‘What’s she doing over there?’ he asked as they drove down the lane.
‘It’s where some girl in her class lives – Amy, I think.’
‘What’s she want to hang out with that crowd for anyway?’ he muttered, fiddling with the car radio.
‘Turn that down – it’s earsplitting. What do you mean, that crowd?’
She remembered Jack saying disdainfully, when he was still at the Academy, ‘Nobody goes about with anybody from there.’ He had been winding Andrew up, since his friend Kevin lived in the village.
‘I think it’s up here on the left,’ Andrew said as she drove slowly along the High Street past the fish and chip shop, where a small group of teenagers had gathered. Turning right, they were in a warren of council housing, all the streets looking the same.
‘Where now?’
‘Not sure. Keep going.’
Frances turned a corner and there it was. She drew up at number six. ‘Go and knock, Andy.’
‘I’m not going.’
‘Don’t be silly – just go and ask for Kate.’
‘No way.’ He slumped in his seat.
‘For goodness sake – ’
As Frances got out of the car the front door opened and two girls appeared. One of them was Kate.
‘Can we give Eilidh a lift?’
They were clones in black with their cropped tops, hip-tight trousers and straight hair. They got in the back of the car together, ignoring Andrew and not meeting Frances’s eyes.
‘Where do you live, Eilidh?’ Frances asked.
‘Robertson Drive in Dingwall. You can drop me at the bottom of your road, if you like.’
‘Nonsense – it’s dark. We’ll take you home.’
She negotiated another council estate, this time with directions. Even Jack admitted to friends here, so it was half familiar.
Later, she said to Andrew as she made herself tea and he ate two bananas one after the other, ‘She seems to be making friends, so perhaps she’s settled all right.’
‘Yeah, but she’s not staying?’ He dropped banana peel into the pedal bin and let the lid bang shut. ‘I can’t see the point in her going to Dingwall, what’s the point in her getting to know people here? She’ll be back in Newcastle soon, won’t she?’
‘That’s the idea.’
‘Well then.’
‘You don’t mind, do you? She’s not disrupting your life. She watches Eastenders, granted, but you still get all the sport you want.’
Frances had resigned herself to Kate being here for the whole term. Alec, always elusive, had been impossible to pin down. As long as I don’t get involved, she told herself, or care too much, we’ll be fine.
Andrew shrugged. ‘I just thought she was leaving soon, that’s all.’
‘Is something wrong?’
‘No.’
If his mother couldn’t see for herself, Andrew wasn’t going to say anything. She had no idea who her mates were, the huddle round the back of the drama studio, the loud laughter, the swagger of them, coming back for afternoon school coughing and smelling of smoke.
‘She seems quite popular,’ Frances persisted. ‘People are forever ringing her up.’
He did not even answer this. Depends who you want her to be popular with, he thought. That useless lot, who’d never pass any exams and would stay in the same place all their lives? Though they were careful never to be caught studying, the attitude his own crowd took was that without being, of course, a swot, you passed what you needed to. You were cool, you knew where you were going. Out of Dingwall.
Kate was popular with boys, all right. Was that what his mother wanted to hear? There were two academic years between them, but he heard the sniggers about Kate and he was beginning to fear that he might soon have to decide whether to defend her (You keep your dirty mouth shut, Mackay …) or disown her. He kept hoping she would just leave, and solve the problem.
As for Kate, she had gone the only way she could. The girls Frances probably wanted her to be friendly with, had shunned her. Politely, after a few weeks of hearing Kate’s stories, they cut her off, so that there was only one thing to do if she did not want to be isolated. She needed a circle of admirers to be impressed by her air of sophistication, her reminiscences of skiving off, of smoking and drinking, and taking Es at raves her parents never knew she went to: the world she had been torn from, glamorous and daring in memory.
Had she played other cards – the missing mother perhaps – she might have attracted sympathy, but she always said my mother’s away for work. She has this job where she has to travel a lot. The States, Europe. Sometimes she almost convinced herself.
