She doesn’t go back. While she was a student she had good excuses. She had to work every weekend and in the holidays she worked full-time at McDonald’s. The longer she was away the harder it was to go back. Going back would have made her that poor kid again, make her think about Gemma. About how old she would be by then, how she would be at high school wearing the long flappy kilt Stephanie had worn, how she’d be into clothes and boys, maybe asking Stephanie for advice. She didn’t want to be back looking at that vast glistening emptiness of lake wondering about what happened all those years ago, wondering how things might have turned out if. If if if if if if.
Smelling the thyme, feeling the sun on her shoulders and face, breathing in those lemony-fresh early mornings in autumn when the frosts were starting. Watching the snow drift further down the mountains. Loving it. Hating it as well.
How she lives, on her own in a one-bedroom flat in an apartment block, wouldn’t suit everyone. It’s not too bad, the living room gets the afternoon sun so it’s reasonably warm when she gets home. She doesn’t have a lot of stuff, only what she absolutely needs, a sofa, a couple of chairs, a table, bed and dresser. The place looks Spartan: she’s carried right on being a Presbyterian minister. There’s a few weekend things in her wardrobe but mostly it’s just clothes and shoes for work. Two black jackets, three black skirts, one grey, one checked, two white shirts. She thinks sometimes of Minna’s wardrobe stuffed with clothes, spilling out colours and patterns, of the bits of pottery on the shelves of their house, the yellow china sprigged with red, tiny flowers in the kitchen, the books everywhere, the rugs and cushions and paintings and photographs on pin-boards. She doesn’t want all that, can’t have anything cluttering up her life.
Another thing that wouldn’t suit everyone is how she hasn’t got many friends, but she doesn’t have time. Not that she’s a total recluse. Jonny and Liam live here now and Stephanie sees a bit of Wanda as well. She’s a Psych nurse Stephanie met when she was working at Public. She’s got this great, loud laugh. In a way she saved Stephanie’s life there, made her step back a bit; Wanda’s got this way of seeing just about everything as a joke. And there’s Mary-Anne as well. Mary-Anne’s married. Married and pregnant. Funny how they’ve stayed in touch, they haven’t got a thing in common, but still, they keep on seeing each other.
Stephanie’s on her own. No partner. Not that she’s a virgin or anything. She made certain to get that over with years ago before she left Wanaka when she lured Nick Baker away from his steady girlfriend and out under the trees during the seventh form dance. She handed him the packet of condoms, pulled her knickers off. She knew what he told everyone she was begging for it. In fact, she was so sick of the boys treating her like she was some weirdo they couldn’t go near in case she did something off the wall. She wanted to take charge, prove she wasn’t a freak.
Yeah, since she’s been in the city she’s had guys, well, two or three. She always gets a second look from men. Looks like Minna. She remembers her by the lake that day. Glossy hair tucked behind her ears, eyes covered by sunglasses, lying on the black-and-white rug wearing the black bikini, her skin dark and polished by the sun. Beautiful and distant. She remembers Minna that way because she never saw her like that again, spread out on a rug, eyes closed, her body smooth, gleaming, dark coffee, so wholly and indifferently herself. In those last few months she lay on her bed with her eyes shut. Then she left.
Stephanie doesn’t need anybody. Though now there’s Mark. She went out with Wanda to a film and they ended up in a bar with a jazz band playing and she drank more than she usually did, ended up dancing. He had curly brown hair and a nice smile. She doesn’t generally do one-night stands but she felt different that night, loose and easy and she laughed a lot. He was still there in the morning.
She doesn’t let him stay that often. She’s set it out clearly to him. Her first priority is work; anything else is way down the line. But when she lets him stay she likes it more than she lets on, waking with him sweetly curled beside her and smiling.
He strokes her hair. Taps gently with his fingers at the side of her head.
‘Let me in,’he says. ‘Hey, Stephanie, let me in?’
8.
