We were nearly always well-behaved, as children, well-mannered, hard-working, not answering back. Darren, being the oldest, had tried it on. He staged his rebellion and had it crushed, brutally, wrestling hand to hand with Dad, because Dad was tough, he was small but tough, he was very fit from his life outside. The women stood in the kitchen sobbing, me and Mum, with our arms round each other. ‘Call the police,’ I begged her, as they shoved and grunted. ‘He’ll kill my brother. Call the police.’ ‘He won’t kill him,’ she said, but she didn’t sound sure. There were horrible sounds of fist on flesh, bone on wood, thumping, yielding, sounds I have never been able to forget. ‘I’ll break you,’ I heard Dad shout, insanely. All of a sudden, they stopped exhausted. Darren knelt on the floor, wiping dribble from his mouth, sobbing, ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it, I’m sorry.’ Then he ran from the house. I ran after him because I thought he would never come back, because I thought he would kill himself: ‘Darren, Darren!’ I couldn’t catch him. I could never run fast and I had the wrong shoes and no coat in winter and people looked at me as though I was crazy. I probably was crazy, with fear and grief.
How did we ever get over that? How do families ever recover? And go on to seem normal. A lovely family. People congratulated Dad on his family …
‘Madam?’
‘Sorry, I was dreaming. A cappuccino. And if you could bring some cakes?’
‘Certainly, madam. With grated chocolate?’
‘Oh plenty of grated chocolate, thanks.’
When Mum had another baby late in life I wanted to protect him, the little blond scrap, his thin pale face and his frightened mouth, from what had happened to the rest of us. Poor little Dirk. Is that why I loved him?
‘Leave him alone!’ It was suddenly easy to stand up to Dad on Dirk’s behalf. So perhaps that was the gift Dirk gave me. Perhaps it wasn’t all one way.
He had spilled Dad’s beer. An accident. It was his second beer, it was Sunday lunch. That second beer had often spelled trouble. I stood up to Dad. My heart was bursting –
‘Coffee, madam. Excuse me.’
I hadn’t heard the waitress. She stands there smiling.
‘Your cakes are on their way.’
‘Yes. Thank you.’ – Nearly twenty years later, my voice is still shaking.
My father hit me in the mouth. ‘You mind your own business, how dare you,’ he yelled, beside himself, insane with temper.
Then Dirk was crying and begging him. ‘Please don’t hit Shirley, please don’t hit Shirley, it’s my fault, Daddy, I’m sorry, I’m sorry –’ Lying on the floor. Submission posture. Trying to make his father less angry. I had learned about that in psychology, I was studying then, I was different then, I thought I was going to be a teacher, before things went wrong, before my life went wrong, but perhaps it had already all gone wrong, being brought up in that house of torture.
And Mum in the kitchen, her low frightened voice. ‘Don’t, Alfred. Please don’t, Alfred. She’s only nineteen. He’s only seven.’ But very quiet. Too scared to speak up. Too scared to come into the living-room and help us.
Later she crept upstairs after me and stood on the landing outside the bathroom. Dirk had been sent to bed for making trouble. Dad had slammed out of the house for a walk, off to the Park where he always went after there was a row, as if he couldn’t bear it – But it was all his doing, wasn’t it? He made the rows, didn’t he? It was his fault. If he didn’t enjoy it, couldn’t he have stopped it? This time he left in the middle of things, so the horror wasn’t over, the lump in the throat, the lead weight in the belly, the fear of worse to come. Mum hissed at me through the rickety door. ‘Shirley. Darling. Are you all right?’
I didn’t answer. I was sponging my face, pressing cold water against the bone, where I felt so bruised, where I felt so hurt, for he’d never before hit me in the face. It was too personal; it almost felt sexual –
‘Shirley. Please.’
‘Just go away.’
‘Shirley, dear. I have to see.’
‘Come in and see then.’ I flung the door open. There was a little cut, from his watch, I think, and a red-blue mark was steadily deepening. ‘I hate him, Mum. I’ll have to kill him. How dare he hit me. I’m nineteen, I’m grown up!’
