Falling FallingYou might say this was predestined. It happened because I caught the fag end of a TV documentary in the pub. Ten minutes later and I’d have missed it. And then I wouldn’t have had a clue. Before I decided to kill her you see, my position was fuck her. She doesn’t want to know me, I don’t want to know her. I’ll never give her the satisfaction of imagining I’ve wasted even ten seconds’ thought on her.
But I happened to arrive for work early. And there was this worthy female bleating on about adoption. With a couple of live oh-yes-please-expose-my-private-parts-to-six-million-viewers guinea pigs. Adoptees. Trying to trace their mamas. And the first thing they did was to write to the Office of National Statistics in Southport, and that’s how they got their birth certificates.
You don’t have a birth certificate, you see. Not like any other human being. All you have is an adoption certificate, a nice little fake, a bit of plastic panelling tacked over the void.
So I thought well it’s a gift. A nudge. I’ll write to them and see. What the hell. I might be the illegitimate daughter of Mary Whitehouse, you never know.
It was drip-feed for about a year then because I wasn’t pushing and people in those places are basically paid to be retarded newts. Then there’s the bureaucratic obstacle course; I even had to see a counsellor and convince the sucker I was sane.
However, in the end I got my hands on two photocopies: the birth certificate (Susan Lovage) and a page from someone’s notepad, social worker or police, about finding me. The date at the top was 1968 October 3. The day after my birthday.
I was found in a cardboard box on the doorstep of Camden High Street post office. Found by the cleaner at 6.30 a.m. I was wrapped in a towel and I was newborn.
So where did my mother expel me? In a bed in a nearby house? Squatting in the bushes in the park? In a pub’s back-yard toilet after closing time?
When did she put me there? Midnight? 3 a.m.? Or was it someone else, maybe? Her mother. Yes, what if she had a mother, who helped her get rid of me?
She chucked me away but didn’t want me to die. That’s the puzzle. The towel, the box, the post office. Maybe she even knew how early the cleaner came. Chose the post office above the bank or the greengrocer’s, for that reason.
Or was it because she really wanted rid: not just chuck me in the bin; post me. Send me far.
They alerted the local hospitals. She pitched up at Casualty that afternoon, bleeding too much. Was she alone? It doesn’t say. It says she couldn’t keep me, she gave me for adoption. Gave. They got her name and address on a birth certificate and through that they got a name for me. It’s the Susan is the only question. Her choice? Oh sure. Most likely the name of the cleaner who found me. Or the policeman’s girlfriend. The worst name anyone there could think of and put on for a joke.
It’s a crap name anyway. Her date of birth was 18 January 1948. She was twenty.
When you watch a woman with a baby she’s always looking at it. On a bus for example, or just sitting in the park. She’ll talk to someone but her eyes will rest on the baby, like the moon and the earth, she can’t escape its gravity. She’s constantly checking it, making sure it hasn’t got its sheet in its mouth or its hat strings strangling it or its hands cold or its nose snotty or flies in its eyes.
Not my mother.
You see them with their knuckles clenched tight around the buggy handles battling round small shops, eyes alert for baby snatchers.
Not my mother.
You see big fat pregnant cows patting their bellies with complacent dozy smiles, planning names and clothes.
Not my mother. Push it out and get rid. Couldn’t wait to get her eyes off me. OK if she was a kid. OK if she was fifteen. But twenty? Cunt.
She dumps me on a doorstep in a box; another bit of rubbish. She hasn’t even got the courage to stuff me in a bin to die.
From then onwards I went down. Down down down down down. I stopped sleeping, I was pacing my room all night listening to the noises, then I fell asleep in the day and missed my shift at the pub. I missed a few and he sacked me. It didn’t matter because I wasn’t spending anything – I wasn’t going out, I could survive on my giro. But the landlady gave me a month’s notice. People sniff out weakness, don’t they, if you’re just hanging on by your fingertips, nothing gives them greater pleasure than to unclasp your fingers one by one and prise you off. What did she want me out for? She wasn’t going to use the room. I paid my rent, I was quiet and tidy, I never lost my key. She said she didn’t know I’d be around so much in the daytime, she liked people to work. Well whoopee-doo, she didn’t work. Just hung in there like a great bloated leech sucking up cash from her tenants. I wasn’t in a good state for finding another place, there didn’t seem to be much available and one house I rang was always engaged and at another no one ever came to the door. I was blurry and dizzy I told her I wasn’t well, which completely pisses me off now, that I was reduced to appealing to that old shark for sympathy. I made myself feel better by planning how I’d leave the room but it was difficult because I was at the top of the stairs and she always knew as soon as I came out. Also I needed my deposit back. Bitch. I had to content myself with flushing a gigantic sanitary towel down the toilet. It was an easy toilet to block.
