Dear Doctor Lily (28 page)

‘Remember me?' Ida looked at him boldly.

‘Christ,' he said. ‘What's happened to you?'

‘I had my hair cut.'

‘I don't mean that. You're –' he let go of the child to sketch Ida's shape with his hands. The little boy moved closer to Jackson's leg and clutched it.

‘That your kid?'

He nodded. ‘I take him out a bit, weekends, so Diane can clean the flat.'

‘You're married, then.'

‘So are you. Or did you leave him?'

‘Of course not. I'm here to see my folks.'

‘You sound like a Yank.'

‘Gimme a break, Jackson. I've been over there for twelve years.'

‘Got out of here in time, didn't you?'

‘In time for what?'

‘Forget it.'

They said nothing much, but there was something risky in the way they talked: Jackson aggressive as always, Ida defensively jaunty.

She looked round for Bernie and called him to her. ‘This is Mommy's friend.'

‘Glad to meet you.' Bernie held out his hand. He was so damned polite. ‘And that's my sister.' He pointed. Maggie was
crouched like a toad on the low end of the see-saw, waiting for someone to sit on the other end and bump her up.

‘What's wrong with her?' Jackson frowned. When his hair lifted in the breeze, it showed the box of his scalp. He seemed to have less hair, and his face was more battered, as if prison had aged him. Well, in twelve years, he would have aged, in gaol or out.

‘Look, sonny.' Jackson gave Bernie his ‘do me a favour' smile. ‘Take Ricky over to your sister and give him a swing, eh?'

Ricky went happily with Bernie. Anyone would, children or old customers like Gopher, who went quite willingly on bus rides with his grandson all over the town.

‘Sit down.' Jackson took Ida's arm and pushed her towards a bench.

‘I don't know that I –'

‘Siddown.' She sat. ‘You're a fat old sow, but you're Ida underneath it, I know you.'

He did, that was the trouble.

‘Why did you do it?' He sat a little apart from her, head down, twisting and squeezing one hand in the other, as if to test its strength.

‘Do what?' Ida's mind raced over what she had told him about her interview with the CID, when she was still writing letters to the prison.

‘You killed my baby.!

That was such a relief that Ida almost laughed. ‘What else would I do, with you inside for at least five years?'

‘It was my son.' Jackson bent to pick up a handful of dusty pebbles, and chucked them angrily one by one away from him.

‘Could have been a girl. So what? You have a son now.'

‘Ricky is Diane's, not mine. She can't have any more. She had the tubes tied.'

‘Did you know that when you married her?' Ida did not know what else to say.

‘Who says I married her?'

‘Oh.'

He had stopped bristling. His hair was less electric, his hands were still, laid on his knee like an empty pair of gloves, his cocky, dangerous mouth was fallen in. He had lost some teeth in prison.

‘Jackson.' Ida had to tell the lie now, because the children were wandering toward them. ‘I never said nothing.'

He turned his light eyes sideways at her without moving his head.

‘At first I thought I'd kill you. Especially when I heard you'd got rid of the child too, as well as me. I promised myself I'd kill you. But they give you stuff, you know, takes away your energy, and after a bit, you lose the anger. You lose even that.'

‘You hate me?' Ida put a hand on his powerful slack hands.

‘I'd ought to. It don't matter now. The past's gone. All of it. The whole thing was crazy, the guns and the drugs and the big money that was going to come so easy. All it got me was they took years off my life. I don't care any more. But they're not going to get me again. I've got my own business now. Junk car parts. I can live.' The children came up. ‘I've got to take this bastard home. She'll think I've thrown him in the duck pond.'

‘Goodbye,' Bernie said. ‘Nice to have met you.'

‘You too. Bye mate.'

Jackson stood up. He was behind the backless bench. Instead of getting up, Ida leaned back. He leaned against her. When she moved to stand up, he put his hands on her shoulders and held her down.

‘Get rid of the kids tomorrow evening,' he muttered. ‘I'll meet you.'

She stood up and faced him. ‘I promised to go with my father to his church service. It's not a church, really, just a house.'

‘Where?'

She told him.

