Dear Nobody

by Berlie Doherty

  I picked up my bike and carried it down the drive, trying to tiptoe on those red pebbles. The whole road echoed with the noise of my scrunching feet. And then I sat on the bike and looked back at the house and wondered whether I’d ever be welcome there again. For a crazy moment I thought of Helen’s dad sneaking out to teach me some guitar chords, and for an even crazier moment I thought of shinning up the drain-pipe to Helen’s room and lying with her till dawn, like Romeo, till I was banished from the land, but I knew that I’d slide down it again like a fireman on a pole before I was a metre off the ground.

  I didn’t want to go home. I put my head down and bombed down the road at top speed, listening to the whirring of my wheels, and when I swung out on to the main road I headed off out to the moors. There were no cars on the road at all, nothing to hear, and when I left the street-lamps behind and there was just the small light of my front lamp picking its way through the darkness and all that silence, it felt as if I was being eaten up by an enormous black mouth. I stood up on the pedals to make them turn faster; I don’t know who I thought I was trying to race, or get away from; myself maybe, that little scared wretched self that had stood on Helen’s doorstep.

  It was uphill all the way, and I felt as if I was sweating inside a tight, hot glove, and then the road fell away and I free-wheeled down to Fox House with the wind licking me. No houses or cars, no trees, only the dark clumps of heather and those looming cliffs. I knew exactly where I was going, and when the track got so bumpy that I was being flung about on my bike I hopped off it and left it leaning against a boulder. The moon was like a white face with a crooked smile, and I’m not kidding, those stars were like rocks. They were massive that night, white hanging rocks that could come crashing down from the sky at any minute. I jogged along till I was right under the Edge, and up above me, sixteen metres or so, was the little overhang that stuck out in front of Robin Hood’s Cave.

  I wanted to bring Helen here once. I wanted to spend the whole night with her, holding her and loving her, watching the sunset and then the stars and then the dawn.

  I scrambled easily up the first bit, then had to search for handholds. The moon kept cutting out behind clouds. I heaved myself over the next bit and lay straddled across it, trying to get my breath back. I managed to stand up on a little ledge by inching myself up with my fingers, thinking all the time, thank God Tom isn’t here, he’d have been up on to the top and down again by now, no problem, and then I made the mistake of looking down. I can’t have been very far up but below me was blackness with little gleams of jagged edges, and I leaned against the cliff and very slowly it started to turn over, and over again, round and round like the Big Wheel at the fairground, swinging chairs and all, bloodbeats in your ears and your heart somewhere sliding round your tonsils; the whole mass of rocks and the whole starry space swinging up and round and over.

  I don’t know how I got back down. My skin had gone out of control like one of those free-hand cartoon characters, but when I pulled myself together and looked up from solid ground I could see the ledge I’d been on, three metres off the ground – if that. I picked up a stone and hurled it against the ledge. The sound was like an explosion, ricocheting along the Edge. White boulders that were slumped under the Edge stood up and skittered away in fright, yelling to each other like sheep. I picked up another stone and flung it, and another and another, ‘Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!’ I roared, and my voice was a million miles away. ‘B-A-S-T-A-R-D!’

  It took me ages to find my bike. As soon as I started to ride it I hit a stone and the chain came off. It was jammed fast between the top gear and the frame, and I cut my thumb trying to jerk it out. I was swearing at the top of my voice all the time. I felt fantastic, in a loud, sweaty, oily, bloody, furious, sobbing sort of way.

  And there was Sheffield, when the road tipped up to it at last, a huge orange glow-with millions of tiny winking lights set into it, and there was Helen’s road, and the shops and the school. Our street and our house and the stairs. My room. And bed.

  Dear Nobody,

  It felt as if it was the last day of my life. Mum can’t drive so I had to do it, and she never stopped talking. She kept reading out the street names as we passed them, and advertisements on hoardings, and even the registration numbers of the cars in front of us. It was as if she was frightened of silence. And all the time she was jabbering, I was forcing this into my head: this is simply an operation to remove unwanted cells from my body. That’s all it is.

