Dear Nobody (19 page)

‘I thought you didn't believe in love,' I reminded him. ‘You always told me changing girl-friends was as easy as changing your socks.'

‘That was before love gave me blisters. I'm bleeding for her, Chris.'

‘Get stuffed,' I said. ‘Love's about as much use as a flat tyre on a mountain bike.'

I think, at the time, I meant it.

July 27th

Dear Nobody,

Today Mum and I went to town together. ‘I want to buy you something nice, Helen,' she said, just as simply as that. It was really hot and you didn't help – you kept doing a limbo dance, waving your hands about or something. We went to Cole's first and looked at the materials there. ‘D'you like this?' she asked me, stroking some blue, soft material.

‘It's lovely, Mum,' I said. We have that in common. We both love fabrics and colours. When I was little she used to make all my clothes for me.

‘Then I'll buy it,' she said. ‘And we'll make a loose dress for you, to keep you cool.'

She could have bought me a maternity dress; any number. But it wouldn't have been the same, and I knew it.

We went to Atkinson's then, to the chocolate bar that Chris and I used to go to. I half expected to see him there. I half didn't want to go. In a way it was like exorcizing a ghost, walking into the place, sitting down, taking in his absence for a fact. We had toasted tea-cakes and hot chocolate with cream floating on the top.

‘I used to come here with Chris,' I told her. I said it because at that moment I felt close to her. We used to have days like this together, years ago, when I was about eight. She would leave Robbie at home with Dad and she would take me to town to look at the shops and to buy materials for my dancing shows.

‘I expect you did,' she said. ‘There used to be a place like this near the old station that your father used to take
me to, years ago.' She smiled. ‘There used to be a jazz trio playing there. We spent hours there, holding hands, making one cup of chocolate last all afternoon.'

Chris and I used to listen to rock on my personal stereo in here, both sets of headphones plugged in. He used to forget himself sometimes and sing out loud to it. Or perhaps he did it on purpose, just to make me laugh.

On the way back to the bus-stop I saw Jill. She didn't recognize me at first and I didn't really want to speak to her, in fact I felt deeply embarrassed, remembering what had happened last time I saw her. How could I have done that to you, little Nobody, that monstrous thing? I was another person then, slightly mad, I think, a frightened little girl, an animal in a trap. I was embarrassed about what she'd told Chris and me about herself, too, that precious, intimate secret. I wanted to tell her about my escape, our escape, from that clinic place. Well, I suppose she could tell, actually. She only had to look at me to know about you.

It feels as if a thousand years have passed since I last saw her. I didn't know how to introduce her to Mum, either, because she was so much part of my guilt and secrecy, and I was part of hers. I think she realized I was embarrassed so she chatted away about the horses at the stables and then, when our bus came and she was just about to walk away, she said, ‘I had a postcard from France this morning. He's having a great time, isn't he?'

So that's where he is. Doesn't he care, then? Can he just go on holiday and forget about us?

My head was tumbling with all kinds of confused emotions. I didn't understand myself. I wanted to run away and hide, be on my own somewhere, open up my thoughts like a locked room and wander about in them. The day was spoilt, and all that lovely warmth that had been growing between Mum and me had gone. I was too wrapped up in myself to talk. I'd gone kind of tongue-tied, couldn't think of anything to say, couldn't bring myself to answer her questions about anything. I know
she was disappointed. I was too. I didn't know what to do with myself. We sat in the garden for a bit and then she went in to cut out the dress for me. We should have done it together.

By the time we got to Burgundy Tom and I were beginning to feel we'd had enough. Some wino with a voice like a bassoon had fallen over my tent in the night and yanked all the guy ropes out, and rather than put it up in the dark I'd crawled in to Tom's. He was right about not changing his socks any more. They stank to high heaven. In the end I'd rolled them up in a ball and hurled them out of his tent. We found them in a pool of water the next morning.

‘At least they've had a wash,' I told him.

We cruised at last into a little village that was surrounded by fields full of white cows, and looked for the camp-site.

‘What wouldn't I give for a bed,' Tom moaned. ‘Have you heard of those things, Chris?'

‘What things?' I said. I'd seen something that he hadn't. A familiar tent. Two girls lying on their stomachs, reading.

‘Wooden frames with mattresses and sheets and pillows. Widely used as an alternative to canvas stretched over mud and stones, apparently.'

He saw them too, then. He raised his fist to me and I raised mine. We couldn't stop grinning.

That night we sat in the dark, all four of us, drinking wine and looking up at the stars. We gave them names like Flash-Harry and Sparky, Skylight and Brillo Pad and then we went through them in French and Bryn translated them into Welsh. She wants to be a writer. She's doing English next year, too, in Leeds. It's odd how much she reminded me of Helen, yet she was nothing like her at all.

We were supposed to be carrying on to the Alps the next day but we didn't. We didn't even talk about it. It's what old Tom called fate, I suppose. If only we'd gone to a different camp-site.

Instead we went for a walk in absolutely sweltering midday heat, all along narrow winding cart-tracks and past fields that were full of corn.

