Dear Nobody (14 page)

Helen was rooting round in the kitchen, dropping spoons and things. I thought of Dad, my gentle, kind, thoughtful
dad, and I wanted to cry for him, I really did. My mother and I sat without talking for ages and Helen came in, trying to be discreet, tiptoeing round us with plates of salad. It was as if she had drawn back the curtains to let in the sunlight. I felt myself relaxing. I put my hand on hers just to let her know something.

‘I'll be in the garden,' she said.

The house was quiet again.

‘And then you met Don.'

‘I met Don. It was a couple of years after Guy was born. I started to join clubs and things, you know, just to get out. Your dad loved you kids. He'd do anything for you. The only thing he wanted at night was to stay in with you, read to you, play Subbuteo and build Lego things. I needed to get out. He didn't mind. I joined a climbing club and that's where it all started. I fell in love, really fell in love. I was twenty-six and I had two children and for the first time in my life I was in love. Too late. Much too late. I couldn't stand it. I didn't know what to do with myself. I thought I was dying, Christopher, and that's the truth. I thought the real me was dying. I don't excuse myself and I don't forgive myself but there was only one thing I could do to keep my real self alive and that was to go with Don, and after nearly four years of worrying about it I did it.'

She shoved her plate away and fished in her pockets for her cigarettes and then shoved them away too.

‘I started smoking these damn things again when you sent me that first letter.'

‘You didn't want to see me.'

‘I couldn't bear to see you, not when you were little. I felt terrible about leaving Alan. I was in love with Don and I'd got what I wanted and we were together, and I'd left behind my two children to do it. I grieved for you boys. Every day for months I was on the point of coming back, and if I had done it would have been to say goodbye to the real me for ever. What I wanted most was to be with Don and to have you with me, too. But I loved Alan, not as a wife should, but as a daughter, maybe, as a friend. I couldn't take his children away from him as well. How could I have done that to him? I made a decision never to get in touch with you boys again. I
suppose I was punishing myself. I know now that it was the wrong decision.'

Hours later, when I was on the train, her words were still going round and round in my head, like tiny mice running through a network of tunnels, into air and into darkness, out into air again, running and running. Helen was asleep I think, snuggled up under my shoulder. I was glad. I didn't want to have to talk.

I couldn't believe how cold it was, the morning of the first English paper. People had always told me that there would be a heatwave in June, it's traditional, right up till the end of the exams. They said I'd get hayfever and spend the exams sniffling and not being able to read the question paper properly because my eyes were running, and that the sun would be scorching the back of my neck while I was sweating over the questions. But it wasn't like that this year. My feet were freezing in the school hall. I wished I'd put my hiking socks on. I'd been awake all night anyway chasing quotes from
Hamlet
and
Much Ado
round my head. I'd got Sociology that afternoon and my head was full of names and dates and theories about that, too. I was banking on Gender and Education coming up.

I couldn't help thinking what a waste of time it all was. Really. Not the learning; the revising. Like eating a massive meal when you only want a sandwich. Then you puke it all up for the examiners and stuff yourself up again for the next day.

They reckon you can get high on revising, like people on speed. You get into a state of unreality, where what's going on in your head is more meaningful than what's going on in the real world. Anyway, what is the real world? Maybe the only reality is what you happen to be thinking or experiencing at any given time.

While I was revising for the first English paper
Hamlet
was going on in my head all the time, like another life I was leading at the same time as my own life. He could have come into our kitchen at any time in his doublet and hose and I wouldn't have been at all surprised. ‘Now then, Hamlet,' I'd
have said, mashing him a cup of tea, ‘Let's talk about your mum.' And maybe he'd have said, ‘Good Kit, ‘tis in our hearts to speak of mothers now, but what of sweethearts, tell me that?' Or something like that, except he'd get the iambic pentameter right, and Ophelia would have come in, white and dripping all over the floor and carrying flowers, holding Helen's hand.

I'm going mad. Foolish prating knave.

Do I want to do an English degree anyway? What's it all for? I want Helen.