  When I parked the car in the grounds of the hospital there was a dead bird on the grass verge, a tiny, skinny thing without feathers.

  Mum sat with me while I was weighed and checked and then I had to change into a nightie. She put all my clothes into her bag. She was going to spend the night at her sister’s, whose house was just down the road from the hospital. Auntie Pat would drive us back tomorrow. It was all carefully planned.

  A doctor came in with a social worker and they sat and talked to me, and asked me if I was absolutely sure that this was what I wanted to do. My mouth didn’t work properly. I wondered if they hated me. I wonder why they worked there. Then Mum held my hand and told me how brave I was being, and how I’d be able to go back to school at the end of the week and everything would be back to normal again. And then she couldn’t bring herself to kiss me goodbye. I’d have put my arms around her if she had. I’d have asked her to stay with me because I was afraid.

  The bed was high and the sheets were so stiff it was like lying between postcards. I lay on my side with my eyes closed and with my knees pulled right up to my chin and I tried to imagine what you looked like. You were twelve weeks old. You would be like a little pink tadpole. I’d looked you up in a medical book before we came. You would be about nine centimetres long. You weighed about fourteen grams.

  I thought of myself on Nab’s back, being thrown about like a doll, and I thought of you, a tiny thing, clinging on. You didn’t think about anything and you didn’t know anything and you clung on.

  And when I was lying there, in all that silence, I felt as if it was me who was clinging on, as if you were my tiny self. I felt as if you knew something that I would never understand. And I felt as if I had become two people.

  I was still trying to focus on you, trying to see through my fear to what it was that I was really frightened of, when the nurse came in with a trolley. She came too soon. I wasn’t ready yet. She didn’t speak to me. She held a syringe up to the light, and I felt hot and scared. I was just on the edge of panic then. I asked her what it was for and she told me I was going to have my operation.

  I wanted Chris.

  I told her I needed to talk to someone, and she told me to hold myself still, that it wouldn’t take a minute, that it wouldn’t hurt, that it would all be over soon. I could hear her voice; I could hear mine in my head but I couldn’t make the words come out. I was sobbing out loud. I was pushing her arm away. She said if I needed to talk to someone she’d better get someone. As soon as she was out of the room I felt as if I could breathe again. I slid out of my bed and put my slippers on. There was nothing in my locker except my little tapestry shoulder-bag and my sponge-bag and I picked them both up and went out. I thought at first that I was going to hide in the toilets but when I heard the nurse coming down the corridor talking to somebody I went straight past the toilets and found myself in the reception area. The receptionist had her back to me, looking for something in the filing cabinet and I walked straight past her and out through the doors into the car-park. The keys were in my shoulder-bag and my hands were shaking but I managed to get the car open and to drive it out into the road. I once saw a film that started in black and white and then went into full colour. All of a sudden I noticed that the leaves on the trees were full green. People had scarlet tulips blazing away in their front gardens. When I pulled up at the traffic lights the woman in the car next to me glanced across and then said something to her passenger, and they both looked at me then and laughed. I don’t blame them
for laughing. I chuckled back at them. I liked that nightie, but I would have liked to tell them that usually I sleep in a long tee-shirt. No wonder I found it hard to drive; my slippers had bendy feet. I put a cassette on and wound down the windows and sang.

  The worst bit came when I got home and had to walk over our pebbles in those bendy slippers.

  I had a bath. I put a CD on really loud downstairs and left the bathroom door open. I hope you like music.

  Then I got dressed in that lovely velvet skirt that I got from the fifties’ shop and that I’m going to look terrible in soon, and drove to the library to find Dad. He was in the Local Studies section helping a student to find something. I felt nervous when I saw him. I sat down and watched him, waiting for him to notice me. He had his hands clasped behind his back, and his fingers were moving one by one, as if he was practising piano scales. Maybe he was. He stoops a lot. He’s so thin. He’s such a quiet man.

  The student said something that amused him and Dad put his hand up to his mouth and coughed gently, and then he saw me. He excused himself and came over, almost tiptoeing.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked me.

  I gave him the car keys.

