Stories From The Heart

by Amanda Prowse

  Suddenly the passenger door of the first van opened and the driver leant across. ‘You working, love?’

  The man was in his mid-thirties, not badly dressed. He was holding a roll of bank notes.

  Gemma was rendered immobile, unsure which path to take: back to safety and boredom or onwards on her adventure with the man she loved, a man who loved her.

  ‘I said, are you working, love?’

  ~

  Neil indicated and steered the van into the driveway. He put his key in the lock and watched as Jackie twisted her body towards the sound.

  ‘Any news?’ she asked in her usual strained yet hopeful tone.

  Neil stood for a second in the doorway, casting his eyes around the room as if it was strange to him. He walked past her and reached down towards the lamp on its little table by the side of the sofa.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Jackie’s voice was accusatory, incredulous.

  ‘I’m turning off the lamp!’

  ‘No you are not! You can’t, you know how she feels about the dark, we need to keep it on just in—’

  He shook his head, as his finger and thumb clicked against the little black bar. ‘No, no we don’t, not anymore.’ He placed his finger over her lips. ‘She’s not coming home. She’s never coming home, Jacks.’

  Neil knew that he would take the image to his grave; his little girl climbing into the seat of the van behind him, looking like any other tart. A part of him had died.

  He fell onto the sofa, too defeated to cry. Jackie wrapped him in her arms. He buried his head in her lap, gripping her clothes, clinging on for all he was worth, a man silently drowning in his sorrow. Jackie stroked the hair away from his forehead.

  She spoke softly and slowly into the darkness that enveloped them.

  ‘I wonder what I did wrong, y’know. I think about it all the time. I try and think about what I should have done differently, but the thing is, if you don’t know that you are doing anything wrong, then you just keep doing it, don’t you? I thought it was all about making her comfy, making her feel special, but I don’t know anything any more. I keep thinking, Neil, about that night. All those people clapping and going crazy. I never knew I could be so proud. It was incredible, wasn’t it?’

  Neil sniffed and raised his head. ‘It was, Jacks. She was unbelievable.’

  Jackie smiled. ‘Yes she was, unbelievable.’

  The two sat in the dark, enjoying a closeness that had been missing for some time. They must have dozed off eventually and were woken by a small voice that cracked the darkness.

  ‘Why are you sitting in the dark?’

  Jackie gasped as a sob leapt from her throat. She reached out and clicked on the lamp and there she was, as if magicked from the night, looking thin and bone weary, haunted and lost, but home. Home where she belonged.

  IMOGEN’S BABY

  Amanda Prowse

  Can Imogen overcome life’s challenges and have the baby she longs for?

  It’s hard enough having a baby on your own. But for Imogen, 24 years old and blind since birth, it will be harder than most.

  Her journey will take her from heartache to hope and back again. But Imogen has never let blindness rule her life, and she isn’t going to start now...

  Inspired by a real-life story, this is a moving and gripping read from number 1 bestseller Amanda Prowse.

  Start Reading

  Table of Contents

  This story is dedicated to Amy, whose bravery, grit, determination and inner light have inspired Imogen’s story. I wish you nothing but joy for your future. Some people you meet, stay with you, leave an impression and teach you things. You are one such person Amy Gilbert.

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  I don’t remember one defining moment when I held a child or heard one cry and felt my womb pulse with longing, nothing like that. It’s just always been there, that desire to become a mum. Like other aspects of my life that have always been there – being proud of being a Scot, hating cheese, or wanting to live in a noisy community, a bustling street; I always have, for as long as I can remember. I love the signs of life, the constant squall and bustle of activity and the way it makes me feel, as if I’m connected to a bigger world, to people. That’s very important to me.

