, slower now and slower. I fingered it round again.

  ‘It’s something to do with you, as well?’

  I nodded. Jill pitched her fork into the straw pile and lifted more into the stable and more again, swinging and lifting and tossing, her dark moving shadow slicing into the bright gold of the pile. She grunted with the effort, lift and swing, lift and swing. Her dark hair swung down across her eyes.

  ‘It’s none of my business, and I may have got everything wrong, and forgive me if I have, Chris. But what your Helen did just now up on the moors looked to me like a pretty desperate attempt to get rid of a pregnancy.’

  Jill made us some salad. None of us ate much. After we’d eaten she sat on the floor, hugging her knees. Helen and I were sitting side by side on the settee. Jill’s front room has a huge wall-window looking out through trees to the paddock where the horses were grazing, and beyond that, to fields and moors. Even though it was warm there were still thin lines of snow threaded under the dry-stone walls, way up in the distance. We could hear the new leaves rustling just outside the window. The sun danced through them into the room.

  ‘Funny,’ Jill said. ‘I gave up smoking years ago, and all of a sudden I want a cigarette.’ She stretched her arms above her head in a long, tired yawn. ‘It’s because I want to tell you both something, you know, and it’s rather hard.’ One of her dogs padded over to her, his paws clicking on the wooden floor, and pushed himself up next to her on her mat. She stroked his long ears. ‘I’m going to tell you something that I’ve never told anyone else. I’m going to keep your secret, by the way. Who you tell, and when and how, is your concern. Look for the good moment to come. And if you want help I’ll give it. Okay?’ We both nodded. ‘I want to tell you something about me. Another secret.’

  ‘I’m full of secrets,’ Helen said. ‘I’ll burst one day. Everyone tells me their secrets at school.’

  ‘Such as?’ I asked her, surprised.

  ‘That’d be telling,’ Helen smiled. She slipped her shoes off and curled up her legs on the settee, so she was leaning against me, warm and close. Jill, I noticed, had never looked so unsure of herself.

  ‘It was when Ginny was about three, and the boys were at school. I’d really got the stables just started, and it was something I’d always wanted to do. It was the year Mac left me. And the last thing he did was to give me another child.’

  ‘I didn’t know…’ I began. Helen put her hand on my arm. Jill wasn’t watching us but was staring out of the windows. The trees were doing a kind of silent dance outside. Their shadows flickered across the floor and the walls.

  ‘And I didn’t want the child, you see. I didn’t ask for it, and I didn’t want it. I couldn’t believe it when I found out I was pregnant. At that time it seemed like the worst thing in the world that could happen to me. So I went to the doctor, and he was very sympathetic. I believe I was pretty low, you know, with Mac leaving, and all the worry about the stables. I was shocked and unhappy. And he asked me if I wanted an abortion and I said yes.’

  The silence in the room was like something you could touch and hold. Only the dog seemed to be breathing, deep in his sleep. ‘He asked me if I was sure and I said yes, yes, absolutely sure, one hundred per cent sure. I do not want this child. And I had the abortion. I didn’t tell anyone – not Mac, not my sister, not my mum. No one. I went into hospital on my own and had it done. It was so quick, so easy. When I woke up from the operation I couldn’t believe they’d done it. But they promised me they had. They even told me it was a boy. I didn’t want to know that. And I came home and I got on with my life.’

  The dog shifted and stretched its legs out, slobbering.

  ‘It was as if it had never happened. I got the stables going. And because I hadn’t told anyone I had no one to share it with. I felt absolutely alone after that. There was no reason to cry. I didn’t have the right to cry. I drove my sadness down so deep that I thought it would never surface again.’

  There was a long silence. I would have thought she’d finished speaking, except that she didn’t move, or turn her head away from watching the dancing leaves on the window.

  She tapped on the floor with her fingers as if she was stubbing out a cigarette. ‘He would be nearly fifteen now.’