It was as if half her real self had been left behind in Newcastle, the half with her own computer and Facebook page. She had been dismayed to find the only computer here was in Andrew’s bedroom; Jack took his laptop with him to Aberdeen. When Frances wanted to check websites or buy online, she did it at work, or used Andrew’s machine.
‘Of course you can use the computer,’ Frances had said, early in her stay. ‘Just tell Andrew you need it.’
That was no good. How secure was that? She could just imagine Andrew and Jack on her Facebook, spying. The only consolation was the girls she went about with were not into all that; they didn’t have their own computers either. She could ask Alec, she could tell him he had to get her a laptop or an i-phone. She hadn’t asked him yet. What was the point? As soon as her mother came back, she was going home.
She could hear Andrew and Frances in the kitchen, talking. She shut her bedroom door. There had been no message from Susan, but that did not stop her constantly checking her phone. There were fewer messages from her friends at home now. Sometimes she called them in the evenings, but to get any privacy had to use the mobile in her own room, and it needed topping up again. There was no branch in Dingwall of the building society where she had her account, and she had only a fiver till she could get into Inverness for more money. She would ask Alex to get her a contract phone and pay for it. He owed her that.
Meanwhile, she turned the mobile over and over in her hands, willing it to ring. After a moment she lay down and set it aside. She put both hands on her stomach. She had cramps coming and going, so probably her period was on its way at last. She could not remember when she had her last one. Not in this house. Ages then.
She had not had many ordinary conversations with her mother in the last few years, but there were times when it was easy: Susan was good about female stuff. She was a nurse so nothing like that fazed her. You could ask anything when she was in a good spell.
‘They’ll settle down,’ Susan had reassured,
‘I never know when it’s going to start. It’s not fair.’
‘Oh, I wasn’t regular until after you were born.’
‘That’s a bit of a drastic cure,’ Kate scoffed and her mother laughed uneasily. Kate could guess why.
She could not remember the time before Alec was in her life, but he had always been Alec to her, never Dad. ‘He’s not my real Daddy, is he?’ she asked her mother when she was very young. Susan turned, her voice sharp, ‘What did you say?’ Kate was afraid even then of the way her mother could switch from kind and ordinary to angry and breathless.
Once when Kate was six or seven they were in the park, the one near their house they called the swing park. It was raining and the park was deserted. Only Kate and Susan were there, for some reason out of the house, defying weather. Susan put a plastic carrier bag on one of the swings so that Kate’s bottom would stay dry, but the chains of the swing were wet and slippery in her grip, cold metal, greasy with rain. Beneath the swing was a puddle with a rainbow in it. Kate looked down at the puddle trying to identify all the colours as she was pushed on the swing, to and fro, a little higher each time. The rainbow vanished as she swept over it, reappearing as she reared back, her mother’s hands on the small of her back, giving another push to send her flying forward. She flew so high she could see over the railing, over the trees,
and in the distance the main road, cars and a bus with its windows misted by rain.
‘That’s enough, that’s enough!’ Kate shrieked, holding tighter and tighter to the chains, and Susan stepped back. Little by little, its momentum gone, the swing slowed and Kate let her legs drop.
‘Another push!’ she cried, but her mother did not answer and when she looked behind her Susan was not there. She stumbled off before the swing had stopped, slipping on the carrier bag, her feet splashing in the rainbow puddle. All around her was the empty park in the rain, the slide gleaming silver, the bushes behind a dense green mass and the only sounds the swing creaking and a rook cawing insolently in a tall tree. There was no-one else there.
For years afterwards, if she really wanted to scare herself, she could conjure that moment of terror, her sense of loss so overwhelming nothing could ever match it. She experienced all over again the not-being-there of her mother, the emptiness left behind, the helplessness of her own trembling self, crying and crying in the deserted park.
‘Katy!’ There she was on the path, emerging between two rows of trees, her arms full of yellow flowers. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I picked some daffodils. They’ll never miss them.’
