Dear Nobody (22 page)

It was the middle of September before I got round to buying the books on the reading list they'd sent me from Newcastle. I enjoyed browsing round the students' second-hand bookshops, though, picking up tatty copies of leather-bound volumes of Milton and Shelley and poets like that, just names to me, that had passed from hand to hand. The pages inside were all scored with underlinings and pencil notes, all in different writing, and I suddenly felt excited at the thought of joining in the long line of scholars from other centuries, other ages. I imagined monks in gloomy cells, bowed over their manuscripts, the scratching of quills on parchment. I bought a little red-leather copy of an ancient poem called
Beowulf
. It was written in Anglo-Saxon. I couldn't understand a word of it.

It was the most amazing thing in the world to walk into my house that afternoon and see my mother there. I didn't know what on earth to say to her. I opened the door and was just about to go upstairs to my room when I heard her voice in
the kitchen. My stomach went cold inside me. Maybe it was shock. I ran upstairs and tried to sort out my head before I faced her. I could hear her down in the kitchen below, laughing out loud. I couldn't understand it; I couldn't understand why she was here, or why I felt so shaken up at the thought of seeing her here, in our house. I couldn't work out in my head what the hell to say to her. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, she was planning to come back here to live with us. Did I want that? No, I didn't want that now. I felt sad inside, frustrated and angry and sad, screwed up so tight that it hurt. It was too late. When I was a little boy of ten I desperately wanted my mother back home, and if you'd asked me why I'd have said it was because she'd have made sure my sports stuff was clean and ready for Wednesdays, and I wouldn't have had to go to Cubs in the rain, and I wouldn't be shouted at for having nosebleeds. Perhaps I'd have said that Dad wouldn't have sat for hours with his head in his hands, night after night. Guy wouldn't have had to cry himself to sleep. It was too late now. Nothing would ever put that right.

I couldn't understand myself. I wanted to write letters to my mother and to talk to her on the phone, and to drop in and see her when it suited me. I didn't want to see her chopping up onions in our kitchen, sitting with her feet up on our settee watching television, coming out of Dad's room in his dressing-gown.

I had a wash and put on a decent sweatshirt and went downstairs. I could hear the babble of voices surging up in a confused kind of frenzy of laughing and talking, and as soon as I went into the kitchen it stopped. It was as if I'd pushed it behind the door as I opened it. There was my mother, looking terrific. That bloke of hers was there. Dad was there, his voice tailing off last of all, in the middle of some yarn about Guy and his telescope. I stared round at them all. Jill was standing next to Dad. I'd forgotten that she and my mother are sisters. And Guy was perched on the stool blinking at the cat.

‘Hi,' I said. I felt awkward, like a six-year-old who's burst in on a grown-up party.

Don shoved a glass of frothy bubbles at me. I guessed it must be champagne. Horrible stuff. They all stared at me,
and I held it up and took a sip. ‘Here's to…' I said. Anything to fill that silence.

‘Our divorce,' my mother said.

‘I don't get it,' I said.

‘You do get it,' said Guy, earnest little owl, bright-eyed and pale as death.

But I didn't. I didn't understand why words like that would make them all smile at me, coaxing me to smile back, and I was the spoilsport at the party, the drab in the corner who never gets a joke, the wet blanket, whatever that's supposed to mean. I didn't want to play games. I didn't know the rules.

‘Your father and I are getting a divorce,' said my mother.

‘Well, that's wonderful,' I said, dry. ‘And I thought you did that years ago.'

‘Our marriage. Drink to it, Christopher.' Don held out his hand to me. I thought of making some daft remark about not fancying him enough to marry him, but I couldn't be bothered. No one would have got it, anyway. ‘I thought you were already married,' I said, ignoring his hand. ‘Or were you just practising?'

They all roared with laughter as if I was the clown that they'd all been waiting for.

‘It means,' said my mother, ‘that Don and I have thought long and carefully about marriage, and what it involves. And we know that we're ready to take that step.'

I looked at Dad. ‘And I know they're right for each other,' he said. I understood then. He was letting her go.

I raised my glass and drained it down. I swallowed back a burp. I felt very drunk, but not in that giggly, smiling give-us-a-cuddle way of theirs. I shook hands with all of them, even Guy, and then I stepped past all their legs and out into the back yard and threw my glass against the wall.

It was beautiful, the way that perfect shell burst apart and splintered; the way the stars of glass caught light and soared before they fell.

It's strange how you can go for years and years letting other people be responsible for the way you think and dress and eat, what you learn, how you speak, and all of a sudden you find
you've broken away from all that web of protection and you're free.

*

Over the next few days I got to know my mother and Don quite well. They stayed in a hotel in Derbyshire and I cycled over there a few times and then went for walks with them. I was surprised to find that I liked him.

‘Come on, Christopher, take us to your favourite places,' he said. I enjoyed doing that. I didn't take them anywhere near the Edge where I'd tried to climb that time, or any of my special Helen places. I only ever go there on my own. But I did take them to the top of Burbage, and we sat on a big rock under the bridge so we could look right down the valley, all the colours turning, and the sheeps' backs muzzy with September light, and I said, ‘This is where my childhood is, Mum.' I didn't care whether it sounded corny or not.

