Lying Together by Gaynor Arnold Page B

the hair, the clothes, the carryings-on. In a couple of years Geraldine was as bad as the rest. One person can’t fight against it. And you get no help from the teachers. They just tell you to calm down. Mr Anderson, for example, just pulling his beard and saying he’ll investigate matters and he’s sure it’s not serious, and you know damn well you won’t hear another word, as if behaviour and manners and bad influences are nothing to do with them.
    Doctors are just the same. They’re supposed to help, be up with the latest trends. I said, ‘These tattoos can be surgically removed – I’ve seen it on the television – and I want it done for Geraldine. He said I was over-reacting, to ‘keep calm’. I’d like to see how calm he’d have been if it was his daughter with ‘DAVE’ all over her knuckles. He’d think it was too common for a doctor’s daughter. But I suppose he thought Geraldine was just a working-class trollop. He took a bit more notice when I hauled her back with her wrists cut to pieces. I got a prescription out of him then. ‘It’s only superficial,’ he said. ‘But bring her back in a fortnight.’
    A lot he knew, giving her pills like that. Six days later she was in St Luke’s, taken out on a stretcher, red blanket, the lot, and all the rowdy element gawping. Kevin Bates had the nerve to ask if he could go and see her at visiting time. ‘You scum can keep away,’ I said. ‘Haven’t you done enough?’
    It took something to walk down the street after that. I knew what they were thinking. Gloating, in fact. But I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of seeing me in pieces. I put on my best green coat, powdered the blotches on my face, walked out in front of them all, and stood at the bus stop daring them to say a word.
    Geraldine was propped on pillows, her dyed hair sticking up in spikes. She said, ‘Hello, Mum.’ No apologies.
    I didn’t know about the baby then, of course, but the young doctor called me to the nurses’ office. I stood watching her through the glass partition while he was telling me. She looked so innocent, with her white skin. So pure. How could she have let anyone mess her about? I remembered those plasters of chewing gum, the stained knickers she thought I didn’t know about, stuffed behind the wardrobe. She’d never confided in me. Nobody did. Certainly not Clifford. He never gave me any support. He’d gone to work as usual. ‘Give her my love,’ he said, his back to me. ‘Say I’ll pop in and see her tonight.’
    They thought the baby was all right. She hadn’t taken very many. A cry for help, they said. All I could think of was who had driven her to this. That Dave? Those boys Mr Chislett had seen her with in the park – those leather boys, the ones with the jackets and chains, the ones who smoked all the time – who she pretended she didn’t know? ‘Who was it?’ I shook her. ‘Tell me which one!’ I’d see he had his come-uppance. There was a law about these things. She was only a child.
    The little bitch wouldn’t say. ‘Anyway, I’m having an abortion.’ She’d got it all worked out. But if ever I’ve done one good thing in my life, it was getting that idea out of her head. I didn’t even let up when that staff-nurse came and told me to calm down. Sister Mary-Margaret would have been proud.
    And Nigel, when he came, was an angel of a child. Blond hair, skin you could almost see through, big clear eyes. Geraldine never had to lift a finger for him. I did everything. She just sat around, watching TV, eating. ‘Why don’t you go back to school, or college?’ I said. I thought she might take some exams, train for something. Be an air hostess, like she’d wanted as a child. Or a TV announcer. Now that I’d got her out of all those dead