Ribbons in Her Hair

by Colette McCormick

  Almost an hour later than normal, I heard her in the bathroom. I was walking up the stairs with a basket full of ironing that I’d done the day before when I heard the water running. I was stacking the towels when she came out of the bathroom.

  Oh my God she looked terrible. I asked her what she was doing and, bless her, in all innocence she said that she was going to school. What the hell was the girl thinking? She seemed surprised when I said that there’d be no school for her that day, and even more so when I said that there’d be no more school for her full stop.

  ‘What about my exams?’ she said.

  What about her bloody exams? She couldn’t do them this year, but if she listened to me and did what I said maybe she’d be able to do them next year when she came back. Things like her exams were exactly the reason why I wanted her to have the baby adopted. Well, that and the fact that I didn’t want one of my girls to be marked as an unmarried mother. I know people would probably laugh at me but I didn’t want her to feel the shame that I had.

  Anyway she was going on about her exams and was saying that some girl at school had had a baby and managed to do hers. Well that’s as may be but it wasn’t going to happen to her. And that was when I told her what was going to happen to her.

  ‘Do you remember your dad’s aunt Rose?’ I asked and she said that she did. She also said that Rose was old. ‘Yes, well, she might be,’ I said, ‘but Sally’s not. Your dad rang her last night and you are going to stay with her. That’ll give us some time to organise an adoption.’

  ‘What do you mean adoption?’

  ‘You can’t keep the baby, Susan.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Why not? Was she having a laugh? That was the first time that I’d said the word adoption out loud. I’d assumed that Mick understood that was the plan but I didn’t think that Susan would get it. I know Mick had said to tell her that it was just an option but I didn’t. It wasn’t an option as far as I was concerned, so what was the point? She just needed to get her head around preparing herself to give the baby away. If she thought there was a chance she might keep it, she would start to get attached to it and that wouldn’t be good for anyone, least of all Susan. No, just let her think that adoption was the only way.

  She obviously thought that there were other options and she mentioned Tim again.

  ‘I should tell Tim,’ she said. ‘If I tell Tim he might help me.’

  Help her? He’d helped himself to what he had wanted and then he’d been off like a shot. I hated myself afterwards for saying it, but it was out before I could stop it.

  ‘Susan,’ I said, ‘he didn’t want you before, so he’s not going to want you just because you’re having a baby.’

  Her eyes could hardly contain the tears that were forming. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘but he has a right to know.’

  I didn’t say anything, mainly because I was afraid of what I might say. I just looked at her for a second or two. It was all I could manage.

  SUSAN

  I watched Mum walk down the stairs and wondered how she could be so cruel. It wasn’t so much what she had said about Tim not wanting me, though God knows that was bad enough, it was the adoption thing. How could she expect me to give up my baby? I’d had all night to think about it and I still couldn’t see how I could ever do such a thing. I’m not criticising people that do have their babies adopted; I just knew that it wasn’t for me. This was my doing and I was prepared to take responsibility for it. Plus, the thing was – and I know this might sound stupid because at that point my baby was no more than a tiny bunch of cells – I loved it. I’d thought, hoped, that Mum might have reconsidered over night, but obviously not.

  I made my way back to my bedroom, closed the door behind me and looked at the teddy bear that was sitting at the bottom of my bed. I grabbed hold of it, clutched it to my chest and flopped down on the bed. I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling. I needed her, really needed her, and she was more concerned with what the neighbours would think; I knew that was at the bottom of the adoption plan. For as long as I could remember Mum had created this façade of being the perfect housewife and mother, and me with a bump would shatter that illusion.

  To be fair to her, in Mum’s mind hiding me away until it was all over and then getting rid of the evidence was probably the only way out of this that she could even see. For once, though, she wasn’t going to get her own way. I had to do something. I couldn’t let what Mum was planning happen. Last night I’d realised that I was the one that had to look after my baby but, more than that, I wanted to look after my baby and I was going to. Mum might not be going to look after her child, but I was going to look after mine.

  From now on, it was just me and my baby. As I lay there on the bed a plan started to form in my head.

  ***

  ‘We’ll not be long,’ Mum said.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I told her without taking my eyes off the television. I tried to appear uninterested. She said something about my dad needing a couple of pints after a hard day at work. I didn’t care why they needed to go, just that they did, and all the while that they were getting ready my mind was ticking over with what I had to do.

  Mum was already in the kitchen when Dad came downstairs and I was surprised when I saw him appear in the living room.

  ‘What you watching?’ he asked.

  It didn’t matter that I couldn’t really explain what I was watching because he didn’t really want to know. It was as if he’d just come into the room to see me. I thought he was going to say something else but he didn’t, well, not unless you count, ‘See you later.’

  I let out a sigh of relief when they were finally out of the house. It was time. My legs shook as I climbed the stairs. They had both told me that they wouldn’t be long so I worked out that the walk there and back was ten minutes each way, which with, say, an hour for a couple of pints, should give me at least an hour and a half.

  It wasn’t a lot of time.