Now that everyone knows they won’t stop talking about it.
‘Oh, Beth, isn’t it lovely?’
‘Aren’t you a clever girl?’
‘You must be so excited.’
They give her things. Squashy ducks, fluffy dogs, luridly coloured plastic things with flashing lights that play metallic-sounding music. And it seems anyone at all can come up and ask if her boobs hurt and if she has to pee all the time and does she have piles and what does she want, a boy or a girl, is she going to find out, they think she should. They pat her belly as if it now belongs to everyone.
When the little cross stood out bright blue she was transfixed, her heart beating hard, staring at it as if it might change back right in front of her eyes. It was like a miracle. They’d only started trying that month. Anyone else she’d talked to about it, her friends and the girls she worked with, said it took ages, it could take up to a year, even more.
She couldn’t move. She called out, ‘Peter. Peter.’
He didn’t know she’d bought the test, didn’t even know she was late. She hadn’t said anything in case it turned out she wasn‘t, she didn’t want him disappointed, he really wanted this. He came into the bathroom and she held it out. He looked down, frowning, not understanding, and then he realised and grinned, wrapped her up in his big, wide arms. And right then she was pleased. He acted exactly as good guys do in the movies when they find out and she felt exactly as she thought she should feel.
I’m going to have a baby. I’m pleased and excited.
She went to the doctor. He said she’d need to find a midwife and he gave Beth the names of the ones he recommended that she should contact. He told her it was important to get onto one right away because a lot of them were booked up months ahead. He said the midwife would book the scans and look after her but that everything looked absolutely fine at this stage. He gave her a date. April sixteenth.
She said to Peter, maybe we should wait before we tell everyone, it might be nice for just us to know for a while and what if something went wrong? But he said nothing will go wrong, nothing can and I’d never be able to keep this a secret, let’s tell everyone, your dad will be so pleased and I can’t wait to tell Mum and Dad.
Then it started. All the patting and hugging and kissing and questions and feeling like she didn’t belong to herself any more. Peter went out and bought books. The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy and Childbirth, The Guide to Conception, Pregnancy and Birth, The Definitive Guide To Gestation. The books made her uneasy. There were women on the covers with dopey dreamy faces, their hands clasped beneath obscenely huge bellies. Why did you need all these guides? They made her feel as if having a baby came with a whole lot of tests she could fail.
Peter read the books and looked up early pregnancy on the Internet. He told her what she shouldn’t eat and what she shouldn’t do. They were once at a party and she picked up a mussel. She was just about to put it in her mouth and he grabbed it off her, grabbed it right out of her hand staring at her like she was doing this bad, bad thing, like she was some sort of criminal. No shellfish. He hissed it at her. I told you, Beth. No shellfish.
No shellfish, no sushi, no processed meat, never ever eat a salad bought in a supermarket, one solitary coffee per day and that’s only if you have to, absolutely no alcohol, no alcohol whatsoever.
She doesn’t get around to phoning any of the midwives on the list. Well, she has a lot on at work right now and anyway she feels so bloody tired all the time, picking up the phone and trying all those numbers until she gets someone is just something else she’ll have to force herself to do. It’s bad enough just getting through every day, trying to ignore that sick feeling in her throat like she wants to vomit all the time and that tiredness that makes her body ache and her head swim and her breasts
hurting so much. All she wants is to sleep and sleep and sleep.
Peter keeps on about it. Have you phoned a midwife yet? Have you got a midwife? You need to get on to it Beth. Sometimes she shouts at him why don’t you get a bloody midwife if it’s that bloody important? But what he does now when she yells at him is get that look on his face, that she’s pregnant look that drives her crazy. Sympathy mixed with amusement mixed with condescension: it’s her hormones acting up. He doesn’t treat her like she’s a proper person any more.
Anything he buys now, anything he does, is for the baby. The baby the baby the baby.
