The Story of You (16 page)

Joe, I’m so sorry I said. And I WILL call you. I just need some time.

Joe and I are in my childhood bedroom in Kilterdale, the one with the sponge-effect walls that I share with my sister. It is September 1997 and we are lying on my bed. I have found out I am pregnant a week previously. I am still mute with shock. Joe is trying to be positive.

‘I think if you can give a baby everything it needs – clothes and milk and love – then it doesn’t matter how old you are,’ he’s saying, so innocently and naively. I can only nod, unable to meet his eyes.

‘If it’s a boy, I want to be the kind of dad my son feels he can cry in front of, but also go down the pub to watch the footie with. If it’s a girl … honestly, Robbie –’ he sighs and shakes his head so seriously – ‘if any man dares hurt her …’

I am gripped by this memory as I lie in bed now, in my double bed in Archway, London, not my single one that squeaks and that Leah crawls into most nights – it is almost 3D, it feels so real, like I could reach inside it and touch the squishiness of the duvet, pass a hand over my already-swelling belly. I can remember the conversation word for word:

‘
God, I wish I had a dad like you
,’ I’d said,
gutted that I had this amazing boyfriend, whom I was so in love with; that, actually, new life should be such a precious thing after losing Mum and yet, here I am, sixteen and scared out of my wits, unable to be excited like Joe.

‘Grace?’ The only way I have ever known how to cope is to throw myself into the job I love and this time was no exception. ‘Grace, are you there?’

Two and a half weeks after that horrific conversation with Faith from Marie Stopes and three days after meeting Joe at the museum, I stood knocking on Grace Bird’s front door. ‘It’s just Robyn, here, Robyn King, your CPN?’

I was really looking forward to seeing Grace again. In fact, in these past three weeks of total insanity, it had ironically been the thing that had kept me sane. The eight-week, six-day deadline Faith had informed me about had been and gone, as I knew it would, with me coiled tightly inside in some kind of madness of my own. Nine weeks passed. Ten … I never made an appointment or even called her back.

It was fair to say that in this dark and brooding mood in which I found myself, the Mr Greedy-alikes with their
BABY ON BOARD
badges and their ‘we are just absolutely ecstatic’ faces, were not just doing me no good but were alien to me. Which is why I was looking forward to being with Grace: it’s pretty hard to think about your own problems while you’re helping someone else with theirs, for a start, but also, I felt an affinity with Grace. There was something in her eyes that I recognized; I knew all that stuff would be alien to her, too.

I rapped again on her door. It looked industrially heavy and was painted burgundy, with a glass panel on the top, from which hung a curious home-made wreath: a ring of plastic, green foliage, within which nestled various woodland creatures and flowers made out of papier-mâché and lolly sticks and fur –
Possibly something she’d made at a mental-health craft group
? I thought. But no, there was something incongruous about it here. It looked too jolly and playful, like it belonged in the sunny Cath Kidston kitchen of one of those huge Edwardian houses in Dulwich village.

As is often the case for people with mental illness, a bright young woman who would have been destined for great things – had her mind not collapsed under the deluge of shit life had thrown at her – had wound up living on the umpteenth floor of an inner-city, concrete monstrosity. Just on the walk from the lift, along the gangway to Grace’s front door, I’d counted a latex glove, a condom and a syringe. A miasma of urine, beer and fried food hung thickly in the air. It was sickly metallic; like how your hands might smell if you’d been gripping the bars of a rusty climbing frame. Just being here made me feel better about everything, if I’m honest. Things were tricky, to say the least, but my job can be a great leveller.

I knocked again, much harder this time, because the TV was blaring from behind, so I guessed she wouldn’t be able to hear me. Eventually, however, there was the sliding of a lock, like the barrel of a gun, the jangling of a chain. One lash-fringed, fawn-like eye peered back at me through the gap.

‘Who is it?’ came Grace’s high-pitched estuary twang. The obligatory Vogue dangled from her lip and I watched the blazing redness of the ash intensify as she sucked hard. Smoke snaked upwards through the two-inch gap in the door and across my face.

I coughed. ‘Hello, it’s Robyn,’ I said, cheerfully. ‘Robyn from the mental-health team.’ She didn’t look too happy, but then I wonder how most of us would feel if someone from the local mental-health team was the only person who ever came to your door.

I lifted up the NHS card and smiled, so she could see.

