by Marian Keyes
But back then, I was seventeen and knew none of that. I was inexperienced at life, at standing up to people, at going against expectations. I had no capacity to be rational and I was in the grip of extreme fear, which woke me on the hour every hour through the night and turned my days into lucid nightmares.
I dreamt about babies. In one dream I was trying to carry a baby, but it was made of something like lead so it was far too heavy to carry, but I still struggled. In another, I’d had my baby but it had an adult’s head and kept talking to me, challenging me, exhausting me with the strength of its personality. I was constantly nauseous, but I’ll never be sure if it was because of the pregnancy or the accompanying terror.
Shay kept parroting that he’d stand by me, no matter what I decided, but I knew what he wanted me to do. The thing was he’d never say it straight out, and though I wasn’t able to put words on it, I hated feeling that I alone was responsible for the dreadful decision. I’d have preferred him to yell at me that I’d better go to England and get myself sorted out pronto, instead of him acting all caring and ‘mature’. Even though he looked like a man and was the head of the Delaney household, it began to dawn on me that perhaps he wasn’t as mature as he seemed; that it was merely role play. And despite us being inseparable, I felt oddly abandoned by him.
Three days after I’d done the test, I broke the news to Emily and Sinead, who were appalled. ‘I knew something was up with you,’ Emily said, her face white. ‘But I thought it was exam worry.’
They kept shaking their heads and breathing, ‘Jesus!’ and ‘I can’t believe it!’, until I had to tell them to shut up and advise me on what to do. Neither of them tried to convince me to have the baby, they both thought that not having it was the best – or least bad – option. Their eyes were so full of pity and relief that it wasn’t them, that once again I yearned for all this to be a terrible dream, for me to wake up, shaky with relief that I’d imagined it all.
They decided my best option was to go to Claire, who was in her final year at university and very vocal about women’s rights and what bastards the priests were. In fact, she used to go on so much about the right to abortion that Mum often sighed, ‘That one’ll get up the pole and have an abortion just to prove a point.’
So I told Claire about my condition and she was staggered. In other circumstances it might have been funny, but at the time nobody was finding anything amusing. Claire actually cried and, peculiarly, I ended up comforting her. ‘It’s very sad,’ she wept unconsolably. ‘You’re so young.’
Through her welfare officer, Claire was able to get information for me and Shay, and with unexpected ease the arrangements were made. A load lifted off me –I wouldn’t have to have the baby and face the consequences – and then a whole host of new, horrific worries bobbed to the surface. I’d been brought up as a Catholic, but somehow I’d managed to avoid a lot of the accompanying fear and guilt. I’d always thought God must be a decent kind of bloke and I’d only suffered mild agonies of guilt about having sex with Shay because I figured He wouldn’t have given us an appetite if He didn’t want us to use it. It had been a long time since I’d believed in Hell, but all of a sudden I started to wonder, and reactions that I didn’t recognize as mine began to play out.
‘Am I doing something terrible?’ I asked Claire, dreading the answer. ‘Am I… a murderer?’
‘No,’ she reassured me. ‘It’s not a baby yet. It’s only a bunch of cells.’
I clung uneasily to that thought as Shay and I got the money together. It wasn’t hard for me because I was a saver, and it wasn’t hard for him because he was a charmer. And on a Friday evening in April – my parents under the impression that I was on a study weekend with Emily – Shay and I left for London.
Plane fares were out of our price range, so we went by ferry. It was a long journey – four hours on the boat, then six on the bus – and I sat bolt upright for most of the way, convinced I’d never sleep again. Somewhere outside Birmingham I nodded off on Shay’s shoulder and I remember waking up as the bus was driving past red-bricked mansion blocks in a London suburb. It was spring and the trees were startlingly green and the tulips were out. Even to this day, I shy away from London. Whenever I have to go there, I relive those feelings, my first glimpse of the place. Those red-bricked mansion blocks are ubiquitous and I always wonder, Were these the ones I saw?
