Chosen Page 15

  I was in hospital for three days. Carol singers came and I got sick and tired of mince pies by the end of it. Marion visited a lot, and Stella every day, but Bogart never once.

  When I told Marion about the infection she went white. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Caught from Bogart?’

  ‘I don’t know where he got it from,’ I said. Of course I didn’t, he’d had fifteen years of screwing around before I even knew him.

  ‘I’ll never be able to have a baby,’ I said. ‘Not that I want one.’

  ‘Because of that? Shit!’ She got up and looked round wildly and I realized at once, with a horrible cold slump of the heart, what was the matter.

  ‘You?’ I said.

  She went from white to red and tears came into her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and then it all came spilling out. It had been the night of the party when Bogart hadn’t come home. She’d slept not only with him but with another guy, she didn’t even know his name. It had been that kind of party, everyone all loved up, she said, hands going everywhere, at one point she had the two of them going at her at once. I listened with an understanding snippet of a smile pinned on my face. I knew Bogart didn’t believe in fidelity or any of that bourgeois crap, but still I never thought he’d sleep with Marion.

  ‘You’d better get some antibiotics,’ I said. ‘I need to sleep now.’ And I slammed my eyelids down like shutters.

  ‘Sorry,’ she whispered. I heard her hesitate, then watched through my lashes as she bolted off towards a nurse.

  When I got home there were flowers everywhere, stiff white chrysanthemums and a ragged red poinsettia in a pot.

  ‘I’m so sorry, honey,’ Bogart said, and hugged me tight against his jumper.

  ‘Have you been to the clinic?’ I asked, extricating myself.

  ‘I’ve got an appointment,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.’ He looked pale and his eyes were strangely wide.

  I thought about asking him to go, but then I thought of Stella’s idea and asked him for rent instead. He shrugged. ‘OK,’ he said. And then he said, ‘I’ve bought us some rubber johnnies.’

  ‘I’m moving back into my own room,’ I said. ‘I’m not even allowed to have sex for six weeks.’

  He started objecting, but I went up the stairs and crawled into my single bed. The bed was against the radiator and it was toasty warm. The kind brown eyes of Cat Stevens looked down at me. Stella brought me up a cup of tea but the milk was old and had gone into blobs and I couldn’t touch it.

  ‘Bogart’s just a lodger now,’ I said.

  She shrugged.

  ‘I’ll never be able to have a baby,’ I said.

  ‘Do you want one?’

  I shrugged.

  She sat on the bed. ‘I know I said life’s not worth anything,’ she said, ‘but I’m really glad you didn’t die.’

  ‘Did you think I was going to?’ The thought pulled me up to sitting by my hair. It had never occurred to me.

  ‘You nearly did.’ We sat in silence for a few moments while I let that sink in, and tightly we squeezed each other’s hands.

  †

  Once I’d stopped letting him screw me, Bogart spent much more time away from the house. He did sometimes give us ten pounds out of his dole for rent. He slept in Mum’s room, and I slept in mine. I kept my eyes averted when he looked at me. Months went past and I worked hard at school. I forgave Marion and we were friends again, but she had a new circle of older and dangerous friends and I didn’t see her much. Stella and I stayed in together and watched telly, with Stella clutching Mother Clanger to her neck, or Stella did puzzles while I knitted – I was doing Bogart a Tibetan hat – and then we discovered the spirits.

  It was a friend of Marion’s who showed us how to arrange Scrabble letters on a tray and put an upturned glass in the centre. We did it as a game, but when it was just Stella and me it stopped feeling anything like play. We’d light candles and sit on the floor either side of the coffee table. It was always Stella who knew the time to start. We’d each rest a finger on the wineglass and, in a specially hollow voice, she would say, ‘Is anybody there?’ Usually the start was wobbly, the glass sliding and hesitating towards the letters Y – E – S. The first time I thought that Stella was pushing, but sometimes, once it got going, we both stopped touching the glass and still it moved.

  ‘Who are you?’ was the next question. The first one was called Ralph. We asked him if knew our mum and he said, N – O. We asked him what it was like on the other side and he said, O – K. We asked him how long he’d been dead and he said, U – N – C – E – R – T – A – I – N. I thought we could have a more interesting conversation at the bus stop.

