Porky (3 page)

And, really, it's remarkable how seldom two people meet each other, even when they're living under the same roof. Either she was out at work, or she was home and he was off on some job. She didn't drive; she preferred the bus and she knew the timetable by heart. She'd be off to the supermarket in West Drayton; or she'd be in the kitchen and he'd be fiddling about outside. Days at a time she'd be out each evening on the late shift; and then he had his deals to negotiate down at the Two Magpies or the Spread Eagle.

Then, when they were together, there was the telly. They could both watch it for hours; they looked quite content then. They even made the odd remark; they both knew the programmes so well that these remarks sounded quite intimate, for them. And their cigarettes made them look companionable; my Mum was a surprisingly careless smoker, she was always leaving them lying around, smouldering in ashtrays, something my Dad never did even though she considered him such a slob. Although she smoked Embassy and he smoked Weights they were always running out – they never bought more than one packet at a time – so, eyes on the screen, they'd fumble around for each other's and he'd light hers. A man looks tender doing that, doesn't he? Although I knew it was bad for their health it made me happy, seeing them at that moment.

What happened in their bedroom is something I still don't want to know. He tried to tell me several times, later, but I could make my mind go blank then – a knack I'd learnt in the same way that people chant
‘om, om'
with their guru. I locked a muscle in my brain. He said she was cold . . . his voice thickening. But I knew, when I was little, that through the wall I'd heard noises as if she were in pain, even though something, thank goodness, stopped me rushing in to save her. At school the girls read
Photo-Love
and talked about animal charm. That's what my Dad must have had once, when he was younger. He must have had it for my Mum.

But as I said, she wasn't too keen on the bodily functions. I remember being sick; it was Dad who knelt beside me supporting my clammy brow. She was always going on about the way he ate, though I didn't see anything wrong with it myself. He irked her, the way he sprawled in the armchair, his legs spattered with mud, such a big man in our cramped lounge. When he came out of the toilet, in she'd go and we'd hear the puff-puff of the air freshener.

I don't remember her playing with me. I don't think she found children interesting. When I was helping her like a little housewife, that's when she seemed most at ease. Sometimes she talked to me then, when she was washing up and I was drying, the sun through the window shining on the brushes in their Nescafé jar. She talked about her childhood in Ipswich. Her father, my Grandad who I never knew, he'd worked on the trawlers. One day he'd sailed off and never come home; he'd disembarked in Oslo and started another family, all over again. She would pause, her arms in the suds, and gaze out at the sky with the gulls blown about in the wind and the planes taking off. She used to dress up in her hat and coat, she said, and walk to the end of the pier to wait.

I always felt awkward; a conversation was what I wanted, so much, yet when it actually happened I didn't know how to answer . . . No wonder she was disappointed with me. In fact I don't know if she expected me to answer; she was remembering out loud. The only way I could please her was by putting the crockery away without fumbling it. She wouldn't say anything, of course, but I could feel her silent approval. I did long to please her. My Dad was so hamfisted; he was always breaking things. Then he'd say ‘Fuck me', which made it worse.

She didn't exactly neglect me; she simply wasn't there. Before I was old enough for school it was mainly my Dad who looked after me. We went our separate ways but we always knew what the other one was doing. Thinking back to that time is difficult, but I try to picture us as companionable. We were; I'm sure we were.

We both liked messing about outside. I'd drag a square of carpet through the dust. On it lay Kanga, and Prod, my rubber duck, and an ambulance. I'd just drag them around; I wasn't an adventurous child. No wonder my Mum thought me dull. I'd sit them on one of Dad's piles of sand, surveying their domain. Roo would be out of his pouch, ready for action. Then what? Nobody ever came to play with me; this was long before Teddy my brother was born. The only things I wanted to make were homes. I'd put a White's Lemonade crate under the apple tree and sit them on that.