But I was falling. I hadn’t got anywhere to go. I was out on the street in the morning and nowhere to lay my head that night, and a rucksack and a bag weighing me down.
There’s nothing more disgusting than being pitiful. Asking for things. I had to find a floor to sleep on. I rang Karen, the other barmaid; I rang caring Bill from the last home; I rang that bastard Vince who dumped me for no reason and I knew perfectly well in advance that each of them would have cast iron reasons why it was impossible for me to curl up on four square feet of their floor for a night or two. She made me this; the one you can walk away from.
Oh ha ha. Don’t go thinking I’m sorry for myself. I’m not that soft. I see them in their little relationships and families, maintaining their values and their property and their gene pool. At least I’m not hypocritical enough to want any of that shit. But I didn’t do anything to Vince. I was nice to him.
Phoning was the most I could do, the whole of outside was so big and light and noisy and I’d hardly been out for days I was in that state where I knew all I must do was sit it out last it out endure the Fear until it rolled on over me. I had to go in somewhere I was exposed as a peeled shrimp. I went into the big marble mouth of the library, shuffling under my rucksack and bag, like those old codgers who go there for the day out of the cold to sit over a newspaper and stink. I stayed till hunger drove me out and when I went I left my rucksack there as if I’d just gone to get a book so I wouldn’t have to carry it.
This is what it reduces you to. I went to university you know. I got away with pretending to be one of them, I wrote essays I talked to tutors I sat in the union bar I took notes in lectures. I screwed boys who’ll be lecturers themselves by now. I was a perfectly convincing student and then I went down.
When I did resurface I couldn’t go back because it was a joke. All these middle-class kids playing. Playing house, playing being poor/drunk/smashed/in love/broken hearted/naughty/off the rails/irresponsible/behind with their work. All cavorting in their self-invented fucking dramas and all precisely on course; with Mummy and Daddy and money behind them, through the nice straight little Uni channel where with any luck they’d pick up a well-qualified spouse from the same socio-economic bracket as well as sound qualifications for themselves – and out into the charmed world of graduate employment and starter mortgages and a car from proud Daddy on graduation day and on and on into their cushy stifling protected little lives. Once you blow out of something you see it clearly don’t you. A charade. I would have gone back to puncture some of them if I’d had the chance. But the money and the energy and the perseverance required are all daunting. When I’m flying they’re all there – at my fingertips, at my feathertips. But from down in the depths they’re unreachable.
What I realise now looking back on that day at the library was that it was the pits. I couldn’t even imagine what might happen next. My head was puffy with Fear. But coolly now what could I have done? Only two choices. Sleep in a shop doorway or pick up some pervert in the street and offer to go home with him for £10. I was destitute. I was twenty-nine and destitute. My inheritance. Thanks Mum.
But then came the proof I’d bottomed out. I fell. Coming down the marble steps in the library my foot slid away from under me and I fell. I fell backwards on to the base of my spine then I bump-bump-bumped down the remaining twelve stairs. My head snapped back as I bumped and I was knocked out. I suffered concussion, whiplash, spinal bruising and a hairline fracture to a vertebra. I know in detail the stages of the fall, the specific injuries sustained, because three doctors and two lawyers went into them extremely thoroughly. The stairs were wet, the cleaner had forgotten to put out a warning notice; an elderly man who hurried to my assistance also slipped and fell. It was a cut and dried case, the library was liable and owed us both compensation. It didn’t matter it didn’t even hurt, it was a relief to be scooped off and carted to hospital and tended. I didn’t even realise for a while that I’d get money as well. It took its time grinding through the system but eventually there came an offer of £12,000.
They kept me in hospital for six weeks because of my back; I had to lie flat. And that’s when I decided to kill her. I finally realised the futility of a life where whatever enterprise you embark on, after a short time the ground under your feet will run out and you will fall over the edge and disappear.
The plan to kill her gave me a path, it mapped out my course. The hospital chaplain (don’t you love these things? Out of the pages of a Victorian novel; he sits by your bed and talks about god’s love, he tells you how to get your benefits. If you are the only person in your ward with no visitors he clings to you like a burr) answered accommodation ads for me and even went and looked at a couple of rooms. He had a nice ground floor room all fixed up for when I moved out, and I was signed on to the sick for three months. I didn’t have to do anything but work at my plan and wait for my compensation to arrive.
I traced her from the address she’d put on the birth certificate. It was surprisingly simple. A second address in Manchester surfaced. I wrote and got a reply. Her parents had lived there till ‘89. Their new address was enclosed. When I could walk I went to Manchester.
