by LK Fox
I came back to town shortly before I was due. I’d thought about running away, but it would have meant giving birth alone and broke, and I just wasn’t brave enough for that.
I was walked through the ward to one of the single rooms, overdosing on pastel treatments. The admitting nurse told me that the Dentworth provided ‘alternative approaches to specialised issues’. Its trustees were former Church employees who helped young mothers reach decisions about their unborn children, which meant they encouraged us to keep our babies. It seems like the Church always got in the way of my life. Harry was paying for it, of course. He gave me my own credit card to help cover the things I’d need, but he put a low cap on it in case I bolted.
‘We still have an unacceptably high rate of teen pregnancy,’ Marleena had told me one day. ‘The girls always amaze us with their lack of knowledge about the biology of birth. We deal with the gynaecological details but fail to understand how their minds work.’
I knew I wasn’t like those girls. I’d attended a good school and, although my parents were divorced, I had been provided with a stable – if somewhat detached – home life.
The clinic had fee-paying patients and ‘courtesy’ patients, which meant they accepted a quota of women in high-risk situations. That wasn’t me, so Harry paid. They asked me to come in ahead of the birth because I was to be part of an evaluation study, but the place was already fully occupied. The resourceful Marleena adapted one of the nurses’ offices into a makeshift bedroom for my after-care, shifting stationery cabinets and packing boxes to make space for another bed. By doing so, she probably violated a dozen Health & Safety by-laws, but she wanted to help me and said that sometimes the rules had to be bent.
‘Make sure I’m allowed to keep my baby, then,’ I told her. But she didn’t answer.
I could see that, one day, she would get caught out by the management and dismissed for doing nothing more than trying to help her patients. Until that time came, she said she would continue to do whatever was necessary for her girls. I guess I placed all the hope I had left in her.
I gave birth to a saucer-eyed boy, a blue-eyed and boneless happy little thing who lay there grasping his toes, so silent that at first I thought he’d been born without a tongue. The process was painful and protracted, but I didn’t really remember too much about it. When I saw him, I didn’t cry or anything. I just thought, So there you are, my little boy blue. It felt right.
When Marleena brought the baby back into my stationery-cupboard room, she didn’t tell me that this was to be her final visit. She wheeled a clear plastic bassinet into the room and propped my beautiful boy up in his blue blanket. In this place, blue still meant a boy, pink a girl, but blue was his natural colour. It felt right. To keep track of the bassinets, someone had taped raffle ticket numbers to their sides. My ticket, 231, was one of the numbers that had got me backstage and pregnant.
‘How is your appetite?’ she asked, knowing that I had been refusing food. According to the nurses, my behaviour had been marked down as ‘agitated’ just because I refused to take visits from Harry. One day, I had stupidly threatened to cut myself if my wish wasn’t obeyed – I wasn’t going to, I just felt so powerless and didn’t know what else I could threaten them with. All they did was replace my mealtime cutlery with a plastic spork, and a doctor came by to tell me that this wasn’t how young women behaved at the Dentworth.
Marleena told me that everything was okay. She said she knew I wasn’t going to mess up, that I was just suffering from an ‘overdeveloped sense of entitlement’. She said the girls who came from privileged backgrounds were usually the worst. They expected everything to be magically sorted out for them and threw tantrums if they couldn’t charge their phones. She said, ‘You’re not going to be like that from now on, are you, Ella?’
I promised her I was fine. I would go home to Harry with my new baby and I would even try to get along with the ghastly Karen.
‘I’m glad to hear that,’ said Marleena. ‘You’ve got to eat more regularly. You have to keep your strength up. Also, we need to have a discussion.’
I told her I wasn’t hungry. My gaze remained locked on the baby’s vivid blue eyes, the same eyes as his father’s. Already they followed mine intently, strengthening the bond between mother and son. Marleena had recently been campaigning against the purchase of forward-facing baby buggies because they prevented parent–child imprinting from taking place. Even though she’s gone now, I still think of her as the patron saint of lost causes.
I thought, Look at you, the perfect image of your father, only even prettier.
I noticed that Marleena avoided the subject of naming my baby, which made me suspicious. Was she thinking that a name would only humanise him before she tried to take him away?
I decided I was imagining things. There were girls who had serious issues and still got to keep their babies, weren’t there? I wasn’t like any of them. My boy was wanted and would be loved.
‘I’ve seen girls like you too many times before,’ Marleena said, clearly made weary by the thought. ‘You try to behave all big and grown up, but you’re still children inside, and that’s okay. It would just make my job easier if you admitted it. You play at being tough and a bit crazy, but at some point it stops being a game and you find yourself in a state. And when that happens, you can no longer see how strange your behaviour has become. Be careful, Ella. I don’t want you to end up like that.’
Earlier that morning, I had watched from the window as two seagulls attacked a blackbird on the roof of the house opposite, pecking out its eyes and thrusting their beaks into its chest, fighting over the stringy crimson meat. That’s the world outside, I told my son. Everyone turns cannibal if they have to. I’ll protect you from them. We’re on our own now. We can’t afford to trust anyone.
