by Fiona Barton
Kate clutched his arm. “Emma? I think I’ve just met her. You little genius, Joe. I’d kiss you, but it could be construed as sexual harassment these days.”
Joe beamed with pleasure. He wasn’t sure exactly what he’d done right, but it didn’t matter. He’d done good. The boss said so.
Kate left her drink on the wall and marched towards the door. “I’m going to the ladies’,” she called back over her shoulder. “See you later.”
Harry and Emma were already there, reapplying lipstick in the smeared mirror.
“Well?” Kate said. “Millionaire or dosser?”
The reflections of the two women looked at her and grinned. “Bald, beer belly, and five kids,” Harry said.
“Serves him right for breaking your heart, Harry,” Emma added.
“Did he marry Sarah S.?” Kate asked.
“No. Blimey, you know all our secrets,” Emma said.
“Well, some of them,” Kate said and got her own lipstick out.
SIXTY-THREE
Emma
SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 2012
We’re on our way back out there onto the dance floor. Just like we always used to. Me following Harry, jigging up and down in readiness, when Kate taps me on the shoulder.
“Can we have a quick chat, Emma?” she shouts in my ear. She sounds nervous. And I wonder if she has guessed who I really am. If she has recognized my voice from my phone calls.
“Shall we go outside?” she says, and I follow her instead of Harry to the door, past the red Formica table where we’d picked up a name badge, now littered with crumpled plastic cups.
We sit on the wall at the front, watching the smokers waving to passing cars while our ears retune.
“What a brilliant party,” Kate says. “Must be like the old days.”
“Yes. Weird to see us all back in the hall as adults. Like one of Dennis Potter’s plays. The one where the adult actors play children.”
“Blue Remembered Hills,” Kate says. She’s seen it, too. “It was a really dark play,” she adds. “One of the children died.”
We sit silently. I’m thinking about the baby and reach for my stomach. And it’s as if Kate is reading my thoughts because she starts talking about Alice Irving.
“It was just down the road that they found her. In the garden of the terrace where you used to live, Emma. Have you seen the stories I’ve written in the paper?”
“Yes,” I say. “I saw them.”
“I’m trying to find out what happened to Alice,” she says. “The police think that she must have been buried when you and your mum were living in that terrace.”
“I can’t believe that,” I say. “I talked to my mum about it. She can’t believe it either.”
“Well, it happened,” she says. And she turns to sit sideways so she can see me properly.
“What was it like, then? How old were you? Thirteen or fourteen in the early eighties?”
I nod.
“Do you remember those days?” she says. Insistent. “Must have been hard living in a shared house at that age. It’s when you need a bit of privacy, isn’t it? You had your mum and Barbara Walker living there. Hard to keep anything private—or secret—when people are living on top of each other.”
“You’d be surprised,” I say. I didn’t mean to say it out loud, but it just came out.
“How do you mean?” she says. “I used to hide the books we were all reading secretly at school—The Carpetbaggers, I seem to remember. What sort of things did you keep hidden?” Like she knows.
I don’t know what to say without betraying myself.
“Emma, was there anyone you think might have had something to do with burying the baby?” she asks. Her voice is all soft and hypnotic. Willing me to speak.
The word “baby” is ricocheting round my head. Baby, baby, baby.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say. “It upsets me too much.”
“What does?” she says.
“The baby,” I say.
“Alice?” she says.
“No. My baby,” I say.
I start rocking gently on the wall. Soothing myself like my mother used to do to me.
“Your baby?” Kate asks. “What do you mean?”
I think I wanted her to ask. I wanted to tell. I wanted to let it out. She could be my razor blade.
“I got pregnant when I was fourteen,” I say.
“God, you were still a child,” she says and she takes my hand as if in absolution. I thought when I finally confessed, there would be shouting and recriminations, but the world doesn’t stop turning. We are still sitting on the wall and the smokers carry on waving to drivers.
“Shall we go somewhere to talk?” she says. “You must be getting cold. The Royal Oak is just round the corner.”
I shake my head. I can’t bear the thought of other people.
“Or we could sit in my car?” Kate suggests as if she understands. Maybe she does. I don’t know why, but I trust her to understand.
In the car, she starts with gentle questions, asking if anyone else had known. Had Jude or Barbara Walker known?
I shake my head.
And she says: “How did you keep it a secret? You must have been so scared.”
There’s no judgment in her tone, just empathy. She isn’t telling me to stop talking about it like Harry. She doesn’t think I’m mad.
I want to tell her about the lies and hiding my pregnancy in big jumpers and I know she will listen.
SIXTY-FOUR
Emma
SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 2012
At first, I couldn’t believe it,” I say. “I told myself you couldn’t get pregnant from one time. Told myself periods came and went at my age—all the agony aunts in the magazines said so. Told myself I’d counted the weeks wrong. Told myself I was putting on weight because I was eating too many sweets. Told myself the fluttering in my stomach was anxiety over exams.
“But my body was telling another story.”
Kate puts her head on one side. “Oh, Emma,” she breathes.
