Scarborough Baby – Chapter 3b

I am happy to present the second half of Chapter 3 of this riveting novel. In the first half of the chapter, Harv found Angie’s diary from when she was a teenage girl, and realizes that by reading it she may uncover the identity of her biological father, something which Angie has kept a secret from her for her entire life. Harv has always found this inexplicable and frustrating, and is determined to find out the truth. This is where events are irretrievably set in motion, and from here on out, there is no looking back. In the second half of this chapter, as Harv reads on, she makes a terrible discovery. Enjoy! And get ready to start biting your nails.

CHAPTER 3b

After this episode, the diary continued in much the same vein. I thumbed through quickly, seeing some empty pages, a sprinkling of capital HURRAH’s and the regular red asterisks.  There were some dull little write ups on nothing in particular and some containing more, deeply difficult to read descriptions of sexual forays, none of them any more sophisticated or satisfactory than the Gary Smythe affair.
Angie clearly hadn’t learned very fast. In fact it appeared that she hadn’t learned at all. She had ridden the exhilarating waves of teenage sex and carelessly given love, with a gung ho naivety, lining herself up again and again to be plunged into troughs of despair and disappointed tears.
I sat back and let the pages riffle through my fingers like a flick book and suddenly understood the significance of the red asterisks; each one flagged up a night when she had gone all the way, like notches on the headboard, keeping score. As I flicked through they flashed up with shocking regularity, about once a fortnight in fact.
It was like a competition. Had she and Sal and Janice just been going hell for leather to notch up the biggest number?  Did they all have a go with the same ones and compare and allocate points?  I felt sorry and a little sick.
I had been eighteen when I had lost my virginity and that had been to James, a serious boyfriend, and we’d waited for at least a month. Then for the next three years I’d only had sex with him. Now, here was my mother, going at it like it was a living, with all and sundry.
The first four months of the diary, she must have totalled what? I checked back, making a count of the asterisks, one, two, three, four, seven.  Seven – nearly one a fortnight.  I shook my head like a disappointed head mistress, appalled at the promising girl who has let the whole school down so badly.  It was no wonder that she had fallen pregnant with this level of reckless activity. For God’s sake, how old had she been? Fifteen? Sixteen?
I flipped back to the beginning, to see the year that the diary had been written, but could find no reference until I noticed two pages stuck together and reamed a fingernail around the gold edging, peeling them apart to reveal the year as 1974.
This was my apocalypse; a gasp escaped as if I had been shocked and an urgent plume of adrenaline fluttered its way from under my ribs to stroke at my heart with a hot, feathery rush.
If there had been a million red asterisks in the first six months of that diary, they would have paled into insignificance with the one that I thought might be twinkling on or around the top of pages dated mid June. I leafed slowly back through the diary turned Pandora’s Box; April, May, steeling myself for what I might find there, all the time knowing that the truth might be far more unsavoury than the fantasy, knowing that it might be better if I didn’t know the answer.
I had been born on Thursday March 6th 1975. Therefore, according to the conception calculator I had looked at on the internet, I had been conceived on or around the thirteenth of June 1974.   Apart from the fact that Angie was my mother, this was the only absolute regarding my conception; that, around the middle of June 1974, my mother had coupled with the man who was probably my father.  This date had secretly felt as significant to me in the absence of any other information, as a birthday.
Part of me hoped that this page of potentially huge implication would be blank and nothing would have changed.  The alternative might be the discovery that a goon like Gary Smythe had spawned me, with my mother’s revolting detail leaving me feeling like a seedy voyeur at my own grunting and youthfully enthusiastic fertilisation. I didn’t want to read that the residue of this disgusting mating had just been some ‘stuff’ which had been wiped off a moquette cushion in a dreary living room, that I was the bit that got away. If that was what I found there, I would have to live with that horrible truth and never be able to tell, and every time I saw Gary Smythe I would wonder if he knew, find myself looking for myself in him.  I would never go out in Scarborough again.
I began to turn the page, eyes half closed as if I could just feed myself a blurry half version of this enormous truth until I knew whether I liked it or not.
