I looked away, p.4
I Looked Away, page 4
When I come up into a different street, it starts pissing down with rain but – stroke of luck here – I’m right outside a church with a stone cross on the top.
I used to believe in this kind of stuff but not any more. So I just sit on one of the side pews, watching tourists forking out a quid for each candle. Every now and then they drop one without noticing and I scoop it up quick. I have a sense of calm, the first in days. I feel my eyelids slowly drooping.
I’m woken by my belly making ‘empty’ noises. That’s another thing about being on the road. You can tell the difference between needing to eat and eating because you’re bored. Ever seen a fat homeless person? Thought not.
There’s a bloke selling doughnuts on the street. I quite fancy something sweet. I reach down into my right-hand pocket and go all hot and cold. Where’s my money? Someone in the church must’ve taken it while I was asleep. What a bloody idiot I’ve been!
I belt back, shoving my way through the late-afternoon stream of crowds. But the place is empty.
What am I going to do now? I haven’t got any money for a hostel and I can’t go to a crisis centre. So I just keep going until my feet hurt. My stomach is aching with hunger. I walk and walk because I don’t know what else to do. A seagull swoops above me. Lorries screech round giant roundabouts. Posters outside a posh theatre invite me to buy a ticket, though it’s not for the likes of me. A man sits by the side of the road, his hat upturned for coins. Next to him is a mouldy loaf of bread. Past a shop with a notice that says ‘It’s Pie Time!’ In your dreams, I think to myself.
I’m down by a river now. Must be some kind of harbour. There’s this drop below me with boats bobbing around. I gaze at the water. What would it be like to jump in and never come up?
‘Don’t,’ says a soft Irish voice behind me. ‘It’s not worth it.’
I turn round fast. It’s a young man holding a cardboard sign that says ‘Homeless and Hungry’.
Usually I keep myself to myself. But the shock of everything makes me come straight out with it. ‘I don’t have anywhere to go,’ I sniff. ‘I got robbed.’
He looks all sympathetic, like he knows what that’s like. ‘That’s tough.’ He puts out his hand to shake mine. ‘The name’s Paul, by the way.’
A real gentleman! His teeth are surprisingly white and even. Not a smoker or druggie, then. I see that his shirt-sleeve is torn.
‘Where are you heading?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
‘Not got anywhere to sleep?’
I shake my head.
‘It’s getting dark. You don’t want to be out here on your own. Why don’t you come along with me?’
‘Ha! I’m not that daft.’
‘C’mon!’ He laughs like I’ve said something funny but in a nice way. ‘You’re old enough to be my mum. I’ll help you find a place for the night.’
I hesitate. I’m cold and my stomach’s rolling on empty. This bloke doesn’t seem like the type to be dangerous. So I find myself walking by the river with him and then along more pavements and back alleys. ‘Where are we going to?’
‘A place called Stokes Croft. You’ll be OK there. It’s where we all hang out.’
There are loads of arty shops here with music blaring out and walls covered with graffiti. Neat pictures as well as faded messages like ‘Bugger Brexit’ in red, blue and white. Then we get to this big factory building that’s all boarded up like it’s empty, with loads of ‘Keep Out’ notices. ‘Round the back,’ he says. There’s a smashed window. ‘Just crawl through,’ he tells me. ‘Watch out for the broken glass.’
It’s a bit of a struggle but I make it.
I stand up. He’s next to me. Then he flings his arms out wide like this is some kind of palace.
‘Welcome to our place.’
3
Ellie
Death is part of our life here in prison. I’m not just talking about the murderers or, at least, the ones who’ve confessed. It’s the death inside you that comes from not having fresh air or being able to smell the flowers in the garden or feel the arms of someone you love around your neck.
Then again, it’s no more than I deserve.
My father and I had an appointment to see Mummy in a place called a ‘funeral parlour’. That’s where she’d been taken to after ‘passing away’. I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant but I felt as though I should do, so I didn’t like to ask. ‘Why couldn’t you have kept her at home in bed?’ I said instead.
