Flying Under Bridges

by Sandi Toksvig

  You decided to go to Barbados and I couldn’t bear that you were going to leave. I kept thinking about John. ‘Fucking gay pride…’ Pride… what else was a wedding but having some pride? ‘Flaunting their fucking perversions in your face.’ I shut my eyes and I could see you drop Kate’s hand as the nurse came into the room. I don’t write that to make you feel bad. It’s just that you had to be free of all that fear, Inge. Kate knew that.

  When I went to see you the day you left, you had lost a lot of weight and all your bounce seemed to have bounced away, but you still opened the door as if you were pleased to see me. I don’t mean your smile. I mean really pleased.

  ‘Ah, I’m so glad you’ve come. I’m in the neighbourhood at the moment promoting homosexuality. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime offer. Come and join us. You know you want to. Be part of a despised minority. Join us and have your parents reject you, your boss fire you, strangers call you names and beat you… and if you agree to become a homosexual for a trial period of just ten days then we will give you, absolutely free… this carriage clock.’ You held up the very beautiful little clock, which had always stood on the mantelpiece in your house. You held it out to me. ‘I’m kidding but I do want you to have it. Kate gave it to me and I know it would have made her happy.’

  You left and I couldn’t bear it.

  ‘Goodbye, Camie, and thanks.’

  Goodbye to being Camie. You went away and left me. There was snow on the ground and the tracks from your car tyres stayed for ages. I knew then that Edenford would be sorry you were gone. You had been useful. The whole town had been able to divert themselves from thinking about their own shortcomings by looking at those they thought they saw in you. Everyone needed scandal. I wondered who the town would turn on next. I thought about you and wondered if you would ever go to San Francisco. If you would go and fly under bridges. And I wanted to run after you but I couldn’t. I didn’t have any money. Then I thought maybe Shirley could get away. I could suggest a short holiday. Give her time to think but I didn’t have any money and then the wickedness started and it didn’t stop.

  I sold Adam’s collection of Shirley Bassey records and then, when I realised how much I could get for them, I went home and got all the souvenirs and sold those as well. He spotted the loss pretty quickly. Well, you would do. He had so much of it. We hadn’t seen the floor of the spare room in years.

  He’d come straight home from work and gone up to change into his full costume for rehearsals, as he’d been doing all week. He still believed that Miss Bassey was to be his social salvation. I’d got rather used to mixing cocktails for my half-hour with Shirley before supper. He stood at the bottom of the stairs in full Bassey regalia — he looked fabulous, diamanté, acrylic wig — and he was screaming at me. His eyes bulging under those extra extension eyelashes I’d got him at Boots.

  ‘What have you done! What have you done?’ he kept shouting.

  I was just going to explain calmly about needing the money for Shirley to get away when the doorbell rang. In his temper I think Adam had quite forgotten about his outfit because he wrenched the door open to see who it was. It was Horace. Horace Hoddle from… the golf club committee. To say Horace looked surprised would somehow fail to capture the moment.

  Horace didn’t actually speak but in his eyes was everything everyone had been saying — Adam’s assault on that woman, Tom’s long hair and strange ways, Patrick, you and Kate…

  I don’t know what came over me but as Adam stepped out to explain, I shut the door behind him and locked it. I stood there till long after Horace had left, looking at Adam through the leaded window in the hall. He stood on the front step with the evening sun glinting off his gold lame.

  It was a shame. Backlit by the sun like that with his arms raised and his mouth wide with fury, he was, for a brief moment… Dame Shirley. I wouldn’t open the door and I think it was a salutary lesson to Adam just how secure he’d made the house. After a while he turned and hobbled down the road to the bus stop to get the 46 to William’s house. I watched his retreating evening dress and felt rather sorry for him. He should have listened to me. I warned him that stilettos should never be that tight. It was best for him. Perhaps the trip on the bus would calm him down.

  But I needn’t have bothered. There was no talking to Shirley. My daughter was slipping and slipping away. She became obsessed with the wedding.

