Helpless (20 page)

I
was oblivious of the pain from my cut leg as I stumbled along the lane to the bus stop. The only thought I held in my head was getting to Bev’s house and making sure the beating had not harmed my baby. I felt people staring at me as I clambered onto the bus but I took no notice and just mumbled out the name of the road I wanted to be let out on and handed over the money for my fare to the conductor. I sat at the back of the bus, oblivious to the stares and whispers of the women who kept turning to look at me. I looked out of the window but my eyes were unseeing, for tears blinded them, and I could feel my nose running. In the glass my reflection showed a blotchy face that was already starting to swell.

It was a two-mile walk from where the bus set me down to Bev’s house. I could have taken another bus but, as I had always been driven home when I had visited her, I had no idea of where the bus went from. So I just walked numbly down the road.

To my dismay when I reached Bev’s house I saw that it was in darkness and remembered too late that this was the evening that she and her husband went out for dinner. My legs buckled and the next thing I remember was the worried voice of Bev’s neighbour.

‘For goodness’ sake, child, whatever’s happened to you?’ she exclaimed.

She called for her husband, and together they helped me into their front room.

My torn stockings were removed, my cuts were bathed in Dettol and warm water, and my legs were bandaged. All the while she attended to me she kept muttering about me being ‘such a tiny scrap of a thing’ and that ‘someone was going to have to pay for doing this’.

Both she and her husband clearly thought I had been set upon by local hooligans and wanted to call the police, something that I begged them not to do.

They gave me sweet tea for the shock with a drop of brandy in it. I must have fallen asleep on their settee, for the next thing I remember hearing was Bev’s voice.

My hand was taken and held tightly and I felt my fingers curl around hers. My eyelids drooped shut again, for all I wanted to do was sleep.

‘Marianne,’ I heard her say, ‘who did this to you?’

‘My dad,’ I mumbled through swollen lips.

Words like ‘bastard’ and ‘how could he do that his own daughter?’ floated in the air above my head as the two women talked about my state.

The women helped me sit up and half carried, half dragged me into Bev’s house and up the stairs into her spare bedroom.

The doctor was called and he came out immediately. He examined me carefully and said the baby’s heart was still beating. He told Bev and Phil that it was a miracle that I had not gone into an early labour or miscarried.

I heard him mention reporting the incident to the police and then Bev’s whispered explanation which included something about my father and, without seeing, I knew his shoulders had shrugged at that bit of information. My father, he knew, would not be the last one that took a strap to his daughter for falling pregnant when underage and unmarried.

Total bed rest was prescribed. ‘I’ll sign her off work for a week and then we’ll see,’ he had said sternly to Bev. I heard him leave and then I slept.

I stayed resting at Bev’s house for the whole of that week. At the end of it she told me that the personnel manager wanted to see me before I resumed my place on the factory floor.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Marianne, come on, you know the rules. The factory doesn’t allow pregnant women to work, and there’s no way now that they don’t know you are.’

She told me then that in fact the older women had known for some time, as had the management, and they had let me work for as long as possible, but it was now time to deal with the problem.

When I went into work that day Bev was right: I was told I had to leave. ‘But once everything is over and you’ve sorted yourself out, there will be a job back here. You are a good little worker,’ I was told.

What a funny way of putting it, I mused. ‘Once you’ve given your baby away, they mean,’ I thought. My pay and benefits were to be sorted out for me by the personnel department. At lunchtime, much to my surprise, I was presented with an envelope full of money. The workers had taken up a collection for me and, judging by the amount raised, everyone had put in something.

There was enough for me to live on for several weeks, ‘not that you have to pay us anything,’ Bev said. My tears threatened to overspill at all their kindness.

Two months later, my second daughter was born. This time I gave birth in hospital.

B
ev had looked into the adoption for me, and an agency had been selected. The baby could be taken as soon as she was born, Bev explained to me.

But that suggestion was impossible – I just refused to consider it.

‘I can’t just hand her over,’ I said. ‘Even kittens and puppies stay with their mothers until they are weaned!’

‘But Marianne, it will make it harder on you,’ she tried to tell me as I found more and more reasons to delay the adoption.

I could not admit to her the reason that I already knew that. But still, the thought of handing over my baby without even getting to know her seemed far worse than what I had been through before. At least I still had an image of my first daughter that was fixed in my mind for ever. But if I gave the baby away immediately I would never get to know her.

In the end, when faced with my increasing distress, Bev reluctantly agreed that both the baby and I could stay with them, ‘but only for a few weeks,’ she stated firmly.

When I went into labour it was Bev, not my mother, who was at my side.

‘She’s so beautiful,’ I said with a sigh, the moment I saw her.

‘Yes she is,’ Bev agreed.

For those few days that I was in the hospital I felt a contentment. Once again I had a baby, one who fitted into the crook of my arm and lay against my shoulder. The outside world, where decisions had to be made, seemed to become fainter, until I felt that it was just my daughter and me, cocooned in our own little world.

‘This one I can’t lose,’ I thought as I held her tightly against me.

