Stories From The Heart

by Amanda Prowse

  ‘Oh, don’t be like that!’

  ‘Like what?’ Imogen snapped.

  ‘You know, a bit off with me, just because you don’t like my response.’

  ‘You’re right; I don’t, because your reaction makes it sound as if I haven’t considered all the consequences! Do you seriously think I don’t know how hard it might be? But it’s hard for all new mums, and that’s what I want to be – just another new mum. I thought you of all people would get it.’ Imogen shuffled along the bench seat and squeezed out between the tables, using her uncanny knack of sensing the objects in her path and navigating around them expertly. Mikey, an old boyfriend, used to call her Batgirl because of this very talent.

  ‘It’s not that, Imi...’ Jenny’s voice tailed off.

  ‘What is it then?’ she said curtly, fastening her coat buttons, wanting to leave.

  ‘I just... I just don’t think it’s fair on a baby.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean just that! Aren’t you worried that the little one will end up doing more than a child should? That it might end up looking after you?’

  ‘I...’ Imogen couldn’t find the words. Her heart beat too fast for comfort and her pulse raced; she felt quite light-headed.

  ‘It’s not like you’ve got a partner who could help in any way. I’m afraid it might not be the right thing to do. I’m only saying what I think.’ Jen’s voice trailed off.

  Imogen abandoned her buttons and turned her head in the direction of her friend. ‘Do you know what, Jen? I think you should look a bit closer to home. Your mum’s a junkie and yet she had five kids! And your own life’s a bloody mess, and there’s you and Shay hanging on to your relationship by a thread. And you think my baby would have it bad? I have a safe, stable home, with enough love to keep a child happy, and the wherewithal to provide for it.’ Imogen walked across the café towards the door.

  Jenny hung her head, stung by her friend’s words and shocked by the way their discussion had deteriorated into this exchange. She expected it with Shay, but with Imogen? Never. Then Jenny did what she did best: came out fighting.

  ‘Yes! You’re right! My childhood was less than perfect, that’s how I know what it’s like to have a mum that you can’t rely on, a mum who is preoccupied with her own struggle. It’s not fair on a child!’

  Imogen noted the tremor in her friend’s voice; she was clearly hating their first serious altercation as much as Imogen was, but that aside, her words cut just the same. Jenny still wasn’t finished. ‘And how dare you say that about Shay and me? I don’t know what the hell’s got into you but you need to take a look at yourself!’

  Imogen shook her head at the irony of her friend’s ill-considered comment and left.

  *

  Jenny’s words were still ringing in Imogen’s head into the early hours. It wasn’t only falling out with her best friend that had unsettled her so, leaving her feeling out of sorts and a little confused; self-doubt had crept into her mind too, causing her to question her own motives. She lay in bed, feeling on the bedside table for her glass of water from which she sipped, imagining a tiny baby asleep by her side in a cot. Imogen smiled. Even the thought cheered her. I can do this. I know I can. It was her last thought before falling asleep.

  *

  The next day, on her way to see her parents, Imogen thought about the quarrel with Jenny and her stomach churned at the prospect of losing her best friend; even the thought of not having her to turn to made her feel sick. As the bus drove her to her parents’ house, Imogen was feeling anxious.

  ‘How’s ma wee girl doin’?’ Duncan kissed the top of her head before taking a chair at the kitchen table.

  ‘Great, thanks, Dad.’ She sat down with him at the table and he poured her some tea.

  ‘I’ll just get your gran settled and then I’ll be back.’ Isla touched her daughter’s arm before going into the next room. She was carrying a small floral laminated tray on which teetered tea in a china cup and a matching side plate with a slice of bread and butter and two Garibaldi biscuits on it.

  When she returned, Isla took the seat next to her daughter. ‘Did your dad read you Euan’s letter?’ Imogen’s uncle had written from Canada where he had been living for the best part of ten years.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head and lifted her mug in both hands, tentatively bringing the hot liquid towards her mouth, testing the temperature against her bottom lip before taking a sip.

