Dear Nobody

by Berlie Doherty

  She doesn’t talk about what it’s like at home. I had been forbidden to go there any more, of course. I think her mother wished me dead, quite honestly.

  Her mother and father came round to see my dad, soon after that do at the clinic. I wasn’t in. Thank goodness I wasn’t in. I was refereeing a football match in the rain, wishing I wasn’t at the time, and when I came home they’d gone. They didn’t stay long, apparently. Alice Garton had prepared what she wanted to say and she said it without stopping. She was very angry, I heard. Mr Garton just kept clearing his throat and taking his glasses off and polishing them on his tie. My dad just sat and listened. When I came home he was still sitting there. The television was switched on without any sound. It was a crazy, flickering thing in the corner of the room, and Dad was sitting staring at it with a kind of cold and heavy silence round him, as if he was wrapped up in a winter coat that still had bits of snowflakes clinging to it. I could tell the Gartons had been. I almost went straight up to my room but Dad just raised his hand slightly and I sat down on the edge of the cat’s armchair.

  ‘I wish you’d told me,’ he said. ‘That woman comes here, shouting her mouth off. Says you’ve got to marry Helen. I don’t know what the hell’s going on, do I?’

  ‘I wanted to tell you.’ I couldn’t get the frog out of my throat. I imagined it squatting under my tonsils, its bright eyes blinking down my windpipe.

  ‘The thing about lads,’ Dad said, ‘is that they can get away scot-free if they want to. Or they think they can.’

  The television screen flashed away like a dumb caged beast desperate to escape.

  I cleared my throat. ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘So what are you planning to do about it? Are you telling me you two want to get wed, at the age of eighteen?’

  Marriage, and a flat somewhere. A mortgage stretching into middle age, till I was older than my dad. The idea scared the wits out of me. Think about re-incarnation. Get it right next time round.

  ‘What do you want then? What about your degree? What about Newcastle?’

  I closed my eyes. I wished he’d stop.

  ‘You’re not expecting to take her with you, are you? Away from her family and her pals? What would she do, that lass, stuck in a student’s bedsit in the middle of Newcastle. Stuck in with a baby?’

  That frog had crawled up my windpipe again.

  ‘She’s reckoned to be a very clever lass, that Helen.’

  ‘She is,’ I muttered. ‘She’s brilliant.’

  ‘Are you expecting her to throw up all her chances too? What the hell were you thinking of?’

  Everything was blurring. The lights from the television were sharp and dazzling.

  ‘Her mother says either you marry the girl or you’re not to see her again. I can’t say I blame her. Mind you, what’s done is done.’

  I put out my hand to stroke the cat, for its warmth and comfort, and very neatly and tenderly it placed its teeth round my finger. As long as I didn’t pull my hand away it wouldn’t bite. I prised my finger free and stood up, and Dad stood up too. He flicked off the TV and came over to me. He has that slight limp, Dad, only very slight, from an accident at work. When I was little some of my friends were scared to come in the house. He just came over to me, shaking his head a little, and because I was scared then I went to walk away, and, as if he couldn’t help it, he put his arm across my shoulder. ‘Don’t think I’m not sorry for you,’ he said.

  I wanted Mum, then, too.

  May 15th

  Dear Nobody,

  I must have been mad, going all that way with Chris. I did it because it was a way of spending some time with him. I pretended to Mum that it was a school trip, even though I haven’t been in to school for ages. It’s awful to tell lies to your own mother. I hated doing it. But she’s not the sort of mother that you can tell the truth to, most of the time. She doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want to hear about you, little Nobody. You don’t exist. We don’t talk about you.

