The Decision: Lizzie's Story (3 page)

Then Sal arrived. In that astute way of hers, she took one look at me and where my gaze was heading, towards the child. “Not here.” She said.

We walked through the marketplace in silence towards the park: to the broken, graffittied bandstand where the teens congregated every night to drink cider. Back with urban deprivation, seeing the cracked glass in the panes, the vulgarities scrawled in black pen, I felt my optimism for the future dissipate quickly. Even the sight of children beyond the bandstand on the play equipment did little to lift my spirits, for they were there with their own young mothers in sweat pants and bling, the supposed “type” I had always been certain I would never be.

Finally, Sal opened her mouth. “You can’t have it.” She said.

A dreadful sinking feeling heaped itself on me. I could see the truth of Sal’s words. They had been in the back of my mind the whole time, struggling to be heard as I tried to tell myself an alternative route was possible. I was barely eighteen. I had no money and no prospect of making any. Babies were expensive; this child would have nothing. Mike would not want to know, I felt sure of that, deep down. My own family could not support me, for they had no money either. It would be unfair on me, unfair on the child and unfair on my family to follow this through.

Yet still the rebellious heart of my relationship with Sal tried to beat and I attempted to disagree: “I’d manage.” I said.

“On what?” Sal said plaintively.

The question hung in the air like the young mothers’ cigarette smoke. I knew what she was really asking. I knew there was help state available for girls in my position and so did Sal. Our mother had had to utilise the system more than once, especially when our Dad was out of work or on one of his jaunts. Life had been an uphill struggle for her, raising us. But money was available if I could swallow my pride and fill in the forms and live with less, whilst fielding the neverending questions
and demands of Social Services. So the real question Sal was asking was, “Did I want the same life as our mother’s?” though neither of us had the guts to say it aloud.

“You’re going to university next month.” Sal said.

“I’d manage.” I repeated, doggedly.

“Everyone would talk about you,” Sal continued, determined. “You’d have no friends, no boyfriends. You’d just be the “pregnant one”. Then for the next two years you’d have a crying baby and studies to do, you’d be all alone.”

“I don’t care.” I whispered.

“You’d have no money and there’s no guarantee when you get out of university you’ll even end up in a job related to your degree. You’ll have loads of debt, but you won’t even be able to pick and choose jobs to get by because you’ll need a babysitter. Bar work will be out, no childminders or nurseries work past six o’ clock. You wouldn’t be able to do weekends…”

“I don’t have to go to university.” I said.

“… You want to go to university.” Sal countered.

There was no real arguing with that. I had been dreaming of going to London for months, years even. Away from the rural backwater where we lived, I really felt my dreams could come true. I had seen the studios at my university, the potter’s wheels, the resources on offer and I wanted them. Desperately. But:

“There are other ways.” I found myself saying, “Maybe I could go later, when the kid’s at school. There was a child on the market, with his Mum, they’re doing fine!”

Then Sal delivered her most devastating blow. “She probably has a husband at home, earning the big bucks.” Sal pointed out. “It’s probably just a hobby to her.”

Pain and disappointment coursed through me. I knew Sal was probably right. But still I couldn’t accept my sister’s words. “I could manage.” I said. Again.

And that was it: compassionate Sal was gone and judgemental Sal returned, eyes blazing. Perhaps from her point of view she felt I was dismissing her good advice, saying it was not good enough. But Sal, despite her large IQ, was still only fifteen. She could not truly understand what I was going through, without having faced the same herself. “So ruin your life.” She declared.

Stung, I watched Sal stalk off, away from the bandstand. I wanted to call her back, but didn’t. Pride would not allow me to back down and resentment flowed through my veins:
who did Sal think she was? She’s just a kid
. Then with a jolt and a lurching of my stomach, I realised:
So am I.

I couldn’t go home right away. Riding on the same bus as Sal, in silence, was just unpalatable. So I wandered blindly back into town, bypassing the market and onto its broken-down old high street. When I had been a small child, I had seen only the sea stretching out bright beyond Winby: the pebbled beach, the donkeys tethered to the promenade railings. On the lampposts of the sea front, coloured bunting was tied and lights flashed and bells rang in the arcades. I had thought I was the luckiest little girl in the world. Living near the seaside was a dream to so many, yet I was living it.

