by Susan Lewis
I know there’s more trouble going on at the school than she’s telling me about. I rang Miss Fisher a couple of weeks ago and she admitted she’s worried, but that they aren’t giving up on her yet. Apparently she’s become quite attached to her form teacher, Miss Vaughan, who’s a very pleasant young woman, judging by the couple of times I’ve met her. So something good is happening for her there, but the rest of the time she’s disrupting lessons, making the other teachers’ lives a misery and leading her friends into trouble. It was when I rang that I found out about all her detentions. Miss Fisher assures me she’s sent a letter each time to inform me, but Susan must be getting to them first and throwing them away.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she shouted when I challenged her on it. ‘I haven’t seen any letters.’
I knew she was lying, it was written all over her, but I could see too that I was never going to get her to admit it.
The sigh inside me curls around the words that need to be spoken, but I have no one to listen to them. Every time I try talking to her she just accuses me of nagging and not understanding and being an old fuddy-duddy dad who knows nothing about girls.
She had another migraine a few weeks ago. I presumed it was connected to her time of the month, but Mrs Moon, our home help, told me that wasn’t the case. (It was a very embarrassing conversation to be having with a woman who’s not even a member of our family, but it was the only way I could find out without asking Susan, who hates talking about those things with me.) It seems the migraine came out of nowhere and Miss Fisher herself ended up driving her home. The first I knew of it was when I came back from work to find her in bed and in so much pain that she started to throw up. It had more or less worn off by the morning, but she stayed home from school that day, on her own after Mrs Moon had gone, and I popped back at dinnertime to make sure she was all right. I’d half expected not to find her there, but she was fast asleep under the blankets with her worn old copy of Alice in Wonderland next to the bed, always her favourite when she’s not very well – and old Ted, who’s never far away.
I sometimes wonder if it’s the effort she puts into not thinking about her mother that makes her head hurt, but maybe I’m attributing the cause of my own headaches to her.
It’s a bit of a weight off my mind to know that she’s getting along with Mrs Moon now, after the difficult start they had. I think our Susan’s erased it all from her mind now, and maybe it’s best that way. Mrs Moon’s a lovely young woman who was very generous to forgive as readily as she did. She’s as good as gold with Gary and does an excellent job about the house.
It was only a couple of nights ago at a parent’s evening that I found out what had happened between our Susan and her form teacher. It was a great relief to learn that this was another unpleasant episode that had turned out well in the end – certainly Miss Vaughan can do no wrong in our Susan’s eyes now, unlike every other teacher who she accuses of picking on her and blaming her for things she didn’t do. However, it was very worrying indeed to think of her causing the same sort of distress to Miss Vaughan that she had to Mrs Moon, before establishing a more friendly relationship with them.
I mentioned both incidents to Dr Leigh when we saw him last week, and he was clearly quite interested to hear more, so this time I didn’t hold back so much and I told him what I knew. When I’d finished he gave it some thought, then started to talk about Susan taking out her frustrations on an older woman who then forgave her, which wouldn’t be unusual for a girl in her position. He intimated that she’s punishing them for her mother dying, as if they were her mother, then she forms strong attachments to them, again as if they were her mother.
Susan doesn’t want to go and see him any more. She hates the way he keeps talking about her mother, she says, and I have to admit, the visits are starting to get me down too. If I’d noticed an improvement in her schoolwork over the time we’ve been seeing him, or some sign of her settling down at home, I’d be more convinced he was helping. As it is, her last school report made me want to weep, it was so bad, and the lies she tells to get out of the house to get up to heaven only knows what come close to breaking my heart. Dear God in heaven, what’s she up to with those boys? My worst fears are so awful that I cannot bring myself to describe them with words. All I can do is pray to the Lord for guidance and hope, believe, that He will deliver us safely from the depths of my despair.
