Things to Make and Mend (14 page)

The teachers were not supposed to refer to ‘the situation’ at all. They were not supposed to mention it. But Miss Button, trendy Miss Button did.

‘That stupid girl,’ Miss Button said one day when Rowena was away at an antenatal appointment. ‘What a waste of a good brain.’

Rowena would sometimes look at Sally from across the
playground.
And sometimes, despite her monstrous betrayal, Sally
wanted to run across and hug her, say ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, I forgive you.’
I knew, really,
she wanted to say,
I knew deep down, when we bumped into you in Woolworths.

Because she missed her. She missed her so much that her eyes welled up with tears when she thought about her. But now there was this thing, this bulge, this
result of reproduction
which only a few months ago they had sniggered about in Biology lessons. There it was, turning Rowena Cresswell into someone else.
Puffing
up her face. Thickening her waist.
What have you done, Rowena?
And inside her was Colin’s child. Sally’s boyfriend’s child. Even her betrayal faded in the light of that.

Within just a couple of weeks, their estrangement had become too frightening, too established to do anything about. Sally was at a loss to know
what
to do. She was so shocked she couldn’t even properly hate her. She pretended to be ill and stayed away from school for a whole week, embroidering a frog on a lily-pad, until her mother marched her to the bus stop one rainy morning. (Rowena had not been at the bus stop: her mother had started driving her to school in their Volvo.) And when Sally got to school she discovered that, in her absence, Rowena had been scooped up by two motherly sixth-form girls – girls who had always had that irritating, serene look on their faces when they went up to the altar during Communion. Now Sally would see them at break, plodding about the playground in their sensible shoes, Rowena between them, duplicitous as a cuckoo.

Nobody really knew what to say. There was no precedent. This was a nice school. It was not ‘that awful comprehensive’ down the road. What was the best course of action? Expulsion? Or understanding? It was 1979. The teachers took so long
wondering
what to do that it became 1980, and Rowena’s pregnancy was becoming undeniable. She wandered around the playground
with her sixth-form minders, untouchable, her stomach
beginning
to swell beneath the blue nylon of her school blouse. She was somebody else now.
Not Rowena.
And now Sally
did
start to hate her, particularly after she had her hair cut – a short, brutal cut, like a signal of contempt. No more prissy perms and wedges for
her.
It seemed she had abandoned her taste in wishy-washy hairstyles. She seemed, Sally thought, almost triumphant,
flaunting
her pregnancy, her short hair like a flag. Her school skirt, the fastening undone to accommodate her stomach, grew tight around her legs. By late winter, when the rest of their class – chaste, good girls – were wondering if she would become one of those extraordinarily huge pregnant people –
God, maybe she would
die
giving birth!
– she left, never to return. It was the most exciting departure anyone had ever made. Even more exciting than dying.

Nobody seemed to know who the father was. Nobody except Sally. She sat quietly, without Rowena, in Needlework, meticulously hemming the cuffs of her blouson. Needlework had become a kind of solace. A consolation. She could bury her head in the material; she could watch the push and pull of the needle, and make the pinking shears purr. She could comfort herself with the feel of silk, with the words
voile, georgette, organza,
petersham,
linen, wool.

At home her parents sat, non-plussed, on their Dralon sofa.

‘What’s going on, Sally?’ asked her father.

‘What do you mean, what’s going on?’

‘You used to get good reports.’

‘Well, I don’t know what they’re all on about. I haven’t done anything different.’

‘At least she’s good at Needlework, Bill. Maybe …’ her mother began, and then stopped, confounded. She sighed, bent, and picked up a piece of fluff from the carpet.

‘I haven’t done anything different,’ Sally said again, and she stood up and left the room. She went upstairs to her bedroom where she sat, listening to the tapes Rowena had recorded for her and staring at all her belongings: her Pierrot doll, her cheap
guitar,
her
Jackie
magazines, her make-up box, her basket of threads. For years, she and Rowena had sat there together; Rowena had sat on that bean-bag, talking about everything, from God to leg-warmers. And latterly, Sally thought – it slowly dawned on her – they had talked a lot about Colin. Rowena had even blushed; had looked shifty at the mention of his name.

She was sleeping with him! She was having sex with him!