  April

  * * *

  Dear Nobody,

  After all, the good moment for speaking to Mum never came. I was stiff and aching for days but nothing else happened. I told my mum that my horse had bolted and that I had been very shaken. I can’t say she was very sympathetic, but then, she doesn’t like horses anyway. They make her sneeze, she says. I think she’s frightened of them. ‘They’re very fleshy things, horses,’ she said to me one day, with a bit of a shudder, as if that made them nasty or disgusting or rude, even. But I know what she means. It’s because they’re so physical, so full of muscle and snorting breath, and they’re so powerful. She doesn’t know what it’s like to feel that huge bulk of flesh moving under you, with you. So, when I told her that my horse had bolted, she just sniffed as if to say what did I expect, and left me to get over it. Sometimes I feel as if I’ll never get near to my mum again. I want to be able to talk to her about things, the way Ruthlyn talks to her mum, but she doesn’t invite it. I think she’d rather not know what’s going on in my head. Sometimes when I try to talk to her she just walks away, as if she’s slamming a door in my face. How strange it is to think that once I was just that tiny speck of being, moving inside her, just like you in me. Did she want me to be there? I wonder if she was ever close enough to Nan to talk about such things.

  I don’t know how I got through those few days after my ride on Nab. I’m ashamed. I can’t believe what I tried to do out there on the moors. I almost feel as if I was taken over by some mad spirit; some cold, mad other being. I don’t know how to talk to Chris about it since that day at Jill’s and I know that’s hurting him, and he’ll be sitting up in his room sad and angry, maybe, and confused, and I wish I could just say to him don’t be upset, Chris, just let me work it out for myself, but I can’t even bring myself to say that. So I just tell Mum to say that I don’t want to speak to him. She probably thinks I’ve had a row, and maybe that pleased her a little. I’m too young to get serious, she says. What does it mean, to get serious? When I’m with Chris I’m laughing and smiling, we’re doing crazy things, all the world’s a joke. Well, that’s how it used to be, anyway.

  But today I sat at the table at lunch-time and refused my food because I just couldn’t face it. I’d done that every night this week, I think. This time Mum gave me such a look that I went cold inside, such a strange, quiet, questioning look. She passed my plate over to Robbie without a word and then sent him off to town with Dad to buy trainers. They both grumbled a lot about that, wasting their Saturday afternoon at the shops. Dad and Robbie get on well. I was thinking they’ll enjoy it when they get there, and then I realized that I was going to be in the house alone with Mum.

  As soon as they went out I ran upstairs to my room. Mum followed me up. She came straight in without knocking and she stood with her hands in her pockets, just watching me, saying nothing, and I knew that this was the moment, right or not. I fumbled wretchedly through the things in my schoolbag, as if somewhere inside it were the words that I needed to say, if only I could fish out the right ones and arrange them in some sort of logical order.

  ‘I want to know what’s going on,’ she said.

  I remember gazing out of the window, and noting somewhere that it was beginning to rain. I could feel a flush creeping across my neck.

  ‘I’m starting a new project,’ I told her. ‘Miss Clancy said I could start the background work at home.’

>   ‘I don’t give a damn about Miss Clancy.’ My mum closed the door and leaned against it, arms folded now. She was breathing heavily. Her mouth was working as if she had too much saliva to swallow. I could see Chris’s photograph grinning at me from my bedside table. He wouldn’t come into focus.

  ‘What’s going on, Helen?’

  My eyes were hurting. Mum’s voice wasn’t right. She wasn’t calm. I looked for the words but I couldn’t find them.

  ‘Can’t you guess?’ I must have been biting my nails – I don’t remember doing it, but I do remember Mum leaning forward and slapping my hand away from my mouth. It was an old, familiar gesture from when I was little. It made me feel helpless.

  ‘I can guess,’ Mum said, and she leaned back against the door and closed her eyes, and blew out her lips like a fish gasping for air. ‘I’d like to have heard it from you, but I can guess,’ and her voice was an alien strangled thing in her throat that I didn’t recognize. ‘How many times have you done it, for goodness’ sake?’

  It was such a stupid, useless question that it helped me to be angry with her. ‘Does it matter?’ I shouted at her, and then I was ashamed. She was upset, and it wasn’t her fault, none of it was her fault.

