An Unremarkable Body

by Elisa Lodato

  ‘Morning, monkey.’ I sat with my eyes closed and let the water flow out of me. ‘I’ll make you some porridge in about ten minutes, OK?’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Go and get dressed now.’ Helen ignored anything inconvenient or beside the point. I could have been one of her pupils declaring I hadn’t done my homework, or her best friend in the depths of depression – if she didn’t want to acknowledge something, she just pushed on regardless. But I enjoyed having Helen to stay. She was exactly what we needed at the time. And she loved porridge.

  ‘Laura? Porridge?’ As if it were a question.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘With honey?’

  ‘I don’t want porridge.’

  ‘Then you need your bloody head checked. What do you want instead?’ We were in the kitchen, preparing for another day at school. Helen poured the oats into a pan of milk.

  ‘Cornflakes.’

  She pulled the cutlery drawer open and angrily extracted a wooden spoon to stir the warm, oaty mixture. ‘Let me tell you something. If you love yourself you’ll start the day with a bowl of porridge.’ And then, because she saw I was unmoved, ‘Do you know what cornflakes will do?’ I said nothing. It was obvious I couldn’t win. ‘They’ll do a silly little dance in the milk, flutter against the insides of your stomach and scratch your bum on the way out. They’re absolutely bloody pointless.’ Placed before me, five minutes later, would be a large, steaming bowl of inevitable porridge.

  After breakfast, Helen walked me over to Sue’s house where Jenny would be waiting to take me and Sam to school. One drizzly morning in October, as she took my hand to cross the road, she said, simply and quietly: ‘She’s getting there, Laura.’ It was a curiously vague phrase for a five-year-old, but I knew what she meant.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s a tough business.’ Then, because I didn’t say anything, she clarified, ‘Having a baby.’

  ‘Is that why you haven’t had one?’

  ‘Not every woman wants to have babies, Laura. Remember that.’

  ‘Helen?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why is she so sad?’ The silence was unexpected and prolonged. We’d long since crossed the road, but still she held my hand. I looked from our hands up to her face, where I saw it folding in on itself. She shook the sorrow that had swarmed her face and regained control. ‘I wish I knew.’

  The months after Christopher’s birth marked a uniquely unsettled period in my life. The very fact of Jenny and Helen’s heavy involvement in our family life pointed clearly to the breakdown of my parents’ marriage. They were dysfunctional in the most obvious sense. My father accepted his failure as a husband and my mother withdrew into the distance that opened up between them. And yet he did not move out.

  My mother’s strength and willingness to parent two children emerged from the darkness of a difficult labour and a troubled marriage. Around the beginning of November, my mother – finally able to wash and dress herself in the morning – told Helen she could go home.

  ‘And what about Richard? When can he come home?’ It was early one morning. Their voices were quiet and measured from behind the door of my mother’s bedroom.

  ‘He is home.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Come back down here.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I think you need to make a decision.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say.’

  ‘Kath, I’m not saying it’s easy or that you have to stay with him, even. But this can’t go on. And Laura will understand. If not now, then one day.’ I heard the bed creak as Helen got out and opened the door. She wasn’t particularly surprised to see me there.

  My father did not move back into their bedroom after Helen left. Instead the house was plunged into a tense silence that made me long for her return. But things did settle down into a kind of normality: my mother began getting up early to supervise my breakfast and feed Christopher in time to walk me to school for the bell at nine. I used to watch her retreating back from across the playground, slightly hunched because the handles of the pushchair were too low for her height, and wonder what she and Christopher would do until the gates reopened to admit parents at three. When she would be there again, relieved and smiling. As if she’d just walked round the corner and waited for six hours.

  One winter afternoon, just before we broke up for Christmas, Jenny came to collect Sam and me from school. My mother had taken Christopher for a check-up at the doctor’s. As we walked home I listed all the things I’d asked Father Christmas for. But the thing I wanted most of all was a My Little Pony. A girl in my class, Stacey Hesler, already had one and derived great pleasure from publicly combing her rainbow mane. My jealousy was unbearable and bordered on obsession.

  ‘I’m sure Father Christmas will bring you one,’ Jenny said with a knowing smile that irked me.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Grown-ups know these things.’

  ‘What have you asked him for?’

  ‘To lose her virginity!’ Sam chirruped loudly, and started galloping sideways in celebration.

  ‘Pack it in!’ she shouted, leaning over me to try to land a thump on his retreating back.

  ‘What’s virginity?’

  ‘It means doing sex on someone!’ supplied Sam.

  ‘Shut your filthy little mouth or I’ll tell Mum!’

  ‘You want Richard to do sex on you! I heard you tell Kelly in your bedroom.’

  Jenny’s face coloured upward like a glass of Summer Fruits squash. Reluctantly she looked down at me, awaiting my question, but I was too distracted by the spiky little word that Sam had used to connect the name Richard with my father. That came later. When it was too late to ask any more questions.

