9
Inga never told Matt about the abortion. She did tell him she wanted to move back to Norwich, though, and they gave up their flat in London. Matt applied for a job at his old company, but, although they took him back, he had to take a demotion. Outwardly, he was stoical about it.
“I’ll give it a few years, and then I’ll set up my own business. It’ll be fine.”
I often wondered how it must really feel to have his work directed by someone in the role he used to fill, but Matt seemed as cheerful as ever—at least when he was with us—so I gradually stopped worrying about him and did my best to stuff my knowledge about the abortion to the back of my mind.
I was busy with my own life, too, of course—getting used to a schedule of teaching and lesson preparation. In reality, because I only felt really confident about teaching if I spent ages preparing my sessions, I didn’t get much more time to be creative than I had before when I was data inputting or serving people their meals.
The courses I taught were all art based, but they varied immensely according to who I was asked to deliver them to. Many were aimed at retired people taking up a new hobby, but some were out in the community, working with groups with some kind of need or disadvantage. I liked those the most, although they could be challenging.
Even with some teaching experience under my belt, I still got things wrong sometimes. And I always worried about whether what I was doing really helped people the way it was intended to, especially when I started my art sessions at a women’s refuge. These art sessions were directed at families, so I had to think of art activities suitable for a variety of ages. It was important, valuable work; work it meant a lot to me to get right. And I didn’t always manage to do that.
There were four children in the art group next time I went there—Tabby, Rose, Leesa, and Jack. There were supposed to have been seven kids and seven mothers, but I wasn’t surprised when some of the group didn’t turn up. The previous week had gone so badly, I’d had nightmares about it afterwards.
“How lovely to see you all,” I said, beaming at the mums. “I wasn’t sure anyone would be back after I turned your kids into mini Shreks last week.” I shuddered at the memory, drenched all over again by horror and disbelief. It had been awful. Truly awful.
“It was cool,” said Teri, Leesa’s mum.
“I haven’t laughed that much in ages,” said Catherine, Rose’s mum.
“Yeah, don’t worry about it, Lily,” said Izzy, Tabby’s mum.
Jack’s mum, Trish, was busy dealing with Emily, Jack’s baby sister, and said nothing except, “Sorry, Lily, I’ll have to give her a feed.”
“Of course,” I said, “that’s fine.” I expected her to feed the baby right there, but she stood up and went to a corner of the room, calling out to her son as she went.
“Stop making so much noise, Jack.”
But Jack, who was running around the room with his toy car making brm brm noises, paid no attention.
“You did look stressed, though,” said Izzy.
“You really did,” agreed Catherine.
“I was,” I said with feeling. “Has the dye come off yet?”
“Tabs, show Lily your hands,” said Izzy, and Tabby turned her hands palms up. There was still a distinct green tinge to them.
“Mine are greener than yours,” said Rose, putting her own palms alongside Tabby’s.
“Mine are the greenest!” sang out Leesa.
Oh, God. All their hands were still really green.
“I am so sorry,” I said. “I should have guessed the rubber gloves would slip off their hands because they didn’t fit properly. D’you think that’s why the others haven’t come today?”
“What, in case you’ve got something else messy for us to do?” said Catherine.
“They’ve just got appointments and that, Lily,” soothed Izzy. “Nobody minded.”
I had, though. A lot. I would never forget my horror when I saw the floating rubber gloves and realised the kids’ hands were plunged right into the tub of green dye mixture. I never wanted to look at a tie-dye scarf again. Whatever had possessed me to think tie-dye was a suitable art project for families?
“You’re all very kind,” I said now, smiling round at them all and thinking how different it could have been if they’d decided to complain. Though I guessed there was still time for one of them—perhaps one of the mums who hadn’t come along today—to do just that.
I pulled myself together. “Anyway, so today we’re going to make some wax scratching pictures.”
“Not with hot wax, though?” asked Catherine.
“No, no, don’t worry!” I reassured her quickly. “Just wax crayons. No mess, I promise. Look, I’ll show you how it’s done, if you all want to watch?”
I pulled my piece of paper closer. “The first thing we do is draw a lovely, brightly coloured picture on our piece of paper.”
Jack was still running round the room making brm brm noises for his car. When his circuit brought him close to the table, I smiled at him. “I know, I’ll draw Jack’s lovely red car,” I said, and proceeded to sketch it out, pleased when Jack stopped running to watch.
“There,” I said, when it was finished. “Now, we cover our picture all over with the black wax crayon like this.”
But I hadn’t thought things through, because the second I began to scribble over the red car with black, Jack burst into noisy tears and tugged at the sheet of paper, screaming, “No! Brm brm .”
“Jack!” called his mother from the corner of the room. “Don’t be naughty.”
“No, it’s all right,” I said. “Here, Jack, you can have it. I’ll do another picture.” I gave him the picture of a car, and he ran off with it to show his mum.