  ‘Mum’s at Auntie Pat’s,’ I said. ‘She’ll be ringing you up soon. She wants you to drive her home.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said. ‘She said you’d both be at Pat’s for a couple of days.’

  All I wanted was for him just to take the car keys. But his face was full of questions. So I told him. ‘I haven’t been to Auntie Pat’s at all,’ I said. ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

  He looked so shocked and hurt that I took hold of his hand in both of mine. I told him about the abortion clinic. He tilted my head back and stared down at me as if he didn’t recognize me; such a bewildered, anxious look. In a strange way I felt as if I was the one doing the consoling.

  One of the library assistants came over and hovered just beside us, and when Dad noticed her he took his hand away from my chin and rested it on my shoulder. The librarian told him that his wife was on the phone. He followed her without looking back at me.

  It was three o’clock when I left the library. I walked to Chris’s school, taking a short cut through the park. It was full of young women with prams. I’ve never seen so many prams in my life before. The women all smiled at each other as they passed, as if there was some kind of conspiracy between them, as if they were members of a secret society.

  Chris was one of the last to come out of the sixth-form block. He looked as if he’d been up all night. He was on his own, and he walked with his head down and his bag slung over his shoulder, as if he was miles away. He would have walked right past me if I hadn’t called out to him. He went white when he saw me. I went up to him and waited for him to put his school-bag down, and when his arms were round me, I told him.

  Little Nobody. I won’t let go of you now.

  ‘What do we do now?’

  It was all I could think of asking, and when Helen said, ‘I don’t know. You think of something,’ I suggested that we should run off to our cave on the Derbyshire moors. It was meant as a joke, really, to make her smile again.

  ‘That’s just your trouble, Chris.’ Her voice was tired and strained. She’d been through a hell of a lot that day. ‘You’re too romantic, We’ve got to be practical about this.’

  ‘I’ve got twenty pounds,’ I said. ‘And a birthday coming up in August. I’ll get a summer job.’

  There was nothing going round here, and I knew it. Most of the people on my street hadn’t got jobs at all, at any time of the year, let alone in the summer. I’d have to go down south to get anything, and then where would I live?

  ‘And after that?’ said Helen, in a quiet voice. ‘When the baby’s come? What do we do then, Chris?’

  When I got home that night Dad and Guy were in the room, looking through a box of old photographs together. They were mostly of my gran and grandad, who’d both died before I was born. There were some of my dad when he was a little boy. I slumped in the cat’s chair and watched them sorting through them. Dad was telling Guy the stories behind the photographs; we’d heard them lots of times before. I let their voices come and go; I was half-asleep, or half-drowning. Their voices were like pieces of driftwood keeping me afloat. ‘I looked like you when I was your age, Chris,’ Dad said. ‘Just look at this one.’

  I didn’t want to look at anything. I didn’t even want to open my eyes. Guy walked over to me on his knees and tugged my arm. I knew which photograph Dad was talking about even without looking. It was the one his father had taken of him in army uniform – short haircut, proud excited smile, off to do National Service. He did look like me. I used to look at it and think of him as a man. He wasn’t. He was a boy with a fresh face and a shy smile.

  ‘Was it in the war?’ Guy asked.

  ‘Was it heck!’ said Dad. ‘I’m not that old. Besides, I wouldn’t have been grinning my socks off if I thought I was setting off to get blown to pieces, would I?’

  He leaned across and took the photograph back, and looked at it curiously, wiping the surface with the tip of his finger as if he was trying to touch that boy’s face from the past.

  ‘Don’t know myself!’ he laughed. ‘It feels like another lifetime. Thought the whole world was mine, in those days. Just like you do, Chris.’

  I closed my eyes.

  ‘Only your chances are better than mine ever were,’ Dad went on. Helpless, I floated away from his voice. ‘Make the most of them. You can never start again.’

  Dear Nobody,

  When she came home from Auntie Pat’s my mother, your grandmother, walked past me as if she didn’t know me. I was sitting in the kitchen waiting for her to come and when I heard the car I went to open the door. I’d made myself look nice for her and I’d started the tea. She walked past me and went upstairs, and on her way up she said, without looking at me, ‘You’ve let me down, Helen.’