  Helen remained a fixture in our lives, coming to see us at least two or three evenings a week but staying away at weekends. She came with a bottle of wine, a packet of cigarettes and a humorous tale from the classroom. My mother would drink, listen and laugh, lifted by the camaraderie after spending the day alone with my brother and his inarticulate demands.

  I used to look forward to Helen’s visits too. Excited by the prospect of her becoming a part of our household again. Always in my pyjamas by the time she arrived, I would hang off her arm in a crude attempt to make her stay. If my mother was in a good mood I would be allowed to stay up beyond my usual bedtime and watch television in the adjoining living room. I was sitting there, with the volume turned down low, the night Helen and my mother argued.

  One of Helen’s colleagues had a baby at about the same time my mother had Christopher. She’d left a small hole in the teaching schedule of the English department, a crack that became a crater when Colin Ball, a sallow and malnourished bachelor of fifty-five, finally threw in the towel on his teaching career, walked out of a fifth-year lesson on Romeo and Juliet and straight into The Royal Oak at the end of the road. There had been no moment of rebellion, no lurid pun on his surname, just Friar Laurence’s quietly convincing view that ‘powerful grace … lies in herbs’. He thought of the hops that must go into every pint of beer and decided to take himself – both wise and slow – to the nearest boozer.

  Helen had been asked to fill in while the school found a suitable replacement. ‘There’s no one else, apparently! I’m supposed to lend historical context, for God’s sake.’ She laughed to herself and said, ‘And do you know what one of the little shits asked me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did Juliet ever suck on her own mother’s tits?’

  My mother giggled quietly.

  ‘I said to him, I said, “I don’t know about Juliet, but you’ll be sucking on this piece of chalk if you ever use that language in my classroom again.” Little fucker.’ Spink-spink. The sound of a cigarette being lit followed by a loud and eye-watering inhalation.

  ‘You’d miss it, though.’

  ‘I would not.’

  ‘But you have something to do every day. Every day feels like t
he last one for me.’

  Helen smoked into the silence.

  ‘I just wish I had something to focus on. Some direction.’

  ‘You’ll find direction the moment you start living again.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Richard.’

  ‘Not that again.’

  ‘Listen to me: it was a mistake. You should never have married. I get it. So why won’t you leave him?’

  ‘Why would I leave him? Because he goes out to work every day and puts a roof over our heads and food on the table? Because he loves his children?’

  ‘Because you don’t love him! Because you’ve every reason,’ Helen lowered her voice to a wet, urgent whisper, ‘to believe his head’s been turned by your little babysitter. There are two reasons for you. Let’s start with those.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So that’s OK, is it? And what exactly do you get out of this?’

  ‘A home, a father to my kids, a—’

  ‘A cover for the truth!’

  ‘Call it that if you want.’

  ‘I don’t want! I don’t want any of this.’

  ‘I’m keeping it together for Laura and Christopher.’

  ‘And I’m telling you Laura and Christopher deserve better.’

  ‘Than what? A good home, a mum and dad who love them?’

  ‘None of that has to stop. Just because you live apart doesn’t mean they won’t benefit from your love. And there’s a good chance your happiness will make them happier.’

  ‘I can’t, Helen.’

  ‘You can.’

  ‘No, you can. You always can. But I need to put my children first. As soon as they’re grown up and move out, I’ll do it. I’ll tell them the truth.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake yourself!’

  ‘And Jenny?’

  ‘What about Jenny?’

  ‘Don’t pretend she isn’t gunning for Richard. And when that happens, when he finally gives in, what happens to your little suburban dream then?’

  ‘He won’t.’

  ‘Kath, he’s human. He has needs like all of us. And when someone offers companionship, comfort, love—’

  ‘Helen …’

  ‘—the sensible thing to do is take it.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘There you go again.’

  I heard the gritty grind of a spent cigarette in the glass ashtray. And then Helen’s hurried and farewell exhalation. ‘I should have known. Always the bloody same.’

  My mother made no response. She just sat there as Helen pulled her coat from the back of the chair and put it on. The quiet, awkward shufflings of an unexpectedly frosty goodbye. She walked past the open door of the living room, where I sat in suspended anxiety, towards the front door. Before she opened it – my ears alert to every sound – I heard the swift and rapid pad of my mother’s bare feet running to her. And then the soft drop of sobbing caught by earnest shushing. I don’t know who was crying or who was shushing. Perhaps they both were. But I know something was resolved by this discreet emotion.

  Helen was right. Eventually Jenny was the one to pull my father away from his marriage. In 1991 he moved out, and I hated him for doing so. I was too young to understand that my mother’s silence and inaction had permitted it. That it was no marriage. I simply saw her as the victim and it made me unhappy. And angry.

  Christopher was also unhappy – at five years of age his unhappiness manifested itself in tears and tantrums – but he wanted my father enough to still see him. He was able to accept that contact had to be at the weekends and under another roof. I envied him his pure and direct love, because my own had become so contaminated by all that I was starting to understand and the many things I could not. Ultimately I just couldn’t forgive him for leaving us. We didn’t speak for many months, and I never stayed the night at his new place.