Chapter Nineteen
Susan
DAD’S GONE ALL strict and even more religious lately. He’s hardly let me out for a month, and sits over me while I’m doing my homework, which is really, really annoying. I haven’t even been able to sneak out, because he lies in wait, ready to catch me when I try. We keep having terrible rows, but he won’t give in. He says I’m turning into a lazy, good-for-nothing madam, who’s selfish, opinionated, ungodly and much too big for my boots.
Very nice, I must say!
‘Imagine your father saying that to you,’ I wrote to Sadie in one of my regular letters. ‘I thought he wanted me to come home to live, but now I’m not so sure. I wish I could run away with Kev.’
Someone’s been chalking Sue loves Kev on the pavement outside his house, which is really childish and probably why he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me lately. If I ever find out who’s been doing it, I’ve made it known that I’ll smash their faces in. (Although I’ve never actually hit anyone, and don’t really want to in case they hit me back and manage to beat me up badly, I find that threatening to often has very good results.)
On the nights I do manage to give Dad the slip I go to meet Mandy in the bus shelter, where we’ve started doing this really cool thing, provided Julie’s not there. Either Mandy pretends to be Kev, or I pretend to be Rich, and we make up these chats as though we’re married to them. We imagine what it would be like on our wedding days, or honeymoons, or telling them we’re pregnant. We even have rows sometimes, but we always make up, and Kev is so nice to me then that it leaves me feeling quite sad that none of it’s real.
The nights are getting lighter now, so we’re hoping they’ll start coming to find us again soon. Someone said that Kev’s going out with a girl called Katherine who lives over Downend. I’ll want to kill myself if it’s true, but I don’t think it is, because I’ve never seen him with anyone. The trouble is, I hardly see him at all. Mandy says he doesn’t go round the Anchor much, or down the club, so maybe he is going to see this girl in Downend. Please God don’t let him be. It’s not fair that no one ever loves me.
Dad keeps going on about how aggressive I sound when I speak, but he goes on about everything these days. He still makes me laugh sometimes though, like when he told me about the day he hid under the stairs from Flirty Gertie, and ended up getting caught. When he’s in a good mood he comes outside and cheats at rounders, which always makes everyone fall about laughing, he’s such a clown. We keep telling him he ought to be in the circus, he might make us all rich.
Usually though, he’s having a go at me about something, saying I’m driving him to the end of his tether and he doesn’t know what to do with me. I keep telling him he doesn’t have to do anything, except keep his hair on and stop treating me like a child. He won’t listen though, and last week, after he found out I’d been knocking off school with Lainey, Julie and Mandy, he only got some nuns to come and have a chat with me. Nuns! We’re not even Catholic, so why he had to go and talk to them I’ll never know. I wasn’t having anything to do with them, anyway. The minute I saw them standing at the door like three giant crows ready to peck me to bits, I tore upstairs to my room and refused to come out till they’d gone.
Honestly! Everyone knocks off, and no one else’s parents call in the nuns. I think Dad might be going off his rocker, which is very worrying, because I really love him, when he’s being normal that is, and I don’t want him ending up down Glenside or Barrow Gurney with all the nutters.
The last couple of weeks he’s been making me go up the library with hi
m at weekends and though there are a thousand other things I’d rather be doing, I’ve found some great books by Jean Plaidy and Georgette Heyer. I love reading them more than anything (apart from going out with my friends, or Kev), and can’t put them down. I can easily see Kev as the hero in all of them, and it’s fantastic imagining us being a lord and lady with tons of money and living happily ever after. (That’s Georgette Heyer, who’s my favourite. Jean Plaidy writes about people who actually lived, so her books are more tragic, but still really good.)
To try and keep Dad happy I’ve been cooking his tea ready for when he comes home at night. Miss Vaughan’s taught us some easy recipes for baked potatoes and lamb chops, or toad in the hole, which I’m useless at, but I keep giving it a go. It seems to work out all right when I’m in her lesson, but by the time I put it on a plate for Dad it looks like a pile of sick with a lost sausage poking out the top. He always eats it though, and says it’s delicious, but he would because he’s like that. I think he prefers the fairy cakes I let Gary help make, with icing on the top and currants in the middle.
