Go to Sleep (2 page)

The nurse came back in with a doctor or a surgeon, a man in a white gown with a full day’s stubble. Neither of them even glanced at me. The nurse pointed at the screen and the doctor nodded. He muttered something to the nurse, gave her another curt nod and turned sharply, left as quickly as he could. Left it to her.

But then she turned the monitor round. Jesus! She was turning the monitor round so I could see it and the cruelty of it almost knocked me out.

Her voice brightened. ‘Now, what we’re looking at here . . .’ She pointed to a greyish, wispy mass, like the cloud cover on a weather report’s satellite photograph. ‘This is Baby, here.’

I almost choked. She hadn’t said the foetus was alive, but surely she wouldn’t be showing me if . . .

‘Is it?’

She smiled. ‘Baby’s fine. It’s a little small but it’s just . . .’

And the moment I saw it, that tiny pulse on the monitor, the struggling mass no bigger than a kidney bean, that was it. That was me, gone – smashed with a love more ferocious than anything I’d ever known. I knew then, where I was heading, where I’d been heading my whole life. I was more certain of it than I had been of anything before. When I was finally able to stand, to function, I thanked the nurse. She looked stunned when I tried to hug her.

My head spinning with ideas, plans, contradictions, I walked automatically, instinctively, towards the Anglican Cathedral. There, my mind might slow down. There, I could be close to Mum. I sat out on the café’s terrace, the only customer on a bleak and beautiful February afternoon, gazing out over that spectacular vista. Trees,
endless sky, silent graveyards below. Gambier Terrace directly opposite, where this began. Where it ended. I should tell him. It was right that he should know. I could call him. Or I could just walk over there now, knock on the door and break the news to him. But that’s how it would be, wouldn’t it? I’d be telling him something he really didn’t want to hear. Dad was right about that part – that’ll be why he did what he did. Held him off. Held him back. And besides – what if they’d offered Ruben the job? He’s on the verge of a new life. He needs it. Not that they’d give him the job – a black lad from Liverpool 8 working in a place like that. But for my part, I can do my bit.

I felt my eyes well up, and I knotted my fingers tightly round my cup. Yet the overpowering sense of destiny that rinsed me through and through came without fear, without sentiment. Calmly, with a cold, still certitude, I made my big decision; and it was easy. It was clear. I was going to do this thing by myself – all the way. I shivered and sipped my coffee, smiling to myself.

*

By the time I reach the park I’m perspiring wildly. The baby’s feet are pushing up into my chest, its head bearing down on my bladder. I need to pee, and fast. I steal a quick glance either side and duck into the bushes. Squatting uncomfortably, it seems to go on for ever – one
solid jet of foul-smelling yellow, a stench so sharp you could nick yourself on it. These last few weeks I’ve felt as though a separate pregnancy has inhabited my bladder, so tight and cumbersome has it become. I shake myself, sigh out loud with relief. The baby relaxes, reclines into the extra legroom and the pressure eases on my lungs.

When I emerge from the bushes there’s a group of Bangladeshi lads setting up a five-a-side goal on the grass; down the other end, their Somali opposition. Their goal-keeper barks instructions, his head almost too large for his slender body. I park myself on the grass and watch the match for a while. The Somali boys are fast and skilful, but the Bangladeshis chase every ball like shadows, harrying the Somalis for possession. They take the lead from a speculative shot that squirms under the Somali keeper’s dive. His defenders smirk to one another. Their captain is not a popular fellow.

It’s easy to take this area for granted: the park, the brio, the buzz of Liverpool 8. Toxteth may have shed some of its shabby glamour over the years as new housing gradually replaces the peeling old Georgian terraces, but the charm of Princes Park, its vibrant mix of race and religion, still prevails. It’s easy to imagine why Dad fell so hard for the place, why he decided to stay on long after university, and after the riots and recessions had sucked the vim and verve out of the barrio. He would have known Toxteth as it was – the blues and shebeens
and exotic-sounding drinking dens. He would have loved all that, Dad – newly arrived from Huddersfield, the bright-eyed student of Tropical Medicine discovering a whole new world of exotica, right there in the side streets and back alleys of Liverpool 8. And our move to the other side of the park, to the safe and sanitised enclave of St Michaels, would have snuffed out a little piece of his soul – I see that, now. Mum, a Scouser, shared Dad’s Egerton Street pad, but she never shared his romantic view of her city. The dapper old Trinidadian dudes sat playing chess in the middle of the Boulevard; the myriad shades of skin and robe, and different twangs of accent; the whiff of ganja on the night breeze; none of that made its mark on her. To Mum, Toxteth was lawless, a law unto itself. It was no place to raise a family. We were moving, and that was that.

