Another in a quite unremarkable series of short stories.

So, met my mother for the first time in my life, found out who my father was, went to the funeral of my only real fried, all within the first few days of my fifteenth birthday.

I didn’t realise that the man that had befriended me almost three years earlier was actually my own father, didn’t realise that he was in constant touch with the mother that I thought had abandoned me without a care all those years earlier. I found out that he had been filming me playing in the street, video as well as photographs and sending them to my mother, she probably had more pictures and things than a ‘normal’ mum would have, boxes and boxes of them. When I was twelve years old she had asked my dad to try and help me on to the right path, he didn’t want to tell me he was my father though so he was very careful not to let anything slip. That is why he was so patient and understanding, not at all the dirty old pervert I thought he was in the beginning. That sounds funny, he actually was an old pervert, made my mum pregnant when she was fourteen, that’s why she was worried about me so much. I was following her path exactly, she didn’t want what happened to her to happen to me.

“So mum how did you and my dad come to make me?” Not the sort of question an ordinary mum would expect from her fifteen-year-old daughter, let alone my mum in her circumstances. She had no tools at her disposal to deal with questions like that, no experience of years of children asking the most difficult of questions. He was about twenty five years old when my mother started ‘seeing’ him. Father to a six-year old boy, married to a woman who got pregnant to trap him when he was nineteen, and never really loved him. Not that she was incapable of love, she had a string of lovers while he was working long hours in the fields struggling to keep a roof over their heads. Every time he tried to initiate normal marital contact she would pull up the drawbridge and reject him. He was working late driving a combined harvester a few miles from the village, his wife went out for fun with another of her lovers and asked a local girl, my mother, to baby sit their son. The harvester broke down and he arrived home earlier than expected, finding my mum, a fourteen year old looking after his son, he quite naturally went ‘hyper’. My mum told him everything she knew, told him of the times she had walked in on his wife making love with almost every man in the village over the years. Things came to a head and he kicked his unfaithful wife out, he tried to keep his son at home asking my mother to help to look after the boy while he continued working. The day his wife got the court order to take his son away was my fathers lowest point, and my mother was there to comfort him, just one time, that was enough and nine months later there I was. Seemed so unfair to me that my dad was there all along and I didn’t know it, and that my mother had kept away from me for so long too. It’s one thing thinking I was conceived from love and passion, a union between two souls deeply enmeshed in each other, born of a long and loving relationship, but no, a comfort shag to help an older man get over losing his son.

So ok there I was, fifteen years old, emotional turmoil my middle name, angry with my mum for leaving me with my un-loving, un-caring, un-emotional grandparents. Upset that my father had three years to tell me he was my father, that he loved me, that he cared if I lived or died. For the next few weeks I was “Miss Zombie” 1977, I had withdrawn as much into my self as anyone could, I totally hated my life, my world, everyone. Then late one night after fighting with my grand parents, fighting with my mum and kicking and stomping my feet at the rest of the world. I grabbed a bottle of pills from my mother’s medicine cabinet, a half bottle of gin from her kitchen and headed out into the moors.

I woke mid morning, mouth of sand, head pounding like the largest timpani in the world was being beaten in there. I was covered in my own vomit, wet from the morning due, and my eyesight was very blurred. Pill and gin bottles both empty, me too I guess. Yet another failure I could chalk up in my life, couldn’t even kill myself. I started sobbing, anyone seeing me in the last few weeks would be forgiven for thinking I was in training for the 1978 crying Olympics. Eventually I fell asleep again and mid afternoon I was woken by a hand pushing my shoulder, I couldn’t hear the “are you all right” comments being made by my tormentor over my own personal percussion section practising timpani forte in my cranial auditorium. I opened my eyes to see a familiar face, a girl from the same school that I attended, the Adolph Hitler academy for girls, she was in school uniform and from the height of the sun I quickly guessed that it was about noon or a little after. I was trying to work out what she was doing on the moors at this time on a school day when the sound of her voice broke in over t the timpani “She’s over hear, I’ve found her”. Within seconds two dozen kids from school and an assortment of police and ambulance men were surrounding me. Then as the vision of a platoon of soldiers in full battle dress from the local army camp blotted out the sun I passed into unconsciousness once more.

God what was her name, Amanda, Mandy, Milly, I never tried to make friends at school, the other girls were there only there to fight with, fight against or simply fight. Her face was in my mind though. Andria! That’s it, she was the one to find me, I feel sore all over, cant open my eyes properly, can’t see where I am, and there is almost total silence. Almost total, I can hear someone mumbling at my side, the sounds drift in and out then stronger. It’s Andria, she is reading a school text out loud, I try to move to look in the rough direction of her voice, there’s a shrill “Come quickly she is moving”. I was in hospital, I had been in and out of consciousness for four days, the school had let some of the girls come into my room and read to me from the more exciting set books of the term. I think it was in the hopes that I would get so sick and tired of listening to them that I would recover just to get away from them. Andria had taken more turns than anyone else had to read to me, even though I didn’t know that she was there. I mumbled Andy and she rushed to my side, the nurse was taking my pulse, checking my pupils dilated, that my tongue reacted to being struck with a hammer. Andria said, “I’m here!” “Stop reading that crap out loud” I said rather disingenuously. Andria said, “you must be getting better”. During the time I was recovering in hospital Andria visited me every day, my mum did too and my grand parents came in a few times but it was Andria that amazed me most. A casual observer would think we were best of friends, before that day on the moors I wouldn’t have given her the time of day and I’m dammed sure she would have run a mile rather than have to talk to me. She told me how the whole school had come out on the moors looking for me when they heard I was missing, there were police from three counties there and the army had mobilised the whole camp, everyone looking for me. I didn’t think anyone would have cared enough to bother to come to the end of the street looking.

The start of a new phase in my life had just begun, Andy had decided she was my best friend in the whole world, I was in counselling for attempting suicide, I was even taking anger management courses. I hated the shrink digging into my head, hated having to tell him how I felt, what I thought. But Andy, there was something strange, I had never had a friend my own age, ever. Andy put up with a ton of crap in those first few weeks, half of me hated her for finding me and saving my life, the other was so grateful and happy that she wanted to be my friend even with all the abuse I gave her. In reflection, I was lucky, I didn’t realise how lucky I was until I left hospital and the girls at school had organised a party to welcome me home, no matter how grumpy I was they would never let me get away with being alone again. And then there is Andy, she was really pretty, long dark blond hair, face of an angel, nicely developed body, all the boys in the area followed her around like dogs on heat. She was in my bedroom a few weeks after the dramatic rescue on the moor, we were sitting together on my bed, listening to music, she was babbling as she usually did and I wasn’t listening to her as I usually did. I felt hot breath on my neck, she was whispering in my ear that she thought she loved me, then she kissed my neck. This was the first time anyone had actually shown me any affection at all in my whole life. I was frightened and leapt to my feet, I called Andy horrid names and threw her out of the house. Sorry Andria, I just over reacted!…….