‘What time does it end?'

She told him.

‘I'll meet you.'

‘I'll have to go home with my father.'

‘Make some excuse, don't be a fool. I'll meet you at the Lamb and Flag, opposite the garage.'

‘I won't be there.'

Jackson picked up the little boy, and swung him, shrieking, on to his shoulder. He loped off, with his flat feet going out like duck's flippers.

‘Who's that?' Bernie asked.

‘No one.'

‘Yeah, I figured. The kid was a real jerk. He made a huge great mess in his pants.'

‘Oh, poor Jackson.'

At the thought of his shoulder, Ida began to laugh as she hadn't laughed for years, bending double, gasping in pain, sucking her breath back for another shriek of laughter. Maggie rolled on the ground. Bernie, who did not laugh hysterically, like a child, went ‘Ha-ha-ha' and put a fist in his mouth. His brown eyes screwed up and disappeared.

When Ida stopped, he said, ‘messed his pants!' to make her laugh again. The three of them ran to the gate, whooping and swerving in circles. To look at them, you'd have thought they were all drunk.

Ida got Maggie to go to sleep before she left for the church. Bernie was going to play cards with his grandmother. Clara did not go to the services with George any more.

‘Afraid she might enjoy herself.' He made one of his rare jokes.

The small group of people on uncomfortable chairs in Winifred's mother's upstairs-room did not enjoy themselves a lot. It was completion contemplation night. After two or three people had told about successful healing, George Lott gave a brief rambling harangue. He stopped in the middle of a sentence and held up his hand like a traffic cop. They all closed their eyes. Jackson was imprinted on the inside of the lids. Damn him. She could even smell him. Would she never be free of him? She wouldn't meet him. She never wanted to see him again. If he came to her house, she would set her mother on him. He'd be at the pub, she knew that, so sure that she would come running when he snapped his fingers.

She would have liked to break the silence of the group. Her spirit moved her to say, ‘Give me strength.' She took a deep breath, and just as she began, ‘My spirit – asks –', George Lott snapped open his eyes and struck his hands together.

Mrs Rees and her daughter brought tea upstairs, with ginger-nuts. Everyone spoke to Ida, and said they were glad to see her
back. They were decent people, George was the only dotty one, but Ida wanted to be gone and safe at home away from the Lamb and Flag, away from the chance of Jackson lurking in the street.

But when a small quarrel broke out among the faithful about whose turn it was to wash up and tidy, Ida heard herself say, ‘I'll be glad to do it. You go on home, Pa. Give me the key and I'll lock up.'

‘Good girl.' He put on his pouchy tweed cap. ‘Use plenty of washing-up liquid.' He had a mania about germs. ‘So shalt thou too be cleansed of all impurities.'

‘Speak for yourself,' Ida risked, and the others enjoyed the laugh, now that they did not have to feel holy. George even laughed too. He honestly seemed to have lost sight of everything that had once happened in Ida's room under the roof, and with it, all guilt or blame.

A fearful excitement walked with Ida along the pavement and down Chester Street to the corner pub. She had escaped from Jackson once. What kind of fool was this who pushed open the frosted glass door, settled beside him on the stool at the bar and put her hand round the glass of shandy he had already ordered for her?

He was morose. She talked about the service, prattling on a bit to try and get him going. When she told him how she had sent her father home and tidied up the church house, he asked, ‘You got the key?'

Ida put her hand into the pocket of her coat and showed him the key on her palm. He grabbed it before she could close her hand.

‘Come on.' He got off the stool, and stared round belligerently at the few quiet drinkers. He turned up his collar, and Ida followed him out.

Winifred's mother called out to them as they went quietly into the house.

‘Just some people from the church, dear.' Ida opened the door of her room. The old lady was settled for the night in a high bed with a lot of pillows and the radio reading her a story. She asked for a hot drink.

Jackson fussed and fumed while Ida heated the milk and took it in.
‘Cup of tea?' she asked him hopefully because the automatic way she had followed him here was leading her toward panic.