That night I had a dream of the baby and me staying on with Bev and Phil.

After all, she wanted a child, so why could she not have mine? For six weeks, as I fed, held and cuddled my second child, I held fast to that dream. It was Bev who, sensing what was going through my mind, finally made me realize it was simply not going to happen.

She said she and her husband had discussed it.

‘Marianne, if we adopted your baby, then we would not be able to see you. It wouldn’t just mean that you couldn’t stay with us any longer, but then you could not even visit us. Do you understand why?’

I didn’t.

I loved her home with its pretty furniture and its clutter. However, this clutter was not like the filth and debris of my parents’ home but was confined to magazines laying on coffee tables, and perhaps dancing shoes cast off when they returned home from a night out. Books were in the bookcase, pans and crockery were neatly stacked in the cupboards and the only lingering aroma that clung to the living room was a mixture of cooking, furniture polish and Bev’s Yardley perfume.

I also loved that wonderful feeling which I experienced for the first time in my life, of being cared for. Over the months I had known Bev and her husband, I felt she had become, if not a mother figure to me, then a big sister, and the thought of losing her support really frightened me.

She, seeing the conflicting emotions flitting across my face, took my hand as she gently explained why she had reached the decision she had.

‘We want our own child,’ she explained gently, ‘one who only knows me as her mother. But if we adopted yours that would not be possible, would it? You would want to see her if you knew where she was, it’s only natural, but that just wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t be fair to the baby either, being all confused as to who her real mother was.’

I heard her gently explaining to me that my other option, of trying to keep the baby myself, was just not realistic or fair.

When I was sixteen, there was no social security benefit for single mothers or rent-free council flats. An illegitimate child carried a stigma that followed them throughout their lives, whereas I knew the adoption society made sure that ‘every baby went to carefully chosen couples who could give them the best upbringing’ – words that I had heard before and, deep down, knew to be true.

Bev reassured me that I could stay with them after the baby was adopted. She felt I was still too young and had been through too much to live on my own, and, yes, her husband had agreed to the arrangement.

But there was one condition: I had to put in motion the adoption.

I
hated being in the hospital where happy parents, who I knew would be taking their babies back home, surrounded me. Whereas in the home all the other girls were in the same predicament, here I was the only unmarried mother and certainly the only girl under the age of twenty. So a few days later, as soon as I was ready to, I left the hospital with my baby. Oh, I knew what the pain was going to feel like when I handed her over, but I felt that this time I was more prepared for it emotionally, and having Bev’s support might help make it better. I just wanted those few weeks with her, those precious weeks where I could fill the scrapbook in my mind with how she was: her scent, her little cries and the way she looked up at me.

She, like her sister had been, was a good baby. She seldom cried and gurgled with contentment when I bathed her and blew kisses on her body. Her tiny fingers held mine, her eyes looked back at me, and once again I told a child of mine how much I loved her, how I loved her enough to hand her over, so that she could have a better life with new parents who could give her everything.

The day finally came, but this time there was no social worker to talk kindly to me; instead I had ordered a taxi to take me to the adoption agency.

Bev had offered to take the day off work to be with me, but I had said no. However much I was hurting, this was something I was doing for my baby daughter and I wanted to do it alone.

I had bought her a special little dress with puff sleeves and rows of lace going across both the bodice and the hem. Again I wanted the new mother to know that she must have been loved by me. For whereas I knew nothing about the adoptive parents except that they were in a position to offer my daughter the brightest future, they knew my age and a little bit about my background. That alone must have told them why I could not keep her.

Once there, I held my daughter in my arms, breathed in for the last time that special baby smell, then passed her to the woman from the agency.

Her hands came out; I saw on one that the red nail varnish was chipped. It irked me, that flaw, but I don’t know why. Then I was aware that it was her holding my baby and that my arms already felt heavy with the loss.

I gave the woman from the agency all the toys and clothes that I had bought and that had been given to me.

‘They will buy her everything new,’ she said dismissively, but she took them from me anyhow.

‘You’ll be contacted in the next few weeks,’ was all she said after that. ‘There are final forms to sign.’ Then she whisked my daughter out of the house, down the path into her car and out of my sight.

I went into the kitchen, made a cup of tea, then sat, not drinking it, with my hand resting on that part of me where my bump had been.

This time it was more than pain that I felt, more than numbness and more than loss. It was as though part of me, that part where two babies had lived for nine months, had been scooped out, leaving me hollow and incomplete.

Tears can wait, I told myself, but they didn’t.

F
or the next few weeks I was utterly inconsolable. I did not want to eat, get bathed or dressed; I did not even want to get out of bed. When I woke in the mornings my eyes would go to where Kathy’s cot had stood beside my bed, only to alight on the now empty space. Throughout the day I listened for her gurgles, only to hear the sound of silence. Each time I forgot, just for a second, that she was not in the room with me I had to cope all over again with the fact that she was gone. I felt a heavy lassitude that weighed down my limbs and dulled my reactions until my whole body ached with the loss I felt for my baby.

I could just not accept that somewhere out there, perhaps only a few miles away, were my two daughters and that I was never going to see them again. All I knew was that I wanted them with me.

