Read So Many Ways to Begin Online
Authors: Jon McGregor
16
Birth Certificate, 17 March 1945
And this was the part of the story they would most want to hear, he thought. This was where they would quieten, and lean forward, and when he'd finished they'd say so that's how it was. You know, I always wondered.
I was sitting in Auntie Julia's room at the nursing home when it happened, he was going to start by saying. My mother had gone down the corridor to get cups of tea for the three of us, and even though she was gone for a long time she still managed to be back at just the right moment, nudging the door open with her foot as she carried the tray into the room. He imagined someone leaning towards him as he said it, as they realised what he was talking his way towards.
He could pinpoint the moment precisely. Julia with her cigarette held up beside her face, his mother nudging into the room. The window open and a woman zimmer-framing her slow way across the garden. The sound of television laughter coming from the main room, and an unanswered telephone ringing somewhere. The cymbelline shaking of the teacups as his mother gasped and put down the tray. And David not knowing where to look or what to say or whether to just stand and leave the room as quickly as he could.
It was a small room with a single bed, a pair of easy chairs, a side table, a wardrobe, and a large window that opened out on to the enclosed garden. His mother had helped Julia try to make it her own - there were photographs on the wall, and one of her jewellery boxes on the side table, and flowers but it still had the feel of a hospital room. The bed was metal-framed, with rails that could be cranked up to keep her from falling to the floor. There was a button on the wall which would bring a member of staff running if it was pressed. There were charts - medication, temperature, blood pressure, behaviour - and although they were kept on a shelf in the wardrobe rather than clipped to the end of the bed, they were still there. And there was a distinct hospital odour lingering about the place, that clinging smell of endless cleaning. But it was still Julia's room, and she seemed comfortable enough to feel somehow at home there. Perhaps she thought it was a hotel, or a room in an absent-minded friend's house, a friend who seemed to have forgotten she was coming, or had even forgotten that she was there at all.
They sat in silence for a while, Julia smoking one of her long menthol cigarettes and staring out of the window. He didn't know what to say. She'd always done the talking when he was growing up and it had been enough for him to listen, to say, really? or, what happened next? or occasionally, can you tell me about . . .? but since moving into the home she had mostly just sat and waited to be spoken to. His mother was much better at doing what was needed, skating briskly over the cracks in the conversation, the inconsistencies and the repetition and the hard-to-understand, seeming to always find a way of stopping the whole thing sinking into the icy chill of who are you, and where's Laurence, and why haven't we had breakfast yet?
How are you feeling Julia? he asked eventually, not knowing what else to say.
Bored, she said sharply, turning to look at him. Bored, and tired. She stubbed her cigarette out in a glass ashtray and gestured at him to empty it. He leant across, and as he picked it up she whispered, loudly, the trouble is the other people staying here are a little sub-normal. He emptied the lipstick-tinged cigarette ends into the bin.
Really? he said.
Oh, yes, she said. Some of the things I hear about, you wouldn't believe your young ears, really. There's an old man out there, she said, haven't a clue who he is but they have to put plastic sheets on the furniture when he sits down, due to his tendency. She said tendency with pursed lips and a note of disgust, as though the word itself was somehow unhygienic, and she nodded delicately, to confirm what she was saying.
His tendency? David asked.
She leant towards him, mouthing the words: he wets himself if he laughs too much. She took another cigarette and lit it with a quick flourish. Not really my kind of people, David, she said.
He smiled and said no, I'm sure, and for a moment the Julia he'd grown up with was back there in the room. She turned to look out of the window and they both watched a young boy kicking a football up and down the garden path until a woman opened a window and told him to stop it. The boy sulked slowly back into the building, and when Julia turned to speak he could see that she'd already slipped back into vacancy and confusion.
She said, I wanted to go home but they wouldn't let me, can you believe that?
