Chosen (19 page)

‘Ring me any time, night or day,' he said, pressing a fiver into each of our hands. ‘I'm still your father.'

We stood side by side to be kissed. I was aching for Bogart. I hadn't known how much I loved him until he wasn't there. He was my new family and his love was making me a new person. It was fascinating to be inside the old one as the
changes happened, like a conscious chrysalis. Aunt Regina and Derek stayed on for an extra day and it was Derek, who was a teacher in a Steiner school, who said he thought Stella was depressed.

Before they left, we tipped the jigsaw puzzle out on the coffee table and all sat round, cosily, doing the edges. Derek thought jigsaws were therapeutic and had a routine – edges first, working strategically towards the centre. They left as soon as the border was completed. I lost interest once they'd driven off, but Stella loved it. As soon as they'd gone I phoned Bogart, who was staying with Celia and Bruce. It was the day before Christmas Eve and Celia was having a party.

‘Come,' he said.

‘I can't leave Stella. Can't you just come home?' I hesitated and I sensed him hesitating too, noticing that I'd said
home
.

He gentled his voice. ‘Later, honey,' he promised. I went to bed naked, which he preferred to any of my nightwear, and lay in wait. But he didn't come back and I fell asleep. I woke when the luminous figures on the clock showed four o'clock. I put on my dressing gown and went downstairs. The room was burning hot from the electric fire and Stella was still hunched over the puzzle. She looked up at me with dazed and ragged eyes.

‘Let's not take drugs any more,' I said, sitting beside her on the sofa. She nodded and slotted a piece in. The mountain was beautiful, shining and surrounded by a silvery veil of blown-off snow. She wasn't following Derek's method though and it was the sky that was missing.

‘There's so much blue,' I said, picking up a piece and hovering my hand around where I thought it might go. She made a funny throaty little sound.

‘I'll look after you,' I said. ‘Maybe you should go to the doctor?'

She took the piece out of my fingers and fitted it in.

‘Bogart will look after me and I'll look after you,' I said. It made me feel better to say that. She gave me a curious
look, curious in both senses. ‘Everyone needs someone to look after them,' I said, defensively. She was only fourteen and looking at me as if I was a fool.

‘Who is Bogart?' she said. ‘Do you even know his real name?'

‘What does it matter?' I said.

‘He should pay us rent,' she said.

I picked up another piece. That had never occurred to me. I made us hot milk with a spoonful of black treacle. She sipped a little of hers. It's Christmas Eve, I realized, and the thought was like a hook in the stomach because we'd had our lame sort of celebration already and all that was left was like an empty box.

‘Go to bed,' I said.

‘I want to finish it.'

‘Please, Stell,' I said.

To my surprise she got up and I could hear the bones in her knees and neck snapping as she got out of the hunched position.

‘Night night,' she said in a lonely voice.

Back in Mum's bedroom I put on the light and my transistor. I thought of the blinking lights of
Radio Caroline
out on the night-time sea; it felt comforting that it was there. ‘Mouldy Old Dough' was playing and I hummed along to it as I continued my secret knitting. I liked the clickety-click of the needles. It had to be ready for tomorrow.

†

Bogart came back at lunchtime. He was a mixture of stoned and drunk and gave me a deep, peculiar-tasting kiss.

‘Happy Christmas,' he said. ‘We're going to Celia's for lunch tomorrow. It's far out, she's got all the trimmings, brandy butter, you name it.'

‘I don't think Stella'll come,' I said.

‘We'll drag her,' he said. He flopped down on the sofa and started rolling a joint, dropping specks of tobacco all over the nearly finished puzzle.

‘Make us a pot of tea, honey,' he said. He put the telly on and
White Christmas
was showing. The house wasn't Christmassy, except for a few cards. There was a tinsel tree in a box under the stairs, but I couldn't bring myself to get it out.

I put the teapot on a tray on the floor. Bogart had his feet on the table now and a corner of the puzzle had slid off and broken.

‘Careful,' I said, quite strictly. It was the nearest I'd come to telling him off. He quirked his eyebrows as he blew out smoke and offered me the joint, but I declined. Stella was still asleep so I brought my knitting down and sat with him, trying not to breathe in smoke as I half watched the film. The phone rang and it was Marion. She'd got really into drugs and hanging round at Celia's and I hadn't seen her since breaking up from school. She came round with a bottle of ginger wine and I did have some of that. I finished off Stella's present and wrapped it before she came down.

