Ann Cleeves - Burial of Ghosts

I’d taken English because I liked the look of the teacher, a moody guy with hooded eyes, a shaved head and a leather jacket, psychology because Jessie thought it would be interesting and sociology because she said I had to do three. You couldn’t get to university without three. None of her lodgers had been to university before. I’d be the first.

‘I did it to humour her. Thought she was mad.’

‘Of course, you passed,’ Philip said. ‘Flying colours.’ He hadn’t spoken while I was describing my time at Jess’s, but I could tell he was listening. Properly listening. Not just letting the words wash over him.

‘Two As and a B.’ I grinned, remembering Jess’s face when I waved the flimsy results slip under her nose. ‘Only five marks short of an A in sociology.’

Philip smiled too, as if he was sharing my triumph, but I thought I should probably be more cool. Probably he and all his friends had brilliant A-levels.

‘What did you do at university?’ he asked.

‘A social work diploma.’

‘Of course.’

‘I thought I could make a difference to kids like me.’ I paused. ‘Cheesy, huh?’

He didn’t deny it, grinned again. ‘What did you do when you graduated?’

‘I wanted to work in residential care. I took a post in a secure unit.’

‘Young offenders?’

‘Mostly. Or kids who were very disturbed. Likely to harm themselves or other people.’

I expected another facetious comment, but none came.

‘I loved it. Every day was different and challenging. I thought I was getting through to them. I thought I was developing some sort of relationship.’

‘But?’

‘No buts. It was just tough. I needed a break. Morocco seemed a good idea.’

He could tell there was more to it than that, but he didn’t push it, not even when I started shaking. It must have been close to 100 degrees in that bus, but suddenly I was trembling. Philip put his arm around me and pulled me towards him. The woman in the seat in front of us turned and peered out through the slit in her veil. Her eyes were sparkling with interest and amusement.

That morning in the bus Philip got my take on the story, the authorized version of the life and times of Lizzie Bartholomew. I didn’t tell him everything. For example, I didn’t describe the antics which really got up the noses of the authorities while I was a kid, the court appearances, the thieving. Because, despite his sympathy, he’d be on the same side as them. I could tell the sort of man he was. He’d pay his taxes at the first demand. He’d vote. Write to the papers about crime figures, litter in the street, dog shite. He was decent and respectable.

Lizzie Bartholomew is a fiction, not created by me but for me. I wouldn’t exist except for the imagination and prompt action of two middle-aged ladies who stumbled upon me. Stumbled literally. They were walking their dog along the headland at Newbiggin. It was 30 November, six in the evening, already dark. Fog blanked out the buoys in the bay, and they took the path through the churchyard because it was safer.

The dog went ahead of them, so when I said before that they tripped over me, I was fibbing for effect. A bad habit of mine. The story’s always more important than the truth. It wasn’t the ladies who tripped over me but the mongrel collie bitch.

I was in the church porch, which was open to the elements on the seaward side, wrapped in a plaid blanket. Not newly born, they were told later, but not more than a week old.

There were appeals for my mother to come forward, but no one was surprised when there was no response. I was a very dark baby, with black hair and olive skin made more sallow by jaundice. Not a pretty child. It was assumed immediately that I belonged to the travellers who camped with their scraggy ponies and their clapped-out vans up the coast at Lynemouth. They were a law unto themselves, the gypsies. Local people had no difficulty in believing that they ate babies. Not surprising, then, that they should leave one in the porch of a church. Later apparently, the police went with a district nurse to talk to the group. You can imagine the scene, the animals, the raggle-taggle children, a fire in an oil drum kept alight with driftwood and sea coal. Of course they wouldn’t talk to strangers. Why should they? In their position I’d keep quiet too. If there was a young woman among them who had been pregnant, but was no longer, or someone who’d drifted away, no one was telling. The group changed all the time. It wasn’t a permanent site.

I’m not sure much else was done to trace my mother. There was an article in the local paper. I’ve seen that. But the assumption was that I’d been left by the gypsies and that I was better off without a family than belonging to a family of that kind. I’d had a narrow escape. So I was taken off to the hospital in Ashington and became the responsibility of the social services.

They had to give me a name. Bartholomew came after St Bartholomew’s, the church. I never minded that. It sounded solid and impressive, like the building itself. And Lizzie. Not Elizabeth, even on the birth certificate. I would have liked Elizabeth. Lizzie after the mongrel bitch.

I should have been adopted. That was the plan. A short-term foster placement, then, if my parents couldn’t be found, adoption. But it never worked out that way and later, when I asked why, no one could tell me, even when I stormed into the office and demanded to see my file. I suspect it was a mixture of lethargy, prejudice and incompetence. None of the social workers cared enough to make it happen. Prospective parents were put off by my wild looks – I still looked foreign as I grew older – and my history. Perhaps they thought a child with gypsy blood would be uncontrollable. Did they imagine me cursing their cats and selling sprigs of heather at the neighbours’ doors?

The children’s homes were much as I described them to Philip. They merge in my mind into a blur. There was one dreadful place run by nuns, but on the whole they were comfortable enough, just unimaginably dull. The workers seemed to fall into two camps – either they were earnest young professionals who sat in the office writing reports and waiting to be promoted, or idle middle-aged women who watched hours of television while claiming to be overworked. Perhaps that’s unjust and my memory’s selective, but I don’t recall any of them spending time with us. When I came in from school, for example, there was no one to listen to my petty grievances, and I always had plenty of those. On the television, I saw families eating together, playing board games, laughing. I thought everyone else in the world had that except us. Now, of course, I know better. What I’m trying to say is that there were adults in the building, but they were always doing other things. More important things. They didn’t enjoy our company. We were deprived of their attention.

That’s my explanation for my behaviour anyway. My excuse. At least it was at the time. They called my aggression attention-seeking. And so it was. Recently everything has seemed much more complicated.

The driver stopped at the top of the Tizn Test pass, at a roadside café, for the driver to eat lunch. We got out to stretch our legs and marvel at the view. It was dizzying. We were looking down at snow and soaring vultures. Philip walked away from the road up a narrow path. He squatted on his heels to look more closely at the scrubby bushes, then called me to join him.

‘This is caper,’ he said. ‘You know, we use the fruit in cooking.’

That is the only identification I remember, but he would have named them all for me, all the plants and the trees, if I’d given him the chance. Shown any interest at all. He could have been engrossed there for hours, but he sensed my attention wandering.