Astonishing Splashes of Colour (35 page)

Then I step out confidently and go straight to the lift. I decide to take the stairs instead of the lift. I’ll be less conspicuous. Anyone I meet will be doing the same as me, visiting or leaving after a visit.

I walk through the entrance hall carefully, waiting for an alarm to go off, or someone to stop me, but nothing happens. Pink carpet, automatic doors. Out into the fresh air.

I walk away from the hospital briskly, feeling the weight of Henry in his Marks & Spencer bag. He’s slightly restless now and makes sudden jerky movements with his arms. The bag crackles.

I should get to a number 11 bus stop, so that I can take him home as quickly as possible in case he wants a feed. It’ll be difficult if he cries. People don’t expect Marks & Spencer bags to contain a baby. I don’t see why not. He fits easily enough.

But instead of waiting for a bus, I decide to walk. I’m afraid of going home. I can’t associate my home with a baby. It’s my home, my colours, my books. There’s no room for a baby there. So I go on walking, towards Harborne. Several police cars pass me on the way to an emergency with their sirens blaring. I wonder what could be so urgent.

It’s getting chilly and I’m glad I remembered to bring the extra blanket. Fresh air is good for babies. Every so often, I stop and look in at his little pink face, see a tiny smile stretch out his mouth, see the miracle of his nose, an exact miniature replica of an adult nose.

I move him from one hand to the other, but my arms are beginning to ache, so I look for somewhere to sit down. I need to work out what to do next. It hadn’t occurred to me that it would be so easy. I haven’t sorted things out carefully enough. The fact that nothing went wrong has confused me.

I’ve reached Harborne now, the park next to the doctor’s surgery. I find a bench and sit down, arranging Henry gently in his bag. I long to pick him up and hold him, but I’m too conspicuous here. I just put a finger in the bag and stroke his tiny cheek. His eyelids flicker slightly, but remain closed, alive and pulsing with warmth. He gurgles, and I know he’s recognized his mother’s touch.

I don’t know what to do, where to go or who to talk to. He’ll wake up soon and need feeding. He’ll probably cry. What will I do then? My stomach churns like a cement-mixer. What if I’m no good with babies? What if he doesn’t stop crying?

But I’m all right here now, sitting in a park in the late afternoon with my baby beside me. I don’t want to move. I’m not sure if I can.

“Hello.”

I jump. A girl is standing in front of me, a girl with long plaits and very big blue eyes. She looks familiar.

“Hello,” I say.

“I know you. You were at the doctor’s.”

I look at her more closely and recognize her as Megan, the sister of the baby Henry, who I sat next to on my last visit.

“Yes,” I say. “At the doctor’s.”

She sits down on the bench beside the Marks & Spencer bag. I move the baby closer to me.

“What’s in the bag?” she says.

I shrug. “Nothing much. Odds and ends.”

“Can I look?”

“No.”

Henry is becoming restless and lets out a little cry. Megan looks at me and I look at her. “You shouldn’t talk to strangers,” I say, remembering Emily and Rosie and Captain Hook. It feels like a million years ago.

“It’s a baby,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Why is it in a bag?”

“I don’t know.” I try to think. “I haven’t got a pram.”

“You can buy them.”

“Yes. But they’re expensive.”

“I know.” She starts to swing her legs under the bench and
half smiles at me. She seems suddenly clever. “Can I come with you and the baby?”

“No, of course not.” I can feel my insides starting to panic. “Where’s your mum?”

She gazes into the distance and swings her legs, humming under her breath. Henry settles down again.

“I’ve run away from home,” she says after a while, and then hums again.

“That doesn’t seem a very good idea. Won’t your mum worry?”

“You don’t know my mum.”

“Yes, I do. I saw her at the doctor’s. You have a baby brother called Henry.”

She stops swinging her legs and looks into the bag again. “What’s it called?”

“Henry,” I say proudly.

She screws up her nose. “Couldn’t you find a better name than that?” She looks at him more closely. “Anyway, it’s a girl,” she says.

I look at her in astonishment. It has never occurred to me that Henry is a girl. “No he’s not. He’s obviously a boy.”

“Then why’s he wearing a pink sleepsuit?” she says. “Pink is for girls.”

“No,” I say. “I don’t want a girl.”

“It’s easy enough to find out,” she says.

We spotted the empty pram outside the butcher’s. We watched the mother pick up her own baby to carry him into the shop.

“Come on,” says Megan. “We haven’t got much time. There’s only a short queue.”

We leave the park and walk over the zebra crossing. Just before we reach the butcher’s, I stop and take the baby out of the
bag. I feel her in my arms. I look down at her—that perfectly formed face—and there is a great pain inside me.

“Hurry up,” says Megan.

I put the baby into the pram, covering her with the blanket. She waves her arms wildly and starts to whine. I stand over her.

Megan pulls my arm, so I turn away with her, leaving the baby in the pram. The baby who was never really Henry after all. I wonder what the mother will do when she finds she has two babies. I wonder if she will keep them both.

8
neverland

I
’m on a train again, but now I’m the protector, not the protected. I wonder if James understands. I turn away from his image; I can’t think of him now. Instead, I think of baby Henry who was probably Henrietta. I should have realized it wouldn’t work. Nothing changes. The mother that I haven’t got is different from the one I thought I hadn’t got, but I still end up with no mother. So no past, and no future.

I look at Megan beside me. She’s holding a comic on her lap and pretending to read it, but hasn’t turned a page for some time. She must be tired. I didn’t make her come with me. She insisted that she wasn’t going home and I thought it would be better if she stayed with me rather than go off on her own. At least I can look after her for a while. Perhaps we’ll just borrow each other for a few days and then go back home afterwards.

“Mum won’t mind,” says Megan. “She spends all her time with Henry. She doesn’t look after me properly.”

