the cadence of part time poets

Chapter 108: Epilogue

If you see her, say hello,
She might be in Tangier;
She left here last early spring,
Is livin' there, I hear;

Say for me that I'm all right,
Though things get kind of slow;
She might think that I've forgotten her,
Don't tell her it isn't so...

During a particularly nasty wind storm in April of 1956, Cherie Anne Roberts gave birth to a healthy baby girl in a tiny council flat in the north end of Brighton. She was fifteen. She'd only known she was pregnant for eight weeks.

After the baby was born, Cherie's mother agreed they could stay on the condition that—should anyone ever ask, the baby was adopted. She was only a distant cousin, a friend of the family's—there would be no out-of-wedlock babies in her house. No cheap whores here, no sir.

Torn by guilt, Cherie stubbornly refused to give the baby a name. Or maybe she couldn't. With nothing else her mother called the girl "Ruth"; Cherie called her "Baby". This went on for two years, until Cherie's mother died of a sudden heart attack and Cherie and Baby were left on their own.

Evicted from their flat and without a roof over their heads, the pair traveled further into the city, where Cherie would end up moving in with a man named Jack Riley. Jack worked construction, building council estates for the poor just like the one they'd been evicted from for being too poor. He also dealt drugs on the side, and would prove a good enough father to Cherie's baby until 1961 when he was put away for involuntary manslaughter after one of his usual deals had gone sideways.

Following Jack's incarceration, Cherie moved in with another man, also named Jack, who pimped her out to help pay the rent. During this time Cherie had fallen down two flights of stairs outside their building and broken her collarbone. A neighbour who had been partaking from a late-night cigarette on his balcony could've sworn she'd been pushed, but Cherie was adamant that she'd tripped. The nurse then told her that she was nine weeks pregnant, and had subsequently miscarried in the fall.

Six months later Cherie was pregnant again. She was excited for this one—more than willing now that Jack II had agreed to marry her and take the child on as his own. But it was not to be. Despite all Cherie's efforts, the baby was born already an angel. A blessing, in hindsight.

Of all Cherie's children, only the first would remain stubborn enough to make it through early childhood. It had taken some time but eventually Cherie had named her Grace, after her mother—though there had not seemed to be much point to that either.

At six years old, Grace had fallen into a bush of stinging nettle outside their council estate and had to be dragged home by a neighbour when they discovered her hours later, playing in the street while covered head to toe in flaming red welts. The woman had much to say; how could someone let a child get this filthy? Are you even feeding her?

Embarrassed, Cherie stripped her daughter bare in the entryway of their home and spanked her. She called her stubborn—too stupid to cry. Then she washed and fed her.

After the incident with the stinging nettles, everyone inside the estate began to call Baby Grace "Nettles" and Nettles she remained until one day in early spring when the girl that was once a stubborn baby too stupid to cry packed a small suitcase and climbed out the bedroom window, never looking back.

She was two weeks shy of her fifteenth birthday.

In the beginning she'd still gone by Grace. Not after her grandmother, but after Grace Kelly, the beautiful American actress turned princess of Monaco. Ms Kelly had married her prince in April of 1956, the very same month and year Nettles had been born. On April 19th to be exact, but Nettles had been born on the 15th, four days too early. It was her first life-long disappointment.