The Child Inside

by Suzanne Bugler

  Janice glances at me, a quizzical sideways flick of the eye. She opens her mouth to speak, and quickly I say, ‘I told you, it was rubbish. It’s not even worth talking about, Andrew.’

  My words, in their haste, come out waspish. I told you . . . like a nag, like a harridan. I flinch at the sound of my own voice, and I am aware that everyone else is flinching too. Andrew is very, very still.

  Janice glares at me. She raises her eyebrows and her eyes are as bright and hard as marbles.

  Slowly, Andrew turns his face to me. The look in his eyes makes my cheeks burn. ‘Then I am so sorry that I even mentioned it,’ he says coldly, making an awkward moment even worse.

  My mother laughs nervously, a shrill whinny of a sound. Any more beef, anyone?’ she chirps. Andrew, let me get you some more.’

  And my dad, following her lead, says, ‘Jono, how do you fancy beating me at chess later?’

  And Janice still glares at me, and Andrew won’t look at me again, for the rest of lunch.

  ‘So what the hell was that all about?’

  Janice and I are in the kitchen, clearing up. My mother has just taken a tray of coffee through to the others, in the lounge.

  I am rinsing plates, and stacking them in the dishwasher. Janice is standing watching me, her hands on her hips, a tea towel, clutched in one hand, dangling down by her side. ‘Well?’ she demands.

  And what can I say, except the truth, at least in part? I pick up a dish and run it under the tap, hoping that the sound of the water will muffle my voice, should anyone be listening from next door. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. It is always best to start with an apology with Janice; I learnt that long ago. ‘I told Andrew that I went to see a film with you on Friday.’

  ‘I gathered that,’ she says loudly, much too loudly; I turn the tap on harder. ‘But would you mind telling me why?’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry—’ I say again, but she cuts across me.

  ‘It’s that man.’ She flicks the tea towel in her hand and folds her arms now, across her chest. ‘You’ve been seeing him. You told me it was over.’

  ‘It is over. I just – I just had to . . . see him about something.’

  ‘You lied to me,’ she snaps. ‘You’re lying to Andrew and you lied to me.’

  My hand is on that tap, turning it off, turning it on again. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say for the third time. ‘It isn’t that straightforward.’

  ‘Well, it never is, is it? That’s the trouble with cheating on your husband.’

  ‘Janice! Please!’ I hiss, and I turn the tap on full blast to drown out her voice.

  ‘And I suppose that’s what you wanted to talk to me about. You wanted me to cover up for you. How dare you drag me into it?’ she carries on. ‘How dare you use me as an alibi for your sordid little—’

  ‘It wasn’t like that!’

  ‘Yes, it was!’ she snaps right back. ‘It’s always like that.’

  She’s right, of course. Cynical, self-righteous, hypocritical Janice – she’s right and she knows it. She glares at me and I glare at her, and I’m searching for something to say, for some justification . . . It’s on the tip of my tongue just to tell her. Then maybe she’d understand, maybe she could even help me. She is my sister, after all.

  I think I’m pregnant.

  It’s there; it’s on the tip of my tongue. I’m about to say it. She stares at me as if waiting.

  ‘I—’

  But then my mother walks in, pushing the door open noisily and plonking down the tray on the counter. ‘Goodness!’ she exclaims. ‘What are you two arguing about out here? You’re making an awful lot of noise!’

  Would I have told her?

  Here, in my mother’s kitchen, with my husband, my parents and my son just the other side of the wall? Would I really have told her? Panic – horror – shoots down my arms, sending pins and needles stinging into my fingertips.

  What was I thinking of?

  My mother clatters about with the kettle and the cups, making more coffee for those who want it, and Janice and I stand there and watch her, both of us silenced. I am so weak I can barely hold myself up.

  We were making a lot of noise, my mother said, but they didn’t hear what we were saying, surely? Please God, surely they didn’t hear?

  But if they did hear, my mother wouldn’t be out here now fussing around us making coffee and saying, ‘Come on now. Come and sit down. I’ll finish the dishes later.’

