The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir

by Lesley Allen

  ‘Aaahhhhh! Aaahhhhh! Blood! Blood! Aaahhhhh! Biddy’s covered in blood!’

  Right on cue, Alison leapt up from her chair and rushed to console her frightened friend. Then, looking at Biddy with feigned horror and mock concern she shrieked, ‘Oh, Mr Hendry, Mr Hendry, come quickly. Poor Biddy’s got her period.’

  The startled teacher, who was already halfway up the classroom to see what blooming fuss was disrupting his reading this time, stopped in his tracks. Sure enough, Biddy Weir’s skirt and chair appeared to be covered in dark red blood, and the girl’s face was as white as his chalk. She looked like she might be about to pass out. Oh shit, he thought. What to do? What to do? There was no way he was touching her or cleaning her up or even going any damn closer to her for that matter. Why in God’s name did this bloody weird little girl have to go and take her bloody monthly thing in the middle of his class? This was a job for a woman.

  ‘Julia!’ he yelled.

  ‘Yes, Mr Hendry?’ said Julia, smirking over at Alison and Georgina.

  ‘Go to the office. Get Mrs Martin. Tell her what has happened and say that we need some . . .’ he paused, not quite sure what it was that they needed, ‘things. And hurry, Julia, hurry.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Hendry.’

  Julia scuttled off to get the help that wasn’t actually needed, wondering if they’d maybe gone a step too far this time: not out of any concern for Biddy, but fearing that they might get caught out. Still, Alison had promised them everything would work out fine. And Alison was never wrong.

  Back in the classroom, mayhem had erupted. Georgina was still in full-blown melodramatic distress at the sight of the ‘blood’. Alison was still feigning sympathy and concern for the girl everyone in the class, apart from Mr Hendry, knew she actually despised. Mr Hendry was still stuck to the spot, completely at a loss about how to handle the situation. The rest of the class started to join in the fun.

  ‘Biddy’s got her period. Biddy’s got her period,’ chanted some of the girls.

  ‘Aw, gross! Disgusting! Yuck!’ shouted the boys.

  Most of them hadn’t a clue what was going on, but it didn’t matter. This was brilliant.

  Biddy felt sick. She had no idea what was going on either. What on earth were Alison and Georgina shouting about? What had she done? What blood? What was her period? Why were they saying that?

  WHAT IS A PERIOD?? she silently screamed.

  Biddy looked round at her chair and saw the ‘blood’. She put her hand down and felt the back of her skirt. She brought her fingers up to her face and examined the reddish liquid.

  ‘Oh, double gross,’ shouted Dennis Bailey, ‘I’m going to puke!’

  It’s just paint, thought Biddy. It’s just red paint. Why do they think it’s blood?

  But she couldn’t say it out loud. The lump was there again, blocking her throat, stopping her words. She instinctively knew that this period business was something big, something important. Something not nice, but something significant. Something to do with being a girl. She looked around at the class. It seemed as though everyone was pointing at her and laughing at her and despising her even more than usual.

  They all know, she thought. They all know what it is, and they know that I don’t.

  She ran her hand down her face, smearing it with dark red paint, which was soon dripping onto her shirt, helped on its way by warm, wet tears. And as the tears fell from Biddy’s eyes as they never had before in public, she suddenly knew what she needed. The shock was overwhelming. ‘I want my mummy,’ she sobbed for the first time in her life. ‘I want my mummy.’

  Mrs Martin, the matronly school secretary, took Biddy to the office, where she cleaned her up as best she could and called her father. It took twenty-two minutes for him to walk to the school, as there was no one he could call on for a lift.

  For twenty-two minutes, Mrs Martin battled with her conscience. Should she try to talk to the girl about what had happened: tell her that the incident had been an unfortunate misunderstanding? Explain why? Perhaps even run through the rudiments of puberty? After all, the poor wee mite had no mother of her own to do the job. But then again, maybe it wasn’t her place to get involved. Surely there was an aunt or grandmother or some female member of the family who was a substitute mother figure? And anyway, Mrs Martin only had sons herself. Four of them. What did she know about sex education, as it was now called, for eleven-year-old girls? Besides, the child was obviously too distressed by the whole thing. Probably best not to get involved. She’d wait and see what the father had to say. And she’d say a prayer for the child tonight at bedtime. Bless her.

