by Sue Fortin
‘God spare us,’ says Kerry.
‘We were friends,’ says Joe. ‘Sure, we were more like brother and sister back then. Wouldn’t you agree, Erin?’
‘A proper double act,’ I say. I realise I haven’t quite managed to inject the banter into my voice that everyone else has been enjoying. Three pairs of eyes look at me in an awkward moment of silence.
‘Right, who’s for another round?’ says Kerry, putting us all back on an even keel. ‘Come on, Joe, you can help me at the bar.’ He gives his cousin an indiscreet kick under the table.
We spend the next couple of hours on safer subjects, the atmosphere being warm and enjoyable.
It’s early evening when we part company with Joe and Bex at the top of the High Street. I lean into Kerry as we wave them off down the road.
‘I think your plan to get me wrecked has worked,’ I say.
‘Not too wrecked, I hope,’ says Kerry. ‘I’ve got plans for you.’ He gives me a tap on the backside.
‘And I have plans for you.’ I return the gesture.
I’m not sure what time it is when I wake up, but the evening is drawing in, the last flecks of daylight shimmer against the dipping sun. I pull the duvet up and snuggle against Kerry, who is sleeping soundly. I feel relaxed and happy despite the altercation with Roisin earlier.
I think about it rationally. Okay, Roisin found the photograph of me and Niall. I don’t know how or where as I don’t know what Niall did with it after I gave it to him. It’s irrelevant, really. The fact of the matter is that Roisin has it. The words I’d written on the back, one plus one equals three, were obviously a giveaway and she must have guessed I was pregnant when I was with Niall. And the reason for her resurrecting it all now, well, that’s simple. She wants revenge. She’s always blamed me for the accident and hated that anyone should feel sorry for me or my family. I remember between the accident and the funeral, she was going around the village telling people it was all my fault. Apparently, she hated it if anyone sympathised with me. I’m not sure whether she’s hedging her bets that she knows what happened to the baby or not.
Kerry stirs and rolls over, his arms slipping round me. ‘Hello, there,’ he says, his voice heavy with sleep. ‘You okay?’
I wriggle even further into his embrace. ‘Of course. You?’
‘Silly question.’ He squints and rubs at his eyes so he can see the face of his watch. ‘Half-eight. We must’ve been asleep a good hour. Cup of tea?’ He rolls over out of bed, pulling on his jeans and t-shirt.
I get myself dressed and follow him out to the living room, where I make myself comfortable on the sofa, curling my legs up underneath me.
‘I’m not used to all that afternoon drinking,’ I say, accepting the cup of tea Kerry offers me. ‘I feel like I’m getting a hangover now. I’m such a lightweight.’
Kerry sits beside me and we drink our tea in silence for a while until he speaks. ‘So…,’ he says.
‘So?’ I repeat, although I’m pretty sure I know what’s coming next. I brace myself.
‘Soooo, what’s the story with Roisin?’
Chapter 22
I look at him. I know he’s not going to like what I’m about to tell him. Not after the secret he shared with me about his mother. Briefly, I wonder whether I can make up something. Tell him a lie. But what would that achieve? Nothing. He’s trusted me. I have to trust him with what I can.
‘When I was sixteen and going out with Niall Marshall, I fell pregnant,’ I say, measuring each word. ‘It was in the spring, my last year at high school. Niall’s last year in the sixth form. He was going off to university in the September.’
‘That was before I came to live with Joe,’ says Kerry. ‘Was the pregnancy common knowledge?’
‘No. Not at all,’ I reply. ‘And that was the way our parents made sure it stayed.’
‘I’m not with you,’ says Kerry. ‘So your parents knew? What, did you tell them?’
‘Niall’s mum found out. She was a GP at the time. I went to see a nurse, but Diana must have got wind of my visit or seen me at the surgery and, I guess, started poking around, and it wasn’t long before she found out.’
Kerry lets out a long, low whistle. ‘I bet she was pleased.’
‘You could say that.’
‘So, what happened?’
