Tomorrow we’re looking at how to introduce characters and establish their world. The teacher touched on this at the end of last week’s session. A mistake that new writers often make, she said, is to take you through who all the characters are in a schoolmistressy way, before the story even begins. Shoehorning in biographies and backstories which clog up the narrative and stop the story from gathering pace. We are going to learn how to avoid this. But I’ve been thinking about it all day and I’ve come to the conclusion that although that might be fine in fiction, when you’re making up a world and are completely in charge of the cast of characters – how many of them there are, how and when they appear, and everything else – it doesn’t quite work with my story. Already, scrolling through the pages I’ve written, I see so many names it must be bewildering. My father and mother, me and Alfie, Catriona, Veronica, Michael. Jeremy and Mr Rawalpindi, the writing tutor. Danielle and Alfie’s girls. Not to mention the cameo roles, the characters who appear briefly once or twice. This is, above all, my father and mother’s story, so I’ll take pains to describe them as fully as I can. Alfie too, and Danielle and their girls. The next chapter I write, I’ve decided, will be about the other family, and the time we went to Belfast to confront them. And I feel I should describe Mr Rawalpindi and Jeremy, and of course the writing teacher, people who aren’t really part of this story but who are hovering at its edges. I want you to see them, as well, or at least know who they are.
I wonder, too, if I should describe myself. I don’t know how much of a sense you can get of someone just by reading their words. In some ways you know me far better than if you’d just met me, because you have access to my most intimate thoughts: but in other ways, you know me far less. You don’t know what I look like. On the list of things we were to think about before tomorrow, the teacher has written: Is a character’s physical appearance strictly relevant to the story? In terms of this story, I suppose the answer is no. I’m not writing a romcom or a chick lit or the sort of book where a hero is going to appear and see through my physical appearance to the true me. If I was writing that, I would describe me, because it would be important that I’m not exactly a catch. As it is, the story isn’t even really about me at all: it’s about my childhood, and my parents. So what I look like, and what job I do, and the rest of it, shouldn’t matter at all. Personally, though, I like to picture my narrator in my head while I read, so perhaps a brief description of me would help.
Here goes. As I said at the start, I’m on the wrong side of my thirties. Thirty-nine in a few weeks’ time. Which is not a good age to be when you’re newly single, not of your own volition, and with no immediate prospects – to be blunt about it. I have my mother’s height – short – and my father’s build: sturdy. My hair is sort of nondescript, and I dye it, these days to cover the grey. When I was a teenager it was pink, blue, striped with green. Purple, once, to match my DM boots. Nowadays it’s ‘plum’, ‘burgundy’, ‘chocolate’, ‘rich chestnut’, deep, comforting names that inevitably look nothing like they sound, or like the packet. At the moment, my hair is a sort of dull reddish-brown, cut above my shoulders in a nothingy style that’s an attempt to grow out my immediately post-Jeremy bob. My eyes, grey; my face, pale, sort of oval.
I work as an Agency Carer, which means that I go around giving non-medical assistance to a changing rota of clients. Usually, they’re old people who aren’t yet old or ill enough to need a residential home or full-time care. They might have had a stroke, or a knee or back injury, or some other incapacitating illness, and need help going up or down stairs, getting washed or dressed, or eating their meals. They might have the onset of dementia, or Alzheimer’s, or some form of senility or other mental illness. I can change their dressings, check they’ve taken the right combinations of medicines at the right times. Sponge-bath them, or help them in and out of their bath, or wash and dry their hair, or help them apply their make-up. Cook for them, occasionally, or cut up their meat into bite-sized pieces, or wield a spoon for them. A lot of my job involves listening to them: what most people want above all is a bit of company and a chat, and after you’ve done the physical things required they force cups of tea and slices of stale Battenberg or crumbling custard creams on you. Sometimes you see a person every day for a fortnight, then never again. Sometimes it’s twice a week for a year or more: until their condition deteriorates, or they die, or their family moves them elsewhere. I get my rota for the week every Monday from the agency – usually I phone in, and they email it across. Sometimes two of you are needed – if there’s a lot of lifting work involved, or the client is obese, or has a tendency to violence – or occasionally I’ll be asked to take a trainee along with me. On the whole, though, it’s a solitary job.
