Dear Nobody

by Berlie Doherty

  It was raining by the time we got to the end of the street.

  ‘I suppose we’d better go back,’ I said, soaked. I had nothing on over my tee-shirt.

  ‘Not at all,’ she said, in a tight, high voice. ‘I have to be in Leeds by this afternoon.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ I said.

  ‘And I’d like to see Tom.’

  ‘Oh, so would he. Like to see you, I mean.’

  We were as polite to each other as strangers on railway trains. I couldn’t shake it off. I couldn’t believe that less than a month ago we’d been lounging round in French camp-sites, messing about as if we’d known each other for years. My head was thick with thoughts of that river-bank, the crickets chirring, that insect drone. Maybe, like wine, sun goes straight to my head.

  ‘How did your results go?’ she asked.

  I pulled a face. ‘I’ve scraped in on points. Dropped a couple of grades.’

  ‘So did I,’ she grinned. ‘All the results were terrible at our school. We’re asking for re-marks.’

  ‘But you’re in.’

  ‘Yes, I’m in. That’s the main thing.’

  The rain was running like worms down my neck, and my hair was flat over my eyes. I was a bit worried about the design on my tee-shirt. I’d done it myself, and it hadn’t been washed yet. I’d feel a right idiot if it started running. But really, that was the least of my problems.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing’s up. It’s the surprise, that’s all. I didn’t expect you.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘So you don’t like surprises. That’s fair enough.’

  We walked on in silence. I used to think Tom’s house was near mine. It seemed miles away. Anyway, luckily he was in. He made everything all right, old Tom.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ he kept laughing. ‘You in Sheffield, Bryn!’

  He brought out his photographs of France and spread them out on the carpet, and Bryn brought hers out of her rucksack. We were soon rolling about laughing at them, and remembering things about people we’d met on the camp-sites – Monsieur Bienvenu and all the other characters – Jeremy Stereotype with all his family of typelets, the Fish at the End of the Universe, Bassoon-voice. We kept remembering things and spluttering them out at each other. It was nerves. I was in a state of advanced hysteria.

  Tom suggested we should walk Bryn down to the station and pick up some chips on the way. The sun was out again when we set off. We were still in a daft mood; and fate did the rest. I just don’t think it could have happened if we hadn’t had that mad spell in Tom’s house. I bent down to tie my laces and for some inane reason Tom just hoicked Bryn into the air and lowered her onto my shoulders. She yelled out and clung to my hair with both hands, and I stood up very slowly with my back straight so she wouldn’t tip off. We were all yelling with laughter. I couldn’t see a thing because she’d pushed her hands over my eyes, but I started to walk forward, holding out my arms to balance myself, like a circus act. Then Tom stopped laughing and put his hand on my arm.

  I pushed Bryn’s hands out of my eyes and held them out to the sides, our fingers locking so she could hold on tight. And then I saw what Tom had seen, and wished I hadn’t. Two girls had stopped at the end of the road and were just turning away. It was like seeing another door swinging open and slamming shut again, only this time there was no secret room on the other side of it. One of the girls was black. The other was small and fair. I hardly recognized her, she’d changed so much.

  Dear Nobody,

  I hate him! I hate him! I hate him!

  September

  * * *

  September 15th

  Dear Nobody,

  I can’t believe it’s only about two weeks to go. Deep, deep inside me there’s that screaming still, that fear; and at the same time there’s a kind of calm. I can’t wait to know you. I wish you could just magically appear. Well, we have got a gooseberry bush in the garden. I’m afraid of the pain, Nobody. I can’t help being afraid of it. I hope we like each other. I mean, really like. I wonder what my mum thought when she first saw me.

  My father has bought a cot for you. It was a most extraordinary thing, seeing him struggling in from the” car with it, realizing what it was, looking at Mum straight away to catch the expression on her face, and seeing nothing there. She wants you to be adopted, still. She just pursed her lips then and followed him upstairs, and I heard them banging about, moving my bed to make room for it. I followed them up.

  ‘I’m staying here, then?’ I said.