He tried to explain, gently, that there were reasons she couldn't go home just then but she didn't seem to hear. And that bloody lot in there are no good either, she said, pointing through the door to the main room where most of the other residents sat and watched television. Half of them are stone deaf, she said. He nodded. Mind you, that's often a result of the explosive impacts, she said, and the shock, you know, and suddenly she was talking about the war, talking as though the mist had cleared and she'd found herself twenty years younger, working in the hospital through years of air-raid sirens, walking home in the morning to find whole streets flattened, seeing doodlebugs droning their way through a bare blue sky.
They were all given cigarettes for Christmas and he kept on to his you see, she said. Sometimes even the bandages were in very short supply but we did what we could. Your mother used to get back from a shift exhausted and we'd just have time to eat together before it was my turn to go out, she said.
He wondered whether to interrupt her, to bring her carefully back out of her confusion or to let her just chatter on. He heard footsteps in the corridor and his mother nudged the door open with her foot.
Julia said and of course we never saw the poor girl again. He moved to clear a space on the table for the tea tray, stacking the magazines to one side, taking his mother's cardigan and laying it on the bed, putting the radio back on the shelf. Julia said Mary, wasn't it? His mother looked up at her. She was all for insisting that it only be for a few days, Julia said, but of course we never saw her again, she disappeared off the face of the earth. Very sad for the poor girl, she said, and she turned and looked him clearly in the eye. She said so when your mother asked me what to do, I said well Dorothy my dear, you'll have to keep the little darling now, won't you? She said you were such a lovely baby, and anyway we couldn't very well give you back, could we?
He sat back down, looking at Julia, looking at his mother, looking back at Julia, gripping the arms of his chair as if he was afraid he might fall to the floor. He heard his mother putting down the tray, the cups and saucers shaking against each other.
Oh Julia, she said.
The poor girl hadn't even left you with a name, so we chose David, after that actor, you know the one, what was his name? said Julia, and she looked up at his mother on this last question, smiling fondly, trying to remember, looking for help. His mother was holding both her hands up to her face, covering her mouth.
Oh Julia, she said.
They left soon afterwards, catching an earlier train than they'd planned, leaving Julia in her room, asking did I say something wrong? Dorothy did I say something wrong? They didn't even drink the teas, leaving them on the side table for a member of staff to clear away while they walked quickly and silently down the corridor. He heard his mother crying as they walked from the home to the tube station and he reached back to hand her a clean handkerchief from his pocket. She tried talking to him a few times, asking him to slow down as he paced through the tunnels at Whitechapel and Euston, and later, on the train, asking if they could talk, if she could explain, if he would at least say something. But he kept his face to the window and he didn't say a word, seeing nothing, hearing only the sound of Julia's voice, fragments of it repeating over and over again.
Of course we never saw the poor girl again.
You'll have to keep the little darling.
She disappeared off the face of the earth.
Did I say something wrong?
When they got back to the house, they sat in the lounge and looked out into the garden. The rose bushes had been in full bloom for a few weeks and were in need of dead-heading. The lawn was starting to yellow. The spade had been left out, sunk into the earth. They drank cups of scalding tea, and finally looked at each other.
David, his mother said.
She looked smaller than he'd always thought of her as being, and suddenly much older. As she spoke, her words came out on the back of long sighs, as if she'd been holding her breath all those years and was finally able to let it go. David, she said, you mustn't be angry with us.
Later, he realised that by us she'd meant only her and Julia. But at the time, it sounded as though she was saying us to include Susan, his grandparents, Laurence, his aunts and uncles, his teachers, the neighbours, anyone and everyone he had ever known or met. He had a sudden feeling of the walls of the house being pulled down, and of everyone he knew standing there behind the settling clouds of masonry dust, sniggering and smirking behind their hands.
Please, David, let me explain, she said. The room, the whole house, felt very quiet. He looked at the photos of his father on the mantelpiece, the one taken during the war, the one taken shortly after they moved to their new home, the one taken a few years before he died. He looked at her. Later, he would go for weeks without speaking to her, without looking her in the eye or even acknowledging that they were living in the same house. But for the moment, before Julia's words had properly begun to settle into his ruptured thoughts, he wanted to talk.
