FIVE Tess
December1997
Hope was the little donkey in her first nativity play. Nobody thought she’d do it after the fuss she made about not being allowed to be an angel. To be honest, I didn’t see why she couldn’t be an angel, there were enough of them, but Mrs.Madden, the Reception class teacher, said people weren’t doing Hope any favors bowing to her will all the time. To be fair to Mrs.Madden, I don’t think it was because Hope didn’t look or behave like an angel, I think she was just tired of all the questions.
Christmas was a confusing time for Hope.
“Is Mum with the herald angels?” she would ask, making them sound like some chapter of bikers. And, “The Virgin Mary looks just like Our Lady.”
“Because she is the same, Hope.”
“Why is she called Virgin?”
“It’s just another name.”
I made her a cardboard donkey mask just in case she changed her mind, and when at the dress rehearsal Mrs.Madden pointed out, in a last-ditch attempt to include her, that the little donkey was the only one apart from baby Jesus who had a carol just about them, Hope decided she would go on stage after all, on all fours, taking her role very seriously and getting very cross when the other children joined in to her song. In the end, a compromise was reached where Hope sang the first verse herself and the rest of the class were allowed to come in for the chorus of “Ring out the bells tonight, Bethlehem! Bethlehem!”
Hope had sat out watching so many rehearsals, she knew where everyone should stand. You could hear her telling the camel that he wasn’t in the right place in between verses of “Away in a Manger.” Several of the mothers came up after to tell me how Mum would have been proud, their fixed smiles meaning they’d let it go this time.
Hope wasn’t popular, even with the other kids. You’d think that four- and five-year-olds would be too young for that, but they’re not. On playground duty, I would watch her charging around and around the painted lines on the asphalt in some determined pursuit of her own, praying that one of the kids would ask to be her friend. Hope didn’t seem to notice, but it broke my heart.
When I mentioned Hope’s isolation to Dad, he just came out with the usual stuff about Hope being spoiled and mollycoddled. If people just left her alone, he said, she’d soon sort herself out, missing the point that people were leaving her alone, but you didn’t challenge Dad like that.
Brendan rang from Australia every few weeks, but he wasn’t much help when I told him my concerns about Hope.
“I expect you’d be lonely, if you were five years old and lost your mammy,” he said. “You worry too much!”
“I expect you’d worry if you were eighteen and you’d been landed with your little sister to look after,” I wanted to say to him. But that would have been childish.
At lunchtime on the last day of term, Mrs.Corcoran sent word she wanted to see me. Waiting on a hard chair outside her office, I was sure she was going to issue a warning about Hope’s behavior, or worse, but when she called me in, she told me that the school was about to advertise for a teaching assistant, but if I wanted it, the job was mine.
“A mutually beneficial arrangement,” she called it.
“You might as well get paid for all the work you do,” said Doll, as we sat watching Sleepless in Seattle. She’d got into the habit of coming round with takeout and a video every Friday night when Dad was out at the pub, usually choosing something romantic on the basis that we’d both be able to have a good old cry. “Just until Hope settles,” she added.
We all used that phrase a lot. When Hope settles. As if it was just a temporary arrangement. I borrowed books from the course reading list from the library, so I wouldn’t be behind if some miracle allowed me to slot back into university.
I suppose I had kind of been expecting Doll to put up an argument, but we both knew I didn’t really have a choice. Dad had to go out to work so he couldn’t look after Hope, even if he’d had the capacity or inclination to deal with a young child. Any other alternative was unthinkable.
“I know how much you wanted to go to university, so I’m sad for you, but I’m happy for me,” Doll said, picking up a triangle of pizza. “Do you think that makes me a good friend or a horrible selfish person?”
“A horrible selfish person, obviously,” I said, with a hollow little laugh.
We both sat staring at the television screen for a while.
“Do you believe in The One?” Doll finally asked.
“Depends what you mean by The One,” I said, with that unintentionally surly voice you get when you’re trying to hold back tears, not because of the romance on the screen, which I wasn’t paying much attention to, but because it felt like we’d finally confirmed I was stuck here for the foreseeable future.
“As in, there’s one person out there who’s destined for you?”
“Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?”
“Why?” asked Doll, attempting to deal prettily with an infinite string of mozzarella.
“That there’s only one person out of the whole of mankind? I mean, what if your person happens to live in the Amazonian rainforest, or speak Arabic, or something? And how would you ever know anyway, because if you think somebody is The One and he’s not, then you might have given up your chance of meeting The One who is...”
