But, this visit? Would it still be OK for me to come up? (That is, if you aren’t engaged full-time in the lists . . .) Are you doing anything later in the week? I’ll call you tomorrow.
Love,
Margaret xxx
Extract from Helen’s diary
Tonight I was suddenly remembering when I was fourteen, and Danny Mercer asked me to dance at the school disco. He was cute, and kind, and his hand holding mine was soft, not like Dad’s at all. But the thought of Danny touching me sent me into a flat panic – he would know! As soon as he touched me he would know the truth, they all would. I found it difficult to believe that they couldn’t all tell already, just by looking at me. Look at Helen, look what she lets her dad do to her.
We did dance, uncomfortably, just one song. I held him at a safe distance, stiff-armed, and Danny was either too sweet or too inexperienced to try to soften my hold and draw me in closer. The next day, at break, he asked me to go to a film with him at the weekend. I almost said yes, before I remembered that the cinema meant darkness. How could a person of fourteen explain being afraid of the dark? Worse still, it would have meant that ever-present nightmare, a pressing darkness heavy with the fear of unseen invading hands . . .
Hi Margaret,
It was great to see you last week, hon. I’m really glad you came. We shouldn’t leave it so long next time.
But I am worried about you. You’ve got even less colour than normal (if that’s possible), and I couldn’t fail to notice you not eating anything. You can wear baggy jeans all you like, babe, but your wrists are like sticks – remember, it was always how we used to spot the anorexics at college? And that accursed diary! Don’t imagine I didn’t see it there, pushed discreetly under the futon, when we were folding it back up. You’ve got to stop torturing yourself. It can’t help Helen now, and it’s certainly doing you no good at all.
I know you are badly in need of something to smile about, so please excuse the rather lumpy segue from tragedy into farce . . . but you might like to know that Sir Huw has receded back into the mists of history whence he came. I spent the weekend at his place. He is an asthmatic, and his condition is brought on specifically by certain plant allergens released by rain during the summer months. Moving away from South Wales was, in the circumstances, a wise decision, but the choice of Greater Manchester as a destination somewhat less so. Huw harbours the belief that sleeping in a room with the windows sealed tightly shut will prove a deterrent to airborne pollen particles. With Saturday’s thunderstorm sending clouds of the offending motes into the atmosphere (thereby transforming Huw’s lungs into a pair of bagpipes), and with temperatures over the weekend soaring to 30 degrees even in Lancashire, conditions in his bedroom last night resembled those endured by troops engaged in desert warfare wearing full chemical protection gear.
He has a fan, which besides emitting a constant, sleep-preventing, clattery whirr, serves only to move around the same indecently hot air, which thus plays over your skin like a hairdryer. Fans also have a tendency to make me wake up in the morning with a stiff neck, so I was obliged as a precautionary measure to make my attempt at sleep clad in a pair of his fleecy pyjamas, with the collar turned up against the tropical sirocco. (I considered and rejected the extra protection of a woollen scarf.) Add to this, if you will, the auditory assault of Sir Huffsalot’s laboured breathing: each breath in a quick, tight, gravelly gasp, and each breath out a series of softly modulating musical whistles. (
This
Sir Hugh, take my word for it, certainly did not ‘make a nicer sound than other knights who lived around’!) At first his wheezing exhalations sounded to my overtired and overheated brain like his name, Huw, repeated over and over. Then the whole thing started to remind me, in its endlessly repetitive variations, of a Mike Oldfield track which my mother used to put on while she was ironing. I nearly had to get up and phone her to put an end to the jaw-grinding frustration of not remembering what it was called, and would surely have done so if it had not by then been 3.47 a.m.
I might also say that Huw’s breathing gets even more noisy and desperate during any physical exertion. Luckily any such activity on his part tends to be short-lived. (Or unluckily, depending on whose side of the bed you look at it from.)