  Fact — the average UK wedding costs £10,500.

  Shirley wanted me to be involved. Of course she did, and I tried. We discussed which shop to place her list at. It was very important. The mere name of the establishment said something about the class of wedding we were having. So, too, did the size of the ring. We discussed invitations, dresses, cutlery …

  I thought I would go mad. She wouldn’t talk about Adam or what had occurred and I realised how much I had ignored of what went on between my mother and father. Big things had happened and I had never said a word. Adam went to stay with William and Pe Pe, while my life turned into a small sub-franchise of Bride’s World. I didn’t understand any of it. The Bible was no help. I had started at the beginning and got as far as the First Book of Samuel. As far as I can understand, it was like this:

  David wanted to marry King Saul’s daughter, Michal, but David was worried that he was poor and couldn’t provide a proper wedding present for a king. So Saul said, ‘The king desires no marriage present except a hundred foreskins of the Philistines, that he may be avenged of the king’s enemies.’ Now Saul was being sneaky because he thought the Philistines would kill David, but off he goes and kills not a hundred but two hundred Philistines and brings back their foreskins, ‘which were given in full number to the king, that he might become the king’s son-in-law. And Saul gave him his daughter Michal for a wife’. And who do you think dealt with all those unwanted wedding presents when they arrived? Saul’s wife, I’ll be bound. You can just see her at the wedding breakfast trying to lay out the foreskins on the present table and hoping her second cousin, who married a Philistine, doesn’t decide to turn up.

  Now that Shirley was taking another year off, she had taken a full-time job at the building society. She worked there amongst the Peps and the Tessas, the endless future plans of Edenford, and on her days off she sat at our breakfast bar making endless lists. A week before the wedding she asked if John could come and stay.

  ‘His lease is up on his flat and it seems silly to keep it on when we’re not going to live there,’ reasoned my daughter. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Mum? You’ve got plenty of space in the spare room, now.’

  And I had. Shirley Bassey no longer filled my life. Mother, Tom and I were alone, although everyone said Adam was desperate to come back from William and Pe Pe’s.

  ‘I don’t think he likes my food,’ soothed Pe Pe, as if praise of my skill in the kitchen would make everything better. He didn’t miss me, just my flans. I missed him or maybe I missed the idea of him, I didn’t know any more. Pe Pe came round with baby catalogues and we were awash with baby bootees and bridesmaids’ bonnets. I nearly choked on some of the prices.

  ‘Dad says we mustn’t stint on anything, Mum,’ moaned my daughter.

  ‘William says I can have anything I want for the new baby and, believe me, I am going to get the best,’ announced Pe Pe.

  Dover the Land of Plenty. 33 reasons why we should send them back and close the door. Reason 13: pregnant refugee mothers only want brand new equipment for their offspring. Are these infants entitled to hold a British passport to success now that they have been born in our local hospitals?

  Suddenly I felt sick. I mean, like I was going to throw up. I started to run out of the house. I could hear Shirley calling, ‘Mum, Mum! Come back,’ but I had to run.

  Lost

  I dreamed and behold I saw a Man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a Book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked and saw him open the book and read therein; and as he read, he wept and trembled; an
d not being able longer to contain, he broke out with a lamentable cry, saying, ‘What shall I do?’

  (The Pilgrim’s Progress — John Bunyan)

  I couldn’t breathe. I ran as if I were never coming back. The tears started to come. Those horrible, female tears. Stupid, stupid. I tried to run faster but the water from my stupid eyes blinded me. The women in Sarajevo were not ashamed to show their grief. They wept and clung to the bodies of their loved ones and the cameras filmed and filmed. Women’s tears have a mind of their own. They are an uncontrollable part of our bodies but I hated them. My breath came in sharp, jagged pieces. Stupid, tearful, fat, middle-aged woman who couldn’t run. A great, useless blob on the countryside. There was thick snow everywhere. It didn’t look like England at all. Everything around me had turned into a foreign country. A great white alien place that I had never been to before. I didn’t know where I was going until I fell.. In my blindness, I crashed into something which cracked but didn’t give and I collapsed beside it.