‘I’m sorry, darling.’ She took the flannel and gently pressed it against my skin.
‘It hurts.’
‘I know. You shouldn’t get involved.’
‘Oh great.’ I turned and pushed her away. ‘So I let him hurt my brother, do I? That’s your policy, never get involved.’
‘It is his house. You might be better away.’
‘Then who would stand up for my little brother? Not you. You’re … disgusting. You’re hopeless. You’re a coward.’ I spat it at her, tears bursting, flowing. At that moment I hated her as much as him.
And then of course Mum started crying. She sat beside me on the edge of the bath, and I pushed her away, but she held my hand, held on to it grimly as I tried to shake her off, and then I gave up, and we sat there crying.
‘I think you could cover it with make-up.’
‘Yes.’ Cover things up; we always did.
‘I’m sorry, Shirley. I feel afraid.’
‘It’s all right, Mum.’ I was sorry for her. Sorry for her, for Dirk, for all of us.
We went together to peep at Dirk. ‘Do you want some milk before your father gets back?’
He was under the blankets, curled up in a ball, his blond hair sticking out on the pillow, and then he uncurled, we saw his red blurred face, streaming with snot, a baby’s face, the face of a boy turned back into a baby by having his courage beaten out of him – (I would never hit a child; never, never. Perhaps it’s as well that I’ve never had one. They say you always pass it on.)
‘I’ll kill him,’ he sobbed. ‘I hate him. When I’m bigger, you wait, I’ll smash him’ – but that was my father talking, you see. Those were Dad’s words, when he got mad. Dad liked to think he could smash people. People were things when they got in his way.
And he had turned Dirk into a kind of thing, all smeared and swollen and unlike himself.
In fact, Dad met his friend George on the walk and went back to George and Ruby’s for tea. By the time he came home, he was over it. He was almost shamefaced, though he never said sorry, but he came and talked to me, unnaturally friendly, asking about my work at college, something he didn’t know anything about, and he watched TV with Dirk on his lap, stroking his hair, which made me want to throw up.
And Dirk went along with it. Dirk was grateful. That was the most sickening part of it. Dirk always idolized our father.
(And he’s never grown up. I think he still does.)
The row was over, but I couldn’t stay at home. I had to get out of the house that evening. I went to a party at Alison Green’s, a party I never meant to go to, at the house of someone I didn’t like, though she was in the same group at college as me. (She kept her hair in a fat French pleat, and wore very short skirts, though she claimed to be religious, with a crucifix and a polo-necked sweater that showed two decks of bosom and bra. I can see her so clearly; her plump pink lips, her enthusiastic questions in lectures, her grey eyes gleaming with real passion, for she was so eager to be a teacher, to go to Africa, like her parents, and then come home and ‘teach the underprivileged’. I thought, my family is underprivileged, but save me Lord from Alison Green.)
I wanted to teach then with my whole heart. But it didn’t happen. I messed things up. I had my chance and messed things up. People from our class don’t get two chances.
Alison’s parents were some kind of missionaries (‘Taking the faith to the savages in Kenya’, but I never even noticed the way they talked.) And they were both abroad that spring, and it was her birthday, in their strait-laced house with its fussy rugs and dried-flower arrangements and pelmets and flounces and Roman Catholic pictures. I arrived early. It looked utterly grim. But I helped her switch off most of the lights, and put red crêpe paper over the others, and hide the worst of the holy pictures ‘in case people spill their drinks on them’. She had laid in plenty of bread and cheese and a great many bottles of cider. We all clubbed together to buy some wine, six bottles of a warmish white that I thought delicious, and impressively French – vin de table, probably, mere vin de table, but the vowels on the label looked strange and sweet and a world away from the bottles of beer on which my father became obnoxious –
‘An éclair, madam?’ the waitress asked, her pale peach apron tightly wrapped around an unreasonably tiny waist. ‘A millefeuille, perhaps? Or the tarte tatin?’
