Chapter Eight
Twelve years ago
I sat on the stairs, feeling the carpet worn rough with age, listening to my mother on the phone. I could hear her voice rising as she spoke to my father, then lowering suddenly to a furious hiss. I had heard these calls before. My father, now married with another child, would be standing outside his home claiming to be on a business call, and would tell my mother to keep her voice down, as though his new wife could sense that the voice on the phone was the predecessor she knew nothing about.
‘You know I had to sell my car,’ my mother was saying, her pacing restricted to a few steps back and forth by the cord of the phone. ‘I haven’t been paid, we can’t get a taxi. You didn’t come to parent”s evening again. Not even a card for her thirteenth birthday. This is the least you can do for her, she’s still your daughter. Or have you forgotten about her completely?’
I could hear my mother’s voice wavering as she spoke. I loved her for speaking up for me, but I hated her for her weakness, her inability to force him to be better for both of us. She had been this way all my life, feeble as an insect wing, as a watercolour painting.
She listened in silence for a few minutes, said ‘right’ a few times, then, finally, ‘Good. It starts at six.’ She hung up the phone and took the deep shuddering breath she always took after speaking to my father then turned to me with a slightly forced smile.
‘Time to get ready darling,’ she said, ‘you’ve got a lift to prom.’
Prom was a strong word. It was a party to celebrate our leaving middle school to attend the local upper school. Almost every child would be going to the same new school in September,but it had been treated by the parents, faculty and the more sociable students as though it were the biggest night of our lives. I had seen dresses girls were wearing, printed out on A4 paper and brought to school, to ensure friends didn’t clash colours. They looked like the dresses of Disney princesses. There were plans for tiaras, professional makeup and hair. I took comfort that Frannie wasn’t buying into it, so I didn’t have to.
‘I’ll wear a nice dress. I want to look good,’ she had said, after grimacing at a puffy mint green monstrosity being shown around by one of the girls, ‘but I’m not getting dressed up for this lot.’
With the pressure off I had scoured the local charity shops with a few notes given to me by my mother and had found a pretty dress in a pale, silvery blue with thin straps and a skirt that flared into a gentle circle around my shins. It was ever so slightly too big, but I found that a few carefully placed safety pins helped it sit properly against my narrow, childish frame.
After my mother had convinced my father to collect me, I went upstairs and pulled it on. The pins didn’t work as well as I’d remembered, and, as I tried to brush my hair, the nerves of the evening created an uncomfortable twisting feeling in my stomach. My mother came in and told me I looked beautiful, and dabbed a pot of pink cream blush on my lips and cheeks. She braided a thin blonde strand of my hair and tied it with a clear elastic, running a cotton pad around my fingernails, neatening up the teal nail polish I had applied clumsily that morning.
‘I don’t feel good,’ I said, the knot in my stomach seeming to tug at my insides.
‘You’re just excited,’ my mother said, ‘you’ll feel great when you’re there. Don’t be nervous. You’ll have an amazing time and I can’t wait to hear about it.’
My father’s shiny silver car parked on the road and waited with the engine running. I stepped out in Converse trainers that my mum had painted silver, holding a little plastic clutch purse, and walked towards the car. My father greeted me gruffly as I got in the passenger seat.
‘Right, remind me where this school is,’ he said. I detailed the directions and he puffed out his cheeks as the car pulled back out and drove away. ‘That’s miles. It feels like it used to be closer.’
‘It was.’ I said quietly. We had to move out of the town centre, to the outskirts where we could afford to live.
The twisting feeling in my stomach was getting worse. I pulled my arms around myself as we drove and pushed them gently into my lap to try and stop the cramping. I’d never felt excitement like this before, or nervousness, no matter what my mother had said. The feeling was growing into genuine pain, as though something inside me was being wrung out, as though parts of me were coming loose and dropping away. With a sudden horror, I realised what was happening, comprehending the alien feeling of something being released in my body and starting to pool beneath where I was sitting.
I started to stammer, trying to work out how to tell my father what was happening.
‘What?’ he said, and when I stared at him in horror, ‘you look like you’re about to throw up.’
