‘I know that. I’m just trying to help.’
She looked at me and blew out smoke and then her face softened just a bit.
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘but I’ve been taking advantage . . .’
‘No, I like it.’
‘I need to do more myself. She’ll grow up thinking you’re her mum at this rate.’
‘You can’t help being ill,’ I said. You were happily playing in my arms, snatching at my nose and mouth, even gnawing my chin, as if it was a teething ring. ‘Adam told me you told him about my operation.’
She wound a strand of hair tight round her finger and blew out a puff of smoke.
‘It’s OK, he doesn’t care,’ I said. ‘I’ll get her bottle, shall I? She needs changing.’
‘I’ll do it.’ She ground her fag out with her clog and took you from my arms.
It was hard but I had to let her take you over. She wasn’t good at it. She didn’t have the softness or the love in her – well, you above anyone know that. Adam was right that she wasn’t happy in her body. She’d hold you in the wrong position and my fingers would itch to take you myself and to show her how, but I resisted. Of course, it was partly to punish me for getting back with Adam that she developed a sudden interest in you. I understood and took a step back. Though I think she was already beginning to develop her agoraphobia, she did take you out to the park sometimes – and it was on one of these outings that she met Ross.
She didn’t tell me straight away. She began to go out more and I was pleased by this sign of recovery. I noticed after a while that she’d started paying attention to her appearance again. She washed her hair and got me to trim the ends. She put violet kohl round her beautiful pearl-grey eyes.
And one day she asked me to babysit in the evening.
‘Babysit?’ I said. It seemed such a demeaning word. We were together always and never went out in the evenings. That seems strange when I write it now, two young women, a bit of money (Adam was quite generous). Why didn’t we go out? Why didn’t I, as Stella put it, get a life? The three of us huddled together in that house, as if protecting ourselves from something. When Adam came he was included, of course. And Aunt Regina and Kathy visited us sometimes, had a go at the garden and stocked the fridge with home-grown greens and goats’ cheese. Otherwise it felt as if we were under siege – but there was no siege, just you to nurse, and Stella’s condition.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Where are you going?’
She smiled mysteriously. ‘Just somewhere.’ Before she went out she had a bath and brushed her hair until it shone like platinum. She looked young again and nearly beautiful. After your bath and feed, I lay with you on my bed, watching you grow drowsy, and it made me drowsy too and I fell asleep to be woken hours later by movement in the kitchen.
I tiptoed you to your cot. It wasn’t long before the smell of dope, along with the sound of the Eurythmics, drifted up the stairs. I’m never gonna cry again. I managed to restrain myself from going down, and after a while they came upstairs. I heard a male peeing, that heavy horsey sound so unlike a female piddle. And then I heard much more than I wanted through the bedroom wall. At first I thought Adam was wrong about Stella – she didn’t sound frigid to me – but then I understood. This was payback for the noises Adam and I had made. But while we’d been so abandoned that we hadn’t given noise a thought, hers was a calculated performance.
In the morning, when I carried you downstairs for your bottle, there was a stranger making tea in the kitchen, dressed only in his underpants. I wasn’t startled; I’d heard him moving around, but he nearly dropped the kettle in his fright. He was tall, with a skinny, caved-in torso, feathered hair and eyeliner – smudged from his night-time exertions.
‘I’m Stella’s sister,’ I said, ‘and this is her baby.’
He opened his mouth but nothing came out, and then Stella came floating in wearing her nightie, with a lovebite on her neck and stars in her own smudgy eyes.
‘This is Ross,’ she said and put her arm round his naked waist.
Later she told me that he had a pierced foreskin and that she loved him. She told me he was the first person she had ever loved. ‘The first person, or the first man?’ I asked, and she had to think before she said, ‘Well, after my family, I mean.’
It wasn’t long before Ross had moved in, and I was glad for Stella. He was a good guy. But when Adam found out he was not pleased. He liked to be the only man, I think, with us like three females marooned on an island, desperate for his visits. At least, I was desperate for them. But now there was another man around and music all the time, music Adam didn’t like – Bowie, The Pretenders, The Police – but I persuaded him to let Ross stay. It makes her well, I pointed out, like nothing ever has, not even Dodie. He had to see the sense in that.
