Ribbons in Her Hair

by Colette McCormick

  Anyway, like I say, we found this charity shop and I used to buy stuff for the flat. That, plus that fact that I polished the place until it shone like a new pin meant that it didn’t look half bad.

  Paula commented on it one day when she came round for one of her regular visits. ‘You’ve got the place looking really good,’ she said, looking at the throw that covered the balding patch on the sofa and the couple of new, similarly coloured cushions that tied it all together. ‘You’ve done a great job.’

  I’ll admit it, I felt proud that someone thought that I kept a nice house but I tried to shake the feeling away because that was a road I did not want to go down.

  I’m not going to pretend that life was easy because to be honest it was anything but. I’ve already mentioned the sleepless nights and on top of that there was the loneliness. I had Mandy, who was great – she was such a support – and there was Paula who came to see me on a regular basis, but neither of them was there in the middle of the night. Once I’d locked the door that was it; just me and Mary and, love her as I did, she wasn’t a lot of company.

  For the first few months I was terrified every time she cried during the night. What would I do if there was anything seriously wrong with her? The nearest phone was out the door down the steps and across the courtyard. Anyway, who would I ring? I may have had help from my friend and my social worker but ultimately I was alone and that got to me sometimes, especially in the early days. I cried a lot of tears.

  But somehow I got through them, we got through them together. As the months passed Mary found her ways of communicating with me and I somehow managed to understand her. We made a good team.

  There wasn’t a lot of money for food, so once Mary progressed to solid food I tried to make meals that I could mash down for her to eat. It was cheaper than the jars from the shop and surely they were better for her. I remember eating a lot of vegetable soup which I would have for my lunch and then, a few hours later when it was cool enough give to Mary to eat once I bashed the veggies to within an inch of their lives. I thanked God that I’d always enjoyed Mrs Clough’s Home Economics class at school so at least I was able to cook. I’d make a big saucepan of soup that would last me a few days for just a few pennies.

  We used to go food shopping as close to the end of the day as we could, when the fresh stuff was at its cheapest. Mandy taught me that trick; she said it was something that her mother had always done. She was surprised when I’d told her that mine hadn’t done the same.

  ‘No,’ I told her one day as we were sitting in her flat with the girls playing together on the floor in front of us, ‘Mum would never do that.’ She looked surprised, so I explained. ‘She’d never do that because it would be a sign that she was struggling to cope, you know, with money. You can’t have the neighbours thinking that you’re hard up.’

  Mandy just shook her head, ‘I’ll never understand your mother,’ she said.

  That made two of us.

  Mary took her first step when she was about ten months old. She’d been wobbling around, hanging on to the few bits of furniture for a few weeks and then one day she just went. I mean it was only a couple of steps before she bounced down onto her padded bottom but I was so excited. I just wanted to tell someone but when I looked around there was no one there to share the moment with.

  ‘Clever girl, Mary,’ I said grabbing hold of the tiny hands that she was holding out to me. She pulled herself up, got her balance and then walked into my arms. We hugged each other and I think I probably cried.

  I told anyone who would listen that she’d walked. When I was cleaning the kitchen windows I saw Bob coming out of his front door. ‘Guess what?’ I shouted, ‘Mary walked.’

  She learned to talk pretty quickly as well and before her second birthday she was putting simple sentences together. The old health visitor that I’d had when Mary was born, the posh one, had retired when Mary was about six months old and been replaced by a younger woman who had just left university and was full of new ideas.

  ‘Talk to her all the time,’ she’d said, ‘doesn’t matter what about, just talk to her.’

  So I did and it paid off.

  We were moved from Palmer’s Court when Mary was about two and a half. Paula said that a one bedroom flat was no longer suitable for us now that Mary was getting older. She said that Mary would need a room of her own. I was sad to leave that flat but I knew that Paula was probably right. We were moved to a two-bedroom house about half a mile away.

