The Confession

by Jessie Burton

  ‘What is it?’ said Matt.

  Elise held up the novel. ‘Connie.’

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ he said.

  *

  That night, Elise went into labour. The contractions started at about three in the morning, and by five, she was on all fours, groaning. Matt took her to Wyckoff Hospital. She’s not dilated enough, they said, take her home.

  She felt delirious, terrified. I don’t know where that is! she said. I really don’t know where that is!

  Is your wife all right? the medical staff asked Matt.

  I’m not his wife, she said. Let’s go.

  They went back to the apartment and Elise crawled like a drunk up the staircase to the second floor and tried to sleep, as per their advice. Matt sat on the side of the bed and took her hand. ‘It’s going to be OK,’ he said. ‘You can do this. Of everyone I know, you can do this.’

  She looked at him. He really didn’t have a clue what he was asking her to do.

  *

  Three or so hours later, as the sun was rising, the contractions were coming closer together. ‘I have to go back,’ she said.

  ‘OK,’ he said, and they got a taxi the short way to the labour ward. The baby was pressing down on her.

  ‘Oh, god, oh god,’ she said. ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I wish I could take the pain for you.’

  *

  Elise demanded relief from the pain. She did not think the pain was a good thing to experience. She did not see why she should, when Matt was just standing there on his hind legs.

  *

  Again, on all fours. ‘Wait, honey,’ said a midwife. ‘Now, push.’

  ‘I am pushing!’

  ‘Push harder, Elise. It’s not gonna come on its own.’

  *

  It felt endless. She turned and looked out of the window. The afternoon had come, the floods to cover Brooklyn would soon come too, and she would still be here, pushing. She had been pushing for a thousand years.

  *

  Beeping, and people rushing in. Elise had no pain; she could not feel her body: all she had were eyes, on Matt in a blue apron and a blue shower cap. ‘Are you going in the water?’ she said.

  ‘Stay with us, honey,’ said the midwife.

  ‘We have to get this baby out,’ said someone else.

  Matt, his face so drained of colour. Is this it, she thought, do I go now. Do I go now.

  *

  When she came to, Matt was sitting in a chair beside her. He noticed her stir, and leapt up. ‘Are you OK? My darling, oh, god. Are you OK?’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You lost a lot of blood. They had to give you a transfusion.’

  ‘Where’s the baby?’

  ‘The baby’s fine. They had to cut her out.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Here.’

  Matt reached into a plastic tub by her bed. A swaddled baby was in his arms. He placed it gently on Elise’s chest. ‘I don’t know if I’m allowed to do that,’ he said. ‘But here she is.’

  She was very much a baby, Elise thought. After all that! It was odd how normal this felt. Matt was looking at her expectantly. ‘How long have I been asleep?’ she said, and she stared into the small red face.

  ‘About five hours.’

  ‘She’s tiny,’ said Elise. ‘Look at her fingernails.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Look at her nose!’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Everything is inside her!’ said Elise, and Matt nodded, smiling, tired. But she knew he didn’t understand. Did he not realize? The tiny lungs, the heart, the stomach, the intestines, the little bones as frail as a chicken’s, the brain – and inside that a deep and endless chamber of music that none of them could hear. Elise felt deeply anxious she might break her. ‘I don’t want to hurt her,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not going to hurt her,’ he replied.

  But Elise thought that was wishful thinking.

  *

  There was a woman in the bed next to her. Stephanie had also had an emergency C-section, and the two of them sometimes talked. It was not easy for either of them to move much, so they turned their faces to each other. ‘I gotta look a state,’ said Stephanie.

  ‘You don’t,’ said Elise.

  ‘I’ve waited years for this,’ said Stephanie.

  Elise didn’t ask her why. Stephanie’s husband was a fireman. He wasn’t able to come much to the ward, but when he did, he was a big presence, tall and broad with red hair. He was one of seven, Stephanie said. Irish Catholics, his mother having come over in the fifties.

  ‘And she stayed?’ said Elise.

