Mourning Ruby (2 page)

These shoes, these precious shoes of calf leather. My father had been saving for weeks. He snuffed the smell of new leather and loved it, just as I do. He wore the shoes, but never threw away the box. It was too big and useful, and besides it had the price of the shoes on its side, proud evidence of what he had spent.

It’s hard to throw away a box like that. It might come in handy. But my mother did take the price off. I can see where the price label was, and I like her for the delicacy that made her refuse to place her baby inside a box marked £10 10
s. Od
. Or ten guineas, as they would have said in the expensive shop where my father bought the shoes.

(But she neglected to take out the price slip inside the box. It must have lain there safe beneath my head.)

Ten pounds ten shillings was a lot of money for a pair of men’s shoes in 1965. I’ve done my research on this, and it suggests three possibilities.

My father was rich.

My father lived above his means.

My father preferred shoes to babies.

There are no such things as guineas any more, but I’m glad they existed when I was born. A girl for ten guineas has a ring to it.

Lucia might simply have handed over the baby, and kept the box. But she gave it to the policeman, while the policewoman took charge of my damp, furious self, and so my history was preserved. These days they might be able to take my mother’s DNA off the cardboard, from the marks made by her sweating fingers. Maybe there was saliva on the box from the kiss she gave me as she set me down. But it’s too late for all that. And besides, my mother committed no crime.

How far off was my mother by the time the policewoman took charge of me? She escaped. She hurried away, turning corner after corner. She would have been bleeding still, after my birth.

Inquiries were made. A man walking his dog (or so he said) remembered seeing a woman hurry away from Vittorio’s backyard. She was almost running, and she was not wearing a coat on that late-September evening. He saw her clearly in the light of a street lamp. So what did she look like, this woman?

The man made a quick shape with his hands to show my mother’s curves. Out, in, out. Yet this was a woman who had only two or three days earlier given birth to the
femmina
in the shoebox. How could she be so shapely?

She could. We’re like that in my family, to go by what evidence I have: that one sighting of my mother, and the sight of myself in the mirror when Ruby was two days old. We are women who snap back into shape after giving birth. I possess that glimpse of my mother in late-September lamplight: out, in, out. Breasts straining her pink jersey. A too-tight black skirt. I compare it to my own figure in the hospital mirror. While the other women in the post-natal corridors pulled helplessly at handfuls of leak and flobber, I snapped back into shape. My strong, curved peasant body was born to be back at work within the day.

A tight dark skirt and a sweater that stretched over her breasts. That’s what the man glimpsed when he was walking his dog.

Yeah, tight. You know. You could see everything. Out, in, out.

Lucia’s eyes were half shut, as she told me her part of
the story. Behind her, ranks of geraniums, lobelia and nasturtiums rioted. Lucia had done her duty. She had preserved me from a yard full of rats and shadows. She had handed me over to authority, raw, screeching, but unharmed.

2

Baby Aeroplanes

the wife wants a child

the wife wants a child

ee ay ee ay

the wife wants a child

I mistrust sensitive people. In my experience what they are chiefly sensitive to is themselves. My adoptive mother had nerves as rare as orchids, and I was on them most of my life.

In her bedroom’s smelly darkness she lay flat with an airline eye-mask over her eyes. In the back lane I ranged with my cap-gun, ambushing witches. Out of the side of my mouth I told myself the count. Ten shot to death that day already. When metal touches a witch they just melt into nothing, and my cap-gun was bronze. I held the barrel close to my nose to breathe in that wild gun smoke.

It was not so hard to adopt a baby in the mid-sixties. Twenty years later I’d have been a rarity, even a treasure, but I was common enough then. A healthy newborn female infant in search of a home. My adoptive parents never struck me as frivolous people, but there was something frivolous in their decision to adopt. They can’t ever have let loose the whole energy of their thought on the
question. Did they really want a child? Did they like children, or know what they were like?

A baby
. My adoptive mother must have hypnotized herself with those two words.
A little baby
. Once, when I was eight, I dug out from the bottom of the sideboard a bag full of baby clothes: cobweb cardigans, silky romper suits, a white dress with coral embroidery. Folded, new, untouched.

‘Oh well,’ said my adoptive mother, a touch of embarrassment in her manner as she took the bag back and folded it shut again. ‘There was no point putting you in these. You were sick all the time.’

A baby. A little baby
. They had planned to adopt a little boy next, once I had settled, my adoptive mother often told me reproachfully. But I was such a difficult baby that it put them off. I wouldn’t sleep. When she tried to give me my Cow & Gate I twisted aside from the teat and screamed, and milk would spurt over both of us. She would ram the bottle back in because she was afraid I would starve, and I would choke on the milk.

‘You’d have thought I was trying to torture you, not feed you!’

I had eczema and colic and I rubbed my mother raw. She could not face the whole thing again and so I deprived her of the son she would have loved, and who would have loved her. The big, sunny baby who would have understood her and slept through the night from birth.
Her real child
.

I used to plot my way back into the past so I could change it. If my real mother had kept me, I could have danced in the street to make money for us both. My
twinkling feet would have captured the hearts of strangers and charmed the cash from their pockets so that we could buy fish and chips and furniture. Nothing would have stopped me. I’d have danced until my feet bled.

