Younger Thinner Blonder

by Sue Watson

  “I will go back to my trekking company. I will be glad to return. Trekking season is now busy... So, I will begin tomorrow.”

  “Gosh. So soon?” I said, thinking, wow he will just go back to his old life in the morning like nothing has happened. Like I never existed.

  “And you, Tanya... What will you do?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t exactly enjoy today – but I wonder if I will have to go back to that life? I mean once I’m back home, if there are offers on the table, I might be tempted. Anyway, it’s not that bad, I could put up with anything as long as I have the right person by my side.” OK, I was being very obvious but given the cultural chasm between us and the fact I had to leave in less than 12 hours, I felt it necessary. To my dismay he didn’t pick up on it, or if he did, he chose to ignore it. He just nodded, half-heartedly.

  “What would you think? About...being in that life? In Britain...could you ever see yourself living ...somewhere like that?” I asked, trying for nonchalant while sipping my wine and studying his beautiful mouth.

  “Ah, Tanya it would never do. Your agent she talks of the papping and the big bucks and she shouting all the time – like she is in great pain... No, no, I could not live with that life. I belong here with my mountains.”

  I sighed, he was right. Why would he want to live a mountain-less life of incessant tweets and flashbulbs and Donna’s tobacco-infused obscenities? No, if I wanted to be with Ardash, it would mean leaving my heart here with his, entwined in the prayer flags hundreds of feet in the air, fluttering through the mountains.

  “I need to think about a different future now that I don’t have my show. But I have here...and the orphanage...and you?” I ventured. He smiled.

  “I’m not obsessing about marriage anymore, Ardash and I had planned to spend some time alone for a while but sometimes life has other plans...doesn’t it? I suppose what I’m trying to say is, I’ve learned here that life is very short and we can’t plan or buy a moment, it just happens. I’ve never wanted to spend the rest of my life alone, I always wanted to share it with another person. Once upon a time I hoped to have kids of my own too but...”

  “You don’t want children?”

  I felt tears well up. I put my fork down, unable to eat any more.

  “I can’t...and it’s not what people think – it’s not my age. Plenty of women have babies in their forties...but I...”

  And the floodgates opened. I started to cry and using my napkin to wipe at my face and blow my nose was disconcerting for the other guests. So I fled the restaurant. Apologising to him through tears and tissues I ran out to the courtyard with the now dark, deserted pool and black distant mountains. I leaned on a wall facing the huge, eternal blackness and sobbed.

  Within seconds, Ardash’s hand was on mine.

  “Bahini... What is it? Why do you cry? Have I upset you? I am so sorry.”

  “No...no...” I shook my head. “It’s not you. It’s...it’s something that happened a long time ago.”

  “But if it’s long ago, why you cry today? What makes you so sad?”

  “Oh, Ardash, you’ve no idea how much I’ve always...longed for a child, children...but...”

  “But what...?”

  I put my head in my hands. I couldn’t talk about it, not after all this time. I looked up into those kind, trustworthy eyes and slowly my heart opened up.

  “When I was a teenager I got pregnant.”

  “Ah...so you have child, this is what you are telling me?”

  “No. I don’t.” I could feel my legs swaying under me. I leaned on the wall for support and looked at him. I’d never told anyone this before, well, apart from Donna.

  “I was 16, it was the first time I’d had sex...a boy I thought I loved. I didn’t tell anyone I was pregnant. I thought if I ignored it the problem would go away but when I told him, the father of the baby didn’t want to know and I was alone...then Mum found out.”

  I thought back to that day, it was late August and it was too warm. I was standing in the kitchen drinking water from the tap and Mum was looking at me strangely.

  “Tanya, do you have something to tell me?” she asked. I turned, saw the look on her face and cried. I wasn’t crying about the fact I was scared and pregnant, I was crying at my mother’s disappointment. She’d been a single mum and life was a struggle until the day she died. She didn’t want the same for me or my sister.