“When the sickness started, I thought I had food poisoning. My mum had had it and I’d looked after her. But mine didn’t get better and I was retching most mornings, turning on the taps in the bathroom so no one could hear me and spraying the room with deodorant so they couldn’t smell my disgrace.”
I turn to Kate. I need her to know that I wasn’t a stupid girl. I was a bit of an innocent about boys and sex, but I wasn’t stupid.
“I know it’s hard for anyone else to believe—especially now, when sex is everywhere—but even though I knew what was happening, I thought I could will it away. I didn’t consider an abortion or drinking gin in a hot bath. That would’ve meant admitting it was real.
“I believed I could stop it by the power of thought. I would ‘get better,’ as if it was just an illness. I hadn’t even worked out when the baby was due to be born. It wasn’t going to happen.”
Kate shifts in her seat beside me and rummages in her bag for a tissue and hands it to me. I hadn’t realized I was crying.
“But Emma,” she says, “how did no one notice what was going on? It must have been so obvious.”
“Well, they didn’t. I didn’t let them. I led a double life: Emma the schoolgirl and Emma the girl who’d got herself in trouble.
“But it couldn’t last. The truth was battering down the door, demanding to be acknowledged, like a madwoman in the attic. I suppose it was a kind of madness.”
“You must have been out of your mind with worry. And at that age. How did you cope?” Kate says.
“I don’t know, now. But it’s when the dread started, that overwhelming feeling that the world is about to end.”
“But what about when your pregnancy started to show?” Kate says.
“That was the
worst part,” I say. “I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror. My stomach wouldn’t stop growing. I wrapped it tightly in scarves and I wore big jumpers and I stayed in my room, away from friends and family, saying I needed my own space. I was terrified they would see and know.
“Sideways, I was sure you could tell, so I became obsessed with always standing head-on with my mum, Jude, and I stopped hugging her. I could see she was hurt when I pushed her away, but I couldn’t risk it.”
I can’t stop talking now. Now that I’ve started. And I tell Kate how I took my meals upstairs to eat. “Jude wasn’t happy but her boyfriend, Will, told her not to make a fuss. He was glad to get me out of the way. And as my stomach grew, I piled more food on my plate to throw away later so I’d have an excuse for my weight gain.”
I was so resourceful. My quick brain spotting the dangers.
I almost feel proud of my child self. I would have got an A grade for deception.
Kate is nodding and never takes her eyes off me. I know she wants to ask lots more questions about how I got pregnant and what happened to my baby, but there is too much to tell. I have to let it out a little at a time or it will flood out and drown me. I feel dizzy. As if my head is going to explode.
“What happened when you went into labor, Emma? You couldn’t hide that,” she says.
“No, it was like a nightmare,” I say. “But I was on my own.
“It happened so quickly, the actual birth. I’d had some pain in my back for a day or so and then I wet myself and my stomach went rigid. It was my body but not my body, if you know what I mean. It just went out of control, and every time the pain came, worse and worse, I held on to the edge of the bath and shouted myself hoarse. I thought I was going to die. I remember calling for my mum, knowing she wasn’t there. Knowing I was alone. I had to be. No one could know.”
Kate is gripping my hand like I gripped the bath. And the deep-buried memories are crowding in on me, banging on the door to get in.
I can see myself, as if through a window. When the thing slithered out, shiny and steaming in the cold bathroom, I lay in the mess of blood and sheets on the linoleum beside it. It just grew cold beside me.
It wasn’t like it said in the pamphlets. While other girls at school were secretly reading the one copy of Fear of Flying, I’d been looking at booklets about placentas and cords, stolen secretly from a hospital waiting room. The words made me want to throw up but I read on, just in case.
In the bathroom, I cut the cord with scissors from the first aid kit and wrapped it and the other stuff that had come out of me in a copy of the Sunday Times from the box beside the front door. I turned on the taps of the bath and climbed into the lukewarm water, watching the shreds of blood move around me.
“It’s the silence after the shouting I remember,” I tell Kate.
“I’d been lucky. Jude and Will were at work. It was just me and the thing. I don’t remember looking at it, but I must have done. Like when there is something scary on the television and you watch through your fingers so you don’t see the full horror. I’ve got no memory of its face. I don’t even know if it was a boy or a girl.”
“Oh my God, is this the first time you’ve told anyone this?” Kate asks.
“Yes,” I say. “I tried to tell Harry once but she didn’t understand what I was saying. And I couldn’t tell anyone else. You see, I did something terrible.”
“What did you do, Emma?” she says gently. “Did you do something to your baby?”
“I buried it,” I say.
SIXTY-FIVE
Emma
SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 2012
Kate stops talking when I say I buried the baby.
I can hear my voice, as if it is someone else’s, telling her that burying the baby was easy.
“It was like burying my pet rabbit when I was nine,” I’m saying. “I wrapped it in newspaper and a carrier bag so you couldn’t even tell what it was. I dug a hole in the garden and put it in and just scraped the dirt over it. It only took a few minutes and it was gone.
