Dear Nobody (10 page)

‘I want to know what's going on,' she said.

I remember gazing out of the window, and noting somewhere that it was beginning to rain. I could feel a flush creeping across my neck.

‘I'm starting a new project,' I told her. ‘Miss Clancy said I could start the background work at home.'

‘I don't give a damn about Miss Clancy.' My mum
closed the door and leaned against it, arms folded now. She was breathing heavily. Her mouth was working as if she had too much saliva to swallow. I could see Chris's photograph grinning at me from my bedside table. He wouldn't come into focus.

‘What's going on, Helen?'

My eyes were hurting. Mum's voice wasn't right. She wasn't calm. I looked for the words but I couldn't find them.

‘Can't you guess?' I must have been biting my nails – I don't remember doing it, but I do remember Mum leaning forward and slapping my hand away from my mouth. It was an old, familiar gesture from when I was little. It made me feel helpless.

‘I can guess,' Mum said, and she leaned back against the door and closed her eyes, and blew out her lips like a fish gasping for air. ‘I'd like to have heard it from you, but I can guess,' and her voice was an alien strangled thing in her throat that I didn't recognize. ‘How many times have you done it, for goodness' sake?'

It was such a stupid, useless question that it helped me to be angry with her. ‘Does it matter?' I shouted at her, and then I was ashamed. She was upset, and it wasn't her fault, none of it was her fault.

‘Yes, it does matter, for goodness' sake! It matters to me!'

Mum has sag lines at the corners of her mouth. I could see how the drops of spittle frothed and oozed there, to be wiped away with the back of her hand, to froth and ooze again. And I don't know why but it helped to watch that instead of listening to the way her breath came in snatches, as if she'd torn it off in little pieces. I'd never noticed the hollow in her neck before, and how the skin round it was pimpled like turkey flesh. I knew how hurt she was.

I told her it had happened once, and that it had been in this room and on this bed, and as if it was the worst thing about the whole business she folded and unfolded her arms, put her hands in her pockets and drew them
out, folded her arms again. She rubbed the skin around her elbows, crinkling it into circles. ‘And you've never heard of decency? Did you have to do it? After all I've taught you?'

I felt as if I was in a room with a stranger from another country who wasn't using the right language.

‘We didn't think.'

I watched how her hands fidgeted in the air, like birds with no resting place. I wanted to hold them still for her.

‘It just happened.'

And Chris's photograph was a blur of colour on my table. I daren't look at it.

Mum gasped out again like a small child and came groping forward with her hands stretched out towards me, and I went up to her not knowing anything now, and she pressed me to her as if I was six years old.

‘What are we going to do with you, child?' she whispered.

On Monday morning Mum took me to the doctor's. The waiting room was covered with posters saying ‘Don't let your baby nudge you into going to the doctor's.' I'd never noticed them before. I felt ashamed.

It wasn't my usual doctor. His examination was quick and professional. He told Mum I was probably twelve weeks' pregnant. My stomach plunged, even though I had known it for ages, for ever, it seemed. Everything felt as if it was draining out of me. To hear it said so clinically and finally was like being told ‘Tomorrow you will hang' or something. I remember saying, ‘I don't want a baby,' in a tiny weak voice that didn't sound like mine, and Mum sat there with her lips pursed tight while the doctor told us that if a termination was to take place it must be before sixteen weeks. ‘Otherwise it will be very traumatic for you,' he said. My tears were as sharp as needles. I couldn't take in what he was saying. I have a baby inside me.

I've been in my room all day, writing this to you. I don't want to talk to anybody. I don't feel as if I have to,
now. Mum will know what to do. The phone keeps ringing and it's always Mum who answers. I keep going to sleep and waking up, I'm not even sure if it's still the same day. The only thing I know for sure is that you're still there. It's growing dark, and I can hear the rain on the window, and it's comforting to hear it. I lay on my bed and let the darkness close in round me like a soft blanket. I could hear Robbie creeping upstairs to his room. He never creeps. He must have been told about me. And then I must have drifted off to sleep, because the click of the door woke me up, and there was Mum framed in the doorway with the full light behind her, and my room was in darkness. The light hurt my eyes. I was cold and stiff on top of my bed. Mum came over to me. I could hear her clothing rustling as she knelt down by me.