‘I’ll have the eclair.’ These days it means nothing, French or English, we’re European –
There were several boys that I didn’t know. Two of them were friends of a cousin of Alison who looked confusingly like her, but more so, with bigger bosoms and more prominent teeth and a shorter skirt and higher heels … however, Kate didn’t wear a crucifix. And the boys she was with were very attractive, both of them tall, with well-fitting jeans and coloured shirts and narrow ties. Alison had told me they were all students. Classy students, not people like us. Trainee teachers couldn’t hope to be classy. Whereas these were university students.
‘I’m not religious,’ Kate announced to me, pouring the wine with impressive freedom. ‘My family are. I think they’re cracked. Alison is. Do you know her well?’ ‘Not very well.’ I felt disloyal, but repressed it. I wasn’t particularly Christian then, and Alison was not a close friend. I wanted to be glamorous and fun, like them. I wanted something I had never known. I wanted to be taken away from my family, away from littleness, away from rules. The boys were tall and slim and dangerous. One of them was swaying his hips as he danced, narrow and definite and sexual. My cheeks felt hot. I wanted him. My eye still throbbed where my father had hit me, how dare he hit me, I’d never forgive him –
His name was Ivo. Imagine! Ivo. Not Ivor, as I first thought, which is just Welsh, but Ivo. Unbearably aristocratic. I soon found out that the other boy was Kate’s. He’s mine, I thought. Ivo is mine. I had the haziest idea of what to do with him, but I started by dancing with him, decorously, watching him closely, which was easy enough as he liked to dance with his eyes half-closed, immensely cool, looking at the floor, making strange little sallies to left and right which at the time seemed like the acme of dancing. I wasn’t really sure he was dancing with me, but when the music slowed down he took hold of me, and started massaging the tops of my arms, my trembling shoulders, my neck, my hair –
‘Watch him, Shirley,’ shrieked Alison, in passing, over David Bowie’s ‘Aladdin Sane’. ‘Oh, I’m all right,’ I told her, airily, trying to be airy and failing, failing, because his hands had found the toggle of my zip, because he was gently kissing my eyebrows, and no one had kissed my eyebrows before.
Soon I was swimming. We were swimming together, through shoals of limbs and warm wine and music. Breathing was hard. Swimming through space, and someone had put on ‘Ziggy Stardust’, flying out further, too far to come back, ‘Ground Control to Major Tom … Ground Control to Major Tom’ … and now I was drifting with Major Tom, out across a Milky Way of pleasure, shivering stars of electric feeling as his fingers brushed the smooth ridge of my spine, going lower, lower as I flew higher, above the crowd, above the voices of my mother and father saying, not too far, don’t go too far, and Ground Control was getting fainter and fainter …
There was an ugly screech like a demented bird as Alison stopped the record-player. ‘It’s too slow,’ she yelled above a chorus of complaint. ‘I want to have fun. I want to – rock!’ It sounded as if she’d read it in a book, but she meant it from the bottom of her heart; her eyes gleamed frantically behind her glasses, her dress had slipped down low on her chest, a film of sweat lit up her breasts. I thought that Ivo would notice them, but he was burrowing into my neck, breathing hard, one hand down my back, caressing the last few points of my spine. The silence was odd; I heard his heart beating, or my heart beating, or both our hearts, and his embarrassingly heavy breathing. ‘Upstairs,’ he said, as Alison’s favourite Rod Stewart record roared into life behind us and everyone started to jump like monkeys. ‘Let’s go upstairs. I can feel you want to.’
I don’t think I did want anything much except to go on in this dream forever, being stroked and held and dissolved by him, being carried so far away from home, so far away from pain and anger. I wanted more wine. He fetched more wine.
But dreams don’t last. We went upstairs. I can’t imagine how I got upstairs. I have lived this evening over and over and I still can’t remember going upstairs, I still can’t remember deciding to go. That’s more important, if I ever decided.
I hope I did it for some kind of purpose. I hope I wasn’t just another stupid girl who slept with a man because she was tipsy. I hope I wasn’t just a stupid cow. I hope my life had some pattern, some point.
