by Laura Elliot
‘But what on earth would I do,’ I ask her, ‘sitting all by myself in an empty house? I’m fit and healthy. I intend working until the last minute.’
‘David warned me to keep a close eye on you and not let you overdo things,’ she said. ‘It worries me,’ she added, ‘him being on that oil rig. If anything…’ She paused, uncomfortable at having to remind me that I’ve a bad track record when it comes to bringing her grandchildren into the world. I try not to give her cause for concern.
It has not been difficult to maintain the illusion of pregnancy. I’ve made a harness with bindings that fit snugly below my breasts and under my stomach. I pad it with firm fillings that outline my expanding curve. I’m so conscious of avoiding contact with anyone that my antennae remain on full alert, tremblingly cautious, always watchful. My face looks too gaunt for a woman in her last trimester but people see what they want to see and their eyes are always drawn to my stomach.
Hopefully, Professor Langley has forgotten my existence. His secretary handled my decision to change gynaecologists with chilly politeness and sent me a bill for my last appointment and scans.
At the start of the month, David arrived home on leave, his skin tanned and taut from the harsh North Sea gales. I hid the harness then, and drank so much water every day that my stomach felt as tight and swollen as a drum. My food was fat and starch, it sickened me, but my weight kept increasing. He transformed the spare bedroom into a nursery. He painted the walls a pale apple green and hung one of Miriam’s seahorse mobiles above the carry-cot. We travelled to Dublin and stayed for a weekend with my father and Tessa. We bought a pram and the carry-cot, a feeding chair, a changing station. The whispering grew more intense as we made our decisions. Each time I faltered they whispered…Remember us…remember us…no turning back…Whenever I felt the urge to run free from the shadow of that cottage and bring the dream to an end, they’d whisper stay…stay. Be silent, they urged, when the truth pressed against my teeth so hard it ached to be heard. Be brave, they whispered, when David laid his ear too late to my stomach and said, ‘I can’t feel anything…Well, maybe I do…it’s so hard to tell.’
What he’d felt was my shudder of fear, my womb contracting with dread determination.
That is how our baby grows, carried into being on a whisper.
I met a horse whisperer once. He was small and stout and wore a wide-brimmed hat with a jaunty feather in the side. To be called a horse whisperer sounded mysterious and powerful, but he said he was simply a man who understood horses. He came to us soon after we purchased Augustus – the horse had too many bad habits for us to handle alone. I’d watched him stand before Augustus, face to face and then cheek to cheek, not threatening, just empathising, reaching deep into the horse’s psyche and connecting with the rage that lay at the heart of his flailing behaviour. By the time he’d finished, Augustus was still a spirited horse but he was biddable. He’s gone from the meadow now, sold to a horse dealer. I told David he broke loose and almost knocked me to the ground. Seeing him at the gate every time I passed was too much to bear. I want amnesia.
It will happen, my whisperers promise. Trust us…believe in us…we are the whispers of what should have been.
David was reluctant at first to move from my bed, but when I told him I’d suffered some spotting, he understood. Nothing must endanger this new life we’ve created. I reassured him of my love, explained how hormones go berserk during pregnancy and lovemaking is impossible. ‘Afterwards,’ I promised him, ‘afterwards when our baby is born, everything will be different.’
When I came home from the studio on the night before he left, he asked me to sit down and talk to him. He placed his hands on my arms and sank me into a chair.
‘Be still,’ he’d said, ‘and listen to me. All this rushing around and working such late hours. Apart from our trip to Dublin, I’ve hardly seen you since I came home.’
He kissed me, his mouth seeking some response. My body clenched in protest, and I accused him of being demanding, selfish, thinking only of his own needs. How was it possible that he could not hear the terrified whine behind my bluster?
‘Why,’ he’d asked, ‘do you spurn me? Do you think I’m a beast, incapable of lying by your side without wanting to invade your body?’
