Midland

by James Flint

  Worst of all was the question of whether his presence was actually helping Caitlin at all. He told himself it was, but what were his motives, really? Was he truly here for her, or had he come to ensure the destruction of another man’s unborn child because it lay in his way? Which was it? Both? Neither? He didn’t know for sure but he suspected the latter, and the suspicion stretched Caitlin’s ten minutes with the doctor into many hours’ worth of torment.

  And then she emerged and stood waiting for him by the exit looking pale and matter-of-fact.

  ‘How’d it go?’ he asked, as they walked out into the sunshine.

  She shook her head. ‘I need a cup of tea.’

  They advanced down the street in silence until they reached a café where she sat at a vacant table while he went up to the counter to order. When he returned she was staring out of the window, an unlit cigarette and a balled-up tissue in her hand.

  He sat down and watched her, sipping his drink while he fought back an impulse to tell her that she really should not be smoking.

  ‘So what did the doctor say?’ he asked eventually, striving for a neutral tone.

  Caitlin lit her cigarette and took a lengthy drag. ‘There’s two ways to do it. There’s medical, which is you take some pills which force a miscarriage, and it’s messy and it hurts, and it takes a while. And there’s surgical, where you go in, they put you to sleep, they do the procedure, and you wake up and go home.’

  ‘Okay,’ Matthew said, venturing a nod of encouragement.

  ‘What do you mean, “Okay”?’

  ‘I just mean, okay, so if those are the options, which one are you more comfortable with?’

  ‘I’m not “comfortable” with either of them, am I?’

  She rested the cigarette in the ashtray, unravelled the tissue, and blew her nose. She hadn’t yet touched her tea.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Well it was a fucking stupid thing to say.’

  He stared at the bubbles floating on the surface of his drink, waiting for the squall to subside. Maybe she wasn’t going to go through with it. Would that be so bad? At least they’d be together. And they could have other children too. It would be difficult, but they would find a way. There had to be a way. Other people did it, didn’t they? Why shouldn’t they make it work?

  ‘Surgical,’ said Caitlin. ‘It has to be surgical. There’s no way I’m doing medical. It takes too long. I might end up having to do it at home. With the surgical I can go in, a few hours later I can walk out, and apart from a few stomach cramps the whole thing’s done with. We can even go in on a Saturday. They’re going to refer me to Warwick Hospital.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Matthew said, despite being nowhere near sure that it was. He’d just traversed the distance from abortionist to family man and wasn’t at all certain he was ready to make the journey back again.

  ‘I’m here for you,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘We’ll get through it.’

  Was she even listening? Her eyes seemed focused entirely inwards. Another thought occurred to him: that baby or no baby, she would not thank him for this, that on the contrary she would externalise her own guilt and project it onto him like a permanent mask of reproach, so that whenever she looked at him she could blame him for it. But if he didn’t help her, who would? Who would have got her the appointment at the medical centre? Who would have got Emily to drive them into Stratford on the pretext that they wanted to go to the cinema? And who would find a way to get them to the hospital for this procedure that had to be kept an utter secret, never mentioned again, never let slip, never anything other than dead and buried, erased, and forgotten. Who, if not him?

  —————

  In the event Caitlin was offered something better than a Saturday: Warwick Hospital could see her for an outpatient termination on the Thursday of the half-term holiday. By spectacular coincidence Matthew’s parents had been planning a few days away that week, leaving him and Emily home alone. The timing could not have been better. To get Caitlin to the hospital all he had to do was borrow his mother’s car. He didn’t have a licence or insurance, but he’d been having lessons and he knew how to drive. The issue would be Emily, who would certainly stand in his way if she found out what he was up to. But a few steered conversations allayed that concern. On the date in question she was going to meet some friends at a point-to-point over near Ashorne, and would be out all day.

  During the week that followed Matthew revised his plan repeatedly, trying to ensure he’d got every angle covered. In the end he was satisfied there was not that much to it: as long as the various other Wolds stuck to their own plans, as long as Caitlin met him in the lane as she’d said she would, as long as he drove the car without crashing it or getting stopped by the police, as long as the procedure went okay – as long as a million factors beyond his control unfolded more or less as they should – then by the following Friday this would all be behind them and the two of them would be free to move on.

  Half-term came and Matthew’s parents left on their trip as scheduled, once his mother was done with fretting over whether there was enough food in the house, and whether he had the number of the vet in case one of the dogs should swallow a stone?

  ‘I don’t know what you’re getting so worked up about, Mum,’ Matthew said. ‘Em can drive to the shops if we need anything.’

  ‘Yes, but what if she has an accident? She’s only been driving a year and she’s still very hesitant at junctions.’

  ‘I am not hesitant at junctions!’ shouted Emily, from the next room.

  Margaret chose to ignore her. ‘Now don’t forget that there’s extra bread and milk in the freezer and a lasagne too, though you’ll need to take it out to defrost it at least four hours before you want to eat, so do try to think ahead.’

  Matthew nodded mutely. His mother had already been through all this with him at least three times. It was ridiculous, and patronising, and tiresome, especially when his only true concern was the whereabouts of her car keys once she’d gone.

