Hailing Maddy

The heavy clunk of metal locking into metal is a sudden staccato
exclamation splintering through the low, rhythmic patter of the sodding
torrential downpour that drenches me as I slam the door and leg it
through the unearthly lamplight to number forty-one. I look back and
see the raindrops pelting and splashing and bouncing off tarmac like
arrows shooting out of the darkness at a dart-board. And I'm orbiting
slowly here, somewhere below bulls-eye, SW12, to be precise, with 'The
Sun' flapping untameably as I shelter myself with the plastic-perfect
skin of some semi-nude stunner while the water gropes at her and blurs
wet spots. I'm dithering and it's pissing it down.

The familiar clack of the key in the lock and I'm inside, weeping rain
all over the floor. Upstairs I hear you jump up quirkily and pad across
the ceiling to boil the kettle. I pant my way up, wriggling out of my
saturated coat and opening the door. Ah, the wooden floorboards,
slightly scummy yellow walls that are further jaundiced by cigarette
smoke, the frilly green lampshade made of those slippy hair-like
threads that seem to tickle your eyes, your arty prints and beloved
fish in their droning tank, and you. First I see your slippers and a
book, spine bent to form a little roof for the hummingbirds on the arm
of your mother's ugly chair. You materialise, the door jamb hiding half
of you from head to toe and making me notice how unsymmetrical you are.
But you're more beautiful to me than any of the media Barbie-dolls.
Your black, curly hair is a little untidy although I like the stray
strands softening your maple-syrup face. I like the little mole on your
cheek, the creases underneath your eyes, your slightly bulbous nose and
the dimples that ooze across your face when your full scarlet lips
break into that pretty, toothy grin of yours that makes you look
nineteen again.

'Here's your tea.' You stretch an arm in my direction, a steaming mug
welcoming me to the warmth of here.

'I love you Maddy Hanley.'

'Aww, Sal.' It's short for Salvador. My dad was all posh, wanted to
rebel against his bourgeois upbringing and that, so he went out with my
mum. As soon as he saw a dirty nappy he decided to go back to his cosy
world of nannies and hors-d'oeuvres. Insisted on calling me after Dal?,
then buggered off before I'd blown my second candle out. If you ask me,
I'm glad I never had a dad like that, but he shouldn't have left my mum
with a yowling sprog like me.

I pluck one of the little orange flowers I bought home on your fortieth
birthday from a vase and plant it lopsidedly in your hair, taking the
tea with my other hand. You kiss me on the cheek affectionately and I
ask how your day was.

'Fairly quiet, but not bad. A man bought in a book on South American
life,' you reply. You work in a second-hand bookshop with Ray, a bloke
who wears a ruby beret and comes over for dinner on occasion. I can
picture you, shadowed by shelves of tatty books, reading in your corner
with your glasses until a customer sounds the little bell on the door
and rattles up the dust. The specs make you look intellectual, very
cultured, and you are. You got me reading and appreciating fine art and
music and that, now I chat to the literary type punters about
Baudelaire and smirk to myself in the rear-view mirror, bulking my
shoulders like a conceited peacock.

'Oh yeah. Glad your pa moved over here?' I venture. You're quite touchy
when it comes to this, all proud of your Brazilian heritage, even
though you were born in Blackpool.

'I am actually.' I smile. It's late, so I fry myself an egg and cook up
some beans on toast while you half pretend to read in the living room,
but really you're talking to me, calling through to the kitchen in your
cheery calming voice. I can almost feel the air refracting at the mercy
of your wild gesticulation. You give up on your book when I slump
opposite you on the settee and chat through greasy mouthfuls, but you
get up and put some music on. It's a bluesy black female voice, a rich
alto husking out a mellow lament about love lost. When I've eaten, you
take me in your arms and slow-dance, steering me gracefully round
coffee tables and the telly. I feel your hips swaying and your
voluptuous breasts pressing into my jersey. When you get all romantic
and sentimental like this, it feels mildly carnal to hold you and move
sensually across the room, as if you've slipped into an evening gown of
youth and become a giggling, bewitching teen and I'm still a
middle-aged man with a beer gut, clumsily hoofing around with my
chapped, fumbling hands encircling your smooth, curvy waist.

Suddenly you feel all fragile and vulnerable in my arms and you're
trembling slightly beneath my hands, as if a little earthquake of
emotion is swelling up in your epicentral heart.

