Caryl Phillips - The Lost Child

At school I decided to try harder because that’s all there was now. There was no Tommy, and I didn’t feel like talking to anybody, and so inevitably I soon discovered that I had no mates. I’d always been a bit of a clever clogs when it came to schoolwork, and the teachers often said if I continued to make an effort, I could do very well. I decided to swot up and try and come top in everything, except the science subjects, of course. It was my way of keeping my mind off the depressing reality that I’d been fostered out again, and this time it looked like Mam wasn’t coming to rescue me. Mr. Gilpin obviously felt a bit sorry for me, so he started to give me fifty pence pocket money every Saturday, and I could double it if I helped Mrs. Gilpin with some jobs around the house. The two girls didn’t have to do anything, and they still got more than me, but I wasn’t complaining, for the money gave me a reason to stop nicking things. Mr. Gilpin told me I could use the record player whenever I wanted, but Mrs. Gilpin let me know that she didn’t much care for my Gary Glitter single. Too much shouting, she said, which made me play it even louder in the hope that she might ask me to take it off. But she never did ask me to take it off, and eventually I realized that she never would, and so I started to play it quietly. I’d already worked out that Nancy Gilpin thought she was better than other folks, and she was deluded enough to think that her two girls were at the front of the line when they were handing out brains. I was shocked when, pointing out of the window, she told me that the next-door neighbour’s dog was allowed to do his business in the house, like I’d be interested in hearing this. When it became clear that I wasn’t — despite the additional information that they were proper Asians, for the wife had a big red spot on her forehead — I could tell that she immediately wrote me off and lumped me together with her scruffy husband. However, the sad fact was I now had no choice but to live with these people, and perhaps try and forget Mam.

After she gave me the silent treatment at the hospital, I didn’t hear from Mam for a while, and Mr. Gilpin must have sensed that things hadn’t gone that well, for he didn’t ask me anything, or suggest a return trip to see her. The truth is, Mam’s silence made me feel as though I’d done something wrong, as though it was me who had to explain myself, and the only way I could forget this whole hurtful nightmare was by concentrating on my schoolwork. At night I used to tell myself that maybe one day she’d be better and we could work everything out, but sometimes the feelings got so upsetting that I seriously thought about changing my name. And then Mam started with the phone calls and letters and postcards, and it must have been Mrs. Gilpin who said something to social services, for a posh woman in a fancy twinset came to see me and told me that Mam was disrupting the Gilpins’ household. I didn’t say anything, but the social worker woman gave me a fake smile and said that she’d be bringing Mam on Christmas Day, but Mam never showed up, and I spent most of the day by myself feeling dismal in my bedroom. Things got worse when Mam turned up outside of school, and the teachers wouldn’t let me out until she’d gone, and I just wanted the whole thing to end. Why couldn’t she just go somewhere and get better instead of all this? Why was she embarrassing me?

“Life on Mars?”—David Bowie

After a while I decided that Helen, the older one, wasn’t so bad. She was thirteen, and her little sister, Louise, was nearly eleven, but of late I’d noticed that Helen had lost a lot of weight and started to fill out upstairs. She’d also started to buy the New Musical Express , and every week she’d Sellotape the double-page posters up on her bedroom wall. It was mainly David Cassidy, and the Osmonds, and even the Bay City Rollers, but she also liked some okay music. After school she’d sometimes ask if she could borrow my records, and I told her that was alright as long as she didn’t scratch them. She’d started to write the names of her favourite singers on the covers of her exercise books in all sorts of psychedelic patterns, and it was Helen who brought up the idea that we go to the Rollarena, where David Bowie was doing his final tour as Ziggy Stardust. If you agree to come with me, then Dad will let me go; otherwise you know he’s just going to say that it’s crackers to waste your spending money on a bloke dressed up in aluminum foil, with a bog brush hairdo, and who looks like he’s good to his mam. Do you remember? That’s what Dad said when he saw him on Top of the Pops. He wanted to know if this David Bowie fellar was doing it for a dare. Although I was two years older than her, Helen talked to me like we were the same age. We’ll have to queue for tickets, I said. She shrugged her shoulders as though this was obvious, and so I agreed. Okay then, let’s go.

The concert was on a Thursday night, and I came back early from school to get changed, not that I had any glam gear to get into. Since I’d started studying really hard, I’d kind of lost all interest in clothes, which was just as well since even the hard cases and suedeheads were now starting to wear tie-dyed scoop-neck tee-shirts and glitter, and I didn’t want to be associated with them in any way. However, I knew that Helen would be going in for something flashy, and I was more than a bit curious about what she’d be wearing. She wasn’t back from school yet, so I nipped across the landing and snuck into her room. She had a smart dressing table mirror with three panels so you could adjust them and see what you looked like from the sides as well as the front. Before I knew what I was doing, I was fingering her cuddly toys, and then I started pulling open the drawers and touching her clothes. Steve Pamphlet was always boasting about going all the way with slags late at night in the shop doorways in town, but I’d never even touched a bra. Her underwear felt so soft and comfortable, and so I picked some up and smelled them and rubbed them against me a little, and then I could sense somebody standing behind me. I put the pile of panties back into the drawer and turned around and saw Mrs. Gilpin staring at me. She had on a headscarf, but I could see that her hair was in rollers, and I guessed that she must have been out in the back garden for she’d never be seen in the street with her hair in such a state. I’ll never forget that look on her face. She was glaring at me like she’d finally sized me up and found out who I really was and there was no hiding it now. I knew that we’d never recover from this moment, and I just wanted it to end, but Mrs. Gilpin seemed to glare at me forever. Then, as though nothing had ever happened, she slowly turned and walked out of the room, but she left the door wide open so I’d know that I was expected to follow. Immediately.

“Dat”—Pluto Shervington

I don’t take a good photograph, and as if to prove it, there’s a picture of me that was taken at one of those photo booths not long before I left the Gilpins’ house for university. After Mam died, it was my history teacher who kept chucking compliments in my direction, and I liked the attention, so I started to do extra lessons after school. That’s when he put me on the list for Oxford and Cambridge, but I could tell that he didn’t have much faith that I would do the work necessary to give myself a chance, although I was determined to prove him wrong. In the photograph I’m seventeen and staring into the camera, with my big, unshapely hair and my bulky black-rimmed specs, and I’m not smiling at all. I’m focused, and there’s not even a little hint of a smile. I’ve also got on the worst jumper in the world: a blue, round-necked polyester number, with two white hooped stripes. The truth is I look downcast, which is pretty much how I remember my time as a foster child in the Gilpins’ house. In my own mind, I reckoned that once Mam died the social services people must have told the Gilpins that the decent thing to do would be to see it through until I went off to university. It must have been agony for them because it was undeniable that Mrs. Gilpin hated me, and I didn’t exactly think much of her either. Right from the off, whenever she spoke to me, she’d always been a little abrupt, and then after the thing with Helen’s clothes she never stopped looking at me as though I’d somehow interfered with her precious daughter.