Everyone knows that mothers want to sacrifice themselves for their children, but there are also children who would give blood to have their parents appear to them, just once, on the battlements of their lives.

You know those women in shawls with babies wrapped up like sausages who walk the length of Tube trains asking for cash? Sometimes the baby has a label pinned onto its clothing:

The woman has written out the label in spiky writing, or maybe it’s one shared label that gets passed from woman with sausage baby to woman with sausage baby. This kind of babywork commands my respect. I’m not criticizing my mother for leaving me in a restaurant backyard, but it’s a pity she didn’t think of pinning a label on me and taking me down the Tube. I would have been with her all the way. Fat tears would have squeezed themselves between my lashes, but I wouldn’t have made a sound. I’d have known that in the confined spaces of a Tube carriage a baby’s screams would produce only irritation, not cash.

(If I’d been an inch prettier, or a mile less mouthy, I’d have done a lot better with both my mothers. If only a newborn baby possessed a strategy.)

At first people mostly gave money to these women with their labelled sausage babies, but now there’s a
consensus that times have changed and it’s all right to act tough on this issue, even if you are sensitive inside. No matter how much money you give to one poor person, there is always another. It’s almost as if they are breeding – perhaps with the help of the money you’ve given them. And here comes another one, dragging the baby round the underground while she is probably getting hundreds of pounds in benefit which we are paying for.

As the woman with baby comes yodelling up the Tube carriage, I get out as big a note as I’ve got in my purse and fold it into the baby’s wrappings. Quick as a knife, the woman vanishes the money. She doesn’t want the rest of the carriage seeing how much she’s got from me, in case it dries up their wallets and purses.

She needn’t worry. Their wallets and purses were dry to begin with. They turn their faces from her, mute and stubborn.

(‘What right have
you
got to be so critical?’ my adoptive father used to say. ‘What’s so wonderful about
you
?’

My cap-gun, I thought to myself. In my mind I caressed it and smelled its bitter smoke.

‘Take that look off your face,’ said my adoptive father.)

In my opinion it would be good if everyone on the Tube had a descriptive label pinned to their clothes, as these women do. It could be as truthful or untruthful as they liked.

It’s true that I’m favouring the less cheerful possibilities. Some labels could well be shorter and sweeter.

But who was it said that happiness writes white?

Like the interior of an aeroplane, the inside of a Tube train has strict rules. We don’t cry, scream or let ourselves do more than stiffen as the brakes squeeze shut in the deepest passages. I know that logic well. Control yourself, and the world will reward you by controlling its terrors. I watch the mothers with labels pinned onto their babies. I listen as they put back their heads and yell out folk songs from the poorer regions of countries no one wants to hear about. Their faces split in song, as if they are giving birth.

The Russian poet Mandelstam once wrote about baby aeroplanes. He wrote about an aeroplane in full flight giving birth to another aeroplane which immediately flies off and gives birth to its own baby…
It’s a metaphor
, Joe taught me, as he taught me so much else.

I can see Joe now. We were in the kitchen of our shared flat, and hard rain was spattering the windows. It was late. Joe had worked until he was so lit up he couldn’t sleep. In our separate rooms our separate beds waited, but we didn’t go to them.

‘A metaphor? So you mean Russian aeroplanes can’t really give birth?’

‘Rebecca.’

‘OK then, tell me about it.’

‘It’s a metaphor for the way he worked. For the way things came alive in his head.’

‘Only in his head?’

My words echoed. Too much happened in the head between me and my flatmate Joe. I added up all the brilliance and generosity and sharp wit in Joe’s face and still couldn’t make them come to what I wanted. I didn’t like to think about what he added up when he looked at me.

‘In his head,’ said Joe, ‘and on paper. The point is that he set it down on paper, or we’d know nothing about it.’

Our conversation didn’t go far. Joe wanted to read me the poems in Russian, but I was tired. I went to bed. In the morning I gave him a long wool and cashmere overcoat I’d found in a charity shop and had cleaned for him. Joe put it on immediately, and he wore it every day that winter.

But since then I’ve never been able to stop looking for those baby aeroplanes. They must be on the tarmac somewhere, butting their mothers’ sides, sucking at the fuel line, pretending to be big enough to fly.

‘Mandelstam never wrote about baby Tube trains,’ Joe told me another time. ‘Maybe because he was killed before they built the Leningrad metro. Imagine the metaphors he would have made out of that. He would have liked the way the trains stop with their doors matching exactly to the holes in the walls. You don’t wander up and down the platforms choosing your carriage. You step right in and you are swallowed.’

This is the full story of the metaphor, as given to me
by Joe.
Someone asked Mandelstam what poetry was like, and he said that it was like an aeroplane flying along which gives birth to a baby aeroplane which immediately begins to fly with its full strength and its own life, and gives birth to its own baby aeroplane. All this happens without any of the aeroplanes missing a beat. All this happens within one poem. Mandelstam’s baby aeroplanes never nuzzle and butt around their mothers’ bellies. Immediately they are born they fly off, with their own life
.