The Confession

by Jessie Burton

  ‘I don’t know, Con. I don’t know about this. She’s – fragile.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Connie emphatically. ‘She just needs to find her own feet—’

  Barbara fumbled in her bag and lit a cigarette. She inhaled it deeply, and Elise watched the smoke plume into the air, spreading to nothingness. ‘You know yourself,’ Barbara said. ‘I know myself, but Elise barely knows her own name. You need to say something. You can’t just have her dangling around you for ever.’

  ‘I thought you wanted this kept quiet,’ said Connie sharply.

  ‘I do, on my side. I don’t even have to come into it. But on your side, you should tell her. It just feels wrong. It feels like we’re tricking her.’

  ‘We are tricking her. That’s why it feels so bloody awful.’ Connie sighed, leaning back against the sun lounger. ‘But is telling her really for the best? Filming will finish. At some point, we’ll go back to London and you’ll forget this ever happened. I’m behaving like a crazy person, I know I am. But she can’t be hurt if she doesn’t know about it. And I don’t want her to be hurt.’

  ‘Do you love her?’ said Barbara.

  ‘Yes. Can I have a cigarette?’

  ‘Have this one.’ Barbara handed over the cigarette and Connie smoked it hungrily. ‘Do you want her, Con?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said Barbara.

  ‘I don’t know what to do!’

  ‘Do you want her, Connie?’

  Connie sighed, stubbing out the end of the cigarette. ‘No. I don’t.’

  Elise clamped her hand over her mouth, and Barbara sighed too, a noise that sounded a million years old. She faced the pool, sitting upright again, like a goddess. Connie leaned towards her and kissed her on the side of her shoulder. Barbara turned, and their mouths met. Elise couldn’t move as the two women scooped their arms around each other and sank back onto the sun lounger, their limbs shifting dark against the bright of the pool.

  As she turned away and crept back to bed, Elise thought it would be just like Connie to leave their bedroom curtain open.

  29

  When Elise woke up the next morning, Connie had closed the curtain. Only a slim bar of light fell across the wall. Unable to move, Elise watched it, her heart beating hard. A rush of nausea made her gasp. Her eyes were rocks, so she closed them again, turning on her side and burrowing into the mattress. She couldn’t get out of bed because she was stuck by a spell. She could not remember the evening before. And then, in a heat-filled rush, she could.

  Elise opened her eyes and peered at the curtain. Behind it, would the pool still be there? Perhaps the women had drunk it in their lust. I could run into the hole they’ve left behind, Elise thought. Smash my head on the concrete at the bottom. That would serve her right.

  Her mind began to flea-jump. She was going to be sick but she still couldn’t move. The bile was rising, and a hammering pain had started in her head, fireflies darting into bullets, exploding until her skull was just a swilling pail of blood where her brain had vanished. Was she going to die here? It was a real possibility. She took a shallow breath, wincing. She was lying like a toad, dying in the half-light of this rented house. She tried to sit up but the pain in her face arched over her skull. She hissed and fell back down.

  Elise wiggled her legs: not paralysed. She could run from here if she had to, catch a plane, go home to – where? But her bones were made of jam, spreading into her skin. It didn’t matter there was nowhere to run. She patted her collarbone: the necklace from Connie was still there. She thought about wrenching it off, but she didn’t have the energy. Never in twenty-three years of living had she felt so terrible.

  ‘Good morning,’ said a low voice. ‘How are you feeling?’

  Elise turned her head very slowly. Connie, fully dressed, was leaning on the door frame. ‘Here you go, Lady Lazarus,’ she said, coming towards Elise with a glass of fizzing aspirin. ‘I thought you were going to sleep for a hundred years. It’s nearly two o’clock.’

  ‘What?’

  Elise didn’t move, so Connie placed the glass on the bedside table. ‘Good party, then?’ said Connie affectionately, sitting down lightly on the side of the bed.

  ‘You tell me,’ said Elise.

  ‘You don’t remember it?’