  I had to let somebody down.

  Dad came in behind her with his car keys dangling in his fingers. He gave me a worried look and made to go into his piano room, to lock himself away in there and lose himself in his music. That’s his escape – that’s my escape too, but not this time. I followed him in and sat on the piano stool before he could get to it, and turned to face him.

  ‘What did she say?’ I asked him.

  ‘She’s very upset, Helen.’

  ‘Of course she’s upset,’ I told him. ‘But will she let me stay here?’

  He looked alarmed. ‘Good God, she’s not goings to kick you out into the streets.’

  ‘But will she let me live here, with a baby?’

  ‘You’re not really going to keep it, love?’ His voice was pleading.

  I knew I was going to break down again, and I thought, is the crying never going to stop, is there no end to all this? I could feel my breath coming in little gasps. It was better not to speak after all. I turned my back on him and raised the piano lid. It was what he’d have done, and I couldn’t help it; it was inside me, just as you are, just as much a part of me as my blood and my breath. I began to play; I don’t know what it was, I was making it up as I went along and I heard him talking to me still, under the rolling ocean of my music.

  ‘I’d have given anything in the world to go to music school. Do you know that?’

  I’d never heard him raise his voice in anger before – or was it grief?

  I didn’t want to hear him. I let the dark chords roll.

  ‘You’re throwing your life away.’

  May

  * * *

  Helen and I tried to spend all our time together after that. I think that week or so after the clinic were the best we ever had together. It was as if we were one person, bound up in each other’s present. The future and the past were outer space.

  ‘What will we do, though?’ Helen would ask me from time to time, or I would ask her, and the answer was always that we didn’t know; space was too vast for us to
enter yet.

  ‘But we’ll be together, whatever happens.’

  I was never allowed to go round to her house, or to try to phone her up. I wanted more and more time with her. That was why, when I met her brother Robbie one afternoon on his way home from school, I bribed him to take her a message. He looked cautious. He’d obviously been well primed by Alice Garton.

  ‘I’ll give you a Mars Bar,’ I offered, and when he began to soften, ‘it’s a really important secret mission, Robbie, and you’re the only person who can do it.’

  I wanted her to meet me at the railway station on May 15th at eight o’clock. I could hardly believe it when I saw her there. She was standing by the bookstall reading a Thomas Hardy novel.

  ‘Are you nervous?’ she asked me, as our train arrived.

  ‘As hell,’ I said.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ she said.

  The train was crowded and noisy. We were glad to get off at Manchester and change trains.

  ‘How d’you feel about it?’ I asked her.

  ‘Okay,’ she smiled.

  We stood on the platform holding hands and staring in front of us, each of us locked into our own thoughts.

  When our train came we held hands all the way to Carlisle. She wasn’t showing yet. You wouldn’t have thought there was anything different about her at all, but we knew. It was a secret between us that made us squeeze each other’s hand from time to time without looking at each other. There’s something very private and special about that, holding hands, and not looking at each other, and knowing just how full and warm the other one is feeling. When I first saw Helen I liked her because she looked friendly and calm, there’s a kind of steadiness about her that tells you she won’t go off into sulks or anything. I can’t say I like girls who sulk. But after a bit I knew that the thing I liked most about her was her smile. She’s quite a serious person really, a bit like her dad, and when you’re talking to her she studies you quietly as if she’s trying to read your mind, and that’s a bit unnerving. It makes you crack daft jokes to try to distract her, in a way. And then all of a sudden she’ll smile, and that just transforms her. She really is stunning when she smiles. And for weeks she wasn’t smiling any more and her eyes had gone strained and scared, and she looked ill. It was awful, that. I knew I’d done that to her, and that I’d taken that terrific smile away. And now she was well and happy again, and when I squeezed her hand I knew she was smiling, even though she was gazing out of a train window and I was reading a book, and I was warm and dizzy, knowing it. I couldn’t help holding her hand. I wanted to touch her all the time.