by Louisa Young
Yes, but come on. Lily is the fruit of something. And never was there anything more innocent and beautiful than Lily.
‘So it would be good to ascertain if Harry … don’t you …?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mum. ‘Yes. I see what you mean.’
She was pale as a fungus. I went back to Enfield with her on the tube. We didn’t talk about it much on the journey, but we did decide not to speak to Dad about any of it for now, and I held her hand all the way.
FOURTEEN
Chrissie, Get Out of My Bath
The city is becoming turgid. Getting through it is like wading in concrete. Concrete, pain and the past. It takes all day to get from west to central, deconstruct your family and break your mother’s heart, then go east, and back west in time for the end of school. But in some small way, thank God for it. Sitting on the tube for about two hours I could let what else Janie did settle in my mind, let it all separate, so the dead leaves could rot and sink and the clean rainwater rise to the surface. Except, like in the bogs at Glastonbury, the layers of shit seemed to be reaching a higher level every time I looked.
It seems every time I poke her memory some other nasty worm comes crawling out.
That’s enough disgusting metaphors.
The fact was that by the time I arrived at the school gates that Friday afternoon my mind was clear and my feelings were under control because that’s how it is. They have to be. Many are the things Lily will have to come to terms with and many are the ways I will have to help her, but for now, while she’s so small, my main jobs are protection and the rationing of chocolate. And I can do them.
Sometimes I feel like some kind of psychological pelican, pre-digesting all the knowledge that my child will ultimately need to consume, so that she can digest it more easily in the end. Pray God let me not sick it up before the right moment.
Enough disgusting metaphors, I said.
Sarah arrived soon after us. Within moments she was drinking coffee and reading an Arabic newspaper. I had to laugh.
As soon as Lily was asleep the protective rings of good humour and patience that rise to protect the mothership and her young sank down again, and so it was in slightly depleted mood that I rang Harry. Not there. Left a message. Declined to call office, or mobile, or send a fax, or bleep him. I can’t believe he has a mobile and a bleep. People so desperate to be got in touch with, and then when you do you can’t communicate anyway because everyone’s humanity is soul-deep in assumptions and second-guessing and desires we can’t admit. I just said call me. I seemed to be developing a cough. Brigid has a rhyme: Get bronchitis, get pneumonia, then for sure the boys won’t phone ya.
Sarah suggested that she cook some dinner. It’s a great way to invite yourself.
‘Are you staying?’ I asked.
‘No – I mean – I can go to my friend in Clapham, I …’
‘Whatever you like,’ I said. ‘That’s the el Araby dorm. And yeah, cook. Please.’
She looked so depleted herself. I was sorry I had been so cross and mean earlier. After all, my child is safe abed, and hers are out wandering among the dangers that face young men. Which are not few. But I did not want company. I wanted a serious session on the hedgehog. Janie was pulling my hair, Sa’id was running his fingers down my spine.
Oh God, if only.
I’m sorry, I’ll rephrase that. Thank God he’s not, actually.
I tried to smile at her. I didn’t mean to be sarky. We should have things in common. English women who have loved Egypt. Then I got the telephone and pulled it on its special long extension cord into the bathroom, and from the depths of the suds I rang my mum, who was small-voiced and calm, and Brigid, who was knackered, and Zeinab, who had five people from the World Service coming to dinner to moan about the BBC’s management, and there was, still, an automatic urge to ring Janie. As I was ringing the girls, you know, doing the rounds. There was her number, right there in my memory. In my fingertip. No address book of mine ever had her number in. I always knew each one. If anyone had tried to arrange my funeral from my address book, like they did the dead princess’s, they wouldn’t have got hold of those I loved the best. They’re not in there, they’re in my heart.
She didn’t tell me because she was ashamed. She made Mum promise not to tell me.
Well, it’s nice to have something from the dead that I didn’t have before. To know something of how she felt.
I was so so sad that she felt she had to keep secrets from me.
I was crying in the bath when the doorbell went.
Sarah answered it. Cheeky cow.
Female voices. Sarah’s and another, loud and raucous. And upset.
Oh, for God’s sake, what now?
