Burial of Ghosts

Chapter Two

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.

‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.

‘Mmm.’ In this mood I was always hungry.

As we walked back to the café, the peace was broken by a car screaming past. It seemed there was a Spanish motor rally taking place. A time trial, I think, not a race. Occasionally a car would flash by and men with stop-watches would wave their arms and yell at each other. I found the speed and the noise exciting, but Philip was furious.

‘It’s completely ruined. Our last stop in the mountains. How dare they?’

If he’d been alone, I think he would have confronted the loud Spaniards, made a scene. I thought he was used to getting his own way.

‘It’s no big deal,’ I said. ‘You’ll come back. There are other places.’

‘Maybe.’

He wandered inside and came back with a tray. There was a plate with an omelette, a loaf of flat, sweet bread, a bowl of salad and two cans of Coke. He put the plate in front of me on the wooden picnic table, wiping the knife and fork with a paper napkin. Then he opened one of the Cokes and took a swig.

‘Aren’t you eating?’

He shook his head. ‘Too hot.’

He took a pair of binoculars from his bag and looked down the valley at the vultures, wincing occasionally when a car went past. He pointed out a family of wild boars, a mother and four piglets, skittering through the shrub below. As I handed back the binoculars and returned to my food, he said, ‘What plans do you have for Marrakech, Lizzie Bartholomew?’

I looked up from the meal, expecting him to be grinning again, but it was almost as if he were holding his breath, waiting for an answer.

‘That depends,’ I said.

‘On what?’

‘On you.’

He nodded, satisfied. I insisted on giving him the cash for my lunch. It was a matter of pride that I’d never been paid for sex.