At the top of the page, blazing like a beacon was the red asterisk. Wednesday June 12, 1974.  The entry went on across the 13th and over to the 14th. There was a flattened cigarette packet, black and still shiny with a gold JPS insignia. On the white inside was written, ‘Angie, Easy Rider, get my dad’s special copy. I’m in it.’
The words were heavily underlined and there was a scribbly forward slanting signature that I couldn’t make out. I put my hand to my mouth and began tentatively to read.
‘It’s two a.m and I’ve just got home. Going to feel like shit tomorrow but I don’t care ‘cos I think I’m in love. AGAIN!!!  Had the weirdest night. Left work and stopped at the Spar to get some fags.  There was this bloke in there and he was absolutely gorgeous. He had on this shirt that made your eyes go funny and he smiled at me when I was buying my stuff at the counter then he smiled at me again when I left and said ‘bye’.  I looked awful. Had my shitty uniform on, but at least I’d rolled up the skirt a bit to make it shorter and tied the horrible shirt in a knot at the front. I hung around outside, waiting for him to come out. Pretended I’d lost something in the bottom of my bag. I really, really wanted to talk to him. Just as he came out, some Tampax fell out of my handbag. REALLY EMBARRASSED.  He was laughing and he came over and picked them up. He had a nice Newcastle accent and he smiled a lot. He said he was on his way to Hull and he had stopped off in Scarborough because he’d never been. He needed somewhere to stay. I started to give him directions to the B and B’s and all the time, he was staring at my mouth and his eyes were sort of twinkling. It made me feel excited and uncomfortable all at the same time. HE IS GORGEOUS. It was like he couldn’t take his eyes off me. It got me all confused and shy because he knew what he was doing. I kept saying ‘Stop it,’ and he kept saying ‘What?’ and smiling more at me. I felt like a little kid.  I said I’d show him where the places to stay were instead of telling him and he said he’d take me home after. We got into his car, it was better than dads and I took him through town. I was hoping that someone might see me in the car with him, but we didn’t see anyone.  Drove up to South Parade and he went into one and booked in, then we went for a drink out of town on the way to Whitby and had fish and chips at a pub. We sat behind a pillar so the barmaid couldn’t see me in case she wouldn’t serve me.  I phoned Mum and Dad and said I wouldn’t be in for tea. Told them I was with Janice. He’s really funny and into films and videos. I’ve never even seen a video machine.  Kept going on and on about Easy Rider. He says I need to see it.  Wrote it down on this fag packet so I’d remember the name of it. Kept teasing me that his dad had a special copy and he was in it. I don’t believe him but he kept saying it was true. His name’s Martin Simmons and he comes from somewhere near Newcastle.’
I looked again at the flattened JPS packet. Now I could see that the signature said Martin Simmons.
‘On the way home we stopped in Peasholme Park and he started kissing me, then we got in the back of his car and we did it, it was fantastic and he kisses really well.  Afterwards we stayed in the back for ages and he told me about Newcastle and talked about music and stuff.  He’s really, really sweet and gentle and he’s going to take me out again while he’s here. We smoked nearly forty fags and he had got some beer from the Spar, so then we went back in the front drank some cans and sat up at the park till half one. He wanted to take me home, but I got him to drop me near South Parade and I walked down the hill. Didn’t want dad to see me get home in his car. Said he’d ring me tomorrow. He’s got green eyes and long dark wavy hair and a really nice moustache. Had to sneak in so Dad didn’t know what time I got home on a work night. Think it’s O.K.  Can’t wait till tomorrow.’
There was the same unsophisticated giddiness in Angie’s telling of the story but none of the coarseness which had made some of her other encounters seem so unclean.  He had stayed with her for hours after they had ‘done it’ and they had shared cigarettes and beer and conversation. He had taken her to a country pub, he had fed her and at the end of the night, he had wanted to take her home and when he had left her he had done so with a promise of more.  I felt a sense of warm relief.  Martin Simmons from Newcastle with green eyes and a shirt that makes your eyes go funny is going to take her out again.
I quickly checked back through the pages, wanting to be sure there had been no other sex which might interfere with my now desperate desire that he was the man I had been looking for.  There was an asterisk a week and a half before, someone called John Clarke; I supposed that he could be a contender but it was more unlikely I convinced myself. I wanted Martin Simmons to be the one. The last sweet and significant piece of my jigsaw clicked into place, somewhere so visceral I couldn’t locate it.  It made me shudder.  My picture felt complete. This was all that I had needed; a few precise brush strokes and a name. I liked him.