There were a few seconds before recognition lit up her face – ‘Oh! Robyn, it’s
you!’ –
and she undid the chain and opened the door. The plastic wreath plunged immediately to the floor. Grace looked forlornly at the little mound of fur and pipe cleaners on the dirty concrete. ‘It keeps bloody doing that.’ She sighed, before pinning it back up above the door.

She walked inside and gestured me to follow. ‘Sorry darlin’, I thought you might be some weirdo, some odd-bod. I forgot you had a boy’s name.’

She was wearing a satin dress-could-be-nightie, a crocheted black cardigan over the top and the bright blue Yankees cap again. Her skinny girl’s calves were clad in black tights. And, on her feet, bright white Reebok high-tops, which looked like they’d been nicked off the back of a lorry.

She stopped and surveyed me for a few seconds, the telltale clozapine blankness descending – a little absence – and then she was back again, engaged.

‘D’you like my dress?’ she said. ‘I got it down the Red Cross. It’s a wedding dress, you know.’

‘It’s lovely, Grace.’

‘So, shall I take your jacket, darling?’ she said, in a mock-posh voice like she’d heard people say things on the telly.

‘Thank you,’ I said, handing it to her. She exhaled smoke all over it, then lay it – as carefully as if it were a baby – but on the floor (along with ash stains and about a gazillion pizza-delivery leaflets). I thought about my baby as I followed her through to the lounge, about the dangers of passive smoking (unavoidable in my job), and felt encouraged: I’d had a maternal thought; a protective, normal thought. This was a start.

The flat was much bigger inside than it looked on the outside and I stood in the spacious, yet cluttered, lounge as Grace picked up various piles of stuff and moved them from one place to another, trying to make space for me to sit down. Eventually, she pushed a tide of papers off a grubby, floral two-seater, which was so small that, when she sat down, her face was just centimetres from mine. This seemed to alarm her and she sprang up. Clearly, she didn’t often have other people sitting on her sofa. And to my dismay, just this thought brought a lump to my throat.

Hormones? Already?

‘Shall I make a drink first?’ she asked.

‘Yes, that would be lovely, Grace. Why don’t you do that, then we can have a chat?’

I leaned down to get my notes out of my bag, but sensed she was still standing there, fiddling with the gold chains around her neck.

‘What shall I make?’

‘I don’t mind. Tea? Coffee? What are you having?’

‘Dr Pepper, darlin’ …’ The ash from her Vogue finally surrendered and fell to the floor, making a fizzing sound, which both of us ignored. ‘Or coffee. I haven’t decided yet.’

‘Coffee’s great for me,’ I said. ‘Just milk, no sugar.’

I could feel her eyes on me for a few seconds longer.

‘All right,’ she said when I looked up again. ‘Coming up!’ And she glided into the kitchen, from where she sounded as if she was building an extension, not making a coffee, but I decided to leave her to it.

The lounge was big but grimy: blue carpet dotted with fag burns, like bullet holes; mismatched furniture; an old, unplugged microwave in the corner, looking as if it might actually start talking, it was covered in so much crusted food.

There was so much
stuff
. Little deposits of it everywhere, like molehills, as if she’d decided to do something vaguely productive – some knitting (there were needles and balls of brown wool strewn across the carpet as though the moles had escaped from those molehills); paperwork (an avalanche of it on top of the coffee table) – or make herself some food (a pan with a boiled egg sat on top of the telly), before she got distracted by something terrible and had had to leave it all there, like someone who’d had to run naked and screaming from a house fire.

The walls were nicotine-stained and the wallpaper peeling, but there were also attempts at domesticity and home-making – ornaments and trinkets and pretty cushions that broke my heart, because it was obvious Grace knew what a home should look like, but her disordered thoughts meant she hadn’t quite managed it. Her illness had robbed her of what was probably, once, a natural sense of style.

There was a bit of a commotion in the kitchen.

‘You all right in there, Grace? Shall I come and help?’

Another bang.

‘What did you want again?’ she shouted.

‘Coffee.’

‘I can’t find the coffee – what about Dr Pepper?’

‘Yes, Dr Pepper. Dr Pepper is great.’ I hadn’t had Dr Pepper since the days of sitting outside Mr Fry’s in Kilterdale with Mum and everyone; it would be nice.