Skip jumps up onto the sofa between us and I’m thankful for the momentary hiatus in the conversation before I continue. ‘Our parents decided it was best if I had a termination. Diana went ahead and organised it.’
‘Just like that?’
I snap my eyes up at him. There’s a hint of distaste in his tone.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact. Just like that.’
‘What, you went along with it?’
‘Don’t judge me, Kerry,’ I warn. ‘You know nothing about what it was like. What my dad was like. What Diana was like. I was only a kid myself. So was Niall, to all intents and purposes.’
‘Okay, okay.’ Kerry raises his hands in defence. ‘How did she manage to sort out an abortion?’
‘She paid for me to go to a clinic in England.’ I stroke Skip’s ears as he wriggles further into the cushions and rests his head on my feet.
‘And that’s your secret? That’s what Roisin has on you?’ says Kerry.
‘Mostly.’
‘What does that mean?’ Kerry puts his cup onto the table. ‘There’s more?’
‘I never had a termination. Niall and I decided to run away. We had all these plans of setting up home. He’d get a job and go to college in the evening. All that sort of thing. Crazy, naive and wistful teenage dreams…’ I know that now. I’ve known it for a long time. Our plan would never have worked, never in a million years. It was based on false hope and a romantic vision of life. ‘The night we took off, we were in Niall’s car. We had an accident.’ It’s so hard to say this out loud; I’ve never had to before. Never had to explain to someone else what happened. Everyone in the village knew. They had heard it from the Marshalls. No one had needed to ask me.
‘Niall was killed,’ says Kerry. His voice is soft in contrast to the roughness of his fingertips that reach out and cover my hand. ‘I know. Joe told me. He never said you were pregnant, though.’
‘It was the best-kept secret of Rossway. Diana and my father made sure of it.’ The tears blur my vision, filling my eyes and cascading over the brim. Kerry scoops the dog out of the way and shuffles closer and wraps his arm around my shoulder, pulling me towards him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers. ‘So sorry.’
For a moment, I let myself take comfort from his embrace. I allow the reassuring words to soothe my pain. If only this was the end of it. If only this was where my story ended, not where it began.
I sit up, wiping the tears from my face. I sniff, not caring as to how attractive it makes me seem. My next words will put paid to any notion of a relationship between us. Once I tell him what happened next, he won’t want to know me.
‘There’s something else,’ I say.
‘There is?’
‘I never had the termination. Not because I no longer needed one after the accident.’ I close my eyes for a moment. ‘I told everyone I had lost the baby, but really I kept it. I kept the pregnancy a secret. I went to live with Fiona and I told absolutely no one in Ireland I was having the baby.’ I look at Kerry. Confusion pulls at every feature. ‘I had the baby. A little girl. A beautiful red-headed little girl. Still I didn’t tell anyone. Only Fiona and Sean knew. My beautiful little red-headed baby girl was our secret. Not even my mum knew.’ I smile as I think back to those precious first days when I cradled my newborn in my arms. More tears come, collecting in the upturned corners of my mouth, running between my lips, their salty taste seeping into my mouth.
As I speak again, my voice begins to crack, little sobs escape. ‘But I couldn’t keep her.’
‘Jesus Christ, Erin,’ says Kerry, he pushes his hand through his hair. ‘Don’t tell me you did what I think you did?’
‘I gave my three-day-old baby away.’
‘You gave up your own child?’ Kerry stands up, muttering more expletives to himself. He takes his cigarette pouch from his pocket and begins to roll up. ‘How could you do that?’
‘I had no choice.’
‘Of course you had a choice.’ He snaps, spinning round to look down at me. ‘You could have kept the baby. You could have still been its mother. You were living with your sister, for God’s sake. You could easily have worked something out.’
I jump to my feet. Skip sits up, his ears pricked, looking at us. ‘We did sort something out,’ I say.
‘Something that didn’t involve you giving away your child.’
‘It was the best thing for the baby. I had nothing to give her.’
