Promises

I can feel the nurse scrutinising my face as she dabs cotton wool on my forehead and smoothes on butterfly stitches. I am grateful that she is gentle and that her fingers are cool, but I avoid her gaze. I catch her glancing at my arms and then back at my face; she’s trying to make eye contact so that she can show me her sympathy. I stare at a poster on the wall that warns me about cancer.
Eventually she says;
‘It’s okay to be shocked, you know, not to be sure.’ I open my mouth and close it again.
‘I understand.’ She says, as if she possibly could. I look at her, directly in the eyes for a moment, say nothing. She picks up the leaflets I’d discarded and presses them into my hand. She says;
‘You know where we are’ and looks at me again for a minute, before she sweeps the curtain aside and is gone.
Bradley is waiting in the foyer, of course, even though I’d told him to go. He’s looking at the floor and shuffling from foot to foot, looking no more out of place here than he does anywhere. I try to smile. I tell him;
‘It’s fine’ and this seems to be enough.
Sliding doors suck open and deliver us into the car park. The tarmac is oily and slick with rain. Suddenly unsteady, I lean my face against the cool of his leather jacket. I want always to be as grateful of Bradley as I am at this moment because now, briefly, he fills a space that is growing inside me. But Bradley is white bread that sticks to the roof of my mouth and leaves me hungry. I pull up the hood of my sweatshirt so that he cannot see any tenderness on my face.
He guides me into his mum’s Astra and this time I don’t shake his hand off my arm. We drive silently in the dark and I watch the headlights of the traffic through the rain and I smoke, my fingers pressed through a crack in the window.
We climb the stairs to Bradley’s door. It’s a petty rebellion, this cheap, airless apartment above the kebab shop with its smell of oil and the blinking fluorescent light which is lit way into the night and seeps beneath my eyelids, invading my sleep. It’s no rebellion at all, because Bradley goes home to his parents’ cosy semi every Sunday as he always can to be stuffed with meat and his mum’s over-bearing love, while his dad regards his kingdom from their living room’s best chair. I stay in the flat. I tell him that I paint, but mostly I stare at the wall and smoke. My dad will sit in his flat staring at his walls too. These days he can barely remember my name.
I lie star-fished on the bed and stare at the web of cracks across the ceiling listening to the strains of Arabic music that drift through the floor and I close my eyes so that I don’t have to speak to Bradley. After a while I hear him flick on the television and the sound of football commentary is suddenly loud, he turns it down quickly. There is an insistent and thumping bass line from a car that pulls up across the street and raised voices. Then a siren that rises and fades as it passes. I imagine that I am sinking into the mattress.
I must sleep because when I wake up, Bradley is over me in just his jeans, looking into my face. He takes my murmur as an invitation and puts his mouth on my neck, on my face. It’s too gentle and hesitant. My hands are in the centre of his chest and I push hard.
‘For God’s sake, Bradley, don’t.’ He yields easily, quicker maybe than I want. For once in his life he could take control, but he sighs and flops beside me. He is asleep in minutes.
I wait until his breathing is heavy before I touch him; trace my fingernail around the edges of his tattoo. He doesn’t stir. The light from the kebab shop blinks out and for once it’s quiet. I take off all my clothes and lie back down on the bed. My skin is pale and silvery like scar tissue in the thin light from the window. It’s tender and taught where it stretches over my breasts and the flesh around the nipple puckers as I touch it. I run my hand over where a life is making a curve of my belly. There is a hollow, dragging feeling somewhere in my gut. I resolve that I will tell Bradley, but later, it will wait. I pull the covers around me tightly.

When I wake again it is a watery kind of light, it must be early. I lift my head and Bradley is standing by the sink. He’s pressing a knife into the flesh of his forearm, concentration on his face.
‘Christ, Bradley,’ I sound harsher than I mean. He jumps and the knife clatters into the sink.
‘Please Janie, I’m just trying to understand how it feels.” I’m propped up on my elbows looking at him. He’s got that pleading look on his face that I can’t stand, like a puppy I’ve flicked away with my toe. It makes me feel wretched.
