The Pull of the Moon (37 page)

‘Yes, please,’ I said. It wasn’t sentiment which motivated me, so much as the need to embark on a fact-finding mission.

The kindly nurse insisted that I travel by wheelchair. She pushed me along the corridor, through some swing doors then into a side room. Danny was lying in a hospital bed with his eyes closed. A
monitor beside the bed registered his hold on life with a steady series of audible beeps. He looked surprisingly clean and tidy. Someone had washed him and combed his dark curls into place.

‘His mother and father have been sitting with him,’ the Welsh nurse said. ‘But they must have popped out for a breath of air.’

I was deeply thankful for that. I didn’t want to run into Danny’s parents.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said slowly. ‘How was it that Simon died but Danny is still alive?’

‘This is much more usual,’ she said. ‘Overdoses are a very unreliable way of trying to kill yourself

‘I thought you just fell asleep and – and sort of died.’

‘That’s the trouble,’ she said. ‘Quite a lot of them do only
sort of die
. They finish up in a coma like this.’

‘Do they recover?’

‘Some do,’ she said.

‘Is Danny going to?’

‘That’s not for me to say, my pet. Come on now, we’d better get you back to the ward.’

My parents arrived an hour later. The doctor had prescribed some tranquillizers and I was grateful to retreat into the sanctuary they provided; able to ignore the questions, the resentful
glances. They withheld direct censure because officially I was ‘ill’. But I was in no doubt about their true feelings. I was ‘their’ Katy after all – the one who had
always been a bit of a nuisance.

Danny lay in a coma for another twelve days. He died without regaining consciousness. Even so I lived in fear of a knock at the door, a uniformed figure in the hall. The deaths had been sudden
and suspicious, so surely the police would investigate.

Not so – the coroner’s inquest brought in verdicts of suicide. Simon and Danny had been found close together in a room containing clear evidence of drug and alcohol consumption and
no signs of violence. They had enjoyed what was described in court as ‘an abnormally close friendship’ and Simon was a known homosexual. It was even hinted that Danny had tried to
combat his own inclinations by indulging in ‘normal’ relationships with the opposite sex. A suicide pact was suggested. It’s hard to believe how gullible people can be. Give them
half a look at a simple solution and they’ll lurch towards it like a drunk to a bar.

I was on the Happy Pills for weeks and weeks. My mother complained to her friends that whenever I appeared to be recovering, something invariably happened to set me back. ‘We are treading
on eggshells all the time,’ she grumbled. It was true. However carefully they tried to shield me, something always seemed to crop up. One day in October I decided to go for a walk and because
it was chilly I started to put on my anorak. I hadn’t worn it since it had been returned from Simon’s uncle’s along with all my other things. My mother surmised that this factor
alone had been enough to upset me: the mere sight of the garment bringing back dreadful memories. She had no idea that it was not the anorak, but the cool slim object my fingers encountered in its
inside pocket which sent me tumbling over the abyss.

‘So I decided the best thing would be to give it to the Scouts’ jumble,’ my mother explained later. ‘But when Katy found out what I’d done with it, blow me if that
didn’t send her off into a fit of hysterics as well. She kept on asking me if I’d checked the pockets, but when I asked her what was in them all she would say was ‘nothing’.
You can’t do right for doing wrong with her, you really can’t.’

My mother bought me a new coat to replace the one sold at the jumble sale. If the new owner of the anorak ever tried to trace the donor, no word reached us. I daresay the buyer was happy to keep
mum about the cash windfall and the shiny pen.