  ‘I’ll fetch it in a bit. He’s doing great, happy as Larry.’ Her mum yawned; switching between shifts at the Krispy Kreme doughnut factory always took its toll.

  ‘I don’t know who this Larry is, but half his luck! Does he ever have a bad day?’ Duncan chortled, wheezing with laughter.

  ‘Doubt it.’

  Imogen heard the familiar mix of love and joviality with which her mum had addressed her dad for as long as she could remember. It made her happy, always, and she could see that when a relationship worked, it was a lovely way to live. Her parents had married when Imogen had been five; her mum said she’d wanted to be sure! It made them all laugh even now, but Imogen knew that she wasn’t prepared to watch the years pass by, waiting to find her Mr Right. Or, worse, try to hang on to someone like Logan who resented her disability and could only hurt her. No, she wanted to crack on with the important job of having a baby.

  ‘I met Jen yesterday in town,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, right, how is she? I saw her mum a couple of weeks back. She seems to be doing better.’

  ‘We had a bit of a row actually.’ Imogen felt her shoulders sag; the fact that they had fallen out was still shocking to her.

  ‘Never! You two are thick as thieves, always have been! What on earth is there to fall out over?’

  The fact that her mum’s voice had gone up a couple of octaves revealed that she was equally surprised.

  Imogen placed the mug on the table and pushed her hair back from her face. ‘I had some news for her and I thought she’d support me.’

  ‘She’s always supported you,’ her mum interrupted. ‘She’s your partner in crime that one!’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I know, but not this time apparently.’ Imogen swallowed.

  ‘What was your news?’ her dad whispered. He was not a man who enjoyed change and Imogen knew he’d be running through all the dire possibilities in his head. Duncan was happiest knowing that his routine was unchallenged and his family and friends all lived within strolling distance.

  Imogen felt their breath coming in her direction and the silent crackle of anticipation in the air.

  ‘I told her I wanted to have a baby.’

  ‘Well, of course you want to have a baby. You’ve said so before and it’s a shame things didn’t work out with Logan, but when the time is right you’ll meet someone else and it’ll happen.’ Isla laughed with relief, having anticipated bad news, as she often did.

  ‘No, Mum.’ It was Imogen’s turn to interrupt, unwilling to rake over the reasons why things hadn’t worked out with funny, amiable Logan, who had been polite to her mum, taken an interest in her dad, and had on occasion treated Imogen herself like a child who needed minding, resenting every moment and fearful of a future where she might depend on him more. It still hurt to recall it. ‘Not when I meet someone... now. The time is right for me and I’m taking steps to make it happen. I’m going to see a doctor about having IUI. My GP says there’s no reason the NHS would fund it. It’s not as if I have tried to conceive and can’t, it’s just that I want to get pregnant and this is the best way for me. That’s fair enough. I have the money saved for a couple of shots at the title and so I’m going to take it.’

  Her parents were silent. She took a sip of her tea and heard her mum swallow. ‘So, is anyone going to say anything?’ asked Imogen.

  Her dad cleared his throat. ‘What did you and Jen fall out over? I don’t understand.’

  Imogen bit her lip. It wasn’t easy for her to repeat her friend’s remarks. ‘She pretty much said
that she didn’t think it was a good idea and that it wasn’t fair on the child.’

  Her parents remained quiet. She sat up straight and took a deep breath. ‘Am I to take it from your silence that you agree with Jenny?’ She tried to keep the emotion from her voice, keep her distress in check.

  Isla reached across the table and held her daughter’s hand. Imogen heard the unmistakable sound of her weeping.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ she whispered.

  ‘I’m crying because I’m happy for you and proud of you, and because you and Jen are closer than sisters and I don’t like the idea of you having a fall out.’

  Her dad’s chair scraped across the floor and Imogen heard him rip sheets of kitchen roll from the stand on which it lived and hand them to his wife before resuming his seat.

  Isla blew her nose into the tissue. ‘We are always here for you, love. No matter what, always. And we’ll support you through this, but I do think I might be a tad young to be a granny!’

  ‘That’s what your mum said too, as I recall,’ Duncan said into his mug.

