Sorry Isn’t Good Enough, page 25
I’m still haunted by an incident that took place the year before that summer of Dawn’s disappearance.
Dawn’s father had put up a new garden shed himself (perhaps inspired by my mother) and the old shed now stood empty. It had a leaky roof, a crack in the windowpane, and some of the wooden slats were rotting; Dawn wanted to use it as a play house, and Mr Webster cleaned it out for her so she could.
This shed was heaven for me and Dawn. It was our cottage in the woods, a witches’ den, a kidnapper’s house, a castle for a princess. A moth-eaten blanket covered an old chest full of dressing-up clothes and became a bed; there was an upended tea chest for a table; a faded deckchair and a paint-spattered kitchen chair. We added pots and cups and potions, jam jars full of flowers and jam jars for drinking out of. I see now that this was my attraction to Dawn. We shared a fantasy world, and within it – and only within it – my ideas counted as much as hers. It was an exciting, boundless world of passion, love, death and risk-taking. Plots were rambling and endless and alarming. It was an unspoken bond we had: when we met, anything could happen.
We had so much fun inventing stories around this shed, it was inevitable that Dawn’s sister would want to join in.
‘Can I play?’
‘Get lost, Karen. This is our den.’
I liked the ‘our’, but I didn’t like the way Dawn spoke to her sister, who at that point was only about three years old. I could see her tears welling.
‘Can’t she join in? She could be a dwarf.’
Dawn considered this, sensing the beginning of a long, whining wail about to reach her mother’s ears. ‘Okay. You can come and sit here.’ Karen did as she was told. ‘Drink this magic potion.’ She offered Karen an empty jam jar, and Karen played along. ‘Now you fall asleep.’
As soon as Karen closed her eyes, Dawn tied her to the chair with a skipping rope. ‘We’re wicked witches and you’re our prisoner.’
Karen opened her eyes and looked alarmed. ‘I don’t want to be a prisoner!’
‘You’re a princess,’ said Dawn, cunningly. Karen looked pleased. ‘You’re a princess, and the handsome prince is going to come and rescue you. But first, we are the wicked witches and we’ve captured you. Okay?’ She said it so sweetly, any child would have been convinced.
As soon as Karen closed her eyes again, Dawn grabbed her arm and twisted her skin fiercely, giving her a Chinese burn.
‘OW!’
‘Don’t worry. I torture you until the prince comes to rescue you.’
She gave her another horrible burn, and another and another, leaving her with bright red streaks on her soft arm. Karen started to shriek. Dawn clamped her hand over her sister’s mouth, telling her to shut up. But I could see she was blocking Karen’s nostrils off with the edge of her hand.
‘She can’t breathe!’
Dawn looked down at her sister with interest, and rammed her hand closer against her nostrils so that they were blocked off completely.
‘Dawn!’
‘You do it then!’ She let go and glared at me. ‘Quick, before she starts again.’
Karen was gasping for air, and then filled her lungs to start bawling. I bent down and told her the prince would be here soon, but she howled anyway. Dawn fished a stocking out of the chest, and handed it to me.
‘Tie it round her mouth!’ she commanded.
I stood there, afraid to disobey, as usual.
‘Do it!’ She clenched her jaw, and I did as I was told.
Of course, it was at that moment, as I was tying the knot in a stocking around her mouth, that Mr Webster, drawn by the howling, flung open the shed door to find his three-year-old daughter tied to a chair and being gagged – by me.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
He pushed me roughly out of the way. ‘Untie her!’ he shouted at Dawn, and pointed his stumpy finger at me again. ‘You! It’s always you, isn’t it? What’s wrong with you?’
I could see Dawn releasing her sister and bending down to whisper something in her ear. My pulse was galloping and my face was hot. By the time he had finished with me, Mrs Webster was outside, asking what on earth was going on. For a moment I really thought she might take me in her arms and poppet me. But seeing her little one sobbing, she rushed at Karen and wrapped her arms around her on the lawn. ‘What is it, poppet? What’s the matter?’