  Elise closed her eyes. ‘I want to die,’ she said. ‘Kill me.’

  ‘I’m not going to kill you. Go back to sleep.’

  ‘You always want me to go to sleep,’ said Elise, mumbling into the pillow.

  30

  Matt was standing on the shore with his board stuck in the sand as usual. His wetsuit was rolled down to his waist and he was facing the water with his hands on his hips as if he were shipwrecked and waiting for rescue.

  For a moment, Elise hesitated. Shara was in the beach house behind her. Maybe she was even watching them.

  ‘Matt,’ she called.

  He turned. ‘I came to pick you up last week,’ he said. ‘Connie said you were still asleep.’

  ‘I was. I got hammered.’

  ‘So you kept your promise to yourself?’

  ‘Yep. In bed for a day. I’m sorry you made that drive.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry.’ He turned to the water. ‘Look how beautiful it is today.’

  Elise stared out at the Pacific. The sun was high. It was a beautiful September afternoon. ‘Shara’s finished the painting,’ she said. ‘It’s over.’

  ‘Do you like it?’ said Matt.

  ‘She’s got me. I’ve never seen a painting of myself like that before.’ It was true: all those hours spent sitting in the drawing classes at the RCA, and finally, she felt seen.

  ‘Shara does that. Is she going to give it to you?’

  ‘She offered. I said no.’

  Matt whistled. ‘Wow. Why?’

  Elise looked up at him. ‘She’s already given me so much.’

  ‘What has she given you?’

  ‘And I can’t take the painting from her when I’m going to take something else.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The wind whipped at Elise’s short hair and she tried to tuck it behind her ears. Beyond them, a huge pod of pelicans flew by, low to the surface of the ocean. However many times she had seen these birds, they still gave her the shivers. They looked like something prehistoric. ‘Have you got your car keys on you?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, go and get them. And let’s drive.’

  *

  They drove along the Pacific coast, with no clear destination, not talking much, still in their wetsuits. When they approached a motel sign, Elise asked him to pull over. By now, she believed it was clear to Matt what she wanted and what was going to happen. It concerned her that Matt didn’t ask her why she wanted this, that he wished only to catch this chance on its wing. So she did not know whether he had moral doubts, or any kind of credo – a conscience, say, about his wife’s grief for a baby he didn’t even know was called Dinah.

  And where is my conscience? she asked herself. Buried like treasure at the bottom of a swimming pool. The bright cheer of the sun above their heads was a joke – but it was also necessary to make Elise feel alive in this day. Everything she had hoped for had been eclipsed – and yet she was still here, illuminated. Her arms were brown, the hairs upon them golden. This decision with Matt, she could control. Elise was sure he wanted her – and it was nice, for once, not to have to fight to be wanted. She had forgotten how that felt. She tried not to think about trouble coming their way.

  *

  Matt paid for the room, maintaining a bemused expression on his face. He crossed his arms to look casual, but it only made him look defensive.

  She unlocked the room door, and stood to the side like a porter. Matt walked in and she shut them away from the sun. The room turned a pale pink through the flimsy curtains as if they were standing in the centre of a shell. ‘We shouldn’t do this,’ he said.

  She s
at on the end of the bed. ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’re not being honest.’

  ‘We will be honest. For now, this is just us. Matt, come here.’

  She shunted herself further up towards the headboard. He stood at the end of the bed, watching her. ‘I do want this,’ he said.

  ‘I know you do.’

  ‘I’ve thought about it.’

  Elise opened her legs slightly, still in Shara’s neoprene wetsuit. ‘Tell me what you’ve thought.’

  ‘What your skin would feel like to touch.’

  ‘It’s soft,’ she said. ‘Come and see.’ She rolled on her front. ‘Unzip me.’

  Matt knelt beside her on the mattress, running the zip of her wetsuit open to the top of her buttocks. Elise felt him rest a warm palm on the centre of her back and it immediately relaxed her. ‘I saw you naked when you were in the studio,’ he said.

