The Generation Game (19 page)

I resort to crying. A flood I can’t hold back however hard I bite my lip and dig my nails in my palms. I am crying for Helena. I am crying for Philippa. I am crying for this poor baby who
can’t possibly be real. But, according to the chemist somewhere on the other side of Torquay, most-definitely-one-hundred-percent
is
real and can no longer be ignored.

You would think it would be Wink or Bob that I turn to in the end, when I realise I can’t do this alone. After all, they love me no matter what. But somehow I
can’t. Bob is happily engaged and caught up in his future life with Wonder Woman. Wink is going steadily downhill and even poor old Andy can be too much for her lap these days, and Captain
too loud. There is the possibility of Linda or Auntie Sheila, but if I confide in one, the other will be offended. So I make my way down to the library one lunch time, on a day when I know my Tudor
queen will be there. Miss Parry takes one look at me as I sidle up to the desk and whisks me off to a store room stuffed with books that almost distracts me from my mission impossible for a
moment.

She sits me down on a chair, gives me a glass of water and I am back in the school library, the smell of polish and the feet of mini storm-troopers marching out to play. But I am not a little
girl. I am most definitely not seven-years-old. I am a woman and I have to take responsibility. So I tell Miss Parry my barely-concealed secret and she doesn’t tut or chide. She pats my hand
and says, ‘dear, dear’. I’ve done my part and from now on she seizes control, handing it over to doctors and teachers and finally to Bob who looks like he’s discovered the
world isn’t the place he thought it was. Which, of course, is true for all of us at some point in our lives.

The end of term comes and goes without me taking part in the usual festivities or merry-making. At home, if I walk in a room, I catch a look between Bob and Wink that I am
unable to fathom. I hear whisperings behind closed door, sometimes a raised voice, and I know that I have created this tense atmosphere that has never existed here before. Everything is changing
and it is all my stupid fault. The relief of telling my family is spoilt with shame and guilt and knowledge.

And there is no escape. No release. I can’t lie cocooned on the sofa like Lucas; I am not ill. I can’t go out with Cheryl; I can’t do any of the things a girl of my age should
be doing. No more sitting in the back of Doug’s Mini sharing chips and chocolate with Nathan. No more swimming in the Rainbow Hotel. No more hair crimping or
Smash Hits
. I can’t
even tell Cheryl, the closest I have to a best friend. I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to see anyone. So I stay in my room, not listening to music, not reading, not able to
sleep.

I dread the return to school after the holidays. What’s the point? I’ll be having the baby in a few months.

‘She should be able to stay at home,’ Wink tells Bob. ‘There’s no sense packing her off to school in her condition.’

‘She should go to school for as long as she can,’ Bob insists, for once the stern father, putting both his feet down firmly. ‘Her education’s important. More important
than ever.’

Maybe he is right but I sense he is trying to punish me in some way, whether he means to or not. I’ve let him down. And however many times they ask me who the father of the baby is, I
never tell them. So he gets none of the blame. That privilege is all mine.

In the end, it is all for nothing. On Christmas Eve, I wake up early with the breath snatched out of me. I’ve been kicked in the guts from an unseen boot. And then again.
And again. The pain is real, more real than anything that has happened so far in my life, but the pain is somehow not happening to me. I’ve stepped outside of my body and float up and away
somewhere. Somewhere by the window where the curtains flicker in the draught. I’ve become someone else. Someone familiar and yet someone who’s always lurked on the edge of my
consciousness. I’ve become the Cavalier. I see through his steely eyes. I see a young woman curled up on the bed, hugging her stomach, cradling her unseen child that is trying for all its
worth to be born early, too soon. I hear this young woman’s screams. Watch her father run into the room, panic in his eyes, arms flailing, holding his daughter who looks impossibly young,
though this is a grown-up’s pain, a grownup’s horror. She is left alone and then sometime later there’s the sound of a siren screeching, footsteps on the stairs. The Cavalier
floats alongside the girl as she is carried downstairs by two men in uniform, out the back way and into the ambulance, all the while sobbing with pain, with inevitability. The Cavalier covers her
with a blanket, gives her oxygen, holds a sick bowl for her to vomit into, and carries her across Torquay in a whirr of noise and light. He pushes her through heavy metal doors, bumps her along
corridors, distracts her from the squeak of lino, the splatters of sick. Then he leaves her. And Bob’s face is there instead, holding her hand. Then nothing. There is nothing.