  The moment his parents dragged themselves away he ran to check said keys were where they were supposed to be: in the Toby mug on the shelf in the kitchen. Then, feeling the need to do something vaguely rebellious to underscore his new independence, he took a beer from the pallet of cans on the floor of the freezer room and drank it with his feet up on the living-room sofa. This was intended to be relaxing, but it wasn’t, as his thoughts kept inexorably turning back to the mission he would undertake next day. He tried watching some daytime TV, but that didn’t distract him either. He needed to speak to Caitlin.

  Fetching the cordless phone from its base station in the hallway he contemplated it for a minute or two – its shell of injection-moulded plastic, its telescopic metal aerial, the pattern of wear on its keypad, the nuggets of grime caught in the perforations of its mouthpiece – then dialled the Nolans’ number.

  Sheila picked up with a flustered hello.

  ‘Is that Matthew? Hi Matthew. How are you, darling? Hang on, I’m not sure where she is. Caitlin! Cait-lin! You have a phone call. It’s Matthew.’

  There was a pause while Caitlin took the phone upstairs to her room.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘How you doing?’

  ‘Okay, I guess.’

  She sounded calm. No. Subdued.

  ‘You still okay for tomorrow?’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  She didn’t say anything more, so Matthew pushed on.

  ‘Mum and Dad have gone. I’ve got the car keys.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘So I’ll see you at ten then? In the lane? Where we said?’

  ‘Yes.’

  How painful this whole thing must be for her – he now regretted ringing her up. But at the same time he couldn’t quite bring himself to terminate the call.

  ‘Okay. Well, see you tomorrow, I guess.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Bye then.’

  ‘Bye.’

  He pressed the handset to his ear in the
hope of something more: a whispered ‘Thank you,’ would have been enough, even if an ‘I love you’ would be too much to expect.

  ‘I love you,’ Matthew whispered into the mouthpiece, saying it for her. ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ But his only answer was the steady electronic tone that signalled the end of the connection.

  —————

  Matthew’s sleep that night was disturbed by violent dreams. In the last of these, the one he remembered on waking, he was in a tower block in a war zone, a skeleton of a building gutted by shellfire and grenades. There were snipers on the upper storeys; they were on his side. He was there to relieve them, but his route through the shattered passageways was continually being diverted by falling masonry and collapsing floors, as well as by the families still living amid the chaos. Crouching in the rubble, huddled round fires made from broken furniture, they offered him saucepans filled with delicious-smelling food, begging him to stay and eat with them as he tried to pass.

  When he finally did reach one of the snipers, he couldn’t unpack his gun. It had somehow grown cumbersome and was proving difficult to assemble. As he tried to fit barrel and stock into one another they morphed and lengthened in his hands, while the threads of the components screwed together only loosely and kept undoing themselves at one joint while he was struggling to tighten up another. The rounds bursting into the room didn’t help, their impact showering him with concrete and metal shrapnel and making it all but impossible to concentrate, while the sniper he was replacing was cursing him for messing up and putting them both at risk. And still the families kept coming by and offering him food. He lost his temper and shouted at them. Didn’t they understand the danger they were in?

  Before they could react a particularly violent volley of bullets tore into the ceiling above him and Matthew awoke to sunlight and a silent bedroom. He roused himself and stumbled downstairs in his dressing gown. Emily was already up and already on the phone, deeply involved in some conversation that was half gossip, half negotiation and to Matthew’s eyes entirely an excuse to swan about parading her social life at that time in the morning, something she would never have done if their parents had been home.

  The chat continued while Matthew dispensed raisin bran into a bowl and sloshed some milk on top; by the time he’d eaten it and made a cup of tea his sister was on her way out.

  ‘Bye then!’ she called. ‘Don’t forget to feed the dogs.’ Again there was something theatrical about the way she said it, like she was starring in her very own soap, that got Matthew’s goat in a manner distinct from her delegating him a task that she could easily have done herself. Then the back door slammed shut and she was gone and he was left alone with his irritation, the butterflies in his stomach beginning to flutter in anticipation of the day ahead.

  One minute later the back door flew open and Emily blew back in.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ she swore, unusually for her. ‘I’ve got a bloody flat tyre. I’m going to have to take Mum’s car.’

  Matthew, tea halfway to mouth, felt the room yawn out onto the infinite, a sensation he was getting to know too well. He sat, extended in time, unable to move, while his sister banged around the room, repeating the phrase ‘Have you seen her keys?’ over and over, as if she’d been programmed to inflict maximum damage on his psyche.

  ‘You’re insured, yeah?’ he asked, in a hopeless attempt to divert the ineluctable procession of events.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Emily barked. ‘Or if I’m not, I should be. Don’t worry – I’ll drive safely.’

  It was pointless. It was better just to put himself out of his misery. ‘In the Toby mug,’ he croaked.

  Emily found them, grabbed them, chucked her own keys on the sideboard, and left for a second time, her happy demeanour restored. Alone again, Matthew remained motionless while the noise of his mother’s car’s ignition puttered through the building. This was followed by the sounds of its tyres hissing across the gravel like a wave retreating down a pebble beach, a wave that had left one lone piece of flotsam washed high up on the shore: the keys to Emily’s Renault 4.