  4

  ‘Right.’

  Imogen sat up straight at the sound of this one-word greeting, issued as the man blustered into the room. She heard the slam of the door behind him. It made her jump.

  She could tell a lot about people and their understanding of her condition by their awareness of the impact sound had on her. The clues lay in small things, like whether they thought to announce themselves or chat a bit more, giving her at least a chance to process who this was and their intention and mood. Introductory words did that for her and were vital in the same way that a first visual impression was for the sighted.

  Imogen was skilled at discerning the way people felt from the smallest of clues; a slight foreshortening of a consonant in an otherwise jolly introduction, for instance, was often a clue to veiled aggression, and laboured sighs with a faint hum between words could signal pain, but were usually the result of sadness. People were so used to painting on a smile to fool the eye that they often forgot to disguise the voice too, or to measure their breathing or monitor their laughter, and she had learnt to speak this hidden language.

  His footfall was heavy. She felt the slight quaking of the wooden floorboards reverberate up the chair legs and send a quiver through her... or maybe that was just her own nerves. She heard the creak of his chair as he lowered himself behind the desk, heard breathing that was slightly laboured. He was unfit, probably overweight, with a gruffness to his tone that she didn’t encounter in anyone youthful. She listened to the spittle paste his tongue to the roof of his mouth and noticed how it gave way with a slight sucking sound as he began to speak. It made her swallow. Then there was the sound of a computer mouse sliding over a surface and the flutter of papers as a sticky finger leafed through them. The faint ticking of his watch punctuated his movements. He clearly figured it was okay to multi-task. Why not? It wasn’t as if she could see him.

  ‘I have looked at your file, Miss McGuire, the results of the questionnaire you filled in online and notes of the conversation you had with my assistant, Miss Wells.’

  ‘Oh, good.’ The questions had been probing, in-depth. Imogen smiled as if she had passed some kind of test and was whizzing through to the next round.

  He continued as though she hadn’t spoken: ‘Having considered your position very carefully, I’m afraid to say that this has been a wasted journey for you.’ He didn’t bother with any pleasantries and the fact that he didn’t look at her while he talked spoke volumes. Imogen had keen radar when it came to the way sound reached her ears, able to sense the direction from which it came and in some way assess the objects from which it bounced. He didn’t offer her the courtesy of facing her but instead spoke with head down, looking at his keyboard or notes, distracted.

  Imogen heard the tap of his fingers on the desk top, she couldn’t decide the reason why; irritation or impatience, maybe both. She sat up straight and gave her practised smile, the one Jen had helped her with. Oh, Jen! I wish you were here!

  In her early teens, Imogen had sat in front of her friend and given a number of smiles, asking her to judge them. She had gone through a whole range that went from comfortable, open-mouthed, tongue resting on bottom lip, to a full gurn. After nearly an hour of uncontrollable giggles, Jen had placed her hand on her friend’s arm. ‘Stop! That’s the one, that’s your best smile!’ This had come at the end of a long afternoon spent hanging out. They had listened to S Club Juniors and sung along badly, before Jen had tried out several hairstyles on her friend, tugging at her scalp as she twisted and backcombed to achieve the desired result.

  ‘You have, like, the best hair in the whole wide world!’ Jen had told her.

  ‘Do I?’ Imogen had beamed.

  ‘Seriously, it’s so thick and shiny, and it always looks like you’ve just washed it, and it’s got that little wave thing going on. Feel mine, it’s so thin!’

  Imogen had done as instructed, letting her friend’s wisps of cobweb-like hair slip across her fingers. It felt fragile, insubstantial compared to her own that had weight and could be twisted around her fingers in a strong knot. She’d shaken her head, liking the feel of her thick mane shivering against her shoulders.

  Now she recalled the tone of warm affection in her friend’s voice as she’d given Imogen such valuable advice, selecting for her the facial expression with which she now greeted anyone she met. It was a hybrid, a cross between the most comfortable open-mouthed smile, with cheeks relaxed, and a more careful one with closed mouth and head inverted slightly. What would she have done without a friend like Jenny? It didn’t bear thinking about.

