The Generation Game

by Sophie Duffy

  The end of term comes and goes without me taking part in the usual festivities or merry-making. At home, if I walk in a room, I catch a look between Bob and Wink that I am unable to fathom. I hear whisperings behind closed door, sometimes a raised voice, and I know that I have created this tense atmosphere that has never existed here before. Everything is changing and it is all my stupid fault. The relief of telling my family is spoilt with shame and guilt and knowledge.

  And there is no escape. No release. I can’t lie cocooned on the sofa like Lucas; I am not ill. I can’t go out with Cheryl; I can’t do any of the things a girl of my age should be doing. No more sitting in the back of Doug’s Mini sharing chips and chocolate with Nathan. No more swimming in the Rainbow Hotel. No more hair crimping or Smash Hits. I can’t even tell Cheryl, the closest I have to a best friend. I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to see anyone. So I stay in my room, not listening to music, not reading, not able to sleep.

  I dread the return to school after the holidays. What’s the point? I’ll be having the baby in a few months.

  ‘She should be able to stay at home,’ Wink tells Bob. ‘There’s no sense packing her off to school in her condition.’

  ‘She should go to school for as long as she can,’ Bob insists, for once the stern father, putting both his feet down firmly. ‘Her education’s important. More important than ever.’

  Maybe he is right but I sense he is trying to punish me in some way, whether he means to or not. I’ve let him down. And however many times they ask me who the father of the baby is, I never tell them. So he gets none of the blame. That privilege is all mine.

  In the end, it is all for nothing. On Christmas Eve, I wake up early with the breath snatched out of me. I’ve been kicked in the guts from an unseen boot. And then again. And again. The pain is real, more real than anything that has happened so far in my life, but the pain is somehow not happening to me. I’ve stepped outside of my body and float up and away somewhere. Somewhere by the window where the curtains flicker in the draught. I’ve become someone else. Someone familiar and yet someone who’s always lurked on the edge of my consciousness. I’ve become the Cavalier. I see through his steely eyes. I see a young woman curled up on the bed, hugging her stomach, cradling her unseen child that is trying for all its worth to be born early, too soon. I hear this young woman’s screams. Watch her father run into the room, panic in his eyes, arms flailing, holding his daughter who looks impossibly young, though this is a grown-up’s pain, a grownup’s horror. She is left alone and then sometime later there’s the sound of a siren screeching, footsteps on the stairs. The Cavalier floats alongside the girl as she is carried downstairs by two men in uniform, out the back way and into the ambulance, all the while sobbing with pain, with inevitability. The Cavalier covers her with a blanket, gives her oxygen, holds a sick bowl for her to vomit into, and carries her across Torquay in a whirr of noise and light. He pushes her through heavy metal doors, bumps her along corridors, distracts her from the squeak of lino, the splatters of sick. Then he leaves her. And Bob’s face is there instead, holding her hand. Then nothing. There is nothing.

  This baby has gone. It will never be. It is lost to the world. As lost as Helena. As lost as Lucas. As dead as Albert Morris.

  I wake up, empty. It is over. I am just Philippa again. I am told I’ve had a lucky escape. I am told my life has been saved by the men in uniform and the doctors and nurses at the hospital.

  I don’t feel lucky. My baby has gone before it ever really got going. It has never breathed a breath or cried a cry. But then what do I know about babies? I know nothing. And how could I possibly be a mother when I have no mother of my own. Maybe it is a lucky escape after all.

  I am technically still a child, the doctors and nurses make that perfectly clear. I should be kept on the children’s ward but, given the sensitive circumstances, I am shunted into a side room. After an immeasurable length of time, I am allowed out of bed to walk to the loo, a challenge in itself. After this Herculean task is accomplished, I shuffle back down the corridor to my room, but take a wrong turning, though maybe someone makes me go that way, who am I to say, she-who-knows-nothing.