I rose back into consciousness, like swimming to the surface, and I heard myself crying. A noise that I’d never before made was tearing itself from my gut. Stunned and still part-anaesthetized, I lay and listened to myself. I’d stop soon.
And pain. Was there pain? I checked, and yes, there was, a low-down, pulling cramp. When I’d finished letting these yelps come out of me, I’d do something about the pain. Or maybe someone would come. In this hospital that wasn’t a hospital, surely a nurse who wasn’t a nurse would hear me and come.
But no one came. And almost dreamily, as if someone else was making those sounds, I lay and listened. I must have fallen back to sleep, and the next time I woke I was silent. Bizarrely, I felt almost OK.
*
On Saturday evening, when Shay collected me and brought me to the B&B where we were spending the night, he was immensely tender. I was relieved, yet I cried – only when it was all over and safe could I afford to let myself get sentimental about the baby. For some reason I’d decided that the baby had been a boy, and as I wondered out loud if he would have looked like me or him, Shay was clearly uncomfortable.
We left for Ireland on Sunday morning, arriving back that evening. Unbelievably, less than two days since I’d left, I was back in my bedroom, where everything looked deceptively –almost bafflingly – normal. My little desk was piled high with textbooks requiring my urgent attention. This was my future, it had never gone away, all I had to do now was re-embrace it. Immediately, in fact that very night, I knuckled down and threw myself into my work, it was only six weeks to my exams. But over the following days, weird stuff began to happen. I could hear babies crying everywhere – when I was in the shower, when the bus was moving – but when the water stopped running or the bus came to a halt, the faint wailing stopped too.
I tried to tell Shay, but he didn’t want to know. ‘Forget it,’ he urged. ‘You feel guilty but don’t let it beat you. Think about the exams instead. Just a few weeks to go.’
So I swallowed my need to talk about it, to convince myself I’d done the right thing, and instead forced myself to list how many hours of study I’d managed. When the urge to talk about our baby got very bad, I’d ask Shay something about Hamlet or the early poetry of Yeats and he’d earnestly explain, mostly regurgitating study guides.
I got through the suspended animation of exam time and then it was all over. I’d left school, I was an adult, my life was about to begin. While we waited for our results, Shay and I were almost never apart. We watched a lot of telly together –even on the warm, sunny days when the celebratory sunshine made the corduroy couch and brown carpet look ridiculous, we stayed inside and watched the box.
We never had sex again.
Mid-summer, we got the results of our Leaving Cert – Shay did brilliantly and I did badly. Not disastrously, but I’d worked so hard that everyone’s hopes for me had been high. My parents were confused and immediately set about reducing my failure into something unimportant. How were they to know that I’d spent the last six weeks before the exams sitting in my room straining to hear imaginary babies crying behind the ring of a burglar alarm?
The aftermath lingered for a very long time. Almost from the moment I was no longer pregnant, guilt and regret arrived and I began to think that having the baby wouldn’t have been so bad. (Although I was just about together enough to understand that if I was still pregnant, I’d be yearning not to be.)
Contradictions pulled me this way and that. I felt I’d had the right to have an abortion – but I was still bothered by horrible uneasiness. No matter how cleanly I lived the rest of my life, till the da
y I died this would always be with me. I couldn’t exactly find the right description: ‘sin’ was the wrong word, because that was about breaking someone else’s laws. But a part of me would always be broken and I would always be a person who’d had an abortion.
I felt so trapped by this irreversibility that I thought about killing myself. Only for a few seconds, but for that short time I sincerely wanted to. It was like being shackled to something shameful and painful for ever. Not like having points on your licence or a criminal record that lapses after five years or ten. It could never be fixed. It would never be fixable.