He swore at her. They went upstairs. Behind the front-room with the uncomfortable chairs, there was a bedroom for Winifred's sister when she came from Weymouth. Ida lit the gas fire. The boiling radiators in Pershing Street had spoiled her for taking off her clothes in the cold.

‘God, but you're fat,'Jackson said. ‘Christ, look at all this, and this. You used to be a little skinny handful with nothing on you. I've got to get used to you like this. My God, you're so fat.'

‘If that's how you feel –' Ida was going to say, ‘Forget it,' and put on her clothes and march out and leave him to rape Winifred's mother. But by then it had started, and it all came back to her, what she had run away from, the old fear and fascination, the glory of the man.

‘We were always meant for each other.' That soft, hot voice that ate through her defences to the core of her being and destroyed her into all body and no soul. ‘There was always only you and me.'

Ida stayed in England longer than she had meant to. Shirley fetched her allowance from the Air Force and sent it over twice, but then there was no more.

At last, a letter came from Sis. ‘Buddy is up here. With the war winding down, thank God, they're sending the men home. You'd better come back, Ida. He's in rough shape.'

Wounded? Gone off his rocker? Ida could hardly care. The whole focus of her existence was how often she could pretend to be going round to Linda's, after the children were in bed, and then sneak the church key off the hook on the back of the larder door and meet Jackson at the house.

Days when they could not be together, because of church meetings, or because of Diane, or Clara, or Ida's children, did not count. Buddy did not count. Her softened feelings toward him had disappeared into no feelings. That's it, she had told herself when he had shot the dog, and when he had hit Bernie. She had not known then quite what she meant. Now she did.

Sis wrote again. Buddy had been charged with receiving stolen
goods. He was remanded on bail for a civilian trial, and living on the base. That was why Ida had no more housing allowance. A note from Buddy was inside Sis's letter, folded very small, since he was suspicious even of his own sister, who was helping him.

‘When are you coming back? I need you. Their trying to frame me here after all I went through in the Nam war.' He had only been gone a few months, and never got farther than Australia.

Ida wrote that she and the children would not come back until he sent her some money. He sent a dollar draft. She changed it into pounds and gave it to her mother, so that she could stay longer.

When Ida discovered she was pregnant, she was thrown into confusion. At first, she wanted to run straight to the clinic where they had helped her before.

You killed my baby. Twice? Could she do that to Jackson? The next time they were to meet, she did not go, because she did not know what to say. She bought a kit and gave herself another test. No doubt. No doubt at all. At the church service again, she wanted to let out a biblical cry: ‘God forgive me, I'm with child!' But George was there, and the others were so kind to each other, so peaceful tonight under the empty phrases that her lunatic father wafted over their heads like a drift of smoke from something burning in the kitchen. For the first time, she envied them. Maybe it was all delusion, but still, they had something she had not got.

‘Pray,' George Lott intoned. ‘Look into yourselves for the answers.'

Ida looked. She tried to see beyond the fear and confusion, to break out of the trap and find her way back to the commonsense that had helped her to survive this far. It all came to her. This baby was not her enemy. It was her friend.

Diane had had the good sense to have her tubes tied. Thank you, Diane. If Jackson wanted a baby, he would set Ida up in a place of her own, and leave Diane. They were not married. He liked Bernie, and if he had been willing to father Ricky, he would take on Maggie also, for the sake of living with his own
child and his own Ida that he dwelt with in magic and obsession in the upstairs back room at Winifred's mother's house.

Dreaming, hoping, her voice airy-light so as not to threaten him, Ida said to Jackson quite simply, ‘I'm going to have your baby.'

They were at the corner table in the Lamb and Flag, where they met so that they could arrive at the house together. Ida had her cropped head on one side and her chin down, smiling up at him.

Jackson had been watching the dart board. He kept his eyes there for a long moment before he took them away, very slowly, and looked down at her. His face was not pleased, not surprised, not angry, not sad. It was nothing, the mouth without expression, the eyes like dead fish.

‘Get out of my life,' was all he said.

Ida got up and went out. As her new English shoes echoed along the pavement in this deserted part of town, she was bleakly conscious of the tiny foetus, flourishing within her like a parasite, a relentless invader.