And obviously they were not even using his free condoms.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the consequences of sex. It had changed Rowena totally. Pregnancy had turned her into a navel-gazer; someone who no longer cared about the outside world. Someone who no longer spoke to Sally. She wished she could ask her what it was like. Was she happy? Or scared? Did her mother condemn her or cosset her? Had she taken her to see someone at the Marie Stopes clinic or knitted her tiny
pastel-coloured
cardigans? And how did it feel, what was it like, to have a stomach with a
baby
inside it? A baby that
moved?
She’d heard that they
moved around
in there! And sometimes you could see little outlines of hands and feet through the skin! Was that true or was that some myth? Sally patted her own flat, uncaressed belly and tried to imagine. At school she went to Biology classes where they were having sex education lessons, and from which Rowena, already educated, was excused. She learned about the reproductive life of a frog, its sad little body splayed out on a wooden board.

Colin, she didn’t actually care about so much. His importance had shifted, like the ace in a pack of cards. From highest to
lowest
value in one switch of games. He had vanished, in any case; had disappeared overnight, sidling away through the night-black
suburbs to who knew where – Reading? Scunthorpe? Italy? – and there was nothing Sally could do. She missed him of course, she missed him physically, in her chest, as if a part of her had been wrenched away with him. A sudden, awful hurt. And visions of Colin floated around her head: there he was, at
Razzles.
There he was, in his beautiful, awful coat. There he was, lying on the lion statue at Trafalgar Square. But then, after just a few weeks she couldn’t picture him clearly any more. His face began to grow hazy and indistinct, and this struck her as the
saddest
thing that could happen to someone: the forgetting of a loved one’s face. She couldn’t picture the exact contours and angles any more, the curve of his lips or the colour of his eyes. His face was a vague shape, a memory of something loved. It was a deprivation. It was not fair. But Rowena had known him better than she ever would.

The town was empty, a void. She walked past the Cresswells’ house and couldn’t bring herself to look up at the lit windows. She told the teachers that, no, she couldn’t give Rowena the
lesson
notes she had missed. She dialled her number and then put the phone down when her mother answered. She dialled Colin’s number and sat with her ear against the receiver, listening to the single, continuous, humming tone on the other end of the line. She imagined his empty flat above the kebab shop. She lay on her bed on top of her old, lanolin-smelling sheepskin rug, staring up at the ceiling. Apart from that, she did nothing. She just lay there.

After a while she wondered if her relationship with Colin had been some sort of elaborate joke. She looked at herself in her
parents’
wardrobe mirror and saw herself reduced; not a mysterious young woman but a schoolgirl with gangly legs. Of course, of
course
this would happen. How could he have found her
attractive
and Rowena not?
But that could have been me!
she kept thinking.
That could have been me, with that stomach and that baby!

A ‘To Let’ sign appeared outside Colin’s flat, and she couldn’t help observing, childishly, how it would have said
toilet
if there had been an
i
in it.

Sometimes she used to imagine she would bump into Colin. Surely it was inevitable? And maybe when she did she would
forgive
him. Or perhaps he would fall in love, unrequited, with the wise, witty beauty she had become. He would be some
unspectacular
thirty-two-year-old man, balding, possibly fat, and she would be twenty-five, gorgeous, talented, cruel. Maybe she would bump into him at a swing-park one day. He would be wearing a hideous two-tone padded anorak and pushing his awful snotty child back and forth, back and forth on a swing, and she would not even recognise him until he uttered the words
How could I have let you go …?

Rowena gave birth four months after she left school. It was early April, a day full of pink and white blossom. Sally discovered on the grapevine that the baby was nearly a month early, a
five-pound,
five-ounce boy whom she named Joe. Rowena had given him her own surname. Joe Cresswell.

Occasionally Sally would see Rowena pushing Joe Cresswell around in a pram, up East Grinstead High Street. Or sitting in the Me-n-U café with her mother, the baby in her arms, A-levels abandoned, the punk hairstyle grown out too. Sally’s heart always blanched when she spotted them. The baby looked tiny and pink, like a prawn, its head flopping as if there was
something
wrong with it. Rowena and Mrs Cresswell always seemed to be arguing.

Sally left school herself a few months later, her life haphazard, insubstantial, papery as a sewing pattern. She stayed at home, cloistered behind the safe, fern-leaf-splattered walls of her parent’s house. She sat in front of the television on Thursday nights, watching
Top of the Pops
and
The Generation Game
and eating
too many Ritz biscuits. She had unfinished O-levels in five
subjects.
She did not have a single friend.

Her father sat on the sofa beside her sometimes, marvelling at the discordant noises emerging from the bands on
Top of the Pops.
(‘Is this singing? Do they think this is singing?’)