So move we did, to the rambling and decadent pile that, bit by bit, became our South Lodge home. For the first few months we lived in just three rooms as Dad gamely but hopelessly grappled with a programme of repairs that would have taxed a seasoned craftsman. Mum fled the bombsite for swimming or knitting or Irish Dancing in town. And when the big Tesco superstore opened, that was her, in her element; shopping on her doorstep, on demand.

‘Just nipping out for . . .’ elicited knowing smirks from Dad and I – and signalled the start of another round of
Me and Dad time. I would stand by and pass him sandpaper, turpentine, paint brushes – I
loved
the smell of turpentine – while Dad waxed lyrical about his adoptive city.

God, but I loved those times together. I felt special. Dad and I were mates, comrades, conspirators. He told me things he’d never even told Mum. Tales of the city; tales of Liverpool 8. How he played backgammon at the Somali Club; how the sky had flamed red for a week after the riots; how the cadavers of his beloved clubs and speakeasies had crumbled to dust in front of his very eyes.

‘Your mother would never come to any of those places with me, you know?’ he’d sigh, as though it were one of life’s great mysteries how a daughter of the city remained immune to its charms. His eyes seemed to get dewy when he got wistful like that.

‘Are
any
of them still there?’

‘Not really, darling. Well, I mean, The Somali is there in spirit. There’s still a Somali Centre just by the roundabout up by Princes Park.’

‘Do you still play backgammon there?’

‘I should do, shouldn’t I? Tell you what – I’ll take you one day.’

But one day never came. Somehow it was fine for Dad to romance about his days as a student
boulevardier
yet he’d always toe the line when Mum came down heavy with yet more rules and realism.

‘You do
not
go one yard past school, you hear me?’
she said when they got me my first grown-up bike. ‘And you do not set foot in that Princes Park. Hear me?’

Dad would drop his head and bite his lip; I came to understand that what he said was often different to how things really were.

These last few months, since the Bean’s imminent arrival has focused my every thought, I’m surprised by my growing sympathy for Mum’s take on things. It’s brand new to me, this – thinking for someone other than myself. For sure, I have loved my flat –
duplex,
if we’re being smug about it – from the moment I first clapped eyes on it. Top floor of a classic Belvidere Road mansion block, split-level with a narrow flight of steps to its atelier and a huge great window out on to the roof, a view of the stars and the park and the river way beyond. This was the garret I’d fantasised about since my teens. I said yes there and then, offered the asking price and moved in. At last, after everything, I’d found
home.
But do I want to raise my baby here? Not sure.

For now, this is where we are, and this is where we start. This is where we started, all those years ago.

It was the hottest day of summer and Dad had finally ground down Mum over taking me to Carnival.

‘She’s fourteen, for God’s sake, Rich!’

‘And what? Fourteen’s too young to take my little girl to the fair?’

‘It is NOT a fair!’ she snapped.

‘Oh? And what is it, then?’ The self-righteous gleam behind his specs, goading her to say something inappropriate; something he could seize upon.

‘You know exactly what I mean, Richard.’

‘Do not. I’m serious. Articulate your fears.’

I sighed and intervened.

‘Look. If you’re worried I’ll come home a ganja freak, I’ve already tried it and it made me sick.’ I winked at Dad, just in case he thought I was being serious. ‘It’s all part of my education, Mum,’ I said. ‘Remember?’

