JESSICA IN THE PARK

A broken family down the generations.

Jessica Woodbridge sat on a park bench and watched the world go by. Children coming and going, old men and women doing the same but without a ball to kick around, puffy clouds above, and the sun. And herself. Miserable.

It had been a weary world. She smiled when it crossed her mind that had she known what it would be like when she’d been born she wouldn’t have bothered to take a single breath because breathing was such a waste of time. But that birth had been, what, seventy nine years ago and it was too late now to change things.

She’d lived down those years, and every one of them had either marked her in a way she hadn’t liked being marked, or been as nothing to her.

Childhood had been wretched. Not that her mother hadn’t tried her best to make her life a playtime of happiness, but she hadn’t really had the wherewithal to do that, what with her dad falling off the gravy train just as that war that she couldn’t remember but knew had affected her ended. Mother said he shouldn’t have smoked, that it was the smoking that had killed him, but that hadn’t stopped her lighting up a cigarette herself when the other teens did. She’d already known back then that life just wasn’t worth it. Smoking was one way out.

She’d been sent to Sunday School where the teacher or headmaster or whatever he was had taken a liking to her shiny face (so he said) and had demonstrated it by stroking her bottom. That might just have been all right but he squeezed it a bit too hard too, sometimes, and that hurt. So she had told her loving mother (and that woman had been loving even though she found things difficult, but then so did everyone else as the forties melted into the fifties), but her mother had simply said he was a good man, a preacher, and wouldn’t do anything wrong because he was a man of God, she must have been a naughty girl in his eyes to earn that pinching, it was his way of punishing her without using a stick on her.

But I never did anything wrong, I was a good kiddie, did my best to please everyone, even that wretched Danny Fortescue who thought he was better than the rest of us because he didn’t live on the council estate…

Danny Fortescue! She hadn’t thought of him for more years than she cared to remember. Danny Fortescue! He was the first boy of all the boys in the world to show her his willy! There he was, on this very park, scoffing at her poverty and flashing his bits at her telling her it was too good for her to ever see again, then readjusting his shorts until he was decent and running off, laughing. And not having a brother and her father being long dead she remembered how shocked she’d been that anyone could have such a thing on their body! How old would she have been? About ten, she supposed, and Danny Fortescue had done that, awoken sleeping knowledge!

Looking back on things Danny Fortescue represented one of the brighter interludes in her life, he and his weird growth that he kept hidden in his shorts and only exposed to her that once!

She’d told her mother about it and her mother had been trapped between laughing out loud and being angry, and in the end the laughing out loud had won the battle.

“Remember what you saw and take care to steer as far from those things as you can,” the wise woman had said.

“But what is it mummy?” she had asked. Those things… were there more of them?

“Ah, that would be telling,” came the only cryptic reply she was going to get. But she’d found out, what was it, three or four years later when Gavin Bush had been playing rugby and she was watching because he’d asked her to. She supposed he was an embryonic boyfriend. Anyway, they told each other that they were walking out together and that meant she had to watch a boring rugby match on a muddy field, and it was very much livened up when he was running, clutching the ball they were playing with, as fast as he could right past her, and she’d called out something, his name probably, maybe words of encouragement, it was all a long time ago and she couldn’t remember the details, and he had been distracted and another boy had taken advantage and leapt upon him and pulled his shorts right down. And he’d been wearing nothing under those shorts. And she saw… she hated to remember what she had seen. But he had pulled them back up and grinned cheesily at her, proudly she had thought.

Gavin Bush hadn’t lasted long in her life.

“So you saw it,” he smirked, “I’m saving it all for you, Jessie.” That’s what he had called her, Jessie when her name was Jessica. Anyway, that hadn’t mattered, what he called her. What had mattered as that she didn’t know what it was he was saving for her and if he meant that shrivelled piece of flesh in his shorts she didn’t want it. Not then and not ever.

And that was the truth. What would I do with a thing like that? I didn’t know what it was and even if I’d known I wouldn’t have been interested. He was a boy and it’s what made boys different. At least, that’s what the smirking, sniggering girls in her class had said, and she wasn’t a smirker or a sniggerer. She wasn’t one of them, was she? She was Jessica Woodbridge and she was decent...