Perhaps the whole thing was an elaborate ruse on his part to discover whether he really was more dear to me than breathing. Well, he wasn’t, so I’ve left him to it.
Big hugs,
Becs xxx
(Huw probably begins with a W or a Y in Welsh, anyway.)
Extract from Helen’s diary
Maybe he won’t come. That’s what I used to say to myself, the words repeating over and over, hammering in my skull like a mantra into the silence: perhaps tonight he won’t come.
I used to bargain with the fates, there in the almost darkness. I’ll give Joanne Miller my new strappy top with the sequinned butterfly on the front, only don’t let him come. So many nights: howling November blackness, frost-stilled Januaries, creeping April dawns. But memory, playing false, casts me always in the sticky heat of high summer, the sweat prickling along my back and thighs, as I lie stifled, unbreathing, but afraid to throw aside the make-believe protection of the quilt. Between my prison-bar fingers I can see the digital display floating in the darker patch above the bookcase which I know to be my Scooby Doo alarm clock. 2:23, 2:24, 2:25. If it reaches 2:30, he won’t come, I plead. 2:26, 2:27. If I get ten out of ten for spellings on Friday, he won’t come.
Even when I’ve heard, along the landing, the soft click of their bedroom door, the rush and gurgle of the flushed toilet which will be his alibi should she wake at his departure – the same flimsy, mechanical gesture to be repeated on his return. Even then . . . If it reaches 2:45, he won’t come. My eyes sting from staring at the luminous disembodied numbers, willing each flicked change. 2:41, 2:42, 2:43.
And now every night, still, my brain pounds out the endless, unclosed deal. I’ll be good, I’ll be good, I’ll be good – only please don’t let him come.
Dear Becs,
Too bad about the puffing cavalier. And look out, the lans of Manchester!
I did some serious thinking over the weekend. I had, in fact, put Helen’s diary on one side while I was staying with you. I admit it was under the futon, but I had stopped reading it. But when I came home I plucked up the courage to read on to the end, and it was pretty harrowing stuff, as you can imagine. Poor Cora had to mop me up a few times, while I was getting through it. But one thing that is clear is how much it helped Helen, when we were all coming round to sit with her in the evenings. And it occurred to me that a lot of young people with mental health problems are probably very isolated, like Helen was. They might not always want to talk to their family, or the family might be too close to the problem. And off-loading on their friends might be too risky; they might not want to risk driving them away. You could be scared that your GP might try to section you if you said too much. There are the Samaritans, of course, but for that you have to feel able to talk. Somebody on the end of a telephone line can’t put her arm round you, or play Scrabble with you, or sit with you while you fall asleep. So my idea is a voluntary befriending scheme for teenagers who are depressed and vulnerable. Giving them someone to be there and listen, someone who won’t be scared off by their pain, because that’s why they’re there.
I really needed to ask someone if it was just a crazy notion or not, and I must admit that it was Richard I thought of first, but of course he’s no longer here to ask, and anyway, what did he ever care about Helen or other people like her? So I phoned the ever-sensible Alison (from WITCH) and she says she thinks it sounds feasible, and Cora, somewhat to my surprise, is also really keen. I think perhaps Helen’s funeral really affected her. She is going to see if she can get some seedcorn funding from the Charitable Donations Fund at her bank.
Somehow, having something practical to think about seems to help. Anyway, I’d be really pleased to see you here any time for a return visit before the end of the holidays, I’m sure you know that without my saying. I’m quite safe, now that the thing with Richard is over (as I’m sure it is over, it
has
to be over, despite the gnawing ache of his absence) – even if in the meantime you work your way through I to Q in double-quick time.
Much love,
Margaret xx
Extract from Helen’s diary
I keep thinking about Mum’s bridge nights, back when I was nine or ten. Every Monday night it was. She used to change and put on powder and lipstick, and she never came back until after eleven. Did she know?