I almost told him. I could feel my knees weakening, the urge to kneel before him and confess. But the whisperers moved from gentle persuasion to implacable authority and straightened my spine. I faced him down, this man whose children I carried so briefly, all five of them, and who now urge me onwards…No more…no more…no more.
He drew away from me and wished me goodnight, chastely kissing my forehead. I understand his desire to be part of my experience but this is a journey I must take alone.
The rain had stopped by the time we left the Nutmeg and shoppers were drifting back to the market stalls. A traveller sat on a blanket outside the café. She was young, twenty at most, a baby in her arms, and a dull-eyed small boy hunkered beside her. I searched in my purse for coins but Miriam went back inside to buy coffee and sandwiches for the mother, milk for the boy.
‘It’s a boy child, missus,’ the traveller said. ‘A big boy child for his fine strappin’ mother.’
Her hard, experienced eyes seemed to sear through my secret. The pavement swayed, or perhaps I stumbled, and the coins fell from my hand, rolling across the uneven surface until they were clenched in the boy’s fist.
Phyllis Lyons arrived back from the pharmacy with her mother’s medication and asked if she could get a lift home with me. Her car was being serviced and she’d missed the twice-hourly bus that runs past her house. Miriam waved and left us together, glad, I suspect, to escape to her house on the other side of Market Square.
Throughout the journey home, Phyllis talked non-stop about her mother’s ailments and her efforts to alleviate them. I stopped outside her gate and waited for her to leave the car.
‘Come in and say hello to Mammy,’ she said. ‘She loves the bit of company.’
I stared at the grey lace curtains on the front window. Her mother would have been watching us, stooped on her Zimmer frame. Inside, the air would be stale and smoky.
‘I’m expecting a call from David,’ I said, and Phyllis nodded, as if my excuse echoed all the others she’d ever heard.
She stepped from the car and walked around the side of her house, squeezing her stocky figure past the tractor. Farming her few acres and looking after her mother…it can’t be an easy life but she accepts it without complaint.
I turned down the lane and drove into the grey arms of Rockrose. I locked the front door behind me. Such relief, being alone again, able to breathe, to open my waistband, to allow the silence to settle until only the whisperers were audible.
I speak to women all the time. They look at my bump and confide in me. One woman told me she’d never once, during the nine months of her pregnancy, felt her baby move. He’s eighteen years old now, on a track and field scholarship in the United States. Another woman was told by her gynaecologist that he could not detect her baby’s heartbeat. That night she felt the first fluttering of life in her womb. Put a group of women together and they’ll tell stories that mystify the medical profession.
Carla Kelly writes about them in her pregnancy diary. The happy, clappy stories about babies who kick and jog and elbow their way towards birth. I sent her a letter shortly after that night. I asked her how it was possible to keep hoping when the womb rejects the dream. An anonymous letter, of course. She could not deal with my story. She passed my letter on to Alyssa Faye for her advice column. As a psychologist, Alyssa Faye believes she has a deeper understanding of the human psyche than the average journalist. Human suffering is grist to her mill. For three weeks she analysed my miscarriages, analysed my head, analysed my emotions. I did not write my story to pad her column. I wanted to see if Carla Kelly could understand, empathise. I got my answer.
Last week in Dublin, I saw her in Brown Thomas with her husband. At least
I assume that’s who it was. He stays out of her limelight but she held his arm in a way that suggested he was her rock. They were looking at baby clothes. I followed them from the department store and up to the top of Grafton Street. The flower sellers were busy. Birds of paradise flamed against white chrysanthemums and tightly coiled rosebuds jutted like spears from overflowing buckets. She bought the roses and continued onwards. I lost sight of them when they entered the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre. I probably could have found her. She’s tall and distinctive enough to stand out from the crowd but I was too weak to move any further. I sat down in a coffee bar and asked for a glass of water. The waitress had the experienced eyes of an older woman counting months. She brought the water sharply and asked if I’d like her to call a taxi.