I was walking with a stick because of my back. It seemed to have a good effect on people. They wanted to help me. (One day they’ll help me, the next they’ll kick me in the teeth. Why is there hope then no hope? There were temperature graphs on the ends of the hospital beds going up and down like mountains, high low high high highest low. A switchback, a ride on a bucking bronco, being dragged screaming and unwilling from the heights to the depths and never knowing when the high will come again or how long last so I can’t even begin to relish it only know it’ll end – that’s the life she’s given. Me.)
The house was in a leafy suburb, Edwardian semi-detached. A prosperous pile. Two-job two-car two-children-and-an-au-pair territory. Needless to say no one was home. The security alarm winked redly over the door. I tried the neighbouring house. It was dingier, peeling paint, thick net curtains; a twitching at the corner of one. An old face peered at me. I smiled brightly and he came interminably slowly to the door. Opened it three inches on a chain. I was sweet I was a charmer.
‘Oh thank you for coming to the door, I wonder if you can help me? I’m trying to find the Lovages, I’ve been working at my family tree and we’re second cousins, I’ve been to their old house and they gave me the address next door to you, do you know if–’ His brain was as slow as his legs, I had to give him the bright patter three or four times before any of it sank in.
Creaky croaky noises in the dark behind him and there was an old woman too peering and muttering. No give on the safety chain. Who can blame them? I’d have been in there in a flash, battering and mugging them, filling my pockets with their family heirlooms. Filthy pair of ancient dung beetles. It turned out the old Lovages (Granny and Grandad? Who would’ve knitted me mittens and held my hand to feed the ducks?) had been shunted off to a home. Were infirm/incapable/possibly dead (some wittering and grumpy mishearing between my aged friends here, she assumed they were dead because there’d been no Christmas card this year; he said why did she always forget Mrs Lovage had Parkinson’s which wouldn’t have got any better with time would it and how could she have held a pen?)
The son, young Mr Lovage (uncle?) lived next door now with his family but he and his wife both worked and–
‘And his sister?’ I chipped in cheerily. ‘I especially wanted to know about Phyllis Lovage, the Lovages’ daughter?’
He turned to his wife to confer but he had to glance back to check I wasn’t nicking the doorknob or the leaves off the privet. I smiled and twinkled gratefully and he turned away again. Then shook his head. No, they’d never seen her.
‘He did give us an address once, when he was–’ he turned to the invisible crone – ‘Didn’t he give us a relative’s address when he went on holiday just in case?’
‘Oh, if you had her address I would be so thrilled – you see she and my mother used to play together when they were young – my mother’s not well and it would bring her such happiness …’
Wasted effort because he retreated from the door and shuffled back into the hall to join his wife who was vaguely scuffling in a mountain of newspapers, envelopes and telephone directories balanced on an ancient black chest. I put my foot gently against the door to stop it banging shut in my face. Each time she put something down in the heap after peering at it short-sightedly, he’d pick it up and carefully read it from beginning to end. They wouldn’t find it, even if it was staring them in the face. I would have to come back to the brother in the evening and who knows why Phyllis never showed her face there? Disgrace? Family feud? He’d want a better story than my current one – he’d have known his sister’s friends. The old guy shook his head. He began to shuffle back towards me.
‘Could I help?’ I tried. ‘I’m a very fast reader.’
‘I think you’d better ask Mr Lovage, he’ll be home around 6.30.’ Hideous drooling old idiot with my mother’s address pulsating in your hall, I’d put my hand straight on it, I’d know it–
‘Did you try the address book dear?’ croaked the female. Of course he didn’t you stupid bat he was looking for a piece of paper. She turned the pages of a big address book with her claws.
‘L-L-Lovage. Mabel and Peter. Yes, in Altrincham – that’s the home … Phyllis. This’ll be it will it? Phyllis MacLeod but she’s under the Lovages, I can’t think of any other Phyllis can you Harold? We’ve got a Scottish address for her.’
Oh glory be and patience rewarded. They creaked and they croaked as they looked for a pen.
‘Here! I’ve got one in my bag – here–’ and she copied it out like a snail on Valium and finally it was passed into my hot sticky hand. A this will be your lucky day; open to check your bonus number! envelope with the address of one Phyllis MacLeod spidered on to the back. Unfamiliar unpronounceable place names. MacLeod. MacHaggis. MacTartan. Married to a Scot. Who was oblivious to my existence? Nice little surprise for him as well as her, then.
When I got back to the station I phoned Directory Enquiries with her name and address and they gave me her number. She was still there. I dialled and a woman said ‘Hello?’ I asked for Phyllis MacLeod. ‘Speaking.’ Middle aged middle class not Scots it was her. On the end of the line, my mother. My ignorant unsuspecting mother. So easy to find, it was meant. She hadn’t even bothered about me enough to cover her tracks. She hadn’t even gone ex-directory. Chucked me away and never even considered I might be dangerous. Her indifference conjured, entreated my plan.