Separate Tracks Read online

  The matron at the home had high standards of cleanliness. In the evening the bath had to be scoured with Vim after each child’s bath.

  “Why d’ya do that?” asked a cheeky new lad, as the nurse bent and scrubbed, and Anthony John stood waiting in his dressing-gown.

  “To kill all your—horrible—dirty—little—germs,” hissed the nurse. She was stout, and had trouble reaching the area around the plughole.

  At Christmas a man came from the Rotary Club, dressed up in a red coat and beard, and made some of the children cry. He gave each of them a brightly wrapped present. Anthony John’s was a blue plastic boat, which he kept in his pocket. It fell out when a young Irish nurse was undressing him for his bath, and she pounced on it.

  “Isn’t that nice now? I bet that’ll float—shall we put it in the bath and see?” Clutching it in his hand, Anthony John was lifted into the bath, and the little boat was let loose. It bobbed up and down on the water, and the nurse swooshed her hand to make a wave. Anthony John watched, then tentatively poked at the boat with his finger. It ducked under the surface and bobbed up again. “See!” laughed the nurse.

  An older woman came up behind her. “What on earth are you doing? She’ll have a fit if she catches you with that.” She reached down and grabbed the boat, and placed it at the back of the shelf that held the shampoo.

  “What?”

  The older woman knelt at her side by the bath. “No foreign objects in the bath. It’s unhygienic, my dear—besides it’s bathtime not playtime. Come on or you’ll be out on your ear before you’ve even started. Have you washed him?”

  The Irish girl shook her head and stood up, while the older woman heaved Anthony John to his feet and expertly lathered him. When his pyjamas had been put on he asked for his boat back.

  “What? Oh yes, just a minute. Go and get in bed and I’ll bring it for you. How many more are there, Kathleen? Jesus, you’ll have to speed up a bit. Come on.” The nurses usually speeded up around bathtime, because they could have a rest when everyone was in bed.

  Next morning as he was cleaning his teeth Anthony John asked again for the boat, and got it. But the matron spotted it next to his plate at breakfast and asked whose it was.

  “Mine.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “That man gave it me. . .”

  “Which man?”

  “With a red coat.”

  One of the nurses started to giggle. “He means Father Christmas.”

  “Oh well, this isn’t the proper place for it, is it, Anthony John? When you have toys, they’re for sharing with everybody, not for playing with at breakfast time.” She picked up the boat and put it in her pocket.

  “But—”

  “Don’t answer back, Anthony John. It’s cheeky. We’ll put it in the toy box with the other toys so that everybody can play with it.”

  That afternoon she did slip it into the toy box, and Anthony John sat near the toy box and guarded it—but just the same, two days later, it vanished.

  Anthony John Childs was not a favourite with the nurses. He was not quick or funny, and he had a pale sulky face. Worse than that, he wet his bed, long after he should have stopped.

  “Come on, stinky,” said the nurse as he queued up to be dressed in the morning. “God, nobody’d believe you had a bath last night. Yeuch!” They argued over who would make his bed, because the sheets always needed changing, and the beds were heavy and had to be pulled right out from the wall.

  The nurses used to take the children out to the park on nice afternoons, in threes, a pushchair and one child holding on to each side. In the summer when Anthony John was three, there was a new nurse called Winnie. Sometimes in the park Winnie would let one of the children push the pushchair, or she would push with one hand and hold hands with the other. Her hands were plump and sweaty. Anthony John liked to hold hands with her. She left in September though, because she was pregnant. The matron confided to her deputy that it was just as well really. Winnie would never have made a good nursery nurse, she was too affectionate with them. And she had favourites. “It’s not fair to the children—and we’re left with tears when she swans off.”

  Anthony John did not cry.

  At six years he was moved into a family group home, where seven other children, all older than himself, lived with a housemother and assistant. He displayed no emotions whatsoever at the move, and according to his social worker’s case notes, he settled in well in his new home. He continued to wet the bed, however.

  At school he made a slow start. The teacher listened to him reading for ten minutes each day.