I’ve been doing some housework too, polishing all our ornaments in the front room and hoovering the carpets the way Mum used to. I don’t like washing sinks and the toilet much, so I try to get Gary to do them, but he just tells me to get lost and goes off outside with his friends.
There are two reasons I’m doing so much round the house: first, so that I can get some practice in for when I’m married to Kev; and second, because Sarah’s going to be leaving at the end of June. She’s having another baby, so her husband doesn’t want her to work any more. They’re moving house too, but I can’t remember where they’re going. I only know that it’s close to Chippenham, which is miles away. She keeps saying she’s going to miss us, and hopes we’ll get the bus to visit her sometimes, but I don’t expect we’ll bother. I don’t tell her that, because it would be rude, but I’ve already stopped going round her house, and I’m not telling her any of my secrets now. It’s up to her if she wants to move away, I’m not going to stop her.
I don’t care, anyway.
‘Dad,’ I say, after he’s finished his tea. ‘Can we have a dog?’
He sits back in his chair and covers his mouth as he burps. ‘No, my love,’ he replies.
‘Why not?’
‘Because there’s no one here all day to take care of it, and besides we don’t know anything about dogs.’
‘I think we should get one,’ Gary pipes up.
‘We can always learn about them,’ I say.
‘You can get a book,’ Gary suggests.
‘Yeah, like you did on sewing,’ I remind Dad, ‘when I started to make my own clothes. We learned how to do it from one of your books.’
‘And Mrs Taylor had to finish it off for us, because we weren’t any good,’ he reminds ‘me. ‘No, we’re not having a dog and that’s that.’
‘I think you’re really mean,’ I tell him, ‘because you and Gary have got one another, and I don’t have anyone.’
‘Don’t be silly, you’ve got us, and you don’t need a dog. You won’t look after it, and I don’t have the time. Now, let’s change the subject please. Who’s got homework tonight?’
‘Me,’ Gary groans. ‘I have to learn twenty spellings.’
‘Well, at least they’re proper spellings,’ I retort snootily, ‘instead of all that rubbish they were teaching you before.’
‘It wasn’t rubbish, was it Dad?’
Dad gives a sigh. ‘It’s better that you learn the correct way to spell,’ he replies, ‘and I have to admit I’m glad that experiment is over. Now, do you want me to test you?’
‘In a minute. I haven’t learned them all yet.’
‘What about you, Susan? What homework do you have?’
‘None,’ I lie. I’m not bothering to do it, because I won’t be there to hand it in tomorrow. Julie, Mandy and I are going shoplifting over Staple Hill, and after that we’re going to see if we can find Philip Bird down the garden centre so Mandy and I can ask him if he’ll go out with Julie. Then we’re going to wait outside Kev’s work so that Julie and Mandy can ask him if he’ll go out with me again.
Eddie
I keep wondering what use I am, if I have any real purpose here. I seem to have lost my foothold and am now falling endlessly, aimlessly through life. My only purchase is in the pages of a book, my anchor is when my pen touches paper. I register the factory noise around me and cringe from it. The thump, grind, hiss and squeal of machinery. The stench of burning metal and sweat. The coarse, loud voices of men. I shrink from the crudeness of their humour, and feel saddened, sickened by the way they discuss, debase the women in their lives. Sometimes I seek to change their views, but why? They only mock me, so let another missionary convert them. I turn away from the explicit nudity of the pictures they hang on the walls, embarrassed, but not unstirred. I feel concern and shame for the girls who are photographed that way, and terrified that our Susan should ever find herself there.