Stella gave me my present – a puzzle ring – and I gave her mine: Mother Clanger. I was pleased with the way she'd come out, ears perked up with pipe cleaners and shiny black buttons for the eyes. Stella's face went soft when she saw it and she snuggled it against her neck. Bogart laughed in a fond way, shaking his head at the two of us.

‘I keep forgetting you're such baby chicks,' he said.

His present to me was patchouli oil and joss sticks with a starry holder; and for Stella a little wooden elephant, carved out of sandalwood. He'd wrapped them up in newspaper.

†

On the morning of Boxing Day I woke with the most terrible pain in my side. It was such agony; I couldn't believe it was true. I'd never been in agony before. It was the wrong side for appendicitis, the only thing I could think that it could be. It was so bad I had to stay in bed. Bogart brought tea up and Stella came in to see what was up with me. I couldn't
drink the tea; the pain was making me feel sick. It was like a knife digging in and twisting.

‘Probably period pains,' Bogart said, which made me realize I hadn't had a period for ages. I'd lost track of when I should and when I shouldn't take the pill so I just took it every day. Except when I forgot. Bogart still wanted me to go to Celia's with him, but I was too ill so he went off alone. Stella stayed behind with me. I did manage to crawl downstairs and we watched TV. She broke up the puzzle and started it again, darting worried looks at me between fitting in the pieces.

After a while I stopped being able to talk or even think. The pain got too big to fit inside me and oozed out, filling all the room, squashing the lampshade against the ceiling. I was cold and sweating. I had to be sick and Stella fetched me a bowl because I couldn't move. She held my hair back while I vomited. I felt a bit better for a while and then the pain came roaring in like a high-speed train.

‘Mum's here,' Stella said, looking at the empty doorway. ‘She says I have to phone an ambulance.'

I looked where she was looking. Everything was cloudy and in the cloudiness Mum might have been there. I couldn't say for sure if she wasn't or if she was.

‘Shall I?' Stella said.

I opened my mouth to speak, but all that came out was dribble.

Stella dialed 999 and soon I was carried away by paramedics whose voices came from inside a tunnel, saying, ‘Good girl, Melanie, there's a girl.' Stella came with me in the ambulance and next thing I knew I was waking up.

‘Melanie,' someone was saying and it felt like a long strip of bacon was being ripped out of my throat. ‘Cough for me, there's a girl,' and I coughed and opened my eyes to see a long plastic tube slithering away. I was wheeled into a ward all decorated with cards and streamers, and Stella waiting for me with a bleached face and huge eyes and at that moment she reminded me of someone from a charity appeal.

A doctor came and explained to me that I'd had an ectop ic pregnancy. It was caused by a bad infection in my Fallopian tubes, which was sexually transmitted. I'd had one tube removed and it was likely that the other was badly blocked and scarred. I also had a malformation of the womb, so all in all, it didn't look as if I'd ever have a baby.

That didn't matter to me then.

‘Do you know where you might have contracted the infection?' the doctor asked.

I nodded.

‘Well, the
gentleman
' – she leaned on the word – ‘will need treatment. Could you ask him to phone this number?' She gave me a card.

‘Is it the clap?' I asked, and her face twitched before she shook her head.

‘Nothing so dramatic,' she said. ‘It's a tedious and rather common infection, which is largely symptomless in men but does have this occasional unfortunate effect in women. But' – she lay her hand comfortingly on my arm – ‘due to the shape of your uterus it's unlikely you could ever have achieved a normal conception anyway, so look on the bright side, at least you know.'

I was in hospital for three days. Carol singers came and I got sick and tired of mince pies by the end of it. Marion visited a lot, and Stella every day, but Bogart never once.

When I told Marion about the infection she went white. ‘What?' she said. ‘Caught from Bogart?'

‘I don't know where
he
got it from,' I said. Of course I didn't, he'd had fifteen years of screwing around before I even knew him.

‘I'll never be able to have a baby,' I said. ‘Not that I want one.'

‘Because of that? Shit!' She got up and looked round wildly and I realized at once, with a horrible cold slump of the heart, what was the matter.

