19. AN OLD FRIENDSHIP

Chantelle recalls a meeting she thought was forgotten

Chantelle, staring at Judy, opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again.

There had been a boy called David, but it had never crossed her mind that his parents weren’t his biological parents, but now she started thinking about it she could see that maybe…

Maybe that was one of the reason he chose a world that wasn’t real to be the centre of his dreams, because he did. He liked to build fantasy scenarios and discuss them with her as if they were real, and go wandering off with her down Durnley Bottoms and find little nooks and corners where they could dream their dreams. And they did. As often as they could.

Was that because he felt there was something different about him, that the very fact that his real mother was an alcoholic addict soiled him and made him different? But no, that couldn’t be the case, it was a daft notion. She shared a great deal of David’s tendency to dream and she hadn’t been adopted or suffered from having an addicted mother. She knew that for a certainty.

Didn’t she?

Of course she did!

She took a sip of her coffee and glanced at Judy as she sat down opposite her. Did she know anything about David and herself and could David, the smart, imaginative and above everything else sensible boy really be her son? Did he have her genes inside him, was his every cell constructed from her DNA?

She sat there, thinking.

There had been the time, oh, it must be four years ago when she’d been thirteen and he’d been the same age when they’d gone down Durnley Bottoms like they’d done a thousand times before, or if not a thousand quite a lot. This time, though, they’d gone past the orchard gate and seen the little path that wended its way past the fruit trees to the bungalow, and he had stood there, gazing at it as if he’d found a wonderland.

“I want to live in a house like that one day,” he said, “with the smell of fruit trees in the air, and the peace and quiet like it always is down here. I like being where nobody goes, don’t you? Where maybe, in the past, dire events took place, highwaymen stashed their loot and somewhere there’s a special tree where they were hanged! By the neck, kicking and screaming, until they were dead, and serve them right! And maybe somewhere there’s a garden bower where lovers go to be alone, young men and women enjoying a kiss, and nobody sees them. What do you think of that, Channy? Would you like it if you were a bit older, grown up, say, and we were still friends? Just you and me and a lover’s bower...”

She shivered as she remembered and Judy looked at her as if she knew her every thought.

“I kept in touch with David,” said Judy, “he was fostered with the folks who got to be known as his parents, but they never actually adopted him. It was the right thing because I wasn’t any good, and I didn’t have a man around, so if he’d been with me he wouldn’t have had a father but a soak for a mother. What would that have done to him? A drunken mother and no father to turn to for support and help? He didn’t know that I kept in touch, though, but every so often he might have seen me looking at him, a scruffy bag lady following him home or watching him from the bus stop, just satisfying myself that he was all right, and he was, I knew that. His foster parents were good folks, I could tell that, and when they moved away from where they lived I grieved a bit because I wouldn’t be able to see him anywhere near as often…

“And I saw you with him, some times, Chantelle, and I knew you were right for him like I knew the summer skies are blue and the autumn clouds are grey. Oh yes, I saw the pretty girl in her pretty clothes with her lovely long hair, and she was right for my David. I still called him my David, though I never interfered with his fostering. I doubt they ever knew I was there sometimes, but I was.”

With a start something returned from where it had been lurking in the deepest recesses of Chantelle’s memory for years. There she was, it was as if she could see herself, and she was cycling the three or four streets to David’s home on her brand new bicycle. It was December and the bike was a Christmas present and she loved it. And she knew that David was going to have a bicycle too. They’d talked about it, the two of them, and discussed where they were going to go for their first ride out together.

But she was unsteady and slipped off the bike on the last corner before she got there, before she reached David’s home. She was wearing a thick skirt and black tights, but they didn’t protect her knees, and those scuffed knees with their tiny trickles of blood hurt her. Fighting back tears, and she wiped them through the torn knees of her tights with a clean white handkerchief and prepared to climb back onto her bike.

And a bag lady, the sort carrying her world in carrier bags and with the smell of gin all around her wherever she went, paused and looked at her, and said “you’ll be all right dearie, just get to the boy’s house and clean it with nice clean water...”

And there it was in her mind’s eye. The pain in her knee, the embarrassment of falling off her knew bike, and the bag lady mentioning the boy’s house…

For the first time she wondered how she had known where she was going. It had come and gone in a moment as she smiled her thanks and climbed back on her bike, and soon she was knocking on David’s door and David was answering it.

And the bag lady was gone.

She shrugged off the bloodied knee as bravely as she could so that David wouldn’t think she was a cry baby, and off they went, down Durnley Bottoms, but not too far. She didn't want any more tumbles.

“Was that you?” she asked, “when I fell off my bike?”

Judy didn't have to answer because Chantelle knew that it had been her. The connection was complete.

© Peter Rogerson 18.12.10