Her mother used to come quietly into the living room, walking across their squeaking autumn-leaf carpet, bearing trays of
Bourbon
biscuits and cups of tea. ‘Here y’ar, darling,’ she used to say, frowning. There was something wrong with her daughter but she didn’t know what it was.

‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’ she asked one evening.

‘No, Mum,’ Sally replied tetchily – by now her grief had turned into a kind of permanent tetchiness. She reached forward for another biscuit. ‘I am not pregnant.’

It was not Colin she missed, after all. It was Rowena. It was Rowena she thought about. Alone in the kitchen, she would go to the phone and dial Rowena’s number again. She knew Rowena’s number better than her own. But she would put the phone down before the first ring, imagining their silence, or their anger, or the wail of Joe Cresswell in the background. Three times their own phone had rung and it had been Rowena; but Sally’s mother had answered and Sally had pretended to be out.

Eventually Rowena and her son moved away – to London, Sally heard – to live in some flat in Maida Vale. And then on to somewhere else. While Sally continued to drift around the house, collapsed on the furniture.

‘Come on,’ her mother used to say. ‘You’ve got to buck your ideas up.’

Her mother wanted her to snap out of it, whatever it was. She plumped down beside her one afternoon, a month or so before Christmas, and said, ‘What are you planning to do with your life, then? Eh?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Because you can’t hang around doing nothing, can you?’

‘S’pose not.’

‘What happened to Rowena? You never talk about her these days.’

‘Dunno.’

‘Can’t you think of anything to do?’

‘Nope.’

So she found work. She began to work at the Country Kitchen, donning her mob cap and her puffed sleeves every morning. And in the evenings she came home and picked up her canvas, her needle and her thread.

There are many ways in which a girl’s life can go wrong.

Or, there are a few ways, but the ways are like waves, building up momentum as they progress. Gathering up seaweed, rubbish, shipwrecks, oil slicks, dubious sailors in their wake. Sailors with tattoos on their arms proclaiming undying love.

My son has always made friends easily. He used to bring some of them home for tea back in England: big, space-invading
schoolboys
in smelly shoes. I remember all their names: Luke, Max, Chris, Simon. I remember the things they used to like eating, their obsession with trainers and small electronic games. When they were very young they called me Mrs Cresswell. When they grew older they didn’t call me anything. They looked at my smooth skin and unmotherish figure and some of them blushed.

Usually I don’t worry any more about the potential pitfalls in my son’s life because he is past the age of stupidity. The time to worry about male stupidity – physical stupidity – is over. He is twenty-seven. He has always been more academic than sporty in any case; not one of those boys that goes abseiling or potholing or freefalling. He has never been interested in situations
involving
sheer drops or tight spaces. But he could always run fast, do trigonometry, clear the high jump.

Another reason not to worry about him: his appearance. He is a nice-looking man, his features even and open. He does not have the hang-ups that I used to have; that all the girls at my school seemed to have. When he was younger he never even seemed to care very much when he got spots. I remember caring a lot. I
remember the hours Sally Tuttle and I used to spend in front of mirrors, fretting and wondering. About our spots and also about our hair. Was it better like this, or like that? Better with a side parting? Or a middle parting? Or no parting at all?

Joe is lucky because (a) he does not mope around for hours in front of mirrors, and (b) he has not inherited my straight, straight hair.

Instead he has his father’s waves and kinks. Curls I used to long for. When he was still a baby people sometimes described his curls as ‘angelic’, which made me simultaneously proud and envious. He had these dark golden, bouncing curls. He had, the hairdresser used to inform me on my visits to Fringe Benefits, ‘hair to die for’.

‘You see the way Joey’s hair stays in place?’ she said,
attempting,
with a cylindrical brush, to flick some life into my hair. ‘
People
pay a fortune on perms to get their hair to sit like that.’

‘Really?’ I replied, thinking how strange it was to describe hair as
sitting,
like a patient dog.

‘That do you?’ the hairdresser asked then, bending down towards my face and pulling two strands of hair across my cheeks, to check they were the same length. They weren’t, quite.

‘That’s great,’ I replied. ‘That’s lovely.’ And I smiled in the mirror. I didn’t have a clue what I should do with my hair or my life.