It was not until Christmas that the sky really fell in. Mistaking my moment, I chose Christmas Eve to reveal to my parents that I was pregnant. To say that mutual hysteria followed would be an
understatement. The liberality of the sixties had left our family unscathed and the prospect of a grandchild born out of wedlock sent my mother into a frenzy of operatic proportions. By Boxing Day
the furore had been replaced by an icy resolve. Tears and recriminations still surfaced from time to time, but my mother’s mouth had set into the hard thin line which became its trademark as
she grew older and a solution had been arrived at – I would be sent away in the style of an earlier age. Officially convalescing with relatives after my ‘breakdown’, I would bear
my child in the secret shame of a home for unmarried mothers. The whole thing was hushed up to the extent that even now I am uncertain which of our closest relatives got wind of it. When I
eventually returned home neither pregnancy nor baby was ever spoken of again – probably less to protect my feelings than to safeguard my siblings, particularly my younger sister, from moral
contamination. It was the elephant in our living room, avoidance of which became habitual.

My parents paid for me to be incarcerated for six months in a big old house in Shropshire, where it was a kind of relief to see out my pregnancy in anonymous surroundings. I shared a room with
chain-smoking Sharon and Fat Deirdre, the pair of them like a cliché from a television drama.

Nowadays the traditional adoption story consists of a weeping teenage mother, her baby wrested from her arms by a stern-faced nun – but there were no nuns in my story. No nuns or priests,
no prayers, no angels. Only demons who came by night to whisper in my ear; poisonous insinuations about the child I was carrying.

He was a very quiet baby. He lay in my arms attempting to focus on my face, almost as if he understood that he needed to imprint it while he had the chance. I knew that ours was a relationship
which could never be – what terrible influence might it have upon someone, to discover he was the son of a pair of murderers?

Hilly was among the few people I ever told about the baby. She took a typically Hilly line: ‘You gave him life,’ she said. ‘And his adoptive parents will be giving him love and
he’ll bring them happiness which they might not otherwise have had – it’s a double gift, really.’

I wished I could share her confidence. I used to wonder about him, wonder how he felt. I wished he could know that sometimes rejection is a kindness, not a cruelty. I wished he could understand
that it was for his own good.

Then one day I saw him in the playground. It was not the first time I had experienced the disturbing sense that I might be looking at my own child without knowing it – but this time there
was something more. This little boy, eight years old and newly moved into the area, had the Mayfield nose and chin. He looked just like my brother Edward at the same age – and thankfully not
a bit like Danny. He hadn’t been allocated to my class, but the register was readily available and there was his date of birth: 1 May 1973. His school record removed any lingering doubt
– there was a note in there from his parents which confirmed that he had been adopted at birth.

Of all the schools in all the world he had walked into mine.

It was when he moved on to senior school that I began to watch the house. It began as a single curiosity visit which developed into a habit. The knowledge of his whereabouts calmed my anxieties
about the kind of family he might have been growing up in; but this unexpected proximity also enhanced my fears for him. He appeared to be a happy, healthy child. He was bright, popular, well
adjusted. But the legislation which had once guaranteed my anonymity was amended while he was still a child. I knew that once he hit eighteen he had a right to see his files – and get his
birth certificate. Mayfield isn’t even a common name. He was sure to remember that a Miss Mayfield had taught at his primary school. I became ex-directory as a precaution, but I knew it could
never take him long to track me down if he cared to do it.

It is not that I fear what this discovery might do to me. To acknowledge that one once bore a child out of wedlock is no longer a scandal – if anything it has become faintly heroic. In the
fashion of our times the unmarried mother of yesteryear has joined the ranks of the Victim. My greatest fear was that once he began to delve, knowing the name of his mother would never be enough.
The space for the father’s name on his birth certificate was blank: but if he were to seek me out I could scarcely pretend not to know his father’s name – and even if I refused to
tell he might turn to others. My brother, my sister, any well-meaning halfwit with a memory spanning three decades might point him in the direction of Mrs Ivanisovic – and out would come the
story of Danny’s death – and he would ask more and more questions, the thought of which made my head spin like a ride on the waltzers when the fairground hand makes the car go faster
and faster, until you are choked by your own screams.