  Number 11 Nightingale Terrace had a living room and kitchen downstairs and upstairs was a biggish bedroom at the front, a smaller one at the back and a bathroom in between. It reminded me a lot of the house that I’d grown up in except for the enclosed yard at the back. The house I’d grown up in had had a long garden. I had a garden at the front though, just a small one.

  Mandy had also moved out of Palmer’s Court for the same reason. We no longer lived a few doors away from each other though we were only separated by a few streets so I still got to see her almost every day.

  I think the girls would have been coming up to three when Mandy met Daniel. She asked me if I’d babysit Jade while she went out with him one night. Of course I said I would because Mary and Jade got along so well and why shouldn’t at least one of us be having a bit of fun? I know that makes me sound bitter but I’m not really. Well, maybe a little bit…

  Anyway, Mandy had met Daniel and the one night babysitting turned into another and then another one. She seemed serious about him. That was until she turned up at my house one night about ten o’clock crying her eyes out. I almost bounced to the door. Who the hell was banging on it like that so late at night? They’d wake the children. The door was on a chain and I opened it a crack to see who it was and when I saw Mandy there with tears streaming down her face I opened it as quickly as I could and dragged her inside.

  We stayed up talking for hours that night and she never did tell me exactly what had happened. Suffice to say that she didn’t ask me to babysit again for a long time.

  The thought of a boyfriend terrified me. I mean, look how the last one had turned out. When I looked at Mary she seemed worth all the heartache. I had her now; I didn’t need a man. Like I’ve said, I was lonely sometimes but I just didn’t feel like I could open myself up to that type of rejection again.

  I thought about Tim from time to time, wondered how he was and what he was up to. Sometimes, especially when I was struggling to make ends meet, I thought that maybe I’d been wrong to keep Mary from him. Shouldn’t he have been forced to shoulder some of the responsibility too? But it was enough that he had rejected me without him rejecting her too. And anyway, I could hardly turn up after all this time and say, ‘Oh, by the way, this is your daughter,’ could I? I somehow didn’t see him dancing a jig at the prospect of fatherhood.

  The thought of a man, any man, scared me.

  That was until I met Joe.

  I met Joe in the library. I loved to read but money being as tight as it was I couldn’t afford to buy books, not even ones from the charity shop. Every other Monday I would go to the library in the afternoon to pick up a couple of books for myself and a couple from the junior section for Mary. Mandy used to have both girls for a couple of hours so that I could browse the books in peace and I would return the favour if Mandy every needed a bit of ‘me’ time.

  Anyway I’d seen Joe in the library a couple of times. I hadn’t really paid him a lot of attention, just noticed him really, like I had the bald fella with the glasses; just noticed him. So, he came over to me one day and said that he’d noticed me too and he wondered if I fancied going out some time for a drink. I hadn’t had a bloke take the slightest bit of interest in me since Tim so it came as a bit of a surprise, but I mumbled something and we got chatting. He asked if he could see me the following night for a drink and I thought why the hell not? So it was agreed.

  ‘’Course I will,’ Mandy said when I asked her if she’d have Mary.

  It had been
over three years since my last date and I was as nervous as I had been that first time. I had taken Mary over to Mandy’s house on the inaptly named Starling Avenue earlier in the afternoon and I had the house all to myself. I didn’t like it.

  Joe was already in the pub when I got there. He waved me over and asked me what I wanted to drink. I settled for an orange juice; somehow I’d lived for over twenty years and never once tasted alcohol so, when he asked if I was sure that was all I wanted, I said yes.

  Okay, so I’m going to cut a short story even shorter here: it didn’t work out. We had a couple of drinks and chatted and as we did it became clear that he had certain ‘expectations’ of how the night would end and I’m sure that I don’t have to spell that out for you. When I twigged what his intentions were I made it clear that he was going to be disappointed.

  ‘Why?’ he asked as he slurped another mouthful of beer. ‘It’s not like you’re saving yourself for your wedding night or anything is it?’ And just in case I hadn’t understood his meaning he added, ‘Well, you’ve got a baby haven’t you?’