Their house, like so many in Northumberland, had no garden, just a small square yard with a coalhouse and dustbin. Daffodils. It must have been Spring, a wet April. Throughout her childhood, Kate dreamed this, and now and again still did. Sometimes she wondered if it had only ever been a bad dream. Susan denied it had happened. ‘Leave you? Steal a huge bunch of daffodils from the park? What an imagination you’ve got. I’d never have gone off and left you alone – even for a minute.’
Kate knew it was true, in her heart she knew that. It was on their way home that day, one hand tucked into her mother’s, the other holding a bunch of the stolen daffodils, the stalks wet and slimy in her cold fingers, Kate was told about her father.
‘He was called Adam,’ Susan said. ‘The first man. Well, more or less.’ She laughed the wild laugh that meant she was laughing at something she hadn’t told you. ‘I was madly in love with him. I thought we were going to get married, but he went off to Canada, so there you are. He never knew about you. I went to stay with Auntie Frances after you were born. She adored you but she wasn’t very nice to me. Maybe she wanted a little girl, she just had the boys. Anyway, that’s when I met Alec, and I fell in love with him instead. He liked both of us. So we got married.’
Had Susan really told her the story like this? It was years before Kate knew more. Now that she had met Frances, she realised there were still gaps.
The real Frances was not at all as she had imagined. Or Gillian either, though she had heard even less about her, discovering her existence only when she was ten and found a letter from her grandmother tucked inside a Christmas card, one probably of many chatty, but desperate, unanswered letters. My Dear Susan, perhaps this will be the Christmas you write back to us. I hope you are well, and Katy too.
‘Who’s Gillian,’ she asked her mother, bold in Alec’s presence, ‘and what does it mean her engagement’s broken?’
Kate lay with her hands over her stomach, pressing on the cramps till they faded, and drifted into sleep, to a dream that was confusion of past and present. Her mother with her arms full of daffodils, the creak of the swing, Frances’s firm voice, Andrew coming round the corner of the gardener’s shed, catching her smoking with Amy and Eilidh. Then Dave Prentice laughing at her, so that she had that burning, shameful feeling she had when he made such a fool of her. She wished, wished she’d never got off with him, what an idiot she was to fall for him. Never mind, never mind, he was miles away, couldn’t touch her now and her mother must be home after all, her arms full of flowers.
She woke breathing in the smell of them, wet and green and bitter, woke suddenly, and found herself alone in Frances’s spare room, the smell fading to nothing in the dark. Turning her face into the pillow she let the tears soak into cotton, cool on her hot skin.
2
By the end of January Gillian knew she was pregnant. She had suspected it sooner but pushed the idea away, not wanting to think about it. She had never been pregnant and as the years went on had grown a little careless about preventing it, as though her luck was bound to hold. Now she was well through her thirties it would probably never happen.
She bought a testing kit from Boots and put it at the back of her underwear drawer, telling herself it was too soon to tell for sure, even to visit a doctor. Yet she knew she must not just let time drift by.
Such a huge anxiety fills up the days. At work, people said, ‘Are you OK?’ or ‘You’re very quiet – anything up?’ Everything was under control at work; if anything, she was more efficient, not less. Fear can concentrate the mind.
In February she made an appointment with her doctor and came home early one afternoon so that she could keep it. She went into the local supermarket for groceries on her way and stopped off to unpack them. On the window sill of the ground floor flat the Fletchers’ ginger cat sat gazing in, mewing now and again. Hearing Gill he jumped down and came to rub against her legs.
‘I can’t let you in,’ she told him as she put her key in the front door. Pam Fletcher worked from home but the car was not there, so she must be out. The cat had the eagerness of an animal shut out for longer than he liked. Swiftly, he took advantage of Gill’s fumbling with bags and keys and shot past her into the hall, to sit hopefully by his own front door. She would put him out when she came back down in a few minutes.