  “ ‘Here we are at home,’ says Daddy. Peter helps Daddy with the car, and Jane helps Mummy get the tea. ‘Good girl,’ says Mummy to Jane. ‘You are a good girl to help me like this.’ ”

  His blank expression, air of passivity and scrupulously clean clothes helped the teacher to pinpoint his background and abilities very quickly. She encouraged him to join in group games and remembered to say “or any grown-up you know” when she asked the class to draw pictures of Mummy and Daddy. But Anthony John’s drawings were never particularly recognizable. He seemed rather backward.

  When he was seven he had his first fight. They had been told to line up in twos in the playground to walk down to church for Harvest Festival. Most of them were carrying things—vegetables, flowers, tins of peaches. Anthony was paired with Amelia, another class outcast, who had been sent home in disgrace one day for coming to school without any knickers.

  “Hold hands!” called out the teacher when they came to cross the road, and Anthony obediently took Amelia’s hand. When they reached the other side of the road, he was pushed from behind.

  “Cissy! Cissy! Holding hands with a girl!” Craig Fisher was holding a Saran-wrap covered fruit bowl full of carefully arranged oranges and bananas, and he prodded Anthony with it viciously in the small of the back. Anthony let go Amelia’s hand and turned round, presenting his chest to Craig’s attacks and staring stupidly. Only after four or five further blows did he raise his right arm and, with a slightly surprised expression, knock the fruit bowl flying.

  Anthony fought badly—it was the first time he had ever done it—but he was heavy for his age and the other boy was not expecting him to retaliate. They ended up rolling on the ground and Anthony did not loose his grip until the teacher pulled them apart. Craig’s nose was bleeding and he was crying noisily. The teacher wiped him with a tissue. Afterwards several people, including Anthony himself, admitted that he had hit Craig first and spoilt his lovely bowl of fruit.

  “Why?” demanded the headmaster.

  “He called me a cissy.”

  “Well,” said the headmaster, “well, what a silly boy you are. Haven’t you ever heard the old saying ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me’? Why did he call you a cissy?”

  Anthony would not say at first. Eventually he muttered, “Holding hands.”

  “For holding hands?”

  “With Amelia.”

  The headmaster stared at him reflectively. He would ask Mrs Francis not to make girls and boys hold hands in a crocodile, he decided. They were quite capable of walking on their own.

  “Well, he’s a silly boy, but that doesn’t mean you can go and hit him. I’m going to make you stay in every lunchtime this week so that you understand that you must not fight. N E V E R take the law into your own hands. Do you understand, Anthony?”

  Staying in for a week was pleasant for Anthony. He acquired a certain status in the other children’s eyes, for the first time in his life. And Mrs Francis sat at her desk and marked books, and gave him a Polo now and again, and the classroom was quiet and peaceful.

  He got a reputation for fighting, and parents told their children to keep away from him. When he left primary school he was known as the school bully, heavy and pasty and feared.

  Chapter 4

  Emma remembered the times when she was hit as a child. In particular she remembered being
hit by her mother for walking on the kitchen floor. When she was five she had come in from playing one hot day, breathless and excited, her friends waiting outside. She needed to go to the toilet. Eileen was scrubbing the kitchen floor. She worked vigorously, kneeling on a folded-up piece of old curtain, putting the whole weight of her body into the scrubbing of the red earthenware flags. She was panting with effort, and Emma saw with dismay that the way through to upstairs was gleaming wet and puddled. She knew she wasn’t allowed to walk on the wet floor—it made footprints. She stood in the doorway with her legs crossed. Eileen’s back was to her, head bent down over the scrubbing brush, jerking back and forth furiously with each scrub. Emma was always aware of that as something peculiar to her mother. She cleaned her teeth with the same sort of furious frenzy, shaking her whole body. No one else did it like that.

  “Mummy?” Eileen didn’t hear her. “Mummy!”

  Her mother put the brush in the bucket and sat back on her heels. “What?” Not looking round.