  The doctor continued, quickening his speech, as though keen to get this meeting over. ‘I am afraid to say that I do not think I am the doctor, nor this the clinic, to help you. This seems to me to be all about you wanting to become a mother and not something that is necessarily in the best interests of the child. I have to consider the wellbeing of any baby, and I can’t say I think it would be fair to encourage the birth of a child to a parent whose life is already... challenging.’

  ‘Right.’ Imogen uttered the one word and stopped smiling. She let the fringe of her scarf slip through her fingers, liking the feel of the soft silky fronds against her skin and taking comfort from the repeated gesture. She thought again of Jenny’s hair. Jenny who had battled anorexia, Jenny who had fallen apart when her mum had been in and out of rehab, Jenny who limped from counsellor to counsellor, trying to find someone who might be able to explain her lack of interest in life while she was all the time bending over backwards to accommodate her pig of a husband...

  ‘I think everyone’s life is challenging. I don’t think mine is necessarily more so than others’.’

  A snort of laughter preceded his response. ‘I think being blind might be considered a challenge of greater rather than lesser proportions.’

  Imogen kept her voice level. ‘I guess the question is, in comparison to what? There are quadriplegic mothers and mothers who contract terminal illnesses who would swap with me any day, I bet. Being blind helps to put things into proportion for me.’

  She could sense that he was now facing her and a silence indicated that all background activity had ceased, as though he’d finally seen fit to give her his full attention.

  ‘It’s nothing personal.’ Dr Randolph gave an awkward cough, clearly not willing to discuss the matter further.

  ‘But it is, isn’t it?’ Imogen kept her voice steady.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  She heard the annoyance in his tone.

  ‘It is personal, it has to be.’

  And then it began again, the clicking of a mouse, the movement of paper. The slight sigh.

  Imogen wasn’t done. ‘It is personal because you are talking about me. This is my life, not some hypothetical question or virtual request or result from your questionnaire. I want to become a mum and I am asking you to help me.’

  ‘And I have explained to you,
Miss McGuire, that I do not think I am the doctor, nor this the clinic, to do so. It’s all well and good to talk about quadriplegia or terminal illness, but the reality is, life cannot be governed by what may or may not happen. When tragedies occur that is one thing, but you, in full knowledge of your difficulties, are choosing to bring a child into the world. As I have stated, I don’t think it’s in the best interests of any child.’

  Imogen felt by her leg for her satchel and her cane. She gathered the bag on to her lap and looped the leather strap over her head and one arm. She then unfurled her cane and stood up. ‘Do you know, after careful consideration, I think you are right, Dr Randolph.’

  She heard the scrape of his chair and the slight creak of his bones as he stood up. When he spoke, she detected something spicy, like salami, on his breath.

  ‘Well...’ he paused, voice tinged faintly with victory ‘...I am actually rather glad to hear that.’

  Imogen gave her practised smile. ‘Oh, no, don’t get me wrong. When I say I think you are right, I mean you are not the doctor, nor this the clinic, to help me. But will it stop me?’ She turned and walked towards the door, tapping against the wooden floor until she felt the door beneath her cane. Reaching out, she turned the handle and felt a breeze hit her face as the door opened. She turned back in the direction of the man and his big fat desk. ‘Will it fuck!’ With that, she walked off into the hallway, her uncle Euan’s words ringing in her head: When you find a nasty wee wasp, sometimes you have to swat the irritatin’ bastard!

  5

  A month later, as Imogen sat in another warm waiting room, her expectations were low. She felt a yawn creep up on her and hid the stretching of her mouth and her tiredness behind her hand, in case anyone watching should think she was anything less than enthusiastic about the project.

  ‘Hello, Imogen.’ The man stood directly in front of her. ‘I’m Dr Hamilton. Sorry we are running late, it’s been one of those days!’ He laughed. ‘Actually, I’ll let you into a little secret... I always say that, as though what my clients are experiencing is an anomaly, whereas in fact around here it is always one of those days!’