After two weeks back in the farmhouse, expressing milk and resting up, I’d gone to stay at a flat I’d rented towards the end of the pregnancy. I’d been concentrating on the bit afterwards so I didn’t have to think about the baby growing inside me. I’d been organising my future reality so the present would quickly flit away.
The last four years of being involved with Bronwyn and Ed had been a step off into another world and now I had to get back to reality. I enrolled in a copywriting course, to learn all the secrets of great copy, and then I planned, after this week was over, to start the course, move on with my life, forget that I’d done this thing. After this week was over, I would have so much money in my account, a buffer for my year on the course, a feathered nest that would be comfortable and soft for many, many years to come. After this week was over, I would be free. I would pretend this last four years hadn’t happened, and I would look to the future.
The room was silent, so silent I longed for even the ticking of a clock that would mark out the seconds, the moments between now and then, between my pressing the nib of the black ink pen in my hand onto the paper and when I finished making the swirling loops of my name.
They hadn’t brought the baby. I had no idea where he was. I had no clue what he looked like now, if he was still pale, if he was still squirmy and squawky, if he cried because the woman who birthed him, who had provided the milk for the bottles for a fortnight, hadn’t been able to hold him. I wondered. I wondered. I wondered.
The silence rolled on; you couldn’t even hear breathing in the room because everyone seemed to be holding their breath. Even the stern-faced solicitor who had clearly disapproved of all of it, who would have to report us to the police if he knew I’d been paid to have their child, held his breath. All I had to do was start the loops. I pushed the nib deeper into the paper.
I wondered if Ed ever thought about it. About how he hadn’t just had sex with me that time she was away. He had seduced me and I had let him. Every time we’d made love he had said my name as though his heart was so full of me, he couldn’t stop himself whispering, gasping and sometimes shouting my name as he orgasmed. I wondered if he fantasised about us, if he thought of me as he entered her, wishing we could turn back time and do it all over again.
I began the first slope, the upwards trajectory towards finishing what had been started all that time ago. I wondered if she ever asked him about it. About why we never went back to the clinic. I wondered what she’d thought when I had shown her the stick with X marking the spot. I wondered if she thought we’d done it in the dark, eyes closed, bodies clenched, as few thrusts as necessary to get it done. I wondered if she knew we’d made love so many times, in so many ways, and I’d longed for him every single day for the rest of the pregnancy but he hadn’t so much as looked in my direction.
I wondered if I was going to be able to do this thing. To walk away without a backward glance, with all that money at my disposal, my future financially set, and not constantly think about the pale bundle that I’d never been able to hold. I wonder, I wonder, I wonder.
I signed my name, scrawled it out clear and easy to read. No shame. No hiding from what I was doing. No pretending that I was a good person who had done a good thing for good friends. Own it. If you’re going to do something, own it. Isn’t that what Mum had always told me? Wasn’t that part of the code of trying to be a good person? Even if you behave badly, own it.
I made the line under my name, a sweeping mark on the page, and the room unclenched. The exhalation of everyone else in the room – including the solicitor – was an almost deafening crescendo of relief as I pushed the papers across the table.
‘Thank you, Miss Smith. Now that you have completed the transfer of parental rights, I’d like to remind you that you have agreed not to see or contact my clients again. Are you clear on that?’
I pretended to myself that he sounded sympathetic, had a modicum of admiration for what I had done for his clients, but I had to be clear-eyed about this. He didn’t care. He probably looked down on me. Having a child for someone else, for the allowable £15,000 worth of clearly itemised expenses, and then signing all rights to that child away just six weeks later was not something he would think of highly.
I nodded at him, and avoided looking at the two across the table by keeping my gaze lowered. We had spent so much time talking, laughing, being friends and companions and confidants.
Now I was their dirty little secret, and they were mine. They left first. And I walked away from Tapping, Cleat & Anderson Associates, Solicitors at Law, knowing I would never see them again.
9:45 p.m. Cece reaches across the table, takes my hand in hers and curls her fingers around mine. It’s only when she touches me that I notice how cold my hands are.
January, 2010
The sound of my fingers rapping against the front door seemed to echo for miles.