‘I think-’ I said, trying to get the words up and out of my throat when everything else in my body was sinking with shame. ‘I think I’ve started-’
‘No,’ my father said, ‘no you’re not, not in my car. Lift up.’ I pulled myself awkwardly up in the seat. My father looked quickly and groaned. ‘For god’s sake. Stay lifted up, try to hold it in.’
‘I can’t,’ I said, mortified, ‘I don’t know how.’
‘Well sit on your hands,’ he said, in a nasty voice that made me feel awful, ‘don’t get it on my seats whatever you do.’
I tucked my hands beneath myself as we drove, until he swung the car into a petrol station and pulled the brake so hard I jolted in my seat.
‘Go and sort yourself out,” he said.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said, ‘it’s my first one.’ For some reason, I couldn’t name what was happening to me. As though it was a dirty swear word that would offend my father. He already looked offended. He pulled his wallet from his pocket and stuffed ten pounds into my hand.
‘I don’t know. Just go in and ask if they’ve got something. Ask if they’ve got a bathroom you can clean up in,’ he paused and then handed me another ten pounds, ‘and get some car wipes, or just kitchen wipes.’
I got gingerly out of the car, as I glanced back I could see a smudge of red on the car seat where I had sat.
‘What am I supposed to tell my wife?’ he said, more to himself than me. He put his head in his hands and groaned as if I was ruining his life. I closed the car door and walked away, trying to hold my bag behind myself while still walking normally.
As I entered the petrol station I saw that four young men were standing by the fridges where the beers were kept. One had already opened a can and was drinking from it deeply. I walked a few steps into the petrol station, edging towards the toiletries, where I could see a small pink pack of sanitary towels, thinking of the pack my mother had brought two years ago for this exact moment, which had sat gathering dust in the bathroom ever since. As I approached the aisle, one of the men swore and shoved the other and he fell back against the glass of the fridge. I turned and ran back outside. I walked towards my father, to ask him to go in for me. He was stood by the car his phone to his ear.
‘I know darling, I know. But this meeting is important. You should see the idiots I’m dealing with.’ I stopped walking towards him. Then I threw his money on the tarmac, running down the street away from the petrol station as fast as my feet would carry me.
After a few minutes of running, I stopped, my chest heaving, my stomach roiling. I could feel blood beginning to stick to the insides of my legs. Marks on my dress were now visible against the pale blue fabric, but I was too upset to care. Out of breath, I looked around. I was in a small neighbourhood not too far from the school. It would have been a twenty-minute walk, but I couldn’t face it. I would arrive with a blood-soaked gown and, I realised, tear stains on my face, as my chest tightened and my eyes stung. I sat pathetically on the curb, and thought of my father, wondering if he’d realised I was missing yet. I envisioned him finding the money and panicking, wondering if I’d been kidnapped. Would he be frantic with worry right now? Or would he be in his car wondering if a problem had been lifted from him?
Without me, he could simply leave my mother in his past, I realised. He could have the life he wanted, with his new wife and his new baby, without being tied to his past mistakes. I sat for a while, the evening getting darker and colder around me. My father had never been affectionate, had always had a difficult relationship with my mother, at least as far back as I could remember, and when he had first left I had foolishly wondered if this new chapter was a chance for us to have a better relationship as a parent and child away from a marriage that hadn’t worked. But I had been wrong. I huddled, making myself small sat on the curb. I pulled my knees tight towards me and rested my head on my forearms, feeling the full force of what I had sensed for some time, but was only just coming to accept. That my father did not love me. Did not want me. Did not even care about me the way I felt that most people should care about one another.
I wrapped my arms around my knees, biting my lip and digging my short bitten fingernails into the flesh of my upper arm as tears slid down my face. It was a few moments before I realised that someone was softly saying my name, and I looked up into a face that I knew, though not very well yet. He had been eighteen then, his hair cut very short and his face still soft with youth, in a dark leather jacket, beneath it a shirt and tie that I recognised as the sixth form uniform of the upper school.