‘This girl here,’ snarled Mr Webster, ‘this friend of Dawn’s, tied her to a chair and gagged her! Can you believe it? The daughter of a preacher! It’s that weird God Squad you have to watch.’
‘Geoff, please!’ Mrs Webster held out Karen’s red arm. ‘Who did this to you, my poor poppet?’
Karen snivelled. She snivelled and hiccoughed and snivelled some more. Dawn and I held our breath. Karen folded her lips together and looked down at the grass. Then she raised her arm and pointed. She pointed at me, as I knew she would.
I was halfway up the road, sitting on someone’s wall, too afraid to arrive home crying, when Dawn caught up with me.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I had to do it. Dad would’ve killed me if he’d known it was me.’
‘He wasn’t very nice to me.’ Injustice had found my tongue.
‘Yes, but he really would’ve killed me! You don’t know my dad.’
I did, actually.
‘I had to make her say it was you. I had to do it!’
‘You didn’t have to hurt her in the first place.’
Dawn wasn’t used to me challenging her. I could see her nostrils flaring; she was straining to control herself. Then I spotted Mrs Webster standing at their gate, looking up the road at us. And I knew, from her anxious face, that she wasn’t angry with me at all, that she was checking on Dawn’s apology. This was my weakness. There was an unspoken tie between me and Dawn’s mum. She didn’t quite know how to deal with her either. Maybe I sensed that if her husband hadn’t been there at the shed, she would’ve knelt down on the lawn and said, ‘I’m sorry, poppet. I know that wasn’t your idea.’
I must have glanced too long and too longingly at Mrs Webster, because Dawn saw that I’d seen her. There was an almost imperceptible sigh. And then the charm: ‘Friends?’ She held out a packet of Spangles for me. A whole packet.
‘For me?’
Dawn smiled at me, winningly, and chewed the inside of her cheek. A bewildered moment passed, while I took in whose idea this was. She was still proffering the sweets. I took them.
To this day I can see the look of excitement in her eyes as she twisted her little sister’s skin so tight. There was an opportunity and she took it. Dawn reacted to things quickly, angrily and without reflection.
Even so, when she fell that summer, getting out of the stream to tell me off, when her head hit the wet slab, when he came and … I should not have run away like I did.
Then again, maybe I had waited all my short life for Dawn’s terrible death, for that definitive proof that I did not have to be the underdog, that I did not have to beg for crumbs.
I could have no idea of the price I would pay.
Chapter Fifty-Six
All is Forgiven
I am over eight months pregnant when I take my finals. The last paper is on Quantitative Research Methods, and I remember being desperate to empty my bladder for two thirds of it.
At some point during my pregnancy I learn that I might have trouble with delivery because of my history of polio. Apparently, as my mother informs me by letter, there is a risk that the disease and my subsequent gait means that my pelvic bones (especially my sacroiliac joint) might not have developed sufficiently, and that I might have an asymmetric birth canal, or one too narrow for normal delivery. She has researched it in detail, like she might research the construction of a shed. Caesarean section also poses dangers, because an epidural could lead to a recurrence of muscle weakness from which I might or might not recover. Post-polio syndrome has always worried my mother, it seems, but she has never mentioned it to me before. I am suddenly struck with fear for the future. Perhaps she’s worried that she will have to bring up this child herself; perhaps she thinks it’s my just punishment for being a slut. On reflection, though – and because it’s so rare for her to write me a letter – I think it’s her way of making sure I am prepared, and that I warn whoever is delivering the baby to take all possible precautions.
I have a normal delivery, although it takes twenty-three hours. I’m so afraid of setting off any new nerve or muscle damage that I refuse all pain relief. There are three shifts of midwives, and when the last shift changes, I am left alone for a few minutes. I don’t even realise I’m alone, until suddenly I’m not, but the company is little Matthew, gazing up at me from the messy sheets. We take to each other straight away.
