Dear Nobody (12 page)

I had to let somebody down.

Dad came in behind her with his car keys dangling in his fingers. He gave me a worried look and made to go into his piano room, to lock himself away in there and lose himself in his music. That's his escape – that's my escape too, but not this time. I followed him in and sat on the piano stool before he could get to it, and turned to face him.

‘What did she say?' I asked him.

‘She's very upset, Helen.'

‘Of course she's upset,' I told him. ‘But will she let me stay here?'

He looked alarmed. ‘Good God, she's not goings to kick you out into the streets.'

‘But will she let me live here, with a baby?'

‘You're not really going to keep it, love?' His voice was pleading.

I knew I was going to break down again, and I thought, is the crying never going to stop, is there no end to all this? I could feel my breath coming in little gasps. It was better not to speak after all. I turned my back on him and raised the piano lid. It was what he'd have done, and I couldn't help it; it was inside me, just as you are, just as much a part of me as my blood and my breath. I began to play; I don't know what it was, I was making it up as I went along and I heard him talking to me still, under the rolling ocean of my music.

‘I'd have given anything in the world to go to music school. Do you know that?'

I'd never heard him raise his voice in anger before – or was it grief?

I didn't want to hear him. I let the dark chords roll.

‘You're throwing your life away.'

Helen and I tried to spend all our time together after that. I think that week or so after the clinic were the best we ever had together. It was as if we were one person, bound up in each other's present. The future and the past were outer space.

‘What will we do, though?' Helen would ask me from time to time, or I would ask her, and the answer was always that we didn't know; space was too vast for us to enter yet.

‘But we'll be together, whatever happens.'

I was never allowed to go round to her house, or to try to phone her up. I wanted more and more time with her. That was why, when I met her brother Robbie one afternoon on his way home from school, I bribed him to take her a message. He looked cautious. He'd obviously been well primed by Alice Garton.

‘I'll give you a Mars Bar,' I offered, and when he began to soften, ‘it's a really important secret mission, Robbie, and you're the only person who can do it.'

I wanted her to meet me at the railway station on May 15th at eight o'clock. I could hardly believe it when I saw her there. She was standing by the bookstall reading a Thomas Hardy novel.

‘Are you nervous?' she asked me, as our train arrived.

‘As hell,' I said.

‘It'll be all right,' she said.

The train was crowded and noisy. We were glad to get off at Manchester and change trains.

‘How d'you feel about it?' I asked her.

‘Okay,' she smiled.

We stood on the platform holding hands and staring in front of us, each of us locked into our own thoughts.

When our train came we held hands all the way to Carlisle.
She wasn't showing yet. You wouldn't have thought there was anything different about her at all, but we knew. It was a secret between us that made us squeeze each other's hand from time to time without looking at each other. There's something very private and special about that, holding hands, and not looking at each other, and knowing just how full and warm the other one is feeling. When I first saw Helen I liked her because she looked friendly and calm, there's a kind of steadiness about her that tells you she won't go off into sulks or anything. I can't say I like girls who sulk. But after a bit I knew that the thing I liked most about her was her smile. She's quite a serious person really, a bit like her dad, and when you're talking to her she studies you quietly as if she's trying to read your mind, and that's a bit unnerving. It makes you crack daft jokes to try to distract her, in a way. And then all of a sudden she'll smile, and that just transforms her. She really is stunning when she smiles. And for weeks she wasn't smiling any more and her eyes had gone strained and scared, and she looked ill. It was awful, that. I knew I'd done that to her, and that I'd taken that terrific smile away. And now she was well and happy again, and when I squeezed her hand I knew she was smiling, even though she was gazing out of a train window and I was reading a book, and I was warm and dizzy, knowing it. I couldn't help holding her hand. I wanted to touch her all the time.

She doesn't talk about what it's like at home. I had been forbidden to go there any more, of course. I think her mother wished me dead, quite honestly.

Her mother and father came round to see my dad, soon after that do at the clinic. I wasn't in. Thank goodness I wasn't in. I was refereeing a football match in the rain, wishing I wasn't at the time, and when I came home they'd gone. They didn't stay long, apparently. Alice Garton had prepared what she wanted to say and she said it without stopping. She was very angry, I heard. Mr Garton just kept clearing his throat and taking his glasses off and polishing them on his tie. My dad just sat and listened. When I came home he was still sitting there. The television was switched on without any sound. It was a crazy, flickering thing in the corner of the room, and Dad was sitting staring at it with a kind of cold
and heavy silence round him, as if he was wrapped up in a winter coat that still had bits of snowflakes clinging to it. I could tell the Gartons had been. I almost went straight up to my room but Dad just raised his hand slightly and I sat down on the edge of the cat's armchair.

‘I wish you'd told me,' he said. ‘That woman comes here, shouting her mouth off. Says you've got to marry Helen. I don't know what the hell's going on, do I?'

‘I wanted to tell you.' I couldn't get the frog out of my throat. I imagined it squatting under my tonsils, its bright eyes blinking down my windpipe.

‘The thing about lads,' Dad said, ‘is that they can get away scot-free if they want to. Or they think they can.'

The television screen flashed away like a dumb caged beast desperate to escape.

I cleared my throat. ‘I don't want to.'

‘So what are you planning to do about it? Are you telling me you two want to get wed, at the age of eighteen?'

Marriage, and a flat somewhere. A mortgage stretching into middle age, till I was older than my dad. The idea scared the wits out of me. Think about re-incarnation. Get it right next time round.