  Would she?

  I cannot believe I so nearly told Janice. I cannot believe this is happening at all.

  I sit down on the sofa next to Andrew, who makes room for me, but doesn’t acknowledge me. He is watching Jono playing chess with my dad. My dad is sitting in the armchair with the chessboard laid out on the little table in front of him; Jono is kneeling on the floor. I too pretend to watch. I am feeling punched, stunned by my own insanity. I sit with my hands clasped in my lap, wanting to be good, like a child; wanting to be forgiven. There are tears stinging in my eyes; I have to keep blinking them away, hoping nobody will see. Just in case they do, I sit with a taut smile pinned into the cheeks of my face. I must be happy. I must be okay. Desperately I want comfort, but the person I would have comfort me is the person who has driven me away; the person I have wronged. My husband sits beside me, but I am on my own now.

  Andrew drives us home from my parents in silence. From the corner of my eye I watch him; I study his face in profile, his focus fixed upon the road. The tension in the car is excruciating; Andrew’s silence is so wilful, so accurate in its aim. What does he know and what does he not know? I cannot tell. The book that was once so open to me is now firmly shut, the page lost.

  ‘I’m sorry I snapped at you,’ I say when I can stand it no more. ‘At lunch.’

  Andrew concentrates on the driving, careful, controlled man that he is. Regularly he checks the mirrors. His hands upon the wheel grip loosely, but firmly. I look at those hands; at those long fingers and those broad knuckles, and I think of Simon’s hands with the bitten nails; hands as tender as a pianist’s.

  ‘The way you spoke to me is the way you always speak to me these days,’ Andrew says, at last.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I need to know for sure. I cannot focus on anything in this excruciating state of limbo.

  So on Monday morning when I am in Sainsbury’s I buy a pregnancy-test kit, sticking it in the trolley along with the weekly shop. How my heart thumps as I move slowly along the pharmacy isle, searching shelves stacked with deodorants and tampons and vitamin pills. And how my face burns when at last I find what I am looking for, and lift the box down, and drop it nonchalantly into my trolley, where it lies among the usual tins and vegetables and various packets and cartons. I swear that there are a hundred eyes upon me.

  And see how it glides along the conveyor belt when I place my items onto it at the checkout to pay. The shop assistant picks it up, scans it and chucks it with a bored, dismissive flick of the wrist onto the heap of stuff piling up on the other side, too fast for me to pack. I feel the woman in the queue behind me watching, as we all watch. She’ll see the standard of my shop: where I spend and where I save. She’ll see my organic milk and vegetables, and my economy tin foil and pasta. She’ll see my pregnancy-test kit.

  One of my friends at school was the product of a late pregnancy. An accident, we liked to joke. I went round to her house once and her parents were ancient. She had a sister, fifteen years older, married and with kids of her own. Her father had false teeth.

  If I am pregnant there will be a thirteen-year gap between Jono and this baby – this unknown baby – inside of me. He will be eighteen when she is only five. He will be taking off on his life, when she will merely be starting out on hers. He will be fully grown, a young man, off to university, and leaving me, when she is merely starting at school. In the blink of an eye I see her sweet, trusting face, the softness of her skin. I see her hand held out to me. Mummy, she says. Mummy.

  I want to shake myself. I want t
o slam my head against a wall and blank out my thoughts. Why must I think of this baby as a she? And yet how can I not? I do not think of her as a new person; I think of her as the one that I lost, come back.

  I stuff my shopping into bags, clumsy, angry with myself. How can I even think of having this baby if I am pregnant? How could I possibly see it through?

  I ask myself this and yet the answer is obvious: how could I not?

  I have not used a pregnancy test before. With Jono, and the second time, too, there seemed little point. You know when you are pregnant. You don’t need to see a little bit of blue on a stick to point out what you already know. But now . . . there is the chance that I am wrong. And should I not hope that I am wrong? If I am wrong, I can close this episode. Andrew and I will chug along as before. I will live in the coldness. I will accept that this is it, for me, somehow.

