by Voss, Louise
The line was ringing. I was so distracted by my flight of fancy that I hardly noticed the change in tone, and had to stop myself from automatically continuing to hang up and redial.
‘Gillingsbury Community College. Could you hold the line please,’ said Poor Wilf, in the long-suffering tones of an overworked martyr. Before I got the chance to reply, something which approximated Mozart’s Requiem performed on a stylophone filled my ear. I tutted impatiently. Adam would probably have gone home by the time I finally got through.
‘How can I help you?’ said Poor Wilf eventually. If Pamela Wilkins was the Queen of Hearts, Poor Wilf was the froggy footman, I decided.
‘I’d like to speak to Adam Ferris in the Art Department,’ I said, as bravely as I could.
‘Just a moment.’ More classical music being tortured on an instrument with very small keys and an on/off switch.
‘Art Department?’
My throat went dry. It felt more nerve-wracking than the opening night of a theatre run, or a screen test. I decided that it must have been the deception of it. Despite being an actress, I rarely did anything under false pretences. Mostly because I was too frightened of the consequences. ‘Is that Adam Ferris?’
‘Yes. What can I do for you?’ He sounded lovely; cheerful without being overly hearty. I instantly pictured chunky knits and moccasins like Cornish pasties; and reminded myself that I was doing nothing wrong. Just a touch of slight deviousness, that was all.
‘I’d like to enrol in your beginners’ mosaic class,’ I said boldly. ‘But I wanted to make a tabletop out of bits of old plates -’
‘Pique assiette,’ Adam commented.
‘Pardon?’
‘Pique assiette. It’s the name of the technique for making mosaics out of found objects, particularly broken crockery. It means stolen plate. Sorry. Do go on.’
‘Right, well, anyway,your secretary thought I should talk to you about it first. She thought it might be too advanced for me.’
‘Well,’ said Adam, ‘provided you weren’t thinking of an eight-seater dining table with a design of Roman soldiers out hunting, executed in an exceptionally intricate pattern of micro-mosaic, I don’t see why not, but …
‘Oh great,’ I gushed, although even if he’d said, ‘the beginners project this term is mosaicking your grandmother’, I’d have started mixing up grout on the spot. I felt so close to Max, even just by speaking to Adam. And I just knew that Adam would turn out to be easy to befriend; he had one of those easy-listening mellow voices. Nobody bad could have a voice like that…/p>
‘Unfortunately,’ he said apologetically, ‘there’s a problem. I’m afraid all my beginners classes are completely booked for next term. There’s a waiting list for the daytime ones.’
I was floored. I hadn’t anticipated that at all. ‘What?’
A poxy little community college, oversubscribed? Didn’t the residents of Gillingsbury have better things to do than spend hours sticking bits of broken tile onto boards? Now how the hell was I going to meet Max?
I nearly gave up. I nearly decided, oh well, if I wanted to meet him, all I had to do was to write back, officially, as Anna Sozi. It was simple. We’d meet. I’d even let the Anthony Nolan Trust take my photograph with him…
But it was the idea of that photograph that made my insides freeze up. The notion that, like Anthony Nolan himself, photographs might one day be all that was left of Max’s childhood, and that my contribution would have turned out to be futile after all, like all the babies lost and their lives unrealised. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t risk it.
It took every ounce of self-control I possessed not to sound desperate. Why hadn’t the Queen of Hearts warned me that this was a possibility?
‘All of them? No places on any of your courses? I mean, it doesn’t have to be mosaic, I just want to do something creative. You do pottery, don’t you?’ The words began to slip away from me, out of control like wet clay whirling unchecked on a potter’s wheel. But I want to meet Max! I fumed inside my head.
There was a brief silence at the end of the line, and I reined in my emotions with difficulty. Adam’s nutter-radar was probably screeching at him, I thought. You always got nutters on community college courses. He was bound to think I was one.
‘I’m sorry. Courses do get booked up very early, and the last few places on all my courses have just been taken.’
