The More You Ignore Me (7 page)

1979, aged 10

Nan Wildgoose threw back
her head and roared with laughter.

‘That
head nurse’s face when we pushed him into the office, tied him up and took the
keys,’ she said. ‘Looked like ‘e thought we was going to kill ‘im. What was ‘e
called now? Some bloody dull name like Andy or Dave, wasn’t it?’

‘Steve,’
said Alice, who had rather liked the flat, emotionless Steve and his ability
to react to everything with the same passive expression. ‘But what did Mum
think?’ she asked. Alice got most of her information from Nan Wildgoose and
although she had heard this story many times, the retelling of it by her nan
was always entertaining and heroic.

‘Oh,
your mother was completely out of it,’ said Nan Wildgoose. ‘They’d filled her
up with drugs, she didn’t know where she was. Wobbly just threw her over his
shoulders like a sack of spuds and we opened the doors and ran for it.’

‘Did
everyone else get out too?’ said Alice.

‘Oh
Jesus, no,’ said Nan. ‘We didn’t want them running around raping and
pillaging.’

‘There
was one,’ said Grandpap, waking briefly from an elongated snore by the fire.

‘You’re
right, Bert,’ said Nan. ‘Now I think about it, there was that woman who told
Big’ead she was a member of staff and she was so convincing ‘e let her wander
through. Why ‘e didn’t cotton on that a real member of staff might ‘ave been a
bit upset we was stealing a patient, I don’t know. It was all so quick, I
s’pose.’

‘You
had to take Mum back, though, didn’t you?’ said Alice as if she was describing
some shoddy goods from a supermarket.

‘Yes,
we fucking did,’ said Nan, getting cross as she recalled the defeat suffered by
the Wildgoose family at the hands of society. ‘Not without a bloody brilliant
fight first, though, was it, Bert?’

Bert
grinned. ‘No, love,’ he said and dropped back to sleep.

Locally,
it had been dubbed the Siege of Dodds Cottage, the name of the mean little
cottage occupied by the Wildgoose family The residents of the village still
talked about it now and again when the weather wasn’t interesting enough. The
local police. with reinforcements from Hereford, once they had familiarised
themselves with Wobbly and Bighead’s criminal records, had approached the
cottage mob-handed with ten policemen. The senior policeman, who had managed to
find a loudhailer in a fusty old cupboard at the station, had taken up a
position some twenty yards away from the cottage.

Inside,
the Wildgoose family, if they were perfectly honest, had already begun to
regret their decision to kidnap Gina from the hospital. It had only been one
night, yet as the drugs had started to wear off, they could see quite plainly
that Gina was not her normal feisty and free-spirited self.

Added
to this, as Wobbly so succinctly put it, ‘We are not watching the fucking
weather report again. We’ve seen it six times today’

‘Still,’
said Nan Wildgoose, ‘we couldn’t let them think we were giving in easily so
your Uncle Bighead stuck his shotgun out of the bedroom window and shouted —
what did he shout, Bert?’

‘Get
back or I’ll blow your f…’ he thought better of swearing in front of a
ten-year-old. ‘Get back or I’ll blow your blooming head off!’

‘He
didn’t, though, did he, Nan?’ said Alice, although she knew the answer.

‘Course
not, you silly old sausage,’ said Nan Wildgoose. ‘It was only to frighten the
buggers.’

‘That
social worker dived like a good’un, though, Violet, do you remember?’ said
Grandpap. ‘Got a face full of cow shit, as I remember.’

‘Yes,
and a couple of big spuds on the ‘ead,’ said Nan, ‘from Wobbly He always was a
good shot.’

‘Tell
me the end again,’ said Alice.

‘Well,
there was a bit of a stand-off,’ said Nan Wildgoose, who spent her time reading
a lot of
True Crime
magazines, ‘and then eventually they surrounded us
and we had to give up your mum to them. She wanted to go really We knew she
wasn’t right, she knew she wasn’t right, and although we’d thought your dad was
being a right scumbag having her locked up, when we saw how she was and what
she was saying, we thought it best she had more treatment and went to
hospital.’

‘What
was she like? What was she saying?’ said Alice, who had never quite managed to
elicit this information on previous occasions.

A rare
guilty queasiness swept through Nan Wildgoose, who was well aware that Keith
had attempted to protect Alice from the worst excesses of the Wildgooses’
behaviour and Gina’s illness.

‘That’s
for your dad to tell you, sweetpea,’ she said. ‘But your mum went out waving a
white pillowcase of surrender and they carried her off back to St Mary’s where
she stayed for the next two months and then came back to us.’

‘But it
wasn’t her, was it, Violet?’ said Bert.

‘Was it
someone else?’ said Alice, wide-eyed, conjuring up images of gothic plotting in
the hospital and Frankensteinian experimentation.

‘No,
what he means, love, is your mum was different —quieter, no spark to her any
more, all the Wildgoose wild-ness gone.

All for
the best,’ said Bert and the conversation turned to more prosaic topics like
what was for tea and how Alice was doing at school.

What
they had said was true, though. Gina had become a watered-down version of her
previous self. Controlled by long-term medication which she received once a
month at the hospital, she seemed to have had the sharp edges shaved off. She
no longer mentioned Ted Fairfax or watched the weather forecast in her
previously agitated way, but sat demurely in the corner of the room, the muttering
television a constant backdrop as she smoked, or twisted a piece of string in
and out of her fingers, the only part of her body that seemed restless and free
now.

Keith
could see that some flames had been extinguished on the blazing bonfire but for
the most part he was relieved. Gina had not been an easy person to live with
and the delightful flashes of anger and excitement he had once loved had become
coarse and wearing as her illness had progressed. Now, at least, the family
home was peaceful and their lives ticked over, thankfully, with little incident
apart from contact with his wife’s family which was always fraught with weirdness
and occasional threat.