I put my head under water and started to sing.
The bathroom door burst open.
It was some kind of mer-harpy that rose out of the bath in a fury. I didn’t care that I was wet or that I was naked, all I cared was that there was a child in my bed, a weepy mother in my kitchen, two runaways on my mind and God knows who and what messing with it from beyond the grave. I did not consider it reasonable that my very bathroom should be invaded.
‘Get out!’ I yelled, sheets of water slip-sliding up and over the edge. ‘Get out of my bloody bathroom!’
‘Not until I get some – some –’
It was Chrissie Bates. She seemed to have forgotten why she had come.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, only a modicum more quietly. ‘Excuse me, but would you mind fucking off?’
She slipped on the bathmat. Whether she was lunging for me I don’t know. Anyway she seemed to have cracked her head, so I stepped over her as best I could in the minute room, and wrapped my towel around me, and yelled to Sarah.
‘You let her in, would you mind getting rid of her?’
‘Who is she?’
Sarah looked scared. Terrified, in fact. Of course she usually leads the quiet life of a provincial academic. She’s not used to this.
‘She’s the widow of a psychotic gangster who used to have a crush on me. And I think she’s drunk.’ I prodded her with my toe. Gently.
‘Oh bugger,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Sarah. ‘Sorry.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She said she was a friend of yours. Sorry. I didn’t think.’
‘Yeah. Well.’
Poor Chrissie. Pathetic sight.
‘Is she all right?’ said Sarah.
‘Shouldn’t think so,’ I said, and went to put some clothes on. I hate getting dressed too soon after a bath. You’re not properly dry, and your bra straps stick to you. I hadn’t been intending to get dressed again anyway. I had been going to put on some comfortable yet slinky black velvet underwear and an ancient gallabeya and my Turkish dressing gown. This is what I like to wear when I am on my own quietly at home in bed trying to escape from/think quietly about things that are trying to do my head in. I don’t know what I like to wear for throwing out hysterical yet comatose widows.
I pulled on a pair of jeans and some jumper, and felt very cross about having to do so. Damned if I’m putting shoes on, though.
Back in the bathroom Sarah, ungainly in the doorway, was cradling Chrissie’s head, and Chrissie was coming round. It was drink more than anything.
‘She might be sick,’ I said unhelpfully.
Sarah looked up at me aghast. At my heartlessness, I think, rather than the imminence of vomit.
I reached under the bath and pulled out a basin, and folded a towel to go under her head. ‘Put her in the recovery position,’ I said. ‘She’ll come on out when she needs a cup of tea.’
Sarah apparently didn’t know the recovery position. So I did it. The amount of Giorgio Chrissie was wearing, I nearly passed out too. From the kitchen came a waft of garlic veering from caramelising to burning.
The thing is, once you’re a mother you’re used to doing everything. So I turned down the garlic, threw in the chopped onions (which annoyed me, because I prefer the
m sliced in moon-pale rainbows – chopped onions to me look amateurish, lumpen, English). Then I made tea, and sighed, and picked up the paper I hadn’t got round to reading and the post that hadn’t arrived when I went out that morning. Two bills, a suggestion that I might have won five trillion pounds from Reader’s Digest, and a handwritten envelope postmarked from the West Midlands that filled me with dread. Same envelope, different handwriting, different postmark, same … smell. Thank you, Chrissie. Marvellous. What a multi-media experience you are tonight.
Inside was a letter from Eddie. His mad, tight, black handwriting. His idiosyncratic way with words.
My Darling Girl,
It seems to me that the thing to do is for us to go away; I imagine that you imagine you can’t, because of the dear child and so on, but there is really no reason why everything can’t be arranged. You may have thought that I had forgotten you but I can’t really believe that you would think that. I’m just writing to say Don’t you worry. Don’t you worry. I’ll let you know as soon as I can what the arrangements are, as soon as we have these little legal details sorted out. I’m afraid I can’t tell you where yet either in case you do something silly like show this to my little scoundrel Harry. But rest in peace, all will come out in the end!
I do miss you, you lovely thing.
See you soon, all my love, EB
I stared at it blankly for quite a while.