“I know,” I said, pressing on, still determinedly cheerful, “I’ll draw a lovely rainbow, shall I?”
I quickly drew a rainbow across a fresh sheet of paper in fat, bright strokes, aware that Rose was starting to fidget. Maybe I should have got them to get started instead of demonstrating? But that hadn’t worked so well last week, had it? And after that fiasco, I’d wanted everything to be perfect. And clean, definitely clean. But clean didn’t necessarily mean interesting.
I sped up, filling in the colours of the rainbow quickly until the whole page was covered.
“Now, I’m going to cover my picture with black crayon. Don’t worry, it will end up looking beautiful by the time I’ve finished!”
I hated my overbright tone of voice. The hint of desperation in the way I said it would look beautiful. It had better.
“You kicked me!” Rose complained to Leesa.
“I didn’t!” said Leesa. “Mummy, I didn’t!”
“She did.”
Oh, God, they were clearly bored.
“Girls, please,” said Izzy, and she sounded so tired. These sessions were supposed to help, not to create more stress.
“Come on, girls,” I said quickly. “Help me to cover the rainbow right up. Here’s a black wax crayon for you all.”
Tabby and Rose were soon attacking my rainbow with gusto, tongues poking out with concentration. Only Leesa was sitting back, her black wax crayon on the table in front of her, not taking part.
“The rainbow was so pretty,” she said, sounding tearful. Oh, God, she’d probably had so many things destroyed in her short life already. In its own way, this wax crayon scratch picture activity was as potentially harmful as the tie-dye one had been.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll see the rainbow again very soon. The next bit is the really fun part. After we’ve covered everything in black, we’re going to take one of these lolly sticks, and we’re going to scratch through the black like this. See? Isn’t it beautiful?”
I demonstrated, moving the edge of the lolly stick so it removed the black wax crayon to reveal the jewel-like colour beneath. Sneaking a glance at all of their faces, I saw them smile, one by one. Phew.
“Do you want to have a try?” I asked Leesa, offering paper. “You don’t have to draw a picture; you can just draw patterns or coloured blocks to cover with the black.”
Which was what I should have done myself.
The girls were delighted with the magic revealed by scraping with the lolly sticks. They wanted to do it all over again as soon as they’d finished, bent over their work, fiercely concentrating. Looking up with gap-toothed smiles to share the magic with their mothers.
And their mothers relaxed, taking the opportunity to let their shoulders soften. Leesa’s mum did her own picture, covering her sheet of paper with yellow, orange, and red, then scraping back the black to make a pattern of stars and planets. A galaxy of optimism.
“That’s beautiful,” I told her, and she smiled faintly.
“It’s make-believe. But thank you, it was fun.”
Jack came over to the table, toy car clutched to his chest, and picked up a black wax crayon. He started to scribble.
I was pleased he was taking part. “That’s it, Jack,” I said. “Go for it!”
But then he picked up a lolly stick and wanted to scrape away a pattern the way the others were doing. Only it wouldn’t work because he hadn’t put any colour beneath the black. Soon he was screaming with frustration, and before I could show him what he needed to do, an unpleasant smell—clearly from his nappy—filled the air.
“Sorry, Trish,” called Catherine, “Jack needs changing. Want me to do it?”
Baby Emily was asleep now. Trish carefully got to her feet and began to come over. “No, it’s all right, he’ll only kick off if I don’t do it. Will someone hold the baby for me?”
She was looking straight at me, so I automatically put my arms out. Seconds later the precious bundle that was her daughter was in my arms—snuffling and surprisingly heavy—stirring for a few seconds before she settled again. Two months old.
I gazed down into Emily’s face, wondering whether it was her birth that had given her mother the impetus to leave an abusive relationship. I had no way of knowing because I didn’t know the background stories of any of my workshop participants at the refuge. There was no need for me to know. My role was to run art workshops to help them to connect with their kids. To help them find creativity and hope through making something together. That was all.
“You look like a total natural, Lily,” Catherine told me, nodding towards me and the baby.
“She does, doesn’t she?”
“Next thing we know she’ll be on maternity leave and these workshops will get cancelled.”
I did know my way around babies, it was true. But even so, their words had taken me somewhere I didn’t want to go. Right back to my thin-walled childhood bedroom with my baby sister crying next door. Suddenly the baby seemed to have doubled in weight. I wanted to give her to one of the mums; to say, “ Here, could you hold her, please? I have to get the paperwork out of my bag. ”
I did have to get the paperwork out of my bag. Even at sessions like this, at the women’s refuge, we tutors were supposed to get students to complete paperwork. We didn’t get any funding for the courses unless the participants set themselves some “measurable goals” and reflected on their progress. And now the girls had finished their pictures and were beginning to look bored again. Very soon everyone would drift off, leaving me literally holding the baby.
“Ladies,” I said, “please don’t go without filling out your forms. Just a sentence or two about what we’ve done today and what you got out of it.”