  I lay in the snow, each breath stabbing into my lungs. Could you die in the snow in south-east England or did it have to be some Siberian steppe? Could I just lie there and never get up again? Why not? What possible loss would it be? I could feel the cold seeping through my trousers and it felt good. I remembered lying in a bank of white as a child with my dad. Lying there on our backs, sweeping our arms and legs in great swathes across the ground to make angels in the snow. The tears began to calm and I tried to breathe again. Slowly I stretched out my limbs into the white landscape. I hurt, I hurt everywhere, but I concentrated my mind. I concentrated on making the most perfect angel, and when it was finished I looked up to the sky.

  ‘What do you think of that then?’ I yelled to the man upstairs, to my creator, to Buddha, to anyone who was listening. That was when I saw the bird. It was a short distance away from where I lay and in my haze of tears it appeared to be what Tom had wondered about — a crow with white feathers. I sat up to look closer and scared the creature. It flapped its wings and flew away, black as night without the snow for cover. It was then that I saw what had cracked when I fell. I thought it was a cross at first but actually it was one of those wooden markings they put along the side of new roads. I don’t know what they’re for. Just two old bits of rough wood slapped together in the shape of the cross. I thought it was a sign. At last I had been heard. I, Eve Marshall, was important enough to have been given a revelation. I crawled towards it and knelt before this holy sign. With my eyes clamped shut and my hands praying like a child, I began to beg for help.

  ‘Okay, this is the fabulous bit of the story where I have a message straight from above to do what I did and you can either claim I’m crazy or wonder if I am touched by the Lord.’

  The shrink looks at me. ‘Is that what you want to tell me?’

  ‘No, I want to stop that’s all. I just want to go back to my cell.’

  I prayed and I prayed and nothing. The wind blew along the unmade road and I was alone. I prayed to die, I prayed to understand, I prayed for calm. I did what people have done for as long as there have been people. I couldn’t face my life, the truth of my life and so I tried to imagine some way or place or time where it wouldn’t exist. I was utterly weak and helpless and what I really wanted was some hero who would come and save me. I don’t think I would have minded much whether Jesus, the archangel Gabriel or Batman had turned up.

  I looked up to the sky and then along the endless track ploughed through the country for the new bypass. Everything seemed vast and I seemed so small and insignificant. I wanted to understand and what I understood was that it was pointless. No one spoke to me. No ethereal being came down to hover on the digger parked beside me. Of course not. I had done nothing to deserve it. I was nothing. I was no genius that the world would be glad had come. What a ridiculous idea that my brain could come to any sort of adequate understanding of the world and my place in it. It was laughable.

  So now what? Make the leap to faith? Jump from not believing to believing because it was safer? I thought about John’s kind of Christian where the basic alternative to accepting Jesus into my heart was hellfire. We were back in the playground. I had to play by the rules or I was out. Maybe it would be okay. I just had to put off being happy till I was dead. Was this God’s divine plan? Did God even have time to make a plan for me? Of course he did. God was an intelligent, benign creator. He had time for everyone. The suffering was for our own good.

  I tried to stay with that thought but my brain wouldn’t shut up. It was like I had a little devil sitting on my shoulder whispering, ‘If God is so all-compassionate and all-powerful then why couldn’t our good be secured without suffering? If it’s a test then why did he make us so we needed testing? If suffering comes from disobedience to God, why did he, the all-powerful one, not make it so we can only obey? How come so many religions are based on what God said to people and yet no two beliefs ever got the same message? Did someone get a bad connection?’

  I kept trying to get back on track.

  ‘I’m not trying to be difficult,’ I yelled to the sky, ‘I just don’t get it!’

  ‘God is benevolent but his benevolence works in mysterious ways,’ came the answer.

