Dear Nobody by Berlie Doherty

Author:Berlie Doherty
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141928869
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

May 15th

Dear Nobody,

I must have been mad, going all that way with Chris. I did it because it was a way of spending some time with him. I pretended to Mum that it was a school trip, even though I haven’t been in to school for ages. It’s awful to tell lies to your own mother. I hated doing it. But she’s not the sort of mother that you can tell the truth to, most of the time. She doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want to hear about you, little Nobody. You don’t exist. We don’t talk about you.

And because we don’t talk about you we don’t talk about anything. I’ve lost my mum. We walk past each other like strangers in the house. I eat in my own room because I can’t find anything to say, because I can’t bear the atmosphere downstairs, because I’m an outcast in my own family. Dad treats me as if I was made of glass, asks me if I’m feeling well, puts cushions behind me when I’m sitting down. But he doesn’t lean over the piano when I’m playing and jazz up Chopin with his left hand, and he doesn’t tease me about Chris, or play his old ragtime records and tap-dance in the kitchen, self-mocking, happy.

It’s my fault, all this.

So when Chris asked me to go to Carlisle with him to meet his mother I said yes. In a frantic sort of way, I felt it would bring me in touch with my own mother again.

He was a bag of nerves by the time we found her road. I think he would have preferred to turn round and catch the next train home. ‘Anyone would think you were about to have your boils lanced,’ I told him. But I knew exactly how he felt. Little Nobody, don’t ever be a stranger to me.

Chris’s mother smokes, so that gave her minus points from the start. I could smell it on her breath when she came to answer the door, and on her clothes. They stank, actually. She was really pretty and she stank. In a way it gave me courage about meeting her, because I knew then that she couldn’t tell us off or try to dictate to us what we ought to do. No one who pumps nicotine into themselves or fouls up the air for other people has the right to tell anyone what to do with their lives, that’s what I think. So I felt confident, as soon as I smelt her. No one’s going to breathe that lousy muck over you. I won’t let them.

She looks years younger than Chris’s dad. She didn’t wear make-up or tidy clothes or anything like that but she looked really pretty, with her hair cropped short like a boy’s and her enormous dark eyes. Actually, Chris has her eyes. She looked happy, too. I suppose it’s climbing that does it, all that fresh air and exercise. It’s a pity about the smoking.

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