“What about Mr.Darcy, then?”
Like everyone else, we’d both had a big crush on Colin Firth in the television series of Pride and Prejudice.
“That was the eighteen hundreds,” I said. “You didn’t get to meet as many people.”
“You’re so unromantic!”
My mind wandered through the great romantic pairings in literature. Had they really met because they were meant for one another, or simply because they lived in close proximity? Cathy and Heathcliff shared the same house, Romeo and Juliet were both in Verona. Wasn’t The One more to do with the fact that the emotion we called love, which I had yet to experience, was so powerful it made you believe that this was the only person in the world for you? Wasn’t it more a matter of definition than of destiny?
On screen, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks finally met at the top of the Empire State Building.
“She could do better, don’t you think?” Doll said over the closing credits. “I mean, he’s a good actor, but he’s just not sexy, is he?”
“Sorry, which one of us was the unromantic one?” I asked.
“So, if it was anyone in the whole world, right now, who would it be?” Doll wanted to know.
It was the sort of conversation we used to have as we walked home from school. In those days, it was all Robbie Williams, although I’d always assumed that if our paths had crossed, he would have chosen Doll, because Doll was petite and blonde and boys liked her.
“George Clooney?” I offered.
ERwas the program the teaching assistants at St.Cuthbert’s talked about. Lusting after George Clooney was something I had in common with a staffroom of sympathetic middle-aged women, where conversation often centered on topics like varicose veins and menopause.
“A bit old for you, isn’t he?” said Doll.
“I’m never going to meet him, am I?”
“You always did have a thing for the older guys,” Doll mused.
“How d’you work that out?”
“Little Women, remember? You didn’t mind when Jo got that old professor bloke instead of nice Laurie. It’s the one book I’ve read all the way through,” she admitted when she saw me looking at her, astonished. “Only ’cause you made me.”
“So who would it be for you?” I felt obliged to ask.
“If we’re talking a famous person, Tom Cruise.”
“Yeah, he is pretty gorgeous.”
“He’s too short for you,” said Doll immediately, as if I was planning to snatch him from her.
She got up and removed the video cassette from the machine.
“What about blokes we know?” she asked.
I was about to say that men hadn’t been uppermost in my mind for the past few weeks, when I heard Dad fumbling with his keys at the front door, so jumped up to tidy away the pizza debris. You could never tell what mood he’d be in after the pub.
A cloud of curry entered the room with him.
“So you girls had yourselves a pizza, did you?” he asked, seeing the box on the table.
“We did.”
“None left for me?” He lifted the lid of the box, in a twinkly rather than menacing way.
“Sorry!”
“How much does one of these takeout pizzas cost, then?”
“Doll paid,” I said quickly.
“You’ve got yourself a job, have you?” Dad asked her.
“I have, Mr.Costello. I’m working full-time at the salon now.”
Doll had left school at sixteen, and while I was in the sixth form for two years after that, she had been at the local college, doing her diploma. She’d always worked evenings and weekends at the town’s poshest hairdressing salon since she was thirteen, graduating from the girl who swept the floor all the way up to junior stylist.
“There now,” said Dad, giving me a look.
“I’ve been offered a job as well,” I heard myself telling him, my heart sinking at the inevitability of accepting Mrs.Corcoran’s offer. “I’m going to be a proper teaching assistant on the staff after Christmas.”
“You’ll be getting the pizza in then,” said Dad.
Not well done, or anything like that. Dad hadn’t forgiven me for choosing university rather than work, even though I hadn’t gone.
Doll and I exchanged glances.
“Well, I’ll be off,” said Doll.
“I’ll walk you,” I said, hoping that Dad would have fallen asleep by the time I got back. You would have thought with Mum dying we’d have got along better together, but if anything, Dad seemed more cantankerous than ever. Perhaps it was one of his stages of grief.
The cool air was refreshing after being indoors all evening.
“Oh, I forgot! Mum said you’re to come for Christmas,” Doll announced.
“Seriously?”
“All of you.”
I almost wept with gratitude. I’d been so worried about Christmas. I hadn’t been able to decide whether to get the tinsel tree down from the loft, or decorate the lounge with paper chains, in case it seemed disrespectful. Whenever I tried to speak to Dad about it, he’d say, “Christmas? Doesn’t it get earlier every year?”