This seems like the right moment to introduce Mr Rawalpindi. Although I call him by his first name to his face, these days, it seems a courtesy to keep him as ‘Mr Rawalpindi’ here. One thing that people often don’t realise is that elderly or sick people don’t like being called by their first names. They find it infantilising: demeaning. I always make a point of calling my patients by their surname, until they specifically ask me otherwise. Mr Rawalpindi I’ve known for more than two years, now – he’s one of my longest-standing clients. There’s no time or space for favourites in my job. You can see up to ten, twelve clients a day, some days, although the norm is more like five or six; and most of the time the half-hour or hour allotted isn’t enough to do what’s necessary. Sometimes, it’s as little as fifteen minutes, which is nothing, except that the alternative is unthinkable. It’s strictly discouraged by the agency to grow friendly with people or to overstay the allotted time. If someone seems terribly lonely, though, or if you grow to know someone, it’s hard not to use up your breaks or your lunchtime sitting with them. It was like that with Mr Rawalpindi, at first. He lives alone in a huge, rambling, filthy old house in Hammersmith, not too far from me. He’s got osteoarthritis, and he’s had both prostate and colorectal cancer, and wears a colostomy bag – his body is quite literally disintegrating around him. His mind, though, is sharp and sly and bright and witty as anything, and some days I think it’s by sheer force of will that he holds himself together. He vows that he’s never going into a care home: he’ll die rather than that. Never, he says, were there two more baldly euphemistic words yoked together. He lives in a downstairs room of his house, as he finds stairs difficult. Some days I go upstairs in search of some box of photographs or mementoes; other days I just do a little cooking for him, or tidy up. These days I call in out of hours, on my way to or from work; bring him shopping; sit and talk with him. He’s full of the most outrageous stories – his childhood in the West Indies, his homosexual conquests, how he ended up with his massive ramshackle house – and at the start of the year he began to be obsessed with writing his memoirs. Every time I went round he’d want more damp boxes exhumed and he’d have more yellowed file paper covered in headings and possible chapter titles and scribblings. It was he who found out about the Introductory Classes to Creative Writing at the Irish Cultural Centre and blagged himself a place, although he’s got nothing whatsoever to do with Ireland. He persuaded me to come along with him and now every Monday evening we make our way there, odd pair that we are, him dangerous-driving along the pavement on his souped-up mobility scooter – West Indies Federation flag, hand-painted rainbow – and me trotting behind carrying his walking sticks and yelling at him to slow down and watch out.
The writing teacher is Irish, naturally, very young and enthusiastic. She talks in sentences that could come straight out of a novel themselves, and she believes, or so she keeps telling us, that fiction can change the world. Mr Rawalpindi, I think, is a little in love with her. He recognises a kindred, Pollyanna spirit. The rest of us oddballs just blush or stare at our feet when she asks us a question.
So that just leaves Jeremy. I’ve been putting him off. I’d really rather not write about him at all, but I suppose I have to, so I’ll get him out of the way as quickly and briefly as possi
ble. Jeremy was – is – a geography teacher at a sixth-form college and we were together for almost seven years. We lived together – in his flat – for four of those years and I think I supposed we’d be together for the long haul. He was never keen on marriage, but that was fine, because – no surprises – neither was I. He was also ambivalent about children, and one of his pet riffs was that the world was overpopulated as it was, and a child was worth an Eiffel Tower of carbon dioxide. That was fine, too. I wasn’t desperately broody, and we slotted in, or ticked along together, or whatever the right phrase might be. Something easy, indeterminate. We’d accumulated mutual friends, habits, everything that life with someone else accrues. I don’t claim we were madly in love, but then, I don’t think that most people are. Nastasya and Aleksander, my father and mother, they’re the exception. For most people, I imagine it’s something like Jeremy and me: you meet when you’ve turned thirty (he was thirty-six) and you’re ready to settle down. My first – my only – serious boyfriend before Jeremy was when I was sixteen. He was the conclusive act of rebellion in my teenage years. He was fifteen years older, unemployed, already divorced. You don’t have to be a psychologist to work it out. At first I thought he was a true gentleman. It was only later I realised how controlling he was, and how sex for him wasn’t something fun, something you did for love or even lust, like with the other boys my age: for him it was the ultimate power play. Some days he would yank my hair and forbid me to look him in the eye. Other times he would insist on pleasuring me first, keeping the palm of his hand on the part of my belly just above my pelvis, to make sure I was coming and not faking. When I left him, he said I was frigid and I’d never find another man. He knew how much I was scared of that. He knew me well enough that he could make a grenade, just like that, and chuck it casually over his shoulder at me. He took up five years of my life, and was a large part of the reason I never made it to university. I was pretty messed up after that, for most of my twenties, and with Jeremy I thought I’d found peace, or at least security; normality and routine. The sex was never great but it was fine. We sometimes argued, but mostly we rubbed along, and there were times we had a lot of fun. Then out of the blue one evening, last summer, he announced it wasn’t working and we should break up. I don’t want to go into the bewilderment and humiliation of that. Six months after my mother had died, too, and I was still dealing with the fallout from that: the sorting of her things, the selling of her house. And somehow, within a fortnight, I was having to move out of my home and into this scuzzy basement flat that I couldn’t have afforded without Alfie’s help and the little money my mother left me. Without that, I’d have been on Gumtree or worse, looking for lodgings in some stranger’s flat. (Mr Rawalpindi, bless him, offered me the use of a room in his house, and it’s a mark of how desperate I was that I almost accepted it, unethical as it would have been.) At Christmas, I heard through mutual friends that Jeremy had a new girlfriend, and by New Year she wasn’t just his girlfriend but his fiancée and they were pregnant. I stalked them on Facebook for a while – he’d unfriended me, but I got to their pictures through other people – until I decided it was unhealthy and deactivated my account.