  And because we don’t talk about you we don’t talk about anything. I’ve lost my mum. We walk past each other like strangers in the house. I eat in my own room because I can’t find anything to say, because I can’t bear the atmosphere downstairs, because I’m an outcast in my own family. Dad treats me as if I was made of glass, asks me if I’m feeling well, puts cushions behind me when I’m sitting down. But he doesn’t lean over the piano when I’m playing and jazz up Chopin with his left hand, and he doesn’t tease me about Chris, or play his old ragtime records and tap-dance in the kitchen, self-mocking, happy.

  It’s my fault, all this.

  So when Chris asked me to go to Carlisle with him to meet his mother I said yes. In a frantic sort of way, I felt it would bring me in touch with my own mother again.

  He was a bag of nerves by the time we found her road. I think he would have preferred to turn round and catch the next train home. ‘Anyone would think you were about to have your boils lanced,’ I told him. But I knew exactly how he felt. Little Nobody, don’t ever be a stranger to me.

  Chris’s mother smokes, so that gave her minus points from the start. I could smell it on her breath when she came to answer the door, and on her clothes. They stank, actually. She was really pretty and she stank. In a way it gave me courage about meeting her, because I knew then that she couldn’t tell us off or try to dictate to us what we ought to do. No one who pumps nicotine into themselves or fouls up the air for other people has the right to tell anyone what to do with their lives, that’s what I think. So I felt confident, as soon as I smelt her. No one’s going to breathe that lousy muck over you. I won’t let them.

  She looks years younger than Chris’s dad. She didn’t wear make-up or tidy clothes or anything like that but she looked really pretty, with her hair cropped short like a boy’s and her enormous dark eyes. Actually, Chris has her eyes. She looked happy, too. I suppose it’s climbing that does it, all that fresh air and exercise. It’s a pity about the smoking. I actually think I might have liked her except for that. I could tell Chris was really excited to be with her; he kept grinning and running his hands through his hair. I wanted to smooth it down again for him when it went spiky in the middle. I wonder if she wanted to, as well.

  Her new bloke was there, too. He just looked like all the climbers I’ve ever seen on Stanage Edge, he even had the greying beard. I’ve seen them clinking along with ropes slung round their shoulders and all kinds of hooks and crampon things jingling off them.

  It was really hot that day, and he was wearing shorts. His legs are very hairy. I wouldn’t mind betting that he’s hairy all over, actually. He had a little knot of varicose veins like a tiny bunch of grapes just below his knee. I noticed them when he sat down. When he saw me looking at them he dangled his hand over them.

  I wandered round the house because I felt too edgy to settle. She kept calling Chris Christopher and telling him that he was tall, as if he didn’t know, and she asked him about Guy and school and she even remembered the cat. She never mentioned his dad, I noticed. I wonder what happened. It was easier to imagine them apart than together, but they must have been in love at one time. It’s strange to think that people can fall in love and out of it again, that love can turn to hate, and that it’s the people who loved you most who could hurt you most. I know that because people have told me that, and because I’ve read it in novels, but I don’t understand it. I don’t understand what it is that makes my mum and dad into a couple, for instance. He’s only happy reading, or playing the piano. I can’t imagine them kissing, or holding hands, or whispering to each other. I suppose they must have done, once. But then, I don’t understand what love is, either. I don’t understand how it can take over, overwhelm you like a huge breaker, knocking the breath out of you, swamping you. I thought of all the lads in Yorkshire, say, thousands of them, and I could have met and liked any one of them, perhaps, but it was Chris who took over. How can it be that there’s not a moment of any day when I’m not thinking about hi
m, and yet I seemed to have plenty of things to think about before. I sometimes feel as if I’m not flesh and blood and bone but I’m made up of millions and millions of minute pieces of mirror-glass, and one side of every piece reflects me, and the other reflects Chris, and they’re spinning and spinning, like the dust in the sunlight, and yet I’m walking about and nobody notices anything different about me.