  Because what can I possibly do otherwise? I have to be wrong. It cannot be any other way.

  But I’m not wrong.

  At nearly a quarter to twelve, after I have unpacked my shopping in the kitchen, emptied the dishwasher, sorted the post and procrastinated until I can procrastinate no longer, I go upstairs to my bathroom with that little box and I do what I have to do.

  And half an hour later I am still sitting on the edge of the bath, too numb, too stunned to move.

  Outside, I can hear the distant scream of a car alarm, and the doors of a delivery truck, slamming shut. These sounds sear across my consciousness, magnified. I hear the sway of the wind in the trees, the clattering of bottles being put out for the recycling, and the persistent shrill of a telephone ringing in the house next door. Footsteps come running up the street, growing louder as they get nearer, and for some bizarre reason I think they are coming to my house; I catch my breath, wait for the creak of the gate, the ring of the doorbell. Irrationally I think, I am caught, and my stomach grips and lurches on a sudden rush of panic. But the footsteps just carry on by, pounding out their pace on the concrete, boom, boom, till slowly they recede again, and fade, like the echo of my heart.

  And still I sit there.

  I start to cry; stupidly, uselessly and horribly noisily, in the confines of my small and functional bathroom. Andrew has left his bathrobe pegged on the hook beside the door. It hangs there like a slumped, dark shadow of a man; redundant and abandoned. I cannot bear to look at it. But his things are everywhere: his shaver by the sink, his towel upon the rail. His toothbrush shares the glass with mine; their two bases meet and cross at the bottom of the glass, but then out they stick, their heads far apart, and facing away. I look away from these things and stare at the floor, and I see where the white tiles are marked here and there by the random stray hairs that Andrew has shed from his body; every day I sweep up those hairs, and every day when he showers he sheds some more. There are traces of Andrew everywhere. This is his home. But it doesn’t feel like his home to me; it feels like the place that I must inhabit and through which he merely comes and goes like a transient judgemental ghost, a cruel shadow of the person that he used to be, the marker by which I measure my own discontent.

  What will I do?

  The walls of this room squeeze in on me. I can smell the faint dampness from the sink plughole; the combined familiarity of old soap, old toothpaste and the lemon-scented spray that I use to clean. Saliva rises in my mouth and I have to swallow. I force myself to stop crying; I need to get a grip. I need to think.

  I could sleep with Andrew and pass the baby off as his.

  It’s the obvious thing to do. If I am careful, he need never know. And think how happy he would be. After all, isn’t this what we both wanted? And wasn’t its absence the very cause of the rift between us?

  But could I do it? Could I really do that to him?

  Could I lie like that, and maintain that lie for all of our lives?

  One day I would crack. One day, in a row, or when faced with his insufferable coldness, I would goad him. I would taunt him, and let it out.

  But what else can I do? How can I have this child, and yet how can I not? And what likelihood is there of it ever becoming a healthy child anyway? What chance of this cluster of cells inside me taking form and shape, and holding on in there, and growing and thriving, and living long enough ever to open its eyes to the world and breathe? What if it should just die inside me, like last time?

  I cannot do it. I cannot go through it all again.

  I need to speak to Simon. He cannot just leave me to sort this out. But his mobile’s switched off, and when I call his direct line I get the answerphone. This is the voicemail of Simon Reiber, I hear him say. Please leave your name and message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible, or alternatively dial zero to speak to my secretary. Again and again.

  And again and again I leave him a message.

  ‘It’s Rachel,’ I say. ‘I need to talk to you. Please call me.’

  And I can’t stop the pitch of my desperation creeping into the word please.

  I pace the house. I wait for him to call me, and he doesn’t. That sense of rejection, that stomach-fisting sense of exclusion that goes hand in hand with everything I have ever known about the Reibers and all of their kind, locks and pulls inside me.

  I call again; I leave another message.

  The day slides by; soon Jono will be home. Agitation – panic – prickles inside my head. I phone again and this time I speak to his secretary.

