Dear Nobody (18 page)

So. That night it started to rain. Tom was going to have to share my tent, and I was going to have to sleep without a bag. My back wheel was in bits where my feet would have to be. Two girls started to pitch their tent near us and because they were having trouble with all the pebbles too, and because he fancies himself and because we weren't talking much, anyway, Tom went over to help them. I sat and sulked and tried to read
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
which didn't make me laugh. The worst disco in the world started up on an island on the river next to the camp-site. That DJ should have been flung in a bed of nettles. Tom went to it with the two girls. I pretended not to see them walk past, laughing their heads off at the terrible music. I couldn't read. After a bit I went down and watched. It was lousy. One of the girls saw me and waved to me to join them. I didn't. I went back to the tent, feeling terrible. She had a smile like Helen's.

Tom finally crawled into my tent long after midnight, and woke me up to tell me that I was winning 2–1 – his tent was as holy as a church, my back wheel was dropping to bits and I had a sleeping bag covered in chain-oil. He was remarkably cheerful about it all. ‘And,' he said, as I drifted back towards sleep, ‘I've fallen in love, Chris.'

The next day I spent ninety francs at a bike shop. I left the bike there first thing and spent the rest of the day reading. I finished
Restaurant
and started
Catcher in the Rye.
‘This will change your life,' Hippy had told me. Well, it needed changing. Tom and the two girls were messing about, playing with a frisbee and rounding up all the camp-site dogs. They seemed to spend all their time laughing, annoying the hell out of me. The girls were Welsh. Bryn and Menai, they were called. They were hitching round France, which I think is a stupid thing for girls to do. They talked to each other in Welsh all the time, and that irritated me from the start. The little one, Bryn, was dark, and just wouldn't stop talking. I tried to ignore her but she seemed to know a lot about books and kept asking me which bit I was up to. I hate people talking to me when I'm reading. But every time I looked up, she had that incredible smile.

At six o'clock I went back into town to collect my bike. It was brilliant. I picked up some wine on the way back and we invited the girls over to eat with us. And in the evening that crazy disco started up again on the island and we went over to it.

It was fantastic!

July 23rd

Dear Nobody,

It's a month exactly since I finished with Chris. It isn't any easier. I can't stop thinking about him. I'm surprised I never bump into him; he doesn't live that far away from me. He seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Sometimes, Nobody, I used to feel years older
than him. Sometimes I used to feel really impatient with him for being so romantic, so impractical. I know now that that's what I miss most about him. He would think that if he just put his arms round me and loved me, everything would be all right again. Sometimes, now, I almost believe that's true.

I talked to Mum this evening, at last. It wasn't easy. Dad was out with his band and Robbie was digging a hole in the back garden because he's decided we should do something for the environment and he's going to make a pond. The room was yellow with sun, I remember that. I asked Mum if she'd like a glass of sherry, which amazed her, but she giggled and said yes. I had orange juice, of course, piled with ice cubes. No alcohol for you, little tadpole!

I told Mum that I'd finished with Chris for good. I let the hurt come out then, in front of Mum, when I was telling her. She listened quietly. She didn't hug me, or anything, of course. She doesn't know how to. I was glad she didn't. I wanted to be in control of this.

I told her that I didn't want to get married or live with him and I didn't think Chris and I should tie each other down. Most of all, I told her, I did it because I thought that Chris would be crazy to give up his university place. I didn't want to be responsible for that, I told her. The easiest way to do it was to make the break now. I know that speech off by heart.

Mum sat very quiet for a long time, sipping at her sherry as if she was kissing the glass almost, just damping her lips with it. She asked me again to think about having you adopted and I said, very firmly, as I say every time, no. You kicked a bit then. I'm sure you can hear what I'm saying. And she just nodded and sighed a little but there was none of that other stuff, that emotion and stuff

‘Then what are you going to do?' she asked me, and I told her that I would try for a university or college place in Sheffield to do a music degree when you're old enough to go to the crêche there. Maybe they would even let me
re-apply to Manchester to do Composition one day. She pulled a face as if she thought I was mad to think such things are possible. But they are possible. I just know they are. A baby isn't the end of everything. It's the beginning of something else. Then I said that I knew she wouldn't want me to live at home once you were born, and that Grandad had said I could have a room at his house if I wanted it. Her eyebrows shot up then. She hardly ever goes there. I don't think she likes her mother. Or maybe she doesn't like her the way she is now, an old woman before her time, day-dreaming the years away. Well, that's what I thought. I found out that it was something much deeper than that, something much more powerful, that kept her away.

‘That's no place for a baby,' she said.

And then I told her what Nan had said.

I‘d spent days rummaging through all the papers in Mum and Dad's box files, trying to find my birth certificate and their wedding certificate. I don't know where they'd hidden them. I felt like a thief in the night, touching forbidden things. And after a bit, when my search was fruitless and yet I searched again and again in the same places, I began to feel quite feverish about it, as if part of my life was lost and would never be found again. And because she sat there, so still and shocked, sipping at an empty sherry glass, I asked, brave as anything, Nobody, if I was born before she was married. She closed her eyes and shuddered, as if she was suddenly cold to the bone. We could hear Robbie outside, singing as he was digging. He would be so hot, out there. Any minute now he'd come in for water and would flop onto the settee, legs sprawled out in front of him, staring from one to the other of us, knowing he was missing something. Somewhere in the room a bluebottle was buzzing. I think it was trapped in the curtains.