‘You think it’ll never end,’ she said. ‘Especially the last months. But it does and then you’ll know all about it.’
She spoke with relish, they all do, warning of impending chaos and tiny impetuous demands that will turn my life upside down.
The taxi came shortly afterwards. I caught a last glimpse of Carla Kelly and her husband as I was leaving. They were laughing at something one had said to the other. Her head was thrown back, her hand covering her mouth, as if her laughter was a wild thing she must contain. It’s a long time since I laughed that way. Had I ever? I must have, especially in the early days with David. Now I laugh on cue. It sounds natural, spontaneous, even contagious. In public relations, where it’s necessary to flatter and admire, I have acquired certain skills. I lean on them now but, from time to time, they slip. Then all I have to do is touch my stomach. Small gestures create an easily translatable language that gives me leave to be tired, anxious, irritable, uncomfortable and, occasionally, irrational.
Was it irrational to follow Carla Kelly that day? Of course it was. I realise that now but she is the face of Anticipation, taunting, flaunting; telling us it’s easy, so easy and natural to carry a baby in the womb for nine dangerous months.
I too used to keep a diary. I made the last entry when I was sixteen years old. Hard to believe that’s twenty-three years ago. I was pregnant then, eight months gone, on the final stretch, so to speak. And on the verge of becoming a teenage statistic. I lost my boy in March, gone before he had time to draw breath. Lots of blank pages afterwards. The world had become a greyer place, not worth recording. Nothing left for me except my scans and a whisper of what might have been.
‘You’ve had a lucky escape,’ my father said when I was discharged from hospital. ‘Best thing you can do is get on with your life and forget it ever happened.’ He’d taken care of everything and discouraged me from visiting the Angels’ plot in Glasnevin Cemetery. It’s such a poignant place to visit – that treasured, communal space where the tiny ones rest together.
‘It’s a new beginning for all of us,’ he said. ‘No looking back.’ My mother was dead by then and he was about to be married again. He’d changed from the grim, dead-eyed man I used to know. His face was plumper and he laughed easily, joyously. I would look at Tessa and wonder how such a small, insignificant woman with rimless glasses and a slight stammer when she was nervous had wrought such a change in him.
I didn’t blame him for not wanting to begin his married life with a troubled teenager and her baby. I just wished he hadn’t looked so relieved, so determined to obliterate my experience. But it never was obliterated, just lightly buried…like my boy. I held on to my diary, kept it safe each time I moved, but I never had any inclination to read it until after that night in the cottage. Funny experience…rediscovering the young me. I was on a wild carousal all right, and heading in only one direction.
Now I’m filling those blank pages. Dates don’t matter. Time is suspended. Writing about it helps. Otherwise my mind is frantic, thoughts running like ants beneath an upturned stone. How did I work through that wall of pain? There has to be a reason…has to be. Three months have passed since then yet the memory clings to my senses. I hear the clunk and clank of a spade, smell the dank, uncovered earth. I see a small bundle resting in that narrow cleft. I feel the clay beneath my nails, the briars tearing my legs, the polka-dot sting of nettles on my skin. And the taste that remains with me is bile, bitter gall.
It’s time to close my diary and try to sleep. Close it now and silence the whisperers. Close these musty pages and trap the future as it waits in anticipation.
Chapter Three
Carla
October 1993
Carla Kelly held her hands upwards to receive the wedding dress. Ivory silk overlaid with lace billowed across her shoulders before settling over the defined bump of her stomach. A beautician moved forward to brush blusher across her cheeks and sweep mascara over her eyelashes. One of the dressers briskly corseted Lizzy Carr into the black Goth wedding dress. Her feet were already booted in aggressive spiky heels. A slash of black lipstick emphasised her masklike white face. In contrast, Carla’s make-up was a delicate blending of peach and gold.
She bowed her head as a hairstylist switched off the hairdryer and rippled his hands through her hair, working it with his fingers until it tumbled in dishevelled strands to her shoulders. He clipped an ivory wisp of feathers into place and stood back to check the effect.
