Dear Nobody (9 page)

Now I was panicking. I lost my seat and found myself being flung and thumped about in the saddle, every stride jolting my entire body. My arms and legs flung about, loose and useless. The base of my spine buffeted
the saddle again and again. My ribs felt as if they had burst apart. I'd lost the stirrups. I hauled on the reins but Nab jerked himself free; I could see his teeth and his gums bared as he tossed his head. I leaned back as far as I dared, heaving on the reins, and then they slipped out of my fingers. I clung on to the front of the saddle, knotting the hairs of his mane in my fingers. The only thing in my mind was Chris.

I felt the other rider drawing up to me. She was shrieking at me to rein him in. She thundered closer and closer till her horse was brushing right against mine. She leaned across and then she grabbed my reins, and the horses bumped together, jostling for lead, slower now and slower as the woman headed them round from their straight course, and round again, in a tighter and tighter circle, till at last they came to a stop.

I felt as if my skin was loose across my bones. The woman was shouting at me. I slid forward till I was lying with my belly flat across Nab's back. I dropped down and landed on all fours in the heather, and vomited.

The woman swung off her horse and came over to kneel by me. She gave me some tissues to wipe my mouth with.

‘Take your hat off,' she said. ‘You'll feel cooler.'

I was too weak to do it. She had to undo the chinstrap for me. My hair was damp with sweat.

She eased me up and helped me to walk away to a grassy mound. The sun felt like a blanket, it was so warm and kind. She kept asking me what I'd done it for, and I kept shaking my head. The rest of the party trotted up towards us and she stood up to wave them away. The leader asked if I'd been thrown off, and she told them that I was all right, and that she'd walk back with me.

‘You're as white as milk,' she told me. ‘But I don't want these horses to get cold. Look how they're steaming. When you're ready we'll go back.'

I said I was ready, but I could hardly stand. My legs juddered as if my knees had been taken away. She helped me over to Nab.

‘I don't want to ride.'

‘I bet you don't. But if you don't sit on him now you'll never ride a horse again. Just don't puke over him, that's all.'

She cupped her hands together to make a step for me to climb on and heaved me up. I lay across Nab's back, and she helped my legs over and put my feet into the stirrups. ‘You
are
in a state,' she said, grim. ‘But you'll live.'

We didn't say a word as we walked back. It seemed to take forever. From time to time she glanced over to me, curious, but she didn't say anything. When we reached the house, she told me to go and have a bath. ‘You'll be as stiff as a tree tomorrow if you don't,' she told me.

I wanted to be nursed. I would have liked to have been picked up and rocked gently. I wanted to be rocked to sleep. I stood hugging myself while she filled up the bath for me.

‘I'm not letting you go home until someone comes for you. I think it should be a doctor, myself.'

‘Oh no, please don't.'

‘Your dad then. Or Chris.'

I knew who she was, after all. Chris's Aunty Jill. I hadn't wanted to recognize her.

‘We're trying to phase out the Aunty bit,' she said. ‘After all, he's a big boy now, isn't he?'

That was what I did to you.

Now will you go away?

The phone call from Aunty Jill woke me up. It must have been midday.

‘How's your bike?' she asked, which was an odd question, even for her. I told her about my new Campag. brakes, which didn't impress her much.

‘Fancy cycling over here for some lunch?'

‘Great.' I was pleased. ‘D'you want Guy to come as well?'

‘Good heavens, no. I can't manage both of you at once.'

When I arrived she was in the stables, forking out mucky straw and tossing it into a reeking pile in a yard. She came out when she heard me.

‘Twenty-eight minutes,' I shouted, swerving up to her.

‘I could do it faster by car,' she said.

Then I saw Mr Garton's VW tucked in by the side of the house, and I knew that this wasn't just a casual invitation to lunch.

‘What's he doing here?' I asked, cold inside.

She lifted a forkful of new straw from its pile and tossed it into the stable. Gold splinters showered across the yard. ‘It's not him. It's Helen. She's having lunch with us.'

‘Where is she?'

‘She's fast asleep on the settee at the moment. Chris' – as I hopped off my bike and made for the house – ‘let her rest for a bit. She's had a bit of a fright. One of the horses bolted with her.'

‘Is she all right?'

‘She is now. But Chris, before the horse bolted and she lost control she was riding him as if she was in the Grand National. It's a good job I was on Mercury or I'd never have caught up with her. I have to tell you this. She could have killed herself.'

I steadied myself against the shed; leaned back on it and slid down till I was squatting on my haunches.

‘Now why should she want to do that?' Jill asked.

I couldn't answer her. I looked towards the house. My throat was a ball, a small spidery ball that hurt and stretched itself and curled up again.

‘Something's very wrong, Chris. Am I right?'

My bike was on its side, its wheel still spinning, slower now and slower. I fingered it round again.

‘It's something to do with you, as well?'

I nodded. Jill pitched her fork into the straw pile and lifted more into the stable and more again, swinging and lifting and tossing, her dark moving shadow slicing into the bright gold of the pile. She grunted with the effort, lift and swing, lift and swing. Her dark hair swung down across her eyes.

‘It's none of my business, and I may have got everything wrong, and forgive me if I have, Chris. But what your Helen did just now up on the moors looked to me like a pretty desperate attempt to get rid of a pregnancy.'

Jill made us some salad. None of us ate much. After we'd eaten she sat on the floor, hugging her knees. Helen and I were sitting side by side on the settee. Jill's front room has a huge wall-window looking out through trees to the paddock where the horses were grazing, and beyond that, to fields and moors. Even though it was warm there were still thin lines of snow threaded under the dry-stone walls, way up in the distance. We could hear the new leaves rustling just outside the window. The sun danced through them into the room.