I visited Fringe Benefits for over a year but my conversations with Lorraine never really got past the subject of how lovely my haircuts were. I was no good at conversations with other girls any more: a part of me, at that time, had closed down.
Sometimes
I thought I might begin a conversation about something – my plans to go back to school or to sixth-form college – but my nerve would buckle as soon as I saw the other clients ranged around the walls like wilting foxgloves beneath the lilac hairdryers.

I should go somewhere else. I’ve been coming here too long.

‘So, what would you like today, Rowena?’

My own flat, nice toys for Joe, a career, some fun, a boyfriend, a girl friend.

‘Just a trim today please.’

Lorraine considered and tapped the side of her face with her fingers. She had a silver bracelet on her left wrist, with the letter L attached to it.

‘Ever thought of a more flicky sort of fringe?’ she said one afternoon. (It was 1982 by now: Joe was two and my old school peers had all started at university.)

‘Hmm,’ I replied, looking around the salon at the women beneath the hairdryers. At the dried-out Easter cactus plants, the curled magazines and the cups of tea. It felt as if nothing had moved in there for years.

‘Go on,’ Lorraine coaxed, ‘have a bit of a change.’

I had an hour to spend at the hairdresser’s before I had to relieve my mother of babysitting duties (babysitting was a huge strain for all concerned).

‘OK,’ I said, ‘it’s about time I had a different look.’

‘Your little boy’s lucky, isn’t he?’ Lorraine observed, pleased that she had persuaded me. She pinned my hair up at the back and gently pushed my head forwards. ‘Them curls.’

‘He gets them from his dad,’ I replied wickedly into my plastic grey cape.

‘Really?’ Lorraine asked, her voice fading away. She cleared her throat, embarrassed. Everyone in that part of East Grinstead knew about the posh schoolgirl who had the baby, but pretended not to.

‘So,’ Lorraine said. ‘I’m going to do a sort of flicky look at the front, and short at the back.’

‘OK.’

Far away, in the distance, a radio was playing Bob Marley.
No 
woman, no cry.
Someone turned on a hairdryer. Someone laughed.

I remember leaving the hairdresser’s that day, running because I was late and Joe would be crying and my poor, ill mother would have on her long-suffering face. I remember turning the corner by the butcher’s shop, putting my hand up to the shortness at the back, the new flicks at the sides, and thinking, ‘I could be
different.
I could be different.’

The hairdresser helped me make that decision. She must have transmitted something through her silver scissors, along my hair and directly into my brain.

I began to think more clearly in those weeks. In a notebook covered in yogurt, I wrote down my achievements and plans: 

(
University?
I wrote in brackets.
Nurseries? Grants? Check library, newspapers.
)

I remember writing this as I lay on my flat stomach, on a tartan blanket in my parents’ garden, my son nearby, crashing into the flowerbeds. He was wearing the little jacket I had found in Oxfam – the one that had the typographical error printed all over it:
cutey pi
. He turned his head and smiled at me and said
something
in infant language about the leaves on my mother’s
variegated
holly. I leaned across and kissed his cheek.

My first step towards a career was a course for early
school-leavers
and people on benefit. It was located in a grey council building in the hinterland of East Grinstead. I left Joe with my parents for the day and clanged up the metal steps, a new
cardboard
folder under my arm.

The course was called ‘Steps to a New Career: The Challenge Ahead’.

The tutor (a woman whose name, I recall, was Felicity) was very upbeat. She wore enormous, swaying earrings and spent the whole of the first hour telling us how she had sorted her life out. Her name used to be Dawn, but she didn’t like that, she almost shouted, so she had changed it by deed poll. This was an
example
of how she had Overcome a Difficulty. And this attitude could be applied to finding a career.

We early school-leavers and people on benefit looked at her. There were eight of us. This was part of a government-sponsored ‘Into Work’ package. Either you attended or you paid back £100. (‘You get a free lunch,’ the ‘Into Work’ adviser had told me at my local DHSS office. ‘There is such a thing. I believe they do quite nice sandwiches.’)

Felicity’s life story involved four jobs, two years in America and a divorce. ‘So,’ she said in conclusion, ‘that’s enough talking from me. Now I’d like you all to introduce yourselves. Let’s start with you. Tell us all who you are and what your last job was.’

She turned to the very scared-looking man sitting beside me.

‘My name’s Bill,’ he squeaked. ‘I was a joiner.’

But he was better at joining wood than groups like this. He shoved his hands beneath his thighs, turned and looked at me.

