Chapter 13

Again I found myself sitting at the neat kitchen counters and pouring out tea. After I had stuffed the teapot with tea bags and put it on to boil, I sat back and smiled sheepishly.

Mrs Brown looked at me disapprovingly. “Why have you come here, Amelia? If there is a proper reason I suggest to get to it – or get out. I don’t want my time wasted by busybodies.”

“Well...” I started, and then looked at her properly. She wasn’t frowning anymore, though she wasn't smiling either.

“Amelia,” she said huffily, in a bit of sheepish voice, “ I’d like to ...talk to you for a bit...if you would not tell anyone about it, that is.”

She glared at my surprised face, and my wide open mouth and she cleared her throat and said in a gravelly tone, “Tsk, tsk. If you dont’ want to take the time then go. But it’s not like you don’t have anything much better to do. Tsk. Finding this a bore, are you?” She huffed.

I shook my head, my surprise still on my face. “Oh no, Mrs Brown. There’s nothing I’d like more than to listen to you.”

“Humph! Sugary words you’re using that you don’t even mean – young people these days are so insincere. You think I’m a cranky old woman, don’t you? ”

I looked at my hands and tried to hide a smile, as that was just what I had been thinking before I went inside her house. “No...not at all.”

“Of course, of course, you never tell the truth do you? Humph.” Her tone slowly changed and she muttered, “But I wasn’t always like this.

You see, a very, very long time ago, my mother died in childbirth. The child was me. My father never forgave me. He couldn’t bear the sight of me when I was born so I was sent to live with my great-aunt Tracy. She certainly did not share my father’s feelings for me, and cared and loved me like I was her own. But she was tired, arthritic, and old. I was fourteen when she was diagnosed with cancer. She didn’t live to see me have my fifteenth birthday.”

Mrs Brown stopped in mid-sentence and made a choking noise; I could see she was desperately trying to hold back tears. I knew the feeling. You keep them from spilling until it feels like your head is going to explode with the agony of keeping it in.

She took a deep breath and carried on. “In normal circumstances I would have gone to live with my father, and I did, for about a year. But he never let me forget my mother had died, telling my siblings that I had ‘killed our mother.’

"They were old enough to realise this wasn’t true, but they had spent the earlier days of their childhood believing it and hating me so they did not change in their manner towards me that they had in the few times we had met. They were distant and cold, treating me like some outcast. That was probably what my father had wanted. Life was completely unbearable.

"So one day, I ran away from home. I took refuge in a bus shelter, sleeping there all night, without having had anything to eat or drink. In the morning a man found me and took me, starved, bedraggled and raving to his car. When asked what my name was, I changed my surname to the first thing that came into my head – Brown.

"He was going to drive me to the police station but I begged him not to. He was not convinced so I took a risk and told him my whole story. He nodded slowly and agreed that home as I knew it would not be the best place for me to go.

"He took me to his flat and looked after me. I stayed with him for about a week. I’m not sure whether it was illegal or not for him to just take me to his house, it probably was, but there I had been shown so much more kindness than in my previous home that I did not look upon it as such.

"Since in a couple years I would be independent, he arranged for some temporary fostering to take place. The family I stayed with were reserved and polite, asking nothing of my previous life. We didn’t have much of a relationship because of the many other children they housed but I was so grateful to them for letting me stay there.

"Strange as it sounds, I heard nothing from my father all this time. I don’t believe he ever searched for me once I was gone, never worried. It didn’t matter. He didn’t love me and I couldn’t honestly say I loved him.

"When I was eighteen and finally independent, I checked into a hostel with the money I had been provided with and got a job waitressing. I was dedicated in my work, there was nothing else left for me, and tips were countless. My wages were enough to rent a flat. A few months later I passed my A-levels and won a scholarship to one of the best universities in our area. At the age of I studied to be a doctor.

"In university I met a man, also studying for his science degree. His name was Richard Brown. It was like the surname I had chosen for myself all those years ago was a sign. I loved him more than I had ever loved anyone in my whole life. We were made for each other, it was as simple as that.