So many questions I could never answer. What does a child want to know? Was I ever in love with his father? So easy now to say that I was not – to deny the best times in the knowledge of
the worst. Perhaps some questions can’t be answered. Perhaps it depends when you ask them. Everything changes. Even Cat Stevens isn’t Cat Stevens any more. This is what goes through my
mind as I sit outside his parents’ house in Menlove Avenue. How easily even now someone could light a touch-paper towards the truth. If I can do one thing for him, it is to keep that burden
as mine alone. Let him believe in the teenage mother bullied by nuns or the parents killed in a car crash – any nice little story will do. Let him be content and without curiosity while I
carry the secrets for both of us.

I feel safer with the passing years. If he had wanted to know he would have found me by now. Yet I am still drawn to sit outside the house, in spite of knowing that he doesn’t live there
any more. His parents are still there and maybe in some deep-down unacknowledged part of me there’s a hope that I might catch a glimpse of him. The faint possibility that one of my visits
will coincide with one of his. There was a strange car parked on the drive one evening last year. I waited over an hour but when the owner finally emerged it was a stranger – too old to be
their son – their son and mine.

THIRTY-FIVE

A strange sense of peace hangs over Mrs Ivanisovic’s room. I no longer watch the clock or think about what I might be doing elsewhere. When her eyelids flicker I take her
hand and hold it; she relaxes, sleeps again.

It doesn’t feel wrong for me to be sitting here – although perhaps it should. Am I not the person who destroyed her beloved son? And yet in doing so I have preserved her illusions
and dreams – perhaps that counts for something.

It gradually dawns on me that the sounds which have kept me company throughout the evening have ceased. The clock has stopped ticking and Mrs Ivanisovic is no more. Death has entered on tiptoe
and borne her quietly away.

I find the bedside buzzer and press it once. It is answered by a different nurse. Fat Bottom must have gone off duty. One look is enough. She nods and says, ‘She’s gone.’ Then
she notices that I am still holding Mrs Ivanisovic’s hand. ‘Would you like a minute?’ she asks.

‘No. I’m fine.’ I lay the hand gently on the cover. ‘Is there anything I have to do – anything to sign?’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ the nurse says. ‘It was an expected death, so we can deal with all the formalities.’

‘That’s fine.’ I gather myself, prepare to leave.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asks. ‘Don’t feel you have to rush straight off.’

‘No, really, I’m fine.’

It feels very cool emerging into the night air after several hours in Broadoaks, where the little old ladies live like hothouse blooms in temperatures that would wilt a hardy perennial like me.
I get into the car with an odd sense of completion. As if in coming here, I have accomplished something – although I don’t know what it is.

As I pull out of the gates an edge of the moon appears from behind the clouds. What was it Trudie once said? The moonshadow is your fate and it follows you everywhere.

I’m being followed by a moonshadow . . . moonshadow . . . moonshadow.

I drive as far as the Tees Viaduct, stop my car and put on the hazard lights. It is too late for there to be much traffic, and there are no policemen around to query why I am illegally parked,
obstructing the inside lane up here on the bridge. I get out of the car and walk round to stand next to the rail, where a chilly wind whips at the edges of my jacket and ruffles my hair.

Moonshadow . . . moonshadow . . .

I take the crucifix and chain from my pocket and drop them over the side. They disappear immediately into the blackness. Don’t even make a splash. I get back into the car and drive on.

Moonshadow . . . moonshadow . . . I won’t have to cry no more.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘Moonshadow’ words and music by Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens)
©
1970, reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London W8 5SW. ‘How Can I
Tell You’ words and music by Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens)
©
1971, reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London W8 5SW. The hymn ‘Lead Kindly Light’ was
written in 1833 by the Venerable John Henry Newman (1801-1890).

I would like to record my gratitude to all the people who have offered help or encouragement in seeing this book into print, but in particular Emma Dickens, Nick Greenall, Jane Conway-Gordon,
Krystyna Green and of course my husband Bill.

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