A Dried Fern Leaf
You tried to be a father to her but she took against you from the moment she was first placed in your arms. She won't remember the wooden toys you bought her, or the furtive kisses dropped onto her neck. The way you looked at her; that ferocious love that used to be just for me.
But she'd scream and kick, rigid with fury against your chest, her tiny body convulsed with contempt. And you'd panic and pass her back and I'd settle her immediately. Limp against my shoulder and then asleep in her basket with her thumb in her mouth. And it would be just the two of us again. Me and you. For a short time, until she needed a feed or a change, it was like she never was.
Only, things weren't the same. Even after my swollen body deflated and my breasts sprang back to tautness, ready to be reclaimed by you, I smelt more like her than like myself. Talcum powder and the sour tang of milk drying on skin. No amount of scrubbing or scent would take that away.
Do I seem resentful? I'm not actually. Not anymore. I did blame her for you leaving. I
do
blame her. But I'm not bitter, not now. I fought with you, with my mother, and with my own fear, to keep her. Nobody wanted her. And then she tunnelled her way into the world, splitting me in half with her enthusiasm for life, and everybody wanted her. They jostled with each other to pluck her from her cradle and puff air into her face and watch her blink and laugh.
I just wanted things to go back to the way they were.
I always knew you'd go in the end. For your wife. For your real children, the ones who shared your name. For the comforts of your life with them all. No man past his youth wants to sneak around, tugging pleasure from brief, damp groans spilled across the back seat of a car. Lay-bys and street lights marking the years, and the occasional cheap-hotel-room peak, with every light in the place on and space to undress, to pretend, to move. Sometimes I'd watch you as you sat across the room from me, bent over your shoes, shirt half on, and the harder I focused on you the more indistinct you became, until I had to lean and switch the lights back off, the better to see you in the darkness.
The problem with giving someone space to move, you give them space to move away. Once I realised that she wasn't going to magic you into our lives permanently, bind you close with her soft palms and her hearty bellows, I lost all remaining belief that I would ever leave my jewellery box. I knew then that I would be that tiny ballerina forever, waiting for the lid to rise.
But I hadn't realised that forever would be over so quickly. Maybe I lost something of my previous mystique, my purity, when I became a mother. Or maybe I stopped trying once I'd accepted my role in your life. Gave up the dream and gave you up in the process.
Whichever, whatever; it's done now isn't it?
6
I was seventeen when the car struck me and brought me down to land beside my shoes. I lay in the road and looked across at the bruised black leather, tried to stretch a hand out to touch them, but couldn't.
Above me sirens shrieked and the cold blue of the sky was studded with eyes, but down here, on the road, the tarmac was warm beneath my cheek and as soft as feathers. I was turned over, shouted at. I tried to put a finger to my lips to hush the intrusion, but couldn't.
It wasn't my fault! She just stepped out in front of me!
For
god's sake, don't move her! You're not supposed to move them!
Faces hung above me like balloons and then disappeared. I almost recognised some of them, though none of them seemed to recognise me. Mouths stretched so wide that I could see the scream at the back of the throat. I tried to speak to them, to ask why nobody would help me up, but couldn't.
And then there were men in uniforms and they slid me onto a board and into the back of some kind of van, and the sky disappeared but the faces didn't. I thought about my mother, waiting at home, waiting for someone other than me, and I wondered how long it would be before I could get back to her. Shouldn't somebody tell her where I was? She might be worried, or angry. Worse, she might not even notice the absence.
The world turned into a storm cloud that settled above my chest. Strip-lights pulsed like lightning-strikes. A blackbird circled above, never near enough to touch but always close enough to tantalise. I held on tight to anything within reach but when the storm faded and I raised my head to see what I was clinging to, my hands were by my sides, spread limp and pale like water lilies, resting on bed sheets.
The faces still appeared and disappeared but I didn't recognise any of them now. They smiled at me, they frowned, and sometimes they said things to each other. I knew that they must be talking about me but I couldn't hear them properly.
When I could finally speak I asked the one question that had been worrying me all of this time.
Did anyone pick up my shoes?
The face currently above me â a soft, round woman's face â lowered itself close enough for me to smell onions and coffee.
Do you know where you are, dear? Do you remember what happened?
I remembered losing my shoes, that's for sure. Maybe they didn't understand how rare and special an occasion it was to be bought a new pair of shoes. What if someone had wandered by and taken a fancy to them while I was being bundled off the road? I cleared my throat so that my voice would be louder.
My shoes?
The face smiled at me and then bobbed away. I tried to reach for the string tied to it, to bring it close again, but then another appeared. A man's face this time, velvety dark against the stiff white of his coat collars. His eyes were all pupil.
Knocked right out of them, you were. You flew through the air like a bird but unfortunately landed like a human. Both ankles broken, fractured right shoulder, concussion and a fractured cheekbone to boot. But you'll be fine. Oh, and somebody gave your shoes to your mother.
I nodded, tucked my hands under the blankets, slept. Proper sleep, without nightmares, without storm clouds. I dreamt of my parents.
They were in the front seat of a car and I was curled in the back. Pretending to nap, watching them through slit eyes. They kissed and whispered, smothered giggles into each other's necks. She climbed onto his lap, knees and lips gripping him tight, and he protested, turned his head to look at me, then held her there and hugged her close. I stretched a finger to draw a picture on the misted windows, dozed for a few moments, then the horn sounded as he groaned and
jerked forward in his seat, once, twice. I sat up and started to cry. She slid away from him, reached to pat my head, looking at him and smiling. Her flailing hand clawed air beside my face and her fingernail scratched the corner of my ear.
When I woke I had a perfect memory of them, just as they'd been when I was three or four. My ear stung for the rest of the day.