‘Frannie’s friend, right?’ George asked. I had never really spoken to him before. A few pleasantries at the table when staying at Frannie’s for dinner, comments about a TV show we both liked when it came on. It was mortifying to be suddenly seen like this by anyone, let alone the big brother of my best friend, who I knew very little about, other than that he was good-looking and funny.
I nodded, wondering if I could somehow disappear from existence, and have him forget he’d ever seen me.
‘What are you doing out here?’ he looked at my dress, ‘Shouldn’t you be at prom? I’ve just dropped Frannie off. I can give you a lift too if you like?’
The simplicity of the offer, the small unthinking gesture of kindness, was too much and I burst into tears again. George watched awkwardly for a few moments, unsure what to do, then it seemed to dawn on him that something was missing.
‘Where’s your mum?’ he asked, ‘Or any adult. You shouldn’t be out by yourself.’
‘My dad was supposed to take me, but I - something happened - I ran away.’
‘Ran away? Here,’ he took his phone out of his pocket, ‘do you know his number? I’ll ring him, he must be worried about you.’
‘No.’ I said, too quickly to avoid suspicion. George looked at me with worry.
‘What’s happened?’ he asked. And when I didn’t answer. ‘Hydie, you can tell me. Whatever it is, it’ll be okay.’
He sat beside me on the curb as I spoke. I watched his face turn from polite interest to concern, to disgust.
‘He didn’t come in with you? He didn’t help you?’
‘I got blood on his seat.’
‘Who cares?’ George scoffed, ‘You can’t help that. I think when Frannie started her period my Dad went out and bought us all hot fudge sundaes. It was great. Actually, now that I think about it when Nisha was about your age we all got cupcakes one day for no reason.’ He reflected for a moment. ‘Anyway, here,” he got up, ‘let’s not sit here on this curb. Do you want to come to prom? I can drop you off.’
I looked at my hands. ‘I’ve ruined my dress.’
‘I can take you home?’
I felt my lip tremble at the thought of going back. Of explaining to my mother how I’d been let down. Of seeing her face fall.
‘Okay,’ George said, his voice completely calm and understanding, ‘new plan. Come to ours. Frannie and Nisha have stuff you can use. I’ll let our parents know and they can take you back later.’
I nodded. He stood up and extended a hand down to me.
‘But your car seats.’ I said, feeling my face burning red.
‘You can sit on my jacket,’ he said, then, when I started to protest, ‘it’s fine. I promise.’
I took his hand and he lifted me gently to my feet. He took off his jacket as we walked to his car parked on the other side of the road, a small boxy red hatchback, and laid it over the passenger seat.
‘Get in, it’s fine,’ he said, as I stood awkwardly at the passenger door. I clambered in, tucking my dress in a pile beneath me to try and keep his jacket undamaged, and we drove away.
In the car, George asked a bit more about my father. I explained to him the situation as best I could. That my father had left me and my mother four years before, that he had a new wife now, and a young baby boy. And that the new family did not know that he had an ex-wife and a daughter.
‘That’s mad,” George said, ‘I thought the worst thing would be a parent who left and never saw you. But this is somehow worse. A parent who leaves and then pretends you don’t even exist?’ he shook his head. ‘Awful.’
I didn’t reply, just held the soft fabric of my dress like a safety blanket. We pulled up to the drive I knew well and walked up to the house. ‘Nisha”s at university. My parents are out for dinner,’ he said, ‘so you won’t have to talk to anyone.’
Inside, the house was quiet and warm. George turned the lights on and guided me to the upstairs bathroom and, while I looked in the cupboards for sanitary products, knocked and passed a folded pair of pyjamas and a plastic bag through a just-opened door.
‘Put your clothes in there for the moment and leave them in the bathroom,’ he said. ‘Mum says she can wash everything with some special stain stuff when she’s back, I just phoned her. So don’t worry about it.’
The pyjamas were a sweater and full-length trousers in a soft fuzzy fabric, navy with stars and moons. They were slightly too big for me, and I felt like a child in them. I splashed my face with water, trying to fade the teary streaks down my face that looked so bright and raw in the light of the bathroom. I padded back down the stairs and found George standing in the living room.
