With No Crying (6 page)

It was hard to decide what, if anything, to take with her; hard, even, to decide what to wear for the journey. What sort of
travelling outfit
is
the right one for a future stretching bare and featureless as a desert into the unimaginable distance?

“You’ll need lots of new clothes!” Mrs Field had declared, with manic, desperate optimism: and all the time, right here in Miranda’s wardrobe,
were
the new clothes she should have been needing, never yet worn: two very pretty and becoming maternity smocks, bought with her birthday money when she became fifteen only a couple of weeks ago.

So practical had these purchases seemed at the time, as well as exciting and delightful; because although it was early days yet, she
would
be needing them before winter set in. She had been quite unprepared for the little gasp of horror her mother had been unable to suppress at the sight of them.

Now, she understood it only too well. Already, Mummy had known that the garments would never be worn, that no maternity clothes would ever be required. Even on that first evening, when the two of them had clung together in such apparent closeness and love, the decision must already have been quietly taken…

It was easier, somehow, to write it down than it had been to say it out loud.

“I hate you,” Miranda wrote, neatly and carefully, bending over her desk in the little circle of rosy light from the
reading-lamp
which had been so marvellous a Christmas present three—or was it four—years ago. “I hate you so very much that I can’t go on living here. I have gone to stay with Sharon.” After which she straightened the bed, drawing the pretty candlewick coverlet over it, and pinned the note with a safety pin in the very middle of it, where it could not fail to be instantly seen.

Then, cautiously and quietly, rattling the metal hangers as little as possible, she reached into the back of the wardrobe for the never-worn, crisply-new smocks that were hanging there.

*

Even with the chair-cushion stuffed into the front of her knickers, the effect was still a bit skimpy, unworthy of these billowing folds of material that gleamed darkly in the lamplight. Not until she had wrapped a bath towel round and around her waist as well,
securing it with safety pins in four places, was she satisfied with the effect achieved.

And so marvellous was it, so exactly tailored to the dreams of these past weeks, that despite herself the tears dried upon her cheeks, and she stared at herself in the dim reaches of the mirror with a sort of incredulous joy. All a pretence, of course—was she not at this very moment re-deploying the bath towel to better advantage with a new adjustment of the safety pins?—but—ye gods and goddesses—
what
a pretence! What balm it brought, albeit temporarily, to her bruised and battered soul!

And it was not until she was actually on the top deck of the bus, rumbling through the half-darkness of the summer night, that it dawned on her that she couldn’t possibly, in this get-up, go and stay at Sharon’s.

I
T WAS NOT
so much that Sharon’s parents would be shocked and incredulous—though of course they would be: it was Sharon herself whom Miranda knew she could not face. Though less well up in the subject than Miranda had succeeded in making herself during the past weeks, Sharon would certainly know enough about the normal course of pregnancy to realise that this sudden and dramatic increase in girth within such a few days could not possibly be genuine. Confronted with the inevitable barrage of searching questions, Miranda would have no alternative but to confess to her friend the silly subterfuge to which she had resorted; and this would lead inevitably to the whole sorry tale of weakness and cowardice in the face of parental pressure, right up to the final ghastly and despicable surrender. Even to a close friend—perhaps particularly to a close friend—the revelation of such shame was unthinkable. Bitterly, Miranda recollected those proud, defiant declarations of hers, in the presence of most of Four A: “They’d have to kill me first!” she’d boasted when Doreen had come out with her tactless suggestion about abortion. She remembered the open-mouthed admiration of her audience, their flattering, half-incredulous awe… After all that, to have to go crawling to Sharon, her staunchest supporter, with a miserable confession of humiliation and defeat, knowing, too, that by next term it would be all over the school. Miranda Field isn’t pregnant after all. Miranda Field has had an abortion. Miranda Field got cold feet when it came to the crunch, just like we said she would…

Unthinkable! Unendurable! She must never see them again, any of them, for as long as she lived! From now on, her existence must be among strangers, people who knew nothing of the girl
she had once been, and could pass no judgement on what she had become—had, indeed, not the smallest interest in doing so.