  But as much as she wanted a future for me, I wanted the baby. Perhaps that’s why I’d kept it to myself, a natural instinct to protect my daughter inside me, so no-one could take her. I had no doubts until I saw what having my baby would do to my mum. “I broke Mum’s heart...so to mend it, I had to break my own,” I heard myself say.

  This was something I’d lived with every single day of my grown-up life, yet I’d never voiced it. Even my sister Tara never knew as she’d moved away by then and Mum said we mustn’t talk about it to anyone. I think Mum believed if we never spoke about it then we could put it away in her blue silk sewing box, with the bills we couldn’t pay.

  And every morning since, when my alarm went off, I’d thought about my lost baby. Every good review, every new designer suit, every award and every penny I earned from that great big future I’d worked so hard for amounted to nothing compared to the child I’d lost. I’d have given everything I had to get my baby back.

  “Even now, all these years on I wake up in the middle of the night and know something is missing,” I heard myself say.

  As I spoke about it for the first time, it became more real and thoughts were crystallizing in my head. Ardash and I moved wordlessly across the empty courtyard to sit on the sun loungers. The evening breeze got up and caught a parasol, I absently watched it flapping. I stared into the pool; bright turquoise sunshine by day, it was now an empty, swirling blackness, swallowing me up.

  “I pleaded with her to let me keep it. There was no-one else – Mum believed it was best for me – I never knew my dad.” I wiped at my palms again and again.

  “Tanya. I’m so sorry... I have no words. Your mother, she did what she thought was right.”

  “Yes, but right for whom? Mum wanted to save my future,” I said into the water, “but ironically, what I did for her destroyed it.”

  “Ah... the Western World sees things in very strange light. Having a child would not have stopped you having a future.”

  “No, but we were all stupid back then. It was the 80’s, we all wanted big hair and shoulder pads and women suddenly had their own careers – and not merely as assistants and secretaries to men. Motherhood as an unmarried teen in my culture was seen as a death sentence to success.” I used my sleeve to wipe my eyes and my nose, and didn’t care how I looked. “I have spent my life grieving for a child I never knew, children I never had. And when I was old enough to leave home, to earn some money and make my own decisions the first thing I did was find a boyfriend. I was desperate to get pregnant, like I owed it to myself – to my baby – but after having unprotected sex for two years, nothing had happened so I went to the doctor. After tests it seemed as the abortion had been so late and I’d been left with scarring – even if I could conceive, it was unlikely I’d ever carry a baby to term. So not only did I lose my first baby, I lost all the babies I might have had.”

  “Oh Tanya.” He sighed and gripped my hand.

  “I have never told anyone any of this. Except Donna of course, and all she worried about was the press getting hold of it. And the show that paid my wages, that made me famous was based on me criticising women who allowed their kids to get pregnant. It would have been hypocrisy... But what I should have done was use my celebrity to tell teenagers that yes, it is OK to have the baby, it’s also OK to have an abortion but only if that’s what they want.”

  I smiled sadly to myself, all those years telling other people to follow their hearts – yet I’d never followed mine.

  “I have never been able to look into the eyes of a baby in a pushchair, or see a toddler in
the street without feeling this terrible, crushing grief and guilt...for what I did,” I stopped crying now and was gasping for breath in that hiccupy way when emotion is too strong for tears alone. “That is, until the orphanage. I was so scared going there. I had avoided babies and children all my life, yet on that first day I could see those little ones needed me so desperately that I had no choice... And touching them, I can’t explain, but it felt like I was being healed.”

  Wracking sobs suddenly thrust through me and I thought my heart was coming out of my throat.

  Ardash put his arm around me and I leaned on his chest gratefully.

  “Tanya, you need to grieve. You need to face what happened and get on with your life."

  I sobbed harder, but in my heart, I knew that he was right. It was time to face what had happened, mourn and acknowledge the significance of my loss. All my adult life I’d tried to wipe it clean, scrub it away and cover up the smell of my grief and guilt with expensive room scent, but all the time it was there.

  “I will never be a mum...” I heard myself say into the blackness, still leaning on Ardash who squeezed me gently.