  Well that was the end of that. I was no longer the naïve kid that I’d once been and I realised that I was no longer scared of a man rejecting me because he couldn’t get his way. I wouldn’t be sleeping with anyone, thank you very much. I told him as much, bid him goodnight, thanked him for the drinks and left without a backward glance. I changed the day that I went to the library and I never saw him again.

  After I’d left the pub I didn’t want to go home to an empty house so I went to Mandy’s. She seemed surprised to see me but not by the story that I told her. I didn’t want to get Mary out of her warm bed and I didn’t want to go home alone so I spent the night on Mandy’s sofa, but not before we’d stayed up talking well into the early hours.

  ***

  Mary started nursery just after her fourth birthday. I was sorry to be without her but I knew that it would do her good and to be honest she was ready for it. She got a place in the morning session and Jade, who had started the term before, was on the afternoon one. I was a bit worried about that at first. I mean, Mary was going to be doing something all on her own for the first time in her life but as it turned out it was probably a good thing because she was forced to make new friends. Unlike me when I was young, she made friends very easily and settled into nursery life without any trouble.

  A year later I cried when I saw her dressed in a little grey pinafore dress, a white shirt and a green cardigan. Mary was ready for her first day at school. I couldn’t say the same for myself.

  JEAN

  Mick never spoke about Susan, not to me anyway but I knew he thought about her. I used to watch him sitting in the chair looking off into space and I knew what he doing. He’d once said to me that he knew me but there was no one in the world knew him better than I did. I knew him better than he knew himself. He was thinking about her all right but he never talked about her.

  But whether we talked about it or not, I knew that Susan was past her time. I knew that she would have her baby – or not – by now. Well, I’m just saying. How did I know? Anything could have happened.

  Anything could have happened to my baby and I didn’t know. I’m not heartless you know; Susan was my baby and I cared about her but she had made her choice. She’d chosen the illegitimate baby of a man that didn’t want her over us, her family. That’s gratitude for you.

  Anyway, I used to wonder about her and the baby. What she’d had, had it been bad for her things like that and then one day Julie came to visit and said, ‘Susan phoned.’

  ‘What?’ Mick nearly choked on the food he was eating – steak and kidney pie as I recall – well, more kidney than steak, I mean, we didn’t have money to burn. Funny the things that you remember. Anyway, after Julie’s announcement he put his knife and fork down and so did I.

  Julie sat down at the table with us and she looked at each of us in turn but I noticed she was looking at her dad when she said, ‘Susan phoned,’ again.

  ‘What did she say?’ he asked. There was more life in his voice than I’d heard for months. ‘How is she?’

  ‘She’s fine.’

  He’d grabbed Julie’s hand and she put her other hand on top of his. It was like I wasn’t even there.

  Julie said that Susan had told her she’d had a baby girl and called her Mary. She told us that Susan had said that they were both all right. Mick asked her to go over it again, what had Susan said exactly? She repeated it but nothing changed from the first time. He was hanging on to every word she said.

  ‘Did you ask her where she was?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did she tell you?’

  ‘No.’

  He nodded his head slowly, patted Julie’s hands and said. ‘She’s all right and that’s the main thing.’ He pushed himself up from the table. ‘And she’ll be looking after that baby,’ he added as he disappeared towards the living room.

  We both watched him leave but neither of us followed him.

  I asked Julie if that was really all that Susan had said and she nodded her head but I knew that she was lying. I don’t know why they bothered; they should just have told me the truth straight away. ‘Really?’ was all I needed to say.

  ‘I asked her why she wasn’t coming back and she basically said that she didn’t want to upset the apple cart.’ She paused for a second or two, like she was letting me take in what she had just told me before she carried on. ‘She said that she didn’t know what you’d told the neighbours but she thought her coming back with a baby would cause a problem for you. “Put a spanner in the works” is what she said, I think.’