Strangers! How tranquil is their company, how liberating to one whose own self has become a burden beyond enduring!
Undemanding
, unconcerned, empty of expectations, they take you at face value, looking no further than whatever image you choose, at that moment, to project.

Already, before she had been riding on the bus for as long as five minutes, Miranda was aware of this lightening of burdens; aware too—intensely and comfortingly aware—of the interest and sympathy her existence was once more arousing. A
white-haired
old gentleman had already stepped aside to let her go in front, and when she’d boarded the bus the conductress had said “Careful, dear!” putting a hand solicitously under her elbow as she climbed on.

She was special again. Glances of interest and sympathetic speculation were coming her way again, and the comfort of it was beyond belief.

Spurious comfort, obviously. The whole thing was a pretence, nothing more than a silly daredevil charade, she kept dutifully reminding herself; but it was extraordinary, all the same, the way it soothed her wounded spirit and boosted her shattered ego. And indeed, there is no doubt that by projecting with sufficient energy an image in accordance with one’s heart’s desire, one can indeed infuse that image with a sort of spurious life of its own. Mirrored in the admiring eyes of others, the image acquires a kind of substance, generating feedback which truly feeds, providing genuine scraps of nourishment for such starving, desperate souls as come scavenging in these perilous waste spaces of the mind.

The bus stop at the corner of Sharon’s road had long been left behind, but the conductress (no doubt in deference to Miranda’s awesome and interesting state) had done nothing about extracting from her any excess fare, and merely asked her if she was sure she was all right … was anyone meeting her … where would she like to be put down?

“The terminus, please,” said Miranda, quite at random, and revelling in every small, unmerited mark of special attention.
“Yes, I’ll be quite all right, thank you. I live just round the corner from there…”

Was
there a corner? Would she be caught out, making rash guesses like this out of the blue? For she had no idea at all what terminus they were heading for, or what it was like. It could be a station forecourt, or an amorphous expanse of concrete in the middle of nowhere, not at all the sort of place that anyone could live round the corner from.

But it was all right.

“O.K., love,” said the conductress, beginning to lose interest; and presently, with the bus gradually emptying as it neared the end of the route, she settled herself in a front seat, with her back to Miranda, to check her takings. And when the bus finally reached its destination, alongside a triangle of tattered grass
overlooked
by tall buildings, she was content to call out, “Good night, dear, watch how you go,” without looking up.

It was as well, perhaps, that she was thus preoccupied, or her young passenger’s behaviour might have roused her suspicions. For Miranda was not behaving in the least like a person who lived “just round the corner”, wherever that might be. Instead of walking briskly and purposefully in some definite direction as might be expected of someone nearing home, she stood
uncertainly
on the grass verge, peering this way and that along the unfamiliar roadway, and clutching her carrier bag of
hastily-assembled
belongings in a state of absolute indecision and completely devoid of plans. She had not the faintest idea of where she was going, or what she meant to do. She didn’t even know where she was, except that it was a good hour-and-a-half’s bus ride, right across London, from her parents’ house.

The lights in the interior of the bus were being extinguished now, and as it pulled away into the darkness, Miranda felt an absurd little pang of homesickness and loss. For it
had
been her home, had it not, for well over an hour: the last home, perhaps, that she would know for many a long day.

“Hi!”

As the small battered Ford drew up beside her, Miranda gave a little start. She wasn’t frightened, exactly—like most people who
have just suffered a shattering blow, she felt somehow immunised against further disasters—but all the same she stepped back warily as the dim talking outline of a head became visible through the lowered window, and an arm in some sort of a shaggy garment reached out towards the door handle.

“You look like you could use a lift,” the pleasant young-ish voice was addressing her. “Hop in.” He swung the door open invitingly, apparently unaware of, or else unconcerned about, the awful warnings about strange men to which a well brought-up girl like this one had probably been subjected throughout her
formative
years.

“Where do you live?” he continued, as Miranda still stood uncertainly at the roadside “—or are you on the way to the hospital?” he amended, after a second look at the bulging, ungainly figure.

Oh dear! Did she really look as pregnant as all
that
?
Evidently the bath towel had been overdoing it.