But now, sea gulls soared up from Winby’s old promenade and its ancient neon arcades. They hovered above the faded posters, broken windows, hastily scrawled graffiti. On the seafront, next to the sea wall and the steps up from the beach, The Grange, an old hotel that had once played host to the rich and famous, stood empty, boarded up and sad. When Queen Victoria had been on the throne, Winby had been a luxurious resort; it had been a jewel of the north coast. Now it was decayed and sad, forgotten as Brits went abroad instead on cheap package deals.
Undervalued by its locals, most were able only to work during the summer months as its few B&Bs, hotels and family attractions closed down in winter. Everywhere I looked suddenly, I could see the poverty for what it was and I was struck by the knowledge it would never change. Because that was the dichotomy: despite the deprivation, house prices were high as city dwellers descended at weekends and summer holidays, believing all was rosy here, for they never saw the metal shutters go up come winter, or the dead streets of the subsequent ghost town. For every rich family like Shona’s, tucked away from the “real” Winby on prestigious huge red brick and sandstone estates, there were ten more families like mine, scraping by at best. We were not living our lives at all, but some marketer’s stereotypical dream of seaside living; one only those with money could buy into. The rest were left with the scraps.

I had to get out.

But Sal’s words kept rolling around and around in my head:
“You’ll be the pregnant one… You’d be all alone.”
I knew I couldn’t leave and take the baby with me. But I couldn’t stay and raise a child in a place like this. I had seen too many people’s potential go to waste here: struggling to get by, never finding enough work, always doing without. The sadness in the women’s eyes, the frustration in the men’s, the unspoken resentment that bubbled under, always, in this place. There was only one answer: Sal was right.
I couldn’t have this baby.

Hot tears pricked my eyelids as I stared vacantly into shop windows, looking at my haunted reflection, rather than the goods beyond the glass. I never wanted this! I never wanted to be “that” girl. I remembered a girl called Vanessa in Year Nine at school. One day, halfway through the academic year, she had just disappeared. The rumour machine was of course in full swing before break time, but shreds of truth got through. Vanessa got pregnant by Shane Dawkins, that eighteen year old loser who
hung around the school gates, hoping to turn the heads of impressionable thirteen year olds. And turn them he did: with his cigarettes and booze, he must have seemed sophisticated and cool, instead of the paedo he really was. A succession of little girls were used and discarded by him and Vanessa was just one of many. She had gone to him and told him she was pregnant, but he and his crew had just laughed at her, Shona had reported with wide eyes. So Vanessa had gone home and taken twenty five paracetemol and washed them down with half a bottle of vodka. They’d found her just in time, but the baby had died. Vanessa came back at the beginning of year ten, smaller somehow and quieter than she’d ever been before. I found myself feeling sorry for her, but there was a part of me of me that had judged her. How could she have been so stupid? Not just stupid enough to go with a creep like Shane either, but to get pregnant!
What an idiot.
But now I was pregnant, only I was much older than Vanessa and I hadn’t been taken advantage of. As the eldest child of such a large family, I had seen so many babies brought into the house. I even remembered Sal vaguely, wrapped up in the blue shawl my Nan had made for my Dad when he was just a baby. I recalled the exhausted, elated expression on my mother’s face each time, the proud puffed-up chest of my father. Each time he’d “toast the little lady” and our house would be filled with his many associates, all of them dodgy, smelling of alcohol and cigarettes, leaning over the second hand crib and congratulating him on producing yet another girl.

“When you gonna bring us a boy, Dan?” one of his mates Rory declared when Hannah was born.

“I’m the only man of the house!” my father chuckled and sure enough, the twins were next and the last of the Carmichael girls. At that party I had sat on the sofa and watched my father and his cronies sink more beer than we could afford, yet for
once my mother wasn’t wearing her sour expression. My father had just come home from a jaunt that had lasted nearly six months and the majority of her pregnancy. I think then she had just been glad to have him back. Not that it lasted long. Dad hadn’t lived at home in years, appearing and disappearing at will: sending money when he could, falling silent when he couldn’t. From time to time, he’d come to the house, his hands in his pockets like a teen, waiting for Mum to take him inside. Sometimes she’d make him a sandwich or a coffee; other times they’d disappear upstairs together for hours. Whatever the case, they were together, yet not together. The same they’d always been, whether they actually lived in the same house or not.

