by Roma Tearne
‘We’ve sent a message to your aunt and uncle, love,’ they told me. ‘They’re flying back on the first available flight home.’
Still I said nothing.
The driver stopped the car and got out. He went a little way away and began talking into his radio. The police took me into the squat building nearby. Nasty fir trees grew all around, screening it from the rest of the hospital. There was no one about as we walked towards the reception desk and the officer gave my name. I was aware of another exchange of looks, but I had this feeling of watching all this from a long way off, through the wrong side of my mother’s bird binoculars. A telephone rang somewhere; there was a faint smell of disinfectant. I recognised it as being the same as when the school toilets were cleaned. People in green coats moved about, no one was speaking very loud, no one really looked at me. I walked between the two women feeling as though I was an alien. What would Sarah say? What would Mum say when she found out? And then we were in this room. I can’t really describe it, except that I saw a bucket and a steel bed. Do you think it was a bed? Anyway, there was this thing on it, covered by a sheet. And a man went towards it and it was only then that I saw my mother’s shoe, not quite off her foot but not quite on either, and her jeans, I saw, had been torn. They were her best jeans, I remember thinking. The thought was sort of fast and condensed and followed by two more thoughts. She was wearing the bracelet I’d given her for her birthday. And there was a gash across her bare arm that looked pretty nasty, and then…and then…I saw her face. Squashed and flattened and with a purple bruise that seemed to cover her forehead. Like the worst fall you could ever imagine having, like the accident that made you scream and scream.
‘Mum,’ I shouted. ‘Mum, Mum!’
And then I fainted.
Before you start feeling sorry for me, let me tell you I’m not the nicest of people. Most of the time I hate everything and everyone. Last year at school one of my teachers wrote that I was a mass of insecurities and immaturities. She’d been reading books on psychology, I suppose. Stupid cow. What would she have been like if she had had to identify her mother’s mangled body in the middle of the night?
‘How did you feel about that? Tell me.’
That’s the bloody therapist talking. Don’t they just love their jobs? How does she think I felt!
‘It wasn’t like opening my Christmas presents,’ I tell her.
Her face remains perfectly smooth. I wonder if she’s had a facelift. Everything is so refined and airbrushed. Does she take her teeth out to have sex I wonder? I guess it’s my immaturities that make me have thoughts like that.
‘Tell me a bit more about your mother.’
‘Like I said, everyone called her Ria. I thought she was beautiful. She was very tall; I’m going to take after her in this. What d’you want to know?’
‘Tell me other things.’
‘We were close but it wasn’t obvious. Is that the sort of thing you want to know?’
I pause, remembering something else Mum had once said.
‘Your father,’ she had said, ‘was not allowed legally into this country.’
Can you believe that? The bastard must have used her to get money, to stay here. Sarah said you hear about these people all the time. Anyway, Mum had sounded so sad when she spoke of Donor-man that, to be honest, I never wanted to see him in case I’d kill him. So I always changed the subject. Aunt Miranda used to have this saying, ‘Least said, soonest mended,’ and I thought so too.
‘She was the most fantastic poet, really,’ I tell Stephanie.
I’m having difficulty keeping the pride out of my voice, I know.
‘Did the two of you fight?’
‘No,’ I say, reluctantly.
I had to look after her, didn’t I? So I couldn’t fight. I always used to envy my school friends who came to school bawling their eyes out.
‘She’s chucked me out, miss,’ Chorley used to snivel to the teacher, and then everyone used to crowd round and offer sympathy. Even me. I could be relied on to do the right thing.
‘Oh, Chorley,’ I used to say, loathing the little coward, ‘I’m so sorry you have to stay at your gran’s for the night.’
At least the tart had a gran! We all knew she wouldn’t go to her though but would spend the night with her boyfriend, but the teacher, being incredibly naïve, would ring Chorley’s mother and try to patch things up between them. No one ever did that sort of thing for me, I’ll have you know. Number one, I no longer had a mother to patch things up with by this time, and number two I was the sort of person no one dared to provoke. Probably the mass of insecurities was the reason for this.
‘Were you hurt that no one noticed how you felt?’
‘Hurt?’
Oh, please! What is this? Jungian or Freudian psychology?
‘Am I making you angry?’
Laugh out loud. It’s Jack and Miranda’s money you are wasting, cow-face. Please ask me some intelligent questions. Silence. Looks like we’re stumped.
‘I don’t want to ask you any questions you don’t want me to.’
‘I don’t want to ask you any questions you don’t want me to. Sorry!’
Another silence. I would whistle if I could, but my teeth are the wrong shape. Eric tried to teach me.
‘Eric?’
‘Yeah. He’s my friend. He lived near us, at the farm. I used to work there in the summer.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Still there.’
Idiot! He hasn’t gone on a world cruise, has he! Concentrate, answer the questions.
‘He knew my mother when she was a little girl.’