“No… Oh no… I … that is…”

“Look, love, you can’t hang about here all night, now can you? The last bus has gone, you know, it’s a rotten service these days, they used to run till gone midnight. So come on, there’s a good girl, tell me where you want to go and I’ll take you”—and then, as she still hesitated, his voice took on a sharper edge: “Hell, I can’t just leave you here, now can I? At this time of night, and in your condition—have a bit of sense!” Briefly, his eyes swept her figure once more, and came back to her face.

“You’re properly in trouble, aren’t you, my dear? Why not tell me all about it while I drive you home? Even though I
am
a Strange Man in a Car, and you don’t know me from Adam—”

Had he but known it, he couldn’t have hit on a stronger
recommendation
. She longed, she hungered for people she didn’t know from Adam, henceforth they were her blood brothers, her new tribe; from now on she would have dealings only with people she was never going to see again.

“O.K. Thanks,” she said, climbing into the car every bit as clumsily as a real pregnant woman, in her anxiety lest the cushion should slip, or the bath towel work itself loose.

“Which way?” he asked, leaning over to lock the door on her side, and then turning on the engine.

What
could
she say? I’m sorry, I haven’t decided yet. I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t live anywhere…

It sounded crazy; and while she hesitated, eyes averted, she was conscious of him turning sideways in the driving seat and looking full at her, puzzled and concerned.

She
must
think of something! She
must
!
He was being so kind.

“They’ve turned me out,” she improvised at last, wildly. “I’ve nowhere to go. I can’t go home any more.”

“Turned you
out
!”
He was shocked rigid. “Turned you
out
—a kid like you … and in your state! I can’t believe it!”

“They’re so very respectable, you see,” she babbled on, “so very respectable and proper…”

The lies flowed easily, almost pleasantly; and presently she found herself weaving threads of truth into the fabric of her fiction:

“They wanted me to have an abortion at the beginning,” she told him, “and I wouldn’t! … I just
wouldn’t
!”

Phoney though it all was, a spark of the old pride seemed to stir in her once more, and she raised her head defiantly, her eyes shining in the flicker of oncoming headlights through the
windscreen
. “I just
would
not
!”
she repeated, and even as she
pronounced
the lie, it seemed, somehow, like a sort of truth: a truth about her
real
self, not about the battered, craven thing to which they had reduced her.

“And now,” she continued, warming to the story, “now that it’s too late for an abortion, they’re insisting that I have it adopted—they can insist, you know, legally they can, because I’m under age. But I won’t! I’ve told them I won’t! I’ll die sooner…!”—even though she knew it was all lies, Miranda felt the wonderful glow of defiance permeating her whole being—“… and so there was this awful row … I kept saying I wouldn’t, I absolutely wouldn’t, and so in the end they said, well, then, I’d made my bed and I must lie on it, I needn’t bother to come home any more…”

Had she gone too far? Was it beginning to sound totally
implausible and far-fetched? She fell silent, hardly daring to look up at her companion lest she should see a flicker of dawning suspicion on his face; but when at last she did venture to meet his gaze, she saw that his eyes were shining with admiration.

“Christ, but you’re a plucky kid!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never heard anything like it. Every other girl I’ve ever known would have chickened-out right from the word go—and without any parental pressuring, either. You know what?—it does something for me, it really does, to have run into a bit of pure, undiluted courage for once! It restores my faith in degenerate humanity. And you no more than a kid, too—how old are you?”

“Fifteen,” half-whispered Miranda, almost bursting with pride. Such an outburst of unqualified admiration from this attractive young man several years older than herself was
intoxicating
; and as he put the car into gear and began to pull out into the road, she felt her heart pounding with excitement and quite
unwarranted
joy.

“Look. I’ll tell you what—” evidently he had been thinking hard during the small silence that had supervened while he manoeuvred his way out into the stream of traffic—“why don’t I take you back with me to the ancestral home? Alias the Squat? I’m sure we can fix you up with a bed. For tonight, anyway; there’s almost always
somebody
gone missing on any given night… No, don’t be silly, of course it won’t be any bother, the girls’ll be thrilled.”