Stella had her hair cut like Ross’s and was more animated than she’d ever been before, precariously happy; I say precarious because there was something hectic about the way she’d laugh and flit about and dance on the lawn in her nightie – or once, in nothing.
It didn’t take long, three months at the most, before Stella announced that she was pregnant again. She had the smuggest expression in the world when she told me. I knew Adam wouldn’t like it and I didn’t dare tell him. There was always a buffalo feeling in the air whenever both men were around and they avoided each other when they could.
In the winter of 1981, I began visiting Adam at Soul-Life again. It was hard to tear myself away from you and very strange to be back. It was quite different: Adam and the core members – Obadiah, Isaac, Hannah, Kezia and others – had moved to a much plusher house in Islington. There were four houses now, all linked, and close to a hundred members. By now, the community had been formalized into the Church of Soul-Life. There were other elders apart from Adam and, though it was all democratic and co-operative, there was a tacit acknowledgment that Adam was supreme. He was, after all, the one with the direct line to Jesus. He’d achieved guru status, and I felt more honoured than ever to be his wife. The more people who believed absolutely in his visions and dreams – and these were not stupid people, some were highly educated – the more I tried to convince myself they must be true. Or at least that there was sense in believing them.
†
The next time Adam visited the house was in March, by which time Stella was six months pregnant – and on her small frame there was no hiding it. She was stronger in pregnancy; more vivid in her hair and skin and body. She was queen bee in the house and Ross and I became her drones. She had less time for you and I took over again, like an unpaid nanny – but not unpaid, I was paid in love by you. Ross did youth work and was out in the afternoons and evenings and we settled into a smooth routine.
Adam arrived with no warning, as usual, and it happened that Ross was in. He and Stella were eating cheesy baked potatoes (when she was pregnant, Stella overcame her aversion for food), and I was upstairs bathing you. I heard the door and I felt the tremble in the air, the slight shifting of the power and balance. I heard the voices in the kitchen and then Adam came bounding up the stairs two at a time, and into the bathroom.
‘Why didn’t you tell me she was up the fucking spout?’ he said.
I just stared. I wanted to cover your little ears. I’d never heard him speak like that before. You were sitting up, plump and pink, your wet tummy gleaming.
‘Dada,’ you said. It was your first word. I don’t know if it was Adam you were trying to say, or if it was daddy.
He fell to his knees. ‘Sorry,’ he said to me, and turned his attention to you, ‘Hey, little chickadee,’ he said, and you splashed and kicked excitedly.
‘I thought it was up to Stella to tell you,’ I said.
He closed his eyes and hummed, getting his feelings under control. ‘When’s it due?’ he said eventually.
‘Middle of June,’ I said. ‘Dodie will be eighteen months by then.’ Adam lifted you out of the bath and snuggled you into a towel. Once you were dressed in your sleepsuit, yo
u waddled about. He hadn’t seen you walk and was enchanted. ‘I’ve missed so much,’ he said.
Adam came more often after that. He and you and I would go for walks like a family. We were a family. Me and Adam, Stella and Ross: or like two rival families with you as the wobbly little bridge between us. And there was the new member growing in Stella’s womb. Secretly, I hoped that when that baby was born she would be so taken up with it she’d let Adam have you. I hoped and wished and prayed. Ross might be happier with just his own child and I could move out, take you to Soul-Life, which is what Adam wanted too. So we all waited through a long warm spring and early summer for the birth.
Adam came in June, on the date the baby was due. Three days later he was still there. I didn’t understand why he wanted to be around for the birth of this baby. It wasn’t his business – and I could see Ross felt the same. They managed mostly to be in different rooms and, since the weather was so hot, Adam spent much of his time in the garden.
Ross had been about to go to work on the twenty-first of June, and had just joked, ‘Keep your legs crossed till I get back,’ when Stella hauled herself up out of her chair and there was a sudden heavy splatter on the kitchen floor. Her hand went between her legs and Ross sat down with a bump. ‘Shit, is this it?’
It was about seven in the evening. Adam was in the garden drinking wine while I cooked fish fingers for us to have with salad. You were in your pyjamas, thin blue ones I remember, with a pattern of ducks.