  ‘Yes, it does matter, for goodness’ sake! It matters to me!’

  Mum has sag lines at the corners of her mouth. I could see how the drops of spittle frothed and oozed there, to be wiped away with the back of her hand, to froth and ooze again. And I don’t know why but it helped to watch that instead of listening to the way her breath came in snatches, as if she’d torn it off in little pieces. I’d never noticed the hollow in her neck before, and how the skin round it was pimpled like turkey flesh. I knew how hurt she was.

  I told her it had happened once, and that it had been in this room and on this bed, and as if it was the worst thing about the whole business she folded and unfolded her arms, put her hands in her pockets and drew them out, folded her arms again. She rubbed the skin around her elbows, crinkling it into circles. ‘And you’ve never heard of decency? Did you have to do it? After all I’ve taught you?’

  I felt as if I was in a room with a stranger from another country who wasn’t using the right language.

  ‘We didn’t think.’

  I watched how her hands fidgeted in the air, like birds with no resting place. I wanted to hold them still for her.

  ‘It just happened.’

  And Chris’s photograph was a blur of colour on my table. I daren’t look at it.

  Mum gasped out again like a small child and came groping forward with her hands stretched out towards me, and I went up to her not knowing anything now, and she pressed me to her as if I was six years old.

  ‘What are we going to do with you, child?’ she whispered.

  On Monday morning Mum took me to the doctor’s. The waiting room was covered with posters saying ‘Don’t let your baby nudge you into going to the doctor’s.’ I’d never noticed them before. I felt ashamed.

  It wasn’t my usual doctor. His examination was quick and professional. He told Mum I was probably twelve weeks’ pregnant. My stomach plunged, even though I had known it for ages, for ever, it seemed. Everything felt as if it was draining out of me. To hear it said so clinically and finally was like being told ‘Tomorrow you will hang’ or something. I remember saying, ‘I don’t want a baby,’ in a tiny weak voice that didn’t sound like mine, and Mum sat there with her lips pursed tight while the doctor told us that if a termination was to take place it must be before sixteen weeks. ‘Otherwise it will be very traumatic for you,’ he said. My tears were as sharp as needles. I couldn’t take in what he was saying. I have a baby inside me.

  I’ve been in my room all day, writing this to you. I don’t want to talk to anybody. I don’t feel as if I have to, now. Mum will know what to do. The phone keeps ringing and it’s always Mum who answers. I keep going to sleep and waking up, I’m not even sure if it’s still the same day. The only thing I know for sure is that you’re still there. It’s growing dark, and I can hear the rain on the window, and it’s comforting to hear it. I lay on my bed and let the darkness close in round me like a soft blanket. I could hear Robbie creeping upstairs to his room. He never creeps. He must have been told about me. And then I must have drifted off to sleep, because the click of the door woke me up, and there was Mum framed in the doorway with the full light behind her, and my room was in darkness. The light hurt my eyes. I was cold and stiff on top of my bed. Mum came over to me. I could hear her clothing rustling as she knelt down by me.

  ‘You look like a little doll,’ she said.

  I turned away from her. Something was making my throat burn like fire.

  Mum said, ‘No one will know. Daddy won’t know.’

  I haven’t called him Daddy since I was ten, I was thinking, and then she told me that the doctor had arranged everything, and that it would be all over by the end of the week, and as I listened to her whispering I felt as dry and bleached as a bone.

  ‘You want to get it all over with quickly, don’t you?’ she said. I had to push the back of my hand into my mouth and bite it. The hurting in my throat had reached my eyes.

  ‘You’re not going to make a fuss, are you?’

  I bit hard on the knuckles of my hand.

  ’Think of your future. It’s your future. You mustn’t throw it away,’ and I shook my head, my eyes too full to see anything. My future is a deep, black well. Whatever I see in it frightens me. Mum touched my hair.

  ‘You’re only a child yourself,’ she said.

  She pulled my quilt up over me and I bit again on to my hand, all the aching in my throat and my neck and my shoulders swelling and tightening round me.