  So: yes, I think there has always been that need. I was like lots of other little girls – when not engaging in rough and tumble, I’d tenderly coo to my dolly and rock her to sleep. Her name was Baby Jean and I’d make up her crib and place her gently inside, tiptoeing out of the room so as not to wake her. Yep, I was just like every other little girl, I dreamt of becoming a mummy. Not that my mum, Isla, ever encouraged me in any way, not like some mums who buy you a pinny and start your training with mini-Hoovers and tiny saucepans, telling you to cook tea for your imaginary husband who is out at work. God, that’s such an outdated mode, but nonetheless, I know some of my own friends who do this with their toddler daughters even now. But with or without my mum’s encouragement, it was as if there was something hard-wired into my DNA, an in-built need. I never considered becoming a parent might not be an option for me, ever. Even though my own birth was... let’s say tricky, and the tales from that fateful day have been bandied about more than a dozen times. I know all the gory details!

  Despite this, I have always been willing to do whatever it takes to fulfil my dream, and why not? I don’t think being single should be a barrier, not in this day and age when so many marriages end in divorce and couples who start off with the best intentions can still end up as single parents. What does it matter, so long as that child is loved and cared for? More and more people are choosing not to marry and that’s fine too. For me, the most important relationship is the one I will have with my child. I’ll keep him or her safe. I’ll love my child unconditionally and I will help it to become the best citizen of the planet that it can possibly be. What is it they say? You don’t know until you try. Well, I am trying, I’m trying very hard and I’m not going to give up without a fight. I will keep on until all options have been exhausted, because that’s me, Imogen. I’m a girl who fought for survival on her first day on the earth, and sometimes, more so recently in fact, it feels like I have been fighting every day since. That’s it really.

  1

  May 1989

  Isla lay on her side, staring into the semi-darkness of the small room. She pulled the sheet up over her shoulder and wriggled her head against the pillow, trying to get comfortable. The mattress was too hard and the regular squeak of shoes pacing the linoleum floor outside, along with the beeps and bells of machinery in the adjoining rooms, meant her sleep had been disturbed. Her throat was sore and her eyes ached from all the crying. She was exhausted by it and sick of it, this neverending well of tears. She screwed her eyes shut, trying to escape into the oblivion of sleep. It was, as ever, elusive.

  It had been another bad night; along with her physical discomforts, nightmares and jumbled thoughts, which wrenched her from her sleep, she pictured her mum Mary’s face when she’d heard the sad news, a couple of weeks back. She had been sorry, yes, but her words of comfort were tinged with a tiny glint of I told you so, thrown in for good measure. It was this sliver of self-justification, mirroring the night Isla had broken the news of her pregnancy, when the whole of Pilton must have covered their ears at her mum’s yelling, that was more than she could bear.

  Every time she thought about her little girl, the tears sprang anew; this seemed to be the instant reaction whenever she considered her daughter’s future.

  Upon discovering her pregnancy, and after the initial stages of disbelief and shock, Isla had drea
mt of all the things they would do together; this baby and she would get their own place, they’d enjoy holidays by the sea, walks in the park, the first school play and the creation of clumsy, colourful paintings to adorn the kitchen walls... It was these vivid images of herself with a rosy-cheeked cherub on her lap that had given Isla the courage to tell her mum and dad, admitting in the process that not only had she and Duncan McGuire, the boy from two doors down, had sex, but they had also been a little lax about contraception.

  She had won her parents over by painting them similar pictures of the future, ones that involved them and their grandchild: ripping open gifts on Christmas Day, playing in the snow on their trips up to the Cairngorms, or listening to the tiny child recite their lines in the first school assembly they attended. How lovely would it be to have a grandchild, a baby, while their own youngest was only ten? And who knew? It might be a little girl to give a bit of balance to a family dominated by rowdy boys, four children in all, of whom Isla was the eldest child and the only girl.