And there’d be some excuse—the pub, the snooker, the match—as to why we wouldn’t talk about it yet.
The cards we’d received were piled up on the hall table, except for the one Hope had made at school in the shape of a Christmas tree, so loaded with glitter and glue it never properly dried. That went up on the knick-knack shelf in the kitchen and each morning while she was eating her Coco Pops, Hope gazed at it, saying, in rather a good impression of Mrs.Corcoran’s Irish lilt, “That’s really very good, Hope, isn’t it now?”
I’d dreaded tackling the Christmas lunch. My cooking skills were non-existent. It was fortunate that they served a hot lunch at school, because in the evenings all I ran to was toast with beans, toast with spaghetti or toast with Marmite. Occasionally, when Dad was flush from a win on the horses, he’d arrive home with a big bag of fish and chips, but usually he ate at the pub, or at the Taj Mahal after closing time.
One Sunday, I’d tried to make us a roast dinner, Hope’s favorite, chicken with little sausages, but I got the timings all wrong, and omitted to remove the plastic tray under the chicken before putting it in the oven. The custard for the trifle was sweet scrambled egg, and I over-whipped the cream, so instead of being all floaty, it was fatty and impossible to spread. After that, Dad started taking us to the Carvery on Sunday where it was all you could eat for ￡4.99 and kids went free, including an Ice Cream Factory which Hope went backwards and forwards to, until Dad decided value for money was one thing, but enough was enough. The Carvery wasn’t open on Christmas Day.
Christmas shopping in London was something I’d always done with Mum before Hope was born. We’d rarely bought anything but we used to look at all the Christmas windows of the department stores, sometimes venturing inside to take a surreptitious squirt of Chanel No 5—“If you marry a rich man, Tess, that’s the scent he’ll buy you!”—while the perfumery assistant’s back was turned. I knew it was a risk taking Hope, but I thought she might enjoy all the decorations and the change of scene.
It was a mistake to stop outside Hamleys. When I tried to move us on, Hope literally stuck herself to the pavement, the force of her will making her much heavier than she really was. Inside, she immediately spotted the mountain of soft toys.
“You can touch them very carefully and nicely. Nicely, Hope! Gently. Now put it back, please, Hope... put it back!”
I ended up having to buy the giraffe, who was on the point of losing his tail by the time we got it to the till. I couldn’t believe the price. Dad had given me a twenty-pound note to have ourselves a good time, but there was only enough left for a Happy Meal for lunch. At that point, it would have been more sensible to go home, but it was already 23 December and I hadn’t yet got gifts for Mrs.O’Neill or Doll, and I wanted to buy them something in Selfridges.
After Doll and I turned fifteen, we were allowed to go up to London in the holidays if we saved enough money from our Saturday jobs. We loved walking around the city, discovering all the different little villagey areas and fantasizing about sharing a place there one day. Doll fancied a modern flat overlooking Hyde Park; I preferred the idea of one of the little houses at the top of Portobello Road which were all painted a different bright color. The dream was that I’d be a librarian or work in a bookshop and Doll would be one of the women in Selfridges’ perfumery who wear a clinical-looking white uniform and offer you a demonstration facial.
Oxford Street was crammed with last-minute shoppers. You just had to keep moving along with the crowd, which was tiresome enough for someone as tall as me but much worse for Hope. When she couldn’t stand the crush and the noise any longer, she stopped dead.
“Come on, Hope. It’s not far now.”
The columns of Selfridges were just up ahead.
“Hope! We’re holding everyone up.”
Initial glances of sympathy changed to disapproval as the screaming started.
“Hope! Come on now! What would Mum think of this behavior?”
I’d vowed never to use Mum’s memory as a threat, and as soon as I said it I wanted to take it back, but the question had distracted her for the second I needed to scoop her off her feet and carry her. She started fighting and kicking me.
“Put me down!”
“Only if you’ll promise to behave.”
“Put me down!”
The screams were getting louder, her face was all hot and wet with tears, and then suddenly, she stopped, cocking her head to one side, like a robin. My ears searched the rumble of traffic and detected the noise of a band playing “Silent Night” somewhere in the direction of Selfridges.
We must have stood there for half an hour listening to the carols, Hope’s face lighting up as she recognized each familiar tune. She knew all the words to “Away in a Manger” and“We Three Things,” as she called it, and sang them completely unselfconsciously. When the band stopped for a break, I gave her fifty pence to go and put in the collection box.
