Exquisite

by Sarah Stovell

  It was with hesitancy that I approached the front door. I wasn’t sure whether I ought to just let myself in, or knock and wait, a visitor.

  But she was there at the kitchen window, looking out for me. Her face, when me saw me, looked flushed with relief.

  ‘You were gone for ages,’ she said, opening the front door and kissing me warmly, urgently, sexily on the lips.

  ‘I had a look round the shops,’ I said, lightly.

  ‘You were cutting it fine,’ she said. ‘We have so little time now before you go … Sweetheart, what’s the matter?’

  I looked away. Tears had sprung into my eyes, but I would not make a scene. ‘Nothing.’

  She reached out and put her arms around me. ‘Oh, Alice,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

  She held me for a long time.

  When she finally pulled away she said, ‘I only wanted to get on with this because I listened to what you said last night – about me not sharing things with you. You’re right. I know you’re right. And you’ll have to forgive me, sweetheart, because I’m just not good at this sort of thing. I’m no good at talking. I prefer to just get on with life, without drama or conflict or anything like that. So what I’ve done this morning is written a couple of short stories; they’re for you to take with you, to read on the train. You can consider them the story of my life, if you like.’

  The relief came all at once. The cold heaviness that had weighed me down all morning lifted.

  I smiled, ‘Thank you. I thought … I thought…’ I shook my head.

  ‘No,’ Bo said, and clasped my hand in her own. ‘Don’t think that.’

  11

  For Alice, From Bo

  We were a family of wanderers. Not gypsies – though we went everywhere in our red gypsy caravan and met a lot of travelling people on our way – but roamers. My parents never liked to stay in one place too long. They said the work dried up if you did, and, besides that, my father had a way of making enemies everywhere he went. You’d know leaving was on the cards a week or so before it happened. Word would reach our ears that men were after my father, and then there’d be nights when we’d be woken up by the sounds of shouting and bodies being hurled against the sides of the wagon, and in the morning, my father would have loaded up the horse and we’d be off somewhere new, all our debts and worries behind us, he would say.

  But the trouble with debts and worries was there was no getting away from them, not for long. If they didn’t follow us, they just greeted us at the new place. We never had money, or if we did, it wasn’t the sort of money that bought food or new clothes. It only ever paid for old things we’d never seen. Money was loose and slippery. It got away before it even reached us.

  Most of the time, my parents weren’t there. I never really knew what my father did, but my mother dealt in rags and bones. She scoured skips and front yards for other people’s discarded belongings, polished them up or took them apart, then piled them into her pack and sold them, door to door. She foraged during the day, sold in the evenings. My brother and I were free to wander.

  We hunted food. We learnt which plants were edible and which would poison us. In summer and autumn we got by, picking wild fruit from the hedgerows and eating it fresh and unwashed. ‘Make sure you stay away from mushrooms,’ our mother said, and she and my father laughed. We knew from the laughter that there was something exciting and forbidden about mushrooms. Like so many other things, they lurked in the dark world children weren’t allowed to enter.

  Winter was harder. In winter, my brother and I squeezed into our caravan and the cold would come blasting down the hills and freeze us – skin, flesh and bone – till we were stiff as the dead and not much happier, either.

  Our mother stayed out later on winter nights. She had to. Hardly anyone opened their doors on winter nights, she said, and she paced twice as many streets to sell half what she sold in summer. But late at night, when she stumbled back to the caravan, there was always the sour smell of beer on her breath and anger in her fists.

  ‘It’s a bloody shithole in here,’ she’d slur, and I would pretend to sleep on, hoping the beer would knock her down before she could work herself into a frenzy. Sometimes it did, and she’d just lie there on the floor till morning. Other times, she would stand above my bed and shout: ‘I don’t know what I was thinking, having children. Having a child like you. You do nothing and you cost me a fortune. A bloody fortune. Look at you! Fourteen years old. You’re old enough to start bringing some money in to this place, or you’ll have to find someone else to take you in.’

  Soon after that, it started. When our parents were out and we were both in bed, the first man came in. I recognised him from around the site. A builder. A drinker. A shouter. For a while, he sat on the edge of my bed, then pulled back the sheets.

  My brother sat up. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Never you mind; and there’s no point telling yer mam about it, neither,’ the man said, and he went to my brother’s bed, grabbed his sheet and wrapped it over his head.

  My brother didn’t try to take it off.

  The man came back to me.

  I laid still and silent, and bore it, feeling myself turning to wood.

  After he’d gone, another one came, and then another.

  And they kept on visiting, night after night, and the more they visited, the richer we grew.

  I was the little money tree.

  12

  For Darling Alice, From Bo

  When I was fifteen, I spent three months being sick as a dog. Every morning I woke in panic, threw the covers off me and ran out the door of our old gypsy wagon into the scrubland behind, where I hid myself on my hands and knees and threw up until there was nothing left. Even then it kept on coming. My stomach went on buckling, and I gagged until I thought the life might leave me, but my mouth stayed dry and empty.