  ‘And I’ve told Chris,’ she said. ‘You’re not to get in touch with him. He agrees with me. It’s for the best.’

  I pretended I was asleep. I hadn’t heard it. I could not put together the pieces of those words. When she went out of the room I could hear the swish of my green leotard on the door hook.

  Dear Nobody. You did not ask for this. I have nothing to give you. Nothing. With all my heart I’m sorry.

  When I rang Helen that night it was Mrs Garton who answered the phone.

  ‘Just a minute,’ she said.

  I thought she’d gone to fetch Helen and I settled myself down on the bottom stair imagining her coming smiling to the phone, and then I heard a door being closed sharply, and the phone was picked up again.

  ‘Hiya you,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not Helen. She’s asleep.’ Mrs Garton said. I looked at my watch. It was eight o’clock. ‘Listen,’ she said, lowering her voice. It sounded as if she was hissing down the phone, but I think she was only trying to keep her voice down so nobody else could hear. But it made my skin creep, the way she hissed, and what she said to me. ‘She’s told me everything. I want you to know that you’re never to come to this house again. Do you understand?’

  I nodded, like a fool. Where were the words to answer her with? There aren’t any. And her voice went on, a snake voice, a hissing dry and ice-cold sort of voice. ‘She’s decided to have an operation. Do you understand?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘It’s the best thing, Chris. But you mustn’t get in touch with her.’

  I put the receiver down, with the words slithering round in my head. Guy went past with the washing he’d just taken from the dryer and headed a pair of rolled-up and still-warm socks at me, and when I didn’t head them back he lobbed another pair at me from half-way up the stairs. I picked up the phone and rang again. As soon as Mrs Garton heard my voice she put the receiver down. I imagined her camped out for the night by the phone, her hand poised over the receiver. I desperately wanted to talk to Helen. I went up to my room with my legs feeling like lead weights, as if there was concrete in my shoes. The cat inched its way through the crack in the door and stared at me. It leapt on to my knee and I shook it off and it leapt up again. I reached over to my drawer and took out my file pad and bala
nced it on top of him. He rumbled as if I’d just switched him on.

  Darling, darling Helen, I wrote.

  Guy came in. I covered the paper with my hands.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Get lost.’

  ‘Who’re you writing to?’

  ‘Nobody. Clear off’

  ‘Can I take the cat?’

  ‘No!’ I yelled at him. ‘For God’s sake can’t somebody even write a letter in peace!’

  ‘I did your washing for you.’ He ducked away as I screwed up the letter and hurled it at him. ‘That’s the last time I do your smelly underpants.’ The cat sprang down on to the roll of paper and lay sideways with it stuck to one of the claws in his front paw, trying to knock it off with the other.

  ‘Darling Nell,’ I wrote. The letters swam round the page. ‘It’s my baby too. It’s a little egg. It’s life itself I didn’t know what I was writing. To tell the truth I couldn’t even see the page. ‘Two hundred million sperm tried to reach you, and this is the one that made it. Nothing will ever be exactly like it again, ever, ever, in the world. It is unique. It is me in you, Helen, and you in me. Please don’t destroy it. I love you, whatever you do.’

  I couldn’t read it afterwards. I felt blitzed, as if I’d been listening to crashing music and all of a sudden there was so much silence that I could drown in it. I put the letter in an envelope and sealed it.

  I realized then that the house was in silence and that I’d been sitting holding the letter in my hand for hours, maybe. I went outside. The stars were out, kind of shivering. I wheeled my bike out of the yard and cruised down to Helen’s on it. I tried throwing gravel up to her window but it showered back at me. I slid the letter through the letter-box and waited with my fingers round it, expecting at any moment to feel it being taken away from me by another hand. I imagined her mother reading it, hating me for what I’d done to her daughter. Surely Helen would know I’d write to her if I couldn’t reach her any other way. Surely she’d come down first thing and know there’d be a letter for her. I had to take the chance. I opened out my fingers, and listened to the soft flutter of the letter as it hit the floor.