  She bit her lip, tears threatening again. It was hard for her to picture any of these things now. Instead, if she looked towards the future, all she could see was a deep, dark hole into which all her hopes and dreams had tumbled. She worried that Duncan would no longer feel the same, fearing that their plans and all the promises he had made on cold, foggy nights would disappear down the deep, dark hole too. How long would he stick around? Of one thing she was sure, she didn’t want him to be with her for any reason other than love. The idea of him feeling tied to her through duty was more than she could bear. If that were the case, she would rather be alone. The future felt bleak and, if she was honest, she didn’t know if she had the strength to cope. It wasn’t fair.

  ‘Let’s let the day in, shall we?’ The chubby nurse bustled into the room and marched over to the window. She then twisted the rod that split the venetian blinds; sending a fractured white light across the cold, blue flooring. She cracked the window open just enough to let the buzz of traffic, creeping along the Crewe Road South, filter into the room.

  Isla sat up in the bed and blinked. She had been thinking about their annual family holiday. Along with cousins, aunts and any neighbours who fancied the jaunt, the high-spirited group set off in a convoy of cars and vans with enough camping equipment to house an army. Rain or shine, for one week of the summer they played footie, built fires, barbecued fish and let marshmallows blacken over the coals as they dangled from twigs, while they all giggled at nothing in particular and berated their daddy en masse for the post-supper farts that he denied.

  She was imagining herself swimming in the loch; something she’d never done in real life, preferring instead to dangle her feet in the water from a dock, to feel the warmth of the sun on her skin as it tried in vain to join up her numerous freckles. Her parents, Mary and Jim, and brothers would heckle from the depths, as they laughed and trod water with droplets shining like diamonds on their long soft lashes and plastering their strawberry-blonde-coloured hair to their pale scalps: Come in, ya big dafty! Isla, come on, it’s lovely! they’d call. But there she stayed, rooted to the spot, too afraid of the sea monsters and kelpies that she was convinced lurked beneath the dappled surface.

  One of the younger boys, Euan or Kurt, would then call her name: ‘Isla! Help, Isla! It’s got me!’ before disappearing suddenly under the water, as if grabbed by the feet, only to break the surface seconds later, spluttering, laughing and high-fiving whoever was in striking distance. ‘Oh, leave ma wee girl alone!’ Mary would intervene, winking at her daughter and turning to laugh with her sons. What had her gran called it? Running with the fox and chasing with the hounds. Isla’s mum had it down to a fine art. She went through life neither offending nor pleasing to any great degree.

  In her daydreams, Isla had been confident, jumping with arms aloft into the cool loch, enjoying the feeling as she dived into a different world, pulling through the water with deft strokes that motored her along. She then lay on her back, staring at the sky, her body straight and her feet kicking, as her long, pale arms worked overhead, propelling her into the centre of the loch, which in this ethereal world held no terrors for her.

  She wished she could be as fearless in real life. Wished she wasn’t so afraid. How she would love to dive in! Isla had thought that becoming a mum might have given her courage and the confidence to strike out. That idea now seemed laughable.

  ‘Did you get much sleep?’ The nurse pulled the top blanket over the bed, making it taut, before tucking it around Isla’s legs.

  ‘A little bit,’ she whispered, rubbing at her pale eyelids that felt full of grit, unwilling to admit that she had cried into her pillow until the early hours, struggling to breathe through the waves of fear that battered her senses and flooded her mind. I can’t do this... I can’t... I don’t know how I’ll cope. My mum was right, I can’t do this...

  Forgetting she was still recovering from the emergency caesarean, she pulled her knees up to her chest, planting her feet on the mattress, before wincing and carefully sliding them flat against the white sheet.

  ‘Shit,’ she murmured, through a mouth contorted by the sudden flash of pain.

  ‘You’re going to have to be careful. It’s those little movements, small things, that can catch you unawares.’ The nurse filled the plastic beaker with water from the tap and placed it on the nightstand.

  Isla nodded. That’s the story of my life, small things catching me unawares...

