TINA’S HOLIDAY

Oh dear. Not a happy tale.

There hadn’t been a day like this since before Tina was born, and that had been twenty-one years ago. But her genes or something brought it about, and that just had to be that.

Because it as back then, all those years ago, that her father had died, before she was little more than an embryo starting on life’s earliest journey.

It was all to do with her mother’s fear of just about everything but particularly the idea of having a child in the house. She couldn’t do anything to hurt the infant she knew must be starting its journey inside her, but she could do something about the wretched man who had inseminated her without so much as a do you mind.

So Tina had been born months after her father passed away at the hands of an unbalanced woman who was to spend the next humongous number years in a secure institution for the criminally insane, and she only avoided a harder prison regime because her legal team had been particularly convincing.

And Tina eventually found herself growing up in a loving home with foster parents who genuinely loved her. From the moment they took her from the children’s home where she spent the first few months of her life she had every reason to be happy, and mostly she was. But then, no child is totally happy all her life, especially if some germ or virus or bug has a go at her, and that just about always happens occasionally.

She soon discovered what real love is. By a kind of osmosis from Don and Jean she learned that love is caring for others, looking after the sad or sick or injured because that’s the right thing to do, and you want to do it anyway. Her foster parents, Don and Jean, were like that. They never even swatted a fly or squashed a spider.

She broke a leg one day and had to have a cast put on it, which made walking even with a child’s crutch awkward. It had happened on the park when she had fallen awkwardly off a roundabout and had screamed herself hoarse, until Don had swept her carefully into his arms and had raced her to the local A and E hospital where the pot was put onto her leg and a few other grazes were treated with love and care. For a few days around then she was far from happy until love showed her that in the end a broken bone doesn’t really matter much. It was, of course, Don and Jean who taught her that by the way they were.

Then, when she was thirteen or so, she was bullied by another girl, a hawk of a creature from a lousy home where love had nothing to do with anything. The girl, Shirley, was scruffy at an age when it was de rigueur to be anything but scruffy, to smell slightly of unpleasantness and most certainly to have nits. And Shirley had all of those, and worse. She had been brought up brutally to be a truly unpleasant child. Until, that is, she started taking pleasure from bullying Tina.

“You’ll never fall in love with your handsome prince if you behave like that,” Tina had told her tearfully after an unpleasant poking, punching and sneering at the hands of Shirley.

“Who wants handsome princes anyway?” the other had squawked in an unpleasant reply whilst poking her with a dirty finger.

“You might, one day,” Tina had suggested, ducking out of range, “then you might want friends around you to show you the way.”

“What way?” shouted Shirley.

“The way to love,” Tina had braved to say.

And that had made the other girl think, which was something she hardly ever did. And when someone who knows anyway that they’re wrong starts to think the person who suggests it has done a remarkably good thing, and Shirley slowly began to look at herself and even thought that Tina might be her best friend.

When she was eighteen Tina met Timmy.

Talk about handsome princes! Because in her eyes that’s exactly what he was.

She loved his hair, sandy, nothing special really, but arranged just right on his head. Just right for her, that is. Maybe not always for him when he pushed a comb through it and re-arranged it. But she didn’t say anything because she knew it wouldn’t be long before nature, the breeze and gravity took over and put it right.

And she loved the expression on his face, the half-cheeky, three-quarters amused and always affectionate expression. And the way he gently ran his fingers though her hair and never went too far with his physical worship.

Timmy was certainly the one for her. There could be no doubt of that.

“Tiny, my love, will you marry me?” he asked one summer’s day when everything in both their lives seemed to be absolutely perfect and she was on the cusp of being twenty, which seemed a very grown up age indeed.. They were on a beach in Spain, the sun wasn’t too hot, but just about right, the sounds of the sea lapping gently on the shore were hypnotic, everything was pitch-perfect for that one question.

“As long as you don’t want a family,” she replied.

He laughed at that. “Of course I don’t!” he replied, “kids’d get in the way of our happiness! You’re on the pill, aren’t you? Then stay on it and everything will be all right.”

“You’re a dirty boy!” she teased back, and she reached out and pushed one finger through his hair, improving the way it hung and loving every strand of it.

“It’s not dirty,” he replied, grinning wickedly, and went on to prove that it wasn’t.

Somehow, as a consequence of their being away from home, on holiday abroad and in a kind of magical world where love dominated every waking moment of their loves she forgot to attend to what had become a routine of pill swallowing. It might have had something to do with the oceans of gorgeous sangria that cooled her when the sun penetrated a little too far, or the way holidays do something to the memory, but normal routines had flown out of the window.

But a summer’s idyll can’t last for ever, and when she arrived back home and she started suffering from morning sickness she knew that something must be very wrong indeed, and her doctor confirmed it.

“You’re three months pregnant,” he said, his face serious.

She had guessed it. Of course she had. She was as bright as a silver button.

“I didn’t want kids,” she moaned at Timmy, “I told you that I didn’t.”

“But I thought … you said … the pill…” he protested.

“Typical of men!” She snapped back at him, “leaving all the important things to us women! So thoughtless! And I suppose I’ll have to sort this mess out!”

“What are you going to do?” he asked, “have an abortion?”

“That would be too easy, wouldn’t it?” she grated.

Which is when she put in motion the very process that would lead her, aged twenty, to be incarcerated in an institution. She was sent to it after her trial, not so long after she put a vicious, bloody end to Timmy with his favourite pen knife.

Neither Don nor Jean could understand what had happened to their precious Tina and did what little they could to try to explain the killer she’d turned into, but there wasn’t really anything they could say that would hold any weight.

She had her child in the hospital wing of an institution for the criminally insane. It was a daughter, and in the fulness of time she was adopted. By Shirley and her husband, by spooky councidence because Shirley had learned all about love but a harsh childhood had left her sterile, and she so wanted a child to love like she hadn’t been when she was young. But she adopted Tina’s tiny one, so all was well.

“I was like you once,” said a haggard and unkempt woman one day in the washroom, “I had a kid in here, just like you. I wish I’d kept her but… I dunno, I was insane and it was a long time ago… they were going to call her Tina because she was so tiny! I sometimes think, I sometimes hope she’s okay.”

© Peter Rogerson 23.08.22

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