Because that evening changed it forever. He pulled off my dress and stroked my back and held my breasts one by one in his hands, and told me I was beautiful, and I thought, yes, he is mine, this is bliss, we shall be together forever like this. Then he pulled down my pants. I know I protested, partly because I wasn’t sure I was clean, or clean enough for whatever he intended. I think I felt sad I could no longer hear the music or be with the other young people dancing, young people, not grim old parents with their rules and habits and desperation, young people in the world we would make, all of us free and unfrightened and happy.
‘Let’s make love,’ he said, and kissed me. Just ‘Let’s make love,’ but at least he asked. I don’t think I heard that as sexual intercourse, although my pants were round my ankles, although his penis stood up like a candle. I heard it as love, and as a request. I heard it as tender, and infinitely hopeful. And I did have a choice, and I did say ‘Yes’. I did make a choice, even late in the day, I did make a choice, even if it was the wrong one. I didn’t just – let people do things to me.
And with that choice, I changed my life. Because I got pregnant, with that first sexual act. It seems amazing now, impossible now, it seems bitterly, unfairly enviable now. It lasted three minutes, and he didn’t walk me home, and I lied to my mother that the party was boring, and I waited five weeks or so for him to phone, and I waited three months for my period to come.
And then I went to the doctor in terror, and he was definite, and grim.
I saw Alison in the Refectory next day. It was September; the party had been in June. ‘Have you heard from Kate, at all, since the party? You haven’t heard from Ivo, have you?’ ‘I hate my cousin now,’ she said. ‘It was Ivo and his friend who were smoking cigars and made burn marks on our carpets. You haven’t fallen for him, have you?’
When I told her the problem she went very pale and her long ugly jaw wobbled in horror. ‘But you’d only just met him,’ she complained. ‘And you must have seen they were different from us. Kate’s an atheist. She told me so. And Ivo wouldn’t help with the washing-up … Besides, they’re modern linguists. They’ve all gone away to France for a year.’
Total despair. I can feel it still. He had gone away, he had gone to France. I was nineteen years old and I’d never been abroad, and if I had a baby I knew I never would –
‘May I offer you more cakes, madam? Perhaps the religieuse?’
‘No more thank you. I’d like the bill.’
I make mistakes, then pay for them.
Alison put her arm round me, I remember. It felt heavy, and out of place. ‘Oh Shirley,’ she said, ‘what shall we do?’ But I didn’t want her pity. And we weren’t the same. I couldn’t bear her thinking that we were the same. I wanted to be the same as Ivo, tall and slim and sexy and selfish. I wanted not to be Shirley White, the sort of silly booby who’d get herself pregnant.
I tried to be mature. I went back to the doctor. I said I had discussed things with the father-to-be. Neither of us was ready to make the commitment. I wanted an abortion. He looked at me.
‘Do you know what it means, a late abortion? You’ll go through labour, with a dead baby.’
Oh God, I thought, I’ve got a Catholic. ‘It isn’t a baby, not to me.’ But for some reason then I burst out crying. I couldn’t bear the sound of the words, ‘dead baby’, I don’t know why not, it was stupid of me, and only encouraged him to give me a lecture.
He talked about adoption, and I laughed in his face. I didn’t know that one day I’d try to adopt, that one day I would be accepted to adopt. Kojo and I had just been accepted when he started to get ill, and the dream collapsed.
‘I can’t have this baby. I’m at college. I’m studying.’
I suddenly saw in a sickening flash that I’d have this baby, there was no escape, I had started to walk down a long straight tunnel that led to a room full of absolute pain, and after that I could see only darkness.
What happened was messier, more tortuous. My doctor reluctantly agreed to a termination, but there was muddle and delay until somehow I was already four months pregnant. I rejected all knowledge of the life inside me, but whatever was growing refused to be rejected. One day I had woken to feel it stirring, a gentle tickling, a gentle stroking. I didn’t care. I went ahead.