‘You look like a little doll,' she said.

I turned away from her. Something was making my throat burn like fire.

Mum said, ‘No one will know. Daddy won't know.'

I haven't called him Daddy since I was ten, I was thinking, and then she told me that the doctor had arranged everything, and that it would be all over by the end of the week, and as I listened to her whispering I felt as dry and bleached as a bone.

‘You want to get it all over with quickly, don't you?' she said. I had to push the back of my hand into my mouth and bite it. The hurting in my throat had reached my eyes.

‘You're not going to make a fuss, are you?'

I bit hard on the knuckles of my hand.

'Think of your future. It's your future. You mustn't throw it away,' and I shook my head, my eyes too full to see anything. My future is a deep, black well. Whatever I see in it frightens me. Mum touched my hair.

‘You're only a child yourself,' she said.

She pulled my quilt up over me and I bit again on to my hand, all the aching in my throat and my neck and my shoulders swelling and tightening round me.

‘And I've told Chris,' she said. ‘You're not to get in touch with him. He agrees with me. It's for the best.'

I pretended I was asleep. I hadn't heard it. I could not put together the pieces of those words. When she went out of the room I could hear the swish of my green leotard on the door hook.

Dear Nobody. You did not ask for this. I have nothing to give you. Nothing. With all my heart I'm sorry.

When I rang Helen that night it was Mrs Garton who answered the phone.

‘Just a minute,' she said.

I thought she'd gone to fetch Helen and I settled myself down on the bottom stair imagining her coming smiling to the phone, and then I heard a door being closed sharply, and the phone was picked up again.

‘Hiya you,' I said.

‘It's not Helen. She's asleep.' Mrs Garton said. I looked at my watch. It was eight o'clock. ‘Listen,' she said, lowering her voice. It sounded as if she was hissing down the phone, but I think she was only trying to keep her voice down so nobody else could hear. But it made my skin creep, the way she hissed, and what she said to me. ‘She's told me everything. I want you to know that you're never to come to this house again. Do you understand?'

I nodded, like a fool. Where were the words to answer her with? There aren't any. And her voice went on, a snake voice, a hissing dry and ice-cold sort of voice. ‘She's decided to have an operation. Do you understand?'

I nodded again.

‘It's the best thing, Chris. But you mustn't get in touch with her.'

I put the receiver down, with the words slithering round in my head. Guy went past with the washing he'd just taken from the dryer and headed a pair of rolled-up and still-warm
socks at me, and when I didn't head them back he lobbed another pair at me from half-way up the stairs. I picked up the phone and rang again. As soon as Mrs Garton heard my voice she put the receiver down. I imagined her camped out for the night by the phone, her hand poised over the receiver. I desperately wanted to talk to Helen. I went up to my room with my legs feeling like lead weights, as if there was concrete in my shoes. The cat inched its way through the crack in the door and stared at me. It leapt on to my knee and I shook it off and it leapt up again. I reached over to my drawer and took out my file pad and balanced it on top of him. He rumbled as if I'd just switched him on.

Darling, darling Helen, I wrote.

Guy came in. I covered the paper with my hands.

‘What're you doing?' he asked.

‘Nothing,' I said. ‘Get lost.'

‘Who're you writing to?'

‘Nobody. Clear off'

‘Can I take the cat?'

‘No!' I yelled at him. ‘For God's sake can't somebody even write a letter in peace!'

‘I did your washing for you.' He ducked away as I screwed up the letter and hurled it at him. ‘That's the last time I do your smelly underpants.' The cat sprang down on to the roll of paper and lay sideways with it stuck to one of the claws in his front paw, trying to knock it off with the other.