What I now understood was that Angie, having committed this act to paper, must have known all along that he was most likely to be the father. So why had she refused to tell. When she realised that she had missed a period, she had to have known; the facts had been in front of her written there in black and white. I couldn’t understand why she had refused to tell me anything about him, given that there seemed to be a lot less to be ashamed of in this encounter than there had been with the rest of them.
I excitedly turned the page to the fifteenth and then the sixteenth but they stared back glaringly and humiliatingly blank.  He had let her down.
I felt as deflated and sorry and disappointed for Angie’s empty pages as she probably had.  They whispered a sad defeat. There was none of the excuses and angry expletives which had followed her earlier let-downs. He had been nice to her, he had been different and she wanted to see him again but he hadn’t phoned.
I turned the page, and another and another, wanting so badly to see one of her big, shouting HURRAHS!  Instead there was nothing but a piece of newspaper folded into a yellowing square.
I opened it carefully, the creases so well pressed that it threatened to break apart as I unfolded it; The Scarborough Herald; the top half of the front page with a colour photograph and a blaring headline, ‘Man found murdered in Scarborough B&B’.  The page was dated Fri. 14 June.
The newspaper picture showed a typical Scarborough guesthouse, but with two policemen standing guard at the wooden front gate.  A Ford Escort squad car was parked in the street. The pavement had been taped off.
I read the article. ‘The body of a man, not believed to be a Scarborough resident, was found yesterday morning at the Golden Sands Bed and Breakfast on South Parade.
The owner of Golden Sands, Mrs Edna Carr, who became suspicious when she found blood on the walls and in the entrance to the property on Thursday morning, made the grisly discovery at about 6.30 a.m.
The man who is thought to be in his early twenties and who, police report, was repeatedly stabbed, bled to death in his room.  Blood found in what is assumed to be his car, lead police to believe the attack may have taken place elsewhere.
Police say they have no clues at present although Mrs. Carr told police that she thought she heard him returning at about two a.m on Thursday morning.
The victim is 6’1” tall, of slim build, with dark hair and a moustache.  Police are appealing for witnesses who may have been in the vicinity of South Parade in the early hours of Thursday morning or who may have seen anything suspicious.’
And I knew it was him. Martin Simmons. I felt winded. I involuntarily stood up, my emotions oscillating between shock and disbelief and a selfish little thrust of horrible disappointment.  Within those two small pages he had been a possibility. Alive and warm, talking, laughing and eating and having young sex in the back of a car and with a turn of the page, he was dead. Not just dead, but murdered, stabbed repeatedly.  How many times was repeatedly?
The word ‘repeatedly’ hung in my head and suddenly felt sickening, the imagined sound of blunt fist and sharp blade again and again driving into the minced flesh and adrenaline engorged organs of the man in the shirt that made your eyes go funny, with his green eyes and dark wavy hair.
Had he put his hands up to protect himself while the blurry image of his murderer flickered before him like the fragmented frames of a terrible film?  I curled my hands to my chest, the backs of my knees zinging as I imagined the shear and sting of flashing metal as it slashed through the tautness of the tendons in his fingers, rendering them useless red jelly on bone.
I imagined Mrs Carr the next morning, knocking, ear to the door, calling with increasing urgency, her concern growing until unable to stand it any longer, she made a proprietary stand and gained entrance with her master key.
Did she find him lying across the bed? One dried up eye, a slit of white staring at the wall, cheek stuck to the pillow with a foamy splutter of bloody spume coughed out and fanning from his mouth and beginning to dry black at the edges.
Where was Angie in all of this? My head felt as if infused with menthol, airy and clear as images flashed graphically and in full, horrible colour. I shook myself to make the pictures go away, feeling nothing and yet everything, the silence of the attic roaring, as the man I so badly wanted to be my father died on the little piece of yellowing, dried up paper which trembled in my hand.

Stay tuned next week for Chapter 4, and don’t forget to comment.

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Tagged as: Angie, Family, Father, Mother