‘Yes you did,’ says Kerry. ‘You had something special and unique to give that child. Love. You had a mother’s love.’
‘Fuck off, Kerry,’ I shout. ‘What would you know?’
‘I know what it’s like to be rejected. I know that feeling. How do you think your daughter is going to feel when she finds out?’
‘She’s not going to find out.’
‘For an intelligent woman, you’re fucking stupid at times. She has a right to know who her parents are. A legal right and one day she might come looking for you. What are you going to do then? And what about the Marshalls? Have you not thought of them?’
‘They didn’t want her.’
‘But she might want them. She might come and find them. They might feel differently now. She has a right to be loved by her paternal grandparents.’
‘They gave up that right when they told me I should have a termination. Diana Marshall didn’t care then, she certainly won’t care now.’ I can hear the venom in my own words.
‘This is wrong,’ says Kerry. He shoves the half-rolled cigarette back into the pouch. ‘I was wrong about you. How could you do that to your own child? Your own flesh and blood?’
I go to retort, but Kerry isn’t waiting for an answer. As I open my mouth to speak he shakes his head, his eyes tell me what he thinks. He despises me. Never have I been surer about him. I close my mouth. There’s no point trying to reason with him.
With as much dignity as I can muster, I rise from the sofa and, for the second time that day, I leave his flat under a cloud. One that I’m not sure I can come back from this time.
Chapter 23
I wake the next morning and for a moment am unsure where I am. The sun streams in through a slit in the curtains. Curtains I don’t immediately recognise.
I can hear the sound of movement in another part of the house, the voices of children and adults.
Of course, I’m at Fiona’s. I had felt so miserable last night that I couldn’t bear going back to the flat and staying there on my own. I had rocked up at Fiona’s, no doubt looking a complete mess, hair all over the place, make-up streaked down my face and struggling with the onset of an early hangover.
I roll over and groan at the effort.
The second groan I make is when I remember what happened last night.
As recollections of the previous evening’s events make themselves known in a coherent order, my mouth dries and my stomach churns. I sit bolt upright. Oh, God. I told Kerry about the baby.
Panic is the next emotion to kick in. Frantically, I try to remember how much I had told him.
A knock at the door and the sound of Fiona calling my name interrupts my thoughts. The door opens and Fiona appears with a mug of tea in her hand.
‘Morning,’ she looks at me, the smile falls from her face. ‘You okay? You look mortified. My cup of tea isn’t that bad, is it?’
‘Erin!’ Molly bursts into the room and throws herself on the bed, bundling me back down into the pillows.
I laugh despite my sore head. ‘Morning, my lovely. You okay? Where’s that sister of yours?’
‘Still in bed, not very well,’ says Fiona, placing the cup on the bedside table and then drawing back the curtains. ‘Come on, Molly. Leave Aunty Erin alone, she’s just woken up.’
I blink at the sunlight and manage to sit up with Molly still in situ. I stroke her hair, planting a kiss on top of the golden waves. A great feeling of love fills my heart.
‘Why don’t you go downstairs and find Daddy?’ says Fiona. With slow but firm actions, she extracts her daughter from my embrace and, jumping Molly down from the bed, escorts her to the stairs. ‘Off you go! I’ll be down in a minute. Sean! Molly’s on her way down.’ Fiona comes back into the bedroom.
I go to speak, but don’t know what to say. Fiona comes and sits on the edge of the bed.
‘What is it? I can tell something’s wrong,’ she says.
I’ve dreaded this moment, but I know I can’t avoid it any longer.
‘Roisin knows. I don’t know how much, but she knows about the pregnancy and she says she knows I had the baby.’ The tears well up in my eyes and my throat feels lumpy as I continue. ‘Kerry knows as well. I told him.’ The tears spill over and a sob escapes my throat. ‘I’m sorry.’
Fiona holds me. ‘It’s okay. Don’t cry, Erin. What happened? How do they know? And what exactly do they know?’