‘Funny,' Jill said. ‘I gave up smoking years ago, and all of a sudden I want a cigarette.' She stretched her arms above her head in a long, tired yawn. ‘It's because I want to tell you both something, you know, and it's rather hard.' One of her dogs padded over to her, his paws clicking on the wooden floor, and pushed himself up next to her on her mat. She stroked his long ears. ‘I'm going to tell you something that I've never told anyone else. I'm going to keep your secret, by the way. Who you tell, and when and how, is your concern. Look for the good moment to come. And if you want help I'll give it. Okay?' We both nodded. ‘I want to tell you something about me. Another secret.'

‘I'm full of secrets,' Helen said. ‘I'll burst one day. Everyone tells me their secrets at school.'

‘Such as?' I asked her, surprised.

‘That'd be telling,' Helen smiled. She slipped her shoes off and curled up her legs on the settee, so she was leaning against me, warm and close. Jill, I noticed, had never looked so unsure of herself.

‘It was when Ginny was about three, and the boys were at school. I'd really got the stables just started, and it was something I'd always wanted to do. It was the year Mac left me. And the last thing he did was to give me another child.'

‘I didn't know…' I began. Helen put her hand on my arm. Jill wasn't watching us but was staring out of the
windows. The trees were doing a kind of silent dance outside. Their shadows flickered across the floor and the walls.

‘And I didn't want the child, you see. I didn't ask for it, and I didn't want it. I couldn't believe it when I found out I was pregnant. At that time it seemed like the worst thing in the world that could happen to me. So I went to the doctor, and he was very sympathetic. I believe I was pretty low, you know, with Mac leaving, and all the worry about the stables. I was shocked and unhappy. And he asked me if I wanted an abortion and I said yes.'

The silence in the room was like something you could touch and hold. Only the dog seemed to be breathing, deep in his sleep. ‘He asked me if I was sure and I said yes, yes, absolutely sure, one hundred per cent sure. I do not want this child. And I had the abortion. I didn't tell anyone – not Mac, not my sister, not my mum. No one. I went into hospital on my own and had it done. It was so quick, so easy. When I woke up from the operation I couldn't believe they'd done it. But they promised me they had. They even told me it was a boy. I didn't want to know that. And I came home and I got on with my life.'

The dog shifted and stretched its legs out, slobbering.

‘It was as if it had never happened. I got the stables going. And because I hadn't told anyone I had no one to share it with. I felt absolutely alone after that. There was no reason to cry. I didn't have the right to cry. I drove my sadness down so deep that I thought it would never surface again.'

There was a long silence. I would have thought she'd finished speaking, except that she didn't move, or turn her head away from watching the dancing leaves on the window.

She tapped on the floor with her fingers as if she was stubbing out a cigarette. ‘He would be nearly fifteen now.'

Dear Nobody,

After all, the good moment for speaking to Mum never came. I was stiff and aching for days but nothing else happened. I told my mum that my horse had bolted and that I had been very shaken. I can't say she was very sympathetic, but then, she doesn't like horses anyway. They make her sneeze, she says. I think she's frightened of them. ‘They're very fleshy things, horses,' she said to me one day, with a bit of a shudder, as if that made them nasty or disgusting or rude, even. But I know what she means. It's because they're so physical, so full of muscle and snorting breath, and they're so powerful. She doesn't know what it's like to feel that huge bulk of flesh moving under you, with you. So, when I told her that my horse had bolted, she just sniffed as if to say what did I expect, and left me to get over it. Sometimes I feel as if I'll never get near to my mum again. I want to be able to talk to her about things, the way Ruthlyn talks to her mum, but she doesn't invite it. I think she'd rather not know what's going on in my head. Sometimes when I try to talk to her she just walks away, as if she's slamming a door in my face. How strange it is to think that once I was just that tiny speck of being, moving inside her, just like you in me. Did she want me to be there? I wonder if she was ever close enough to Nan to talk about such things.

I don't know how I got through those few days after my ride on Nab. I'm ashamed. I can't believe what I tried to do out there on the moors. I almost feel as if I was taken over by some mad spirit; some cold, mad
other being. I don't know how to talk to Chris about it since that day at Jill's and I know that's hurting him, and he'll be sitting up in his room sad and angry, maybe, and confused, and I wish I could just say to him don't be upset, Chris, just let me work it out for myself, but I can't even bring myself to say that. So I just tell Mum to say that I don't want to speak to him. She probably thinks I've had a row, and maybe that pleased her a little. I'm too young to get serious, she says. What does it mean, to get serious? When I'm with Chris I'm laughing and smiling, we're doing crazy things, all the world's a joke. Well, that's how it used to be, anyway.

But today I sat at the table at lunch-time and refused my food because I just couldn't face it. I'd done that every night this week, I think. This time Mum gave me such a look that I went cold inside, such a strange, quiet, questioning look. She passed my plate over to Robbie without a word and then sent him off to town with Dad to buy trainers. They both grumbled a lot about that, wasting their Saturday afternoon at the shops. Dad and Robbie get on well. I was thinking they'll enjoy it when they get there, and then I realized that I was going to be in the house alone with Mum.

As soon as they went out I ran upstairs to my room. Mum followed me up. She came straight in without knocking and she stood with her hands in her pockets, just watching me, saying nothing, and I knew that this was the moment, right or not. I fumbled wretchedly through the things in my schoolbag, as if somewhere inside it were the words that I needed to say, if only I could fish out the right ones and arrange them in some sort of logical order.