Perhaps it was not meant to be. ‘Not meant to be’—now there was a phrase I sorely overused, I thought hollowly. But Adam was saying something else.
‘However, if you’re interested in creating mosaics—‘
‘Yes, I am,’ I interrupted eagerly. There was a beeping at my end of the line, puncturing Adam’s words, breaking them up like coloured tiles. ‘Sorry. My call waiting’s going off. Could you hold on a minute please?’
‘No problem.’
I quickly switched calls. ‘Yes?’
‘Who are you nattering on to, babes?’ It was Ken.
‘Oh. Ken. Listen, can I call you back. It’s—um—Fenella.’
‘OK. I’m about to go into a meeting but if you ring me—‘
I switched back before he could finish. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘No, I was just saying, if you’d like to get involved in a mosaic project, I’m organising a big community mural. It’s to go in the underpass by the station, you know?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I lied.
‘Well, anyone’s welcome. We’ll be doing it for the next two weeks, until term starts. Longer, if I can get a commission for three more panels, which, hopefully, I will. It’s free, you just drop in. It’s a great way to learn about the basics—tile cutting, design, backgrounds, etcetera.’
‘Brilliant,’ I said, punching the air with my non-phone fist. ‘Where?’
‘Moose Hall on the Devizes Road.’
‘Er—I think I know it.’
‘Opposite the turning into Queens Drive.’
‘I’ll find it,’ I said confidently. ‘Thanks.’ Something occurred to me. ‘And—um—will you be there every day too?’
‘Most days,’ he said, sounding amused. ‘What’s your name? I’ll look out for you.’
I cleared my throat. ‘Annavalentine.’ I gabbled, to try and prevent him even thinking Sozi.
‘Right. Excellent. See you there, I hope. And I’m sorry about the college courses. Do you want to go on the waiting list? People do sometimes drop out.’
‘No. No, it’s all right, thanks. But I will come down and help with the mural though.’
After I’d hung up from him, I couldn’t stop beaming. It was perfect. I screwed up the piece of paper with the fake address on it—no hassle with college registration, no risk of being checked up on. All I had to do was to just turn up and meet him. Plus, since it wasn’t a formal class, there would probably be far more opportunity for social chat. It would have sounded weird to ask the teacher about his family life in the middle of a lesson, but surely not at all odd to bring it up in a more social situation. And—be still, my beating heart - but wasn’t it still the school holidays? Max himself might quite likely be there!
I felt so excited and happy that I had to go and stand on my head for ten minutes, to try and calm myself down.
Chapter 9
Getting pregnant had not been easy for me. That glib chat you sometimes heard: ‘blah blah, first night of our honeymoon, not even trying and, whoops! We conceived!’ That was so not us. And that was why Holly had been such a miracle-she’d really lasted the distance, staking her claim in what I had come to believe was the inhospitable barbed-wire rolled and—metaphorically - chilly expanses of my uterus. All the other potential babies—or, as the doctors called them when they were about to hoover them out of me: ‘the remaining products of conception’ (a phrase which made ‘embryo’ and ‘foetus’ sound positively warm and un-clinical)—had given up far more easily.
The first miscarriage was fine, because I hadn’t even known I was pregnant. I just thought I was havi
ng a particularly heavy period, and it was only with the later ones that, in retrospect, I realized what had gone on. The second was bad—eight weeks, and I’d done the positive pregnancy test three weeks earlier. Ken and I had had three whole weeks of euphoric planning and celebrations, Ken revelling in his newly-proved virility; ‘I am All Man!’: me greedily and reverentially shopping; fingering great big stretchy trousers with huge elasticated panels in the front of them as if they were being displayed in some designer-wear Mecca instead of on the rails at Mothercare, actually looking forward to the time when I’d legitimately be able to wear such monstrosities. Then came the bleeding, a little at first, just enough to worry but not panic. ‘Some women bleed all through pregnancy’, said the doctor, and I thought, that must be nice for them. Not.
