Thicker Than Soup (9 page)

Water splashed in the kitchen and she could see and hear her mother ‘oooing' as she bathed Sammy in the kitchen sink. She called through, “Do you want any help?”

“No. We're managing very well thank you.” Sammy was held, dripping, above the water. “Just look at those legs; he wants to stand already. Before you know it he'll be playing football.” There was a shift in tone. “I don't suppose you've thought of making him legal? He could get bullied when he goes to school, y'know, without a proper Dad.”

“Mum!” She'd been given a number of reasons why she should marry, but Sammy being bullied was a new one. “First of all, he's not ‘illegal'. He's registered, has a birth certificate, and his parents' names both appear on it. He has a proper Dad, as you call it. John and I are proper parents, and we'll be bringing Sammy up together. And why would anyone bully him? No-one will know his Mum and Dad aren't married and even if they did, they wouldn't care. It's 1982 you know, not 1952!”

Her mother cuddled Sammy in a towel and muttered, “Come the day, come the deed.”

Sally changed the subject. “How did you cope, Mum, when Matt and I were little? Weren't you lonely with Dad at work every night?”

“Well, sometimes. ‘Course I was. But you two kept me busy. And anyway, we couldn't afford much that wasn't needed. Mostly I'd watch telly. Or listen to some music. His night off was always a bit special though; you remember – either he'd do one of his curries or I'd make something a bit special. We went out sometimes but we were never ones for gadding about. I did my embroidery and your Dad always had a book on the go. He loved his books.” She dried Sammy as proficiently as if she'd been drying babies only the day before.

“But you went to work too.”

“Well, I had too, didn't I? We needed money. But only when you two went to school, and only part-time.”

Sally took Sammy and laid him on a sheet on the floor. “Look at him kicking his legs! He loves to be free of his nappy.” Draping the damp towel over a radiator she returned to the conversation. “But you liked working in the pharmacy.”

“No, not really. My feet and my back used to ache from standing for hours on end behind that counter. And I used to have to get up early to get my chores done before I went to work. I remember feeling tired a lot. But I did enjoy chatting with Bob and Brenda. I wonder what happened to them after they sold up.”

Sally remembered her mother often fell asleep in front of the TV; she and Matt had teased her about it. “We should have helped you more; why didn't you tell us to do things instead of trying to do it all yourself?”

“I did. And you didn't do it properly.”

She wondered what was true and if time and perception had changed things much. “What about when we were little, Mum. Did you enjoy being at home then?”

Jane narrowed her eyes. “What's this about, eh? Is it about me, or might it be about you?”

“Well, you of course.” Sally shifted in her chair.

“You're sure, are you?” Sammy gurgled and kicked his legs and blew bubbles at his grandmother. “Hello beautiful boy,” Jane encouraged him, and then spoke to her daughter. “It's not like the films, is it?”

Suddenly she saw a woman who was more than her mother. Behind the old fashioned ways was a perceptive and caring person who had always put the needs of her family before her own until one by one, they'd all gone. She'd have expected her children to follow independent lives but nothing could have prepared her for the early loss of her husband, and immersion in a personal grief that was, at times, still fragile. Sally realised she'd never sought to know much about her mother's loss. Her mother had accepted and adjusted, but silently and privately, she still grieved for her husband.

“Are you lonely, Mum?”

Jane was putting a nappy on Sammy, cooing and gurgling with him so that she almost repeated the question just as her mother began to reply. “Lonely? What's lonely? No, I'm not lonely. I'm happy with what I do and what I have. I have you, and Matt, and now your families to think about. And I have church. And friends. I've lived here a long time and I have lots of friends. There's always somebody to talk to and there's things going on. Being lonely and being alone are different things, you know. Being alone is a gift. It gives me chance to see clearly, to see what's right. There's no distraction. I'm happy with it. But lonely, that's different. Being lonely is being unloved. And I'm not unloved. So I'm not lonely.”

There was the truth. Sally couldn't say she was lonely either; Sammy was a joy and after all that had happened, she and John still loved each other. She had her mother and her friends too. When she'd been working she'd longed for a day at home and now she had plenty of them she was soaking in self-pity! Her mother's words echoed. Lonely? No. Alone? A gift. With an indefinite but not infinite time span. With renewed vigour she vowed to use her time so that when it ended she'd look back and be proud of what she'd done. Taking Sammy from her mother she prepared herself to feed him. “Do you… Do you miss Dad?”