  ‘Do you need anything for pain right now?’ The nurse spoke louder than Isla was comfortable with. Did she not know how stressful it was to have the baby wake and start crying? Or how long it took to get her off to sleep again? Isla’s eyes darted towards the plastic bassinet by the side of her bed. Thankfully, the baby didn’t stir. She shook her head; she wasn’t in pain, not physically, not any more. Her surgery had dulled to an inconvenience; gone was the sharp tug of trying to stand tall and the nervous hesitation when she had to pee. It was only these small, ill-considered movements that took her breath away.

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ she mouthed, letting her eyes dart towards the baby

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry about her waking!’ the nurse laughed. ‘Have you ever listened to what goes on inside a stomach? It’s a proper racket! That gorgeous little miss has been surrounded by noise – burps, shouts, hiccups and your very loud heartbeat – for the last nine months! My dulcet tones aren’t going to disturb her.’ She chuckled. ‘In fact, in my experience, they quite like a bit of background noise. My eldest used to nod off to the sound of the Hoover. Which is funny, as he’s sixteen now and I don’t think he even knows what it looks like!’

  But that’s the problem: she wasn’t surrounded by noise for nine months. She was born too soon, at just a little over twenty-three weeks, and only able to come home today, finally.

  Isla smiled, knowing the woman was trying to be nice.

  ‘Are you all set then? It’s a big day for you.’ Again, the nurse boomed.

  ‘I think so.’ She nodded, thankful once more for all the medical team had done for her and her new baby girl, unable to forget the hurried surgery, the feeling of panic in the air, the sight of her tiny baby lifted lifeless and floppy from her body, as machines beeped loudly and alarms sounded and voices were raised with an edge of adrenalin-fuelled tension to them that no years of practice could erase.

  ‘She’s a pretty little thing,’ the nurse cooed.

  ‘Yup, takes after her mum!’ Isla laughed.

  ‘Then she’ll do just fine.’

  Isla looked around, knowing that this would be the last morning she would spend within the confines of this little space, and weirdly, as desperate as she was to get home, back to her mum’s, she was also sick with nerves about having to leave its security, where an expert lurked around every corner.

  ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, that this room is so full of significance for me? These four walls, this bed... the place where my daughter was born, and yet there’ll be another baby bo
rn here tomorrow, or even later today, and for those few hours it will be their special place.’

  ‘That’s kind of how it works, a bit of a production line.’ The nurse coughed, as if remembering that this woman was a customer of sorts. ‘I hope, of course, that it never felt like a production line. I hope that you’ve had a good experience here.’

  Isla nodded. She had.

  ‘It’ll be okay, you know.’ The nurse smiled at her reassuringly.

  Isla nodded again. Will it? She wished she could be so certain. A thought popped into her head, an idea she had had about her child becoming successful and travelling around Europe, visiting all the cities that Isla herself had yet to make it to, and she did so by car, driving around in an open-topped Beetle... but there’d be no driving, not for her little girl. Isla closed her eyes and sank back on the pillow, finally feeling the pull of sleep. She decided to nap when the nurse had finished her pottering.

  As if on cue, the baby let out a tiny mewling noise, calling from her crib. Isla instinctively pulled back the covers and swung her legs gently around in an arc, as she had been instructed. Lifting her daughter from the crib, she cradled her in one crooked arm. ‘Morning, little one. Morning, darlin’,’ she cooed.

  ‘Have you named her yet?’ the nurse asked, curious.

  ‘Imogen. She’s called Imogen.’

  ‘Well, that’s a lovely name and one that’ll carry her through life. You know, she can be anything she wants with a name like that.’

  Isla stared at the woman, swallowing the thought that her name wouldn’t be the thing that held Imogen back.

  ‘Is there anything you want to ask me? I know you have had plenty of instruction and you’re a dab hand at the bathing, nappies, feeding and whatnot, plus you’ve the numbers of your designated Health Visitor and they are on hand twenty-four, seven.’