'You all right darling?' I'm a little concerned. You turn your face up
and look into my eyes. Yours are glittering and moist, soulful, the
colour of black coffee. The corners of your mouth are slightly downcast
and a desperate expression has invaded your sweet face.

'You're everything to me, Sal. I'm scared, I don't want to lose
you.'

You've had this thing about being abandoned and alone in the world
since your little sister decided to recover her roots and moved to
Brazil. The two of you have always been close and you try to act
extroverted and outgoing but I know you're shy and felt friendless and
insecure after she left.

'Madeleine. How many times do I have to tell you? I'm not going
anywhere. There's no need to be worried.' I wonder what you've been
reading and glance over at the coffee table. 'Tess of the
D'Urbervilles.' 'No bloody wonder you've been fretting if you're
reading that.'

'You're right.' Forcing a little smile, you squeeze me tight the way
you finger dough when you bake bread, all intense and secretive. I
usher you into the bedroom, clicking on the dim, dusky pink glow of the
bedside lamp. After peeling off damp clothes I lie down and a moment
later you slither in beside me, gathering the duvet to your chest. We
don't say much, you and I, but we don't need to. The silence that seems
to be levitating over the headboard as we stare at the ceiling is
companionable. A few minutes pass before you sigh lightly and switch us
into darkness. I still watch the ceiling absently until my eyes become
accustomed to the dark and your breathing regulates, undergoing the
nightly rallentando to your familiar and gentle stertor.

I know tonight I won't be able to sleep. It's one of those evenings
when rooms seem empty in the dark and all you can do is scan the walls
with restless eyes and think how thick the air is with all your little
plaguing thoughts. One usually predominates, and this time it's you.
It's almost as if you astrally project yourself in titanic proportions,
superimposed onto the cool night breeze above me, stirring the curtains
and moaning at me using the creaky wood in this house as your voice
box. I visualise each detail of your face, hands, bosom, thighs and
feet as if they have been magnified. When I turn my head and look
across the gulf of our starched pillows you seem petite and compact,
like a small, high-performance computer that has replaced the bungling
old model which consumed half the room. I wonder what's happening
inside your motherboard, what dreams, and how you can imagine that I'd
leave you. A slight jealousy gnaws at me while I watch your peaceful
slumber, a little resentment at the fact that you, who were anxious
earlier, could expel any little demons when you relaxed your muscles,
and drift smoothly under the heavy wave of sleep. You exhale noxious
thoughts until the air is dense with them and I'm pestered by them,
second-hand and sour-tasting. After an hour of sleeplessness, I
remember this book I was given earlier and heave myself out of bed.
Padding into the living room, I wrench it out of my coat pocket,
slightly soggy, and look at the cover. 'The Rope Around My Neck' is the
title and there's a painting on the cover of a hanging girl in the
style of Picasso. Cheerful. In white letters at the bottom the author's
name is modestly written. Caroline Claybourne.

~ * ~

She gave me the book because she didn't have enough money on her. She
was my last customer and a very amiable one at that. I was first in the
cab queue outside a station and she came tripping out into the
electronic twilight with a backpack, smiling to herself like
Buddha.

'Can you take me to Saltham Street?' Her voice was kind of lyrical,
tinkling through the metal grate. I nodded and glanced in the rear-view
at a dark-skinned girl with long wavy hair, wiry like a horse's. She
had enchanting eyes and a heart-shaped mouth.

'Home from a holiday?' I inquired, being friendly.

'Kind of. It was a writers' retreat. It was brilliant, you can get away
from the world, forget everything and just write and really
concentrate. I've written some of my best work this week I
think.'

'You're a writer? Great, my wife and I love reading, she works in a
second-hand bookshop. What do you write?'

'I've done a lot of poetry but I've had one novel published and I'm
hoping to start another one next year.'

'Blimey! You're young. Must be talented!' I saw her blush a
little.

'Well, I'm twenty-four. I guess that's fairly young, but I started
writing when I was tiny. It's in my blood I think.'

We chatted about literature we liked and then her career for a while,
how she was first published and won an award for a poem she wrote about
a light-bulb, and her time at uni studying English. She laughed as she
told me how she used to be a recluse, hunchbacked over her desk with a
candle, an ink well and a phrenologist's head to create some kind of
inspirational atmosphere while all her peers got drunk and copulated in
nightclub toilets. I got the idea that she was kind of special. I have
a knack of knowing when a person is different from your average
citizen. We were chattering away when she timidly pointed at a house
that was framed nicely by some cramped-up foetal trees. 'It's just
here.'