Peter’s parents and her dad keep phoning, far more than they ever have before how are you keeping, love? Nobody has ever said that to her up till now, how are you keeping?, and now everyone’s saying it how are you keeping, how are you keeping? How she is actually keeping is she feels like she’s been invaded, like she doesn’t have any rights within her own skin. She’s watched those weird sci-fi things on TV where aliens move into somebody’s body. That’s how she feels. That’s how she’s fucking keeping.
It’d seemed a nice idea, her and Peter having a kid. Kids now. Peter talks about our kids. What she hadn’t realised is how it would feel with her body not being hers any more. Another thing she hadn’t thought through was that this baby will never ever go away, it will be there for years and years and she’ll have to look after it. What if she doesn’t like this baby and doesn’t want to look after it? What if she can’t look after it?
It gets to her most of all at night when Peter runs his hands across her body like he’s some farmer checking out a big fat cow making sure her udders are big enough and her belly’s growing properly. Then he makes this soft grunting noise like he’s reasonably satisfied and kisses her and goes to sleep so close against her she feels like she’s suffocating. He’s read somewhere in some guide that miscarriages are most likely to occur in the first trimester and while there isn’t any specific evidence to support this, sexual activity could be a factor. So. No fucking either.
Even though she’s so worn out she actually can’t sleep. She walks around the house in the dark, into the living room, into the dining room, into the study, the kitchen, drinks tea watch the caffeine intake, babe and stares out of the windows. She can’t sleep beside Peter, his body is so hot and his breathing’s loud. She can’t sleep in that other room either, not with all those fluffy things and that cot with the cover Peter’s mother had all ready, knitted way back before Beth even thought about getting pregnant, way back probably from the first day she and Peter started going out when Beth was still at school.
In the end she gets cold and goes back to bed. But that’s when the thoughts start up like lights flicking on off on off on off in her head. She longs to go to sleep but she’s afraid to as well. The dream’s back.
What’s worse? Going to sleep and maybe having the dream or lying awake thinking? She doesn’t know. The dream’s terrible but sometimes the worst thoughts of all pop into her head while she’s lying there.
What if I can’t look after it, what if I end up like Mum? What if I loved it, what if I loved it so much and what if it?
No no no no no.
The skin on her skull feels so tight it’s started itching. Not like an ordinary itch you can scratch but a real hard itch that hurts.
Every night.
At work the girls say, ‘You’re looking a bit tired, are you okay?’
She smiles back at them. ‘Nothing I can’t handle.’
‘You’ll feel great after the first three months are over. Everyone’s like this at first. It’s normal.’
She tries to talk to friends who have babies it’s normal to feel a bit down at first, you’ll get over it. Tries to talk to Peter, ‘I’m not feeling so good, I’m not sleeping all that well, I feel a bit, a bit, kind of spaced out.’
‘That book explains it. You need to read it, Beth. What’s happening is perfectly normal.’
But what if what she’s feeling isn’t normal? She goes to another doctor. To talk, just to go through her options. But she ends up making an appointment for the next week. She can change that, though, and probably by then she’ll be feeling fine. Yeah, she’ll have changed her mind by then and she’ll cancel it.
She goes in on the Friday morning. There are others sitting on the row of chairs beside her. They’re all dressed the same in the washed-out green hospital gowns they give them. Nobody says much but the other girls look okay, everyone looks like this is an okay thing to do. Perfectly normal. She’s third.
It doesn’t hurt. She can leave by two o‘clock. She calls a taxi.
What she’s worked out to say is that she lost it. She’s going to say that after he left in the morning she started feeling a bit funny. But she didn’t phone because she didn’t want him to worry and she felt okay, not really all that bad so she didn’t think anything serious was going on. She took the day off work because she thought she should rest. That sounds good, it sounds responsible that she thought she should rest. Then it all happened at once. Bleeding and pain. It was too late to do anything about it by the time she realised. She lost it.