  But it wasn’t always like that. A person called H – U – R – S – A said, Y – O – U – R – M – O – T – H – E – R – I – S – B – E – S – I – D – E – M – E. There was a long gap while Stella and I locked eyes, silently daring each other to continue, until the glass quaked under our fingers, as if impatient. ‘Why doesn’t she speak to us?’ I asked. R – I – N – G – R – E – G – I, was the answer and that spooked us because Mum sometimes used to call Aunt Regina that. ‘Why?’ asked Stella. D – O – C – T – O – R, came the answer, and then the glass began to spin and tilt; R – E – G – I – D – O – C – T –O – R, it said.

  ‘Is she ill?’ I asked, but it just repeated the words faster and faster until our fingers couldn’t keep up and the glass spun right off the table. Stella shrieked, jumped up, upsetting the tray, and went for the light. There was a weird cold thickness in the room. You could feel the presence.

  ‘Go!’ I shouted. ‘Go back!’ I flapped my arms and I could feel it there like silk tangling about them, and then my arms were free and it was gone and we could breathe.

  Holding hands, we went into the kitchen. I poured milk into a pan. Everything looked frightening, even the toaster with its snarl of burnt crumbs, even the cottage-shaped tea cosy, the windows like gone-out eyes.

  ‘Let’s not do it any more,’ I said.

  ‘But it was Mum.’ Stella’s voice was tiny.

  ‘Shall we ring Aunt Regina?’ I said.

  Stella nodded and the milk hissed in a frothy tongue over the edge of the pan.

  We stood together in the hall with the gloomy stairs looming above us.

  Derek answered. ‘Everything all right with you girls?’

  ‘We’re fine,’ I said, filling my voice with brightness.

  ‘Stella eating?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and it was true she’d settled into eating a little bit more and she was actually sipping at her milk and treacle as I spoke.

  ‘Funny thing, I was going to ring you tomorrow. We thought we’d come down for Easter. How does that sound?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Lovely. Yes, do come.’

  ‘How’s the weather?’ he said. ‘Can’t make up its mind here.’

  ‘Same here,’ I said. ‘Can I speak to Auntie?’

  ‘She’s taken herself out, this evening.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Rushcraft. I’ll get her to phone you later, shall I?’

  ‘Or tomorrow,’ I said. ‘How is she?’

  ‘Blooming,’ he said. ‘Quite the spring in her step. I’ll get her to call you back, shall I?’

  ‘Sounds like she’s all right,’ I said to Stella after I hung up. ‘Maybe the . . . Hursa . . . is wrong.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘but still.’

  I lay awake in my bed and even Cat Stevens looked spooky, the way he kept his eyes on my face. I closed mine, but I was still aware of the gigantic face. I got up, took him down, rolled him up and shoved him under the bed. I kept the door open for the light and so I could hear Bogart come in. I listened to my transistor quietly. ‘Desperado’ was playing, which I found hard to listen to, the voice so desolate. And then I heard Bogart. He was humming when he went into the bathroom. I waited until he’d gone to bed before I crept in.

  ‘Hi ho,�
�� he said. ‘This is a turn up.’ I snuggled into his arms and it felt so safe to be hugged tightly against living skin and flesh and warmth.

  ‘We back on then?’ he said.

  ‘If you want,’ I said.

  ‘Shall I use a johnny?’

  I sighed. It wasn’t really sex I wanted, but warmth, but it was hard to get the one without the other. I saw that it was one of those deals you have to make in life and so I made it.

  †

  Stella was disgruntled that I was back with Bogart.

  ‘If you get pregnant again you might die,’ she reminded me.

  ‘I can’t get pregnant,’ I said, ‘and anyway he’s using rubbers.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I saw one floating in the toilet.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I’ll tell Aunt Regina,’ she said, but I knew she never would.

  Bogart had told me that his father was a rich banker – wanker, he said – the son of an earl. He’d grown up in Derbyshire in a huge place near Sheffield and gone to Eton. His mum had died when he was six, and he’d spent his holidays riding and boating and visiting cousins in Devon. He was the only child and would eventually inherit the family fortune, he said, which is one reason why he didn’t work.