  My wrong turning brings me into the children’s ward, the place they’ve been trying to keep me from. There are children of all shapes and sizes and illnesses, sitting, lying, eating, sleeping in beds livened up with shiny tinsel and glittery stars in an attempt at Yuletide celebrations. I stop at the foot of the bed where Dick Whittington once stood over Lucas, on his way to London. (He’d have more luck in the city than Helena, Lucas or me. I never want to go there again.)

  Now there is a small girl in Lucas’ place, her leg strung up and a mass of cards hanging all around her. Get Well Soon, they instruct her. And she will get well soon, no doubt. Her leg will heal and she’ll go home and run around and live a happy life, and grow up and get herself a husband and bear children of her own one day in the future.

  Lucas didn’t get well. He was taken from that bed to the mortuary and then to his grave. I don’t know where they put my baby. I don’t want to think about that.

  I am brought back to a home stripped of Christmas. It has been and gone and passed me by completely. A new term is approaching but I can’t go back to school. Not yet. Bob listens to Wink and doesn’t push me into it.

  ‘Next week, Philippa,’ he says. ‘You mustn’t leave it too long.’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Wink. ‘See how you go.’

  I lie silently on the sofa, the telly on, a blanket covering me. I can’t face my room. My bed. For when night comes and I close the curtains, who knows what I’ll be able to see? Then a Blue Peter special comes on and I cry again. I cry so much that Bob wonders if he should call the doctor. But Wink gives me a shot of her brandy instead and then somehow manages to scoop up old Andy from the hearth and place him gently beside me on the sofa, so I can cuddle him, listen to him purr, feel his thick, wiry fur on my face.

  Days pass. The sun rises and sets in a muddle of time that has no meaning except for when the television is on to guide me. Some days I eat a little of what Bob puts in front of me. Sometimes it goes cold and congealed and is only fit for the bin. Sometimes I can sleep. Sometimes all I can do for a whole day is cry. But I have at least ventured into my room. Which is as it has always been. It if weren’t for the gaping hole inside me, I could almost make myself believe nothing happened to me. It happened to someone else. Like it was something off the telly. On an episode of Angels. A news item. Though I don’t kid myself this is an important event in the grand scheme of things. But television helps. Television is more real than life at the moment. I can see why Lucas was so transfixed by it. His eyes like pebbles washed up on the beach.

  I am grateful for Bob for never saying it was for the best. Maybe it was, but we’ll never know that for sure. Instead, what he does is show me the love of a father. The love of a parent who feels his child’s pain as sharply as if it were his own. He drops the whole school thing and tells the Head I’ll be back in September to repeat my lower sixth. And he pops down to the travel agent in Castle Circus and buys two plane tickets. One for himself and one for me. We are going to Canada. We are going to hunt down my mother and… well, we don’t know what. But we know it is something that has to be done at long last.

  ‘What about Linda?’ I ask, as we prop up the counter together during a quiet run in the shop.

  He looks sheepish.

  ‘She’s too busy with work,’ he comes up with eventually.

  And I don’t ask any more. It doesn’t matter. I look round Bob’s News and try to capture in my head the place where I’ve spent so much of my life: the shelves of papers and magazines and comics that bank one side of the shop; the cigarettes and tobacco – and everything you could possibly need to make a hobby out of smoking – displayed behind the counter; the chocolate and chewing gum and cough sweets; the grockle souvenirs, including those paper flags that wrench my heart from its mooring, set me adrift, whenever I see
a child buy a packet with their pocket money; the local maps; the batteries; the plasters and safety pins and emergency sewing kits; the Mills and Boon rack that you can whizz round so all you see is a blur of petticoats and brunettes; the bell that pings every single time the door opens; the sound of the kettle boiling from the kitchenette out the back; the smell of print and sugar and old rain; the jars of sweets glittering like jewels, the first thing I ever set eyes on in here. A treasure trove. My home.

  But still.

  We are going to Canada!