‘You can’t, Bradley, you just can’t.’ There’s a raised, red line on his arm where the knife was, no blood. I start to tell him that he can’t even get that right but I stop myself and just look. His eyes drift to my breasts. I turn onto my side and pull the sheet over my head. He showers and leaves for work without trying to speak to me.
I get up and pull on his Black Flag t-shirt and it smells of him. I pad to the sink, the floor chilly under my feet. I pick up the knife and look at it, wonder if the cold scratch, the intake of breath and the blooming of blood will fill the hollow today but somehow that’s been taken from me too and I throw it onto the counter. I shower with the water as hot as I can stand and leave to see my father.
I open the door with my own key and pull back the security grate. The curtains are still shut and his flat smells of whiskey, cigarettes and sweat and I run to the bathroom and vomit, clammy fingers gripping the grab rail around the toilet. There’s a smell of fresh smoke when I come out of the bathroom and I jump at the sight of him sitting in the corner. He’s in a grubby sweatshirt and I wonder if he’s even been to bed. He could have been here for weeks; the scene is always the same. He shakes an empty box of Benson and Hedges at me, a demand, neither of us speak, it’s a waste of time when he’s like this. I go to my room and pull the shoe box from under my bed. In it are the letters from my mum to him that I’ve stolen, a year’s worth from when I was ten, which he’s kept, hidden from me for nine years. On the bottom of each one; ‘tell Jane I love her’, the last one with a ‘please’. He never did, the bastard’s let his own grief make me spend half my life believing I was abandoned. I stuff them all into my bag then stop and stroke the fur of the teddy bear, as old as me, propped up on my bed. I push that into my bag too, close the door and leave without saying goodbye.
I sit in a café for over an hour sipping black tea because I can no longer stand the acid taste of the milk. I try to text Bradley but he doesn’t reply and I breathe on the window again and again, rubbing it off. I unfold the last letter, there’s an address on it I know off by heart. When the waiter asks me for a fourth time, impatient, if I want something else, I push a pound at him across the table, ignore how he’s looking at me and go.
On the bus I press my forehead against the glass scratched with graffiti and watch the town drift past. The houses get bigger, the streets less dirty as we move away from the centre. I feel a little sick, a little shaky but more certain than I have in months. I get off in the suburbs a couple of stops early and walk. This bit I’ve done before. The streets are lined with terraced houses with tall established trees in their gardens. There is a smell of lavender and a kind of stillness, no dogs barking, no sirens. A few leaves are starting to fall and I kick my trainers through them, remembering how that felt when I was younger, before I was me.
I’m there before I realise, before I’m really ready and I spend several minutes staring at the black front door, the brass knocker and the neat garden. I start up the path like I have in dreams then suddenly I’m dizzy. I turn to rush away but the door opens and I turn back to see a girl with groomed hair and a sky blue t-shirt, a struggling cat under her arm. She’s almost my age, certainly not more than a year or so younger.
‘Can I help you?’ She’s frowning. I can’t speak. She turns and shouts
‘Mum!’ into the back of the house. I can smell something cooking.
‘Mum’ the word lodges somewhere near my solar plexus and I want to repeat it over and over until it’s meaningless. The woman who appears with a tea towel is older, with lines around eyes I’ve never forgotten. I realise that my face is bruised and scratched from where I fainted, how I must look.
‘Jane?’ It’s a question, not a statement.
‘That’s not my name’ I tell her and I walk away quickly. I don’t know if I want them to call me back, but they don’t and the door closes behind me before I get to the end of the path. I start to run until I’m several streets away and then I stop and lean against the wall of another almost identical garden to fight back a wave of nausea. I swallow back the saliva that gathers in my mouth and quickly wipe away pointless tears. There’s a fluttering in my belly, a turning and I press my hand against it.
‘Maybe you’re what will fill the gap,’ I tell her in my head, my fingers finding the fur of the teddy bear in my bag.
‘I’ll make it alright for you.’ I can’t tell her I’ll make it wonderful. I won’t make promises I can’t keep, but I can tell her it will be just okay.