  Well she wasn’t wrong there, but I didn’t say anything.

  Julie didn’t stay long after that and when she’d gone I sat where I was at the table.

  So Susan had a daughter, we had a granddaughter. Part of me wished that I could celebrate it. I wished that I could accept her baby and what had happened but I couldn’t. I’d wanted certain things for Susan: A levels, maybe even a degree. Putting her through university would have been hard but it would have been worth it. She wasn’t stupid, she could have done something with her life and now she’d gone and thrown it all away. She’d shown herself to be no better than any number of lasses on this estate that got themselves pregnant by lads that were no good. And the one thing that I hadn’t wanted for my girls: she’d shown that she was no better than me.

  I was sure that Susan thought she loved her baby – she probably thought that Mary was the best thing in the world – but it would just be a matter of time before she started resenting the child for holding her back. She wouldn’t be able to do the things that she wanted to do, go to the places that she wanted to go to, not with a baby to think about. How long would it be before she realised that I actually knew what I was talking about? Not that she’d ever admit it; she was too stubborn for that, too much like Mick’s mother, but that stubbornness would do her no favours. That was the real reason that she couldn’t come home. It wasn’t that she was afraid of ‘upsetting the apple cart’ or whatever she’d said to Julie; she just wouldn’t be able to bring herself to admit that I’d been right.

  I was there ages and by the time that I finally moved myself and started washing the dishes, the gravy had set like cement on the plates.

  I was scrubbing at a plate when I felt Mick looking at me. I could just sense that he was there. I hadn’t heard him come in, so I had no idea how long he’d been watching me.

  ‘Mary,’ he said eventually, ‘where do you think that came from?’

  There was something in his voice, something not kind exactly but softer than it had been for months.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said in answer to his question.

  Mick changed that night. He wasn’t back to his old self but he seemed more at peace. He was at least able to bring himself to speak to me a bit more often, so our home situation became more bearable.

  ***

  ‘Your Susan not coming home for Christ
mas?’ Ida Watson had caught me in the street on my way back from the post office a couple of days after Susan had phoned Julie.

  ‘No,’ I told her. ‘It’s like I said, Ida, she likes it over there. She’s settled and she’s got new friends.’ I tried to move away but she wasn’t going to let me get away that lightly. Why would she? I’d have been the same in her shoes.

  ‘Even so, I thought she might come home for Christmas.’

  ‘Yes, well, she’s not.’ I was sharper than I’d meant to be but I knew what Ida was getting at. And, what’s more, she knew that I knew. ‘She was on the phone the other day and she’s fine,’ I said. ‘That’s all I need to know.’

  ‘Can’t live their lives for them, can we?’ she said, with a look on her face. She might have claimed it was a smile but it looked more like a smirk to me.

  It was nearly Christmas though and Susan was out there somewhere with her baby. Under different circumstances I would have enjoyed looking for things for a granddaughter. I’d have bought her little fairy frocks and teddy bears galore. I’ve never told this to anyone this but I did buy a teddy bear for her, as a Christmas present. Stupid, I know, because who knew if I would ever get the chance to give it to her? But I did it anyway. It was a caramel colour with a pink ribbon around its neck. It’s still wrapped up in Christmas paper in the bottom of my wardrobe. God knows what they’ll think when they’re going through my stuff after I’m gone.

  I spent a lot of time thinking about Susan on Christmas Day and I know I wasn’t the only one. It was heartbreaking really because I think Mick was hoping she would come home. It would have been the best Christmas present he could ever have had but in his heart he knew he wouldn’t get it.

  ‘I thought she might have rung,’ I said, as me and Julie were clearing the dishes away after Christmas Dinner. Mick and Chris had left us to it.

  Julie didn’t say anything; she just piled dishes on top of each other and took them to the sink. I watched her as she rested the plates on the tiny little bump that was starting to form on her belly. I had never seen her look happier, or healthier for that matter than she had since she found out she was pregnant.