Friday reading

Deb settles into a new routine at Hilda's digs but the old demons continue to torment her

For all Ellen’s kindness that letter made me flinch as if a smack had landed on my cheek. What she didn’t seem to understand was that making excuses for Jim didn’t excuse or make up his evasive behaviour towards me. The way I saw it, I had a right to know about my father’s entanglement with my mother, and how he reacted and how soon after she know she was pregnant with me their relationship ended, and why.

That dance of feelings was a part of my story because I had been there between them, curled up, hearing every word they said, registering every mood like the weather, and he had a duty to account for himself to me, even if Mam didn’t want to know. Instead, though, he avoided being alone with me and worked hard to keep the coloured balls of artificial jolliness in the air whenever I was around.

I began to imagine going back to their house, knocking on the door, going in and making him sit down, face to face to tell me the truth about myself. Only I lost my nerve when it came to actually buying a train ticket. Somewhere underneath my anger was a layer of paralysing fear. What if he got drunk and turned violent and abusive? What if Ellen sent me packing again? There’d be no going back again. I’d be worse off than ever. Maybe that undercurrent of fear was what dredged up the old nightmares of Mr. Johnson, forcing me awake in a panic in the dead hour of the night with palpitations, while an icy terror took hold of me. I had to gnaw my fist to stop my screams waking the whole household.

Ellen was right about Hilda. Her digs was a tight ship. At first her manner intimidated me, her strict rules making me shudder with memories of the Mission where we lived like automatons. I told myself I’d stick it for a week, to give myself time to work out my next move. Not that I was ever much good at that, much less ever had a plan. Meeting Jim had shot the bit of a plan I had had all to flitters.

Suddenly I was completely and utterly alone. I couldn’t even fall back on Rose after the way our last meeting ended with me refusing to go to London with her and her telling me I could run to the ends of the earth but I’d never escape myself or fill the big hole where my heart should be and I’d end out begging for coppers, sleeping under a bridge with no one to even know my name, sicker than a stray dog.

She started to cry and I didn’t know how to stop her so I did what I did best in those days of confusion and disillusion. I walked away, without casting a glance over my shoulder, although with every step I knew I was making a mistake. Looking back from where I am now I think I must have been expecting Rose to run after me and apologise, which goes to show how messed up I was, pretending to be self-contained and self-possessed while needing other people to tell me who I was and what I should be feeling. Only why should they?

Photo by Greg Willson on Unsplash

Of course I stayed longer than a week at Hilda’s place. I wound up spending nearly two years there. After a few weeks I realised that as long as I stuck to the rules it was easy enough to get along with Hilda. You know the kind of thing: use only the delft and cutlery she assigned to me; wash and store everything after use etc. All lodgers were to be out of the kitchen by 8 pm. Sharp! Anyone who messed up the system got a telling off from Hilda and was threatened with eviction if it happened again. Two other girls lodged there but I rarely saw them because we all came and went at different hours.

Hilda’s whole life seemed to run on strict rules. She was a book keeper for a big engineering firm and left for work at 8 a.m. every morning, returning at 6 p.m.; bridge on Tuesday and Thursday nights; choir practice on Wednesday; a glass of sherry and telly on Friday; Saturday was golf and dinner with her man friend and Sunday was service followed by lunch with friends in the local pub.

She reminded me a bit of you, Marge. Not that your days were so cut and dried but she had your clarity and certainty about the world and its ways, and she was independent, like you. In my naivete at the time I viewed her life as suffocatingly dull. Now I see that it was full and satisfying.

Meanwhile, I got a job stacking shelves in Tesco. Funny now to think that Lucy and I might have been arranging boxes of Daz simultaneously, she in Dublin, me in Manchester, neither of us knowing what the other was doing, and possibly each wondering at the same moment what the other might be doing. I picture us on a split screen in a film. Or we could be cartoon figures with matching thought bubbles.

No matter what happens when you read Ellen’s latest letter, no matter what Lucy feels when you tell her about it, or reads it, if you decide to show it to her, you need to know that I did think about all of you during my wanderings, especially in those weeks after leaving Jim and Ellen’s house, and that nothing will take away the feeling that whoever, whatever, wherever I am, I owe to Mam, Denis, Lucy and you. I hear myself using your phrases, catch myself using your gestures, thinking what you might say or do in a given situation. I suppose you could say I’ve come full circle, a big messy circle that most of the time felt like a spiral or a whirlpool.

Tesco gave me my walking papers two months into the job. They had a point. Truth to tell they’d been surprisingly tolerant. It happened the third time I turned up an hour late for work. And yes, hands up, hungover. I hadn’t the nerve to tell Hilda and immediately set out in search of another job, any job, that would at least pay the rent. Not a sausage. I began to imagine that everywhere I went people saw straight into my flighty undependable soul. It wasn’t long before I was skint.

The reckoning came one night when Hilda returned from bridge to find me sitting at the kitchen table with a cold mug of coffee and the jobs page of the evening paper open before me. It was long after our kitchen curfew of 8pm so already I was in trouble for breaking a rule.

She got straight to the point, saying, It’s not good, you know. What you’re doing.

I thought she meant breaking the curfew and stood up to rinse my mug, muttering apologies.

Leave that, she said. And sit down. Your stepmother gave me the whole story. You’re a very foolish girl.

Stepmother? It took a minute for the penny to drop that she meant Ellen. I’m going to get another job, I said, and jabbed my finger at the newspaper, although there wasn’t a single thing there I could apply for. Truth to tell I’d been thinking of doing a flit and finding a hostel.

Hilda wagged her head at me. I’ve been observing you these past few weeks. it’s time you went back to school or did a training course.

No, I groaned, covering my face with my hands.

Yes, she insisted. Tomorrow I’m bringing you to work with me. They need an office runner to do work in the post room, make the coffees and help with the filing.

Now it was my turn to shake my head. You don’t need to do that, I protested. I’ll get another job. Really I will.

And you’ll be sacked again. Stay out of those clubs. She stiffened her spine. Now go to bed. We’ll leave here tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. Wash your hair and put on some clean clothes. If you have any. I’ll take you out at lunchtime to buy more suitable office wear. You can repay me out of your wages.

---