‘Juice,’ you remarked. The waters had splashed one of your pyjama legs.
Not expecting Adam to be there, we had already made a plan for the birth: Ross would take Stella to hospital in a taxi – he had no car – and I’d stay behind and care for you. But Stella panicked and grabbed my hand. ‘I want Mel with me,’ she said. ‘I want my sister.’
‘But what about Dodie?’ I said.
‘Bring her. Please, Mel, please?’ She was bent double, holding onto the kitchen table. Ross was put out, I could see.
‘Shall I?’ I asked him. I was excited by the idea, and moved that Stella wanted me. We are sisters, after all, I thought; we are sisters. And birth is exciting. My new niece or nephew was nearly here. I’d not even thought of being at the birth.
‘If she wants you,’ Ross said, shrugging.
‘Adam can stay with Dodie,’ I said. The fish fingers were burning and I switched off the gas.
Stella started to say something, but had another contraction, began to puff and pant, and then to cry. ‘It’s not right,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t feel right.’
‘OK, baby.’ Ross pulled himself together and got up to rub her back.
I scooped you up and carried you out into the garden to tell Adam. He stood up and knocked his wine over. He was excited too, I could see. It would have reminded him, I suppose, of your birth. Maybe, it was that memory that made him want to be involved. You shrieked with joy as he lifted you over his shoulder and carried you back into the kitchen. Ross was phoning a taxi.
‘Leave it; I’ll take you,’ Adam said, jingling his car keys.
Stella had straightened up but she was grey in the face, her hands cradling the weight of her swollen belly. ‘Just get me there,’ she said.
‘OK,’ I said, thinking fast. ‘You drive us, Adam, and then bring Dodie home.’ I didn’t like to think of him driving with you in the car, but he could strap you in, I thought, and it was an emergency, you could almost have called it that. I didn’t realize how much he’d had to drink. None of us did. We should have stuck with the taxi plan. Or even called an ambulance. But we did what we thought was best and that is all that anyone can do. That’s what I told myself afterwards over and over and over again.
I got the bag we’d packed for Stella with her nightie, sanitary towels, even a puzzle in case the labour was long, and Ross and I each took an arm and supported her out to the car. She had a contraction as she got one leg in the car, and was stuck there, moaning and panting. I saw a trickle of fluid, pink-tinged, trickling down the inside of her leg.
Once she could move again, she squeezed herself in behind the front passenger seat. I sat beside her, you on my lap. You kicked your little legs about, shouting, ‘Car!’, delighted by the unheard-of treat of a bedtime ride.
‘It doesn’t feel right,’ Stella said again. ‘It doesn’t feel like last time.’
‘It’ll be OK,’ I said. ‘I expect it’s different every time.’
‘You didn’t like it much last time,’ Adam remarked, and Ross threw him a look of loathing.
I took Stella’s hand and it was cold and wet. She began to shiver, though it was boiling hot inside the car, which had been sitting in the sun with the windows shut all day. The plastic leather seat stuck to the back of my thighs.
Ross was in the front passenger seat and had to twist round awkwardly to see Stella.
‘OK, baby?’ he said. ‘Soon be there. Remember to breathe. Want some music on?’
‘No,’ Adam said. ‘No sounds.’ He was driving jerkily, grinding the gears, and he didn’t stop at the Give Way sign at the end of the road. There was nothing coming, luckily.
‘Adam,’ I said, ‘take it easy.’
‘Easy!’ He laughed. ‘Don’t worry. Jesus is driving this car.’
‘No he’s not, mate: you are,’ Ross said. Over his shoulder, he shot me a worried look.
‘Ow,’ Stella said, ‘another one coming.’
‘Mum, mum, mum,’ you said, and it was all I could do not to cry out as we lurched round a corner and Stella gripped my hand so hard I thought my fingers would break.
‘Maybe you should stop, mate,’ Ross said. I could hear the controlled panic in his voice. I turned you round, Dodie, so you were facing me and pressed my hands against your back.
‘No,’ Stella moaned, ‘just get me there.’