The baby will be due any time now: has maybe already been born.
There is one more character in this story, an invisible one, that hovers between the lines of everything I write. It’s the spectre of the children I know I won’t have, now. I’m writing about my own parents, and how they fucked up, but I’m writing about myself, too, mourning the loss of something I won’t now have. It was a strange and terrible sensation learning that Jeremy had found someone so quickly, that a man who’s always been against marriage and children can decide at the age of forty-five that that’s what he does want, after all. A woman doesn’t have that luxury. Into the vacuum that he left came rushing all kinds of urges that I didn’t even know I had, things I’d suppressed, or hadn’t had, or hadn’t allowed myself to have. You do read the odd story of a woman who gave birth at forty-three, forty-five, forty-eight, without IVF or the rest of it, and to a healthy child. Mostly, though, the media is full of women who leave it too late for a baby, women who can’t have a baby, the ticking time bomb of infertility inside of us that’s ready to go off – boom! – and turn your womb into a scorched, dry, arid place where nothing can ever grow again. Every glossy magazine you read is full of warnings that your fertility declines so severely in your thirties that it’s half what it was even by the time you’ve finished reading this article. But there’s little I can do about it, I want to scream back. There’s nobody on the scene, and I’m not likely to meet one in my job, or any time soon. My flat’s not suitable for a baby – it’s barely big enough for one person, and even cats are prohibited. I couldn’t afford it, not the baby itself nor the time not working. Yet I can’t stop the yearning. Sometimes it feels like a tugging, an actual tugging, deep in my pelvis and womb. It’s not entirely rational, what I’m feeling, and I know it’s not just to do with Jeremy: it’s to do with losing my own mother, too, and both events happening so close together. It’s a sort of mourning for myself, and for my life, for mothers and motherhood. But I can’t seem to stop it, or assuage it, and it keeps me awake at night.
Before I started writing this, I’d taken to searching databases of sperm donors, wondering if I could or should do it myself, even though the only possible answer was: No. There have been problems with the sale of my mother’s house – possible asbestos, and some subsidence – but once it’s sold I’ll have some money, and perhaps this will be what I’ll do with it. The Danish clinics, all websites tell you, are the best. For free, and even without signing up, you can scroll through donors organised by race, ethnicity, hair and eye colour, height, weight, blood type, education, occupation, almost any criterion you can think of. You can see photos of them – most have pictures of themselves as babies and toddlers, of course, because that’s what you’ll be getting. Some even have audio interviews, so you can hear their voices, talking perfect, clipped Scandinavian English for twenty- or thirty-second bursts. All of them have short profiles, written by staff at the clinic. Aake is a very creative and organised person. He is a perfectionist when it comes to his education and he sets himself very high goals in this matter. He has just gotten his Diploma as a Graphic Designer and is now looking for a job to launch his career. Thick brown hair and blue eyes characterise Aake. His eyes are ones you can easily get lost in. The skin tone is fair but he can get a great tan in the summertime, without getting burned. He is in great physical shape . . . And so forth. Below will be a list of Aake’s ‘stock’ of donations. Each is graded: if it is ‘IUI-ready’, ‘ICI-unwashed’; the quality in terms of density and motility. There are lists of prices – MOT5, say, costs 74 euros for 0.4 ml whereas MOT40 costs 370 euros – and instructions on how and when to place an order, how to store an order, how to tell when you’re at your most fertile, how to self-inseminate if you don’t have the means to travel to the clinic in Denmark. They make it sound so rational, so reasonable, so possible.