I took a taxi to the hospital. I went with a friend, who sat and cried. Lynn was a true friend – (indeed she still is, we try to meet twice a year to go shopping) – and funny, and kind, and not prim like Alison, but she was very fond of me, and scared of blood, and scared of me dying, so she wasn’t happy. By then I don’t think I’d have minded dying. To be taken away from all the horror. She kept saying ‘Are you sure? Are you totally sure?’ and staring at me with big frightened eyes.
We sat side by side in the waiting-room on rock-hard chairs that made me long to go to the toilet. She held my hand, and both of us were sweating. ‘I hate the smell of hospitals,’ she whispered. Suddenly she took her other hand off her handbag and laid it on the lump of my belly, my swelling belly underneath my dress, it was warm late spring, I was young and pregnant – ‘Shirley,’ she said, in absolute horror. ‘I felt it move. I felt it kick.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know. I’ve felt it.’ I wouldn’t look at her. I made my voice hard. Against You only have I sinned.
‘It’s alive,’ she said. ‘It’s really alive. It’s already alive. I know you know that –’ The tears were pouring down her face. You would have thought it was her who was having the abortion, and me the friend who was holding her hand. I was trying hard not to hear what she said except with a mechanical part of my brain.
‘I know she’s alive, I know she’s alive –’ It wasn’t what I had meant to say.
‘You know the sex.’ She was calm this time, almost beyond shock, but she dropped my hand. She sat there watching me as if I was an alien.
‘I don’t know why I said that. I feel it’s a girl.’ I got up off the seat, walked to the window with its view of a garden, a neglected, walled-in hospital garden, just scrub, really, in the gap between buildings. I stared out across the dark bushes to the sky, which was blue with wild clouds sprinting across, and I thought, this baby will never see it, this baby will never get out alive …
She. She. Will never do it.
And I couldn’t go ahead. Of course I couldn’t. I never had a chance, once she started moving.
So I had to tell Mum. ‘I knew,’ she said. ‘I’ve been watching you. I hoped I was wrong.’ She went grey, I remember. She slumped by the sink, then sank on to a stool to stop herself falling. ‘He’ll go mad. Mad. You should have thought about your father.’
‘I don’t care about Dad.’ But I did, I did. ‘Will you tell him, Mum? Will you do that for me?’
She looked at me. She twisted her rings. She twisted her rings as if to torture herself. ‘Don’t ask me,’ she whispered, like a little girl. ‘I’d do anything for you. Anything else.’
So I waited till Dad came home from the Park, practising my lines, stroking my stomach. And he came home in a benevolent mood, and told me I looked pretty, and I was looking pretty, because pregnant women look pink and pretty.
Mum brought him some tea. He put his feet up.
I told him. He was remarkably calm. He sometimes was calm about big things; it was little things that annoyed him most. Or perhaps he hadn’t quite taken it in.
‘Who’s the father?’ he asked.
I remember feeling blank. What on earth did he mean? He was the father, he would always be the father.
‘Oh, no one you know.’ It came out wrong, as if I were saying, he’s too good for you.
‘I suppose you know him, do you? You knew him a bit before you let him get you pregnant?’
‘He’s a university student,’ I said.
For a moment he was cheered. Only a moment. ‘And when is he going to put in an appearance?’ I didn’t say anything. ‘Oh, I see. It’s like that, is it. We’ll see about that. If he thinks he can just muck about with my daughter …’
‘He’s gone abroad. He doesn’t know.’
‘What do you mean, he’s gone abroad? What do you mean, he doesn’t know?’
I didn’t speak; didn’t know where to begin; and besides, his voice had begun to rise, and the lump was rising in my throat.
But another part of myself was calm. I was different now. I was a pregnant woman. That made me a woman, for the first time.
‘What is this man? Some foreigner? Answer your father. What’s his name?’
‘He isn’t foreign.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘None of your business.’ It just came out, and I knew as I said it that he would kill me, and then I thought about the baby, and I saw him coming across the room, red in the face, his arm lifted –
‘Don’t you hit me.’ I backed away. ‘His name is Ivo.’