  She rolled over onto her back and began to peel away the arms of the wetsuit. Then she lay back. ‘I know you did.’

  He put his mouth to her collarbone and kissed it, kissing the battered gold E of her necklace, the tops of her breasts – gently at first and then with more urgency. He freed her legs from the neoprene, and she freed his, and they fell back again onto the bed. Elise felt herself unwinding, his hands and mouth releasing her out of her body and into a timeless place where she was floating in pleasure.

  ‘Go into me,’ she said, even though she wasn’t sure she was completely ready. He eased himself in but it was still a shock, so deep into her that she gasped. ‘Oh, fuck,’ said Matt. ‘Elise, I think about you all the time.’ He kissed her mouth, and she kissed him back, again and again and again. ‘I never thought this would happen,’ he murmured.

  ‘Me neither,’ said Elise. But as she closed her eyes and let herself go, she knew that she was lying.

  2018

  31

  I’d been so caught up with Connie’s manuscript, and with the strange tightrope walk of being two women with both different and familiar lives, and with the question of my mother and who I wanted to be in the world, that when I did pay actual attention to my physical self, I was in for a surprise.

  On the 6th of January, Epiphany, I discovered my body again, in Connie’s understairs loo, peeing on a stick as she wandered the Heath. My period had been late – but there’d been so much stress. I just thought it was late. I hadn’t felt sick, or any different. I’d felt tired, sure, but who by the end of 2017 had not felt tired?

  I sat on Connie’s lavatory in the black and gold bathroom, urinating on the fibrous stick, and watched it turn pink. And when the two lines appeared on the screen, I did not believe it.

  I thought of Joe. I thought of my dad. I thought of Kelly and her online community of instamothers. I imagined telling them. I thought of Elise. I even thought of Christina, dying in her mother’s arms – Christina and Margaret, protected by fiction, but penetrating my core as much as my own intangible mother. I thought of Connie.

  I thought of all these people, and barely knew what to think of myself.

  I went to the kitchen and had a cup of tea, and half an hour later I went back to the loo and did a second test, and the second confirmation forced me to entertain some kind of understanding.

  I felt biological. As if my body had passed a test. My ovaries, my womb, my blood, taking things into their own hands. This is our time now! they were saying. My imagination was forced to play catch-up.

  *

  I hid the sticks in my bag, and in a daze I wandered to the front room and sat down on Connie’s sofa. Many friends had said to me, Oh we weren’t really trying! before admitting in the same breath that they’d dispensed with birth control – just to see. Just to see what, exactly? If they were viable bodies? If they did, in fact, want to be parents? This was a life we were talking about, not a lifestyle. But I realized now why they had said that. It was because they were trying to embody the paradox of wanting something that they might not want. No one could test out being a parent; have a baby then reasonably hand it back. No one wanted to confess that they didn’t know what they were doing. I wish more people did.

  Had I, too, wanted to put my body to the test, just to see? It made a certain illogical sense.

  There was a chance I would not be pregnant in three months’ time. It would be healthier not to think of what was inside me as a person who actually existed. And it was easy enough to do. The only person I was thinking about at this point, was myself.

  *

  Connie was still out, so I used her phone to call my doctors’ surgery and got a last-minute appointment for that day (a genuine Christmas miracle). I left a note for Connie saying I’d had to go out, and I walked to the station, feeling like a lightbulb had just switched on in my stomach. Could people see this light shining out of me? It appeared not. I was as invisible as the next person.

  In the doctor’s consulting room, I told her I thought I was pregnant. ‘I’ve missed a period,’ I said. ‘I’ve done two tests that have come up positive. But I want you to tell me for sure.’

  She listened to me and nodded, appearing to understand my unwillingness to rely on my own investigations. She was an older woman with grey hair cropped short, and a kindly face. She made me think of Dorothy.