‘Oh,’ I said. I wasn’t expecting to be in the spotlight so
suddenly.
‘I’m Rowena. I’m just a …’

But I didn’t want to say anything about Joe. I didn’t want to say I had left school at fifteen because I had got pregnant.

‘A what?’ Felicity asked, smiling at me.

‘I don’t know. I just …’

‘No no, you never
just
do something, Rowena,’ Felicity said.

‘OK. I was … I am … I kind of …’

I thought of Joe and felt treacherous.

‘I’m a mother,’ I said.

‘That’s better,’ Felicity said, looking a little alarmed, her
earrings
sparkling beneath the fluorescent lights. ‘None of us is
just
something. The word “just” is not allowed in this room.’

And she stood up, walked over to the whiteboard, wrote JUST on it, then drew a line through it.

‘“Just” has been exterminated,’ she said. I almost expected her to throw her head back and laugh, like a villain in a cartoon. Instead, she smiled mildly, sat down again and looked at me.

‘Being a mother is one of the toughest jobs there is’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I mumbled, feeling that I might be about to cry. I was aware of the woman next to me bracing herself for an ordeal.

Some events, some days stay in your mind and you don’t even know why. I remember that day with great clarity. I remember having to do something called ‘Accelerated Learning: Dilemmas and Solutions’. This had involved shuffling around the room until we found someone to discuss a dilemma with. We had to discuss two problems each within six minutes. I grabbed the first person I could find – a curly-haired woman who had once worked in a café.
Her
problem, she told me, was that she used to eat half the cakes before they had even made it on to the counter. ‘I did it for weeks before anyone found out it was me,’ she said, and I nodded sympathetically, like a priest in a confession box.

‘I mean, apart from putting on the weight,’ the woman said, ‘it meant we used to run out of things to sell by four o’clock.’

I tried to apply my mind to a solution. ‘Maybe,’ I suggested, ‘when you get a new job, you could eat a bowl of cereal or
something
before you …’

The woman looked at me and gave a small, unamused laugh. ‘It wouldn’t be the same if I just ate something at home,’ she said. ‘It was the thrill of the chase.’

She looked at her watch. ‘That’s one and a half minutes
anyway
. You have to talk about a problem now, duck.’

‘Oh God,’ I said. I couldn’t think of a small enough problem. Also, I really didn’t know how I could follow the woman’s cake story.

‘Go on,’ said the woman, ‘We all have problems. I’m all ears.’ But actually she was all eyes. Her eyes were enormous behind her glasses.

So I talked about getting pregnant. How I had not meant to but it had happened, quick as anything – there was this bloke I had had a crush on, and now I had a twenty-six-month-old son and I had screwed up. And my best friend didn’t talk to me any more. I hadn’t seen her for well over a year, but time … time seemed to have done strange things. It had moved and it hadn’t moved.

‘I love my baby and everything …’ I said, instantly regretting what a private subject I had chosen. The tears were beginning to well up behind my eyes, as they often did in those days. ‘You know, I wouldn’t ever have wanted to …’

The woman looked at me. She blinked. ‘You’re young,’ she said, somewhat irritably. ‘How old are you?’

‘Seventeen.’

The woman gave another short, slightly bitter laugh.

‘The world’s your oyster, darling.’

‘Yes, but it’s not, is it? It’s not exactly …’

The woman picked three shortbread biscuits off the catering trolley. ‘Have you tried to patch things up with your friend? Maybe she could babysit for you.’

I found it hard to comprehend how obtuse this woman was.

‘It’s a bit complicated,’ I said. ‘I really don’t think that’s likely to happen.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because we fell out. She thought …We never really talked about it, but I think she might have thought …’

I stopped talking. The woman was staring at me, her eyes enormous and uncomprehending. She took a bite of shortbread. I imagined how I might once have talked to Sally about her. The way we would have spoken about it. And a little picture came into my head then, of how it might have been; how different it might have been, if Sally had remained my friend. She could have been like an aunt to Joe. She could at least have continued to be my friend. But now I didn’t even know what she did any more. I didn’t know where she spent her days. She had left school, apparently, got some job in a plumber’s merchants: that was all I knew. 

‘Quick, we have to swap again now,’ the woman said, looking around her at the other couples in the room. Then she launched into a story about going to the vet’s with her dog. ‘He had a
distended
stomach,’ she explained. ‘He looked like one of those
airships.
He looked as if he was about to explode …’

And I listened and looked at the rain bouncing off the window sills and knew something about my life would have to change.