After the taxi brings her home she sits on the couch and waits for him. She’s calm, ice- cold calm. Then her head starts off again how could you do this how could you what have you done? She starts walking around the house, goes into the room that’s all painted and ready for April sixteenth. She can’t do it, she can’t lie to Peter. Anyway, he’d probably find out. And if he doesn’t, if he believes her, he’ll want to start trying and it’ll all start over again. She’s not doing that, she can’t. But she can’t tell him what she’s done. The white cot and the yellow-and-white spread and the teddy. No. No. Oh God, no.
She shuts the door, goes into the bathroom. She opens the cabinet and drops all of them into her bag. She goes into the garage, opens the garage door and drives out.
9.
Stephanie loves early mornings in her office. She makes a plunger of coffee, enjoys the silence as she opens up her computer, deals with the emails and begins work. She’s positioned her desk so she can see the gardens beyond the window and, when she’s losing concentration or uncertain about something, she lifts her eyes and fixes her gaze on the wide span of lawn and roses.
She’s there until ten most days, reading over patients’ records, checking the medication lists. She notes any problems that might have occurred overnight, looks over material on new patients admitted the previous day.
There’s a new file on her desk and she opens it and reads it through slowly, taking short notes in the notebook she likes to carry around with her on the wards. Elisabeth Anne Clark. Twenty-two. Transferred from Public, four weeks there, family concerned she wasn’t making progress. There’s a letter from her father along with the case history. We’ve decided to shift her because we can’t see any improvement, nothing seems to have happened since she’s been in Ward Ten other than giving her drugs and they don’t seem to be making any difference. She’s withdrawn right into herself.
She can believe that. Though it’s not that the staff in Ward Ten are incompetent or uncaring, it’s space and resources that are the problems. Stephanie thinks back to her own time there, remembers going into a ward-room. Four beds. An anorexic patient, a bipolar patient in a manic phase telling them all to trust in God, someone just out of detox, a depressed patient, almost catatonic, rolled up in a ball on her bed. She remembers walking out what the hell can I do? how the hell could anyone get better in this place?
It was her first job and she started off bright and shiny with ideas and ideals. But nothing was possible, nothing could be funded without going through months of red tape and then it’d more than likely be turned down. She watched the patients. There was nothing for them to do other than eat their meals, and wait for the drugs to kick in so they could get out. That was until the next time.
Chronic mental illness, it wears you down, wears everyone else down as well. She saw family members standing around
beds. The first time it happened they were hopeful, this was some kind of aberration, frightening, but it could be fixed, it was all in the mind, not real. The parents, friends, partners of the patients who had been in regularly had that look of helpless resignation, that’s the ones who still came to visit. This girl, Elisabeth, is fortunate her father can afford the fees here, crippling if it’s a long stay. Fortunate, too, that he’ll help. Some prefer to pretend it isn’t happening, rather like those parents of years ago who sent their single daughters up north or down south to have their babies alone, protecting their families from the shame. Mental illness continues to have a stigma, no doubt about it.
She looks over the notes forwarded from Public. Found unconscious in her car. Taken sleeping pills, aspirin, antihistamines, anything and everything in the bathroom cabinet probably, washed down with whisky. Parked among the sand-hills by the beach. A jogger found her. Unconscious and covered in vomit. The vomiting probably saved her.
Taken to hospital in an ambulance. A medical examination revealed she’d recently undergone an abortion. Married, no children. No previous evidence of mental illness though there was a family history of depression. First interview on admission, patient failed to respond. The following weeks afterwards, patient fails to respond. The attending psychiatrist at Public assessed her as clinically depressed.
So they’d keep her on bed rest and under observation. Fill her up with Aproprax and if that didn’t work, move on to Mirtazapine. If she wouldn’t talk they wouldn’t push it. Couldn’t. There were too many other patients to take much time over this one; they’d keep up the meds, play around with them, hope for the best.
Hunting BLind: It's Every Family's Deepest Fear Page 7