Three years later she got pregnant. That was a nightmare. The boy, well, not a boy so much as a man who should have known a great deal better, was Mr Astley. She couldn’t remember his Christian name, maybe she’d never even known it, but it was when she was at work in the factory down Bath Street when she left school, and his job was to make sure she did hers properly, and before she could have said Jack Robinson he was chatting her up.

“You know, Jessica, you’re the prettiest girl here,” he had said, and winked at her in a way that she’d found almost attractive. Well, it would have been attractive had it not looked so sleazy…

She’d gone out with him because he asked her to. He had a flat of his own, which was a bit special back in those days, not many single men seemed to have flats of their own but lived at home with their parents until they went off and got wed. Anyway he had taken her there and somehow he’d talked her out of her clothing and without asking permission or anything he’d done it. All she could remember was that it had hurt like mad and made her feel so ashamed she hadn’t even mentioned it to her mother. But what she hadn’t realised, and this showed how stupid she’d been as a teenager, was that what Mr Astley had done to her could make her pregnant.

And it had.

Like that. Simple, painful and awful.

Mum had thrown her out of her home, said she wasn’t going to have a loose-living w***e anywhere near her and that she no longer considered her a daughter. The worse thing mum was still young enough to be caught as well, and Jessica noticed that at the same time as she was putting a tummy on, so was her mother. She saw her sometimes. She was staying with the Brysons, a chaotic family on the same street. Mum never told her she was getting married, but that’s what she did, hurriedly to Mr Bowman. So she was now Mrs Bowman and nothing whatsoever to do with Jessica.

Amelia Bryson had listened to her when she’d told her she was pregnant and had nowhere to stay and she had taken her to her home and her chaotic family. It was a place that was none-too clean and Amelia said she could share her bed if she liked. She hadn’t liked, but she’d shared it anyway because beggars can’t be choosers, and she was the worst of beggars. That bed was a tight fit for two girls, especially as she grew bigger and bigger because of her pregnancy.

A tear trickled out of one eye as she remembered those weeks. Mr Astley denied knowing anything about her, said she was a fantasist when she tried to tell the boss why she couldn’t stay at the factory any longer, and he married a slightly older woman from the typing pool who, in Jessica’s opinion, was out to trap any man into marriage she could find because she looked herself as the last babe on the shelf.

There were children playing on the park, two boys and a girl kicking a ball about in a casual something-to-do sort of way, and her mind went back to Jane because the girl with the two boys looked quite a lot like her.

Like Jane, that is. Jane was born to her when she was still in her teens, and they took her off her immediately after she’d been born because in the opinion of someone in authority she wasn’t fit to care for a child, and her mother wouldn’t be a proper grandmother because her mother was also having a child, which probably meant that if she, Jessica, was a w***e like mother said, then mother was a w***e as well.

That was the end of my life, she mourned, though it hadn’t been. She’d lived ages after that, ages and ages and all on her own. No man, no husband, thank goodness, nobody to boss her about, nobody for her to cook and clean for, just a long blank series of decades, and nothing. Even right up to now.

“Who are you staring at, misses?” asked the girl playing with the boys.

The insolent brat! But no, she had been staring, hadn’t she? The girl was right.

“What’s you name, young lady?” she asked, trying to sound sweet and old ladyish, which she supposed she was.

“Jessica,” said the girl, “it’s a family name… my granny Jane was adopted and she knew it was her mum’s name, so I’ve got a family name…”

Then she ran off with the boys.

As they ran one of them pulled his own shorts down for a second and the young Jessica giggled. Then they were gone and the old Jessica was left to her thoughts until the girl came back on her own.

“That was Tony and he’s disgusting,” she said, “but he’s fun!”

“I’m Jessica too,” she told the child.

“It’s a common enough name I suppose,” replied the child thoughtfully.

“Yes,” she smiled, “Common enough. Live it, little lass, little Jessica, live it well, but be careful how you go. And tell your grandma Jane that I remember her and always will...”

© Peter Rogerson 06.04.22

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