Nick
What else happened in the year that passed between losing Gabriel and the anniversary of his death?
I can fill in a few of the gaps. After Gabriel died, I missed quite a few days at work, days when I couldn’t trust myself to speak to anyone else without falling apart. My boss started having trouble with clients, and soon our department wasn’t meeting its targets.
I tried to get back in the groove, but I had lost all interest in the job and realised that I had to leave Datachase. I’d been taking evening classes for a while, studying horticultural therapies, and had talked about setting up a company with Matthew. I had the knowhow, he had the contacts, and we could work mostly at home, although I suggested renting part-time office space just to get me out of the flat.
As soon as I gave up my job at Datachase, my spirits improved. They say almost everyone undergoes three career changes in a lifetime. It was the best thing I could have done. Suddenly I was helping others far worse off than myself instead of wallowing in my own misery.
I thought everything would be all right then. But on one perfectly normal Saturday night I went out for a drink, which turned into a trawl around a few bars looking for trouble, and I disappeared for two days. I returned with only the haziest of recollections about where I’d been. My clothes reeked of alcohol and I had a cut above my eye. I’d thought I was fine, but I wasn’t.
I gave Ben the perfect excuse to leave. The timing was right – he was finally up for promotion at the company and needed to concentrate on his career. He didn’t think I was about to chang, and told me he would leave the flat at the end of the week. The little boy who had brought us together so quickly and easily was gone, and nothing could take his place.
That afternoon, Ben started packing – this must have been around nine months after Gabriel’s death. He left his keys on the hall table and waited for a friend to come by and collect his clothes. He took his name off our voicemail and the little sign from our letterbox. I made tea. It was all terribly civilised.
I finally realised that he had been planning to go for months. He’d just been waiting for the right moment. As he left, he touched me lightly on the arm. The gesture was
so cold and remote I could hardly believe I had ever been in love with him. It was like I saw him clearly for the first time. Driven, ambitious, selfish.
I’d lost quite a few of my friends in the months following Gabriel’s death. As far as everyone else was concerned, there was nothing more to the story but, in my mind, there was. Something had happened to him in the space of a few seconds, and nobody could discover – or wanted to discover – what that thing was. Whenever I thought about that morning, I got trapped in a loop, events repeating themselves endlessly, over and over. I kept returning to the school gates, hoping to spot someone hanging around. But the only person hanging around was me.
Sometimes, on heavily misty mornings, I thought I saw a figure – little more than a human shape outlined in the murk – standing motionless at a distance, watching the school, but as I approached it would move away, and no matter how fast I ran after it I was never fast enough.
On the surface, it probably looked like I was recovering well. But I had bad dreams. And I became as obsessed with the dragoon, still missing, just as Gabriel had been. I continued to place ads for the exact same piece on websites, hoping that someone would turn up with it, but nobody did.
To beat a system, you have to use a system, and the process can be learned, studied, understood. I analysed everything, and became convinced that there were only two solutions. One: Gabriel had undergone some kind of mental dysfunction and had run out of the school, unseen by anyone. Two: there was an abductor, and he’d known exactly what he was doing. He was the kind of loser you could find hanging around the backwaters of any town if you looked hard enough. The police had so much technology now, I thought they should have been able to run a profile match and dig out a hundred like him.
I thought back to my time at Datachase. I knew there was software you could download that would get you into the Dark Web, and you could use it to hide your identity. After you create an avatar, you need to find sites that use untraceable digital payments. I searched around it for a while, not really knowing what I was doing. I thought I might bump into the kind of creep who would hang around outside schools trolling for kids. I started to find a few leads, but I didn’t follow them up. I didn’t know how to deal with them and knew there was a risk I would end up getting flagged on a police surveillance system somewhere.
The more I analysed this non-crime, the more complicated it all became. That’s what happens to conspiracy nuts; you start bending the facts to fit the theories and soon everything links back to faked moon landings. I couldn’t make any scenario work in my head. My theories turned into plots that defied any sense of rationality. I suspected everyone, especially Ben. I had lost everything I valued. I was devastated, and had no way of getting my old life back.
The mathematician John Nash developed a game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma which proved that the only way to create a secure world was to distrust everyone. The problem with his theory is that it’s human nature to do exactly the opposite and trust implicitly, without reservation. We want to trust strangers. We trust habitual liars and repeat offenders. Cynicism, suspicion, mistrust – they’re the real win-win, but that’s not what we do. Mind you, John Nash became a paranoid schizophrenic.
*
By the time the anniversary of Gabriel’s death rolled around, I was on my way to becoming a John Nash. The career change probably saved me. Seeing chemo-damaged patients intently caring for plants was a wake-up call that put my own life in perspective.
Before Ben left the apartment for what was probably the very last time, he turned to me and asked, ‘So why did you go back to the school this morning, Nick? Honestly?’