But the best place was the caravan. Our yard was good to grow up in because there were so many places where nobody went – my Dad rarely, my Mum never. The cats dozed in the caravan but they were wild creatures and leapt out when I arrived. Inside, things were stored which Dad had forgotten about – paint pots, and sticky bottles of pig linctus. All our outbuildings were full of junk. Mum had given up complaining about them.

I called the caravan the Rosy Arms; I suppose it must have been a pub because I collected Dad's empties from round the front and laid them out on the caravan floor. I sat in there for hours; the name Rosy Arms comforted me. I sat humming to Roo. When Dad's whistling approached I stopped humming and pretended I was clearing my throat. I was embarrassed, you see; but in those days I didn't dread his step.

There were other places, surrounded by nettles and that long, pale grass. There was a chilly concrete building full of farm machinery that was probably left by the people before us. Beside it was the railway carriage where I collected the eggs. There was a shed, with our dog tied up and stacks of dusty flowerpots that perhaps my Mum had once used. There was an old car, a Ford Anglia. Years later, Teddy would sit in it all afternoon, heaving round its wheel and zooming off towards horizons only he knew about. Its seats were broken, with the wires sticking through.

Then there were more daring places to explore, farther away from our bungalow. Down by the road, before the petrol station was built, there was a tangled, brambly plot. In the evenings rabbits came out, nibbling unconcerned as the cars passed by. Little did they know the fate in store. The sunlight lit their fur, like haloes . . . You see, I do remember it as sunny.

Outside, the sun has sunk. I'm trying to tell you exactly what it was like. It's not just for you that I'm trying to fix these memories, it's for myself. Just now, talking about the potholes in our drive, I suddenly remembered squatting there beside the puddles. There's this oily film on puddles like that, isn't there? Aren't I right? I was there, I know I was, dangling string into the sheeny violet . . . Mauve swirls . . . I shifted them with my string. My sandals were canvas, and scuffed paler round the front. And the edges of the drive were muddy . . . Ribbed mud, where my Dad had steered around the holes.

I'm getting it back; I thought I'd never be able to. Can you picture it now, with me telling you? Last week, when the doctor saw what had happened, he suggested I visit a colleague of his. A psychiatrist, he meant. No fear, I said.

Perhaps that's why I decided to tell you, because it's easier. I couldn't tell a real person what I might be able to tell you. And it's working . . . It's coming back to me. This little girl . . . I can recognize her now as somebody who once was me. You've helped me, you know.

I'll continue the conducted tour. Out front was the pigs, and the road, and the brambly garage site. Up beside our drive ran another road which led past our bungalow to a brick depot out the back, behind our yard. This didn't belong to us. I didn't know who it belonged to, I hardly ever saw a human being there, though each morning cars drove up to it and at lunchtime a hooter sounded. Like most of the buildings down our way, it was a block put down in a field, just like that, and fenced in with ornamental shrubs. Years later it was bought by Avis Self-Drive and then it was Cortinas driving in and out, shiny saloons with UK visitors inside, wide-eyed from the airport. They stared at our yard.

Behind the depot stretched a large, flat cabbage field. I never went there – it was too big. In winter the smell of rotting vegetation hung over us, with the kerosene. The few fields around us, they all belonged to the market garden down the road. Down there were rows of greenhouses, and along the road stood a sign saying ‘Chrysanths!', then the next saying ‘Bedding Plants!', then the next, ‘Buy Now!' . . . So people had time to slow down.

Cars, cars, whizzing to and fro. Cars out the front; and way across the field, at the back, misty-far, the elevated motorway. But you don't notice that when you're little, do you? You just sit there in your nest of grass with nothing larger on your mind. I was like that too, then . . . I'm remembering it. I'm sure I was just like you.

My Dad made the meals, before I was old enough to take over the cooking. He fried sausages in a haze of fat. When my Mum came back she tut-tutted at the mess, but what could she do? There was no one else to look after me.