“I dragged the big pot that my mum had planted with daffodils over the top. You could see the little green tops, just poking through. Then I walked back to the house.”
I remember thinking that all I had to do was throw away the bloody towel I’d used and it would be as if nothing had happened. Everything back to normal. I was so young. I didn’t know that nothing was ever going to be normal again. I remember I put my hand on my empty stomach and it felt like a balloon at the end of a birthday party, soft and puckered. I twisted the loose skin through my jumper to see if it was still me. To feel something. Anything.
“Stupidly, I’d thought the danger would end when I’d given birth,” I tell the reporter.
“I’d had it all planned.” I almost laugh at the naiveté of it now, but then, I was so alone.
“When I finally accepted that there was going to be a baby, I decided I was going to leave it at the local maternity hospital for a nurse to find and look after. I’d seen it on the news, how the nurses gave abandoned babies names—Holly if it was at Christmas, or after the policeman who found it, that sort of thing—and held them tight in their arms. And loving families adopted them and everything turned out fine as far as the public was concerned. Happy endings all round.”
I tried to see my life in terms of a heroine in a novel. Everything clean and tidy. No loose ends.
“I was convinced it was going to be so easy. I was going to pop the baby out like in the drawings in the pamphlets, wrap it up in a white blanket I’d bought secretly, and lay it down quietly in the toilets and walk away. People are in and out of toilets all the time. It wouldn’t take five minutes for the baby to be found.
“But I hadn’t needed to do that. I’d used newspaper and the Boots carrier bag to wrap it instead.”
“Oh, Emma,” Kate says. “And you’ve kept all this inside until now. Until Alice’s body was found.”
“It’s my baby in the garden,” I hear myself shout. “My baby.”
I can see Kate is shaking and she’s gripping the steering wheel to steady herself. I’m frightening her. I’m frightening myself. I sound mad. I must stop this.
“I need to go, Kate. I must tell Harry where I am. She’ll be frantic,” I say.
Kate’s face is pale and she speaks to me as if I’m a patient in a hospital. Low voice, calming rhythms.
“I’ll drive you home, Emma. You must be tired and too raw to think straight. You need time to gather your thoughts.”
It all sounds so comforting and normal. Gather your thoughts. That’s what I should do. It’s what Paul says when he is worried about something. But I don’t need to gather mine. They have been there for years.
• • •
Harry is standing on a chair, scanning the dance floor, when we go back in, plucking at her hands and looking anxious.
“Where the hell have you been?” she shrieks as soon as she catches sight of me. “Disappearing like that. I’ve been looking for you for half an hour.”
But she shuts up when she sees my face. I must look awful because she takes my arm and leads me back outside and whispers: “What’s happened, Emma? Where’ve you been?”
“I’ve been talking to Kate, that’s all. I’m sorry I worried you,” I tell her, trying to keep my voice steady.
“What about? What have you been talking about?” she says.
“It doesn’t matter now. I’m a bit tired, Harry. I’m going home. Kate’s going to drive me.”
Harry looks across at Kate. She’s talking to a young bloke near the car, giving him some money for a taxi.
“Have you upset her?” she shouts at her, and the bloke looks frightened, as if she’s accusing him.
“No, she hasn’t, Harry,” I say. I want it all to stop. Can’t face any more emotion. “It’s all been a bit much tonight.
Seeing everyone. Lots of memories, not all good.”
She squeezes my arm. “Sorry, Emma. I shouldn’t have made you come. I’ll go home with you.”
I shake my head. “I’m fine.” The strands of the story are still working themselves out in my head and I can’t share them with anyone else just yet, not even my closest friend. Harry would get upset and angry for me and I’d have to deal with her emotions as well as my own. She wouldn’t understand why I had chosen to tell a stranger my secrets, but it felt so safe. I was almost anonymous.
“I’ll call you in the morning,” she calls after me, waving miserably as we pull away.
• • •
It’s a long way home, snaking through dark streets, then out into the dazzling lights of the dual carriageway.
We don’t speak much. I give directions. Left here, carry on over the roundabout. But Kate and I are both deep in our own heads. Me, reliving my shame. And haunted by the dread I deserved.
• • •
The house is in total darkness when I get in. Paul hasn’t left the hall light on. I stand in the dark for a while, unable to put one foot in front of another, the thoughts crowding in on me.
“Emma, are you okay? What are you doing down there?” Paul calls, his voice sleepy.
“Nothing. Just taking my coat off,” I call back. “Go back to sleep.”
I turn on the light and have to close my eyes to protect them from the dazzle. I open them slowly, testing the glare. Everything looks exactly as it did when I left this evening. Paul’s jacket hanging crooked on a hook, unopened junk mail on the table, my shoes lined up by the mat. But everything has changed.
I have told. The police will come now. I need time to think. To plan.
I feel like one of those wildebeests tiptoeing to the edge of the river while the crocodiles wait round the bend, jaws braced. I think about running away. Hiding. But I pull myself up short. At your age? I tell myself. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s time to face it all.
I make a grown-up plan. I’m not going to let this sleeping dog lie.