  As we waited for the result, I sat looking at the gastroenterology diagram on the wall, at the beauty and intricacy of the gut. I wondered why the doctor had that illustration – and not one of the lungs, for example, or the heart, or the womb. My gaze drifted over the many colours and contours of the gastric system, at the marvel we never know and never see – until it goes wrong, until it turns on us.

  The doctor saw me staring and smiled. ‘The most extraordinary part of the body, if you ask me. You didn’t, but still.’

  ‘Why is it?’

  ‘It’s such a sophisticated set of systems and organs. I read recently that researchers believe that ninety-five per cent of the body’s serotonin resides in the bowels.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘We’ve dragged up all our emotions into the brain and heart, but doctors since the sixteenth century have thought that the gut exerts the real hold over our feelings.’

  ‘I’ve probably sat down on mine a little too hard,’ I said.

  ‘We all do, at one time or another.’

  ‘So!’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The test. OK, Rose. You were right. You’re pregnant.’

  I stared at my palms, turned upwards on my knees like some act of supplication. It was official. I was in the condition. I was a case. I wasn’t alone. A ghost of a person had turned up in the corner of my mind.

  We sat quietly.

  ‘Have you told anyone you might be pregnant?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you can share it with people you trust, Rose, that will always help.’

  I hesitated, feeling as if I was unburdening my deepest secrets to her. ‘I – don’t know what to do,’ I said.

  ‘What to do? Well, the first thing is to start taking folic—’

  ‘No, I mean—’ I stopped, unable to go on, but knowing I had to speak. I felt like I was revealing something sinful, and I hated myself for it. ‘I don’t know if I can – if I can do it.’

  ‘OK.’ She paused. ‘That’s fine.’

  I closed my eyes, bathing in her words with something akin to relief. Just to speak the words was to take the sting out of them. But then I wondered if the doctor really thought that what I was saying was fine. She might only be saying this because as a doctor she had to obey the law. As a woman she would know the grey shades and holistic injustice of having so much going on in just one body, but really only being able to make a stark choice about it – a binary choice of black or white, yes or no.

  Hit by the ambiguity of the doctor’s reaction, I realized that I’d come here looking to claim some certitude. I still had my eyes closed, waiting for it, when the doctor touched me gently on the arm and passed me a leaflet entitled ‘What’s Next?
’. For a fleeting moment of horror I thought it was some sort of evangelist anti-abortion pamphlet, but it wasn’t. It was just a photo-set of all kinds of different things I might be feeling, physically and psychologically. And then, on the other side, my options.

  ‘Have you been feeling pregnant – sick, tired?’ she asked.

  ‘A bit tired, but I didn’t really notice. I’ve had a lot going on.’ I felt so pathetically defensive.

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  ‘The father doesn’t know,’ I said. ‘I might not tell him.’ I knew she didn’t need to hear all this, but I had to tell someone.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘You’re not together?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, feeling even more pathetic. I was making a nine-year relationship sound like a one-night stand.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I guess that’s life!’ I said, and laughed.

  Her eyes flicked to the computer screen. ‘You don’t have to make any decisions today,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Read that pamphlet. There are some telephone numbers on the back for organizations women can consult when they’re trying to make a decision.’

  ‘Right.’

  She smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Rose. For now, that’s all. Take the folic acid, and if you decide to go another route, I’m here too.’

  ‘OK. Thank you.’ I stood up, gripping the pamphlet so hard in my hand that I almost crushed it. ‘Happy new year,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘A happy new year.’

  I wandered out into the street. It was bitterly cold, and getting dark. I walked. I didn’t feel pregnant. I felt alone.

  32

  Joe and I met up a week later. He came through the door of the cafe where we’d agreed to meet – central, neutral, just off Oxford Street – and I thought, Here is a man I used to know.

  His beard had grown. I wondered whether this was neglect or intention. It suited him. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Happy new year.’ A thought almost physically juddered through me of what was inside my body. I pushed it away, smiled. ‘Thanks for meeting here,’ I said. We hugged, no kiss.