She rang me up to wish me luck before I left home. I could tell by the sound of the traffic that she was using the phone at the top of her road. Her first exam would be the next day. Music. She'll waltz through it. She'd waltz through any exam she took. I don't think I've ever met anyone as clever as Helen.

I felt all right till I actually got to the school hall, and then when I saw everyone fidgeting outside, all dropping their pens and their rulers and saying that they hadn't done a stroke, I started to panic. The place was humming with tension, as if the room was strung up with pylon wires. Tom was striding up and down gabbling reams of quotes as if they were shopping lists, all in a jumble, and saying, ‘What play's that from? Who's the old guy who gets stabbed?' and ‘Is
Hamlet
the play with the balcony scene?'

‘You're making me as nervous as hell,' I told him.

He stuck his hand out for me to shake. ‘Good luck, comrade,' he said. ‘If it were done when ‘tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly.'

‘Get lost,' I said.

I took a deep breath then before I went in, as if I was about to launch myself off the high-dive. I didn't even know what I was going to do in October. It was all a confusion. I didn't know what I wanted, today, tomorrow, next year, ever. I didn't know what Helen wanted. We hadn't even talked about it. Somehow, we couldn't – it's too dangerous to put all that into words; searchlights probing into darkness, picking out creeping, scared soldiers. Gunning them down forever. My dad was insisting that we made some plans, and the more
he insisted the more I resisted. ‘The problem won't go away, you know,' he said to me. ‘It'll get worse. The longer you leave it, the worse it will get.' When he gets a bill he can't pay he hides it behind the clock for a bit. I could have reminded him about this, but I didn't. Helen and I told each other we'd talk properly after the exams, get them out of the way. It's all too much to carry, all at once.

Helen should be taking her place at the Royal Northern College of Music in October. I should be taking mine at Newcastle University. That was how our future looked six months ago, anyway. It had looked like two separate pictures; now they were both shattered and shuffled up together, like collapsed houses of cards.

Our Head of English, Hippy Harrington, grinned at me as I went into the hall and gave me a discreet wink. I walked down the rows of desks, looking for M for Marshall, and all of a sudden I felt calm. Helen was well and happy, after that terrible start. Did anything else matter? Soon, irrevocably, there would be a baby that was hers and mine, she and me. Nothing was going to stop that happening. If she could feel calm about these things, then so could I. I sat down and laid out my pens in a neat row. When the signal was given I turned over the paper. There was the first context question. ‘What! my Lady Disdain . . .' I could imagine Helen, pursing her lips, tilting back her head at me. My dear Lady Nell. Soon we'll know what to do.

June 6th

Dear Nobody,

Today two things happened to me.

You moved. Deep inside me I felt a fluttering, and I knew that you had moved. You arched your back or something, turned over in your sleep, I don't know – unsucked your thumb, maybe, whatever it was, I felt it. It was like a tiny bird fluttering. You are arms and legs and fingers, you are moving parts. You are a little amazing piece of machinery.

Soon you won't be a secret any more. Already my waist has disappeared and my stomach is rounding out. Just slightly. I can hide it, you, with loose shirts. But soon the women in the park will know me for what I am. I'll be one of them, part of their conspiracy, and we'll smile at one another knowingly.

It's like winter today. I'm cold to the bone. Are you warm enough, tucked up in there?

Listen.

Can you hear the rain?

I'm glad the exams have started. I wish Mum would relax about Chris. It would be wonderful to be revising together, to have him here at home and spend time together, listen to music and drink coffee when we want a break, walk out for air with rain on our faces. But she won't hear of it. He's not allowed here, ever again. She won't even talk to me about him, or you.

Sometimes Dad comes and sits with me on the settee or in the piano room and he'll say something like: ‘Your mother wants to know what your plans are, Helen.' But she won't bring herself to ask me herself, and that's what hurts most.

I always say, ‘Don't ask me, Dad. I don't know yet.'