I had to repeat the question twice before my father answered. Maybe he couldn’t talk much because he hadn’t had any dinner for ages, even though people kept ringing the bell with lamb casseroles and apple pies and something called a ‘fon doo’. You have to eat enough to think properly. Mummy always used to say that.
‘The undertaker needed to make her look nice,’ he eventually replied.
‘What’s an undertaker?’
‘Someone who … who looks after people like your mother.’
‘But she looks nice as she is,’ I protested. ‘You’re always telling her that.’ It was true. Mummy had soft dark hair and her skin smelled like roses. Then I remembered the colour of her face the last time I’d seen her and my chest began to get so tight that it was like someone had wrapped a giant elastic band round it and was squeezing hard. ‘I don’t care about the yellow bits. I just want to see her.’
‘Poor lamb,’ murmured Miss Greenway, who had come round to ‘help tidy up a bit’.
But my father was looking out of the window with an expression on his face as if he expected my mother to come walking up the path and open the front door.
Looking back, I wish my father had never taken me to see my mother’s body. Didn’t he realize how much it was going to affect me? In those days, I don’t believe it was as common as it is now for young children to go to funerals, even when it was a parent’s. But despite everything that happened afterwards, I believe my father was a good man. He must have thought it would help me come to terms with her death.
Whatever the reason, the details of that terrible day are still indelibly imprinted on my memory. And I can’t stop my mind playing it over and over, all these years later, as I sit in my cell.
From the outside, the funeral parlour looked like a shop that was closed up. In the books I’d read, a ‘parlour’ was like a sitting room. This one was a whole house with white curtains across the window and a vase of white plastic flowers on a table next to a big gold cross. A man in black took us into the back. It was so quiet that I could hear myself breathing.
My mother’s eyes were closed. Her face was no longer yellow. She was all white and shiny instead.
‘What’s happened to her chin? I cried out. It was a different shape: long and pointed like my face in a mirror at the fairground where my parents had taken me once.
‘It’s the muscles, love,’ said the man in black. ‘They sag when people die.’
‘But she can’t have died!’ I screamed out. ‘She’s just passed away. You told me that, Daddy. Didn’t you?’
I clung to his arm, pulling at his sleeve desperately. ‘Make her wake up, Daddy. MAKE her!’
His voice sounded as if it was being squeezed out like toothpaste from an empty tube. ‘I can’t, Ellie. Her body is broken now.’
‘Then mend it,’ I wept. Hadn’t he fixed the boiler when it had ‘gone on the blink’ by lighting it again? He was ‘good like that’. My mother was always saying so. He’d even fixed the lid of my music box after it came off its hinges.
‘Sometimes, love, people can’t be mended.’ My father had tears running down his face. They scared me. Adults weren’t allowed to cry. My mother used to say that too. ‘Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.’ He took my arm and made towards the door.
‘Did she die because of me?’ My voice sounded small, as if it was someone else’s. We were in the street now, heading towards the car. I couldn’t stop shivering. It was like some monster was in charge of my body, shaking me around like the jellies Mummy and I used to make together. Even my teeth rattled.
‘No! Of course she didn’t die because of you. Why would you think that, Ellie?’ A motorbike roared towards us and Daddy picked me up quickly to get to the other side safely.
‘I upset her,’ I said in a small voice.
‘How?’
‘That time when I asked why she couldn’t have a baby and then she smashed the blue bowl.’
He shook his head. ‘It had nothing to do with that, Ellie. She was ill. The doctors couldn’t make her better.’
‘But she wanted to have a baby, didn’t she?’
‘Yes.’ He’d nodded his head. ‘We both hoped to give you a brother or sister. It just didn’t happen.’
I said nothing, because I didn’t want to upset him any more. But inside, I knew the truth. I’d hurt my mother by talking about it. And that’s when she’d started to be poorly. Then she had died. So it had to be my fault.