  Stephanie laughed. ‘Oh, yeah. She wasn’t about to go back.’

  ‘She must have lots of grandchildren.’

  Stephanie grinned. ‘So many. This one –’ she indicated her little son, Callum, in his own plastic tub – ‘he’ll probably get lost.’

  But the way she said it, Elise knew she didn’t mean it. Stephanie was never going to let Callum get lost.

  *

  The days passed, and Elise lay there in the hospital, itching to leave, staring at the ceiling as Stephanie drifted off. Stephanie’s fireman husband had just been and gone, and the two of them seemed so in love. Looking at Stephanie, who was thirty-eight, and finally a mother, Elise felt suddenly ashamed of her youth, which she had so long denied. It all made sense with Stephanie. Stephanie was so comfortable in herself, so warm and witty, and now so rewarded with her baby Callum.

  *

  Elise stayed in the hospital with the baby for a week. They had wanted to monitor her and the child. She lay in the bed, staring at the ceiling, the baby on her chest or in her bassinet. After seven days had passed, the doctor told Elise she had nothing to worry about. ‘You’re young and strong,’ he said. ‘It’s time to go home.’

  But spiders in Elise’s mind were weaving webs. ‘Is it going to be OK? Are you sure it’s going to be OK?’

  ‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ said the doctor. ‘What’s her name?’

  They’d thought about calling her Patricia, but Elise wanted a new story. ‘Rose,’ she said. ‘We’ve called her Rose.’

  2018

  41

  Standing on Connie’s doorstep after she closed the door in my face, I realized two things. There was a good chance I’d lost a very important person that day – not just because of Connie’s connection to my mother, but because of what, over the previous months, she’d taught me. The space she’d given me. Her example of living was unapologetic and self-knowing, whilst encouraging me to find my own voice, regardless of what name I’d been using. At Connie’s side, I’d begun to excavate myself, to question who did I really want to be, and how, and where?

  *

  I headed to the nearest cafe, and sat down with a coffee. My heart ached. I wondered what Connie was doing right now, whether Deb was going to stay with her, the two of them talking long into the night about old ghosts. I tried to imagine my mother and Connie, back in the eighties. A couple. What had they been like? Demonstrative, balanced? Now, I might never know. However, my most immediate problem was that I had nowhere to live.

  I felt there was no way I could go back to Brixton to live in the flat – although Joe would probably let me stay there if I needed, and a lot of my clothes and possessions were still there. I could buy a ticket to Brittany and leave this evening – but I didn’t know the cost of a last-minute journey like that, or if I could face Dad quite yet. Claire might be able to tell something was different about me. I’d lie badly, and then the secret – all the secrets – would come out. And it was too much of an imposition on Kelly and Dan to ask for their spare room, what with Mol, and Kelly’s pregnancy. I told myself that these were the reasons I didn’t ask Kelly. But truth be told, even though they would welcome me as they always did, I didn’t know if I would be able to cope right now in their family unit.

  I had other friends, but I’d been neglectful
since working with Connie, and it would seem too opportunistic to text them out of the blue. But there was one person who might be willing to put me up, even just for a couple of days. I pulled out my phone and dialled the number.

  ‘Hello?’ said a voice, young and light.

  ‘Hi, Zoë. It’s Rose. How are you?’

  ‘Rose!’ she said, her voice breaking into happiness. ‘Oh my god, how are you? We miss you at the cafe. Well, maybe not Giles. I miss you.’

  I laughed. ‘I miss you too. I miss our chats. I’m sorry, I’ve been so shit at being in touch. A lot’s gone on. Hey, listen – are you free this afternoon, by any chance? I know it’s a long shot—’

  ‘This afternoon? Sure.’

  *

  Zoë lived in a tiny sub-let council flat in East London with three other people. Every public wall I walked past on the way was flyered with achingly cool low-key club nights, whose bands and aesthetics I couldn’t even begin to understand. Elaborate and beautiful graffiti lined the brickwork, and there were coffee shops with square footage the size of a postage stamp and wooden benches outside. I passed a shop that seemed to sell only black socks from Japan, its frontage artfully rough around the edges. The coffees, I noted, were the same price as in Hampstead.