Two more days of polka-dot spotting, furtive and panicked late-night phonecalls to NHS Direct so as not to worry Ken, an inconclusive scan, and then, wham, the mass evacuation. Fleeing for the emergency exits without stopping to collect possessions. Matter-of-fact but revolting talk by doctors of clots, and the reality, the even more revolting lump of what looked like grey shivery liver coming out of me like a deformation, an accusation.
Gross as it was, though, I wanted to keep it. I knew what it was: ‘the remaining products of conception’, and what would surely have become my child, a living breathing human being, had things been different. I wanted to put the lump in a matchbox and bury it in the garden, with a little cross made of ice-lolly sticks marking the place—anything would have been better than flushing it down the toilet with as much respect as for a belly-up fairground goldfish. I made the mistake of telling Ken that I wished I could have done that, but he didn’t understand. Didn’t want to think about it, I supposed. Ken was the world’s most squeamish man. Anything involving more than a bead of blood was enough to turn him green at the gills. He couldn’t even watch medical dramas on television; so the knowledge of a medical drama in his own downstairs loo was just too much to bear. He was at work, anyway, when it all unfolded.
He’d been away at a conference when I had my third miscarriage. That was the worst one: eleven weeks, when we were just teetering on the cusp of believing that everything would be OK, that this one was tenacious, clinging on with its minuscule fingernails to the cliff face of my insides. We’d even begun to believe it was not only clinging on, but thriving, blooming like a desert rose. And then, out of the blue, there I was again, examining bits of toilet paper and crying over the tell-tale signs. The doctor saying, ‘It’s a bit sad…,’ his words tailing off into nothing as if he realized that the gross understatement of them could hardly be a comfort. The craven panic which threatened to overwhelm me when I even considered this happening again. I had to have hypnotherapy before I could face having sex—and that was before Holly.
Poor Ken took that third one really badly too. He kept saying how he couldn’t forgive himself for not having been there for me, but really, what could he have done? In a way I was glad he’d been spared the ordeal—God knows he later went through enough with Holly. But it was around then that our sex life took such a dramatic nosedive that it was a miracle Holly managed to get herself conceived at all.
It was just before Holly’s conception that I gave the bone marrow donation. In retrospect I wondered if it was all part of a divine plan; if maybe that was why I had the third miscarriage. If I’d carried that baby to full-term, then I wouldn’t have been eligible to make the bone marrow donation—pregnancy precluded one from donating. Then perhaps another donor wouldn’t have been found for Max, and he would have died.
I couldn’t help feeling that my would-be baby, the one before Holly, gave up his or her life for Max. It really had helped, to think that. But it also made the urge to meet him even stronger.
The actual bone marrow harvest hadn’t been too bad. Not what you’d call a pleasant experience, and my lower back had been stiff for weeks afterwards, but not agony or anything. In a weird sort of way it felt like an atonement, like I was saying to God, if I’ve done something wrong, and that’s why my babies keep dying, then I’m sorry, and perhaps if I do this for a stranger, then please I can have a baby who’ll stay?
I remembered coming round in the hospital after the operation, lying on my stomach, pain coming in waves from the small of my back, but with enough drugs in me to be able to objectify the discomfort; regard it as something happening to a different person—the pain didn’t go away, it just felt attached to me via a hazy umbilicus of unconcern. It was a strange sensation. Anyway, of all the various medical indignities I had been subjected to over the years, the bone marrow harvest had definitely been among the most minor. It wasn’t as bad as the D&C I had after miscarriage number three.