Keith’s
parents had tried to persuade him to leave Gina. They wanted him back near them
in a little semi, furnished with a dull and obedient wife and a child who
didn’t stand in the corner of the room wordlessly observing them and honouring
them with the odd monosyllable.

‘That
child is a bit odd,’ Keith’s mum, Jennifer, had tactlessly said to him on a
number of occasions. ‘She needs taking in hand. Why can’t she chat nicely and
dress prettily like your cousin Lesley’s two?’

Keith
thought that cousin Lesley’s pale-skinned, gawky offspring were as dull as they
come and that rather than dressing prettily, they both looked like anorexic
toilet roll covers. He waved his mother’s comments away with a humorous remark,
but her words stayed in his head until eventually he booked an appointment with
Marie Henty to talk about Alice.

Keith’s
name in the appointments book of the gargantuan receptionist at the surgery
where Marie worked lifted her spirits as her eye ran through the usual gamut of
varicose veins, chronic coughs and the collected complaints of the
over-seventies. She wanted to think that perhaps Keith had just missed her and
wanted a chat. Gina’s equilibrium had been fairly well maintained with monthly
anti-psychotic injections, with few side effects, apart from a general slowness,
some weight gain and a bum like a pin cushion, so Marie had rarely seen Keith
over the past five years. Yet she had rejected approaches from a number of
unsuitable suitors in the hope that one day, like Mr Rochester in
Jane Eyre,
he would rid himself of his mad wife and fall into her arms. But it seemed
Keith wanted to talk about Alice. Marie rarely saw Alice but she had noted
sadly that her mother’s illness seemed to have turned her in on herself; the
once sparky little girl was now a somewhat sullen and unrewarding miniature
adult.

‘Should
I see someone about her, do you think?’ Keith asked worriedly ‘I mean, how
likely is it she’ll get what Gina’s got?’

‘Oh,
Keith,’ said Marie, her stomach doing uncontrolled fluttering, ‘it’s so hard to
say at this point. Shall I talk to her and let you know what I think?’

‘Would
you, please?’ said Keith. ‘I’d be so grateful and perhaps it would put my mind
at rest. Just informal like, if you can. I don’t want to bring her here — she
wouldn’t want to come anyway.

All
right then,’ said Marie. ‘I’ll try and catch her around and about and see what
I can do.’

‘Thanks.’
Keith squeezed Marie’s hand and the fluttering dropped lower.

Alice, Mark and Karen were
all draped over the broad oak tree at the end of the school lane one evening
some days later. They had been talking about building a den which none of the
adults could find, to which they could escape whenever high emotion boiled over
in any of their households. Alice was at her most happy and verbose with Mark
and Karen, both refugees from the seemingly traditional happy nuclear family
that populated the Bisto adverts and for which both of them yearned with an
intensity that would have shocked their parents.

‘I
could ask my uncles to help,’ said Alice, who had very little understanding of
the pure unadulterated terror even the mention of their names had on most of
the village.

‘Nah,
we should do it, then it’s ours.’ Mark tried to say it as nonchalantly as
possible to disguise the squeak in his voice that always appeared when he was
scared.

‘Yes,’
agreed Karen. ‘It’s got to be only ours and if anyone comes near it we’ll kill
them.’

‘Yes,’
said Alice, ‘and we’ll cut off their heads and put them on big sticks to scare
everyone.’

‘Brilliant,’
said Mark, thinking of Matthew Stephens, who had called him a homo in the
playground that day because he wouldn’t play hitting girls’ legs with a stick.

‘Oh
look, here comes the doctor,’ said Karen.

Marie
Henty was trying to look as if she was strolling up the lane for no other
reason than pure enjoyment. She was thirty years old and not bad looking, but
little did she know that Mark had put her age at about fifty recently and the
others had concurred.

‘Hello,
you three,’ she said.

‘Hello,’
they said.

‘Alice,‘
said Marie, ‘I was wondering if we could have a chat.’

Alice
began to batten down the social hatches.

‘Why?’
she said suspiciously.

‘Oh,
just wanted to see if things are OK.’ said Marie as airily as she could.

‘I’m
playing with my friends,’ said Alice stubbornly.

‘Just
ten minutes,’ said Marie.

‘All
right.’ said Alice. She climbed down from the tree.

‘Let’s
walk for a bit,’ said Marie.

They
headed up the hill towards the crop of oaks that stood at the top, flushed with
mistletoe.

‘How’s
your mum?’ said Marie.

‘All
right,’ said Alice.

‘And
your dad?’

‘He’s
all right too,’ said Alice.

‘And
what about you?’

‘I’m
all right,’ said Alice.

‘School
OK?’

‘Yes.’

This
monosyllabic torture continued for ten minutes until Marie, exhausted by
Alice’s responses, said brightly, ‘Well, I’m glad to hear it. Shall we go back
and find your friends?’

Alice
looked enormously relieved. ‘Yes please,’ she said, and they headed back down
the hill to where Mark and Karen were still hanging in the branches of the big
tree.

Whoops
and cheers greeted them and Marie said her goodbyes, thinking to herself that
she had no more ability to talk to ten-year-olds than she had to the pigeons
that flocked to her bird table and stole the food intended for the smaller
birds.

That
night, heart slightly aflutter, she phoned Keith.

‘I
couldn’t really get anything out of her, I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Don’t
worry,’ said Keith, slightly disappointed. ‘She’s like that with all of us and
I suppose I could hardly have expected her to suddenly open up and tell you her
deepest darkest thoughts.’

‘We’ll
keep an eye,’ said Marie. ‘She seems fine but there may be stuff going on
underneath.’