I'm glad I had those few days with her. I liked her a lot. And I wanted to call her Mum, not Joan, I found. So I did. Names are weird things.

But when she asked me about my future plans I clammed up. My future had been decided for me.

‘I haven't spoken to Helen since the end of June,' I said.

‘I gathered that,' Mum said. ‘But can you put it all behind you?'

‘Like hell I can.'

Maybe I won't go to Newcastle, I told her. Maybe I'll go on the road, pack up my rucksack and free-wheel round the world. How far away from Helen could I get and not think about her? If it takes light less than a second to circle the planet, would she see me from the other side? How long does sound take? If I stood by Ayres Rock and whispered ‘Nell', would she hear it in her dreamings? If there was nothing else in the way, no engines or machinery or laughter or shouting or crying, maybe she'd hear it. Europe, Africa, India, Japan, Australia. If I cycled for ever and ever, shouting her name, would that help?

‘It takes time,' Mum said.

A few days after Don and Mum went back up north I had a
letter from Bryn. It was full of jokes and funny drawings and bits of poems. It went on for pages. She finished up by asking me to come and see her one day when she was in Leeds. ‘I miss you,' she said. It hurt to read it. I knew for sure what I'd been guessing when we were in France together, and from the way she'd looked at me when she came to my house that day. I remember the way she'd been after we'd seen Ruthlyn and Helen in the street. I remember now how I stooped down to let her climb off my back, and then I'd just stuck my hands in my pockets and headed back for home, with my head cracking like a machine-gun. She and Tom had come after me and walked with me; Bryn had had to run to keep up with me, I remember that, and I'd tried to shake her off the way you shake off a wasp that's bothering you. But it wasn't her fault. I'd turned round to tell her that and she'd just stood there, with her face, smiling and puzzled and sorry, turned up to mine, and for some reason that I don't understand I'd just bent down and kissed her, a friend's kiss, a please-don't-blame-yourself kiss. So we'd gone on to buy chips and then to see her off at the station, and I could tell by the way she smiled goodbye to me that she did blame herself, and what's more, that as far as she was concerned we were far more than just friends. I hadn't written to her though, and I hadn't heard from her. I'd thought, that's it. It's over now.

And then her letter came, bubbling with Bryn. I could hear her voice and her laugh in every word I read. I knew it would never work the way she wanted it. There was too much of me that was hurt, tied up in something that I couldn't work out, never would work out, like the threads of a spider's web that won't ever snap.

So I did this: I wrote her a letter to say that I liked her very much but that I didn't think we should ever meet again. I knew it would hurt her, and I didn't feel any better for writing it. I felt bad. But I had to do it, so I did.

September 30th

Dear Nobody,

I feel peculiar tonight. Terrible. I can hardly walk in fact.
You've moved right down. Dropped, the midwife said. Turned, ready for action. I wish I was. I feel more like going to sleep, for a long, long time. You'll be here in a few days, if you're punctual.

I'm gross. I'm a tub of butter. I don't know myself these days. Once upon a time there was a girl called Helen who could dance. She could actually bend in the middle. What middle? Then she turned into a fat caterpillar and then she became a pupa and went into a state of coma. And a fairy godmother called a midwife came to see her and said, ‘Cinderhelen, you WILL go to the hospital. You will emerge out of your chrysalis.' But the amazing thing is, there won't just be one butterfly emerging, shaking trembly wings. There'll be two, you and me. And the sad thing is, there won't be a handsome prince. There won't be any prince at all.

I wish it was all over.

God, I'm so fed up.

The day before I was due to set off for Newcastle I bought some new jeans. They felt really peculiar because they hadn't got holes in the knees. Mum had given me some money to buy a quilt cover, of all things, but I didn't bother to get that. But I did window shop a bit, looking at some pale blue, floaty material that reminded me of the dress Helen wore at that last dance we were at. There was a bit of poetry that kept coming into my head. ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven', it's called. It was one of the ones Hippy Harrington read to us, gave us I suppose, by that Irish poet, Yeats. I know it off by heart. He's right, Hippy. You should learn poetry by heart; then you own it, in a strange kind of way.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

I bought a postcard and wrote it down. No need to sign it. I walked down her road after that, with those words banging away in my head like music. I just thought I might see her and be able to say goodbye to her in a natural way. There's no way I'm going to phone up again and suffer the humiliation of having the receiver put down on me. They've built a protective wall around Helen that's too high to climb over and too thick to break through, and too deeply founded to tunnel under, and it's something to do with the fact that they love her. I understand all that now; but it's a funny kind of love. I walked past the house, looking and not looking at it. It was as neat as ever. They've got money, that family. Funny. I hadn't even thought about that before.

I hate this silence. It's like a bandage, wrapped round my mouth and my ears. Speak to me.

I found myself in the library where Helen's father works. He grinned away when he saw me and came tiptoeing over with his hands behind his back.