I’m no expert on how the human mind works. I told him that when I woke up today I somehow stepped back in my head to the last time I had seen Gabriel alive, and I had relived the events of that terrible morning. I had no other explanation for what had happened.
In the last year, whenever I found myself in a really bad space, I had done the school run again. I knew that some of the teachers would make allowances if they found out because they realised what I had been through.
‘Did you really believe what you said to me?’ Ben asked, pausing in the doorway. ‘That you thought you’d seen Gabriel today?’
I said, ‘Yes.’ I cleared my throat and raised my voice, if only to give myself the confidence of the reply. ‘Yes, I did. I conjured him back into being. We talked to each other, just as we had on that day. We were running late, we joked and ran about and – well, you know how it always was between us.’
‘You honestly thought you were taking him to school again.’
‘Yes, the event relived itself.’
‘You mean you wanted to relive it.’
I sighed wearily. I was tired of all this, just tired. ‘I don’t know. Maybe, subconsciously.’
‘So the conversation you two had, it was the exact same conversation you had a year earlier?’
‘A lot of it, yes. God knows, I repeated it to the police often enough. It’s burned into my memory, along with the date. How could I not honour the anniversary? The photograph is real. I hit another car. I took a shot of the licence plate. But I wish I could understand why I also thought I saw him being abducted.’
‘Show me the picture again.’ Ben held out his hand for my phone and looked silently at the shot. ‘There’s no child in this photograph.’
‘What’s going on with me, Ben?’
‘I think you need to see someone,’ he said finally, standing at the front door, anxious to leave.
He may be your ex, but this time you should take his advice, I told myself. You need to understand what happened to you today.
I went to see somebody, but I don’t think it was quite what Ben had had in mind. He assumed I would attend a session with a psychiatrist. Instead, I made an appointment for the next morning with our neighbour Kaylie.
Ella
Gabriel gurgled and smiled up at me.
His moods jumped across his features as fast as rabbits. I had chosen Ryder’s middle name because I thought that, one day, he might meet his son. It felt appropriate.
Marleena’s fingers were resting on the unopened blue plastic folder in her lap. After the birth, the doctor told me that Gabriel had been turned towards my stomach, and the resulting back labour had torn my birth canal. Gabriel had been saved, but I would need additional surgery before I could have another baby. Marleena and I were supposed to discuss the matter in more detail, but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. I knew that at this particular moment in time something was disconnected inside my head, and no amount of carefully considered conversation would be able to correct it. I found myself staring at the child intensely, scared that he might disappear at any moment.
I had a bad feeling about what was inside the folder: medical details of the operation? Confidential notes on my mental state? Was I really part of a study, or were they using that as an excuse to examine my fitness as a mother?
Marleena had forgotten her shoulder bag that morning, so she had nowhere to put the thing. She was always carrying tons of stuff, everywhere she went. Folders, books, files. She was forever shedding pens, rubber bands and paperwork.
She moved the folder from her lap to the table behind her, where I guess she thought it was out of my line of sight. I figured that people in authority were so used to dealing with idiots they underestimated the watchful ones.
I looked up so abruptly that I made her jump. ‘What’s going to happen to him now?’ I asked.
‘You don’t have to leave here until you’re both ready,’ Marleena said, seemingly keen to allay my fears.
‘I don’t care about myself, I only care about Gabriel.’
‘I know you do, honey, but your health is as important—’
‘I’m fine, and I’ll be fine because he needs me. I’m his mother.’
Marleena was saved by the trill of her phone. She unearthed it from her pocket and listened. In the silent room, the voice on the phone was as
sharp as knives. The girl in room six had been caught trying to leave the building again. She was Somalian, sixteen years old and homeless. Her father had threatened to kill her if she came back. Her baby had hardly stopped screaming since she was born.
I’d noticed that decisive action came easy to Marleena when she was faced with practical problems. She always assessed the risk of leaving me alone. I looked up at her, and she rose. I felt groggy, not quite there, but forced myself to concentrate.
Marleena knew I wouldn’t touch a hair on Gabriel’s head, but she called a colleague just in case. Someone agreed to come and take over for her, probably Jasmine, the day nurse, who was sweet but very slow-moving.
I pretended not to be listening to the conversation. My fingers lightly brushed Gabriel’s wispy dark hair.
‘Ella, you’ll be all right with Jasmine for a minute, won’t you?’ Marleena asked. ‘You like her.’
She should have taken the folder with her. After the door had closed, I remained still for a moment, silently watching Gabriel as his eyelids grew heavy and he sank into sleep as quickly as a kitten.
A wave of panic swept over me. Suppose there had been a meeting and it had been decided that Gabriel should be taken away from me? Would I be allowed to contact his new parents? If at some point it was decided I was able to cope, would my boy be returned? Or would I never be allowed to see him again?
I looked up at the door and could hear hurried activity down the corridor. There was the sound of a chair falling over, followed by a shout. The wild girl in six was playing up again.
I looked back at my dreaming child buried in his blue blanket, then headed for the folder on the table behind Marleena’s chair.
