The Last Gift (3 page)

‘Boots,’ he said, smiling.

‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr Boots,’ she said, and they both laughed.

They chatted for a while and then he said goodbye, see you again some time. He told her his name and said that he worked on ships. She told him her name too and said that she worked in a factory. Even that exchange seemed somehow amusing. She knew, without knowing how, that she would meet him again. She could not remember much of what he said or what she said in return, only the feeling of it remained and she was not sure if she could name it: excitement, anticipation. She remembered the way he looked at her and the pleasure she saw in his eyes and the way that made her feel.

And the third time she met him, the blessed third time as he said later, because blessing always comes the third time round, was in the factory. It was such a surprise to see him there and she could see from his sly, pleased smile that it was no coincidence. He had taken a job there because he wanted a rest from the sea, he said. He was in Exeter to stay a few days with a friend and was having such a good time that he thought he would stay on for a while. In the meantime he took a job in the factory because a person had to work or become a burden on someone else. He spent so much time hanging around where Maryam was working in the line that the supervisor told him off in the end, but he still came to talk to her. The supervisor was a thin weasly man who strode about querulously, looking for provocation and bickering with everyone. Abbas was an immediate provocation to him, and it took a day or two before Abbas learned to evade his attentions. His work was supplying several of the lines with what they needed, so he could roam about whenever he was not in demand, charming the women and keeping out of the way of the supervisor. Afterwards he walked her home, still talking, making her laugh, flattering her outrageously. She knew she was being courted and she lay awake in the dark afterwards, thrilled by what it meant. All that week they went around like that, talking all the time, holding hands by the third day, a goodbye kiss on the fourth evening, and they made love for the first time that weekend. It was the first time for her altogether. She told him before, in case something happened. She was not sure what could happen but from what she had heard something was going to be broken and there was going to be blood, so she wanted him to know. He asked if she was sure, and she said she was. He was so handsome.

Maryam would have preferred to stop her memories there for a while, to linger over the image of the Abbas she had just met, but she could not supress the presence of Ferooz in the vicinity. She was still living with Ferooz and Vijay at the time, and they did not like what was going on with Abbas. At first they did not like the idea of a boyfriend. Then they did not like his age, old enough to be her father. He is twenty-eight, she told them, which is what he had told her. Then they did not like that he was a sailor. They are wild, irresponsible people, Vijay said. Drunkards. He’s just using you. There’s only one thing men like him think about.

It was a terrible evening. She was supposed to meet him at the cinema but they would not let her go out, talking at her with such alarm that she dared not move. The next morning, before anyone was up, she collected a few clothes in a carrier bag and went to him, to Abbas, to where he was staying with his friend. He must have guessed that she would come, that she had not been allowed to come the previous evening. He was standing at the window, so early in the morning, looking out for her, and as soon as he saw her, he ran downstairs to let her into the flat.

‘What happened to you?’ he asked, pulling her into the house and shutting the door gently so as not to wake up his friend. ‘I thought . . . I thought you no longer wanted to see me.’

‘They wouldn’t let me come,’ she said, thrilled, despite the tension of the moment, to see him so agitated.

She told him about the arguments and the abuse, and he said let’s get out of this place, and she thought fine. She was happy to go far away from the mess, get away, leave it behind. She did not know if she had any rights, or if Ferooz and Vijay could have her brought back. So when Abbas said,
Yallah, let’s get out of here
, she said count me in, I’m coming. It felt glorious, not to stop and think, not to go back to the belittling life she was used to.

She had thought of dying when she saw his collapsed body by the door, his dying, her own dying. Later, his collapse made her think of him gone, and then of her own life, of its beginnings and its endless furtive turnings. It was Ferooz who had told her the story of her arrival in the world, the story of her beginnings. She was found outside the casualty doors at Exeter Hospital, an abandoned baby. A night-duty porter, whose name nobody bothered to remember, stepped outside to see the dawn and to smoke a cigarette, and saw a bundle at his feet. It was wrapped in a cream-coloured crocheted shawl and had a brown envelope pinned to it like a delivery address or a label. When he saw that the bundle was a baby, the night-duty porter may have smiled or he may have been uncertain whether he should pick it up and take it inside in the warmth, or whether to call someone who would know exactly what to do. The nurses sometimes became annoyed when the porter tried to help, as if he might break something, or hurt the patient, or just generally be uncouth. He put his cigarette away without lighting it and went in to tell the other porter on duty. They called the duty Staff Nurse, who swept up the bundle and hurried inside with it, and Maryam expected that the nurse gave the porters a rebuking glance and that they exchanged a look at the fuss she was making.

She was tiny when she made this dramatic arrival, weighing just over four pounds and was no more than two or three days old. The doctor who examined her said that she had been well looked after. Her mother was possibly a teenager, the doctor said, to judge from the size of the baby, but that was only a guess. Maryam wondered what faces the doctor and the Staff Nurse would have made at each other as they shared this information. What word would have described a girl like her mother at that time: scrubber, slag, slut? She was not told that kind of detail, and she had no choice but to add in some extra strokes of her own to fill in the picture. She was not sure about the cream-coloured crocheted shawl, for example, whether that was there in the story she was told or whether she added it because that was what she imagined an abandoned baby would be bundled up in. She had a cream-coloured crocheted shawl for her own babies, and sometimes thought
my mother
as she handled it, and felt tender towards the absent one.