‘Darling Nell,' I wrote. The letters swam round the page. ‘It's my baby too. It's a little egg. It's life itself I didn't know what I was writing. To tell the truth I couldn't even see the page. ‘Two hundred million sperm tried to reach you, and this is the one that made it. Nothing will ever be exactly like it again, ever, ever, in the world. It is unique. It is me in you, Helen, and you in me. Please don't destroy it. I love you, whatever you do.'

I couldn't read it afterwards. I felt blitzed, as if I'd been listening to crashing music and all of a sudden there was so much silence that I could drown in it. I put the letter in an envelope and sealed it.

I realized then that the house was in silence and that I'd
been sitting holding the letter in my hand for hours, maybe. I went outside. The stars were out, kind of shivering. I wheeled my bike out of the yard and cruised down to Helen's on it. I tried throwing gravel up to her window but it showered back at me. I slid the letter through the letter-box and waited with my fingers round it, expecting at any moment to feel it being taken away from me by another hand. I imagined her mother reading it, hating me for what I'd done to her daughter. Surely Helen would know I'd write to her if I couldn't reach her any other way. Surely she'd come down first thing and know there'd be a letter for her. I had to take the chance. I opened out my fingers, and listened to the soft flutter of the letter as it hit the floor.

I picked up my bike and carried it down the drive, trying to tiptoe on those red pebbles. The whole road echoed with the noise of my scrunching feet. And then I sat on the bike and looked back at the house and wondered whether I'd ever be welcome there again. For a crazy moment I thought of Helen's dad sneaking out to teach me some guitar chords, and for an even crazier moment I thought of shinning up the drain-pipe to Helen's room and lying with her till dawn, like Romeo, till I was banished from the land, but I knew that I'd slide down it again like a fireman on a pole before I was a metre off the ground.

I didn't want to go home. I put my head down and bombed down the road at top speed, listening to the whirring of my wheels, and when I swung out on to the main road I headed off out to the moors. There were no cars on the road at all, nothing to hear, and when I left the street-lamps behind and there was just the small light of my front lamp picking its way through the darkness and all that silence, it felt as if I was being eaten up by an enormous black mouth. I stood up on the pedals to make them turn faster; I don't know who I thought I was trying to race, or get away from; myself maybe, that little scared wretched self that had stood on Helen's doorstep.

It was uphill all the way, and I felt as if I was sweating inside a tight, hot glove, and then the road fell away and I free-wheeled down to Fox House with the wind licking me. No
houses or cars, no trees, only the dark clumps of heather and those looming cliffs. I knew exactly where I was going, and when the track got so bumpy that I was being flung about on my bike I hopped off it and left it leaning against a boulder. The moon was like a white face with a crooked smile, and I'm not kidding, those stars were like rocks. They were massive that night, white hanging rocks that could come crashing down from the sky at any minute. I jogged along till I was right under the Edge, and up above me, sixteen metres or so, was the little overhang that stuck out in front of Robin Hood's Cave.

I wanted to bring Helen here once. I wanted to spend the whole night with her, holding her and loving her, watching the sunset and then the stars and then the dawn.

I scrambled easily up the first bit, then had to search for handholds. The moon kept cutting out behind clouds. I heaved myself over the next bit and lay straddled across it, trying to get my breath back. I managed to stand up on a little ledge by inching myself up with my fingers, thinking all the time, thank God Tom isn't here, he'd have been up on to the top and down again by now, no problem, and then I made the mistake of looking down. I can't have been very far up but below me was blackness with little gleams of jagged edges, and I leaned against the cliff and very slowly it started to turn over, and over again, round and round like the Big Wheel at the fairground, swinging chairs and all, bloodbeats in your ears and your heart somewhere sliding round your tonsils; the whole mass of rocks and the whole starry space swinging up and round and over.