  Matthew stared at these for over a minute, abstracting their form and imagining the jumble of steel and rubber transformed to massive scale like some monumental industrial artefact, once immensely powerful and productive but now beyond salvage, welded into a solid form by weathering and decay.

  And then something changed. The luminous flux of the morning light, a sigh and shift from the dogs in their box, the distribution of dopamine in Matthew’s brain as caffeine from the tea he’d drunk found its way into his bloodstream – and the keys were once again key-sized and accelerating through the present and out into the future, no longer merely abstract, static objects but the origin of vectors describing powerful fields of potential activity.

  Matthew reached forward, picked them up, and gripped them like a talisman. He’d never changed a wheel before. But how hard could it be?

  —————

  Not that hard, it transpired. The only really tricky bit was deciphering the convoluted geometry of the collapsible jack. Once he’d got that figured out, raised the car a little and got the first nut turning, the rest of it was a breeze. He left home only twenty minutes later than he’d planned, and as his schedule allowed an hour of extra time for delays this was well within his zone of tolerance. There was an unexpected extra bonus, too: this forestalling of disaster with action had bred confidence. As he drove Matthew noticed that the nerves with which he’d begun the day had almost entirely evaporated, and he was able to contemplate the dirt ingrained in his hands and the nail he’d broken on the wrench with a fair degree of pride.

  ‘I thought we were going in your mum’s car,’ Caitlin said, as she climbed in and fastened her seatbelt.

  Matthew explained the situation with the tyre, careful not to boast about his resolution of the crisis, but not altogether eliding it. Perhaps he should have boasted, because Caitlin didn’t seem to notice his act of heroism.

  ‘This feels really weird,’ was all she said. ‘I nearly got in the back. I feel like we’re on our way to school.’

  The route they followed was indeed the one Emily took on their daily run, at least until they reached Wardle’s where, instead of stopping and then turning down past the castle and over the river towards St George’s, they carried straight on around the old town gate in the direction of the hospital.

  They returned the same way some hours later, Caitlin lying in the back across the seats, groggy from the anaesthetic. Matthew drove a little faster than he should have done, in case of overlapping with his sister, but he needn’t have worried. Emily showed up much later in the evening, long after he’d dropped Caitlin back at her parents’ place.

  When they’d parted there had been no kiss, not even an embrace. Matthew didn’t think they’d exchanged more than a hundred words all day. Everything had been preordained: there’d been nothing much to say. The only sound that lingered from the whole grim process was the one he made when, on his way back through the lanes to Snitterfield, he’d had to pull over for a while to cry. But even as he did so he found himself wondering whether he was crying for himself, or for the dispatched foetus, or for Caitlin, or just because he felt that tears should be shed at some point on that day. And if he didn’t know which of these was the reason, then was the crying any more genuine than Emily’s social airs that morning, which had so irritated him? He simply could not say.

  —————

  It was around a month later that the small brown envelope landed on the Wolds’ front doormat. It was addressed to Emily but Miles picked it up and carried it into the breakfast room, holding it by one corner between thumb and middle finger and flapping it back and forth so that the cellophane window crackled.

  ‘Ms Emily Wold,’ he read, holding the envelope level with his eyes. ‘From the DVLA. It looks like … could it possibly be … some kind of traffic violation?’

  Emily grabbed the envelope and tore it open. I
t was indeed a speeding fine.

  ‘What? I don’t believe it. Forty-two in a thirty zone – fifty pounds and three points! Where did that happen?’

  ‘I’ve always said you drive too fast,’ Margaret chided. ‘They hide with those radar guns, the police do. You don’t see them.’

  ‘Well I can assure you I don’t remember being clocked by anyone.’

  ‘Unless it was those new cameras they’re bringing in,’ Miles said. ‘They’re testing them in the West Midlands now. It’s all completely automated – calculates your speed, photographs your number plate, tells a computer to send a letter out. Could have been one of those, in which case it’s probably a mistake.’

  Emily was reading through the letter again, checking she hadn’t missed anything. ‘It says here that it happened the day I went to Ashorne.’

  ‘That was when we were on holiday, Miles,’ Margaret observed. ‘Clearly you weren’t being as careful as you promised while we were away.’

  ‘It’s only forty in a thirty zone, Margaret,’ Miles murmured, hoping that his wife wasn’t going to remember that he’d received a fine for the same offence two years previously. ‘It’s easily done.’

  ‘That’s not the point. She should have been paying more attention. What if a child had run out in front of her and she hadn’t been able to stop? That’s why we have speed limits, you know.’

  But Emily wasn’t listening. She was staring at the letter, brow furrowed, eyes flashing with an obsidian glint.

  ‘It’s not me that’s not paying attention,’ she fumed. ‘It’s the DVLA. I wasn’t … Ow! What did you do that for?’

  As he’d got up from the breakfast table Matthew had rammed the toe of his trainer into his sister’s shin.