‘What is it?’ asked Sarah.
‘My past come back to haunt me,’ I said. ‘Either it’s a letter from a dead man, or it’s a very old letter that has taken eighteen months to get here, or it’s a letter that a widow finds amusing to send on posthumously. It’s not funny, either way. Any way.’
I stared at it a little more. No date. Postmark date was yesterday.
Chrissie must have found it somewhere and sent it, a charming follow-up to the phone call.
Bitch. I had still, after all, been half prepared to be not entirely unsympathetic towards her, but no longer.
At that moment the gurgling noises in the bathroom took on new energy, and in a moment Chrissie appeared in the doorway like the ghost of Medusa in Chrissie Hynde’s make-up. Sure enough we turned to stone.
She collapsed on the sofa and burst into tears again.
‘You,’ she said. ‘You … You … You.’
I waited.
‘You just … you wait. You can’t … You won’t get away with it.’
Ah!
‘You know … but you can’t have it. You can’t fuckin’ have it. I need it and You Can’t Fuckin’ Havit.’
‘Go away,’ I said.
‘Fucking …’
‘Chrissie, shall I call you a cab?’ I said politely. (‘You’re a cab!’ went the joke in the back of my mind. I couldn’t stop it. Pathetic.)
‘Fuckin …’ she replied.
I didn’t want Lily waking up to this.
‘Sarah, would you be so kind? The number’s on the wall by the phone, I don’t want to leave her … thank you.’ Sarah crept to do my bidding.
Chrissie wept a bit more.
‘And stop sending me these,’ I hissed.
She looked up at the the letter. Squinted at it.
‘Never,’ she said, shaking her head. It seemed to mean ‘I never sent it’ rather than ‘I will never stop sending them’.
‘What?’ I asked, just to be clear.
‘I never,’ she gurgled. ‘I … that’s Eddie’s writing! You fucking—’ and she was off again, and grabbed the letter off me, and read it, and shrieked her indignation, and was carrying on like some kind of banshee when Sarah slipped back in and said a cab was coming. She didn’t look very convinced. She went and sat down by Chrissie, and offered her a cup of tea.
‘Yes please,’ said Chrissie surprisingly. Her mascara was everywhere; her face completely out of focus. Every now and then she would droop forwards, then nod violently, nearly knocking herself off the sofa with the force of it.
Sarah gave her her tea with a look of absolute pity and only a dusting of disgust. Chrissie tried to take the tea without giving up the letter, either to the floor or the table or to any person. She sighed.
‘Put it down, no one’s going to nick it,’ I said.
She looked up at me, scared.
‘Drink your tea, there’s a cab coming for you.’
‘You and me have got to talk,’ she said. ‘We have. Yes.’
‘I think not,’ I said.
‘Yes we have. It’s not legal and you can’t keep it. So you’ve got to give it to me. It’s mine.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘Go home.’
‘This doesn’t – wossit say?’
‘What?’
‘Wossit say?’ She was moving her eyes over the surface of the letter but nothing seemed to be sinking in. Her eyebrows took on the angle of puzzlement. ‘I don’t know,’ she said pathetically. ‘I don’t know.’
I think she may have truly believed that she hadn’t sent it. But if so, it was only because she was completely barking.
‘Chrissie,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Go home. Go down and wait for your cab. Go on.’
‘It’s coming?’ she said.
‘The driver won’t come up to the door because this is a horrible council estate in a big dangerous city,’ I explained, as if it weren’t completely bloody obvious, ‘and I won’t come down with you because my kid is asleep here. So please. Go. Wash your face, go.’
Sarah went with her to wash her face. Then collected her handbag and steered her to the lift. Then went down with her, and found the cab, and came back up looking knackered.
‘Thanks,’ I said. The worst and most immediate fears had left with Chrissie, but there were plenty left. I can’t have her making a habit of this.
Damn.
‘What was all that about?’ Sarah asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and wondered about purification rituals, whether I should get someone in to burn a native American smudge stick for my flat’s aura, or to put rose quartz crystals on my passageways.