“More than I can tell you.” Jane's gaze turned inwards. “I carry him with me. Every day.” Then she was back in the present. “But thinking about being without him is a way to be miserable, so I don't let the past change the future.” She spoke complicitly, “Y'know, when nobody's listening, I talk to him. He even answers me sometimes.”

“That's where I get it from! I talk to myself too; John laughs at me. But I don't often get answers. What does Dad say to you?”

Encouraged, her mother divulged the proof of her husband's spirit. “At the supermarket last week, I picked up two packs of bacon, and wondered whether to get the large or the small one – I couldn't remember if I had any in the fridge, you see. And so I asked your Dad. He knocked the larger packet clean out of my hand and it fell on the floor. I picked it up and put it back on the shelf, and when I got home, he was right – I had some there already.”

“Oh Mum. You are funny and I do love you.”

*

Travelling home, Sally meandered thoughtfully through the week's memories. The visit had been unexpectedly uplifting and feeling a new equality in the relationship with her mother she resolved to spend more time with her during this time that she had on her hands.

*

The train pulled into the station almost ten minutes late so it was a surprise to not find John there to meet them. Finding change she dialled home, then the restaurant, then home again. Sammy started to whimper; he was hungry. “Shhh. Where's your Daddy?” He sucked on Sally's finger for a few seconds before finding it unsatisfying and began to cry determinedly. “Shhh, shhh. We'll be home soon. We'll find Daddy. I expect he's fallen asleep. Silly Daddy. Don't worry, I'll feed you soon. Shhhh.”

*

A light shone through the glass of the front door. “There you see, Sammy. Daddy's home.” She paid the taxi driver and struggled to the front door with relief turning to irritation. No doubt she'd find him asleep on the sofa. “Hello!” Was it too much to expect him to get to the station on time? “We're home.” The smell of fresh cigarette smoke told her that his resolution to give them up hadn't lasted long, and pushing open the sitting room door she saw him – awake and sitting in a chair!

“Where….”

She stopped. His face was tense, his eyes cold as granite. “John?” Something terrible had happened. She laid Sammy in the carrycot. Something in John's expression frightened her. “John? What's happened? What is it?”

Sammy's whimper faded beyond awareness as John stood and a terrible premonition made her raise a hand protectively over the carrycot as he moved towards them both. “What…”

He pushed her roughly to one side. “Looks like me, does he? What do you think?”

Sally's heart gave a huge thud, seemed to judder, and then resumed a drum roll beat. “What… what do you mean?” She was in the middle of one of her nightmares; soon she'd wake and everything would be normal.

“I asked you if you could say he looks like me. It's not a difficult question is it?” The words were spoken precisely, slowly, as if to a recalcitrant child.

“Well, I don't know. He's got your build, but…”

“But whose blood has he got? Answer me that, whose blood has he got?”

Sammy's screams scythed the nightmare. “I have to feed Sammy. He's hungry; he's missed…….”

“No!” John's roar silenced Sammy for a moment then a fearful whimper replaced hungry screams. Sally moved but John grabbed her arm, jerking her violently so that her face was in front of his. She'd never known him like this. Violence wavered and she tried to pull away but the grip tightened, pinching her arm. “You'll not feed him. You'll answer me. Whose blood does the bastard have?”

Breath left her body in a single, rapid ‘hummph' as her legs folded. He knew. He knew. This was her worst dream; the nightmare was real. “Oh my God.” She gasped for air and shuddered as oxygen forced her lungs to work again. Pain in her arm increased then subsided as he dashed it aside.

John's body deflated and his face crumpled. “It's true, isn't it? You're not even going to deny it. You're not even going to lie. It's true. He's not my child.” He whispered and his voice cracked. “How could you? How could you!”

She hadn't any words. She couldn't lie. She never had. John had believed he was Sammy's father because he'd had no reason to think otherwise and because she'd been unable to wound him with the possibility that he wasn't. But she'd dreaded such a moment as this since the pretence had claimed its passage as truth. It had nagged maliciously and needled her conscience and she'd tried to tell him but he'd silenced her. His adjustment to fatherhood had been alarmingly complete and his happiness had restrained her as effectively as a gag. Now her secret had exploded and her worst fears had materialised. Had Diane told him? Sally couldn't believe she'd have told him, at least not deliberately. Had she told him by accident? At her side, Samuel gnawed miserably at a fist. “How did you know?” She trembled uncontrollably.