That was the in-joke between Mum and I, how everything vaguely edgy Dad tried to foist upon me was a ‘part of my education’. Along with our regular trips to Manchester, where some dense Polish art flick at the Cornerhouse would be followed by a lacerating curry in Rusholme, Dad had tried gamely to inculcate me in the ways of the broad left intelligentsia. Ballet, experimental theatre at the Unity (Mum dismissed this as ‘shouting’), afternoons spent browsing the imports at Probe Records. This outing to Liverpool 8 for Carnival – just up the road, yet a world away – was just another crack at broadening my horizons. Yet he got it wrong, Dad – as dads do. While he was salivating over the seismic curries of Rusholme, I was gazing out of the window at the flotsam and jetsam of Saturday night in Banglatown; the more he pushed King Tubby at me, the more I fell for Blur. The thrill of the thing for any teenager is the thrill of stumbling upon it yourself. And that’s how it was when I met Ruben.

From the moment we set foot through the park’s ornate green gates, I was beguiled. The smells: ackee, calf’s foot curry and, yes, the sweet, sensual herb, soft and mellow here, weirdly pungent there, every step taking me deeper and deeper into a new and wondrous place. The sounds, too: throbbing bass, gospel choir, steel drums. The atmosphere made my head spin. And the faces: all those varying shades of brown and black and yellow. I had never known
so many gorgeous skin tones could exist; burnt copper, blue-black, clay brown and aubergine purple all in the first minute of arrival, all thronging the food stalls. Above all, I was spellbound by the boys. To me, they were otherworldly, fantastical. These were kids that lived a bus ride from our riverside home, yet they were alien to me. Even their language was new, different to the Scouse dialects I knew from school; this was lyrical, a lilting cadence to their back-slang that made them sound a million miles from here, from home.

And the swagger of them! Their raw self-confidence sparked a frisson in my loins. I squeezed my bum clamtight as three teenage boys jostled past, to stop the heat between my legs finding me out. Dad noticed nothing of this; I doubt the young bucks even registered with him as he walked and stopped, walked and stopped, pushing up on to the balls of his brogue-clad feet as he scanned the crowd for comrades. Had he paid more attention he might have recorded the scene, as I did – and as I recall it now – in meticulous slow motion as the last of the boys passed by and turned and smiled; a generous and promising and beautiful smile. A shockingly beautiful boy. Ruben.

He made some wisecrack as he joined a group of lads smoking outside one of the food trailers. He was wearing the standard check chef’s trousers with a t-shirt emblazoned with the Big Mamma’s cauldron logo in red, gold and green. I knew the café well, of course, Dad having
had a phase of taking us there every week before the university crowd cottoned on and began colonising the place.

Juddering bass and echo clattered out as we got nearer to the lads and, to my horror, Dad started a cringe-making skank routine, ducking his head into his shoulders, popping it out again, yard-stepping and clicking his fingers. The lads started smirking and nudging each other, but Ruben seemed lost to it all. Ruben was staring at me.

I was a gauche kid with pale skin and wild hair, too dark to be ginger but nowhere near rich enough to be auburn. I was a plain, gawky redhead. Yet, in spite of my ordinariness, I was aware of what power I
did
have; the power that came just from being female, from having tits and long legs and being so young. I knew it, without quite yet owning it. Since sprouting breasts, since starting my periods, I had sensed that adolescence, for all its attendant pains and yearnings, was a potent force. And even though Ruben’s eyes were cool and appraising, I knew that they were not poking fun at me; rather, he was parting my lips, snapping the buttons off my tight cotton shirt, fingering the outline of my bra, gently tugging it down over the taut hummocks of flesh. We stood there, eyeing each other, and the moment detached itself and hung above us, backlit and made elegiac by a pale Mersey sun, the waft of sensimilla and the sexual charge of a distant sub-bass.

And then he broke it, brought us back to real time with another smile, more direct, and I knew then that I wanted what he wanted. I had to have him.

We spent the afternoon fencing around each other, me awaiting an opportunity to flee my father, him the chance to slip away from work and the snag of his freeloading mates. And then the sky stretched up high and started to fade, hazy purple-pink as the sun slipped away, and then deep blue and silver as it rolled itself out across the city like a Moroccan rug. The mood darkened with it – more urgent now, a nastiness in the air, jostling and parrying, gangs of boys and girls haphazard as they lurched this way and that, some laughing, others with faces set, ready for action. I was tingling, wild with excitement, yet I sensed a change in Dad, too. With the twilight went his levity, his constant glancing around ruled now by misgivings more than a surfeit of choice. My heart sank as I realised he was steering us not to the food shack, for the goat curry he’d been rhapsodising about, but towards the gates.