In the meantime, while the doctor continued his examination of the baby, the Staff Nurse called the police in case the mother was still nearby. Also, she did not think anyone should touch the envelope in case there was some evidence that would be useful to the police. One could not be sure what horror lay behind such cases. It was most likely that the mother had relinquished her baby out of the shame of being unwed, or out of desperation at the thought of a despised and lonely motherhood, but it was just possible that the baby had not been left by the mother but by a relative, or by someone who had harmed the mother. In any case, whoever had done it, it was a crime. Offences Against the Person
Act 1861
, Ferooz told her. She had looked it up.

The police came immediately but could not trace the mother or whoever had left the baby outside the hospital. The envelope was unaddressed and contained a sheet of lined paper, a page torn out of a school exercise book. It said,
Her name is Maryam they won’t let me keep her
. Judging from the name and from the baby’s complexion, the police thought the mother must have been a foreign woman, or rather, they said, in the elegant phrasing of the time, that she was probably a darkie of some kind. As the police knew, some of the foreigners had worse prejudices than Christians in matters such as unwed mothers, and sometimes hurt their own daughters out of shame. So the first job for the police was to locate foreign families in the town and begin their enquiries there. This was easier to do then because there were so few of them, before the floodgates opened. However, they also found copious evidence of blonde hair in the shawl, and the baby’s little tuft of hair was fair, although this was not unusual for babies who grew dark hair in adulthood. So it was possible that it was the father who was foreign, and he had abandoned the teenaged girl he had made into a mother, who in turn was forced by her relatives to abandon the baby.

The police made their enquiries, had their suspicions but could not announce a definite identification of the mother. If there had been another crime associated with the incident, they would probably have tried harder, but this looked like another case of a girl who had been foolish and had paid the price, and what information they had, which was nothing more than rumour, suggested that the strongest possible suspect was no longer in Exeter. Maryam was put out for long-term fostering with a family in Exeter. Her date of birth was estimated
as 3 October 1956.

The family she was put out to foster with were Mr and Mrs Riggs, an elderly couple who were already fostering two other little girls. Maryam would think of them always as her mum and dad, even though she was only with them for the first few years of her life. For practical purposes, their name filled the empty space in her own name, and she became Maryam Riggs. Her own earliest memories were of the time she lived with them and shared a room with two little girls.

Their mother was a large, tall slow-moving woman with a mole on her cheek. It was a large mole, and sometimes their mother worried it until the skin around it became red and angry. She talked to them in a kindly grumbling monotone, talking all the time, and she even carried on talking when she was on her own. When she was angry, her voice was sharp and painful to listen to, as if she was hurting. When she started talking like that, it took her a long time to stop, and the shortest word or the lightest sigh set her off again. She cooked them vegetable stews and watered down the milk to save money, and she filled them up with sweet suet puddings and scones that were hard as rock. They were to call her Mum.

It was a cold house. They all wore several layers of clothing and Mum’s dresses reached all the way down to her ankles. The dresses made her look as if she was someone from another time, and Dad sometimes called her Queen Victoria. She kept their hair cut short to avoid nits, as she called them, and gave them a shallow bath, once a week, all of them in the same water. They were bathed in the kitchen, in a tin bath which Mum filled with water heated in saucepans. Mum had big hands, and scrubbed the children hard with a thick grey flannel, kneeling on the stone floor beside the tub, sometimes with a cigarette in her mouth. The only room with a fire was the living room. The kitchen kept its warmth from cooking and from heating the saucepans, but the water quickly lost its heat and their baths were hurried and brief. Their dad got into the bath after them, and they had to get out while the water was still warm enough for him to use. Afterwards, the children ran upstairs to get under the covers as quickly as they could. Maryam smiled when she described this bathing routine to her own children, and she made them see that some of it was fun.

Their dad worked in a carpet store not too far away, and he was often around the house. He had been a van driver for the carpet store, but he was disabled in the war, wounded in an air raid, and he was not allowed to drive because his eyesight was bad. A thick scar ran like an underground tunnel just below his right eye. The store kept him on for odd jobs, sweeping, small repairs and generally helping out when he was required. When he went to work, he wore a suit and tie, an old herringbone suit that was the only one he possessed. Maryam did not know at the time that Dad’s job was probably a kindness by the store and that he probably received poor wages. That was something she worked out for herself when she thought about him later.

At home, Dad was always fixing something, pottering he called it, and he smoked a pipe. They called her Mary and it was only much later that she learned that her name was Maryam. The eldest of Mum and Dad’s three girls was Maggie. Maggie’s name was always on Mum’s lips: fetch this, stop that, you’ll come to no good, that’s for sure. The other girl was Gill and she was not well. The children were allowed to sit in the living room while their parents listened to the radio after tea. Dad liked to have one or other of the girls sitting on his lap, and he stroked them and kissed them on the cheek and called them you little nig nog. At seven in the evening they were all sent to bed, even if the sun was shining. She did not remember being hit or being shouted at, although Maggie was, for answering back and for being nosy. She used to peep through keyholes and rummage in forbidden drawers. Mum said there was nothing worse than someone who was nosy. Nosy people caused all the trouble in the world.

There was an outside flushing toilet just beside the back door. The toilet door did not fit the frame. There was a large gap at the top and bottom, and Maryam remembered times when there was a skin of ice in the toilet bowl first thing in the morning. The toilet had an animal smell, as if something else lived in there, and she was terrified of using it after dark. By the time she was five, the other children had been sent away. Mum explained that they had been adopted and now had families of their own. They belonged to someone. She asked five-year-old Maryam if she would like to stay with them for good. Maryam said she would. She did not really know what she was being asked. It had not occurred to her to wonder if there was anything different about the way she lived with Mum and Dad compared to the way anyone else lived. It had not occurred to her that she could be sent away from them.