  All the while she was talking to Chris I felt as if I was squatting inside his head listening to her, and feeling tense and uncomfortable and happy for him, all at the same time. I wandered round, looking at her photographs. She had them all over the walls. She gave me one because I took it down and asked her about it. It was a long kind of spiny ridge of mountain, and it sloped down to a lake. She said it was Catbells, above Derwent Water in the Lake District. It had a wonderful, calm atmosphere about it, and it was almost a double image because the whole thing was reflected in the lake, mountains upside-down, sky turned to water. It was nice of her to give it to me. I want to go there, but I’ll wait till you can come too. That’s daft, isn’t it? I mean, you come everywhere now. One day I’ll take you in a rowing boat right out to the middle of the lake, and you’ll look up at all the ridges and fells around you.

  ‘These are for you, little Nobody,’ I’ll say. ‘I’m giving you the world.’

  I can’t even think what’s going to happen next. But that photograph is like a bridge, somehow, taking me over to the other side of a black chasm of nothingness.

  On the journey up, Chris had said that he wasn’t going all that way just to say how nice the lentil soup was and to tell her where he was going for his holidays. He said he wanted to tell her about the most important things in his life, and we both curled up when he said that, you and I, we both felt warm and safe for a bit. I laugh at Chris sometimes when he’s like that, and I get impatient about it and tell him off for being romantic and I get embarrassed, too, in case anyone else can see the way he looks at me. But I’m glad.

  And it was lentil soup. I couldn’t look at Chris when she brought it in. It was lovely, though, brown lentils with onions, and lots of thick bread with bits in it. And when she said, ‘Have either of you made any holiday plans yet?’ just to make conversation, and Chris smiled and hesitated for one second, I came straight out with it. ‘I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere,’ I said. ‘I’m having a baby in the autumn.’

  I wish I’d waited till we’d finished the soup.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ she said, and she kept looking from one to the other of us as if she was trying to catch us out. Some people have their feelings written all over their faces. I had no idea what she was thinking. Her bloke had just put a spoonful of soup into his mouth and he choked on it. We all sat in total silence with lentil soup dripping off our spoons and him making little spurting noises at the back of his throat because he was trying not to cough out loud. His face was going scarlet and his eyes were watering, and he was swallowing in tiny, fast gulps with his mouth shut tight and his Adam’s apple poking up and down over the hairs at the neck of his tee-shirt.

  ‘For God’s sake get a drink of water, Don,’ she snapped, and he jumped up and ran into the kitchen with his hand over his mouth and soup dribbling down his chin. He coughed out loud as soon as he was out of sight, more like barking really, and he didn’t come back to the table again. He was probably embarrassed because he thought he’d made a fool of himself, after all that posing about he’d done with his hairy legs. I once went out with a bloke before I met Chris. He was older than me, and I was impressed because he was a systems analyst. He took me out for a meal at a restaurant. I thought we were just going in for a coffee and I didn’t like to tell him that I’d already had my tea. He ordered fresh salmon for us both. I’d never had fresh salmon before, and I didn’t know about the bones. With tinned salmon they’re just little scrunchy things, a bit like chunks of Edinburgh rock. So I put a forkful into my mouth and then found it was full of bones that I couldn’t bite or chew or swallow, and I didn’t know what on earth to do, and this bloke kept looking at me and talking to me really earnestly about computer programs all the time, so I couldn’t spit them out. My eyes were streaming, just like her hairy husband’s. In the end I just stood up and went to the ladies and got rid of them. I stood there for ages, daring myself to go back in and face the rest of the bones, and then I opened the wrong door and found I wasn’t back in the restaurant but out in the street. So I caught a bus home. I suppose it was an awful thing to do, and I hope I never bump into him again. I suppose I could offer to pay for the meal. But he was very boring. And he hadn’t even asked me whether I wanted salmon.