  ‘I’ll say,’ I muttered, as my head filled with more heresy. What if God was just incompetent or a bully? What if… there were no more what ifs? I was not going to get a revelation. I could either lie down and die or get on with the lot I had been given.

  I think I was exhausted because I seemed to see one of my dreams as I knelt there. I was on a raft. A really strong, wooden raft, lashed together with stout rope. I was alone on the raft but it had everything I needed. The water was calm as I drifted down a wide river. Then slowly the water began to surge and things started to slip from my raft. Things I needed. The waves got worse and soon the raft held only me. Then the raft itself began to break up until I was in the water, clinging to what remained and I knew I had to let go.

  I stood up, knowing I would have to say goodbye to everything that had got me through before. The old stuff was gone and there was nothing new to replace it. I had no choice but to do it my own way. I looked at the roadside cross and had never felt so alone in my life.

  As I turned to leave, I noticed something on the ground where I had been lying. The snow was white, pure white, unblemished except in the middle of my angel. There was a large patch of red. My life was seeping from me.

  Under the Knife

  A cheerful heart is a good medicine,

  but a downcast spirit dries up the bones.

  (PROVERBS 18.22)

  The hysterectomy was easy. The doctor had been pushing me to have it done and I swept in on the much-maligned NHS. Everyone was very sympathetic. Women’s troubles. Adam even brought me a present. He’d been to Düsseldorf about some infrared burglar alarms, so I got a solitaire pendant with a 1 x 0.01 carat, brilliant in a 14-carat white gold setting — £35.70 without tax, and two free toilet bags from British Midland. He wouldn’t hold my hand since he thought I’d slept with Inge but he did come. Anyway, having my reproductive system whipped out was free and not as bad as I had expected.

  Wedding Day

  Hear, O daughter, consider, and incline your ear;

  forget your people and your father’s house…

  (PSALMS 45.10)

  I didn’t get foreskins as a wedding present. They turned out to be much too difficult to get hold of. I got a lace tablecloth and some matching napkins. Tom, however, outdid himself. He came downstairs with Claudette on a large oak plinth. I don’t know where her soul had gone but she stood crouched down, just like the cat who had plagued me all those years. Even the glint in her eyes was the same.

  ‘It’s for Shirl and that… man. For the wedding.’ Tom handed the moggy over to me. ‘I think Shirley was fond of Claudette.’

  I took the creature in my arms and nodded. ‘Yes.’

  Tom stood there in his usual jeans and T-shirt. ‘Are you not coming to the wedding?’ I as
ked.

  ‘I don’t see the point,’ said Tom.

  ‘No.’

  I put the cat down in the hall but it was so lifelike that I couldn’t drink my coffee. In the end I took the monster out to the car and put it on the back seat to take to the ceremony. John was just returning from the hire shop with his wedding suit. It was pure white and hanging lifeless on a hanger in his hand.

  ‘I think there might be more snow,’ he said. ‘Look lovely in the pictures. White snow, us all in white.’

  ‘Yes.’

  John swung his suit over his shoulder and went in whistling. I could see Mother through the dining-room window, sitting in her chair. No one was ever going to help me with her. Martha had gone back to Bangkok and William had also come to a decision.

  ‘Now that I’m going to be a father, I have had to do some thinking,’ he said sonorously. ‘It’s an important step in a man’s life and it has made me think about my own father. He didn’t want his money going to Mother and I feel that I must honour his wishes.’

  ‘But he’s not here and I am. I need some help, William,’ I begged, but he wouldn’t listen. The father-to-be.

  I went in to sit with Mother before getting ready. I think she’d been dead most of the morning. Well, I’d been busy and hadn’t looked in on her as much as usual. Now she had gone to the great Last Supper in the top room. I sat and looked at her. She wasn’t there any more but maybe she had given me a gift. Maybe she had meant to let me go. I felt calm until I thought about Shirley. It didn’t seem like a great omen for your marriage to have your grandmother die on your wedding day, so I called Tom downstairs.