  I hadn’t dared risk packing my bag before, out of fear that Mum might find it, so now was the time to do it and do it quickly. Okay, so think. I crawled under the bed and grabbed the holdall that Mum had bought me when I’d gone away with the school the year before. It was covered in dust, so I bashed it, and coughed as the dust flew everywhere.

  What would I need? I had no idea so I threw some underwear in the bag along with a pair of shoes, some T-shirts and a couple of pairs of jeans. I opened the drawer and fumbled through it until I found my bank book. There wasn’t a lot in it but there’d be enough for a bus ticket to where I needed to go, or at least I hoped that there would be. Would there be enough for a taxi to the bus station? Probably not and anyway I was going to have to be careful with the little money that I did have.

  Did I mention where I was going? Sorry, I should have said this before. Just after the doctor had told me that I was pregnant he’d handed me a leaflet which I hadn’t paid much attention to at the time. I’d shoved it into my pocket, not thinking that I would need it. How wrong had I been? When I’d realised that it was me and my baby against the world, I had got the leaflet out my pocket and read it.

  ‘Are you pregnant and in crisis?’ it said in big, bold letters cross the top and there was a telephone number underneath. ‘Call anytime,’ it said, ‘day or night. So that’s what I had done. Mum had sent me to town the day before to buy a couple of things that I would need for Scarborough and I had taken the opportunity to use a pay phone to ring them.

  I remember my hands shaking as I rang the number and feeling my teeth chatter against each other as I waited for someone to pick up. I was so nervous. I could hardly believe that I was actually doing it. After three or four rings a woman’s voice introduced herself as Sharon and asked how she could help.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, my voice shaking as much as my hands had been, ‘I’m pregnant and in crisis.’ I’ll never forget those words.

  ‘Then you’ve called the right place,’ Sharon had said and asked me what my name w
as.

  I told her.

  ‘All right, Susan,’ her voice was calm and reassuring. She’d asked me if I was in danger and I told her all about my mum wanting to send me away and how she wanted me to give my baby away. ‘And is that not what you want, Susan?’

  No, it most certainly wasn’t what I wanted.

  She said that she could help me and a wave of relief flooded over me. She asked me where I lived and when I told her she asked if I realised that they were about forty miles away. I said that I did. I remembered what the doctor had said to me. He had said that they weren’t local and before that moment I hadn’t really thought about what ‘not local’ meant. Apparently it meant forty miles away.

  ‘Can you get to us, Susan?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said without thinking.

  ‘Then we’ll be waiting for you,’ she said.

  So that was my plan. I was going to a refuge for girls like me. When I’d first come up with the idea, I could hardly believe that I was planning on running away from home but here I was getting ready to go. Sharon had given me exact instructions on how to get to the house and I read through them again. Stop it, I said to myself, stop putting it off. Go now. Go now while you can. You don’t have time to waste.

  I put my jacket on, checked that I had the leaflet and the instructions safely stowed in my pocket and that my purse and bank book were in my holdall. I left my bedroom without a backward glance, closed the door behind me and trotted down the stairs. I plucked my house key from the window sill and used it to lock the door behind me. As soon as that was done I posted the key back through the letter box.

  I made my way down the path to the gate. I had to open it carefully because the hinge needed oiling and usually squeaked. I was scared that in the silence of the darkness the squeak would be louder than it normally was and I didn’t want to attract any attention. I was surprised when the gate opened silently. Were the god’s looking out for me?

  On the other side of the gate I did allow myself a look back at the house, just for a second. It was the only home that I had ever known and here I was leaving it without a word to anyone. I forced myself to move. I had to get to the bus station.

  I took the round about way into town. The quickest route would have taken me past the pub that was my parents’ local and I didn’t want to take the chance of them being by a window and looking out just at the wrong moment. So it was the back streets for me and I didn’t see anyone apart from an old woman who seemed drunk, or doolally, it was hard to tell.

  ‘You all right love?’ she asked as she hung on to a wall. ‘Where are you going with that bag?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ I said and rushed past her.

  Once I was in the town centre there weren’t too many people about and none of them were interested in me. They were more interested in which pub they were going to go into next. I made my way to the bus station as quickly as I could.

  Once there I searched out the board and looked at the timetable for the number 84 that would take me to where I needed to go. I was disappointed to find that there were no more buses that night. The last one had left just after seven o’clock. According to the timetable, the next one was at six-thirty-six the next morning, would take an hour and a half and cost me £5. That was just about half the cash that I had so I would have to get some more.

  Every second of that night is still clear in my head and when I think about it I’m seeing it just as I did then; it’s as if I’m there all over again and right at that second when I realised I needed more money I was scared because it occurred to me that I didn’t know what I would do if I couldn’t get any. I needed the money to get away.