And then he hit me. ‘Ibo! What kind of bloody name is that? He’s a bloody darkie, isn’t he? Isn’t he?’ He hit me on the shoulder and upper arm, the usual places he would hit me, but I was afraid he would hurt the baby, I couldn’t stand there and take my medicine.
So I went on backwards, and he kept on coming, head down, fists up, as if he had to hit me but couldn’t bear to look at me. I suddenly thought, no more of this. I shan’t have any more of this. And I stepped aside, so he bumped into the mantelpiece, and waited for him to come round again, and hit him as hard as I could in the face, full in the face, across his huge red nose, and I winced as I did it, I winced for his pain, but I screamed from a place that knew how to scream, ‘I’ll kill you if you hit me again. I’ll bloody kill you. Are you listening? The child isn’t coloured. Not that it matters.’
And then my mother came in from the kitchen and my father said in a muffled voice, ‘I’m bleeding. Do something, May. I’m bleeding. I think Shirley has broken my nose.’
Then Dirk ran in, eyes wild, frightened. He had a cricket bat in his hand; he’d been out in the yard, batting at the wall. He saw Dad bleeding and began to cry. ‘Dad, you’re bleeding. What happened? What’s happening?’ I remember the blood splashing red on Dad’s shirt and a few drops going on Dirk’s new jeans, I was sorry the blood went on Dirk’s new jeans –
And Dad said, ‘I bumped into the mantelpiece. Bent down to pick something up, judged it wrong. Mummy is bringing me some sticking plaster. Hurry up May, for goodness sake.’ And he didn’t look in my direction. I think I knew it was over then, and he wouldn’t dare to hit me again.
It was just a habit, really, like smoking. People need help with breaking them. She helped me, didn’t she, my vanished daughter?
By now she must be eighteen years old. If nothing bad has happened to her …
She was eighteen on the twelfth of December. I thought of nothing else all day. I tried to keep my thoughts happy and hopeful. I have something to be proud of, after all. I kept her alive. I didn’t kill her. I hope she’s happy and beautiful. I hope her family is happier than mine – and yet my family will always be hers.
I told myself adoption was the best thing to do. The doctors were helpful; almost too helpful. So many couples waiting, they assured me, for babies like yours (I suppose they meant white ones), you’ll make some childless couple very happy, so the whole thing should have been perfectly happy.
I did what I was told. I had a Caesarean because she was presenting upside down. I was full of drugs, but I held her, briefly, and tried not to see that she looked like me, she looked like me, not at all like Ivo. She looked like me; weeping, weeping, screaming as if she was being abandoned.
I did as they told me and took some pills that made me feel sick but suppressed the milk. My breasts hurt horribly. They sang and cried. They throbbed and yearned and I ignored the pain, and when it subsided, when my breasts lay down, I began to give up, I began to accept it, I gave her to the nurse to bottle-feed. ‘I can’t do it. She’s not really mine.’
The rest disappears into a mist of terror. They took her away and I went back to college and two weeks later had a total breakdown. I left Winthrop College, never to return. Yet I’d given her up to protect my studies. If I had been older, richer, more confident, I would have done everything to get her back, because I knew without doubt that I wanted her back, that without her my life could never be complete.
Without her my life can never be complete. Without my daughter; without children.
I did talk to my doctor. More than once. He sympathized briefly but pointed out it would be selfish to uproot her. ‘I hear it’s a completely successful adoption. They’re a family now. It would break their hearts. And besides … what do you have to offer?’
Nothing, except my own broken heart. And a face like hers. I shall always wonder –
If I saw her now, would I recognize her? Would she look like me, as I did then? She’s almost as old as I was when I had her.
I hid it inside me, all that pain. I knew my mother couldn’t bear to listen. Somewhere, under those veils of rain. Somewhere, maybe in one of those windows, the hundreds of windows I see from here. Maybe it’s her I go shopping for, her I look for in all those faces.