I think of her a lot now. I try to work things out, how we might have been if events had been different. She was inhibited, but she wasn't deep-down cold. I don't think most inhibited people are. It just takes more skill to reach them, and when I was young I didn't know how. I was too little to be a companion and that was what she needed – companionship. She must have been lonely, with my Dad. And stuck in that place, with the airport lit like a city at night, but not for her, and the black fields behind with their far string of lights. Nobody except us lived along that stretch of road; they only worked there.

We would have got on better when I was older, I'm sure we would. I think she was looking forward to that. We could have discussed what clothes suited me, what matched my eyes and so on, like mothers and daughters do. I could have asked her about my periods. She'd never mentioned this but I'd seen her sidling through the kitchen with a newspaper parcel in her hand. Once, in my innocence I asked her if it was fish and chips and she'd been furious; I realize now that she was just terribly embarrassed. But later, when I wasn't a stupid kid asking stupid questions, and old enough to have female problems myself, then I'm sure we could have become quite comfortable together.

But the bleeding began early, when I was twelve. By that time I'd made a habit of going down to the toilet at the petrol station. I sat there in the concrete cubicle, my knickers round my ankles and my face swollen hot. I didn't know what to do. Now it had happened, she was the last person in the world I could tell. The words thumped in my skull: I was bleeding because of what my Dad was doing with me.

Perhaps it was true – that I started early because of him. I never knew. But that's what I believed. Outside a car hooted for petrol, from the other side of the world.

So I kept it a secret for months, more furtive even than my Mum. Just when I should have been getting closer to her – and when, I'm sure, she was feeling more interested in me – I was prevented. It must seem ironic to you . . . But there was no such neat word for how I felt.

And it was all because of me. I didn't blame him. It was my fault; I was the wicked one.

IT ALL STARTED
when Teddy was born. I was ten. I don't remember my Mum being pregnant; I don't think she liked to remember it either. She wasn't keen on babies. I'd nearly killed her, she said, being born. The complications, she said, hinting and sighing, with dark remarks and exhausted, knowing looks. But though she went on about them she never actually told me what these complications were, she was secretive about that, so I could only guess. I imagined I'd pulled out her stomach with me; that accounted for her small appetite. Or that she was all tangled inside, like a mixed bag of knitting. Shirl, our sow, once dropped her womb, said Dad. I imagined Mum's pulled out by me, by great big me, and her having to tuck it back inside with tears streaming down her face.

She had a pile of
Woman's Realms
in the lounge; she read magazines avidly. Inside were dreamy romances and Dear Doctor letters about athlete's foot. When nobody was about I'd pull out the magazines and have a search. I found an article about having a baby, and at the end there was a paragraph about stitches, and how soon before you could resume marital relations. I thought this meant meeting your uncles and aunts. But we never did that anyway; perhaps the pain of having me had put an end to these weekend visits. I looked, but I couldn't find anything called Complications.

So she'd vowed never to have any more babies. But along came Teddy. She was away a long time. For a month before he was born she had to lie flat on her back, at Ashford General Hospital, suffering from something I couldn't pronounce.

And then she was kept in for some time after he was born. It was probably only a week or two but it seemed an age, because I felt responsible. I was the big lump of a baby who'd done the damage.

It was a cool, blustery spring and the hens were laying again. Mum's, though, was not as easy as an egg. It was the school holidays. Behind our sheds the hawthorns were sprouting green tufts. My Dad called them bread and cheese and said he ate them when he was a boy. He said he nibbled the hedges like a pony. I didn't know whether to believe him or not. I nibbled them but they tasted bitter; when his head was turned I spat them out.

Our home felt different, without Mum. It changes, doesn't it, when you know the person won't be back. Time slowed down, like a watch someone had forgotten to wind. There was nothing to prepare for, no step at the back door. I always kept my bedroom neat, I loved my little room, and I tried to keep the kitchen and lounge tidy, but I wasn't much good at that. Without Mum to shop, we ate pilchards and jam tarts. Dad liked the yellow tarts best, he called them ‘dirty boys' ears'. The air felt empty and waiting. She must have felt the same over in Ashford, the other side of the airport. I can't tell you how much I was longing for a baby brother or sister.