The women on the ward fussed over me and gave me their puddings. They exclaimed over my bruises and my bony arms and legs, tapioca-grey against the bright white of my cast. Maureen showed me photographs of her family and promised to introduce me to her children at visiting time. Paula had mislaid her glasses so I helped her with her crossword puzzles, read out love stories from magazines. Jane was closest to my age and she wanted to hear again and again about the accident, about flying, the brief euphoria before I lost my wings and clattered like a plastic doll into the road. They were all so sweet, those women, and I don't remember whether I ever asked any of them why they were in the hospital.
I gorged myself on Apple Charlotte over the next week and spent every day swollen-stomached with indigestion, my hipbones buried beneath flesh grown hard and round. I wheeled myself about, ripe almost to bursting out of my nightdress, cradling my belly and beaming at everyone who glanced my way. I found out where the maternity ward was and hung around the entrance, sharing coded smiles with the expectant mothers. Finally I was asked to wear my gown whenever I left my bed.
Little interest was taken in my play-acted pregnancy at the time. Nobody on my own ward seemed to see my straining stomach and nobody on the maternity ward seemed to see beyond it. I was accepted at face value, without questions being asked, and I'd so needed questions to be asked. If my stay in the hospital had been any longer how many more puddings a day would I have had to eat to maintain the illusion? And what was I hoping to achieve? I don't like to dwell on all that too much, but I think it was a phantom pregnancy in every sense; my dead baby morphed into my granny's escaped soul, and my sense that it was all somehow my own fault. Maybe. Either way, I haven't been able to eat stewed apple since.
Visitors came every day after lunch for two hours and three times a week in the early evening. I'd wait at the ward doors as soon as I'd finished the last of my puddings and stay there until every single visitor had come and then gone again. I pestered the nurses for messages and was told that my mum had definitely been at the hospital that first night, had waited while my injuries were investigated and my left ankle pinned.
White as a sheet she was. Someone fetched her in and she sat right there for hours, drinking from her flask. She had a real go at the man who hit you, shouting the odds and waking everyone up. She's rung in a few times since, to check on you. Shame you haven't got a phone at home, you could give her a ring.
They described her; the dark hair, the bitten finger nails. It certainly sounded like mum. Of course it was her, who else could it have been? And she'd been scared for me, had come to the hospital, had stayed all night to see if I was okay. I continued to wait by the door at visiting time.
A policeman came to interview me. He had the longest head I'd ever seen, his crown teetering above strands of grey like a mountain peak wreathed in cloud. He looked at me intently when he asked questions, tapped his pen against his notebook. I sweated and hid my belly beneath the bedclothes.
He told me that if the man who'd hit me with his car had to go on trial then he could get into a lot of trouble, so it was really important that I described the accident exactly as I remembered it. He told me that the man insisted that I'd stepped out into the road without looking, that he didn't have a chance to stop. I said that I didn't remember anything.
He told me that three members of the public had come forward and reported that I'd seemed agitated, distressed, was following a woman with a pram, had rushed into the road to pass a group of people who'd blocked my way. Was this true? Again I said that I didn't remember anything.
The policeman went away at lunchtime, promising to return with more questions. I bolted my lunch, followed by two puddings, and spent the afternoon on the toilet.
When I was discharged mum came to collect me. She pulled me close and started to cry. Her hair was un-brushed, her breath sour.
Oh, Fern, I was so scared. I was out of my mind with worry, I really was.
I held myself against her stiffly, stepped away and limped ahead to the taxi. Tommy helped me slide inside, his huge hands soft against my back. He rested his fingertips on the top of my head for a second, cupping my skull.
It's good to be bringing you home safe and sound, kid.
I refused to speak to mum in the car but I let her hold my hand and stroke my wrist. At home she tried to bustle around me, lead me to the sofa and thrust old magazines at me, but I stood in the middle of the room and shouted at her, swaying on my crutches, throwing the glossy peace offerings onto the floor.
You didn't visit me once! Not once, mum!
She started to cry again.
Try to be reasonable, love, how could I come? I had to wait at home in case your father came back, didn't I? Someone had to be waiting to tell him that his daughter was in hospital. It wasn't that I didn't want to be with you, but I couldn't be in two places at once, could I? I called, though, lots of times, did they tell you that? And I'm going to get a phone installed, so if something bad ever happens again you'll be able to ring and tell me.
I slumped forward on my crutches and started to laugh, squinting up at her. She gazed back at me; pleading, puzzled, hopeful. I shrugged and then winced at the pain in my shoulder.
God, you really don't get it, do you? I'll be finishing school next year and I'm getting off this island. I'm going to leave home. I'm going to leave you, mum, and I won't look back, and I hope you'll finally understand why when you're sat in this room year after year by yourself, waiting for him to come home.
She put her hands to her eyes and stood silently for a moment in front of me, then spun away with her face averted, collapsing into the doorframe for a second as she cannoned from the room. When she returned, the glass in her hand brittle with ice cubes, we both sat and watched the television, pretended that everything was fine. She brought me my dinner on a tray and I thanked the area just to the left of her head, ate without appetite, concentrated on a documentary about bees.
By the time I hobbled up to bed that night she was so drunk she couldn't be shifted from the sofa. I draped a coat over her shoulders and left her there.
*
I don't ask mum's permission to sift through every drawer and cupboard in the house. She follows me from room to room, snorting contempt, but she doesn't stop me, not even when I clamber up the flaking stepladder to the attic and start to hurl bulging carrier bags onto the landing. She scuttles out of the way and retreats back downstairs then, feeding the banister through her fist and lowering herself one muttered step at a time, as if scared that I'll sneak up behind her and give her a shove, just for the hell of it. The phone starts to screech as she's halfway down and she lets out a startled yelp and stumbles, but regains her balance and composure, continues on.