Mum said no, of course not, they'd been married for two years before I was born. She picked up a letter that was lying on the table in front of her and started fanning herself with it. ‘This dreadful heat,' she said.

I was a dog on the scent now, digging away, sending all the muck flying up. ‘But there was a baby, wasn't there? Nan said, “Like mother, like daughter.” What did she mean?'

I had to find out, Nobody, for you. It seemed to be part of your past, and part of our future.

‘If it wasn't me, who was it? Where is it now?'

She said it was none of my business, and calm as anything, feeling that deep inside I was the same person as she was, just as you're the same person as I am, just as she is the same person as that quiet, sad old woman staring all day and all life out of a crack in her bedroom curtains, I told her that I thought it
was
my business.

‘What are you trying to ask me, Helen?' she said at last, and I told that from what my nan had said it sounded as if I'd been born illegitimate. I was sure that was what she had meant. I told her the words: ‘bad blood'. It was a hard thing to say. ‘Like mother, like daughter.' I was hurting myself, too. I was hurting you.

‘Do you imagine I'd do a thing like that?' she said then, her voice gone cold and shaking. ‘A dirty thing like that?'

No. After all I couldn't imagine it. Not if she thought it was dirty. How can love be dirty? If she'd said sinful, or silly, or thoughtless, it wouldn't have hurt so much as that word ‘dirty' did. For a minute I was sidetracked. I asked her if she'd ever been in love, then, which I suppose was a bit of an impertinence. But she's so difficult to talk to. She's such a closed-up, tight woman at times. I can't imagine her being the same age as me, ever. She won't give anything, just as she won't take anything from me.

‘Well. Were you in love with Dad when you married him?' Why couldn't she answer that, at least, instead of sitting there with her mouth all pursed up, fanning herself with her eyes closed, locked away from me? I wanted to see Alice, the girl that she was, the me in her at eighteen or so. And she couldn't answer that question, or wouldn't. Does that mean she did or she didn't? I remembered Mum then as she used to be when I was a
kid, at Christmas time perhaps when she'd had a drink or two. I remembered watching her once, shimmeying round the kitchen in an odd, flappy dance that had made Robbie and me laugh. My dad was watching her, too, in a half-proud, half-disapproving way, and she had danced up to him and put both her hands on his shoulders and danced just for him, holding his eyes in hers, and both of them gone quiet as night, till I'd felt embarrassed and locked out. Things like that didn't happen any more.

And then, just when I'd given up and I was about to go out of the room she said, ‘If you must know, Helen, I'm the one who was illegitimate, not you.'

The bluebottle had gone still. Even Robbie had stopped his maniac singing. ‘I was born out of wedlock, as they say. Born in sin. And I'll never forgive my mother for that.'

That was when the talking started, little Nobody.

‘I don't even know who my father is,' she said. ‘Except, Helen, that he was a dancer in a night-club. It was your father who found that out.'

I was utterly shocked at this news. I walked over to the window and watched Robbie at his digging. One of his friends had come round to help him. They'd stripped off their tee-shirts. I could see how their shoulders were looking pink and sore already.

‘So Grandad isn't really…' I couldn't take it in. I felt closer to my grandfather than to any other member of my family; always had done.

‘He married her when I was about nine. And that, I can tell you, was a brave and generous thing to do. In those days an unmarried mother was no more than a slut. Her child was a disgrace. My mother's family wouldn't own her. She was an outcast, and so was I. A bastard, that's what you were called if you didn't have a father. That's what I was called, when I was a child at school. That's the start I had in life.'

It was as if she'd taken all the guilt of it on herself, all the family shame, and tried to put things right all
through her life. I understood her then, for the first time in my life. I understood her commitment to that word ‘decency' which was a word she cradled as if it was a gem, a precious legacy from another age. I was more shocked and confused by all this than if she'd told me what I thought had been the case, that I was born before she was married, or that she'd had a baby before she had me, or anything like that. Because what she was telling me was something that she had had no choice about, and that she wished had never happened. We have no choice about being born, little Nobody. I've made up your mind for you.

It's not a stigma any more, not like it was when Mum was a child. No one will be calling you names.

But I hope you'll forgive me, all the same.

Bryn gave me a Barry Hines book that she'd just finished reading. I said I knew him because he lives in Sheffield. I don't really, but I've seen his photograph in
The Star
. It was a goodbye present, she said, because we were heading off for Burgundy that day. ‘Maybe we'll see you there,' she said. ‘I hope we do.'

I didn't say anything.

So we left the Dordogne for the day to whip down to the Auvergne and spent it looking at mountains and taking photographs while Tom talked on and on about Menai. That night we camped on the top of a windy hill. It was bitterly cold, especially for me, minus my sleeping bag. We seemed to be a million miles away from civilization. The camp-site woman had eyes like a cod and Tom christened her the Fish at the End of the Universe. ‘I want Menai!' he kept saying. ‘I can't live without her.'