I’m as good as his granddaughter. He takes me eel-catching in the summer. We take the boat upstream in the early mornings. Sometimes we even sleep on the boat and then wake up very early when the sun rises. All the coots come out on the water making parping noises. As soon as they see us moving about they swim over, hoping for food. The sun rises above the mist, the willows rustle softly in the breeze and Eric makes us breakfast. Bliss! Bliss! I’m happy at last! Two rashers of bacon, two eggs, sometimes a bit of onion. And then tomato sauce and bread. You wouldn’t think to see us sitting there so peacefully that the rest of the country is a mass of riots and unemployment. That terror stalks the streets of every town in Britain, that a crusade is taking place in Britain, just like in the Middle Ages. Seeing us there is a bit like reading The Wind in the Willows. Honestly, it’s so peaceful. Afterwards we check the eel-traps.
‘Tell me more about Eric.’
‘He’s old. Mum trusted him completely, so do I. He never repeats anything you tell him. Not a bit like Miranda and Jack, who are the biggest gossips in the world.’
‘What sorts of things do they gossip about?’
I open my mouth to speak, then close it again. Is this a trap? Are my words going straight back to Uncle Jack? I don’t like the sound of this question, so I ignore it. Uncle Jack is not my favourite person. Everyone says he feels guilty as hell about Mum, but I don’t see any sign of it, myself.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I say, making my voice sound vague.
There’s a small pause.
‘Lydia, whatever you tell me is in confidence. You know that, don’t you?’
‘You know that, don’t you!’
Another pause.
‘Are you referring to the fact that your uncle was part of a right-wing political party? And that he had to resign because there was some suspicion he was involved in the animal killings?’
I keep my face perfectly straight and open my eyes really wide. I know I can look innocent this way. I hate this woman almost as much as I hate Uncle Jack. And just for the record, I do think he was part of that business. One, he hates Muslims; two, there’s no smoke without fire. I know Eric keeps telling me it was never proved and that he was really only having an affair with some friend of Mum’s. Oh God, my mum was surrounded by betrayers.
‘No, of course not,’ I say, my eyes wide.
&nbs
p; ‘You love Eric, don’t you?’
Another stupid question. What does she think?
‘No, I hate him.’
Her face is comical. Oh, how immature, she’s thinking! Of course I love Eric. He loved us both. Now she’s dead, Eric is all I’ve got. He understood everything. Why Mum was so repressed, why I behaved the way I did because I was trying to look after her. I was always the strong one. Being different makes you tough. I’d heard the stories about my birth. I mean, the way the midwife had said as she pulled me out:
‘Oh, look, she’s got a Mongolian blue spot! Is the father a foreigner?’
My aunt told this story to me, thinking it was funny.
‘You had a blue spot on your bottom,’ she said.
She must have told my cousins because they took it up and tormented me with it.
In fact, the ‘blue spot’ was at the base of my spine and it had faded by the time I was a week old, but the way the story went around the family you’d think I was marked for life! Eric heard Sophie laughing and teasing me about it and told her off. Then I heard him saying something to Mum and she cried and cried and Eric gave her a hug. And after that she tried to have one of her hopeful heart-to-hearts that I blocked again for fear she’d start crying. Oh God!
‘Anyway, I’m over all that now.’
‘How’s that?’
Because Eric told me. Lovely Eric, rescuing me as always.
‘He told me that a Mongolian blue spot was a birthmark that appeared at birth on children of Asian descent but faded quickly afterwards. It meant nothing!’
Why my aunt had to even mention it was a mystery to me. At least if she had to mention it, why couldn’t she talk about its significance? Why make such a bloody issue of it in the first place?
‘Did she make an issue of it?’
‘She said later it was her way of trying to tell me about my father. Because Mum had told her she was scared of hurting me. So we were both trying not to hurt each other. I talked to Eric about it, obviously, afterwards. He said she blamed herself for not telling me when I was very small, but that in the beginning she had been so traumatised and frightened of damaging me that she couldn’t. Eric said that sometimes grief works in strange ways, not how you’d expect it to, and that I shouldn’t judge her. And when I freaked out over the Mongolian whatsit she clammed up completely. Anyway, it’s all in the diary she kept. How much she loved him, how much she wanted me. It’s all there; I’ve seen it. Now.’
Funny how everything ends up as my fault. I stop talking. It’s strange, really, how circular the process of revisiting the past is. Nothing goes away. All the things that hurt long ago remain poisonously capable of hurting again and again. Like my aunt’s joke.
‘She didn’t mean it in the way you took it, Lydi,’ Eric said.
But it was too late by then; she was dead.
‘She was frightened. Everything that had happened frightened her. She felt to blame on every count, don’t you see?’
Somehow I was meant to be strong, understanding and magnanimous.
‘You tell me, how was I supposed to manage that? I was thirteen, for God’s sake. Thirteen!’
‘So what did you do?’ Stephanie asks.
I couldn’t believe the question. She calls herself a therapist! I’m here under sufferance. Miranda and Jack are paying for the sessions at the moment. I’ll pay them back, of course; as soon as the money comes through. That’s the other thing, you see. When I’m eighteen I’ll be rich. The insurance people paid up. The way it works is, you lose your mother by accident and you are given money to the value of that loss. I imagine someone sitting in front of their laptop, checking the chart. Accidental death of mother…£500,000. Accidental death of migrant worker…£1,200. Sorry, mate, that’s your lot. But I’m jumping ahead.