  ‘Why do you get the social screw then?’ I asked. The brown envelopes, addressed to Mr A. Robertson, had begun to arrive soon after he moved in. ‘Can’t your dad send you money?’

  ‘Dad and I . . .’ His face hardened. ‘We don’t speak. Bastard. I won’t ask for a penny from him, won’t give him the satisfaction. No, I’ll wait, me. I’ll wait till he’s gone then I’ll be quids in. You should see the place, Mel, we can have a commune – Celia, Bruce, Marion, Stella – and we can have a barrel-load of kids all rolling about under the apple trees.’

  He would often paint this picture of how the future would be. It made him more exciting, sexier, that he was rich and posh and that he was a rebel too. His dad had expected him to follow him into the bank. ‘Can you imagine me in a collar and tie?’ he’d say, and mime being hanged.

  ‘Can we go and have a look?’ I said.

  But he refused.

  ‘Just from the gate?’

  But he shook his head. ‘I’m not setting foot within a mile of the place,’ he said, ‘not till he’s six foot under.’

  At night I’d sometimes get Bogart to tell me stories of his childhood. His cousins Hugh and Perry and their ponies, the adventures they’d have boating out to islands with a tent. It reminded me sometimes of Swallows and Amazons, sometimes of the Famous Five. After making love and feeling so falsely adult it was comforting to snuggle childishly under his arm and fall asleep listening to his tales.

  †

  Bogart went on Good Friday and I opened the doors and windows to let out the smell of smoke. It was a breezy spring day with sweetness flying in the air and I noticed that the daffodils in the garden had bothered to come up, even though nobody cared. We’d done nothing in the garden since Mum died.

  Derek’s first words when he and Aunt Regina arrived were, ‘I’ll get the mower onto that,’ nodding at the waving, dandelion-starred lawn. They’d brought eggs from their own hens, and Easter eggs too, which Aunt Regina had made herself in fancy moulds. It felt normal in a comforting way, though not normal at all for us, for Stella to be out in the garden helping Derek with the weeding while Aunt Regina and I made a simnel cake. She gave me the ingredients for the marzipan and I watched her as she creamed butter and sugar, the muscles glimmering through the fat at the top of her arms.

  ‘How are you coping with your grief?’ she asked, pausing with the sieve in the air to give me a meaningful look while a fine veil of flour floated down.

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  ‘Has Dad been in touch much?’

  I lied and said yes. He was still sending money but he hardly ever rang us.

  ‘And how are you?’ I said.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Maybe a wee bit’ – she tapped the sieve on the bowl edge and started to fold in the flour with a lovely scooping action of her wrist – ‘out of sorts. My age,’ she explained.

  ‘Seen the doctor?’

  She shook her head. ‘That looks gorgeous.’ She smiled at the ball of marzipan. ‘Could you zest me those lemons now? No need for any doctor. It’s just the change.’

  ‘But you could still . . .’

  ‘Oh, I’ll soldier on.’

  Derek came into the kitchen, bits of grass snarled up in his curly grey beard, and to my horror he patted Aunt Regina on her bottom. Stella pulled a face at me from behind him and I stifled a giggle in my lemony hand.

  ‘I had a really strange dream last night,’ I said. ‘I dreamed Mum came into my room.’ I looked at Stella. ‘And she said to tell you’ – I pointed at Aunt Regina – ‘that you should go and see the doctor.’

  ‘I wonder why she didn’t come and see me?’ Aunt Regina said. She sounded quite put out.

  ‘Well, I dreamed the Prime Minister turned out to be a dog,’ Derek said, and guffawed into the sink.

  When they left on Easter Monday afternoon, Derek slipped us each a pound and said how welcome we’d be to visit, and to ring in an emergency any time of night or day. I hugged Aunt Regina tight as she made me promise to make Stella eat.

  ‘I will,’ I promised, ‘if you do what Mum said and go to the doctor’s.’

  ‘You wee fusspot!’ She shook her head. ‘I will, if you promise to look after yourself.’