And yet… I was relieved that I didn’t have a child to bring up. What I really wished was that I’d never had to make the decision to begin with. And of course it was my fault, I should have kept my legs closed in the first place, but life isn’t like that – even then I knew it – and it’s easy to be wise after the fact. Occasionally, anti-abortionists paraded through the streets of Dublin, campaigning to make abortion in Ireland more illegal than it already was, carrying rosary beads and waving placards with pictures of unborn foetuses. I had to look away. But when I listened to them condemning abortion so vehemently, I wanted to ask if any of them had ever been in my situation. I would’ve bet money that they hadn’t. And that if they had, their commitment to high-minded principle might have wavered.
What bothered me most were the men – men protesting against abortion! Men! What did they know, what could they ever know, of the terror I’d felt. They couldn’t get pregnant. But I never voiced any of it at home, because I didn’t want to draw attention to the issue. And – at least when I was there –Claire never said anything either.
At the end of September, Shay went to London to do his degree in Media Studies. That had always been his plan, because Irish universities didn’t offer such imaginative courses.
‘This changes nothing,’ he promised me, as we said goodbye at the ferry port. ‘I’ll write lots and see you at Christmas.’
But he never wrote. I’d had a premonition this might happen – I’d already started having dreams about trying to catch him even before he’d left – but when it did, I refused to believe it. I watched the post every day and after seven wretched weeks I took my pride in my hands, visited his mother and gave her a letter to give to him. ‘Maybe I’ve been sending them to the wrong address,’ I said. But she checked and the address I had was the right one.
‘Have you heard from him?’ I asked, and flinched when she said, in surprise, that of course she had, that he was getting on great.
I regrouped my hopes and instead hung everything on him coming home at Christmas. From the twentieth of December onwards I was a ball of adrenalin, waiting for the phone or the doorbell to ring. But when they didn’t I began walking past his house, up the hill, down the hill, shaking with cold and nerves, desperate for a sighting of him. When I saw Fee, one of his sisters, emerge, I nabbed her and in a high, wobbly pretence of unconcern said, ‘What day is Shay coming?’
Looking confused, she broke the news. He wasn’t coming, he’d got a holiday job. ‘I thought you’d know,’ she said.
‘Oh, I thought there was still a chance he might get here for a couple of days.’ My humiliation had me stuttering.
Easter, I thought, he’ll come home at Easter. But he didn’t. Or for the summer. I waited for him long after most people would have given up hope.
In the meantime I’d got a job, where I’d made a new friend, Donna. Like my other friends, Sinead and Emily, she went out a lot, on the hunt for men and good times. I used to tag along and, with them urging me on, if some decentish bloke asked me out I’d say yes; nothing much came of any of them. There was someone called Colm who gave me an engraved lighter for my birthday, even though I didn’t smoke. Then, for about six weeks, I saw a DSS worker who kept coming across his dole claimants working in the pubs he took me to; he ditched me when I wouldn’t sleep with him. After him was a cuteish one called Anton, even though he wasn’t foreign. I towered a good three inches over him and he kept wanting us to go for walks. I actually went to bed with him – probably, I later suspected, because I found it so embarrassing to be upright with him.
But no matter how I tried, I just couldn’t get worked up about any of them.
The current of life was trying to drag me forward, but I resisted. I preferred the past, not yet convinced that that’s what it was – the past. And I would never have believed when I’d said goodbye to Shay at the ferry port that it would be fifteen years before I saw him again.
44
I drove from the Mondrian back to Emily’s. Roars of laughter and a smell of burning were coming from the Goatee Boys’ back garden. Ignoring it all, I let myself into the mercifully empty house, and made straight for the couch. I didn’t even turn on the lights, I just lay in the dark, feeling flattened, soulless, lost to myself.