Years later I was visiting an exhibition of black-and-white photographs at the National Gallery when I was struck by a portrait of a girl from Edwardian times in mourning dress. Her hair was scraped back from a high forehead with a black velvet Alice band. Her eyes were soft and gentle. Her mouth turned down. She bore an air of sad acceptance. Instantly I knew how she felt.
As I stood there, jostling with other art-lovers around me, the photograph took me back to my mother’s funeral. There I was, standing by the open grave next to my father in his long grey coat. In my hand I held an early daffodil from our garden. At his instruction, I threw it into the earth on top of the box.
‘Why has she got to be in there?’ I asked.
‘What did she say?’ hollered Miss Greenway’s mother.
‘Shhh,’ said someone else.
Afterwards, people came back to our home, including the mother of a boy called Peter Gordon, who had been friends with Mummy. We used to be playmates when we’d been small and then we went to the same schools, though we didn’t talk much now. My head was patted. Someone I’d never met before gave me a hug. Would they still be nice to me if they knew I had upset Mummy so much that she eventually died?
Everything changed after my mother’s funeral. Daddy went back to work, so Miss Greenway started walking me to school. ‘It’s no trouble, Nigel,’ I heard her tell my father. ‘I’ve told you that before and I mean it. It’s not as though I have anything else to do.’
I’d never heard her call my father ‘Nigel’ before.
Miss Greenway always seemed very nervous when she was with me and would hold my hand so tightly when we crossed the road that she almost hurt me. ‘You’re in my care,’ she kept saying. ‘I need to get you back in one piece or your father would never forgive me.’
She talked a lot (my mother used to say that our neighbour ‘prattled’). She’d also ask questions like who my favourite film star was and what my father’s ‘best’ meal was. I didn’t have an answer for the first but I did know that my mother often used to make a dish called ‘toad in the hole’. It made my eyes water to think about it. I missed her so much.
One day I found myself having to jump over the pavement cracks. My mother’s voice told me that if I didn’t, my father might die – just like she had.
‘Do be careful,’ Miss Greenway would keep saying. ‘You might fall and injure yourself.’
But I couldn’t stop.
Miss Greenway would take me back to her house after school until my father returned from work.
At first, I didn’t like this, because her old wrinkly mother smelled of a sickly perfume that tickled my nose. She would also stick out her tongue at me when no one was looking and laugh. Her deafness seemed to come and go. Sometimes she spoke softly and sometimes really loud. ‘I tell you,’ she’d shout at Miss Greenway right in front of me so that my ears rang. ‘No good will come of this.’
I didn’t know what she meant but I’d stopped asking questions because no one answered them.
My nightmares got so bad that my eyes grew black underneath. ‘Your daughter needs more fresh air,’ declared the doctor when my father took me to the surgery one Saturday morning.
Summer was coming by then. The grass smelled different and the birds began to sing. They reminded me of the way my mother used to whistle songs.
‘We’re going on holiday,’ my father announced.
My parents had taken me to the sea once in a place called Devon. We had built a castle with real paper flags. But this time, we weren’t going to a beach. We were going on an ‘educational trip’. Part of this involved visiting a Roman villa near a place called Newcastle.
‘Look, Ellie,’ my father said. ‘The Romans were so clever that they had underground heating.’
But it was the mosaics I was drawn to. ‘They made pictures out of broken glass and pottery,’ said my father, noticing my interest.
Again I thought of the blue bowl my mother had smashed.
‘I’d like to do that.’
He smiled as if I’d said something silly. ‘It’s not easy.’
‘But putting broken things together could be a way of making them better again, couldn’t it?’ My heart began to feel light, as if a ray of hope had pierced its way in.
My father stopped smiling. ‘I suppose it might.’ Then he gave me a quick hug. ‘You are a funny little thing.’
When we got back after our week away, it was nearly night time. But there was a light on and, when we opened the front door, a delicious smell was coming out from the kitchen. There was a note on the table. Supper in the oven.
‘How very kind of Miss Greenway,’ said my father. ‘Toad in the hole. My favourite!’
Later, when we’d finished eating, he went round to thank her. He was gone so long that I began to get worried. What if something happened to him like it had to my mother?