  After a week of it, my mother looked at me, suspicious. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked.

  I didn’t meet her gaze. ‘It’s something I ate. Maybe we killed a bad duck.’

  She nodded and said nothing more. I spent my days lying in bed, sometimes too weak to even go outside when the sickness came. My brother brought me a bucket. I cleaned it out when I could.

  The caravan stank, and I knew I was in a sorry way.

  Eventually, the sickness stopped, but it had left me wrung-out and thin. I thought, Let the baby in me have been killed by this.

  But it wasn’t, and even my mother realised it in the end. ‘There’s only one thing wrong with you,’ she said.

  I thought she was going to get it out for me, because I knew you could do that. I knew there were ways. You could go to a doctor and he’d give you a pill and the baby would disappear from the world, like smoke.

  But my mother hated doctors. She called them ‘the authorities’. The authorities were snoopers, prying eyes who wanted nothing but to lock us up. The authorities were schools, social workers, police, doctors and the government. They were to be hated and avoided at all costs. The authorities were why we never stayed long in one place. As soon as they got a whiff of children not in school, they were on us like rats.

  So she didn’t take me to the doctor. Instead, every night for a month, she dragged me with her to the Black Horse and asked the owner to give me two double gins. ‘She’s got herself in a bad way,’ she explained. ‘It wants getting out, quick. I can’t afford more babies.’

  The owner, a man everyone called Huggs, but which can’t have been his real name, shook his head, as if he didn’t have any words for the shame of it all; and then he passed me a glass and my mother handed over the money, paid her by the men who visited me at night.

  I drank the gin quickly, four measures of it, neat. It made me feel sick to my stomach and sometimes my head would spin and my words would come out slurred. Walking back to the caravan wasn’t easy. When I got there, I’d kneel on the floor and pray like a Christian girl for that gin to work its violent magic and
get the baby out of me. But it never did, and I couldn’t understand how a potion that could leave a girl seeing double and without her mouth or legs working properly, could still manage to keep the bones of a baby inside her, growing and healthy. There wasn’t any sense in it.

  There was one good thing about all this, though, and it was that the men stopped coming. Word got out that one of them had planted a child in me, and now they were all saying it wasn’t them, and they’d never done it, and to prove how the child wasn’t theirs, they stayed away.

  Once the sickness had stopped and I could eat what little we had again, I had to start making room in my clothes by cutting the sides of my tops and undoing the button of my jeans.

  ‘How long’s it been?’ my mother asked, looking pointedly at the round swelling of my belly.

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Five months. Maybe six.’

  ‘Well, there’s no getting rid of it with gin now. We’ll have to find some other family of mugs to take it in.’

  I said nothing.

  Time went on. The baby in me grew and I felt so tired and heavy from it, and so afraid of what might happen, I wanted to lie down in the dirt and let the earth claim me and turn me to dust.

  But it didn’t.

  My mother set me to work, fixing and painting tiles. She’d come across a whole sack of them in a builder’s skip, bashed to pieces, and she wanted me to sit outside and glue them together again, like some impossible jigsaw. When I’d done that, they needed painting with a thin paintbrush, in beautiful patterns, so they could be sold to rich people, each one ten pounds.

  And so that was how my days went by – sitting alone on a plastic sheet in the scrubland, matching up pieces of broken tiles, gluing them together and then painting them. All the while, the baby got bigger and fought me for the space to move.

  Once, I said, ‘What’s going to happen when the baby comes?’

  My mother said, ‘There’s a woman over the other side of the site whose daughter wants it.’

  But I hadn’t meant that. What I’d meant was what would happen to me, and how would I get it out? Mostly, I tried hard not to think about it, but there were nights I dreamed bad dreams of giving birth here, in the wagon, on my own, with no one to help me at all.

  The baby came. It came earlier than I was expecting. I didn’t have any idea what day of the week it was, or what time, except that it was light outside and not the grey sort of light of the early morning, but quite bright.

  The wagon was empty and it took me a while to work out what was happening. At first I thought I must have wet myself, but my dress and the floor were soaked, and there was water everywhere. I was worried about how I could clear it up before my mother came home.

  But soon I realised this was my baby on its way, so I went outside to the toilet block and sat there for a while.

  When I grew uncomfortable sitting on the toilet, I took myself back to the wagon. There were only four wagons now on the site. All the ones with the visiting men in them had moved on. Everyone looked to be out.

  I stood on the grass and called out: ‘Help.’ Then I waited a while, but nothing happened, so I decided to set up my work again, as a way of taking my mind off things.

  The pain came after a couple of hours or more. And it wasn’t that bad at first, but even so, I called ‘Help’ a few more times to try and get someone’s attention. But no one heard. I thought perhaps it was Sunday, because on Sundays most people on the site spent the day in the Black Horse. I wondered if it might be a good thing for a baby to be born on a Sunday, because maybe there’d be a bit more hope for that sort of baby than there’d be for just the ordinary Monday or Tuesday sort.