I used to beg her not to go out, crying and wheedling like a toddler. She would always stand there in the hall, smelling of scent, with her arms folded defensively over her chest, and demand, ‘Why not?’ It was a challenge thrown down, we both knew it. And every time I didn’t answer, every time I just sobbed louder and shuffled my slippers without speaking, it underlined the illusory, comfortable untruth, the unvoiced, perfidious, safe certainty that there could be no reason for her not to go . . .
42 Gledhill Street
Ipswich
18 August 2005
Dearest Pete,
Oh dear, love, I’m ever so worried about Margaret! First, as you know, there was all that business in the papers, and then Helen’s death and the funeral, and the next thing, she’s split up with Richard over something he said in the
Town Crier
. It all just seemed like a lot of politics to me, but what really got to Margaret, I think, was that he was running a campaign with that horrible man, Helen’s father, the one that abused her.
Then, next thing, Margaret gets hold of this diary that Helen kept, right since she was a little girl, writing down all the dreadful things that she went through. Margaret being Margaret, of course she insisted on reading it from cover to cover. Poring over the blessed thing in every spare moment, she was, in tears more often than not. I could see it tearing her up, and it was awful to watch, since obviously nothing I could say would make it any different. We have had a good idea, though (well, it was Margaret’s idea), about setting up a support scheme for other youngsters like Helen, you know, with depression – arranging for people to go and sit with them and so on. I’m going to see if they might have any money for it at work.
Anyway, on top of all this, this afternoon at about six o’clock Margaret had a call from her mum, to say that her gran has had another stroke, poor thing. She’s in hospital and it doesn’t sound too good. Of course, Margaret packed a quick bag and went straight off to get the train – down Hampshire way, it is, where the old lady lives. She promised to phone me before bedtime and let me know how things were, but she hasn’t yet. It will have taken her a while to get there, of course, and then she’ll want to be with her gran, and the family. It’s getting late for me to be up, what with work in the morning, but I don’t want to go to bed and miss her call.
I’m sorry it’s just a short note this time, Petey – but it has really helped me to write this all down.
With my best love, as always,
Cora xxxx
Dear Becs,
Sorry to bend your ear from the train yesterday like that, but I just had to talk to someone, and you did a great job of calming me down. You were quite right, I’d have been no earthly use to Gran or anybody else in the state I was in when I called!
I said I’d give you a progress report today, so here it is, from an otherwise eerily deserted internet café near the hospital in Winchester. Well, things don’t look quite so bleak as they did when I arrived last night. She has at least regained consciousness now, and seems to have some hazy idea of where she is and who we are, though she’s not able to speak at all, not for the moment at least, so it’s hard to be sure exactly how much she is aware of. Her right arm and hand are completely useless, like they were at the beg inning last time, but this time she doesn’t seem able to move either of her legs – nothing below the waist at all yet – so of course she’s incontinent, too. One good thing is they’ve disconnected her drip and said that she’s OK to take food by mouth now. There was some macaroni cheese with peas tonight, which was do-able because it didn’t need much chewing, and she can just about manage a fork with her left hand (you know she’s a lefty like me). But the whole right-hand side of her face is frozen, and her coordination seems to be all haywire, so just finding her mouth took every ounce of her concentration. Then swallowing was another whole challenge – she seems to be having to relearn all the things which are normally more or less a reflex. An hour and five minutes it took her, but she finished the whole plate with a real sense of achievement. I wouldn’t have stepped in and fed it to her for the world.
She looked so frail, Becs, lying propped partway up in that metal bed. Hospital always seems to diminish people, somehow (probably a combination of the disempowerment and the high ceilings). I couldn’t help being reminded of Helen, that last time I saw her. Gran seemed about half the size she did when I saw her last, when I came down with Richard . . . but everything was different then. What I care about most, though, the thing that scares me so much I hardly dare write it, is whether she’ll have lost any of her mental faculties. I’d happily watch her eat soup through a tube, wheel her around in a chair, anything – but I need my gran to come back to me as the person she is. What would I do without her?