I wandered towards the window. It was one of those huge 1960s ones that take up the whole of the wall – not stylish, but it let in a lot of light at least. It looked over the grimy congestion of the Walworth Road: more concrete rabbit hutches; an Esso petrol station; the dark red Victorian arches of the entrance to Elephant and Castle station.

If you looked down below, there was a rather threadbare football pitch, more scrubland than pitch, and the mellow afternoon light was playing on it in such a way that a memory suddenly assailed me, so vivid I could almost taste it on my tongue. I was seventeen and watching an eight-year-old Niamh play for Kilterdale Primary football team. It was autumn and sunny, that glassy autumn light. It reminded me of the same time the previous year when we’d lost Mum – she’d spent her last days on a Marie Curie bed in the lounge, looking out on a garden bathed in light just like that.

Niamh’s pale, stocky legs were flushed with cold in this memory. She was sturdy, still with a rounded little girl’s tummy but, God, she flew like a hummingbird around that pitch.

Her side won, and all the kids ran cheering, arms pumping the air, to the sidelines to meet their mums. I remember the look on her face at the moment she embraced me, the moment she clocked that she was the only one without her mum there. I remember, as we walked home together across the golden fields, her saying, quite casually, ‘Do you think Mum saw that today? My goal? Do you think she was watching when I scored?’ I’d had to bite down hard so I didn’t cry.

‘Won’t be a sec now, darlin’,’ Grace called from the kitchen. Then I heard the pop-fizz of the Dr Pepper can being opened. Something caught my eye as she brought it in: a collection of photos, like a shrine on a table beneath the window. They all pictured the same girl, with dark eyes like Grace’s and black hair in plaits, that Grace had shown me in the Hello Kitty wallet: Cecily.

‘Here we are.’ Grace handed me the can, rather proudly, and I took a sip. Immediately, I was transported to outside Mr Fry’s with Mum and everyone, the can cold in my hand, the fiery heat in my throat. So happy.

Grace sat down, but on the armchair opposite this time. She took another cigarette out of the packet and lit it. It took several goes, her hands were shaking so much.

I picked up my notebook and pen. ‘So,’ I said, ‘I know we’ve met but it’s great to see you back home, in your own surroundings. Today is really about getting to know one another and seeing how you’re doing, but also to get an idea of how you’d like to use our time together, what makes you happy, how we can get you out and feeling part of things again.’

Grace and I chatted easily for half an hour. As I suspected, having a diagnosis of schizophrenia was about the least interesting thing about her. She used to be a professional photographer for one (why Jeremy had never told me this, and why they’d taken the one thing she loved away from her in hospital, I’d never know). She used to have a studio where she did portraits – babies and families and so on – but would also travel and do her own projects.It was on one of these photographic trips, Grace told me, that she’d met Cecily’s father.

‘He was a Cambodian tribesman,’ she said, as matter-of-factly as if she’d said, ‘He was called Chris and he worked in IT.’ Like the escalator story, I even wondered if it were true. But then she picked up one of the photos: it was of Grace with her dad and, lo and behold, he was standing outside some sort of hut in the Cambodian jungle, dressed in Western clothes and very handsome, but in the Cambodian jungle, after all.

‘She gorgeous, i’nt she?’ she said. ‘My Cec.’

‘She really is,’ I said. ‘She’s a beauty.’

There were so many photos: Cecily as a baby in black and white in a studio; Cecily wearing an i am 5 badge, standing outside a green front door. Then, the most heartbreaking one of all: Cecily with a woman dressed in shorts and strappy top, arms wrapped around one another in some exotic garden (you could tell by the palm trees that it was somewhere abroad), and it took me a few seconds to realize that the woman was Grace, because it wasn’t the ravaged face I saw staring back at me, but a normal, shiny-eyed mother, just enjoying time with her child.

‘That were in Mallorca,’ Grace said, the photo shaking like a leaf in her hand. ‘The three of us and my mum and dad. Thomson package, all in. Grace would have been six – no, just turned seven.’ Her face had lit up, like that of the woman in the palm-tree picture. ‘She was incredible; she’d go out in the waves with her dad. Six foot, they were, and she wasn’t scared one bit. Such a little dare-devil, she was,’ she said, laughing again. Then her eyes narrowed, the smile dropped. She took another deep tug on that Vogue. ‘She’s ever so arty, too. You see that wreath on the door?’ She made it. She was only six when she made that.’