  For twenty-two minutes, Biddy thought about her mother. She stood in the office with its salmon-pink walls and cream lace curtains and imagined that the plump, middle-aged woman with soft peachy skin and apricot lips, who was wiping down her skirt with a damp linen tea towel, was her mummy. She could smell her sweet scent and feel the warmth of her body as she busied around. Is this what her own mother looked like? Smelled like? Moved like? She’d never seen a photograph, never asked, never even really wondered. But now she did, and more than anything she wanted this lady to hold her, hug her, stroke her hair, kiss her forehead, tell her that everything would be OK, pretend to be her mummy for a minute.

  ‘Mummy, what’s a period?’ she silently asked.

  A knock at the door jolted Biddy, and for a split second she almost believed that her mother had come to save her.

  ‘Oh, Mr Weir, she’s fine. Come in, come in,’ said Mrs Martin as she ushered Biddy’s breathless, worried father into the room. ‘It’s all been a dreadful misunderstanding, Mr Weir. Somehow Biddy managed to spill some paint over her skirt, red paint, and some of the girls panicked. They thought she’d taken her, well, you know, her, ahem, monthly’s, you see. Anyway, Biddy got a bit upset, and there were a few tears and . . . well, you’re all right now, aren’t you, Biddy?’ she said, rather too loudly, rather too brightly.

  Mr Weir nodded and looked at his daughter, standing by the window, a halo of sunlight highlighting her wild copper curls, her pasty cream skin sinking into the lace curtain behind, her pale green eyes glistening like slivers of broken glass. She looked like a miserable angel. She looked just like her mother.

  ‘All right, lass, let’s go home,’ he said softly, reaching out for Biddy’s hand. Biddy desperately wanted to be hugged. She couldn’t remember having had a hug, from anyone, ever, not even her father, and it had never occurred to her to want one before. But suddenly she longed to escape to the shelter of someone else’s arms, to feel protected from all her pain. But she took her father’s hand, knowing it was the best that he could do.

  ‘Mr Weir,’ said Mrs Martin hesitantly, taking a book from the solitary thick shelf in her office that constituted the school’s library. ‘I hope you don’t think it’s out of place, coming from me, but perhaps you might find this useful,’ she said, handing him a small hardback Ladybird book.

  Mr Weir glanced at the cover. ‘Your Body,’ he read and stared at the drawing of a human male skeleton alongside a sketch of a muscular man in a running pose. How could this help his little girl? ‘Page forty-two,’ whispered Mrs Martin, her smile oozing pity. ‘All she needs to know.’

  A flush rising in his cheeks, Mr Weir nodded and slipped the book into his inside coat pocket. He took Biddy home via the park, stopping at Mrs Henderson’s corner shop to buy a packet of Kimberley biscuits and a sherbet dip. And when Mrs Thomas, their new neighbour at number 21, who was brushing down the path outside her house, asked if everything was OK – was Biddy ill, or had the whole school been sent home early and should she run now and get her boy Ian who’d be fretting if he was left standing at the gate? – he simply tipped his cap and ushered his daughter into their house without so much as a word.

  The day after the ‘incident’, Mr Weir bought his daughter a packet of Dr. White’s.

  ‘You, ah, you can put this away for safe keeping,’ he muttered, handing her a white plastic bag as s
he hung up her coat, shattered from enduring the relentless jibes and sniggers of her persecutors at school. It was the one and only time she had pleaded not to go, but her father had insisted.

  She looked at him expectantly, waiting for an explanation as to the contents of the bag. Her father did not give gifts freely. It wasn’t her birthday and Christmas was ages away. But he wouldn’t meet her eyes and turned away, embarrassed and uncomfortable by this necessary gesture. ‘I’ll be in the shed if you need help with your homework. My tools need sorting.’

  Biddy sat on the end of her creaking bed and removed the packet of sanitary towels from the bag, noticing they had been purchased in the big chemist store in town and not from their local pharmacist round the corner. It must have been the first time her father had broached its doors, and would probably be the last. She hugged the packet to her chest, wishing all at once to have a mother, to really have her period and to be normal like the other girls. Then she put the packet in her bottom drawer, tucked in beside the Ladybird book, where it would stay, untouched, for over four years, until her period finally came.

  ‘Thank you, Papa,’ Biddy said quietly to her father that evening at dinner. He nodded, knowing what she meant. ‘Just let me know when you need some more, lass. I’ll give you the money.’