For the past few months, since she left Red Maids to start afresh at home, we have been through the valley of the shadow of death. Sometimes I feel as though I’m losing her completely, but then she returns to my side, settling back into the child she still is and struggles so hard not to be. I watched her despair when Mrs Moon left us, and felt helpless to soothe it. I tried, but she pushed me away, saying she didn’t care, we could manage on our own. Her focus now is her teacher, Miss Vaughan, who can do no wrong, and who, as far as I can tell, is working hard with Miss Fisher to keep Susan at the school. There are others who would prefer her to go. She continues to be disruptive, arrogant and rude, they say, and when I search for words to defend her I can find so few that I feel treacherous and of no use to her at all.
We no longer go to see Dr Leigh. I don’t think he was surprised when I told him after our last visit that we wouldn’t be coming again. He asked if I understood that Susan’s behaviour is a reaction to losing her mother, a cry for help, I think he said. ‘She needs to talk about it,’ he went on, ‘and come to terms with why it happened – and the fact that neither she, nor anyone else, is to blame.’
I didn’t argue with him, he knows more about these things than I do, but if he can’t get our Susan to talk about her mother, I’m sure I don’t know how I’m going to when I don’t have any of his expertise. And would it really do any good to dredge it all up again? Eddress has been gone for almost four years now and our Susan’s unstable enough as it is, without trying to make her go through the process of grief, as he called it.
What’s happened to my little girl, I keep asking myself. Where is she? Why is she turning into this stranger who is so hard to control, even to like? I worry about her day and night. My only refuge continues to be in books, but I dare not spend as much time as I used to reading, or writing, for fear of what she might do while my eyes are averted. I feel sick to my soul when I leave for work in the mornings, wondering whether she will go to school, or roam the streets with friends who are anything but. In desperation a while ago, I went to see Father Michael at the Catholic church. It was the first time I’d set foot in one for two decades or more, but I’d started to wonder if God was using our Susan to punish me for leaving the faith, so I had to find out. It would be cruel of Him to make her, a blameless child, suffer for my sins, and though she says she’s never been happier, and I should stop worrying all the time, I know that deep in her heart she must be suffering indeed.
Father Michael spoke to the nuns at Our Lady of Lourdes, and three of them came to the house on an ‘errand of mercy’. Susan wouldn’t see them, and I had to apologise for wasting their time. Sister Benedict was very kind, and told me to call on them at any time. ‘You are still one of us,’ she assured me, and for a while I took some comfort in thinking I was. I wanted to belong to something, or someone, who might give me enough strength to get through each day.
Florrie keeps telling me I should get married again.
‘Our Susan needs a woman
to lean on,’ she says. ‘Someone with a strong arm and who can teach her how to behave. I’m doing my best, but I’m old now, and I don’t see her often enough. And God bless you, Eddie, you’re too gentle a soul to know how to handle that girl when she’s got her mother’s wilfulness about her.’
Is it her mother’s wilfulness that’s driving her? Of course, I see and hear Eddress in her all the time, but there’s a distance between us that I never had with her mother, nor with her, until I sent her away to school. Is that what created the rift that I am finding so hard to close? Am I to blame for the way she is? As her father I must be.
As for getting married again, it’s not what I want, and I don’t think our Susan would like it either. Besides, what woman would want to take on a girl who behaves the way she does, cheeking back all the time, and dressing like a trollop twice her age? A picture of Anne who works in the charity shop over Staple Hill comes to my mind, and I shudder to think of how troubled her tender sensibilities would be by my unruly daughter. She’s a refined and educated woman who’s never been married, or had much experience with children, but she is kind enough to ask about Susan and Gary sometimes when I go in. Perhaps she’s only being polite, but I always appreciate the friendliness, and am polite in return when I tell her that they’re well, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to see her smile. She has pale blue eyes, and fair hair that I think she must have washed and set every week at the hairdresser’s. She often keeps books aside for me when they come in, and seems very pleased when I buy one or two of her recommendations. She’ll even ask me about them the next time I drop in.