  They moved to a small two-bedroom flat in New Malden. It was all they could afford, because my father insisted on keeping up the mortgage repayments on our house in Surbiton. Even after the mortgage had been paid off in 2001, he never suggested selling it or that he and my mother should get a divorce.

  In 1994, just one month before my thirteenth birthday, Jenny gave birth to a little girl. My father telephoned my mother to ask if he could come to the house – without Jenny – and introduce us to his new daughter. It was a watershed moment for all of us, seeing him with his baby. His pride was boundless and he wanted us, his first family, to share this moment of achievement with him. I understood then, on the brink of adolescence, that my mother, in her rejection of him after Christopher’s birth, had deprived him of a great chunk of joy. And in Ellie he regained what was rightfully his. It made me want to be his daughter again.

  We started slowly; my secondary school was in Kingston, so on at least one afternoon a week I’d take the bus to New Malden and spend an hour with Jenny and Ellie before he came home from work. I didn’t exactly help, and I certainly didn’t wash up or cook like she did for my own mother, but I took an interest in Ellie and played with her, something that – I’m assured by friends who are now mothers – is help enough to any new parent.

  By the time I was offered a place at Cambridge, in January 1999, my father and I had rebuilt some semblance of a relationship. When I got my results the following August, I drove with some friends to the bank he worked in to show him the slips of paper. He was so thrilled, he asked if he could hug me. And I remember crying on his shoulder, not because of my results, but because he’d felt the need to ask.

  I wasn’t the only one to soften towards him after he moved out. My mother wasn’t friendly, but she was perfectly happy to see him when he came to collect Christopher for the weekend or drop him off on a Sunday evening. The quietude of a broken home; when the walls first crack, all is panic and upset, but once the damage has been assessed and accepted, it’s possible to live calmly under its roof again. I’m not saying my mother wasn’t right to be worried about the impact of a break-up on Christopher and me, but she underestimated the great benefit of peace and harmony.

  My meeting with Helen in the park had helped me to see that Christopher’s birth was the catalyst for a process that was already well under way. Helen was right – my mother did freeze him out, I remember it myself – but I still wanted to know when, and if, they were ever happy. And I knew my father was the only one who could answer that question with any certainty. I’ve covered many stories in my professional life, interviewed people in the aftermath of great trauma, and yet I felt myself cringe at the thought of asking my father how he really felt about my mother. Before things went wrong.

  The Friday that followed my meeting with Helen was a gloriously sunny day. The kind of June morning that makes you feel sudden panic that plans are not in place to enjoy it fully. I put on shorts and a T-shirt, found my trainers at the bottom of my wardrobe and, tying my hair up, went out for a run. I realised as I made my way towards Clapham Common that I hadn’t even brushed my teeth. With every stride I got further away from my flat, her report and the sorrow that had engulfed me for so long. I did a lap of the common and then ran back to my flat, against the flow of commuters, at around nine and showered. I made breakfast to Desert Island Discs and sat down with a cup of coffee around ten. I continued working on my fourth article; it was about the rush to buy property near the Olympic Village. I was playing around with the title: ‘Are We the Village Idiots?’ and the decidedly weak, ‘The Only Doorway in the Village’, when my father phoned.

  ‘Hi Dad.’

  ‘Hi, Laura. What are you up to?’

  ‘Just doing a bit of work. I’m writing some articles on the Olympics.’

  ‘Very good. Got a tough deadline?’

  ‘Not especially tough, no,’ I said, rolling my eyes. My father liked to believe I worked in a smoke-filled, cut-throat Fleet Street office full of hard thinkers and straight-talkers.

  ‘Well, let me know when it will be publishe
d.’

  ‘Printed, Dad. I’m not writing a book.’

  ‘Well you should. And you could.’

  ‘What can I do for you?’ I asked, looking out at the sunshine.

  ‘I haven’t seen you in a while. Jenny and I have got you a little birthday present here. Ellie would love to see you.’

  ‘I’d like to see you guys too. I’ve been meaning to phone you, actually.’

  ‘OK, well, can you do this weekend?’

  ‘Yeah. Tomorrow afternoon – say around four?’

  ‘Great. I’ll let the girls know. Ellie will be pleased. See you tomorrow.’

  With the mortgage on my mother’s house almost paid off, in 1998 my father and Jenny moved to a small three-bedroom house. It was still in New Malden, but in the catchment area for a much better primary school. On the edge of a big housing estate, their road is swamped by cars and impossible to park on. I underestimated how long it would take to find a space and ended up knocking on the door late and ever so slightly out of breath.

  Ellie opened the door, standing tall in heels with self-consciously long hair. Her face, so heavy with new beauty, looked almost perilous on her neck. As though it might tip over into womanhood at any moment.

  Their hallway was narrow and cluttered. My father’s bike was leaning up against the wall, and Jenny and Ellie’s shoes filled most of the space in between. Ellie had to open the door and press herself against the wall for me to enter before we could hug. ‘They’re in the kitchen,’ she directed.

  ‘Happy birthday!’ my father said as soon as he saw me. Jenny was vigorously stirring a small pot on the stove. She turned her body to wave briefly.