‘It's made of gold, today,' Bryn said. She looked up at me and away again, biting her lip. ‘I don't want it to end, ever.' She told me a poem in Welsh and started to explain about the complicated rhyming pattern of Welsh poetry. We were having a hell of a laugh trying to make up a poem in English that would work the same way and we suddenly realized that we'd lost Tom and Menai and that we hadn't a clue where we were. The heat was so intense that it was like walking through a furnace, and there were crickets all round us, chirring away incessantly. The air was heavy with the noise of them, a kind of intense clamouring. We walked down through some trees for shade and there was a river, like something from a dream. Bryn stripped off and jumped straight in. I couldn't believe it. Helen would never have done that, never in a million years, and there was Bryn just peeling off her clothes as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do and laughing back at me and splashing into the water. There wasn't a sound, except for insects humming and those crickets, chirring away.

‘Come on, Chris,' Bryn called.

There were some cows paddling further down and some suspicious-looking brown stuff floating on the top so I didn't fancy it, but she kept trying to splash me so in the end I jumped in too. We swam up to the cows and they all turned their heads to look at us, all in a row, all big sad eyes. There were huge green and blue dragonflies zipping round us. Bryn said they were demoiselles. We climbed out and lay in the sun. I was almost afraid to look at her.

She told me that she and her boy-friend had packed up before she came away, and that she had never thought she'd be happy again, and that today had been fantastic. I told her about Helen.

‘What's she like?' Bryn asked me.

Like a poem, I wanted to say, like a star, ‘She's brilliant.'

‘Oh,' Bryn laughed, ‘too clever for you, then.'

I would have liked to tell her about the baby but I
couldn't. I told her that Helen had said she didn't want to see me again, and she asked me if I was very hurt about it, and I said yes, very, and my voice cracked a bit then. We lay there without saying anything and the grass was full of poppies and butterflies and these huge green demoiselles and I was wondering what the hell I was going to do about the way I was beginning to feel and she just kind of rolled over in the grass towards me and put her arms out and began to kiss me.

Oh, Nell. I wanted you so much.

August 8th

Dear Nobody,

It's too hot. I've turned into a tottering boat, a huge swaying galleon with round sails. Can I possibly get bigger than this and not burst? I saw a film once of a man stuffing himself with food till he exploded over all the people in the restaurant. I laughed at the time.

And you don't help. You're nudging me and elbowing me all the time. I expect it's getting a bit cramped for you in there. Sometimes I think you're as big as a whale, lumbering up out of the sea, arching your great long back. I've heard a record of whales singing. They can hear each other forty miles apart in the ocean. I wonder if you're singing in there.

I used to think oceans would be silent places. They must sound like motorways with all that whale-singing going on.

I'm being besieged by doctors and midwives and health visitors, monitoring my weight and your size and your heart beat and my blood pressure, till I'm beginning to feel like a campaign rather than a person. They're taking me over. I'm scared that they're going to take you over, too. I dream that I'm lying in a bed in a hospital and that someone walks past me with a pram. I know that you're in it and that they're taking you away from me and I try to sit up but my arms and legs are weighted down, try to scream out but my mouth is bandaged up, and my mother sits at the side of the bed and smiles down at me.

I've been given breathing and relaxtion exercises to do but as soon as I start to do them I start shaking. Nobody, what's it going to be like, giving birth to you? However many people are with me on that day, I'll still be on my own with the pain. In my head I scream out loud, no one can hear me, they think I'm calm, that I'm not worrying. I sit in front of the television at home with Robbie and my face is quiet but in my head I'm screaming out loud.

Ruthlyn came to the relaxation class with me today. I hate going. I feel really out of it, without a partner, years younger than anyone. At least Ruthlyn sees the funny side of things. We giggled all the way to the clinic on the bus. People kept looking at us, as if we were invading their privacy just by laughing, then they sort of smiled at each other knowingly when they noticed me. You, I mean. I felt about twelve years old, Nobody. One woman actually patted my stomach as I got off the bus! What a cheek! How would she feel if I went and patted hers? ‘You look bonny, love,' she said to me and patted my lump, you, as if she was a good witch charming me. I didn't feel bonny. My back aches and aches all the time, you're so heavy; my head is screaming inside.

At the ante-natal clinic I had to lie on my back on the floor and breathe in and out, slowly and regularly, and curl round and move my legs up and down, very gently. I was really aware of you then. Some of the women had their husbands with them. There were all these bloated women on the floor having their ankles squeezed by partners and friends, trying to simulate labour pains. Ruthlyn did her best, trying to look solemn and practised, but every time she caught my eyes she cracked out laughing. It's all right for her. Laughing hurts. None of us took it seriously. It wasn't real. We were all as shy as each other and smiling at each other like kids at a new school. I felt embarrassed, yet I felt supported, too, by all of them. Embarrassed and embraced. That sounds nice, doesn't it? Afterwards we chatted about when our babies were due and suddenly, after all, it seemed terribly
real. A few weeks away! It's really, really going to happen.

I can't wait to meet you.

I felt relaxed when I came out. I could have gone straight to sleep. You were dozing, for a change. Ruthlyn and I sat behind a young mother on the bus. Her baby kept peeping over the top of the seat at us, and we were both laughing at it and ducking our heads, trying to get it to smile at us. It looked so solemn, like a little old professor, just staring at us. I wonder what on earth it was thinking. Do babies have thoughts? Do you, in there? Or are thoughts only related to experience?