As time passed after Shay’s departure for London, occasional news reached me of him: he was spending the summer working in Cape Cod; he’d graduated; he’d got a job in Seattle. At some stage I understood that it was over, that he wasn’t coming back to me. I tried my best with the other men I met, but I couldn’t move forward. Then one night when I was twenty-one I bumped into Garv in a pub in town. It had been more than three years since I’d seen him. Like Shay, he’d gone away to college – Edinburgh for him. Now he was back, working in Dublin, and as we swapped autobiographical details, I felt so guilty about the way I’d treated him that I could barely look his way. Mid-small-talk I blurted out a shamefaced apology and, to my relief, he began to laugh. ‘It’s all right, Maggie, take it easy. It was a lifetime ago.’ And he looked so cute that for the first time in a long, long time, I got a feeling.
It was a great surprise to find myself going out with him again, the boyfriend I’d had when I was seventeen, my first-ever boyfriend. I was wildly entertained by the novelty of it, as indeed was everyone else. But then it stopped being funny the day I lifted a snail off his windscreen and threw it at a passing car of nuns – because I realized I’d fallen in love with him.
I loved him so much – he was such a good man. Though he didn’t have Shay’s quicksilver charm, he enchanted me nevertheless. And I thought he was gorgeous. Again he didn’t have Shay’s full-on hunkiness, but he had subtler good looks that had worked their way under my skin, so that whenever I looked at him I got a rush. His eyes, his silky hair, his height, his big hands, the way he smelt of ironed cotton – I was mad about him. Above all, we were mates – I could tell him anything. He even got chapter and verse on myself and Shay and was nothing other than entirely sympathetic. Not even a flicker of judgement came from him.
‘I’m not a murderer who’s going to burn in hell, am I?’ I asked anxiously.
‘Of course you’re not, but no one’s saying it was an easy decision.’
And I felt so, so relieved to have met a man as benevolent as Garv was.
But some people went a bit weird when we got engaged. Emily, in particular. ‘I’m afraid you’re playing it safe by marrying him,’ she said.
‘I thought you liked him!’ I said, wounded.
‘I love him. But you got so badly burned by Delaney, and Garv is so cracked about you… Look, I just want you to be sure. Just think about it.’
I promised I would, but I didn’t because I knew what I wanted.
So we got married, moved to Chicago, moved back to Dublin, got the rabbits, started trying for a baby, had one miscarriage, had a second miscarriage, then watched my past come back to haunt us.
For a long time, I was the only person I knew who’d had an abortion. Then, when she was twenty-five, Donna had one and Sinead’s sister had one when she was thirty-one. Both times I was called on to relate how it was for me and I told them honestly what I thought: it was their body and they had the right to choose. They shouldn’t give any credence to those pro-life bullies. But – at least if they were anything like me –they shouldn’t expect to emerge unscathed from the experience, but should brace them
selves for fall-out. Every emotion from guilt to curiosity, shock to regret, self-hatred to wretched relief.
Though I was glad no longer to be the only one, both those terminations churned up memories, so I almost felt as if I’d gone through it all again. But it passed and, mostly, I lived with being someone who’d had an abortion. As the years went by, I thought about it less. Except for every anniversary, when I felt awful, sometimes without even realizing why, at least not immediately. Then I’d remember the date and understand, and wonder what the baby would be like now, aged three, six, eight, eleven…
But I thought it had been absorbed safely into my past –until that last visit to Dr Collins, the day of reckoning, when I had to vent the worry that had been gnawing away at me.
‘Could I keep miscarrying because… because… I’ve damaged myself?’
‘In what way, damaged yourself?’
‘By an operation?’
‘What kind of operation? A termination?’
I flinched at his bluntness. ‘Yes,’ I mumbled.
‘Unlikely. Very unlikely. We can check but it’s highly unlikely’
But I didn’t believe him and I knew Garv didn’t either, and though we never discussed it, that was the very moment our marriage keeled over and died.
Some time later – I don’t know how long – the phone rang in the darkness of Emily’s front room; I had no intention of getting it. I let it ring, waiting for the machine to pick up, but someone had switched it off so, cursing, I dragged myself over to the phone.
The second I answered, I remembered Emily’s ban and said a silent prayer that it wouldn’t be Larry the Savage. But it was Shay.