  And that was the last that was said about it. She often wondered if he wondered whether she had started. He sometimes thought that maybe she had, but was too shy to say. And as that first packet lasted for two whole periods, and Biddy started getting twenty pence a week of pocket money when she turned thirteen, she never did ask him for the money to buy some more.

  5.

  Biddy waded through the rest of her final year at primary school in a haze of despair. Her head bowed lower, and her body stooped over more than ever. From a distance she could have been mistaken for a shrunken old lady, and her classmates had great fun impersonating her strange and unconventional gait. But after Red Paint Day, nothing major happened for the rest of that year. It was generally agreed that nothing could top the success of that momentous day, and Alison knew when to back off. She couldn’t risk being exposed as the master planner of Biddy’s big humiliation and she suspected that some of her admirers had lost their enthusiasm for the game. Not that anyone actually befriended Biddy, or stopped referring to her as ‘Bloody Weirdo’, or stood up for her. Alison just had a feeling that she should let things settle. Besides, there was the 11-plus exam to concentrate on, and then the P7 cup – which, naturally, she expected to win.

  The 11-plus was a breeze for Alison. There was never any doubt, from anyone, that she would do anything other than pass with flying colours, which she did. The wait for the results didn’t cause Alison a second of concern, but, when the time came, the issue of which school she would go to most certainly did.

  Since their move to Ballybrock, Alison had wholeheartedly believed that her father would pay for her to go to Belamore College, the prestigious private school further on down the coast. This was, after all, one of the main reasons that George and Felicity Flemming had decided to move from the city – or so they had told Alison, and everyone else in their extended social circle. Belamore was by far the best school in the whole country. Sophia La Grue, the daughter of TV star, Lana La Grue, boarded at the Girls’ College and her brother, Oliver, at the adjoining Boys’ College. There were even rumours that a proper Lady someone or other was one of the pupils. Alison was almost beside herself with excitement.

  ‘When I go to Belamore, I think I should board,’ she told her parents on numerous occasions. The thought of midnight feasts and sliding down drainpipes for secret liaisons with some of the gorgeous floppy-haired boys from the Boy’s College next door was beyond thrilling. ‘Obviously, I’m only thinking about you, Mother,’ she’d say. ‘I mean, the long drive to and from the college each day would be far too much for you, wouldn’t it, Daddy?’

  And George Flemming would smile, and stroke his daughter’s long golden hair and say, ‘Let’s just wait and see, honey.’ Then he’d go into his study and remove the bottle of Black Bush from the cabinet, pour a large slug into a Waterford crystal tumbler, and knock it back in one. Then he’d pour another, and often, a third.

  Alison knew he did this in the way that Alison knew everything: by snooping, by eavesdropping, by pretending to be asleep on car journeys and quietly lifting the telephone extension and holding glasses to walls and peeking through keyholes. She was as good at being a spy as she was at being a bitch, and she approached the activity in the same methodical and committed way that some of her fellow pupils might have applied themselves to, say, learning to play the cello, or becoming a county-level swimmer.

  Thus Alison knew all along that the relocation to Ballybrock had actually nothing to do with her education at all. It turned out that her darling daddy had lost his very well-paid job as Company Director due to a moment of madness involving the Chief Executive’s wife. Well, six months of madness, actually. For some time prior to her mother’s discovery of the affair with Muriel Clarke, Alison had taken to slipping out of her bedroom at nine o’clock each night and tiptoeing across the landing to the third step from the top of the stairs, from where she had a perfect view of the television through the glass panel at the top of the living-room door. Although the sound was often muffled, the pictures were good. So much more interesting than the boring children’s programmes she was allowed to watch. Blue Peter didn’t interest her in the slightest. At this particular time Alison’s favourite programme was Shoestring, primarily because she found Trevor Eve, the actor who played the part of Eddie Shoestring, strangely alluring. Her parents’ first major row about the affair happened to coincide with a Shoestring night, which distracted Alison’s viewing and put her in a very bad mood. They, of course, were blissfully unaware that this interesting episode in their marriage was being witnessed by their ten-year-old daughter who, they assumed, was fast asleep in her pretty pink and white bedroom. That very afternoon, Felicity’s dear friend, Diana James, had taken her to lunch and told her that she had virtually caught George and Muriel at it in the golf club locker room during the Night at the Races evening the previous Saturday. She’d wrestled with her conscious ever since, apparently, but felt Felicity deserved to know.