  ‘Of course she’s staying here,’ my father said to Mum.

  ‘Where else would you go, tell me that?’ she demanded. ‘This arrangement won’t do forever, just remember that. And don’t leave that thing up,’ she said to him. ‘Not till it’s born.’

  She went into her own room and closed the door. I wanted to follow her but Dad shook his head at me.

  ‘She has her own way of coping, Helen. Leave her,’ he said. After all, it seems he understands her.

  I sank down onto my bed. The sides of the cot were propped against the wall. It was pale lemon, with rabbits in little blue and pink rompers prancing along the bars. ‘How can I stay here if I’m not wanted?’

  Dad cleared his throat and squatted down in front of me, his long bony fingers resting flat along his thighs. ‘Of course you’re wanted. Get that out of your head. You’re our daughter. Never forget that. It wasn’t in our scheme of things to have a baby living in the house . . .’

  ‘It wasn’t in my scheme of things, either.’

  ‘We don’t want to lose you, you know.’

  I shook my head and he lifted up one of his hands and just touched my cheek; a shy, unfamiliar gesture.

  ‘You’re to stay here as long as you want to. That’s my promise. And your promise to me, Helen, is that you won’t let your music go. One day you’ll dance again. Promise me that.’

  I did promise him, though the screaming in my head was loud enough to drown us all. Maybe it was you, making your whale noises deep inside me. For a long time after he’d gone out of the room and into their bedroom I sat there, listening to that screaming, counting the rabbits in their never-ending joyous prancing round and round the sides of the cot, flopsy-bunnying for all the babies in the world. I could hear Mum and Dad in their room, consoling each other in whatever way it is that married people do. I wondered if he was loving her.

  I went out then, to see my nan and Grandad. I can’t remember when I last went there with my mother, I was thinking, or whether my nan had ever been to our house to see us there. I wondered whether that wound would ever heal, whether there ever came a time in people’s sorrowings when forgiveness was easier than pain. But what I did know was that I wouldn’t live with Nan now. How could I bear her silences? One day I want to try to creep inside her mind and talk to her; after all, we have a lot in common. I want to ask her about my real grandad, the dancer in a night-club, I’m holding that in my head, a tiny warm promise, for the right moment. I wonder why it’s so hard for young people to talk to old people about the things that really matter. But then, it’s hard to talk to Nan about anything at all.

  Her eyes lit up when I went in to her room that day, just a brief blaze of light, and then faded away to daydreaming again. I know about you, Nan. I have your secret in my head. I went over to her and put my arms round her. She had a lovely, soapy smell.

  ‘I’ve got a present for you,’ she told me.

  It was a shawl for you. Grandad told me he’d had to bring all the boxes down from the attic, and that she’d spent hours rummaging through the past to find it. It must have been my mum’s when she was a baby. Perhaps it was her own, the child in the drawer. She spread it out for me to touch. Then, instead of giving it to me, she just sat there with the thing rolled up on her knee, staring down at it.

  ‘It’s lovely, Nan,’ I said. She was slipping away again. I touched her dry and papery hand.

  ‘She probably wants to wash it before she g
ives it to you,’ Grandad said. ‘It’s years old.’

  She looked at him, then, as if he’d just walked off a space ship. ‘How can I give it her before the baby’s born?’ she asked him. ‘It might be dead!’

  Oh little thing, be alive! Be well. Be perfect for me.

  No, how could we live at Nan’s? I want you to be able to yell your head off when you feel like it, and not annoy people. I want us both to be able to yell our heads off.

  September 21st

  My dear Helen,

  I know you are an independent young woman who will make up her own mind about things. I admire you for it. Whatever plans you make for your future, I wish you well with them. You are a survivor, whatever happens. You have that quality in you. You and your baby will need money, and I would like to make a contribution till Chris is able to do it for himself, though I don’t want him or his father to know about this. There will be a sum paid into a monthly account for your child, and I hope you will accept it. I also hope, Helen, that one day you will be willing to let me meet my grandchild.