  “Motherhood – she isn’t always about the blood,” he said. “You were like mother to Maya and the motherless children, if only for an afternoon.”

  My heart melted. I’d felt worthless and less than human, like I could never really be a ‘real’ mother but with someone like Ardash I could change my life. He was a shard of light to cling to in the dark and for the first time I had a chance of being whole again. I might even finally be able to come to terms with what I’d lost at 2.34pm on September 12th 1982, on that cold operating table somewhere in Manchester.

  * * * * *

  Later we went back to my room and he held me for a long time. No sex, no heat, just warmth and comfort and lying together on the bed. I had never felt such lightness, such a sense of deep joy and relief. “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “I am thinking I need to go now, Tanya.”

  “Oh, but it’s my last night Ardash. It may be a couple of weeks before I can get back here...”

  “I have to talk with you... I am hurting.” He wasn’t smiling.

  “Yeah... I know. Me too. But I’m too old to play games. I don’t have time to sit around waiting to be asked, I wasted too many precious years with the wrong man when I could have been happy with the right one. Do you want me to come back here? If things work out, we could live together perhaps? I know it won’t be easy...but I’ve never felt so sure about anything in my life. What about you?” He said nothing.

  “Well?” I asked, “You do want to be with me again, don’t you?”

  “Tanya. I should have told you before...I can’t be with you.”

  “Why? Is it the abortion? Oh God, you hate me for it, don’t you?” I said, wracked with guilt all over again.

  “No, I don’t hate you.”

  “I never told anyone because I knew it would change how they felt about me, how I feel about myself, knowing they know...” I said, feeling the tears pricking behind my eyes.

  “Tanya, it is not you.”

  “Well, what else could it be?”

  “I... I have a wife.”

  “What...wh... Hang on, are we saying the right words here?” I grappled in the darkness to make some sense of this. “You said ‘bahini’ meant sister, which also means girlfriend... ‘Wife’ is someone you marry – it means married in my language.” I explained.

  “And also in mine.”

  No. No. No. How could I have missed this? It was the oldest story in the book and I was one of the oldest women in the book and I bloody missed it.

  “Ardash, are you teasing me?” I wanted to laugh. If I laughed loud enough I could drown out what he was saying. He was shaking his head.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this last night when we first slept together? You asked me to the party and I assumed you were free...we’ve talked so much. I’ve told you things I never told anyone before, yet you failed to tell me that you are married?”

  “Tanya, I was wrong to ask you to the party, but you have filled my heart since we met. I never think you would want to be with me, and now I am hurting your heart... But I can’t.”

  “No, you can’t.” I snapped, searching my brain for the appropriate words, desperately trying not to show my anger, my wretchedness.

  “Tanya, my wife... I miss her so much, she died.” he said, with a crack in his voice.

  “Oh... I’m sorry... I didn’t understand...” I instantly felt awful for doubting his integrity.

  “She had the weakness in her heart... So sudden. We had only been married for five years.”

  “Oh, Ardash. How awful, there’s me going on about my pain, but your suffering is just too much. You lost your parents as a child and now this. I had no idea... How long ago did she die?”

  “It’s been four years since her death. She was twenty-nine years old. I was thirty-six. We wanted children like you, but her health was always so bad...it never...” There were tears in his eyes. “I can’t ever be in the love with another woman Tanya, it would disrespect her memory. My wedding was for my life,” he said, head now in his hands.

  My heart crash-landed into the basement of the hotel. “I understand how you feel. You must have loved her very much.”

  He nodded and I put my hand on his shoulder.

  “But what would be sadder is if you devoted your life to her memory and didn’t have a future for yourself. I can’t imagine she’d want you to spend the rest of your life alone, mourning her.” I said, gently.

  “It’s not my choice, Tanya, I can’t help the feelings. The loss it is very deep.” he replied.

  “I understand.” I smiled sympathetically and tried not to cry.

  “These last two days were very beautiful, Tanya, but today, it hurts too much. It can never be – I am so sorry.”

  And he climbed out of bed, dressed and left, without even saying goodbye.