  2006

  You made it. You made it this far and I will make sure you carry on all the way. You may only be small – like Lucas – but you have filled that gap, that empty space left by all those people I have lost. You have filled the minutes in the day when I used to stare, in the manner of Auntie Nina, into the middle distance and pretend I was Someone Else. The hours at night when I used to lose myself in the pattern of my curtains. You have filled me with emotion, worry and love, so that there is not room for much more right now. But they tell me you are a special baby for a different reason. You are on the Special List. A man has been down to see you, sent by Dr Standing (Auntie Cheryl to you) who I spoke to yesterday on the phone. ‘I know the man for the job,’ she said. ‘If there’s anything wrong, he’ll find it and he’ll put it right.’ And here he is, poking and prodding and adding to your canon of notes, listening to your heart beat through a stethoscope. Your little heart that doesn’t quite beat to the rhythm of my own.

  You have a murmur. A possible hole in the heart. He says they can fix it. But I know without a shadow of a doubt that if anything happens to you, it is my own heart that will be broken beyond repair.

  Chapter Thirteen: 1982

  Have I Got News For You

  Three weeks later, I am feeling much stronger and I am in my bedroom packing an old suitcase with clean underwear plus all of my warm clothes, which include a new parka purchased by Linda especially for the trip. The chill that she is anticipating in Canada can’t be anything like as cold as the atmosphere in a room when both she and Bob are in it at the same time – not that that is very often these days. Linda is always busy-busy, always driving from A to B and right through to the end of the alphabet and back, checking up on her underlings who can never hope to be as efficient as their boss. But she isn’t efficient as far as Bob is concerned. He is always left in her pending tray, never quite got around to. Massages and Chinese takeaways have become a rare event indeed.

  Still, Linda has made an effort to help me out on this trip. She thinks seeing my mother will help me get over not being a mother myself. I can’t think clearly enough to decide whether she is right or not but I am grateful for the packing checklist which I’ve almost got through when I hear Bob’s cough-shout making its way up the stairs.

  ‘Someone to see you,’ it says. ‘I’m sending them up.’

  For a moment I wonder if it is. But it isn’t. The footsteps are too light and determined. I am nonetheless very pleased to see Miss Parry pop her head round the door. She’s brought me a book from the library. It has a maple leaf on the front.

  ‘It’s most comprehensive,’ she says, handing it over. Then she gives me a smile that inspires valour and courage and the desire to step forth across the Atlantic and discover all the how’s and why’s of my mother’s disappearance. Now is the time for answers.

  ‘Send me a postcard.’

  Then she is gone, leaving the Cavalier fluttering his eyelashes in the breeze created by her departure. I hope she’s left some of her strength of character behind, just a little so that I can pack it in my suitcase and tick it off my checklist.

  Two days later, after another stay at Toni’s flat (her brother nowhere to be seen) and a taxi ride to Heathrow that Linda would have loved, Bob and I wait to board our plane. He buys us both a cup of tea and, to everyone around us, we must look like any other father and daughter going on holiday. But you never know what’s going on with other people. You never know.

  After a turbulent plane journey that takes us through a never-ending night from all that is familiar to all that isn’t, we eventually touch down on Canadian soil. We collect baggage and stagger through customs, Bob proudly wielding his British passport as if this makes him superior in some way. And that is almost how we are treated, as English cousins from the posh side of the family (if only they knew). Everyone is so nice. They ask us if we’ve had a good flight, if we are staying long, if we know their cousin Doris who lives somewhere in the Greater Manchester area. Finally they insist we visit Niagara Falls (as if you could stop us) and impress on us the need to enjoy our trip, eh.

  It is dark and foggy as we make our way outside Toronto airport, into the chill of the January night. I have little sense of this new country but feel sick with excitement and longing amongst other unnamed emotions. This is where Helena lives and breathes! She is probably sleeping in her bed, maybe minutes away from where we are standing right now, dreaming away an everyday sort of night, completely oblivious to our arrival.