  ‘And what was that toffee-nosed bitch doing in the locker room herself? Eh?’ Alison heard her father sneer in response to the accusation, before denying it.

  But Felicity knew the truth. And so, from her vantage point on the stairs, did Alison. She smelt the lie, like a trained dog sniffing out a truffle.

  ‘I mean, Muriel Clarke,’ her mother wailed. ‘Muriel bloody Clarke. Why could you not have chosen someone less, well, less important?’

  Alison had to cup her hands over her mouth to suppress the snigger bursting from her nose.

  ‘Why your boss’s wife, for heaven’s sake? She’s the Lady Captain of the Golf Club, George. She’s President of the local Lady Taverners group. She even had a bloody rose named after her at the City’s centenary flower show last year!’

  Alison had to scuttle, mouse-like, back to her bedroom then, when her father hissed to her mother that she should calm down and shut the fuck up before she woke up their daughter, and that he’d better go and check on her, just in case. As he headed up the stairs she arranged her angelic face in a suitably sleep-like pose, her silky locks spread over the pillow like a plumage. But, to her annoyance, George didn’t go directly into her room. Instead she heard the creak of his office door, the clink of a glass being removed from a cabinet, and the low groan of three soft ‘fucks’ in a row. When he finally came to check on her she smelt the whisky on his breath, and caught the edge of a sob in his throat as he tiptoed out of her room. Until that moment her father had been her hero, the man she knew no other would ever live up to. He was definitely handsome. Perhaps not quite as wealthy as she’d like him to be, but she knew from her snooping he had potential (there’d been recent talk of a promotion to Deputy Chief Executive, with a lucrat
ive package). He was strong and capable and popular, especially with women, and charmingly flirtatious – which Alison found both thrilling and infuriating to watch. Of course he adored her: she was his number one, his hunny bunny, his princess. He was always buying her little presents, and pressing money into the palm of her hand, and stroking her hair, and telling her what a beauty she was. But that night, as well as the lie, as well as the whisky, Alison smelt something else from her father as he stood by the foot of her bed: weakness. And it turned her stomach.

  The truth came out, of course, and, naturally, George lost his job. But the reason that Felicity gave for their move to Ballybrock, which, as everyone knew, was a small-time town in the back end of beyond, was Alison. Alison heard her: over the fence to neighbours, on the telephone to the ladies from the bridge group and the golf club, at the school gate, in the supermarket. They needed to be closer to Belamore College, she gushed to anyone who would listen, as it had always been their intention that Alison would go there. And she simply wouldn’t agree to her boarding. Oh, no. She couldn’t bear the idea of being parted from her darling daughter during the week. And, of course, the timing of George’s wonderful new job was perfect. Yes, yes, he had indeed been looking for something in the area for quite some time. It might not be their ideal place to live, but their daughter came first. Alison was so talented, and so intelligent, that they owed it to her to give her the best education possible.

  Alison sneered with contempt each time she heard her mother desperately relay her meticulously rehearsed story. She knew her mother didn’t really care about her education. She probably did want Alison to go to Belamore – but only so that she could boast about it at her clubs, and committees and to anyone who would listen. When they moved to Ballybrock, she knew it would take her mother no time at all to join the golf club, the tennis club (even though she couldn’t actually play), the bridge society, the Young Wives Club at the most socially attractive church, the PTA, the local Lady Taverners group (if Ballybrock was even big enough to have one, which Alison very much doubted) and any other group of influence she deemed to be worthy of her membership. And she would brag to every single new contact she made (to say ‘friends’ would be inaccurate, as Alison was well aware her mother didn’t really invest in friendships as such) that her darling daughter would be attending Belamore. Alison despised her mother for the importance she put on social standing and the time she invested in securing it: yet she admired her for it too. And the older she became, the more Alison realised what an excellent role model her mother actually was. And, of course, she was secretly delighted about Belamore. The timing was perfect, as it coincided with the whole Selina Burton thing, and when she overheard her parents discuss the move, she was actually deeply relieved. Perhaps in this new place she really would be the richest and prettiest girl in the class. Perhaps everyone would adore her. Yes, she was sure that they would. She felt it in her blood. And if she encountered somebody who didn’t, she would make damn sure she handled the situation much better than she had with Selina.