When he got back he gave me an extra-long hug. I thought I saw tears in his eyes. ‘What’s wrong, Daddy?’ I asked.
He smiled in the way adults do when they pretend everything’s fine when it’s not. ‘Nothing, Ellie. I promise.’
Even though we missed Mummy terribly, my father and I were content with each other’s company. Or so I thought. I used to love sitting at his feet in the evening by the fire while we each read our books from the library. Sometimes he would quote me poetry. His favourite was John Masefield. How I loved those descriptions of the sea! I could have listened to my father’s voice for ever.
We would play Ludo together and card games too, although once, when I got out the Happy Families pack and put Mrs Baker on the carpet, he shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, do you, Ellie?’
Quietly I put the game away. Then I tried to make it up to him by suggesting draughts and letting him win.
Daddy always made sure I did my homework and that it was put in my satchel for the following day. My lunch money was always laid out too. I’d help him make his sandwiches for the shop, just as Mummy had done. ‘We’re a good team, you and I, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘Your mother would have been proud of you.’
Then he turned away but not before I saw that his eyes were wet. So I tried to cheer him up with a joke that I’d heard at school. ‘Why did the tomato blush?’
He was trying to sound as though he wasn’t crying but his voice came out cracked. ‘I don’t know, Ellie.’
‘Because it saw the salad dressing.’
And even though I didn’t understand why the joke was so funny (something I couldn’t tell the others at school or they’d say I was stupid), he smiled. Then it was all right again.
In the autumn we’d gather conkers in the park and I showed him how Mummy had taught me to make little people out of them by sticking in pins for arms and legs. I even asked him to do some cooking with me – something else I’d always done with my mother. We found her old cookery book with one of her favourite recipes. Mum’s special macaroons, she’d written down the side. But when Dad and I whipped up the egg whites, they went all flat. ‘Never mind,’ he said brightly. ‘We can just buy them.’ But it wasn’t the same.
‘What shall we do for Christmas, Ellie?’ he asked when the shops began to have their decorations up. It seemed impossible that Christmas could take place without Mummy. ‘We could go to your aunt’s in Scotland if you like. She’s invited us.’
I didn’t care for my father’s sister. When she’d visited us here, she kept telling my mother that I was ‘too grown up for my own good’, whatever that meant.
‘I’d rather stay in our house with just you and me,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Good. I’m glad you said that.’
So when Miss Greenway invited us to spend the day with her and her old mother, I expected my father to turn down her invitation. But instead, he said that was very nice and that we’d been wondering what to do with ourselves. ‘It wouldn’t have been polite to say no,’ he told me later.
We had to dress up, Daddy said. So I wore my navy-blue velvet dress that was getting too small for me, with a matching Alice band, and my father put on his best grey trousers and what he called his ‘turtleneck jumper’ (though it didn’t look like the turtles’ necks in my encyclopaedia). Miss Greenway was at the door to meet us before we even had a chance to knock. She was wearing a short red squirly patterned dress that showed her knees. ‘Oooh! Milk Tray,’ she gushed when I handed them over as instructed earlier. ‘You shouldn’t have. And presents too! You’ve spoiled us.’
‘Not at all,’ replied my father. ‘I’m very grateful to you for the care you’ve shown Ellie.’
He gave me a little nudge. ‘Yes,’ I said, remembering my manners. ‘Thank you.’
When we went into the lounge, the old lady was sitting in her chair, knitting. ‘He’s brought the child, I see,’ she announced to her daughter as if we weren’t there. ‘Playing happy families, are we?’
Miss Greenway blushed. ‘Don’t worry about Mother,’ she whispered. ‘She rambles a bit, especially after a nap.’
But after lunch, when Daddy had nodded off in a chair in front of the Queen’s speech and Miss Greenway had gone upstairs to ‘freshen up’, I went into the kitchen. The old lady was washing up. Her neck was all wrinkled, I noticed, like a tortoise’s. ‘May I help?’ I asked politely.