Sometimes he just squeezes my hand, and I feel like crying then. I want to put my head on his shoulder and cry and cry, but I don't think he'd know how to cope with that. So I hold it back, and he gives me the little prepared speech that she's told him to say, about wasting my life.

‘What do you want me to do, Dad?' I asked him yesterday. I knew the answer.

‘I want you to do Music'

That's it. It's so simple for him. He's not facing the facts any more than she is, so how can they blame me?

Anyway, I
have
come to a decision, and that was the other thing that happened to me today. I've decided that I must finish with Chris.

You see, I know I'm ready for you. I know I can cope. I was afraid of you once. Now, every inch of me wants
you, and I'll bide my time and when we're ready I'll go to Music College and you'll share my future with me. You're all I can think about. I'm turned inside out, like a bud with all its perfume and colour locked inside it. Every second of the day I'm aware of you.

But I'm not ready for Chris.

I'm not ready to share my life with him, and that's what it would mean. The thought of it terrifies me. He's all keyed up for Newcastle, and university life. He's talked of nothing else since I met him. I know he'd stay with me if I asked him to. It would be asking him to make an enormous sacrifice but I'm pretty sure he'd do it. I know we'd find a flat somewhere and maybe his dad and my dad would help us out. I'd lose my mum for ever. But we'd do our best to make things right for you.

Yet I hurt inside when I think about it. I wake up in terror, Nobody, and I don't know what it is I'm more frightened of: promising myself to Chris forever, or spending forever without him. I don't know him yet. Six months ago the thought of spending the rest of our lives together had never entered our heads. We were a pair of kids having fun together. And now we've been catapulted into the world of grown-ups. I'm not ready for forever. I'm not ready for him, and he's not ready for me. And more than anything else, I'm afraid of all this hurt touching you. Does it? Can you tell?

I'm going to wait till his exams finish before I tell him. It would be cruel to do it now, but I mustn't just let it slide, just wait till you're born, just let things happen as if nothing could be helped or stopped or thought about. Chris and I will have a lovely last few weeks together – I'll see him every day if I can.

And then, when the exams are over, I'll tell him.

June 15th

Dear Nobody,

I walked with Robbie to Grandad's this morning. If
Grandad doesn't know already, I've decided, I must tell him about you. Mum won't have told him, that's for sure. They're so secretive, my family.

It's cold. June should be sunshine and strawberries, cotton dresses, bees in roses, but it's all grey skies and cold winds. The weather's closed in round us, like concrete walls. We've got the central heating on at home, and last night Mum took a hot-water bottle to bed. It feels more like winter, she said.

My exams have finished now. I just put my head down and got on with them. I actually enjoyed them. I think I was high on adrenalin, actually, after all that revising and all that agonizing about Chris. I poured myself into them, and felt myself soaring through them.

Success is like a bright star that you hold out both hands for. I do want to succeed, little Nobody. Now, for both our sakes, I want to shine.

Before the exams started I met Ruthlyn and the other girls in the school foyer. I felt as if it was a hundred years since I'd seen any of them, except Ruthlyn. Ruthlyn was fine with me, of course. Good old Ruthlyn. She knows now. She said she's always known, but she just waited for me to tell her. I wish she wasn't going away. It would be a lot of fun, sharing a flat with Ruthlyn. She'd be brilliant at helping with you. Just while we were waiting to go in to the first exam she started to tell me a story about when her sister Grace was pregnant and had such a craving for coal that she used to crunch lumps of it as if they were sweets. She was trying to whisper but she's got such a loud voice you could hear her over a rock band. I suppose we were a bit tense as well, I mean it was the Applied Maths exam we were going into, but she got me really giggling. I could tell all the other girls were hating us. They're real bores, some of these maths girls. They wear triangle skirts and white socks. Funny, lots of the music students are like that too. I used to like them, actually. Now I don't know what to say to them. I feel like a curiosity, the way they all glance at my stomach
and look away again, the way they turn to each other and smile. But I want to say, ‘I'm still the same person, you know. I haven't changed.'