  Then I decided I couldn’t sit down anymore, and I went walking instead. I walked and walked, pacing the scrubland, and the pain started to get bad, I did some more shouting. But still no one came, and I started to think maybe I was going to have to do this thing by myself. I didn’t know what I was meant to do, or if I might die.

  And I thought maybe it’d be a good thing if I did.

  And then more pain came, so I didn’t think anything for a while.

  In the end I had to stop walking, because the pain was coming too often, and it wasn’t an easy thing to walk through. I took off my nightdress and sat down in the grass. And when the pain came, I cried out, but it wasn’t screaming – it was a strange noise, like I’d never heard before. I wasn’t sure it could even be coming from me.

  I kept hoping someone would hear me crying and come running, but no one did and so I just carried on sitting there, cross-legged in the grass, with my back leaning against a tree. I cried and grunted and shouted, and when my body said I had to, I started to push.

  The grass got a lot of blood and mess on it, but in the end the baby came. I caught it myself in my hands – a wrinkled-up, grey, crying thing, covered in white wax that disappeared into its skin. Then the baby itself turned from grey to red and screamed, and I wasn’t sure what to with it, or if it was getting cold, or how I was meant to keep it alive. All I knew was that the cord needed cutting and I didn’t have any scissors, and everything was a mess and not at all clean.

  So I put the baby down in the grass and picked my nightdress up off the ground. It was the only thing I had, and I thought I’d better cover the baby in it so it could keep warm, and when I did that, I saw that the baby was a girl.

  It went to sleep. I carried it back to the wagon and sat with it in my bed.

  My mother came home eventually. I heard her coming up the steps and got a horrible feeling inside, like I’d done something shameful and was about to be punished for it. And so I quickly moved the baby under the covers and hid it, and I sat there looking normal, as if nothing had happened.

  But she’d seen the blood and the mess outside. She looked around and said, ‘Have you had the baby?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Where is it? Why didn’t you tell us?’

  I pulled back the cover on my bed and showed her the baby, lying there on the mattress. ‘I tried calling, but no one heard me.’

  She didn’t say anything, but she picked up the baby and held it close to her, and said hello to it, which was more than I’d done myself. But it was a difficult thing, to know what you ought to say to a body that’d just come out of you, and which you hadn’t ever wanted in the first place.

  I’d thought someone would come and take it straight away, but they didn’t. I kept it with me for days. It lay in the bed next to me and I looked at it, but it didn’t look like me and I wasn’t sure it was really mine.

  My mother told me to feed it, but I didn’t know what I was meant to do, so I did nothing. The baby shuffled a bit, and waved its arms like it didn’t know who they belonged to, and then it started crying so I covered it up with the sheet.

  Mostly after that, I just wrapped the baby in a sheet, took it outside with me and got on with my painting. There wasn’t anything else to do. The baby didn’t cry much in those first few days. It mostly slept, and when it woke up, I covered its face with a blanket and put my fingers in my ears and then, eventually, the crying would stop and sleep would come again, which was good.

  Sometimes at night, I got a sight of the baby when I’d thought it was asleep, and I’d see it wasn’t asleep at all, but just wide awake and silent, watching me in the dark. Its eyes made me afraid, as if they were the eyes of a terrible fish.

  My mother made sure there was food around now, but she still went out all day and most of the night. She never said much to me, except to ask how the baby and I were. I’d say we were both fine, thank you, and she’d go away again. But one time she said, ‘Remember to feed the child.’

  So I opened up a bag she’d left on the floor, took out a bread roll, and went over to where the baby was lying on my bed and held the crust to its mouth. It sucked and sucked on it, and its eyes got wild, as if it was half mad, and I was afraid.

  So I left it there with the bread, and went to sit in the corner away from it
.

  I supposed other people would have given the baby powdered milk, but I didn’t have any of that. I’d seen other women suckle their babies themselves, but I didn’t really want to go picking it up and holding it to me like they did because I was afraid of doing it wrong. So I just gave it bread and some water now and then, and it didn’t die, so I thought I must have been doing alright, though it was sick a lot.

  Then one day, my mother came home early and with her was another woman – a young one I’d never seen before. My mother said, ‘Where’s the baby?’

  I nodded towards the bed, where the baby was sleeping. It was always sleeping. She went over to it and picked it up, then took it to the other woman and handed it to her.

  The woman looked at the baby in her arms and started to cry. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  And then she took it away.

  13

  On the train back to Euston, I read each story over and over. So this was it. This was Bo and what had made her who she was: a beautiful soul locked away from the world, strong and pure, not shrivelled with anger and bitterness.

  But things were changing now. Slowly, I knew, the hot shock of our love was warming that heart. ‘I’ve never…’ Bo had said that first night, then shook her head and couldn’t continue. But I knew. Bo had never done this before, never put her heart on the line for anyone. Her steps toward intimacy were small and cautious.