  I sat at the table grinning about it and started tucking in to my lentil soup before it went cold, and Chris’s mother leaned forward and began to drill me with questions, how old was I and was I sure and what arrangements had I made, and in the end I felt like crying and I blurted out, ‘It’s Chris’s baby too!’ She laughed out loud, a cold sharp laugh, and fished her cigarettes out of her pocket. I can’t stand people who smoke when you’re eating. It’s all you can taste. So I asked if I could have some more lentil soup because it really was lovely, and then I wandered outside with it and sat on a bench in her garden to eat it. I stopped boiling up inside after a bit. I felt warm and sleepy in the sun. I could hear her and Chris talking, and their voices were coming in and out like waves because I was nearly asleep, and then I heard him telling her that he wasn’t going to give up his degree.

  I went into the kitchen and made a lot of noise washing up my soup bowl and dropping spoons on the floor and looking for something else to eat. I was famished. Fancy letting people come all that way and not cooking a proper meal for them. Not even people. Your own son, for goodness’ sake. I could have wept for Chris, I was so disappointed for him. I looked in the fridge and saw four plates of cheese salad and took one of them outside. Chris and his mum were still talking by the time I’d eaten it so I took two of the other plates and put them on the table in front of them. Chris would be starving. We’d left home at six. I pretended I was a waitress in a café, discreet and dumb, and Chris glanced up and put his hand over mine and squeezed it.

  ‘I’ll be in the garden,’ I said.

  I helped myself to a yoghurt and wandered out again. She followed me out a bit later. Chris was washing up in the kitchen. She looked a bit surprised to see me eating a yoghurt and I realized that they probably hadn’t been meant for pudding after all. I finished it, anyway. Yoghurts don’t cost much.

  She sat on the grass watching me, pursing her lips now and again to blow out smoke. Her fingers were tap-tap-tapping ash on to the lawn. She looked composed and at ease with herself, but I’ve got a feeling she was nervous and at a bit of a loss. It must have been a strain for her, seeing Chris again after all those years. I bet she was knotted up inside, in spite of looking so calm and easy. I bet she went to bed with a headache as soon as we’d gone. I wonder if she usually smoked as much as that. I coughed and she moved her hand away so the smoke spiralled up behind her.

  ‘Christopher tells me you’re in the sixth form, too, Helen,’ she said. She has a nice voice. Posher than Chris’s or his dad’s. I think she must have married beneath her, as my mum would say. Isn’t that daft? How can someone be less than somebody else just because they say their words in a different way or they come from a different part of town? What if they were brilliant at playing the flute or dressmaking or growing tomatoes or building cupboards? I thought of Chris’s dad, bending over his potting wheel, his breath thick and thoughtful and satisfied, and his big hands shaping those lovely jugs and pots he makes. I’d rather have him than Hairy-legs, any day.

  I told her that I didn’t go to Chris’s school because they didn’t offer music in the sixth form.

  ‘Music?’ she raised her eyebrows. I’d been through her pile of CDs. She’s really into Mozart. ‘That’s nice. What else are you doing?’

  I told her, General, because everyone has a go at that, and Maths, Latin and Danc
e, and she raised her eyebrows again and I went quiet. It isn’t your fault, little Nobody. I don’t think about Dance any more. I’ve put my leotard away in a drawer. It’s better if I don’t see it again, that’s all.

  ‘Music, Latin, Maths and Dance,’ she murmured, as if it was a line from a poem. ‘You like patterns, then.’

  I thought that was a really good thing to say. I love it when people think sideways.

  ‘And your exams start next month?’

  I thought she hadn’t understood me, then. I thought she’d forgotten about you. Nothing’s happening between now and you. It’s a void. A tunnel. When I think about it I slide down into it myself. I turn myself inside out and find myself in the dark tunnel with you.

  ‘I hope you do well, Helen,’ she said. Her smile was so warm and encouraging that it made me like her again. ‘You owe it to yourself, and to your mum and dad.’ She leaned forward and patted my stomach, and it was such an odd and intimate and cheeky thing to do that I laughed out loud with surprise, and so did she. ‘And you owe it to this little thing.’