“Dad’s here!” Hannah would exclaim every time, beaming. Each time he came back, Hannah was always sure he would stay, yet surely she could never remember a time in her life he had for any significant amount of time? I barely could.

“Don’t get excited,” I would counsel, before Sal would inevitably cut in cruelly, “He’s not staying, dimwit.”

And sure enough, Dad would give us all a hug, call us his princesses and then be on his way again. At the moment he was living in as a kitchen porter at the Belle View Hotel on Roslin Road, just four streets away from where I was standing now. Yet I knew I would not go and see him and ask his advice. How could I? He had always been there, more or less, but never truly been there for any of us, Mum included. His superficial, dissociative nature could not allow it. I recalled a time I was being bullied at school. Mum had advised me to simply hit back, but this had resulted in an even more savage beating and humiliation from the girl involved, a brutish little bitch called Lorna. She was the type who carried more freckles and puppy fat than the victims she singled out for them, a way of deflecting attention from herself. Feeling unable to report my failure to subdue Lorna to Mum then, I had sought Dad at the
house he lived at that time, one down near the seafront. A forty year old living in with some teenage students from the local college, he cut a strange figure, but it was all he could afford. And the students loved him and his neverending supply of weed, of course. He always had enough money for that stuff. So I had knocked on the door and a shirtless boy barely older than myself had answered, plumes of smoke billowing around him. Perhaps no other fresh air had hit the house in days. Behind the boy, I could see the muck of a house not cleaned in months: mouldy plates piled high in the sink, the carpet deep in detritus. My father practically fell out of the doorway and his stoned face lit up at the sight of me.

“Lizzzzz…” He slurred after a short beat, as if he had to think first which of his girls I was. “Come in!”

I just stood there. There was something so pathetic and sad about him, a grown man, standing next to the shirtless boy, surrounded by filth. “I have to go.” I said and simply turned on my heel and walked back up the road. He didn’t call after me and it was never mentioned again. Perhaps Dad did not even remember the encounter. Whatever the case, I knew I could not go to him now.

I looked at my watch. It was roughly an hour and a half since Sal had left me at the bandstand, more than enough time to make it home on the bus and across the two fields to our house. Would she have spilled her guts to Mum? I took my mobile from my pocket, half expecting a text from Mum, with the curt words COME HOME NOW. Mum always wrote in capital letters, as if she didn’t expect to be taken seriously otherwise. I envisaged her, sitting at the long kitchen table, a cigarette smouldering in the ashtray, giving her true feelings away. How many times had I stood before her like that, shame filling my boots, yet defiance rising in my chest? She was a forbidding woman, my mother. Perhaps I would have been too had my
children outnumbered me, six to one. Mum was a short woman, even shorter than me (and I was the shortest of all the Carmichael girls, or would be; even the twins were gaining on me at nearly eight years old). Sal and Amanda had taken after our father and Hannah was the tallest of all of us, nearly five ten at only thirteen, gangly and awkward, all arms and elbows. Yet our mother was not just short, but tiny: her hands, her feet, her nose; everything about her was miniature, as if someone had shrunk her with some kind of futuristic ray gun. She was painfully thin, no breasts to speak of, for she favoured cigarettes above food. From a distance she could be mistaken for a skeletal child and it was only up close could you see the age in her eyes, the faded enthusiasm. A shock of frizzy hair stood out from her scalp, which from time to time she would attempt to dye, yet it would always go orange, no matter what the colour said on the box. Lines drew in her lips like a drawstring and she rarely wore make up, the grey pallor of her skin showing the world just how tired she was. And always, always, her catchphrase was the same in response to our protests at cleaning our rooms, helping out with the housework or whatever else we had been asked: “Have I slipped into some kind of parallel dimension where I’m speaking Chinese? Do it!”