  Yes, oblivious. For Bob has only just admitted he hasn’t told her we are coming. I’m not sure why he hasn’t told her we are coming. Perhaps it’s because he wanted to make sure she didn’t run away again. But this does throw up all sorts of traumatic questions: What if she isn’t there? What if she’s gone on her holidays? What if she’s moved? What if all this has been for nothing?

  ‘She’ll be there,’ says Bob, the mind reader. ‘Don’t fret.’

  And with this new-found confidence, he manages to grab us a taxi in a way that would impress both Helena and Linda. We are driven along the wrong side of the road with all its signs in English and French and metric, past skyscrapers we can’t see the top of, down vast multi-lane highways and across back-to-front intersections, to our motel (a motel!).

  Our motel isn’t anything like the accommodation we stayed at in London with the avocado en-suite. Nor anything like Toni’s flat in Belsize Park. We collect our key from a very nice man called Ed. Ed looks like he’s been employed by the Canadian tourist board to satisfy our English expectations, in his checked shirt and deer stalker, as if he’s about to set out and fell a giant tree. In the meantime he’s watching an over-sized television in his little office.

  ‘What’s on?’ Bob asks in an attempt at male-bonding.

  ‘Hockey,’ Ed says, immediately perking up.

  It’s nothing like the hockey I play at school. This hockey is played by huge men with crates on their heads zooming around on ice. The only men I’ve previously seen on ice have been of the Robin Cousins ilk, dressed in spangly costumes with too much blusher. I can see this will be the first of many cultural differences between our two countries.

  Once Ed has enquired about our flight, our length of stay, his old school buddy, Ken in Cirencester, and impressed upon us the need to enjoy our trip, we bid him goodnight and he points us in the direction of our home-from-home.

  ‘Be sure to come and ask if you need anything,’ he calls after us. ‘I’ll be right here, eh.’

  Fortunately we don’t have far to struggle with our luggage and the cold. We are soon inside our basic, to say the least, accommodation. Basic and not authentically Canadian accommodation; there isn’t a racoon’s tail or a picture of a Mountie to be seen. We make a (very) brief tour – twin beds, a small fridge, a two ring cooker, an ancient telly, a tiny bathroom (washroom) with only a shower, a loo, and a basin – and then unpack our night clothes and wash bags.

  ‘Which bed do you want?’ Bob asks.

  I look at them both, with their overhead lights in the fake wooden headboards and indicate the one by the window which doesn’t appear to sag as much as the other as far as the eye can tell. (I am recuperating from a near death experience, remember.)

  ‘I’ll get changed in the bathroom,’ Bob says.

  I listen to the noises he makes through the bathroom door and realise that I’ve never watched him brush his teeth or shave or do any of those things I might have wi
tnessed if he were my real father. But this is not the time for regrets. He has brought me here after all. No-one else in the world would have done that.

  He re-appears after several minutes in his Marks and Sparks striped pyjamas and towelling dressing gown.

  ‘It’s all yours.’

  I wish it wasn’t. It’s grim inside. There’s something about the shower curtain that brings Norman Bates to mind. Maybe it’ll be less horrifying in daylight. But unfortunately there’s no window, so presumably not.

  Once I’ve brushed my teeth and got into my own familiar pyjamas, I feel better. It doesn’t matter where we stay. All I want is a bed. And the bed isn’t so bad. It is good enough to lure me towards sleep, to soften all visions of a psycho lurking in the shadows. I turn on my side and gaze at the window, the orange curtains. And I blow a kiss at the Cavalier who’s stowed away in my suitcase and followed me across the ocean in the hold of the plane and is right at this moment settling himself down for the night, getting ready to watch over me.

  It is late morning when we finally surface into a fug of jet lag. After a shower (a very brief shower due to the cold and the haunting violin shrieks), we have a complimentary cup of coffee. Then we sit on our beds and stare at each other.

  ‘Let’s get some breakfast,’ says Bob. ‘That’s the best place to start.’