I’m sure she’s right, because I saw them at the doctor’s. I can understand why her mother would be diverted by such an enchanting baby, but she should give Megan some of her time.

“What about your dad?” I say.

She looks up at me with a slightly confused expression on her face. “Haven’t got a dad.”

Just like me, except that I had someone who pretended to be my father. “Does he live somewhere else?”

“No,” she says. “I haven’t got a dad. I told you.”

“Has he died?” I say gently.

She thinks for a while. “You can’t die if you never existed.”

I’m beginning to think that she’s older than she looks.

We’ve had fun together. We went shopping, and bought lots of clothes for her. She tried on so many things. We dressed her in jeans from Tammy Girl, a top with a heart on it from Miss Self-ridge and a warm coat from Marks & Spencer. And we found some trainers with a red light that flashes off and on as she walks. Not the sort of thing that Lesley would buy for Emily or Rosie.

We went into Rackhams and bought a hold-all to put all the old clothes in. Then I did what I had wanted to do since I first saw her. I walked into the hairdresser’s and asked them to cut off her plaits.

She came out to show me, swinging her hair round her face, grinning in a way I had not seen before. “Cool,” she said.

“You look so much older.”

“Do I look as if I’m thirteen?”

“Easily. You must be at least fifteen.”

But she wasn’t that old, because she slipped her hand into mine and it felt as if she belonged to me.

“Do you want to go home now?” I said.

“I told you,” she said. “I’m not going home. I’m running away.”

“Let’s go and have some tea,” I said.

In the last half-hour before Rackhams closed, we went up to the restaurant on the sixth floor to see what they had left. Megan
had chocolate cake and a cream bun and fizzy orange. I had a scone and a cup of tea.

I sat for a while and watched her eat. She looked like a different child in her new hairstyle, certainly older, but she was still very pale. She didn’t look very well. Her huge eyes were strangely dark and translucent, with purple shadows underneath.

“Why were you at the doctor’s?” I said.

She met my eyes for a few seconds, then looked down again without speaking. I saw that she hadn’t eaten very much. Most of the food was broken into crumbs and scattered over the plate. “Nothing much,” she said.

“Who was ill?” I asked. “Mum, Henry or you?”

“Don’t know,” she said.

“Was it you?”

Her eyes slid away from me. “I’ve got—asthma,” she said.

I relaxed. Thousands of children have asthma. Emily has it, although not badly. “Do you have an inhaler?”

She nodded.

“Do you have it with you?” I knew she didn’t. I’d helped her take her clothes on and off when she tried on the new ones.

“No,” she said. “I forgot it.”

She looked older, but was acting as if she were younger. “How often do you use it?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Not much.”

It couldn’t be too bad. She was breathing all right now, and she had been all afternoon. It’s nothing, I thought, just an inconvenience. But when I looked at her closely, I could see something not quite right—a fragile, vulnerable look. Her face seemed too clearly defined, as if the skin were shrinking and needed to be stretched very tightly over the bones.

“Shall I take you home now?” I said.

“No,” she said, and a warmth crept through me, a secret
pleasure at the discovery that she really wanted to be with me. “What are we going to do now?” she said.

I thought of Emily and Rosie and what we used to do together. We went for walks, read books, played hopscotch. Megan is older than both of them, more capable of acting independently. There must be far more things to do.

“Have you ever been to the theatre?” I asked.

She screwed up her nose. “I went with our school. It was a stupid play about people who fly and pirates.”

So she’s already seen
Peter Pan.
“Didn’t you enjoy it?”

She rolled her eyes and didn’t bother to reply. I was amazed. How could she, a lost child, be unable to identify with the lost boys?

“Couldn’t hear it. The boys next to me were talking all the time. Sir took them out in the end, but then I couldn’t see properly because Sarah Middleton was in front of me and she’s so big and fat nobody could see round her. I kicked her a bit, but she wouldn’t move.”

I didn’t know what to say. I tried to imagine Rosie and Emily kicking the people in front of them and calling them fat, but I knew they’d never do that. Lesley wouldn’t allow it.

“Can’t we go to your house?”

“My house?” Did she mean Dad’s house, with Paul and Martin and my father? Or my flat? Where a baby wouldn’t fit. I couldn’t take her there because—well, what about James? If I couldn’t see a baby in my space, I certainly couldn’t see an older child of indeterminate age. Even if she had no father.

“No,” I said. “That’s not possible.”

We were still in the restaurant on the top floor of Rackhams. You ought to be able to sit and look down on Birmingham, but you can’t because there are barriers outside the windows. You have no good way of knowing that you’re high up.

An idea shot into my mind. I
am
high up, I thought. I could leap out of the window and fly. We could do anything, go anywhere. Maybe if I let go of the table, I would float upwards—to a distant Neverland.

“When did you last go to the seaside?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

She frowned and looked confused. “It’s not my fault if I’ve never been.”

I was appalled. “Never?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

I leaned forward and grasped the table tightly in case I floated off. “Would you like to go to the seaside?”

She shrugged. “How should I know?”

“It’s wonderful. Playing in the sand with buckets and spades …” I thought of my father’s picture of the baby crawling off to the side. He was right about one thing. Babies are not for keeping.

“You can make sandcastles—seaweed, shells—real sandwiches with sand—kites. You can watch boats—or swim.” I nearly tip over the teapot with my hand, but save it just in time.

“I can’t swim.”

“You don’t have to. You can paddle.”

She looked uncertain.

“We can go together. It’ll be your first time on the beach and we can do all the things you’ve missed.”

“Now?” she said.

“We could go down on the train tonight, find somewhere to stay in Exmouth. Have all day on the beach tomorrow.”

She drank up the last of the fizzy orange. “OK,” she said.