I had to confess that I didn’t think much, at the time, of who my bone marrow would end up in. I hadn’t even given much thought to the prospect of saving a life; apart from a brief swagger of pride when we’d first registered. It had just seemed the right thing to do. Vicky and I had both been on the Anthony Nolan Trust register of would-be donors for years, since we were at university. An aunt of Vicky’s had died young from leukaemia, so Vicky and I had gone along to our local GP and given a blood sample to send to the Trust. I remembered sitting in the waiting room with her, giggling at the Beware of Sexually Transmitted Diseases poster and flipping through old copies of Cosmo, waiting so long that we got bored and went to play with the train set on the floor in the corner, great hulking nineteen year old students crouching over the battered wooden carriages and mismatched pieces of track, earning us a ticking-off from the receptionist and much tutting and head shaking from a coughing old lady in the corner. But we’d felt far too virtuous to care. Look at us, I’d felt like proclaiming. We’re not here for our own benefit, you know, we could soon be saving someone’s life! But it hadn’t seemed real, then; more like a game.
Neither of us had heard from the Trust again—in fact, I’d almost forgotten that I was on the register - until they had approached me two years back saying I was a potential donor for an anonymous leukaemia sufferer. Max could have been anyone, male or female, old or young, from any corner of the globe. It was another small miracle, I reflected, that he ended up living less than a hundred miles from me.
And that, there I was, driving down on a hazy August morning to that place to meet his father, and to help stick bits of broken tile onto a board. I wondered again if Max was going to be there too.
Life could be very strange.
Chapter 10
Despite Adam’s directions, Moose Hall was far more difficult to find than the college had been. Perhaps because I had expected a large impressive edifice, with at the very least a stuffed moose head trophy outside, I drove past it at least four times without seeing it.
Moose Hall—the name reminded me of a book from my childhood, some surreal story about minced moosemeat, or maybe moosed mincemeat? Odd how gruesome that sounded as an adult, when it had been just funny words to me as a child. A bit like Shock-Headed Peter, I mused, as I drove like Miss Marple, nose an inch from the windscreen, peering at the houses along Devizes Road. Strewelpeter, to give Shock-Headed Peter its correct untranslated title, was full of hideously frightening tales of girls being burned to ashes after playing with matches, or boys having their thumbs cut off for sucking them. You’d have thought it would give a child nightmares. But perhaps a child didn’t attach any significant meaning to the words. They were just words, and pictures. They had no resonance or impact on the things which really mattered to them: family, television, toys, sunshine.
I thought of Max, and how nightmarish much of his own short life must have been. I hoped he had just seen it like the words of a frightening story—something to take in his stride, to let wash over him. Perhaps he succeeded in making his own reality, of chemotherapy, needles, pain, exhaustion, no different to reading about minced-up mooses or thumbless and bleeding storybook children.
Bloody hell, where was that bloody hall? For a brief moment I wondered if
it had all just been a story too, a yarn Adam had spun to get rid of me, the madwoman on the telephone desperate to be creative…If so, I’d swallowed his fairytale as easily as a child would have done.
I pulled up next to a old man walking a toffee-nosed hairy little dog.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, through my open car window. ‘Do you know where Moose Hall is, please?’
The man barely glanced at me, but instead gazed back in the direction I’d just driven from, as though the hall would come shimmering up the road to meet me. His dog stared, too. Then the man lifted a slow heavy arm and pointed the same way.
‘Down there, on the right.’
I was puzzled. ‘I just came from there.’
He shrugged. ‘On the right. Down there.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and pulled away. I must have been too busy thinking about minced moosemeat and chemotherapy to spot it. I did a three-point turn in the road - much to the irritation of a teenager in a souped-up red Escort, who was then stuck behind me - and drove at five miles an hour back the way I’d come, craning my neck at all the houses on the right hand side of the street.
There it was, after all, in the middle of the terrace. I couldn’t believe I’d missed it, although it wasn’t at all what I’d been expecting. It was one of those tiny, neglected Victorian halls that every town seemed to possess, uncared for and tucked away. The grimy paintwork was flaking off the front in huge jagged strips, and the once-impressive portico over the door crumbling and dangerous. An easel with a large wrinkled sheet of paper pinned to it stood outside the front: ‘Mosaic Workshop—Open to All’ it said in faded, blurry crayoned letters.