So we got married. I was just twenty-five.”

Mrs Brown paused, and walked into the hallway. I waited patiently, to find her returning only to beckon me after her. We stopped before the shelf with the picture frames I had seen the first time I had visited her house.

She pointed to the picture of two newly weds standing under an arch. “That was us.” She sighed, and gestured at another one. The one I had seen of an elderly lady with an infant.

“That was me...and my great-aunt Tracy. All I achieved was for her...it is what she would have wanted me to do. When Richard and I became doctors, we had already been trying to have a baby for months. It seemed hopeless. We were unhappy in our work because of the thought of that child we couldn’t have.

"I was thirty-three when I finally became pregnant. The child had Down’s...Richard and I, after a long struggle with ourselves, decided to have it. I brought a baby girl into the world, she was christened Karen. And there began another long string of hardships for us. It wasn’t so hard when she was younger. People accepted her, she was made to feel liked. Little children aren’t prejudiced. But when she was about ten, life was made very hard for her. She grasped the concept of acceptance, and knew exactly when she was being made the victim of a joke.”

I swallowed and looked down. I didn’t want to think about this subject, I wanted to escape from it. But it followed me everywhere I went, relentlessly clutching at me. Mrs Brown pointed at the photo of the sad-looking teenager girl.

“That was Karen. At sixteen. Look at her eyes, Amelia. Can you see any happiness in them? Any joy?”

Mrs Brown broke off, wiping her eyes.

“And then she went into secondary school. Can you imagine her pain, her hardship, Amelia? Can you? No-one understood her, she was ridiculed to the point of despair.

"So we moved her to a special school and moved to a nicer area. By the time she was about fourteen, she was flourishing, and confident in herself. She had even started to make friends of a similar condition. I wasn’t getting any younger, I was about fifty then, perhaps a year younger. But Richard and I were happy because Karen was happy.

One day, she and her friend’s were celebrating her seventeenth birthday party. After endless revelry, we were going home. Waiting at the bus-stop, I realised I didn’t have enough money for everyone’s tickets, and rushed to the nearest ATM.

I heard noise and shouting and dropped everything, rushing back to the bus stop. I was only there in time to see Karen being pushed over the side of the kerb in front of a speeding car. I screamed and rushed over to her side. My head was a blur...I didn’t see anyone except her, lying there, so still, so white...so cold. I squeezed her hand, I shook her, I sat on the road next to her, weeping, all that time waiting for the ambulance, oblivious to everybody but her. On our way to the hospital in the ambulance I had no tears left to cry.”

She broke off. “Sometimes it seems like I still have none left.

When we arrived at the hospital, a bystander from the accident came up to me and told me she had seen everything. The group of teenagers new to the area, the mocking, the jeering, the girls getting beaten up, and then...”

I interrupted her with a gasp. “But...they couldn’t have. I mean...how could they do that to complete strangers. They hadn’t done anything to them apart from being different...”

It was my turn to break off, realising what I had just said. How similar it all was... I blushed again.

“There are people out there like that, Amelia," Mrs Brown sighed. " Hard-hearted, selfish, people, people without feelings. When the doctors came out and told me they had done everything they could but it was too late, I felt like I wanted to die. All over again, like I had done before. But this time I had someone to help me through, and that was Richard. He had come to the hospital the minute he heard of it, and was there, sharing the pain and tears and helping me, and I realised then and there that there was no such thing as despair.”

“How do you know?” I blurted out. “Why do you think so many young people end their lives? Why do you think, Mrs Brown? Because of these people, these people you talked about. And it’s because of them too, that there is despair! Of course there is. There is no hope.

What about the people who don’t have anyone, Mrs Brown? What about them? Are they just meant to grin and bear it, hoping that someone will come along but they never do, they never...”

I was crying too much by that time to talk. I burst out of her flat and realised there was no-where for me to go. I couldn’t go back home and I couldn’t go to Mrs Brown’s. There was no-where except out of the block of flats. And so that’s where I went.