This baby has gone. It will never be. It is lost to the world. As lost as Helena. As lost as Lucas. As dead as Albert Morris.

I wake up, empty. It is over. I am just Philippa again. I am told I’ve had a lucky escape. I am told my life has been saved by the men in uniform and the doctors and
nurses at the hospital.

I don’t feel lucky. My baby has gone before it ever really got going. It has never breathed a breath or cried a cry. But then what do I know about babies? I know
nothing. And how could I possibly be a mother when I have no mother of my own. Maybe it is a lucky escape after all.

I am technically still a child, the doctors and nurses make that perfectly clear. I should be kept on the children’s ward but, given the sensitive circumstances, I am shunted into a side
room. After an immeasurable length of time, I am allowed out of bed to walk to the loo, a challenge in itself. After this Herculean task is accomplished, I shuffle back down the corridor to my
room, but take a wrong turning, though maybe someone makes me go that way, who am I to say, she-who-knows-nothing.

My wrong turning brings me into the children’s ward, the place they’ve been trying to keep me from. There are children of all shapes and sizes and illnesses, sitting, lying, eating,
sleeping in beds livened up with shiny tinsel and glittery stars in an attempt at Yuletide celebrations. I stop at the foot of the bed where Dick Whittington once stood over Lucas, on his way to
London. (He’d have more luck in the city than Helena, Lucas or me. I never want to go there again.)

Now there is a small girl in Lucas’ place, her leg strung up and a mass of cards hanging all around her. Get Well Soon, they instruct her. And she will get well soon, no doubt. Her leg
will heal and she’ll go home and run around and live a happy life, and grow up and get herself a husband and bear children of her own one day in the future.

Lucas didn’t get well. He was taken from that bed to the mortuary and then to his grave. I don’t know where they put my baby. I don’t want to think about that.

I am brought back to a home stripped of Christmas. It has been and gone and passed me by completely. A new term is approaching but I can’t go back to school. Not yet. Bob
listens to Wink and doesn’t push me into it.

‘Next week, Philippa,’ he says. ‘You mustn’t leave it too long.’

‘Maybe,’ says Wink. ‘See how you go.’

I lie silently on the sofa, the telly on, a blanket covering me. I can’t face my room. My bed. For when night comes and I close the curtains, who knows what I’ll be able to see? Then
a
Blue Peter
special comes on and I cry again. I cry so much that Bob wonders if he should call the doctor. But Wink gives me a shot of her brandy instead and then somehow manages to scoop
up old Andy from the hearth and place him gently beside me on the sofa, so I can cuddle him, listen to him purr, feel his thick, wiry fur on my face.

Days pass. The sun rises and sets in a muddle of time that has no meaning except for when the television is on to guide me. Some days I eat a little of what Bob puts in front
of me. Sometimes it goes cold and congealed and is only fit for the bin. Sometimes I can sleep. Sometimes all I can do for a whole day is cry. But I have at least ventured into my room. Which is as
it has always been. It if weren’t for the gaping hole inside me, I could almost make myself believe nothing happened to me. It happened to someone else. Like it was something off the telly.
On an episode of
Angels
. A news item. Though I don’t kid myself this is an important event in the grand scheme of things. But television helps. Television is more real than life at the
moment. I can see why Lucas was so transfixed by it. His eyes like pebbles washed up on the beach.

I am grateful for Bob for never saying it was for the best. Maybe it was, but we’ll never know that for sure. Instead, what he does is show me the love of a father. The
love of a parent who feels his child’s pain as sharply as if it were his own. He drops the whole school thing and tells the Head I’ll be back in September to repeat my lower sixth. And
he pops down to the travel agent in Castle Circus and buys two plane tickets. One for himself and one for me. We are going to Canada. We are going to hunt down my mother and… well, we
don’t know what. But we know it is something that has to be done at long last.