I pulled up and she pushed the heavy door, climbing out with her
burdenous bundle that didn't stop her almost skipping to my front
passenger window on light girlish feet. I smiled, she seemed like a
little pixie with a dizzy overgrown mind swirling in a halo of stories
around her fairy head.

'That'll be ?6.50 please, dear,' I said, making a special effort not to
hold my palm out expectantly, a habit I've noticed in shop assistants
and cabbies that makes people fumble nervously. She was rummaging
through her purse with a flustered expression anyway.

'Look, I'm really sorry, I've only got a fiver. Um...' I waited while
she contemplated something. 'I don't suppose you'd like a copy of my
book do you? To make up for the extra I don't have. Nobody's at home,
see, and I didn't leave any cash in the house. I've got a paperback
though, that I took to the retreat.'

Nobody's ever given me a book in return for a ride before. I was
interested to read what words this raven-haired girl had conceived, so
when she pulled a mildly tattered volume from her rucksack I smiled and
accepted it. Glancing at it quickly I saw her name.

'Well, goodnight, Caroline Claybourne. I'm sure I'll enjoy your magnum
opus!'

Her impish laugh spangled one last time and she strained her head
towards the window to read the name on my cabby-card. I cringe slightly
whenever people see that embarrassing passport photo of me looking like
a serial killer on death row. She leant back and started to recede
beyond the orange pool cast by the street-lamp. 'Night Salvador
Hanley!'

~ * ~

I'm a fairly quick reader. Seeing as I can't sleep, I decide to make
myself a coffee and sharpen my mind properly. Not that I need to, my
head feels shiny and keen as a knife right now. I settle down, nestling
with the hummingbirds that sip like I sip coffee, the yellow from the
table light with its neck bent like a straw, a chrome mother bird
incubating their fading blue. I open the book and the first sentence
is, 'I will say nothing of my biological mother.' It's an
autobiographical novel and I can hear the young woman's singsong voice
reading it aloud inside my head, although the words aren't very happy.
'I keep her in a special place, much like her womb still branded with
the fossil of my baby bones. She lingers in the time before me when the
blueprint was being formed for the time after, but she was not there
when I unfolded, and this is the story of a life which she was not a
part of.'

Two hundred and thirty-eight pages. I read up to the seventh chapter
and then make myself another coffee. It's absorbed me and I won't sleep
until I've read the last word. The story tells of a girl who was lifted
at birth from her mother who was still under anaesthetic. The teenage
mother had undergone a Caesarian section and, relieved at escaping a
live birth due to the complicated delivery, requested that her child be
removed before she had to see it. Baby Lily emerged blue, almost
strangled by her own umbilical cord. She was adopted by a couple named
Ned and Molly Claybourne who cherished her and bought her up like a
little princess. They already had a son, Kyle, who was seven and
passionately jealous of the attention lavished on the cute little pest
who had intruded on his comfortable life. Lily loved her family and
never felt the need to trace her biological mother. She was happy with
her parents, although Kyle held a strong antipathy towards her which
was occasionally interrupted by bursts of affection, in which she was
'his little Lilliputian'.

Kyle was a sleepwalker. Lily had been solemnly warned by her parents
over and over that she must never, under any circumstances, wake her
brother from his somnambulation. One night when she was eight, Kyle
wandered into Lily's room and groped at her, pinning her to the bed and
shoving his cold hands underneath her night-dress. She wanted to scream
and kick him, throw him off the bed but she remembered what she had
been told. At that point, her life spiralled downwards and she became a
very frightened, silent child. Of course, she couldn't tell Ned or
Molly what Kyle did to her because he was their child by blood and she
assumed they would naturally believe and defend him.

Lily was a beautiful teenager blossoming into an attractive woman. Kyle
was winsome and witty, but at the centre of a circle of riotous and
angry youths. Having found Lily satisfied his fierce sexual appetite,
Kyle appointed himself pimp and would let his friends violate her in
exchange for drugs, while he supervised from the corner of the room
like a chaperone accompanying his little sister on a date, an ironic
advocate for innocence. By the time Lily was seventeen she was royally
botched and, after being impregnated by one of Kyle's drug-fiend
friends, was found by Ned, hanging half-dead from a curtain rail, and
subsequently institutionalised. Her adoptive parents knew nothing of
her prolonged abuse and believed Kyle's drug habit extended only to the
recreational use of marijuana. A year later Kyle died of an accidental
heroin overdose. Eventually, Lily was discharged from the mental
hospital and finished her education.

