Unbelievable, Part One

Prologue

Afterwards, they didn’t know what to do with me. My mother edged around me at home as if I were breakable, suddenly, a new piece of china to be dusted, polished and then put gently back upon the shelf. School was a complicated dance of avoidance; I kept a low profile, donned a hoodie, and lurked at the back of classrooms, absorbing knowledge quietly, no questions. The teachers learnt not to bother me; I met their polite, concerned enquiries with blank looks and a shut mouth. I let the school counsellor try to charm me once a week, on Fridays, but the numbness was all-consuming. Outside school was harder. The gauntlet to run between the school gates and the door of home. I stopped for nothing and no-one.

My brain had an incredible way of dealing with my extreme emotional pain. It locked it away, compartmentalised it from the rest of my mind, until my heart would be able to deal with it. Outside that security box, it left only numbness and a sense of unreality. Life moved that little bit slower, as if I was wading through honey trying to walk, going through the familiar motions of everyday as if they were a sort of therapy.

But the pressure was building; I could feel it. Eyes followed me wherever I went, holding different expectations of me, and I could not meet any of them. I knew that a change had to happen, and if I was to remain in control, my fate must be of my own making. I knew that by leaving Mum, I was causing her more pain, but she would not come where I was going, and so I planned to go alone.

But Destiny had one or two last cards to lay on my table, and the date of my leaving was fixed for me; suddenly, brutally. One great act, and then a great loss. Newfound euphoria was replaced by numbness far deeper than before, as my brain removed, packed away, tightened the boundaries of the pain I could not yet feel connected to.

Chapter One: Homecoming

The bus skidded along the motorway, scattering the thick, lying water into shards that battered the windows and drenched the cars coming in the opposite direction. I watched their windscreen wipers flick manically, the image of dogs shaking their coats after being in the river springing to mind. Although it was nearly nine o’clock in the morning, the world was dark, a heavy mist of rain shrouding the countryside around us in a deep grey cloak, blotting out the light. I could hardly see the shapes of the fields and towns as they passed, blurry, smatterings of streetlights distorted through the huge, flat rain-ridden windows that lined the bus. It made what should have been familiar difficult to recognise, as the rolling hills of Wiltshire rose to admit us, a small, white speck on a great, grey, wet snake, cutting its venomous way through the green.

I could romanticise the scene, but I was tired. Last night had not held much sleep, and it had not been difficult to rise early to catch the long distance bus that would take me… I hesitated to call it home, for I had only ever visited. But home it was to be, now that I was suddenly the responsibility of my grandmother. And yet, leaving Nottingham behind was not the wrench I had expected. A city that had been home for the last fifteen years of my life would have hurt more to leave perhaps, if so much pain had not been experienced there.

This was not my plan; I did not think that it would ease the numbness, and as I travelled, the numbness did follow me, complete and in its entirety. I pressed my clammy forehead against the clammy window, seeking its cool, hoping it would soothe. I had resolved to leave the past behind me; I had hoped the numbness would remain also, but here it was, an unwanted hitchhiker, filling the bus with its dullness, echoing deep inside me, like a sort of permanent emotional indigestion. The bus juddered, and my knuckles whitened, my left hand gripping the bar across the back of the seat in front of me; it had been weeks since I’d been inside a fast-moving vehicle, and it unnerved me deeply.

Pushing unwanted memories to one side, I concentrated on my Grandmother’s face, drawing the familiar lines around my own reflection in the condensation formed by my breath on the cold window. The tip of my index finger worked swiftly to recreate her eyes, her smile, her hair, her nose, her jaw; like looking in a mirror tainted only by age, the fluorescent overhead lights setting the dark circles under my eyes in stark contrast to the paleness of my cheeks. My grandmother was the member of my family that I most resembled. My mother had taken after my father, supposedly, but I could not tell, for I had never met the man. Like my grandfather before him, he had died before he laid eyes on his own daughter, history repeating itself cruelly, leaving both my grandmother and my mother widows only months after their wedding days.

I grimaced at my framed reflection, wiping away my whimsical drawing with the sleeve of my hooded top, replating my response to the men who had influenced my life without being present in it. I would never marry, of that I was sure. I didn’t wish for children either. From what I had seen of family, procreation only caused problems and arguments, dividing mother from daughter and a tide of recrimination. My mother had left home at the age of seventeen, running away from a life in which she had never been happy. The boundaries of a small Wiltshire village too tight to contain her, the isolation too much for a sociable person to bear.

My mother the dreamer, following the fairytales of her youth North to Nottingham, city of Danish Vikings and Robin Hood, seeking her destiny amongst the urban sprawl. As far as I knew, she had never returned to her birthplace, sending me on trips to visit my grandmother alone, only when I was old enough to be placed on a bus under the care of the driver, an underage parcel to be delivered. A modern-day refugee.

And so here I was, as the bus turned off the motorway, passing across the county border into Somerset, headed for the Roman City of Bath, where the bus station awaited our arrival. The rain was dying off now, the sky brightening as the wind gusted the clouds away. A ray of hope, of lightness if not sunshine, filled the countryside as it opened up around us, the great, green rolling hills undulating towards a more visible horizon.

She was waiting at the bus station, a diminutive figure in a pale blue mac; elegant knee-high boots guarding her feet from the wet; a peaked hat shading her eyes from the rain. Blue eyes met blue eyes and a warm ebb of recognition flowed between, filling in the intervening years and wrapping a sense of reassurance around my overtired shoulders. She stepped forwards, grinning, to take my bag from the driver as he unloaded the luggage compartment, waving away my hand. I followed her striding figure towards the line of waiting taxis at the rank, and together, we slipped inside the warmth of the car. The directions she gave to the driver were the first words she uttered. Then she turned her full attention onto me.

‘I didn’t know how to begin,’ she admitted, smiling ruefully, ‘so I thought I wouldn’t. It’s easier to just leap straight in to life after a change. No tramping over the past and muddying it.’

I sat, dumbfounded at her honesty. I hadn’t known what to expect. My Gran wasn’t like other people, I had always known that, but I had been worried about how she would ‘deal’ with me now; after all, this wasn’t a normal visit. It had been two years since I’d last visited; last summer I had been consumed with… but that way, the numbness started to peel back, and I closed the pathway, firmly.

‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I’ve provisionally registered you at the local school, Mandervay. They were concerned at you joining the sixth form so late; you started different boards in Nottingham but you’ve missed so much anyway… well, you’re just going to have to start again and catch up on what you’ve missed. English Literature, Maths and Biology. Plus, Drama, as long as you can keep up with the work for the others. You can always wait until the next academic year, but it’s a whole nine months until September, and how you’d occupy yourself until then, I don’t know. Besides, it’s best not to get behind.’

She stopped talking abruptly. It was clear that she’d said everything she felt she needed to, and now she let the silence grow in the car, turning slightly away from me to give me the space to absorb and settle. I didn’t know how to respond; I felt ill-equipped to deal with her thoughtfulness and her organisation of my life, now that it was in her hands. So I just sat and watched the rainy streets flow by, as the taxi ushered us ‘home’.