“Aren’t you the little angel?” the Salvation Army lady said.
“I’m the little donkey,” Hope told her.
Selfridges was packed inside, and all the cosmetic counters were just a little too high for Hope. When I tried to interest her with a squirt of perfume on the back of her hand, she started coughing in a silly exaggerated way. I quickly chose a box of guest soaps with beautiful floral wrappers for Mrs.O’Neill and a gift pack of Rive Gauche eau de parfum and body lotion, Doll’s current favorite fragrance.
“I’d like them in separate bags, please,” I told the assistant when we eventually got to the front of the queue.
The whole point was the bright yellow Selfridges bags.
“That’s twenty-eight pounds, madam.”
Delving around in my bag, I could feel the line behind me growing impatient and had a horrible sinking feeling that some clever pickpocket had stolen my wallet in the crush of shoppers. Finally, I felt it at the bottom of my bag.
“Here!”
Thrusting two notes at the assistant, I was suddenly aware that Hope was no longer holding my hand, nor was she standing next to me.
“Hope?”
No sign of her.
My chest tightened, as if I’d forgotten how to breathe. Keep calm. She must be around somewhere. I scanned the crowds. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of people on the ground floor of the shop. Where had she gone? People were packed onto every step of the escalators going up and coming down; and everywhere there were mirrors reflecting more people. But no Hope.
“Hope?”
With the cash still in my hand, I started moving through the crowd, peering over the tops of the shiny glass counters looking for her. Perhaps she was hiding? But it would be so unlike Hope to hide. Whenever I tried to play hide-and-seek with her, she didn’t get the idea.
“...nine, ten, coming to get you!”
“Here I am!” Hope would call out from behind the curtain.
Had she run away? Hope never ran away. She wriggled and kicked, but she didn’t run.
It was like a nightmare, except instead of shouting and nothing coming out of my mouth, I was shouting and nobody was paying any attention.
Someone must have taken her! Please God, no! Don’t let someone have taken her!
The revolving door was whirling people into the street. Did someone have a car outside waiting, a car with black windows? Surely people would have seen her being taken? But I’d had all the disapproving glances and nobody had asked, “Is that child yours?” Everyone was too busy shopping.
Please God! I will believe in you, if you just bring her back to me!
As I started saying Hail Marys in my head, I suddenly had a flash of inspiration. Aren’t you the little angel?
Outside, I dodged this way and that, not caring who I bumped into in my haste to get back to the Salvation Army band.
An ambulance siren screamed nearby. Please God, don’t let her have tried to cross the road and gone under a big red bus!
Calm down. She’ll be standing by the litter bin where we listened to the band.
She wasn’t! I’d lost her! I really had lost her! And it was stupid to leave the shop because if she was looking for me, she wouldn’t find me now!
The band started a new carol.
“Little donkey, little donkey, on the dusty road...”
In my panic, I hadn’t seen Hope standing right next to the conductor. She was adamantly refusing to hold the hand of the worried-looking woman with the collection box.
“Stop that huggy stuff!” Hope shouted, as I squeezed her ever so tightly in my arms. “Stop it, I said.”
She fell asleep on the train home, a picture of innocence, her hand clasped around the giraffe’s neck, his soft face next to hers. When I thought about it calmly, it was astonishing that she had found her way through the store and back to the band. Didn’t that just prove that she was as intelligent as any other child, if not more so? That would be something to tell Mrs.Corcoran.
Or not. Because that would involve admitting that I’d lost her.
A middle-aged woman sitting opposite us with her Christmas shopping nodded and smiled.
“Bless her!”
“You should have seen her earlier,” I said. “Screaming blue murder!”
“You don’t ever want to criticize your own,” she admonished me. “There’ll be plenty of people in life who’ll do that for you.”
Normally, I’d have explained that I wasn’t Hope’s mother, but those cataclysmic seconds, minutes—I don’t even know how long it was—without her had made me realize that Hope was so much more important than anything else. It was suddenly clear as an epiphany that I had a choice: I could either go on thinking life was unfair and getting all bitter and resentful, or just get on with looking after her. It was actually a relief. And it was true what Brendan said the last time I’d had a bit of a moan on the phone. Not studying English literature didn’t stop me reading books, did it?
I thought of something Mum often used to say. If you do something with a happy heart, it will bring you joy.
Or as Doll put it, because she was the only person I ever told about the incident:
“You lost Hope, but then you found it again.”