  TWEET: @TanyaTruth Thanks 2 all who voted 4 me back home soon. So sad 2 leave #Nepal a beautiful place + beautiful people #TheLostChildrenOfNepal

  34

  OCD in Overdrive and Kardashians in Crisis

  Four hours and 22 minutes later, he’d gone and I was packed and waiting in the lobby for Donna and our taxi to the airport.

  She finally staggered down the stairs, yelling at staff and demanding help with her baggage. “Honey I arranged for a car... Where’s the car?” she was in full stress mode and I didn’t need another layer on top of my own. I’d already showered for a whole hour and all the tears and vigorous scrubbing had left me crispy-dry and exhausted.

  I had to put this one down to experience; Nathan had left me vulnerable and I had been too willing to let Ardash in. I needed to stay closed and detached and never allow anyone to screw me (in every sense of the word) ever again. (OK, perhaps not totally ‘ever again,’ but I had to be wearing the emotional equivalent of a bullet-proof vest if I were to venture down that rocky road.) Despite my own talking-to though, I’d wanted the phone to ring, a knock on the door– and Ardash to be there. It was bad timing, terrible geography and the stars were not aligned, they were all over the damned place – so why did it have to be now that I’d finally fallen in love for the first time? Even as the taxi pulled up outside the hotel and Donna hurled a fag across the lawn, swearing loudly about the service, I imagined him appearing from nowhere, taking my dry, crusty hand in his and walking me back into the hotel. Into his lovely, calm, centred life.

  I picked up my bags and took a final look around. The sky was its usual breathtaking blue and the white hotel building gleamed in the sun. I wondered if I would ever come back again. I’d arranged for the magazine fee to go to the orphanage and any money I earned beyond my needs I would send too. I desperately wanted to see the children again – and one day I would, but I couldn’t come back too soon. At the moment my heart was too full of Ardash and I couldn’t take the pain of seeing him until I felt stronger. So I reluctantly
stuffed my stupid, mangled old heart into the boot along with all the bags. Donna’s cases were engorged with glamorous saris and gold jewellery, she was a magpie and couldn’t resist anything that glittered, but her unruly bags made me feel unclean. I never bought anything when abroad because my perfect packing would be ruined – there was a place for everything. I never carried extra stuff in my luggage as it was too messy. But this time I had one extra item, the blue elephant that Maya had given to me – I kept it close to me, in my hand luggage.

  “I just need to pop to the ladies.” I said, rushing back into the hotel, ignoring Donna’s yells of protestation from the taxi. As much as I couldn’t allow myself to be late for the airport, all the stress was making me desperate to wash my hands. I had to break one obsession in order to obey another and my head was starting to whirl as I scrubbed my hands in the hotel bathrooms, all the time fretting about missing the plane.

  After a few minutes I walked out of the bathroom and I’ll admit, I scanned the foyer for Ardash. I don’t know why I thought he’d turn up, after all he’d made it clear the previous night that he couldn’t be with me and I needed to accept that. I climbed into the taxi, telling myself this was no time for me to behave like a love-struck teenager.

  The taxi shuddered and spat and set off for its ride through the crazy beeping, cow-loving, traffic-jamming city and I felt nothing but loss. I’d come here to get my life back yet now I was leaving most of it behind. I’d had my heart torn apart, mended and torn again, the remaining fragments were now swirling through the mountains.

  Arriving at the airport we stood in a queue and waited. As I looked around, I caught sight of a man examining the departures board. He was standing with his back to us and he was taller than most Nepalis. It was Ardash, here, at the airport. He started to walk off, and abandoning Donna and the cases I ran after him. I called his name, but he couldn’t hear me and when I caught up with him I forgot all about the taboo touching thing and grabbed him by the arm.

  “Ardash? I’m here” I said, breathlessly. The man turned round. And it wasn’t Ardash. I almost cried with disappointment and embarrassment. “I am so very sorry, I thought you were someone else,” I said, stroking the stranger on the arm and upsetting him even more. He shook me off and I scuttled back like a naughty child to an incandescent Donna.