I imagined Sonia as she must have been then – a two-year-old, who could already form words and was calling a woman, whom I had never met, Mummy.

Another picture plagued my mind during those days of intense loss. It was of a woman in a pastel-painted room. I visualized a dimly lit place, where filmy cream curtains moved gently with the light breezes that came from the large picture windows. There was a white wicker cot covered with a soft wool blanket, and by its side there was a pale velvet chair where a woman sat. She was crooning a lullaby to the small form of my youngest daughter, whom she was cradling in her arms.

I looked for my baby’s face in that picture, but I never saw it. Instead there was only a blank circle.

It was then, when the pain became too much to bear, that I escaped into my fantasy, one where I had a flat and lived with both of my daughters.

If only, I thought, I could find a job that paid better, then maybe I could get Kathy back. After all, the final forms had not been signed, had they? And until they were, the legal adoption could not go ahead.

Once Bev left for work I would feverishly scan the situations vacant columns in the local papers, ink a ring around the ones that looked promising and then phone them.

Undeterred by the same questions of how old was I, and what work experience did I have, I became used to the responses that followed. They were really looking for someone older – more experienced and with better qualifications. I kept phoning every job where the salary was higher than I had been earning.

I filled a small notebook with my calculations. But no matter how many times I did my sums, when I subtracted the outgoings of a bedsitter’s rent and its running costs from my potential incoming wages, there was little left over for food and certainly none for the child care that I would need to provide for my daughters.

Bev left me alone for those first few weeks, but on the sixth one she sat me down and passed over a letter that we both knew had come from the courts.

‘You’ve not signed those final forms, have you?’ she asked.

I shook my head guiltily.

‘Marianne, you have to let go now,’ she said. ‘Look, I know I can’t begin to understand what you’re feeling, but you want your daughter to have the best out of life, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered, not wanting to even hear my own answer or to acknowledge that she was right.

‘Well, then, sign those forms. I know what you’re dreaming of, but, Marianne, it’s not going to happen. And think what that other poor woman’s going through, the one that has waited for a baby, the one that can give your child everything that you can’t. It’s not fair to her either to keep her waiting and worrying that you are going to take her baby back. You must know that.’

For the first time since I had known Bev I heard sternness in her voice, as she continued telling me that it was time to leave the world of dreams behind and face reality. I was only sixteen and had my whole life in front of me. I had done the best I could for my baby.

‘Marianne,’ she added, ‘it’s brave what you have done. Most girls who have decided on adoption do not even want to see their baby once it is born. But you chose to do it the way you wanted to. But you got attached and made it more difficult for yourself.’

She was right, of course, but even I, who unbeknownst to her, had been through it before, had not known just how hard it was going to be.

‘Now,’ she added, ‘it’s time to try and put all of this behind you. I spoke to the personnel officer at the factory. I told her a bit of what you’ve gone through. She says you’re to go and see her as soon as you’re ready. She’s all set to give you a job doing what you were doing before. So when shall I tell her you’re coming?’

‘The day after tomorrow,’ I eventually said, and she understood from that that I was going to go to the town hall where those papers were waiting for me and finally sign them.

Her voice softened and she took my arm supportively. ‘Marianne, do you want me to come with you? I can get a day off if you do.’

Again I said, ‘No.’ This was the last thing I was going to be able to do for Kathy, and I wanted to do it alone.

That morning I bathed and dressed carefully. I pulled on stockings and the last outfit that Bev had made me before I had grown too large: a circular skirt and crisp white blouse. Now, nearly a year later, it hung loosely on me for I was not only petite but I had lost a great deal of weight since the birth.

Can’t be helped, I thought, and I tied a belt around it to camouflage its bagginess. My hair was freshly washed and curled, my make-up was carefully applied and I was ready to take the final step. At sixteen I had just learnt the lesson that make-up and smart clothes can present the image of who we want to be and what we want to feel to those we meet.

It was only a short walk to the bus stop, followed by a few minutes on the bus, but I can remember nothing about the journey. I can only recall closing the door of Bev’s house behind me, then being in the town hall. Funnily enough I can remember the click my heels made on the tiled floors as I walked in and I can, in my mind’s eye, still see the middle-aged woman in the room my letter told me to report to. She asked me what I had come for.

I told her I was there to sign the adoption forms.

‘Oh yes,’ was her indifferent reply after I gave my name. Then she fumbled in the drawer of a filing cabinet and passed the forms to me.

‘Sign there,’ she said in a bored voice as she passed me the pen.

Is that it? I thought as I took it from her outstretched hand. Is that all it takes? Just me facing a disinterested stranger, holding a borrowed cheap plastic pen in my hand and looking at the two places on the form that requested my signature?

I signed that form stating that I was relinquishing all rights to my child, and it all took less than thirty seconds.

Thanks,’ the woman behind the desk said as she placed it back in the file. She did not look up again, for her interest in me was so small that it had disappeared the moment the form was back in the file. Without saying another word, I turned and left.

The next day I went to the factory and was given my old job back.