  ‘Promises, promises,’ Derek said. ‘Can I have a go? Will you two promise’ – he smiled between Stella and me – ‘to laugh at least once a day?’

  ‘We’ll try,’ I said.

  We stood and waved as they drove away, then I went in to phone Bogart and tell him to come back home.

  †

  It was at Bawdsey on a mellow trip one hot afternoon that Bogart first met Jesus. The mud was drying on my calves into itchy lettering, a kind of script; I don’t know what the language was. Somehow, I must have gone off the path, searching maybe, or just enjoying the warm suck of the mud. I found Bogart sitting cross-legged in the long grass, his face a blaze of bliss. He pointed to the sky and said, ‘He came to me.’

  I sat down beside him and examined my legs. ‘What language is this?’ I said.

  He only glanced. ‘He bade me wait,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Our Lord. Melanie.’ He turned to me and his eyes had gone golden as a lion’s. ‘I have seen the light. I have seen Jesus. And he has bade me wait.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ he admitted. We waited there for the rest of the afternoon. The thing about the acid was the way it stretched the surface and changed the way I saw things. One time I felt like an animal, my sense of smell sharp as a dog’s and I snuffled and wagged along the street, feeling a tail, real as my hand, feeling the blood pound in my veins and the air go in and out of me of its own accord. I knew then for absolute certain that our physical bodies are pets for our souls, and we must look after them as kindly as we would tend a pet, and that not only did we have souls but so did rabbits and snails and trees and all the babies that never got to be.

  I wandered off and played for a while with a black dog, chasing and laughing (and the dog was laughing) and then it started to wear off, which leaves you with a strange emptiness, as if the elastic that holds your mind together has lost its snap. I found Bogart again and he hadn’t moved a muscle. A frown in the sky had obscured the sun and the hairs on my arms hissed and swayed.

  I got hold of his hand and tried to pull him up, but he seemed to have grown into the ground.

  ‘I’ve got to wait,’ he repeated.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said. But it was another age and the sun had oozed its yellow juice between the stones before I could get him to budge.

  ‘What did he say again?’ I said.

  ‘To wait.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but that could be for days or weeks. He probably means wait for
another sign or something.’

  He looked at me, eyes spinning in opposite directions. And then he stood, tottered unsteadily for a minute. ‘Fucking foot’s gone to sleep,’ he said, stamping so that the ground shook.

  The sign, when it came, was on the anniversary of Mum’s death. Neither Stella nor I referred to the date, but Aunt Regina phoned and made us acknowledge it. She said that she and Derek would be coming to see us for a week and to keep strong and had we kept our promises, because she’d kept hers.

  ‘You went to the doctor?’ I said, bracing myself. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘There’s nothing amiss,’ she said, ‘but we’ve become friends. Kindred spirits.’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘Or soulmates,’ she continued. ‘Between you and me, Derek is finding it all rather trying. Nose out of joint sort of thing.’

  ‘Anyway, you’ll be coming to see us,’ I said. She gave me the likely date and I wrote it on my hand.

  That evening, for the first time in months, we had a seance. It was in the hope of attracting Mum, of course, or someone who’d act as go-between. Bogart was in the garden snoozing on a deckchair. The Bible lay on the table; he’d taken to searching it for clues. Since Jesus first spoke to him he’d been waiting for another sign, searching the sky, the television and the post, taking regular doses of acid to keep his mind open – but to no avail.

  Stella arranged the Scrabble letters while I lit the candles. I’d cried earlier, privately, and then I’d removed a school picture of me from a frame and, by trimming the edges off, got a picture of Mum in there. I sat her on the table by the letters and polished the special glass with a silky petticoat.

  ‘Is anyone there?’ said Stella and we waited and, as usual, at first there was nothing.

  ‘Is anyone there?’ Stella repeated, and at last, the glass began to tremble.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  The glass hesitated and seemed to change its mind several times, before eventually it went to H.

  ‘Maybe Hursa?’ Stella whispered.

  ‘Is our mother with you?’ I asked.

  The glass began to move more certainty now. C – A – L – L – A – L – A – N, it spelled.