As she reached her flat on the first floor she realised he had followed her up and was coming in with her instead. The Fletchers had had this cat for about a year; he was young and slender, adopted as a kitten from the cat rescue home. He came into Gill’s kitchen and sniffed around, delicate and cautious, then strolled into the living-room and sprang lightly onto the window sill, sitting down to take in a different view of the street.
‘You’re going back out very soon,’ Gill said, closing the fridge door and coming to join him. He pushed his head up under her fingers and rose as she stroked him, arching against her hand. His fur was silky, electric, sparking a little against her dry skin. ‘What do you see, eh?’ she murmured, as they both gazed down at parked cars, dry leaves rustling along the gutters and a man on a bicycle, in helmet and lycra, pedalling fast, low over the handlebars. In a window of the flat opposite there was a vase of flowers, so pink and flourishing Gillian thought they must be artificial. In winter she was never in her flat in daylight during the week. Everything looked a little different, as if surprised to see her. Some sort of life went on without her, even in the empty flat.
‘I could have a cat like you,’ she said, ‘if I worked at home.’ Or a baby, her conscience whispered, or a baby. ‘You know what,’ she went on, still stroking the cat, rubbing him gently under his chin. ‘I’m pregnant. What do you think of that? You’re the only one in the world who knows.’
The cat jumped down and padded swiftly to the door, asking to be let out. ‘You just came in to look at the view, didn’t you?’ Gillian said. ‘Not to start any kind of relationship.’
When she came out of the bathroom he was still sitting there. Gillian put her jacket on again, and they both left. At the front door, Pam Fletcher was just coming in.
‘I’ve had a visitor,’ Gillian said.
‘Oh, he’s a pest. He wants to sleep inside all day just now.’
‘He saw your car,’ Gillian said, realising this, ‘and he was off like a shot.’
As she walked to the surgery she was absurdly pleased about this. The cat had only wanted to leave because he saw Pam’s car. You won’t clipe, will you, she thought, the old childhood word coming back to her, you won’t tell.
The doctor was a woman about her own age, but married with young children, brisk and pragmatic. She could be relied on to deal with problems in a sensible fashion, presenting her patients with the possible options and letting them choose. Why then, as she stared at garish magazines, su
rrounded by the really ill with their coughs and crutches, was Gillian so reluctant to tell Dr Andrews what was wrong this time?
‘Hello there, how are you?’
‘Fine.’
Why did doctors always ask you that before you’d even sat down? You were lying already, before the interview had begun.
‘Well, I feel fine, but – ’
Bridget Andrews gave Gillian her full attention. She’s attractive, Gillian thought, in a way, though her clothes are so dowdy. I know I look a heap better. Yet there she is, with her good career and her husband and children, and here I am. In a mess.
‘I’ve missed a period, nearly two now. I think I might be pregnant.’
The doctor turned to Gillian’s notes, and began leafing through them. ‘Didn’t you have an IUD fitted?’
‘I had it taken out again. I was bleeding a lot.’
‘Right, I’d forgotten. You didn’t go back on the pill?’ She was still reading the notes.
‘It was an accident,’ Gillian blurted out. She felt like a schoolgirl, caught out. Perhaps the doctor would say, eyebrows raised, ‘So you took no precautions at all?’ But of course she did not. Instead, they talked symptoms, dates.
‘Have you done a pregnancy test yourself?’
‘Yesterday. It was positive.’
‘I don’t want to examine you internally – not a good idea at this early stage, but from what you say, it seems very likely. If you want to wait a couple of weeks, we can leave it and do a urine test here.’
‘A couple of weeks?’
Dr Andrews went smoothly on, ‘I gather you don’t want to proceed with the pregnancy?’
‘No. I don’t know how I could in my circumstances.’
‘You’re not in a stable relationship?’ She smiled gently. ‘I’m sorry, but I do have to ask questions like this.’
‘I know, I do know. Look, the relationship is over, I’m on my own. I have to think about the future. I could get a termination, couldn’t I?’
‘I should think so.’
Tell Me Where You Are Page 10