When I’m stitched and bathed, I lie on the bed facing Matthew and we study each other happily. My eyes keep blurring over with tearful, joyous love for him. We’re interrupted by an announcement that I have visitors, and suddenly Mum and Dad are there, sitting either side of the bed. I have no idea how they’d heard. Perhaps they’d rung and rung and come to the obvious conclusion, but in any case, they have travelled up by train to see their new grandchild. As soon as Mum picks him up, her face fills with love, and all my fears of being shut out for ever for being a slut evaporate. My mother is pleased. I can’t stop smiling.
From that moment, my parents dote on Matthew. Nothing is too good for him, they visit regularly, I visit them, they babysit whenever they can, they want all the news about him, and I love them for loving my boy.
Simon turns up at the hospital the day after the birth with his camera, and asks a nurse to take a few photographs of him posing with his son. ‘My son! My son!’ he wails, with tears in his eyes (is he thinking about his grandad in the trenches? Or is this a new source of tear production?) and picks him up high like a trophy. After that he shows no interest in him, and forgets all his birthdays apart from his second one, for some reason, when he buys him a pedal car.
When I tell my parents I’ve won a scholarship to study for a DPhil at Oxford, they are not supportive. ‘You’re going to be a perpetual student,’ Dad says. ‘Who’s going to pay for it?’
‘I’m funded. I’ve won a scholarship. It has money attached.’
‘That’ll soon run out. Get yourself a proper job. Look after your child.’
The exhortation to look after Matt is a low blow. It nearly works. Then Mum comes out with the desperate – and almost comical – ‘No one will marry you!’ This is a given, because, ‘Men don’t like clever women.’ She may well be right.
‘Perhaps I don’t want to get married,’ I venture.
‘Of course you want to get married. Who’s going to look after you?’
‘Is that what you’ve been, Mum? “Looked after”?’
I shouldn’t have said it. I wish instantly I could take it back. She sneers. She grinds her teeth. ‘You think you know it all, don’t you? Well, I’m a darned sight better off than you’ll ever be. There’s not many men want to bring up someone else’s child. You’ve narrowed your field, there, for certain.’
It feels curiously like the bra incident all over again. You’ll have what I had. And also reminds me starkly of Dawn: No one’s going to want you! Look at you.
I so nearly topple. This generation of women may have had a completely different set of choices to their daughters, but they have successfully passed on many of the values. The sense of being unfulfilled without marriage – not sex, but marriage – runs deep. We all struggle with it. I think of me and Dawn plotting our futures with Gareth and marriage and children and his job and our own exotic jobs. Somehow, higgledy-piggledy, it worked. We didn’t see how it couldn’t. How we might have to drop our own dreams in favour of the main breadwinner. But then again, if no one is going to want me, I might as well do my own thing.
I change my mind several times before I accept the scholarship, which I have fought off forty-two other candidates to win. I apply to a postgraduate college, find outside accommodation, and manage to get my doctorate within three years. I am paid a little extra as a research assistant on various projects that I can do from home, and manage to afford babysitting twice a week. Matt hardly ever leaves my side. We spend a lot of time feeding ducks or looking at ancient skeletons and stuffed animals in the Pitt Rivers Museum.
When he is very small, I read all the books I can find on good mothering. I compile a list of things to remind myself how to be a good mother and stick it on the fridge, but it’s too long; also, my parents will see it when they come to visit, and I don’t want them to think I am having to try so hard. So I whittle it down to five things, and write them on a piece of card with his footprint on it that I use as a bookmark in my diary:
I love you
I see you
I am here for you
I will keep you safe
I delight in you (I’m glad you’re here)
I look at it every day. I memorize it like a student sitting an exam.
It’s a piece of cake: I read him stories, I encourage him, I get down on the floor with him and join in his games, I hug him, I tell him I love him, I listen to him, I giggle with him, I console him, I cherish him. It isn’t difficult. It’s a joy. But once, when he’s still very small, he grabs my arm and I spill a glass of water all over an academic paper I’m writing, and I find myself saying, ‘Shit! Look what you made me do!’
‘Soy,’ he says, a look of terror in his eyes. ‘Maddy spill a water – soy, soy.’
‘Sorry isn’t …’ I am appalled with myself. I apologise for frightening him. We clean it up together with kitchen towel and I thank him. I thank him for saying sorry, too. ‘Well done, Matty.’ He gives me a hug.