  Joan

  She has terrible handwriting. It’s like unravelling a tangle of inky knitting. I can’t take it in, the words of her letter, but it made me cry all the same, as if someone had put a blanket of comfort round me in the night.

  All I can focus on is you, thrusting and pushing inside me all these weeks, turning yourself round. You’ve settled yourself now for coming out, the midwife told me yesterday. You’ve got a long and dark and frightening journey ahead of you soon. Don’t be afraid. We’ll manage it together.

  It was the middle of September before I got round to buying the books on the reading list they’d sent me from Newcastle. I enjoyed browsing round the students’ second-hand bookshops, though, picking up tatty copies of leather-bound volumes of Milton and Shelley and poets like that, just names to me, that had passed from hand to hand. The pages inside were all scored with underlinings and pencil notes, all in different writing, and I suddenly felt excited at the thought of joining in the long line of scholars from other centuries, other ages. I imagined monks in gloomy cells, bowed over their manuscripts, the scratching of quills on parchment. I bought a little red-leather copy of an ancient poem called Beowulf. It was written in Anglo-Saxon. I couldn’t understand a word of it.

  It was the most amazing thing in the world to walk into my house that afternoon and see my mother there. I didn’t know what on earth to say to her. I opened the door and was just about to go upstairs to my room when I heard her voice in the kitchen. My stomach went cold inside me. Maybe it was shock. I ran upstairs and tried to sort out my head before I faced her. I could hear her down in the kitchen below, laughing out loud. I couldn’t understand it; I couldn’t understand why she was here, or why I felt so shaken up at the thought of seeing her here, in our house. I couldn’t work out in my head what the hell to say to her. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, she was planning to come back here to live with us. Did I want that? No, I didn’t want that now. I felt sad inside, frustrated and angry and sad, screwed up so tight that it hurt. It was too late. When I was a little boy of ten I desperately wanted my mother back home, and if you’d asked me why I’d have said it was because she’d have made sure my sports stuff was clean and ready for Wednesdays, and I wouldn’t have had to go to Cubs in the rain, and I wouldn’t be shouted at for having nosebleeds. Perhaps I’d have said that Dad wouldn’t have sat for hours with his head in his hands, night after night. Guy wouldn’t have had to cry himself to sleep. It was too late now. Nothing would ever put that right.

  I couldn’t understand myself. I wanted to write letters to my mother and to talk to her on the phone, and to drop in and see her when it suited me. I didn’t want to see her chopping up onions in our kitchen, sitting with her feet up on our settee watching television, coming out of Dad’s room in his dressing-gown.

  I had a wash and put on a decent sweatshirt and went downstairs. I could hear the babble of voices surging up in a confused kind of frenzy of laughing and talking, and as soon as I went into the kitchen it stopped. It was as if I’d pushed it behind the door as I opened it. There was my mother, looking terrific. That bloke of hers was there. Dad was there, his voice tailing off last of all, in the middle of some yarn about Guy and his telescope. I stared round at them all. Jill was standing next to Dad. I’d forgotten that she and my mother are sisters. And Guy was perched on the stool blinking at the cat.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. I felt awkward, like a six-year-old who’s burst in on a grown-up party.

  Don shoved a glass of frothy bubbles at me. I guessed it must be champagne. Horrible stuff. They all stared at me, and I held it up and took a sip. ‘Here’s to…’ I said. Anything to fill that silence.

  ‘Our divorce,’ my mother said.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said.

  ‘You do get it,’ said Guy, earnest little owl, bright-eyed and pale as death.

  But I didn’t. I didn’t understand why words like that would make them all smile at me, coaxing me to smile back, and I was the spoilsport at the party, the drab in the corner who never gets a joke, the wet blanket, whatever that’s supposed to mean. I didn’t want to play games. I didn’t know the rules.

  ‘Your father and I are getting a divorce,’ said my mother.

  ‘Well, that’s wonderful,’ I said, dry. ‘And I thought you did that years ago.’