Taking a piece of blue card from his pocket John thrust it in front of her face. “This told me,” he said, “It's on the record card if you know what you're looking for. And I wasn't even looking.”

Sally looked at the card. “I don't know what you mean,” she said. “This doesn't….”

“Look at his blood group. It's ‘O'.”

“I don't understand.”

“Clearly.”

Sally's brain wouldn't function. Blood group ‘O'? There wasn't anything unusual about that.

“Mine's ‘A'.”

Confusion still clouded Sally's mind. “What are you saying? I don't understand”

“Yours is ‘A'.

A sliver of light broke through the fog and she tried desperately to remember biology lessons from school. If they were both ‘A' group, then Sammy should also be ‘A', shouldn't he? Was that right? She couldn't remember. But wasn't ‘O' the group that anyone could be? Or was ‘O' just compatible with other types? But it didn't matter whether she knew or not, whether he was right or wrong. John knew, without doubt, that Sammy's parenthood was not as he'd believed. “I…I'm sorry, I…”

Sammy was whimpering and John looked at him. “You'd better feed him. Poor little bastard. I'll get my things and come back for the rest.”

*

She watched the ghost of his departing back long after the front door slammed. “What have I done?” she whispered, “oh, what have I done.” One crazy evening; a few stupid drinks and she'd destroyed the thing she valued most in her life. The mistake of her life. Irreversible. Her chest hurt. It really hurt. She wanted John to come back and hold her. She wanted him to understand it had been a mistake. But everything was spoiled now. Sullied. Impossible. He'd tell his parents she was a slut and a liar and it was true. And they'd hate her too. They'd hate her for what she'd done, for what she'd done to John, and for destroying their own dreams. And her own family? Shame almost drowned her. For the first time in her life she was glad that her father wasn't alive. He'd never know; never be so completely disappointed in her.

*

Sammy's cries broke her catatonic state and shrugging off her coat she tugged at the buttons of her cardigan and lifted his tear wet face to her breast. “I'm sorry,” she whispered, “I'm so sorry.” Sammy's legs jerked and he shouted his frustration. Pinching her nipple she edged him upwards, encouraging him with soft words. “I know, you're hungry. Come on little one, here you are.” But his knuckles tensed, his back arched, and his scream pierced the air. The angry voices, her trembling body, his need for food that had passed, and hungry though he was, he couldn't feed. Hugging him to her she rocked them both, backwards and forwards and wiped away her tears from the face of her innocent son.

*

Days weighed heavily as self recrimination and regret were interrupted only by Sammy's feeds and needs. “I'm sorry,” she told him repeatedly, “it's my fault.” She searched for fugitive hints of paternity as she struggled to remember her schoolgirl biology, convinced that John was mistaken yet knowing there was no going back. She'd as good as admitted her guilt and it was evidence enough. She embraced wretchedness, pain, welcoming it as if taking it all could lessen John's share. Sleep came intermittently, sometimes on the sofa, sometimes in a chair. The bed was too full of memories and reminders and though she sometimes lay on it during the day, night-time had too many ghosts. The only thing that grounded her, that had any definable meaning, was her innocent son.

*

By the end of the following week Sammy's hunger seemed insatiable. He was taking all she had and crying for more and it didn't take long to realise that her milk was drying up. She had to do something, if not for herself, then for him. She explored the kitchen and finding not much more than milk in the fridge made herself drink sweet milky coffee. She made a breakfast of a half packet of ginger-nut biscuits, dunking each one into the coffee and eating them one after the other until the packet was empty. Realising her hunger she searched again. A slice of curled ham, a half wrapped pack of butter and three overripe tomatoes littered the fridge, and the freezer offered packs of solid meat, the inevitable packet of frozen peas, plastic pots of John's frozen herbs, lamb chops she could chip off, and a small carton of soured cream that John must have bought, for stroganoff possibly. But no ice-cream. Eating required shopping, and shopping required more energy than she had. But Sammy's grizzle urged her on. She transferred the cream to the fridge. “Shopping list.” She was talking to herself again. “Two pints of milk, a pound of minced beef, rice.” She amended the list to half a pound of minced beef, and disheartened anew, drifted again into the groove of despair that filled her days, until the phone startled her.