Mum was right, to an extent. A lot of the clever men prefer dumb-but-pretty women. Those men that are too smart for that are also too smart for my neediness, or else just see me coming. I have a lot of sex: mostly bad, some good. It seems that many of them have learnt their sexual prowess through rugby club songs and girls too afraid to say ‘Ow!’. I have a few relationships that follow a predictable pattern of my being a pleaser and making excuses for bad behaviour. There is one wonderful man who seems to truly love me, and likes Matt too. His name is Knut and he specialises in the study of seaweed and its properties. He is shy and kind. Not unlike Mr Man, only younger. He even says once – because he’s Norwegian and enjoys collecting English idioms – that I knock his socks off. But thinking of Mr Man suddenly only makes me think of relationships that are destined not to work.
I picture Knut living in a little pink or yellow shiplap house by the side of a harbour; his mother knits him chunky sweaters in a rocking chair and his father throws wood on the log-burning stove and cooks up some of the fish he’s caught that day in his trawler. In fact, Knut told me, his father works at a meat-packing factory and his mother works in a supermarket. But still, there is a log-fire-chunky-knit homeliness to Knut that can’t be spoilt. I take to wearing a fur-hooded parka; in the fantasy in which he takes me home to meet them, I want to fit in. I want them to like me.
But of course I sabotage the relationship. I tell myself it’s because he’s going back to Norway soon, and I’ll only get hurt, but I know there’s a more complex thing going on. He actually asks me to marry him, and I say no.
‘You know what I think, Stephanie?’
‘No. What do you think?’
‘I think you can’t bear to be a member of a club that actually wants you as a member.’
Maybe he’s right. Maybe I have become so comfortable with the feeling of longing for something I can’t have that it has become preferable to having it. I know all about Bowlby’s attachment theory, and ‘the self-perpetuating quality of our internal world’. Why, having studied behaviour so intently, I can’t see this pattern in myself, will baffle me in years to come.
Not long after that, I move back to my old university town in the West Country to look for a potential school for Matt, and find myself a part-time job in clinical psychology. It will have to do for now, but I keep looking for something more full-time. My parents do not congratulate me on becoming Dr Townsend.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
An Independent Woman
The flat I find is a picture of neglect. The sofa is balding, the radiators temperamental and the stringy carpets held together by dust and dead woodlice. The place seems like an old person in need of care: every bit of it thinning, spluttering, leaking and prone to the cold.
Even so, I feel I have everything I want. I enjoy my work, and I love spending time with Matt. But as soon as he starts school, I find myself bereft. The part-time job doesn’t lend itself to friendships. There is no ‘happy hour’ after work, or if there is, I have to go and pick up Matt. There are occasional social events which I find hard to attend, as they require a babysitter. Eventually I hire a babysitter every Friday, and start to go out on my own. I go to the cinema and find I can’t cry at the sad bits or laugh at the funny stuff in front of people. I imagine I would look like a madwoman laughing to myself. I go to the theatre, milling around in the interval, trying to look as though I’m searching for my friend.
Sometimes I look out of the window of my flat at the other houses in the street. All along it rectangles of amber light glow warmly and announce other lives being lived just yards from my own. I imagine sitting on the sofa of the family at number nine, and listening to their chaotic family dialogues; or else I shadow the beautiful young woman at number eleven, follow her clicking up the steps in her heels and watch her prepare her couscous while chatting on a phone propped in the crook of her neck. I imagine the dinner parties thrown by the chiropodist and his wife at number thirteen, and see myself making interesting conversation with some of the guests; I picture a man with dark hair called Jerome or Angus or Geraint offering me a lift home (ignoring the fact that I would have to get out after a few yards). Sometimes I’m so lonely I have romantic fantasies about the man who sells ice cream to Matt from his van on Sundays, or the carpenter who replaced the rotten wood in my window frames, or Matt’s headmaster with suede elbow patches. And there are days when I want to grab hold of my neighbour – a single man who works in town planning and who occasionally smiles at me on the stairs – and beg him to take me away with him. Anywhere.