  “Mummy, can I go to the toilet?”

  Her mother sighed. “Yes, go on. Take big steps.” Exaggeratedly, on tip-toe, Emma stepped across the wet floor, and looked back from the door to see the footprints slowly filling with water again. Like a sponge. Her weight squeezed out the water for a minute.

  She ran upstairs, weed so quickly that there was still a little dribble coming out as she pulled up her pants and rushed down again. They were going to play at showjumping over the clothes prop. She flung open the door and started the giant steps over the kitchen floor, staring down at her feet. Her mother, kneeling over her brush, suddenly coiled and lashed at her—a stinging slap on the leg. Emma nearly lost her balance, staggered and stood stock still. Tears sprang to her eyes automatically.

  “Look!” her mother shouted, pointing at the footprints. “Get out—go on, get out!”

  Emma began to howl with pain and hobbled to the doorway clutching her leg. “I asked you!” she cried. “I wanted to wee, you said I could go—” She was overwhelmed by the unfairness of the slap.

  Eileen threw down her brush and stood up, and Emma was shocked into silence. Her mother’s face was terrible, not looking at her. “I don’t care,” she said. Her voice was low and harsh. “That’s my lot, isn’t it. Down on my knees while you traipse in and out—a living bloody doormat!” Her face was contorted, her eyes found Emma and stared at her. “I’ve had it. I’m sick of it. S I C K of you!” And her face crumpled horribly into crying and she blundered out of the room, upstairs.

  Emma stood there in terror looking at the floor and the footprints. Mummy was crying. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t dare walk across the floor again. She could hear her mother’s harsh awful sobbing from upstairs. It was her fault but what had she done? Her leg was bright red where the wet hand had slapped it. What now? She had never heard her mother crying before—she had never imagined she did, or could. And what for? No one had hurt her. Just because Emma had walked on the wet floor? She knew it couldn’t be, and the inability to understand made her almost frantic. “I’m sick of you.” Would she run away? Emma was desperate to make it all right again. She walked gingerly across the floor and, taking the piece of curtain in both hands, crawled backwards across the floor rubbing out all the footprints. It left a smeary dry pathway across the middle of the room. The noise was still coming from upstairs. She didn’t know what to do. She went upstairs. Frightened into crying again herself now, she opened the bedroom door.

  “Mummy? Mummy?”

  Her mother’s red swollen face lurched up from the pillow. Her voice was soft and funny. “It’s all right, Emma. Go and play, I’ll be all right in a minute.”

  Crying thick and fast now, in panic. “Mummy, Mummy!”

  The puffy face smiled strangely. “I’m all right, Emma. I’m coming in a minute. We’ll go and buy some sweets, all right? You go downstairs, I’ll come in a minute.”

  “I wiped the floor,” sobbed the child.

  Her mother gave a strangled laugh. “It’s not the floor,” she said. “That’s the least of my worries.”

  Emma quieted, but with a coldness in her. It wasn’t the floor—it wasn’t her. She and her mother were in separate worlds.

  Once her father had gone away somewhere, she didn’t know where. It was just before Easter. Her mother had gone peculiar, very gentle spoken and kind where usually she was sharp. Emma understood enough to know that something was wrong and her mother unhappy, and she tried desperately to please her. She laid tables and washed up and made beds, and her mother seemed to notice nothing, always the same, that awful gentle smile and far-away-seeing eyes, as if her life had turned to slow motion. At school they were making Easter cards and Emma stayed in at morning and afternoon break to work on hers. It was a deep blue card with a crêpe paper daffodil, finely shredded yellow petals stuck on over and over each other so that her flower blossomed and glowed out of the dark background. It was really beautiful. Inside, Emma wrote in her round neat handwriting, “Happy Easter to Mummy, lots of love from Emma x x x”.

  On Easter morning she put it in front of her mother’s plate at breakfast, and Eileen picked it up and glanced at it. “That’s pretty, Emma. Why haven’t you put it to Daddy?”

  “He’s not here.”