‘Go back to the beginning.’
Robot!
‘What did you do when she was killed?’
Big question. ‘I started giving everyone a hard time. I began to play up at school.’
‘How?’
‘Well, you know the war in the Middle East was getting on people’s nerves. I wrote to the Prime Minister and told him that Uncle Jack was causing trouble for the Muslims in Britain. “Inciting racial hatred”, those were the words I used!’
‘Was he?’
‘I dunno. Probably…who knows? I hate Jack. Anyway, I told him he was breeding a nation who would eventually destroy this country too.’
Stephanie raises her eyebrows slightly.
‘Well? Look what’s been happening. That woman was not the first suicide bomber in Britain, was she? Can’t you see there’s a trend here?’
‘Tell me what happened after you wrote that letter.’
‘Why are you asking me? You know. Jack’s already told you.’
‘No one’s talked about you to me. I’m asking because I don’t know.’
I’ve got her really riled. Hurrah!
Eric was the only one who saw what was going on. He came to visit Jack and Miranda. There was some kind of explosion between them. I could hear Miranda shouting and then Jack started. She had found out about his affair with Mum’s loathsome friend. There’d been other trouble at home that day, anyway. Someone had come from some government office to talk to Jack! I giggle, remembering: their serious faces, my obvious lies, the way Jack tried to be calm when really he hated my guts for ruining his comeback to politics for good! Strangely I don’t remember that time with any distaste, even though it got me into a lot of trouble. I remember it as the day the poison was sucked out of me. By lovely, wonderful Eric.
18
APRIL 18TH. SECOND SESSION.
‘Tell me what happened after you left the hospital that evening?’
We’re on our second session together, Stephanie and I. Stephanie is wearing an orange shift dress. There is, amongst students of my age, a trend towards dressing in 1960s clothes. I suppose the trend has existed on and off for ages, but anyway I would say there’s a great revival of the era just at the moment. Although she’s certainly not my age, Stephanie is wearing just such a dress. For some reason the sight of her in this orange-and-black dress irritates me. I glare at her.
‘Where did the police take you that night? You couldn’t have been left on your own, after all.’
She’s right, of course. They weren’t prepared to leave me until I told them who I could stay with. Jack and Miranda were coming over on the first flight from Palermo, but that was eleven hours away.
‘What about your friend Sarah?’ one of them asked me.
I had stopped screaming. A doctor had seen me and given me something to take and I’d drunk some water. I was cold now, although it was a hot evening. A nurse brought a blanket and they put it around my shoulders. I felt like a homeless person. Had I given the matter some thought, I would have seen that of course I was sort of homeless; motherless, anyway. The policewoman was still at it, gently trying to get me to speak.
‘Give us your friend’s address, love, and we’ll ring her parents. It’s only until your uncle and aunt get here, it’s not for long. Only, we can’t leave you alone.’
Not after news like this, was what they meant. What did they think I’d do?
‘What were you feeling?’ Stephanie asks.
Jesus!
‘I don’t want to go to Sarah’s,’ I said.
The policewoman looked a bit taken aback.
‘She’s your best friend, isn’t she?’
She was suddenly no longer my best friend.
‘I want to go to Eric’s farm,’ I told them, calmly.
They must have thought I was pretty cool to be behaving like this. No tears, no emotion, well, not after that initial screaming fit. Someone had clamped up my throat, which incidentally was sore from the screaming.
‘Can you really remember your throat being sore from all those years ago?’
‘Yes,’ I say, shortly.
What does she think? That I’d have forgotten it? I remember
every single last fucking thing of that day. Everything, every fibre on the policewoman’s uniform, the way the weave ran in the cloth, her teeth with a little fleck of lipstick. I think she was pretty shaken up by it all.
‘So you went to Eric?’
We did. There was a bit of a wait. Eric had been over in Ipswich, too, that day, to some farmer’s market or other. But the traffic had held him up on the ring road. He presumed it had been an accident. There was a black spot at the turning to Snape. He told me years afterwards that he’d thought some bloody idiot had been going too fast. It was what usually happened. It had never crossed his mind that it might have involved someone he loved. Anyway, he turned off at Snape and decided he would call by his sister’s house for a cup of tea. By the time he left, after she had insisted he have a bite to eat, it was already dark. We were waiting for him in the lane, sitting in the police car. Whatever it was that I had been given at the hospital was taking effect and I had stopped shaking and was now feeling drowsy. The early evening had taken on an ethereal feel. Normally my mother would be cooking something. The television would be on, I might be on the phone to one of my friends, or I might, if it was a Thursday, be cycling back from my piano lesson.
‘You play the piano?’ Stephanie asked.
‘I play jazz.’
‘Just jazz?’
‘Yes.’
Anyway, it wasn’t a Thursday, nor was it any other ordinary day. I paused, thinking. In one second all my ordinary days had been destroyed. Eric was coming home to this.