‘Angeline?’ said Sarah. I looked up at her. Her concern seemed completely genuine, completely normal, completely kind. But I was in no mood for concern.
‘I’m going to bed,’ I said. ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘I’ll get a cab,’ said Sarah. I didn’t stop her.
After she left I picked up my letter from beyond the grave and put it on my desk, half brushing at my fingers to get the dust of it off me. Then I washed my hands. And went to bed. Sa’id’s fingers were already trailing the back of my neck as I got in, but Lily woke, chasing him away, and kissed me all over my face. ‘It’s a heart of kisses,’ she said. ‘Could you tell the shape? I kissed you a heart of kisses.’
Actually I don’t think she was awake.
*
First thing on Saturday morning the telephone rang. I grabbed it to stop it from waking Lily who lay like a miracle with her feet in my belly and her head half under the pillow. But sleeping. That was the miracle.
It was Harry. He was sounding disgustingly efficient for what couldn’t be more than eight in the morning. Had I spoken to my parents? I told him about my conversation with my mother. Not about the extra chapters of Janie’s history, or about how churned up yet unsurprised I was by them, nor about the strange comfort that I felt at having had something, whatever, back from the dead. The knowledge that she was ashamed. Nor that Chrissie had been round. No, I just told him that Mum was talking to Dad and no doubt they would soon be ready to go ahead with getting the blood samples and, er, that seemed to be it. It was curiously dry and unemotional. Early morning. ‘OK then, great,’ he said. And that was it. We might have been travel agents, confirming a booking. If we hadn’t been I might have mentioned Chrissie’s visit, and the latest letter. But I didn’t.
A surge of want-not-want came over me. I want this to be emotional, I don’t want this to be emotional. What do I want? It does h
elp to know.
To kiss Sa’id.
FIFTEEN
Sunday Night Coming Down Again
It was a quiet weekend. I quietly thought about Janie. I rang my mum and we talked for a long time about nothing much. Sarah rang saying she was going back to Brighton, saying she’d ring, telling me to ring her, desperate to communicate when there was nothing to say. There was nothing I could do but wait.
So Lily and I went to Kew and had a picnic under a willow tree, fighting off geese and watching the slant of sun on water. Then we came back to Shepherds Bush and wandered down the market, buying parsley and fresh hot popcorn and falafel sandwiches – really nice ones, the falafel sizzling and lumpy like they should be – and we stopped in to see Charlie the parrot in the pet shop, and Lily was given a livid green and scarlet feather. And we got some dangerously hot little fried Brazilian doughnuts, and a three-pack of knickers for Lily. And we went to the Syrian supermarket and bought five varieties of baklava for tea, along with stuffed vine-leaves and olives and livid crimson sausages with pine nuts and chilli, and a small forest of broccoli. It looked like green clouds, like I would imagine a rain forest looks from above. We greeted the Ghanaian barber and the Egyptian fishmonger and the Armenian deli-man (so we bought some rye bread, and Lily got a piece of turkish delight) and the Indian sweetshop lady, and we laughed when a Scandinavian asked one of the Syrians for red pesto and the Syrian said what, Bisto? At least I laughed. Lily didn’t get the joke. She only gets one joke. What’s the fastest cake in the world? Scone.
The sky was blue and London was beautiful and so was everything in it.
And when we got home the flat was ours. I opened all the windows and Lily got out her Bananas in Pyjamas colouring-in book and I put on Summer Breeze by the Isley Brothers very loud, because although it wasn’t summer and there wasn’t really jasmine in my mind, we were doing a pretty good pretence of it. Then we changed the sheets on her bed as the sun paraded a glorious old-testament sunset across the western skies, complete with shining light shafts and purple cumulus, nicely set off by the deep green OXFORD AND THE WEST signposts, and the almost empty Saturday evening A40. Those who had left town had left; those who were coming had come. We who stay are here. And then we ate baklava and broccoli in the bath with candles, which was very beautifully sticky and funny, and then she fell asleep in her own bed and I put on my gallabeya and velvet knickers and Turkish dressing gown and a Bach cello suite, and I lay in the middle of my own floor and sang along. Because I felt like it.