  “That’s very unkind. He’s sent you some Easter eggs, hasn’t he? He’ll be very upset.”

  “It’s for you,” said the little girl fiercely.

  “I don’t want a card just for me.” And she put the card down again and didn’t say anything else about it. She didn’t even look at the separate orange and yellow petals of the daffodil that had been stuck over each other, each with a tiny separate blob of glue, thirty of them.

  Chapter 5

  Emma was an intelligent child and did extremely well at school. Both Eileen and Richard were excited by her progress and did all they could to encourage her. By the time she was ten she was reading omnivorously; books, comics, magazines—everything from Dickens to the Dandy.

  Whenever she visited her Aunty she brought back a pile of magazines with her. She didn’t admit to herself that she was hiding them from Eileen, but somehow they were always at the bottom of her satchel and didn’t see the light until she was safely shut in her bedroom. Woman, Woman’s Own, Woman’s Realm, crammed with helpful home-making hints, holiday fashions and prize-winning recipes. Her glazed mind skimmed over this wealth, in greedy search of FICTION. “Fiction” was usually written in elegant curly script, and often the promised page was lusciously coloured in midnight blue, deep purples or reds. Girls with exquisite profiles stood on lonely promontories with their long fair or glossy dark hair windswept around their shoulders. She read as a connoisseur, in delicious anticipation of the next move.

  At the gate he looked back, to see her as he would always remember her, frail, beautiful, one arm outstretched towards him. . . “It’s no good, Malcolm,” she gulped, bravely holding the tears back. “I can never marry you. I made a promise.” Suddenly his strong hands were grasping her shoulders, and the two brightest, funniest, most serious eyes in the world were gazing deeply into her own.

  She read them gluttonously, as if she had a box of chocolates she was determined not to share. Often she stayed awake till one or two in the morning, her bed littered with consumed magazines. It was as if her appetite for romance could never be satisfied. But when she set off for school in the mornings they were stowed neatly out of sight under her bed. Reading them was always accompanied by a frisson of guilt.

  One day when she came home from school they were in two big piles on the kitchen table.

  “Are those yours?” said Eileen.

  “No, I just borrowed them from Aunty May.”

  “Oh,” said Eileen brightly. “I was having a tidy-out. You don’t want to keep that sort of drivel do you?”

  The girl was humiliated and angry. She knew perfectly well that Eileen did not tidy out her room, but had been snooping around there, and that she despised that type of
magazine. She always scoffed about the women who read them at the hairdresser’s. “What slop!”

  They were thrown away and Emma didn’t take magazines home any more, but read them greedily and surreptitiously at her aunt’s, while her aunt watched telly and talked to the newsreaders.

  Chapter 6

  Richard left Eileen when Emma was ten and a half, and came back a year later. Emma was glad he had come back. When she was fourteen he left again. He didn’t want to lose touch with his daughter, and arranged to see her every month or so. Gradually these visits grew more sporadic, and Richard came to dread them.

  Emma looked forward to them inordinately, then found herself sullen and tongue-tied in her father’s presence. She wasn’t what he wanted her to be, she knew. She owed it to her abandoned mother to show disapproval and to not have a good time. She wanted him to like her and she was sure he didn’t. Her mother said often enough, “He’s seeing you out of duty, you know.” The only retaliation left to the girl, then, was to show even less enthusiasm than he.

  In the summer of her fifteenth birthday he was working in Liverpool and invited her there for the day because he had not seen her since Easter. He went to Lime Street Station to meet her. Standing at the ticket barrier, he stared intently at the people spilling out of the train, searching her out. He wondered what she would be wearing. For no obvious reason his eyes kept returning to a figure moving slowly along the outside of the platform. Dutifully he turned back to scan the oncoming crowd, hoping to recognize her. Only when she was a few feet away did he realize that she had been that slow-moving figure. He wanted to laugh at himself for his lack of faith. Like a city boy who is shown the leaves and flowers of a potato plant and told to dig up the vegetable roots, stupidly amazed by the discovery of the predicted golden fruits in the earth.