We were on the dual carriageway now, passing the university, not far to the hospital and, though he was drunk, I don’t believe what happened next was entirely Adam’s fault. I saw it all with utter clarity. Adam was changing lanes when another car, a white estate, shot suddenly out of a junction, so Adam veered back into the outside lane and into a blue plumber’s van. I say it wasn’t his fault, but if he hadn’t been drunk, if his reactions had been quicker . . . well, no one can ever know. Our car was smashed between the others. Most of the impact came on the passenger side from the white car.
I can remember the sudden frostiness of the windscreen as it crazed and then the dazzling clarity as the glass fell away. There was the silver glint of an aeroplane high up in the blue. I can remember silence as if the world had stopped and then a painful chunter as it started off again. Someone, somewhere screamed. There was a stench of metal mashed with flesh, plastic, faeces, blood. A blur of blonde on the white car’s bonnet. Ross’s bum on the dashboard, his head invisible. I remember your hot body in my hands, alive, like me, almost unharmed.
Stella was unconscious and at first I thought that she was dead. Adam had his head in his hands against the steering wheel; his thumb was hanging by a thread of skin, but there was very little blood. I stared at the dangling digit, amazed by that. We were near the hospital and help came quickly. You had a gash on your thigh from the seat-belt buckle and I had whiplash. They treated us and sent us home.
Stella’s right leg was broken and she lost her baby girl. It had been a breech and already in distress before the accident. They said she might have lost her anyway.
Ross was declared dead at the scene.
Adam escaped unscathed, except for his thumb. A surgeon tried to save it, but later it was amputated.
Adam said it was a miracle that he, Dodie and I had survived. It proved God’s purpose. But what about Ross? I said, or the poor blond girl whose skull was smashed? What was God doing there? And what about Stella’s baby and her mind? Her leg may have healed, but her sanity was gone. She spent the next two years in hospital and Adam nearer three in prison.
On your back, the bruises from my fingers, where I�
�d held you so tight against my breast, were like shadowy wings; it took weeks for them to fade. And your leg healed with a pretty scar, like a sickle moon.
Oh, Dodie, you really were mine then, for two whole years. Often Aunt Regina and Kathy came to stay, and sometimes we went for a holiday to Peebles where you toddled about with Princess and where Kathy milked a nanny goat straight into your beaker. I took you to visit Stella, who wouldn’t even look at you for months. Once I took you to visit Adam in prison, but all you did was scream and kick.
Stella was discharged two years later. At first I was glad, of course, glad for her, and I welcomed her home to Lexicon Avenue, but she wouldn’t have it. She wouldn’t have my welcome and she wouldn’t have me. No sooner was she back than she told me to get out. She blamed me, when I was simply not to blame. There was no rational way to frame it like that – but then she wasn’t being rational. I don’t think she ever was again. I offered to take you away but she said no. You were frightened by her inconsistency. Sometimes she was intense and sometimes blank. Sometimes she squeezed you half to death and sometimes she ignored you.
I phoned Aunt Regina in a panic and she came to help. It was plain Stella would never manage you and the house alone. Aunt Regina took you and Stella back to Wood End and I was left to take care of the house. Adam was still in jail. I was alone. I didn’t even feel I could visit Peebles without upsetting Stella, though I did try. I did try to see you. I longed for you. I knew you’d be unhappy to be snatched so suddenly away from me; we had built up such a bond. I was afraid that you would be disturbed, damaged even. Aunt Regina worried too, but said it would be better if I stayed away to keep Stella calm and to minimize your confusion.
Though Stella refused to see me any more, Adam said he lived for my visits. But I could hardly stand to see him looking so grey and diminished. The guilt and shock of life in jail, where he wasn’t special any more and his preaching gained him only ridicule, made him doubt everything. It even made him doubt the signs, the fact that he was chosen. He took the blame for the accident and felt it deeply, grieving for the child who wasn’t even his. It was Satan who’d got into him, he said. Satan who’d made him drink all afternoon, Satan not Jesus who’d driven the car that day. Maybe the herons were coincidence? Maybe he was nothing but deluded? His light had gone out. And even his eyes had lost their power: they were normal, mortal eyes; bloodshot, bleary. Nothing happened when they looked into mine; they stirred nothing but pity.
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