  I found Zoë’s estate and rang her doorbell. She appeared quickly, dressed in a big baggy blouse and leggings. Tiny gold hoops frilled the curve of her left earlobe. She gave me a hug. ‘Come in!’

  Her room was a dream. That sheepskin rug and fairy light feel, with postcards from the Tate stuck up with Blu-tack, succulents lining her windowsill, night-lights and slim novellas, a journal and pen-pot on a tiny desk. It felt like a room that held hopes and dreams inside it, and my heart couldn’t decide to swell or break.

  ‘You’re so kind to let me stay,’ I said, and I meant it.

  ‘Oh, not at all. People crash here all the time. I’ve got you clean sheets. I’m really sorry about you and Joe.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m all right, though. And I promise I won’t be here long, I just—’

  ‘Rosie, it’s cool, really. Listen, tonight we’re having a big vegan lasagne and watching Clueless. You wanna join?’

  ‘I’d love to,’ I said, feeling about three million years old. I wanted to bottle and sell this heady combination of Zoë’s utter youth and sweet maturity.

  She gave me the Wi-Fi password, VirgosRUs – ‘there’s three of us here born in September’ – and I logged onto the Internet on my phone. No one had emailed me. I went on Joe’s @joerritos Instagram account, but he hadn’t posted since before Christmas. Kelly had been busy, though – a great photo of all three of them in Christmas pudding onesies. Tis the season! she’d typed. #Puddings #whatdoidowhenineedawee.

  Again I thought about her ferociously chopping logs alone in the frosty field on Christmas morning. I would have loved to have seen Kelly’s other self. To see her bright, primary-coloured squares washed in different hues of sage and brown, dark, skeletal trees, a line from an Anne Sexton poem and her selfie with an axe. But I doubt she’d get quite the sponsorship she needed. She knew that too. Since the pudding photo, into the New Year it had been some tasteful interior shots of their home, Dan and Mol’s backs, walking along in a park – and yes, Kel’s observation on ‘what it feels like to be a mother’. She’d remembered what she’d told me practically verbatim. The comments underneath this caption were endless: ‘Oh my god, THIS.’; ‘You’re so right, sometimes I think it couldn’t get any worse and then you turn a corner and all you see is sun!’

  I switched off my phone.

  *

  That night, I sat round a tiny melamine table and ate a delicious aubergine lasagne, and laughed and listened to Zoë’s and her flatmates’ conversations. They were all a similar age to Zoë, in their early twenties – and it wasn’t until I was with the four of them that I realized quite how different I was. I felt heavier in my mind and in my bones, the effect of the accumulation of time. They liked to talk about themselves, a lot, with little encouragement from me, finding their own anecdotes fascinating and new – but they were generous with each other’s stories too, riffing and spinning off into absurd tangents, their moods dogmatic and whimsical by turn. They talked about their work. One was an art student, another was a PA in the City, the third was debating whether to train as a teacher. All of them were in serious debt but this had not dented their ambitions.

  I asked the art student, a girl called Lara, what she was making. ‘I’m working with plastic, mainly,’ she said, free and flowing with her sentences. ‘Old plastic. I want to reconfigure it, try and take the blame out of it. All of my processes are low-energy – I use solar energy, natural light, rain water, composted material. I don’t buy anything. I feel I can only move forward by bringing with me only what’s already here.’

  ‘She does the most beautiful sculptures,’ Zoë said, and I knew she thought she had to act as translator for me. ‘One of them was bought by a serious dude.’

  ‘A serious dude?’

  ‘The kind of guy you need to buy your work,’ Lara said, with no apparent bitterness. ‘He’s got it in the courtyard of his mews house in Bayswater. I installed it for him.’

  ‘That’s amazing,’ I said. ‘And what do you want to do once you graduate?’