I probably sound crazy. I sound like every magazine’s worst stereotype of a single woman nearing forty: lonely, desperate, probably unhinged. I don’t even know if I’d actually do it: it’s just the knowing that there’s a way out, that there’s something I can do. Feeling, more and more each day that the escape routes out of your current life are rapidly closing down around you.
It’s suddenly gone eleven: the writing of this has managed to kill the whole of a hated Sunday evening. That’s no small mercy, and for that alone I won’t delete this yet, though the shame at what I’ve written is starting to curdle in my stomach. I’ve gone way off course with this. None of it I meant to say. Last Monday we were talking about the importance of planning, the dangers of launching into something and going off track and getting lost in the wilderness. I’ve managed to ignore all of it. But the thing is: this isn’t some neat, plotted, made-up story. I don’t have that luxury.
The other family
The time we went to visit the other family, my mother and I, was of course the secret trip to Belfast, the forbidden one, the one she didn’t think I remembered. After the revelations of Fuengirola, it suddenly made some sense. To my intense frustration, however, the hours spent dredging my memory have yielded only a few results; a handful of grit. The little that I do know, or have surmised or pieced together, is as follows.
It was while she was pregnant with Alfie – I remember her big, taut tummy, the way I put my ear to it and used to listen for the baby – so it must have been 1977. I know I entered a Reception class the autumn Alfie was born, and I don’t think that had started yet, so it must have been late August. I would have just turned four, and my mother must have been almost exactly six months pregnant. That was why she went over: to confront Catriona Connolly in person, with her swollen belly and school-age daughter, evidence that her affair with Patrick had been going on for more than five years, now.
Five years – half a decade – it’s almost unimaginable. Five years and two children, and she still hasn’t left him, or made him tell his wife. I wonder now why she didn’t telephone. Choose a time when she knew my father was at the hospital, or mid-air. Perhaps that wasn’t enough: a phone call could be dismissed more easily than a pregnant woman standing there, than a little girl unmistakably her daddy’s daughter. My mother was upping the stakes, double or quits, forcing a resolution to a situation which must have been getting untenable.
What I remember most about the trip is the overnight ferry – it would have been from Heysham to Belfast. It’s the only time in my childhood we took an overnight ferry and so I know my memories of it are true, that they belong to this trip. If I concentrate, I can at least dredge some of them up. It was still light when we arrived – by coach from Victoria, I suppose – at the ferry terminal. We walked along the harbour, thick with the queasy smell of diesel, and I squatted to look for fish through the railings. We ate pale, flabby chips and limp battered fish in the terminal café, and Mum let me scrape the leftovers into a napkin to throw to the seagulls. It was twilight when we finally boarded the ferry and our cabins weren’t ready until an hour after sailing. I dozed on and off in Mum’s lap, waking when the juddering engines rolled and turned deep in the bowels of the ship, and we went out on deck to watch the land slide away. All the lights were on – I remember this – and so we stood on the salt-slick deck with the wind tangling our hair and watched them twinkling, smaller and smaller. After a while the wind got stronger, colder, was sore in my ears. I remember that, too. People who’d been out on deck started to go back in. A woman – that’s right – was being sick over the railing, and beige spatters flew back on deck. My mother didn’t notice. We stood there a long time, as I recall: until we must have been out in the Irish Sea, past the sight of land-lights. The wind by now must have been stronger, blowing in huge buffeting gusts, throwing sprays of sea over us, as wet as if it was raining. I must have gripped the cold, white-painted, blistering railings. Then suddenly, my mother remembers that I’m there and we go back inside. I want to play on the flashing, chirruping one-armed bandits and arcade machines and she won’t let me. I start crying, then, and no wonder: it must be very late by now, way past my bedtime, and we’ve had a long day’s travel. Our cabin has a single bed – let’s say – and a fold-down bunk. I want the top, but Mum must be worried that I’ll fall out, because she makes me sleep in the lower. There is a tiny bathroom, with a toilet and doll-sized sink, and no porthole. That sounds about right, doesn’t it?
All the Beggars Riding Page 6
