Highly Commended - Short Story Competition 2012

"What You Think" by Lorraine Cooke

I know what you're thinking as you watch me push this buggy up the road.  You don't need to speak; your eyes say it all.  You think you know what I am and you think that gives you the right to judge me, the right to hate me. 

I see you think, as your eyes move from me, to the toddler in the pushchair, that not only am I a teenage mother, but that I had underage sex, didn't take precautions, got myself in trouble. 

Probably most of you think I did it on purpose - for attention or council benefits - a nice new flat for me and the baby.  You'd be shocked if you could see where we live.

I expect some of you think I was stupid. I can picture you in a posh coffee shop in town, sharing your small-minded views with your small-minded friends.

"Don't they teach them anything at school?" Slurp of skinny latte.

"I doubt she bothered to listen in Sex Education. Too busy texting her boyfriend under the desk." Inspection of manicured nails.

"I thought they handed out the morning after pill like sweeties these days." Pursing of lips.

"I know." And you shake your head as you wonder why I didn't take it.

They used to call the kind of girl you think I am "slag" at school.  I hear you use it too, sometimes. Once, a woman spat at me.  She was about 40 and wearing a smart coat.  She was on her own, no children trailing along beside her, a pinched, unfulfilled look to her face. I like to think she was jealous, seeing Jamie, so contented in his pushchair.  I had to wipe some of the spit off his hand where it landed and I remember telling him it looked like it might rain.

The sad thing is you are so sure you know me - but you know nothing.  "We can all see what you've been up to," your eyes say, but you couldn't be more wrong. No point trying to tell you though.  You see what you want to see and you're convinced you know the whole sordid story. You don't have time to think of other explanations.  And I wouldn't want to tell you.  Let you keep your dirty little thoughts if it makes you happy.

But I wonder sometimes what you think as I turn the buggy at the top of the hill towards the nice part of town.  Is that the problem?  That girls like me shouldn't come from places like that? Perhaps if I lived on the council estate, in that damp little flat you think I've got, I wouldn't get this grief.  It's what you'd expect from girls who live there. 

Do you know about my parents? The accountant and the doctor.  A doctor?  I see your eyebrows raise, imagine your gossip. "You'd have thought she could have got her daughter an abortion, wouldn't you?  By far the simplest solution.  Better than have her scrounge off the state." 

I know you think that if you live in a respectable area then you ought to be respectable - worthy of respect.  But respect should work two ways.  I don't think many of you are worthy of respect - not the way you look at me, the things you say to me, the way you treat me.

Of course you're not all like that.  Some of you are quite nice really.  "Doesn't he look like you?" you say kindly and smile.  Usually I smile back, and Jamie does too.  See, I told you respect works both ways, didn't I? But sometimes I wonder if there's actually a hidden question behind the smile, some thirst for knowledge about Jamie's father, that you're too well bred to come straight out and ask.  But I don't say anything.  If you only knew. 

You think you know Jamie's mother, but you don't.  You never met her.  She was always in trouble at school - when she bothered to go - just like you'd expect.  But it's hard to know how much of that was down to the grandfather who abused her.  Perhaps sex was the only way she felt loved.  Maybe that was why she got such a reputation at school.  Not even she could remember how many boys she slept with.

Perhaps the drugs helped her cope.  But she nearly lost Jamie because of them.  Social Services wanted to take him away when she was caught shoplifting to fund her habit.  You would have thought her an unfit mother in every sense.  But she didn't want Jamie to go into care. She said she'd ditched the drugs.

Then one Saturday she turned up at our house with Jamie and asked me to babysit.  "Just for a couple of hours.  I need to go into town and it's such a hassle with the buggy on the bus." Her eyes were big, pleading.

"I don't know.  I've got homework.  And I don't really know how to look after a baby."

"He'll be fine.  Everything he needs is in the buggy."

I hovered, not inviting her in, wondering what Mum would say.  "Well…"

"Thanks, Soph. You're a real mate."

A moment later she was gone. And my life changed.

That was nearly two years ago.  All I got was a text, days later: Had 2 get away.  Look after J for me.  You'll soon realise Y it has 2B U.

But Social Services don't give up so easily.  You probably think I should have handed him over when they came asking questions. But I couldn't do that.

"That's not your baby." You'd have laughed if you'd heard the woman from Social Services. "You can't keep him."

"He's just staying for a bit," I told her.  "I'm his aunt, and these - I waved my hand towards Mum and Dad, hovering in the background - are his granny and granddad."

I wasn't really sure if it was true, when I said it, but the text suddenly made sense. The likeness in Jamie's smile to my brother David's was quite obvious, even then.  I expected the Social Services woman to want proof, but she didn't seem too bothered.  A baby being looked after by relatives, what could be simpler?  Less forms for her to fill in.  Plenty of other cases she could be sticking her nose into.

I wonder what David would have thought of Jamie.  Would he have loved him as much as the rest of us?  Hard to imagine anyone who could love Jamie more than me. But David never even knew Jamie had been born.  Just a statistic of a foreign earthquake disaster, his Uni place deferred forever, not just the gap year he intended.

As I turn the buggy in at the drive of our house, Jamie wakes up.

"Love you, Mummy," he says, rubbing sleepy eyes. My brother's eyes.

"Love you too, Angel." And I plant a kiss on the top of Jamie's head, as I fish for my key. If his real mum ever turns up again, wanting him back, I'll fight for him. In every sense but one, he's mine. And it doesn't matter what you think.