‘You?' I said.

She went from white to red and tears came into her eyes. ‘I'm sorry,' she said, and then it all came spilling out. It had
been the night of the party when Bogart hadn't come home. She'd slept not only with him but with another guy, she didn't even know his name. It had been that kind of party, everyone all loved up, she said, hands going everywhere, at one point she had the two of them going at her at once. I listened with an understanding snippet of a smile pinned on my face. I knew Bogart didn't believe in fidelity or any of that bourgeois crap, but still I never thought he'd sleep with Marion.

‘You'd better get some antibiotics,' I said. ‘I need to sleep now.' And I slammed my eyelids down like shutters.

‘Sorry,' she whispered. I heard her hesitate, then watched through my lashes as she bolted off towards a nurse.

When I got home there were flowers everywhere, stiff white chrysanthemums and a ragged red poinsettia in a pot.

‘I'm so sorry, honey,' Bogart said, and hugged me tight against his jumper.

‘Have you been to the clinic?' I asked, extricating myself.

‘I've got an appointment,' he said. ‘I'm so sorry, I didn't know.' He looked pale and his eyes were strangely wide.

I thought about asking him to go, but then I thought of Stella's idea and asked him for rent instead. He shrugged. ‘OK,' he said. And then he said, ‘I've bought us some rubber johnnies.'

‘I'm moving back into my own room,' I said. ‘I'm not even allowed to have sex for six weeks.'

He started objecting, but I went up the stairs and crawled into my single bed. The bed was against the radiator and it was toasty warm. The kind brown eyes of Cat Stevens looked down at me. Stella brought me up a cup of tea but the milk was old and had gone into blobs and I couldn't touch it.

‘Bogart's just a lodger now,' I said.

She shrugged.

‘I'll never be able to have a baby,' I said.

‘Do you want one?'

I shrugged.

She sat on the bed. ‘I know I said life's not worth anything,' she said, ‘but I'm really glad
you
didn't die.'

‘Did you think I was going to?' The thought pulled me up to sitting by my hair. It had never occurred to me.

‘You nearly did.' We sat in silence for a few moments while I let that sink in, and tightly we squeezed each other's hands.

†

Once I'd stopped letting him screw me, Bogart spent much more time away from the house. He did sometimes give us ten pounds out of his dole for rent. He slept in Mum's room, and I slept in mine. I kept my eyes averted when he looked at me. Months went past and I worked hard at school. I forgave Marion and we were friends again, but she had a new circle of older and dangerous friends and I didn't see her much. Stella and I stayed in together and watched telly, with Stella clutching Mother Clanger to her neck, or Stella did puzzles while I knitted – I was doing Bogart a Tibetan hat – and then we discovered the spirits.

It was a friend of Marion's who showed us how to arrange Scrabble letters on a tray and put an upturned glass in the centre. We did it as a game, but when it was just Stella and me it stopped feeling anything like play. We'd light candles and sit on the floor either side of the coffee table. It was always Stella who knew the time to start. We'd each rest a finger on the wineglass and, in a specially hollow voice, she would say, ‘Is anybody there?' Usually the start was wobbly, the glass sliding and hesitating towards the letters Y – E – S. The first time I thought that Stella was pushing, but sometimes, once it got going, we both stopped touching the glass and still it moved.

‘Who are you?' was the next question. The first one was called Ralph. We asked him if knew our mum and he said, N – O. We asked him what it was like on the other side
and he said, O – K. We asked him how long he'd been dead and he said, U – N – C – E – R – T – A – I – N. I thought we could have a more interesting conversation at the bus stop.

But it wasn't always like that. A person called H – U – R – S – A said, Y – O – U – R – M – O – T – H – E – R – I – S – B – E – S – I – D – E – M – E. There was a long gap while Stella and I locked eyes, silently daring each other to continue, until the glass quaked under our fingers, as if impatient. ‘Why doesn't she speak to us?' I asked. R – I – N – G – R – E – G – I, was the answer and that spooked us because Mum sometimes used to call Aunt Regina that. ‘Why?' asked Stella. D – O – C – T – O – R, came the answer, and then the glass began to spin and tilt; R – E – G – I – D – O – C – T –O – R, it said.