‘What about Linda?’ I ask, as we prop up the counter together during a quiet run in the shop.

He looks sheepish.

‘She’s too busy with work,’ he comes up with eventually.

And I don’t ask any more. It doesn’t matter. I look round Bob’s News and try to capture in my head the place where I’ve spent so much of my life: the shelves of papers
and magazines and comics that bank one side of the shop; the cigarettes and tobacco – and everything you could possibly need to make a hobby out of smoking – displayed behind the
counter; the chocolate and chewing gum and cough sweets; the grockle souvenirs, including those paper flags that wrench my heart from its mooring, set me adrift, whenever I see a child buy a packet
with their pocket money; the local maps; the batteries; the plasters and safety pins and emergency sewing kits; the Mills and Boon rack that you can whizz round so all you see is a blur of
petticoats and brunettes; the bell that pings every single time the door opens; the sound of the kettle boiling from the kitchenette out the back; the smell of print and sugar and old rain; the
jars of sweets glittering like jewels, the first thing I ever set eyes on in here. A treasure trove. My home.

But still.

We are going to Canada!

You made it. You made it this far and I will make sure you carry on all the way. You may only be small – like Lucas – but you have filled that gap, that empty space
left by all those people I have lost. You have filled the minutes in the day when I used to stare, in the manner of Auntie Nina, into the middle distance and pretend I was Someone Else. The hours
at night when I used to lose myself in the pattern of my curtains. You have filled me with emotion, worry and love, so that there is not room for much more right now. But they tell me you are a
special baby for a different reason. You are on the Special List. A man has been down to see you, sent by Dr Standing (Auntie Cheryl to you) who I spoke to yesterday on the phone. ‘I know the
man for the job,’ she said. ‘If there’s anything wrong, he’ll find it and he’ll put it right.’ And here he is, poking and prodding and adding to your canon of
notes, listening to your heart beat through a stethoscope. Your little heart that doesn’t quite beat to the rhythm of my own.

You have a murmur. A possible hole in the heart. He says they can fix it. But I know without a shadow of a doubt that if anything happens to you, it is my own heart that will be broken beyond
repair.

Three weeks later, I am feeling much stronger and I am in my bedroom packing an old suitcase with clean underwear plus all of my warm clothes, which include a new parka
purchased by Linda especially for the trip. The chill that she is anticipating in Canada can’t be anything like as cold as the atmosphere in a room when both she and Bob are in it at the same
time – not that that is very often these days. Linda is always busy-busy, always driving from A to B and right through to the end of the alphabet and back, checking up on her underlings who
can never hope to be as efficient as their boss. But she isn’t efficient as far as Bob is concerned. He is always left in her pending tray, never quite got around to. Massages and Chinese
takeaways have become a rare event indeed.

Still, Linda has made an effort to help me out on this trip. She thinks seeing my mother will help me get over not being a mother myself. I can’t think clearly enough to decide whether she
is right or not but I am grateful for the packing checklist which I’ve almost got through when I hear Bob’s cough-shout making its way up the stairs.

‘Someone to see you,’ it says. ‘I’m sending them up.’

For a moment I wonder if it is. But it isn’t. The footsteps are too light and determined. I am nonetheless very pleased to see Miss Parry pop her head round the door. She’s brought
me a book from the library. It has a maple leaf on the front.

‘It’s most comprehensive,’ she says, handing it over. Then she gives me a smile that inspires valour and courage and the desire to step forth across the Atlantic and discover
all the how’s and why’s of my mother’s disappearance. Now is the time for answers.

‘Send me a postcard.’

Then she is gone, leaving the Cavalier fluttering his eyelashes in the breeze created by her departure. I hope she’s left some of her strength of character behind, just a little so that I
can pack it in my suitcase and tick it off my checklist.

Two days later, after another stay at Toni’s flat (her brother nowhere to be seen) and a taxi ride to Heathrow that Linda would have loved, Bob and I wait to board our
plane. He buys us both a cup of tea and, to everyone around us, we must look like any other father and daughter going on holiday. But you never know what’s going on with other people. You
never know.