  ‘I need to speak to Simon Reiber,’ I say, keeping my voice as calm as I possibly can.

  ‘Who’s calling please?’

  ‘Rachel. Just tell him it’s Rachel, please.’

  And she says, ‘I’m afraid Mr Reiber’s not available at the moment.’

  ‘Is he in his office?’ I demand, too harshly, too insistent.

  ‘I’m afraid Mr Reiber’s not available at the moment,’ she repeats robotically. ‘Would you like to leave a message?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Tell him I need to speak to him. It’s urgent,’ I stress. And, ‘Do you know when he will be free?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I am not able to say. I will tell him that you called.’

  And then I know: she’s vetting his calls. He’s not available to me. What did he say to her, I wonder? Don’t put any calls through from a strange, desperate woman called Rachel?

  He cannot avoid me.

  Suddenly I picture Simon’s mother. I see her face as she threw me out of her house; the bright abhorrence in her eyes. It wasn’t just that she didn’t want to be reminded of Vanessa, but that she didn’t want to be reminded by me, a stranger. And I think of Simon’s reaction that time I suggested that I go with him, to visit his mother. I recall the look on his face now and I want to squirm. And I think how I listened as he talked about the old days with Vanessa and Fay and Dominic and the others . . . and how I lapped it all up; how I couldn’t get enough of it – all those stories and memories of the wild, fun times they had without me.

  I am nothing to him. I was nothing to any of them.

  I have the phone number of his flat. I have never used it because I have always called him on his mobile, but I have it nevertheless. I wrote it down once, when I was there. I found it written on a travel document, left lying on the counter along with the post. I saw it, I remembered it, I wrote it down. I have the phone number of his house in Kingham, too. That number is on all his correspondence. Anything sent out by him goes on heavy, letterheaded paper, and there it sits, the family phone number, right after the family address, at the top of each sheet in Times italic, centred, ten-point.

  Would I ever call that number? Would I, if I had to?

  Later, when Jono has done his homework and eaten his supper and is now ensconced in his room, doing God knows what, and Andrew is slumped in front of the TV watching miserable men moaning on about the miserable news, I go to bed. I have a headache, I say, though no one listens. No one takes any notice. I take my phone with me and I curl up with it, under the duvet. I ring Simon’s mobile once more,
but it is still turned off. Did he think he could deter me so easily? I dial the number of his flat. It rings and rings. I lie in my bed and I listen to it ringing. I picture his flat; that huge open room, the shrill of the phone bleating through the darkness. I picture the stillness; the view from the window, the lights of the city below orange and blurred. And still the phone rings. I lie on my side with my phone snug against the pillow. I have it on redial. It rings and it rings.

  I hear Jono going to bed. ‘Goodnight,’ I call as he walks past my door, but he doesn’t reply, and I am too weighed down to go after him. I hear Andrew go out to the kitchen, boil the kettle, make a cup of tea and take it back to the living room. I follow the change in sound and voices as he flicks through the TV channels. And then there is just me again. The phone rings and rings against my ear.

  And finally Simon answers.

  He knows that it is me, of course. I hear it in his voice: the guardedness, the lie of his careful Hello.

  ‘I tried to call you,’ I say. At work.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’ve been busy.’

  ‘And on your mobile. You’ve had your mobile switched off.’

  ‘I’ve been in a meeting most of the day.’

  ‘I left a message with your secretary.’ I hear myself nagging and I think: This is how he will remember me. I close my eyes and the tears slide into my pillow. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘You can talk to me now,’ he says, his voice as smooth and impartial as a stranger’s.

  ‘I can’t,’ I wail. ‘I can’t talk to you now; my husband is downstairs. I need to see you.’

  ‘Rachel—’

  ‘For God’s sake, Simon, I’m pregnant!’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks, his voice clipped, cutting to the point. ‘Are you absolutely certain?’

  ‘Yes,’ I hiss. ‘I did a test.’

  ‘The test might not be reliable.’

  ‘Oh, Simon, come on.’

  He says nothing. I picture him, standing in his flat, thinking of ways to fob me off.