I tell Fiona the whole story from start to finish. How I had received a couple of emails from Roisin but ignored them to start with. Then the one I received the night of Dad’s accident. The photograph Roisin had found. And about our arguments and everything else that has gone on since I have come back to Rossway.
‘I’m sorry, I should have told you at the start,’ I say. ‘I thought I could handle it but it’s all spiralling out of control. And now I’ve told Kerry. I’m scared Roisin is going to do something stupid. Something that will blow this whole thing wide open.’
Fiona hugs me and tells me not to worry. ‘The photograph, what does it prove? That you were pregnant. It doesn’t prove you had the baby.’
‘But she said Mum told her.’ I say, suddenly remembering what Roisin had said. I can feel the panic starting up again.
Fiona thinks for a moment and then speaks calmly. ‘That’s impossible about Mum knowing. If Mum knew, she’d say. I’m certain. Roisin must be making that up. You know what she’s like – she says things out of spite sometimes.’ She pauses again. ‘Okay. So what if she thinks she knows you had the baby? What then? Nothing. That’s where it ends.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘You had the baby and then the baby was adopted. That’s what you’ve told Kerry and that’s what Roisin thinks she knows.’ I nod. ‘So she can’t do anything else about it. Under law, she can’t trace the child. It ends there.’
‘But she could cause a hell of a fuss,’ I say. ‘What if she…’
Fiona cuts me off. ‘A bit of tittle tattle from something that happened ten years ago. I don’t think even the residents of Rossway will find that too interesting. It might be a bit of gossip for a day or so but that’s all.’ She smiles at me with confidence.
‘You don’t seem at all worried,’ I say, wishing I could buy into Fiona’s confidence.
‘Because I’m not. You should have told me at the start and then we could have nipped it all in the bud and you wouldn’t have got yourself in this state.’ She gives me another hug. ‘Now, stop with your worrying. We’re safe, Erin. Safe.’
The early-morning rush of emergency appointments and requests for same-day consultations had finally reached a lull.
‘Why don’t you go for your morning break now?’ said Roisin, turning to speak to her colleague. She wanted to be alone at the reception desk. She needed to access the patient records without anyone looking over her shoulder or asking what she was doing.
Her colleague was only too pleased to escape to the staff room for fifteen minutes and, once gone, Roisin quickly logged onto the patient-record system.
She typed in the name ‘Erin Hurley’.
Roisin had accessed them the day after she found the photograph of Erin and Niall. The same photo she’d sent to Erin.
Erin’s words had haunted her for the past few days. Had Roisin’s mam really told Erin to have an abortion? It was unbelievable. Her mam was a GP. She saved lives. She didn’t terminate them. Not only that, but abortion was still illegal in Ireland. Roisin was certain her mother would not do anything to break the law. Diana was a well-known figure in the village, she held a position of responsibility. Breaking the law would only bring public humiliation to her and that was something Diana would avoid at all costs.
And it was this last train of thought that had, time and time again, brought Roisin back to the same place. Diana would want to avoid any sort of scandal and Erin being pregnant at sixteen by Niall would, in itself, bring shame on their family.
The uncomfortable and unanswerable question came trundling back to Roisin. Would her mam have done anything to avoid a scandal, even if it meant breaking the law? Which scandal was the lesser of the two evils? Which one would her mam consider the best option?
There was no mention of the pregnancy on Erin’s records at all. Roisin wondered if Diana had something to do with that. It wouldn’t be so difficult for her mam to change the notes. She could also have arranged for the termination in the UK without anyone knowing. That would tie in with Erin leaving almost immediately after the accident, either to have a termination, which Roisin doubted, or to have the baby and put it up for adoption in England.
The telephone ringing broke her thoughts. Closing the patient-record system Roisin answered the call.
‘Good morning, Rossway Health Centre.’
‘I’d like to make an appointment for my daughter, please? Sophie Keane.’
Roisin sat up a little straighter. ‘Hello, Fiona, it’s me, Roisin,’ she said. ‘You need an appointment for Sophie?’