Lizzy was handed a bouquet of black roses with one red rose in the centre. Her heavy eye make-up emphasised her emaciated appearance while Carla, carrying a bouquet of orchids sprigged with lily of the valley, looked dewy, fecund, feminine. The backstage photographers clicked around them until Raine signalled at the models to prepare for their entrance.
Lizzy strutted forward into the light and headed towards the foot of the catwalk. She paused, waited for Carla’s entrance. The audience gasped, then laughed and applauded as Carla, sexy and pregnant, opened herself to the vibrating music, the piercing strobes, the lens of the cameras stripping her layer by layer as she glided towards the photographers. They called her name. This way, Carla! That way! The other way! At the foot of the catwalk, she stood with Lizzy and allowed the audience to absorb the contrast. Then they separated, each move choreographed, each inch of space worked to full advantage. Carla smiled and turned. From behind, she looked like the other models. No weight on her bottom, ankles still slender. The fashion journalists scribbled, the flash of cameras dazzled. This was Raine’s most ambitious designer collection to date – and the introduction of the Anticipation wedding dress. Tomorrow the dress would feature on the front pages of the newspapers and Raine, delighted with the publicity, would laugh when the inevitable calls were made to talk radio complaining about pregnant brides glamorising carnal knowledge.
The wedding dress swirled around Carla as the music quickened and the fashion show built to a finale. The other models emerged from behind the screens to sashay down the catwalk and form a guard of honour. They clapped Raine forward to meet her audience. The applause increased as she bowed, grinned self-consciously, longing to be backstage again, organising everything and everyone.
Carla changed into a pair of Anticipation stretch jeans and a midnight-blue top. She had enjoyed her time as the face, or – to be more accurate – the belly of Anticipation, but she was growing tired of the constant publicity.
The baby moved, a gentle jog of heel and elbow that never failed to delight her. She did not know if she carried a boy or a girl, preferring, like Robert, to wait. Life was a series of changes, of adjustments, and the biggest adjustment would take place in three weeks’ time. Outside in the auditorium, chair seats snapped back. Voices faded as the audience departed. She emerged from a side door and walked down the empty catwalk. The cleaners had moved in and were removing discarded programmes and press releases. The sound engineer grinned across at her as he packed his equipment and wished her goodnight.
In the ladies’ she breathed in the scent of potpourri and tried to imagine a time when she would not feel the constant pressure on her bladder. A woman, heavily pregnant and wearing a distinctive Anticipation top, emerged from one of the cubicles.
‘So did the photographers.’ Carla laughed and held her hands under the tap. ‘I’m still hallucinating from the flashes.’
The woman ran a comb through her short, spiky hair. Studded earrings glistened on her earlobes. ‘It’s been a long time, Carla,’ she said. ‘How are you?’
Startled, Carla paused as she was about to dry her hands. ‘Do we know each other?’
‘I’m Sue Sheehan,’ she replied. ‘At least, I was before I married. I used to work for Edward Carter.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t recognise you.’ The scent of potpourri breathed sweetly into the space between them. Carla swallowed a hot rush of nausea. Since her pregnancy, her sense of smell always seemed more acute at night.
‘Like I said, a long time ago. Ten years at least.’ Sue Sheehan tilted her chin, as if checking for any sag underneath. Despite her advanced pregnancy, she had a slim face, her features emphasised by her boyish haircut. Her complexion was smooth, almost waxy, and Carla was suddenly reminded of a doll, an asexual doll with a blue unflinching gaze. Sue blinked and the impression was immediately dispelled. Carla struggled to separate her from the brashly confident team of women who had surrounded Edward Carter in those days. They all had that look, tight haircuts and sharp shoulders, their rippling blouses and pert breasts defining their femininity. She must be in her mid-thirties now, Carla speculated, or even older, if she had been one of the senior executives in Carter and Kay Public Relations.