  I looked around, trying to get my bearings, and realised there was a branch of my bank nearby. Luckily for me, it had a cashpoint outside it. I had only used the machine once before and I hoped that I could remember my PIN number. When I got to the machine there was already someone using it, so I held back and waited until they had moved away. Making sure that there was no one else around I approached the machine and put my card in. I was careful to put the numbers in in what I thought was the right order and pressed the buttons to take all but £2.34 out of my account. Three £10 notes popped out of the machine and I folded them carefully and put them into the toe of one of the shoes in the bottom of my holdall. I looked around to make sure that no one had seen me but I was the only person left on the street, apart from someone throwing up in a flower bed.

  Then it started to rain. Great big, heavy drops that went from nothing to a torrent in a matter of moments and within seconds my hair was flat against my head and my jacket felt heavy on my shoulders. There was a café in the bus station and I ran there as quickly as I could. I would be able to shelter there while I thought of what I was going to do next. I wasn’t the only person to have had this idea and I found myself in a queue of four or five people.

  ‘Coffee please,’ I said when it was my turn to be served.

  ‘Big or small?’ the surly woman behind the counter asked.

  ‘Big, please,’ I said. I know it was a bit of an extravagance but, under the circumstances, I thought I deserved it. Plus, judging by the amount of rain that was falling, it didn’t look like I’d be going anywhere any time soon.

  I handed over the right change and thanked the woman. She looked surprised but given her surly outlook she probably didn’t see a lot of gratitude for her customer service skills. Mum had brought me up to be polite though and I always thanked people when they did something for me, regardless of how they did it.

  I took the coffee and moved away from the counter. There were about a dozen people sitting at various tables and I made my way to an empty one at the back that was furthest away from the door and closest to the toilet.

  I don’t know if I can describe how I felt right then. It’s not that I can’t remember because, as I think about it now, the feelings are as real as they were that night. I just don’t have the vocabulary to describe it. I was more than sad. I mean, what did I have to be happy about? I was pregnant by a boy who had dumped me as soon as a better offer had come along, my mother was so ashamed of me that she wanted to send me away until I’d had a baby that she then wanted me to give away and I had run away from home. Life was just peachy.

  But though I was sad, I wasn’t despondent, if that makes sense. In an odd sort of way I was feeling positive. For the first time in my life I had got the courage from somewhere to stand up to my mother, and I was doing something to protect the life that I had created. When it had been important enough, I had finally found the strength to do something I’d never done before. Whether Mum liked it or not I was going to have a baby and, more than that, I had no intention of giving it up. I didn’t know what the future would hold, I didn’t even know what was going to happen in the next twenty-four hours, but I was doing something and that made me feel good inside.

  I’d been sitting at the table a while sipping my coffee, trying to make it last as long as possible, when I felt someone looking at me. You know the feeling, when you can just sense that you are being watched. I looked around the café and found that there were a few more people at the tables than there had been when I’d first come in, but none of them were looking at me. Most were staring into their cups, one was reading a paper, and I think that a couple of others might have been asleep.

  But then I saw him. My dad was at the window looking at me as I looked at him. So, my secret was out and they were looking for me. Well, he was looking for me – there was no sign of my mum. I fully expected him to walk in and drag me home. Maybe not drag, because that wasn’t Dad’s style, but you know what I mean. But he didn’t. He just stood in the pouring rain looking at me as I looked at him.

  Eventually he lifted his hand to his mouth and rested the tips of his fingers to his lips. Then he put those fingertips on the window and without thinking, or even realising at the time that I was doing it, I lifted my own hand up and caught the kiss that he had thrown me.

  Through t
ears, I watched my dad turn away from the window and walk away.

  I remember seeing the now lukewarm coffee wobble in the cup as I tried to lift it with shaking hands. I put the cup down and held my hands together. Dad had blown me a kiss and walked away. Why would he do that? Mum must have told him to bring me home when he found me, so why hadn’t he? I wasn’t imagining it, he had seen me and that kiss was like thousands of other kisses that he had thrown me before. It was like he had seen me and, without actually speaking the words, had given me his blessing for what I was doing. It was as though he was telling me to get away while I could. It was the closest thing to Dad standing up to Mum that I had ever seen. Part of me wanted to chase after him and go home. I loved my dad dearly and I knew he loved me back. I couldn’t bear the thought of Mum giving him a hard time when he got home without me. But wasn’t that what he wanted? He clearly wanted me to go through with whatever it was I was doing and I wasn’t going to let him down. He didn’t know what my plan was but he trusted me enough to carry it out.

  I had a renewed strength and I was more determined than ever.

  ‘Right you lot,’ the surly assistant said, ‘we’re closing in ten minutes, so finish your drinks and make yourself scarce.’

  For the first time that day I found myself smiling. With charm like that, the woman could have worked in the best of establishments, yet here she was working in a greasy café in a deserted bus station in the middle of the night. Amazing.

  The few people that were left started to leave so I quickly drank what was left of the almost cold coffee and started to make my own way out of there. I picked up my holdall and swung it over my shoulder leaving my hands free to pick up my mug and carry it to the counter.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said as I put it down.

  ‘You’re welcome, love,’ she said kindly. She surprised me when she added, ‘You look after yourself.’

  She held me with her eyes for a second and then she surprised me again by smiling at me. I smiled back.