Is it true? he asked her first. She looked surprised that he was asking. If she'd been quicker, then, or on the journey home, or in Julia's room, she could have laughed the whole thing off, putting it down to the confusion and muddle of Julia's illness. Perhaps if she'd been ready, she could easily have convinced him that the whole idea was ridiculous, and perhaps he would have thought little more about it. But her immediate reactions, and her reactions in the days and weeks that followed, were a helpless confirmation of what Julia had so casually and forgetfully blurted out. Is it true? he asked her, and what he actually meant was: tell me yourself, say the words, I want to hear it from you.
The story was simple enough, and, when it came down to it, not so unusual. There was a girl; she had a baby she wasn't supposed to have; she gave the care of the baby to someone else and she disappeared. It happens. It has always happened. In those days, his mother said, it was considered neither unusual or fit for discussion. It was kept a secret, or else it was ignored, unstated, denied. Children grew up to realise their sister or their aunt was actually their mother, or they grew up with the names of orphanage directors who had taken them in, or the name of the street where they'd been abandoned. The tale of Moses, floating downstream in his woven rush basket, would not once have seemed so strange, in the days when baskets and blankets placed on doorsteps could turn out to contain wrinkled babies still dazed from the shock of birth. David's story, or the fraction of it which Julia and his mother had known between them, and kept to themselves all those years, did at least have a little more detail than those tales of early morning finds.
Her name was Mary, his mother said. She was young, fifteen or sixteen or seventeen, it was never quite clear. Julia was working in the ward when she gave birth. There was no father pacing expectantly in the waiting room, and she refused to give the name of one. There was no one in fact, no relatives, not even a friend, and afterwards, when she'd come round from the sedatives they'd given her, Julia had sat and talked with her for a few minutes, held her hand, comforted her.
Sometimes he thought he could picture her there. Young, too young, her limbs a little too long and slim for her body, the way that teenage girls' limbs sometimes are, her face small and neat and framed by a damp slick of dark brown hair. Or perhaps broad-shouldered, with taut muscles running down her arms and a slightly squared jut to her jaw. Blonde hair, or auburn, pale brown, coal black. Long hair, tied up, curled, straight, cut sensibly short around her face. Brown eyes, flecked with grey. Green eyes. Blue eyes, a pale watery blue. Sitting quietly in the bed, her chest heaving, trying to catch her breath, the curtains drawn around her and the rest of the ward quiet for a moment. She was Irish, his mother said. She told Julia she was from Donegal, and had been in London for two years, working in a big house, saving money to take back to her family. She told Julia her family wouldn't have her back if they knew, that she couldn't go back but she couldn't stay in London, she had no work, there were too many people she knew, the shame was too much. Afterwards he was surprised by how easily his mother had spoken the words. Her voice quivered a little, but she spoke clearly, and laid out the few facts for him as though she had long been practising them in her head. The poor girl asked Julia what happened to babies whose mothers left them, his mother said, and Julia told her what there was - Barnardo's, St Catherine's, social services - and the girl, Mary, said she didn't want that for a child. Julia asked her what she was going to do. Mary said that if she could go home she could find someone who would take you, without her parents knowing, and then at least she would see you growing up. Julia asked who that would be, and Mary said she didn't know, she would find someone. She said she would find someone and come back for you, but Julia told her it might be difficult to place you in a home and take you out again. His mother faltered here, bringing a hand to her face and squeezing her cheeks, and from behind her hand he could hear her whispering sorry. She breathed in sharply, put her hand down, and continued. Julia always said she didn't know why she'd done it, she said. There were plenty of hard things happened in that hospital, especially then; we couldn't let it get to us. Julia always said the words came out before she knew what she was doing, she said. He watched his mother going over the well-rehearsed words, the sunlight fading through the back garden and the photos of his father looking down on them both. Julia told the girl, Mary, she said to her, you can leave him with me, I'll look after him until you get back, and before she'd even finished speaking Mary had turned to her and said can I? Will you?