Jesus, here I am, a full-grown man, blubbing over page two-three-eight.
The lads at work would never stop razzing. Poor girl, she looked so
sprightly too. Deeply moved, and impressed by Caroline's authorship, I
potter back to bed and stash the book in my bedside cabinet. Better not
let you see it. You're infertile, motherhood has always been a bit of a
sore point with you, understandably. I remember how you wept when your
sister's boy told you he loved his aunty Maddy and you held him to your
breast. He was three then and he'll be twelve now. I know you wonder
what kind of little Brazilian your nephew's growing up into.

I'm feeling pretty thoughtful now, but it's three in the morning and
I'm finally tired. I watch you for a little while, your chest
undulating deeply and your lips slightly parted. Your skin is warm and
balmy despite the slightly chilly draught still billowing through the
curtains. London seems insomniac like me, but the sounds of cars
skimming anonymously through the streets seem to be whispering 'hush'
and harmonising in a lullaby. Soon I feel my eyelids become heavy and
my arms flop to my sides. Time for some shuteye. Thinking of poor
little Lily and wanting to cradle her tiny blue newborn body like the
child you never had, I nod off gently.

~ * ~

A few months later, I'm coasting along in the taxi, newly cleaned and
sparkling black like an invincible cockroach at about seven in the
evening, when Larry starts rasping over the walkie-talkie which
fragments voices and spits words at me. He's telling me that I've been
requested for Saltham Street in ten minutes. So I turn round pronto and
make haste. When I drive up there, that girl Caroline Claybourne is
standing on the pavement waiting. She's looking all nervous, still
impish, but this time as if she's expecting some giant to come stomping
out of nowhere at any minute and crush her under his hulking great Doc
Marten. Her eyes are darting about all over the place like cartoons
shifting on a fruit machine, it makes me a little uneasy. I haven't got
a clue what to say to her after reading that book. I'm only a humble
cabby and right now I'm cursing you for ever getting me into books. In
these situations, you feel like you've got to say something consoling
or wise, but you're out of your depth.

'How's it going?' is the best I can manage. She seems really quiet this
time, like a little mouse.

'Fine thanks. I'd like to go to Osby Lane please.'

'What a coincidence! That's my very road,' I exclaim. The young lady
laughs forcefully and doesn't say a word more. I just drive, catching
her eye in the mirror every so often and commenting on the book.
'Appropriate title... really poetic style... good characterisation...
very touching... you'll go far I'm sure... it almost made me cry!' That
last one's a bit of a euphemism. She just smiles gratefully with those
little cordate lips of hers, but whatever's playing on her mind is
obviously troubling her to muteness. I wonder why she asked for
Salvador Hanley in particular if she wasn't going to speak. I don't
mind, it's just a little awkward. I cruise down Osby Lane and she
motions for me to stop right across the road from our place. She's got
the right money this time and thanks me with a gentle smile. I'm just
about to drive off before I'm tempted to climb out and get off duty
early, cross the road and retreat into the hummingbird chair with a cup
of tea, when I see that she's walking right towards our door. Jumping
out the cab I call across the road, 'Caroline? That's my house! You
come for Maddy or me? Or maybe you've got the wrong number?'

'No. Number forty-one,' she answers, casting her eyes down to a
creased-up scrap of paper in her clammy palm. It looks like she'd been
sponging up each word like a leach for days.

'Oh. Well, allow me then.' I slide the key into the lock and open the
door, letting her in. For some reason, neither of us say a word. I
don't ask why she's in my home and she doesn't feel compelled to
explain, or can't. I hear your voice upstairs pipe, surprised, 'Hark!
You're home early!' in your jolly Maddy-way, and the slapping of your
slippers on wood like fish on a ship deck as you cross the room in your
ritual kettle-boiling routine. Miss Claybourne is walking hesitantly up
the stairs ahead of me, pale knuckles clasping the banister, and I'm
wondering if she's about to faint or something. As we enter the sitting
room, your voice floats through from the kitchen.
'Ooh, visitors?', and you appear in the doorway in that spooky way,
stopping in your tracks when you see the stranger by my side.

'Hello...' your voice is uncertain and polite.

'Madeleine Molena?' Miss Claybourne hazards, like a child testing the
sound of a new word tripping off the tongue.

'Yes, that's me?', although you don't sound too sure. Caroline's voice
is even more unsteady and she sounds on the verge of crying as she
takes a deep breath and attempts to regain some composure.

'Hey, mum.' And outside I see that it's started to rain, and the tears
come stammering down.