  ‘Our marriage. Drink to it, Christopher.’ Don held out his hand to me. I thought of making some daft remark about not fancying him enough to marry him, but I couldn’t be bothered. No one would have got it, anyway. ‘I thought you were already married,’ I said, ignoring his hand. ‘Or were you just practising?’

  They all roared with laughter as if I was the clown that they’d all been waiting for.

  ‘It means,’ said my mother, ‘that Don and I have thought long and carefully about marriage, and what it involves. And we know that we’re ready to take that step.’

  I looked at Dad. ‘And I know they’re right for each other,’ he said. I understood then. He was letting her go.

  I raised my glass and drained it down. I swallowed back a burp. I felt very drunk, but not in that giggly, smiling give-us-a-cuddle way of theirs. I shook hands with all of them, even Guy, and then I stepped past all their legs and out into the back yard and threw my glass against the wall.

  It was beautiful, the way that perfect shell burst apart and splintered; the way the stars of glass caught light and soared before they fell.

  It’s strange how you can go for years and years letting other people be responsible for the way you think and dress and eat, what you learn, how you speak, and all of a sudden you find you’ve broken away from all that web of protection and you’re free.

  *

  Over the next few days I got to know my mother and Don quite well. They stayed in a hotel in Derbyshire and I cycled over there a few times and then went for walks with them. I was surprised to find that I liked him.

  ‘Come on, Christopher, take us to your favourite places,’ he said. I enjoyed doing that. I didn’t take them anywhere near the Edge where I’d tried to climb that time, or any of my special Helen places. I only ever go there on my own. But I did take them to the top of Burbage, and we sat on a big rock under the bridge so we could look right down the valley, all the colours turning, and the sheeps’ backs muzzy with September light, and I said, ‘This is where my childhood is, Mum.’ I didn’t care whether it sounded corny or not.

  I’m glad I had those few days with her. I liked her a lot. And I wanted to call her Mum, not Joan, I found. So I did. Names are weird things.

  But when she asked me about my future plans I clammed up. My future had been decided for me.

  ‘I haven’t spoken to Helen since the end of June,’ I said.

  ‘I gathered that,’ Mum said. ‘But can you put it all behind you?’

  ‘Like hell I can.’

  Maybe I won’t go to Newcastle, I told her. Maybe I’ll go on the road, pack up my rucksack
and free-wheel round the world. How far away from Helen could I get and not think about her? If it takes light less than a second to circle the planet, would she see me from the other side? How long does sound take? If I stood by Ayres Rock and whispered ‘Nell’, would she hear it in her dreamings? If there was nothing else in the way, no engines or machinery or laughter or shouting or crying, maybe she’d hear it. Europe, Africa, India, Japan, Australia. If I cycled for ever and ever, shouting her name, would that help?

  ‘It takes time,’ Mum said.

  A few days after Don and Mum went back up north I had a letter from Bryn. It was full of jokes and funny drawings and bits of poems. It went on for pages. She finished up by asking me to come and see her one day when she was in Leeds. ‘I miss you,’ she said. It hurt to read it. I knew for sure what I’d been guessing when we were in France together, and from the way she’d looked at me when she came to my house that day. I remember the way she’d been after we’d seen Ruthlyn and Helen in the street. I remember now how I stooped down to let her climb off my back, and then I’d just stuck my hands in my pockets and headed back for home, with my head cracking like a machine-gun. She and Tom had come after me and walked with me; Bryn had had to run to keep up with me, I remember that, and I’d tried to shake her off the way you shake off a wasp that’s bothering you. But it wasn’t her fault. I’d turned round to tell her that and she’d just stood there, with her face, smiling and puzzled and sorry, turned up to mine, and for some reason that I don’t understand I’d just bent down and kissed her, a friend’s kiss, a please-don’t-blame-yourself kiss. So we’d gone on to buy chips and then to see her off at the station, and I could tell by the way she smiled goodbye to me that she did blame herself, and what’s more, that as far as she was concerned we were far more than just friends. I hadn’t written to her though, and I hadn’t heard from her. I’d thought, that’s it. It’s over now.