‘What do you want then? What about your degree? What about Newcastle?'

I closed my eyes. I wished he'd stop.

‘You're not expecting to take her with you, are you? Away from her family and her pals? What would she do, that lass, stuck in a student's bedsit in the middle of Newcastle. Stuck in with a baby?'

That frog had crawled up my windpipe again.

‘She's reckoned to be a very clever lass, that Helen.'

‘She is,' I muttered. ‘She's brilliant.'

‘Are you expecting her to throw up all her chances too? What the hell were you thinking of?'

Everything was blurring. The lights from the television were sharp and dazzling.

‘Her mother says either you marry the girl or you're not to see her again. I can't say I blame her. Mind you, what's done is done.'

I put out my hand to stroke the cat, for its warmth and comfort, and very neatly and tenderly it placed its teeth round my finger. As long as I didn't pull my hand away it wouldn't bite. I prised my finger free and stood up, and Dad stood up too. He flicked off the TV and came over to me. He has that slight limp, Dad, only very slight, from an accident at work. When I was little some of my friends were scared to come in the house. He just came over to me, shaking his head a little, and because I was scared then I went to walk away, and, as if he couldn't help it, he put his arm across my shoulder. ‘Don't think I'm not sorry for you,' he said.

I wanted Mum, then, too.

May 15th

Dear Nobody,

I must have been mad, going all that way with Chris. I did it because it was a way of spending some time with him. I pretended to Mum that it was a school trip, even though I haven't been in to school for ages. It's awful to tell lies to your own mother. I hated doing it. But she's not the sort of mother that you can tell the truth to, most of the time. She doesn't want to hear it. She doesn't want to hear about you, little Nobody. You don't exist. We don't talk about you.

And because we don't talk about you we don't talk about anything. I've lost my mum. We walk past each other like strangers in the house. I eat in my own room because I can't find anything to say, because I can't bear the atmosphere downstairs, because I'm an outcast in my own family. Dad treats me as if I was made of glass, asks me if I'm feeling well, puts cushions behind me when I'm sitting down. But he doesn't lean over the piano when I'm playing and jazz up Chopin with his left hand, and he doesn't tease me about Chris, or play his old ragtime records and tap-dance in the kitchen, self-mocking, happy.

It's my fault, all this.

So when Chris asked me to go to Carlisle with him to meet his mother I said yes. In a frantic sort of way, I felt it would bring me in touch with my own mother again.

He was a bag of nerves by the time we found her road. I think he would have preferred to turn round and catch the next train home. ‘Anyone would think you were about to have your boils lanced,' I told him. But I knew exactly how he felt. Little Nobody, don't ever be a stranger to me.

Chris's mother smokes, so that gave her minus points from the start. I could smell it on her breath when she came to answer the door, and on her clothes. They stank, actually. She was really pretty and she stank. In a way it gave me courage about meeting her, because I knew then that she couldn't tell us off or try to dictate to us what we ought to do. No one who pumps nicotine into themselves or fouls up the air for other people has the right to tell anyone what to do with their lives, that's what I think. So I felt confident, as soon as I smelt her. No one's going to breathe that lousy muck over you. I won't let them.

She looks years younger than Chris's dad. She didn't wear make-up or tidy clothes or anything like that but she looked really pretty, with her hair cropped short like a boy's and her enormous dark eyes. Actually, Chris has her eyes. She looked happy, too. I suppose it's climbing that does it, all that fresh air and exercise. It's a pity about the smoking. I actually think I might have liked her except for that. I could tell Chris was really excited to be with her; he kept grinning and running his hands through his hair. I wanted to smooth it down again for him when it went spiky in the middle. I wonder if she wanted to, as well.

Her new bloke was there, too. He just looked like all the climbers I've ever seen on Stanage Edge, he even had the greying beard. I've seen them clinking along with ropes slung round their shoulders and all kinds of hooks and crampon things jingling off them.

It was really hot that day, and he was wearing shorts. His legs are very hairy. I wouldn't mind betting that he's hairy all over, actually. He had a little knot of varicose veins like a tiny bunch of grapes just below his knee. I noticed them when he sat down. When he saw me looking at them he dangled his hand over them.

I wandered round the house because I felt too edgy to settle. She kept calling Chris Christopher and telling him that he was tall, as if he didn't know, and she asked him about Guy and school and she even remembered the cat. She never mentioned his dad, I noticed. I wonder what happened. It was easier to imagine them apart than together, but they must have been in love at one time. It's strange to think that people can fall in love and out of it again, that love can turn to hate, and that it's the people who loved you most who could hurt you most. I know that because people have told me that, and because I've read it in novels, but I don't understand it. I don't understand what it is that makes my mum and dad into a couple, for instance. He's only happy reading, or playing the piano. I can't imagine them kissing, or holding hands, or whispering to each other. I suppose they must have done, once. But then, I don't understand what love is, either. I don't understand how it can take over, overwhelm you like a huge breaker, knocking the breath out of you, swamping you. I thought of all the lads in Yorkshire, say, thousands of them, and I could have met and liked any one of them, perhaps, but it was Chris who took over. How can it be that there's not a moment of any day when I'm not thinking about him, and yet I seemed to have plenty of things to think about before. I sometimes feel as if I'm not flesh and blood and bone but I'm made up of millions and millions of minute pieces of mirror-glass, and one side of every piece reflects me, and the other reflects Chris, and they're spinning and spinning, like the dust in the sunlight, and yet I'm walking about and nobody notices anything different about me.