  Lara smiled. ‘More of the same. But it’s not going to be easy. I have a couple of bursaries I rely on at college. They’ll dry up.’

  ‘You’ll do it,’ I said.

  Her smile wavered. ‘I don’t know. You need to know people. Get people’s attention. You need followers on the Internet. I’ve only got, like, six thousand.’

  ‘I doubt a million followers would make you a better artist,’ I said.

  ‘I know that,’ she replied, a touch defensively, and I thought I’d better not act too much like a big sister.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘you really remind me of my friend Kelly.’

  Lara’s face lit up. ‘Do I?’ she said. ‘Why?’

  ‘She was determined, like you. Still is. She made it work. She needed bursaries too. Have you ever heard of @thestellakella?’

  They all looked at me blankly, and I realized that I was asking the wrong crowd. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘She took her passion and she made it work as a living. She didn’t worry about what people thought of her. She just got on with it and before long, people were coming to her. It is a gamble though, doing that.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Lara, looking baffled.

  ‘Because if you rely on something you love to feed you, pay your bills, put a roof over your head, I think it complicates your relationship with it. That’s how it seems with her, anyway. You have to be practical around something that’s impulsive, sometimes elusive. If you turn your soul into a business, you have to be ready for that to hurt sometimes.’

  Lara looked at me wide-eyed. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘You’re so right. And the thing is, you can’t compartmentalize – but if you don’t, you’ll pay a price one way or another.’

  This was all making me think of Connie. I felt that Connie had paid a price – for what, exactly, I was still unsure. But her reaction to me earlier that day betrayed some deep pain inside her that had never been resolved, and which she had let impact on every aspect of her life, including, I believed, her desire to write.

  ‘Exactly,’ I said to the table. ‘But you don’t have to worry. You’re all way ahead of where I was when I was in my twenties.’

  ‘Where were you in your twenties?’ asked Gabriella, the PA, who had perfect nails, and bright eyes that still betrayed anxiety.

  I took a deep breath. ‘I was really lost,’ I said. ‘Really, really lost.’

  I could feel the air in the kitchen condense, their bodies tensing in anticipation of when someone might actually tell a truth. ‘People have always disagreed with me when I say this,’ I said, looking round the table. ‘But I’ve come to think it’s not always a great idea to be spectacular at school. It’s hard to keep that going.’

  Jacob
, the one boy in the room, the one who was thinking of being a teacher, chuckled. I knew I’d touched a sore point. ‘Do you remember that ten-year-old, who was made to go and do a physics degree at Cambridge, had a nervous breakdown and never looked at a calculator again?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Zoë.

  ‘Yeah, it was ages ago. Like, the seventies. I mean, my situation wasn’t that bad – Zoë will vouch that I’m no physics genius, or any genius in fact. But it can be hard, twenty years on, to have a patchy CV. When everyone thought you would “go to Oxford”, or be “living in New York”, or running some amazing organization making the world “a better place”.’

  I had them enraptured. Maybe they didn’t know anyone my age? It would make sense. I didn’t really know anybody their age. Maybe no one was prepared to talk to them like this? But I realized as I talked on, that I was prepared. Something in me over the past few months had broken open. It felt as if Laura and Rose were joining together, and it felt right, and heady and full of potential. For the first time ever, I felt free to be myself, and to tell my own story. ‘It’s good to have people believe in you,’ I said, looking at Jacob. ‘It’s better than the opposite. But a lot of it is about them, not you.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said Jacob. ‘Do you want to tell that to my parents?’

  That night, a stolen night slipped from the calendar, I told them my story – these three welcoming strangers and one casual friend. I told them about my missing mother, about how I grew up dreaming fantasies about her. How I felt I didn’t have a path, how I slid into this job or that, how I compared myself to others and found myself wanting, how often I ended up the second fiddle in other people’s projects – including my boyfriend’s. I didn’t tell them about Laura Brown, or why I’d decided to be her. Given Zoë’s love of Connie’s work, I thought that was a conversation best saved for another time.