I bent to pick up my bag from the floor next to my chair, encountering Emily’s soft, downy head with my cheek as I did so. Inhaling her milky, unique-to-a-baby scent. With only one hand, it was a struggle to undo the flap of the bag to reach the paperwork.
“Here, let me help,” said Catherine. But she didn’t take the baby from me. Instead, she rummaged in my bag. “You got any pens in there? Oh, yeah, I see them. Here you go, girls.”
The trio of women settled down to write, their daughters drifting away from the table. For a very brief moment there was perfect peace. Just the sound of pens moving across paper and the gentle breathing of the contented baby in my arms.
Then the door opened to signal the return of Jack and his mum, and very soon the little boy was running around the room with his car again making his brm brm noises, and Trish reached to take her daughter back from me.
“Thanks, Lily,” she said, and she looked so very tired I wanted to ignore the fact that she hadn’t completed her perishing form and to tell my boss all over again that all this red tape and form filling had no place at a women’s refuge.
Not that it would do any good. I already knew what she’d say, because I’d heard her say it plenty of times before. “ Presumably, you want to get paid for the work you do, Lily? No forms, no funding. It’s as simple as that. ”
It wasn’t her fault, I supposed. She hadn’t put the rules into place. She’d probably felt just like me when she first started out. Probably still did, beneath that tough exterior. Take it or leave it was her attitude. She knew as well as I did that there were plenty more struggling artists hungry for a bit of part-time teaching to help them get by. With a prestigious art college in the town, I was dispensable. If I left because of my principles, someone else would soon take over from me while I was struggling to afford to eat. And besides, leaving the paperwork aside, I did enjoy the work. When I wasn’t dyeing children’s hands green, anyway.
I always cycled when I worked at the refuge. Cycling got me to places quicker than the bus—I knew all the time-saving cycle tracks and cut-throughs in the city. But after a session at the refuge, I usually pushed my bike back home, taking a little detour so I could walk along the path near the river. I needed some space to leave behind all those faces. The emotions. The undisclosed histories. And doubt, too; there was always plenty of self-doubt about whether I’d done the best job I could have done or not.
Gradually, as I walked along through the scrubby piece of woodland that led to the river, my bike wheels tick-ticking beside me, I became aware of the birdsong or the rustle of a squirrel in the treetops, and I was able to let most of those faces and emotions go.
By the time I reached the bridge across the river, I usually only had the children left in my head. The children were always the hardest to forget.
I stopped on the bridge to stare down at the moving water, my bike propped against the wrought-iron structure. Alex had introduced me to the game of Pooh sticks from the Winnie-the-Pooh books when I first brought him here. You both found a stick and dropped it into the river. Then you rushed to the other side of the bridge to see whose stick emerged first. I was crazy with joy when I won the first time we played.
“You threw your stick out a bit when you let it go!” Alex protested. “You’re supposed to just drop it.”
So, next time, I just let it fall. And I won again. Pooh sticks champion of the world, me.
That day, straight from the refuge, I imagined the children I’d been working with that afternoon playing Pooh sticks. Leesa, Rose, and Tabby, concentrating, their tongues protruding the way they had when they’d made their wax scratch pictures. Jack, demanding to be picked up.
Had anyone ever played Pooh sticks with any of them? If not, I hoped somebody would very soon.
I picked up a stick and dropped it in, crossing to search for it from the other side of the bridge. But I never saw it emerge because something else caught my attention. One of the reeds just where the river began to bend, moving in an unnatural way that had nothing to do with the gentle breeze. A kingfisher, staring down into the river, on the hunt for fish.
I gasped, watching it. It almost made my heart stop it was so beautiful.
Sapphire, cerulean, turquoise—my artist’s mind searched fruitlessly to describe that exact blue. I switched it off and just accepted the gift of the sight—the utter treat of the bird’s perfection. And then the kingfisher launched itself from the reed and flew straight towards me, ducking beneath the bridge. I dashed to the other side to watch it fly right up the river. Then it was gone, lost in the shadows of the overhanging branches.
I got onto my bike—because walking was too slow now—and made for home, my legs pumping, the trees and the river rushing past me, a huge smile on my face, the problems of the women and children in the refuge tucked away until next time. I slowed down only for dog walkers and their charges, smiling automatically when they thanked me, my whole focus on what colours I would use to recreate the experience of that kingfisher. How I would incorporate it into the painting I was working on.
So it was a surprise when I got home to find Alex already there, home from work early, the house filled with the smells of cooking, the kitchen with the sounds of sizzling and chopping. Just in time, before Alex could look up and see my expression of disappointment, I remembered that Inga and Matt were coming to dinner. The kingfisher would have to wait.
“Hi, sweetheart,” he said, looking up with a smile. “Did you have a good day?”
“Perfect,” I replied, dumping my bag down and going over to kiss him.