‘Take a seat. I wasn’t sure what would make you feel better,’ he said, ‘but Frannie and Nisha usually have some combination of these.’ He nodded down to his arms, in which he was just about holding a bottle of water, a box of painkillers, a hot water bottle and a large bag of chocolate buttons. I took the water and the painkillers.
‘Not the chocolate?’
‘I feel bad taking them.’
‘Well, to be completely honest, I want them. So why don’t we open them and you can have some if you want?’
We sat on either side of the couch with the chocolate buttons between us, and George put on a rerun of a show we both liked, one we often defended when Frannie badmouthed it. I took a handful of the buttons and lay my head on a cushion, putting them in my mouth one by one and letting them melt, dark and sweet across my tongue, feeling the tension leaving my body. At some point I had fallen asleep, waking for a moment when a door opened and shut, and then again to see Frannie’s mother Sameera laying a blanket over me, tucking the hot water bottle into the crook of my arms. I was comfortable and warm, as though cocooned, and then I was woken properly by loud voices somewhere else in the house. Frannie was standing at the door to the living room, looking out towards the front door. She looked beautiful in a simple burgundy dress, her long hair in a ponytail, but her body was set, like she was standing guard.
‘Frannie?’ I say, lifting myself up to sit on the couch, ‘How was prom?’
‘Boring without you,’ she said.
‘Who’s talking?’
I stood up to join her, and she put out a hand to stop me standing in the sight of the doorway. Peering around I saw people in the hall. I realised that my father was standing at the front door, his phone in his hand. George was facing him, his voice loud and angry. Between them was Frannie’s father, his hands out and placating both sides.
‘Your Dad’s mad George took you here without telling him,’ Frannie whispered, ‘and George is mad because your Dad is a piece of shit.’
‘And your Dad?’
‘I think he’s trying to make sure nobody gets punched.’
We listened to the altercation. I turned away from the door and stood very still, as though if I moved, I would be seen by my father, pulled by my wrist through Frannie’s family home and dragged back out into the night. But after a while the door was closed, hard, and I could hear only George and his father talking in the hallway.
‘I’m not saying you’re in the wrong George,’ his father said, his Spanish accent hushing the G’s into H sounds, ‘but you should have left me to talk to him.’ George said something back that I couldn’t hear, and then I heard his footsteps hard on the stairs as he disappeared. Roberto said a few quiet words to his wife then followed George upstairs.
‘You’ll be staying with us tonight,’ Frannie’s mother said, coming into the room, ‘I’ve called your mother and she’s happy for me to bring you back in the morning. I haven’t said anything else, it’s not our place, but I can come in with you to talk to her if you like.’
I nodded, the relief at knowing I wouldn”t have to go back with my father like a warm haze in my body. Frannie ran upstairs to put her pyjamas on while her mother sat me back down on the sofa. She brushed my hair, as she often did when I came to hers with it in thin tangles. I could hear the rumble of the washing machine in the background and knew that she had already put my dress in to wash, no questions, no judgment. Sameera put my hair into a loose braid to sleep in, saying it would keep my wavy hair protected for the morning and called gently up to Frannie, who shouted back loudly that she had changed. She gave me a soft kiss on the cheek and looked at me in a way that she often did, a sad smile that made me feel cared for, but also pitied. I climbed the stairs and entered Frannie’s room, clambering into the sleeping bag and blankets that she’d laid out for me.
‘I don’t know what George gave you,’ she said, ‘but if you need anything else for your period there’s loads in the bathroom.’
She put a boxset tape of Friends into her bedroom television, and I lay quietly in the dark listening to the familiar sounds of the cast’s voices in the background, as Frannie began to talk about the party that evening.
After an hour Frannie had fallen asleep, and the episodes buzzed in the background as I lay on the floor. In gaps between episodes, I heard the sound of Frannie’s parents talking quietly downstairs, the rumbling of the washing machine, sounds of normal domestic life, a life I had never quite had. As I drifted into sleep I thought of George, his dark eyes concerned for me, the passionate anger as he spoke to my father, the warm skin of his hand as he held my fingertips. I thought of all these things and felt something within my heart flutter awake.