I’d been sitting in the car I’d hired down the lane since early afternoon, and now it was dark and I’d finally managed to get the courage to do this. To knock, to hear my knuckles against wood reverberate across the hills, reminding me how alone and isolated it was up here.
After the knock, the anxiety and fear bloomed in full. I didn’t know what I expected by coming here, but I couldn’t go on how I had been. I was so close to the edge, so close to falling into an endless pit, I couldn’t do anything but come back here. Beg for a second chance, for the chance to be in their orbit again, to have the suns of their affection back on me. To have the chance to hold the little bundle.
I’d managed seven months. I had managed to get through seven months of what felt like not living. I wanted to see them, I wanted to be with the baby. Not all the time – I knew he was legally theirs – but I wanted a little time with him. Just to be allowed to see him sometimes, to know what it was like to hold him as he got bigger, got cannier about the world, to see him develop and grow, become a little boy. Not every day, not all the time, but just a little bit. If I could have just a little bit of him, of them, then I would feel better. I knew I would. And I’d be able to move on. I would feel able to get dressed in the mornings; I wouldn’t stay in bed, staring at the walls, wondering if there was a point in anything.
Ed’s eyes closed in agony when he opened the door and saw it was me. ‘You shouldn’t have come here,’ he said. His words were stern, but not his voice. He sounded almost resigned, as though he had been expecting me to turn up at some point but had been hoping I wouldn’t.
‘I only want to talk to you. Then I’ll go. I’ll go. I just want to talk to you. Please?’
He shook his head, but stepped aside anyway. I stepped over the threshold and went straight for the living room. There was a fire crackling in the hearth, the lights were low, there were two glasses of wine on the coffee table and an open bottle of red in between them. They had music on, and Bronwyn was reclining on the sofa. The place did not look like it had when I had been there those two weeks after the birth. Then it had been filled with baby things; now there was no sign that they even had a baby. No cot in the corner, no muslins and bottles and toys and clothes, no changing mats and nappies. My eyes darted around the room, looking for a sign that the baby was still there. The only clues were the car seat and the pram that I’d seen in the corridor. Other than that, their lives didn’t seem to have been changed at all by the baby.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Bronwyn demanded. She lowered her legs and stood up, angrily jerking down the folds of her dress over her thighs. ‘Why did you let her in?’
‘I just want to talk to you,’ I begged. ‘Please.’
‘We have nothing to talk about. I paid you a lot of money to go away, and stay away.’
‘Why are you being so cold to me?’ I asked her in desperation.
‘You slept with my husband. Is that not enough?’ she replied.
‘But I only did that to get pregnant with the baby you so desperately wanted.’
‘You keep telling yourself that. I’m
sure one day we’ll all believe you, won’t we, Ed?’ I looked at Ed, who was lurking in the doorway, looking pained. He flinched at her words, as if they had genuinely, physically wounded him. ‘She hated every single second of it, didn’t she, Ed? Begged you to be quick, didn’t she?’
I looked at Bronwyn again, and she was transformed. I saw her for the person she was, the person so many others had claimed she was. She was cold. At the very core of her, she had a tundra instead of a heart. At the very core of her was a woman who could not see beyond herself. She had told me this, many, many times. She had told me she only liked me because I reminded her of herself. She had called herself a narcissist and I hadn’t believed her. I had thought, because she was showering me with warmth, attention and affection, that she couldn’t be cold, she couldn’t be what she had named herself. And she had named me as just like her. And I was. I had taken money to have a baby. I had handed that baby over. I was worse than she was, because I doubt she would have ever done what I did. I was cold. At my heart, I was cold.
She carried on, the vitriol spewing from between her perfect lips, the lips she’d kissed me with so many times. ‘How long did it take to get her knickers off, eh, Ed? Five minutes? Five seconds? Five nanosec—’
‘All right, stop, enough now!’ Ed suddenly said. He raised his voice, but not too much, obviously aware the baby was asleep somewhere around here. ‘It wasn’t anything like that, and you know it, Bronwyn. It was what you wanted. You told me that you didn’t want to wait for the clinic anymore, for the uncertainty, you wanted it done as soon as possible.’
‘Ha!’ she spat, and rounded on him. ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! I told you to impregnate her, not to seduce her. Not to fall in love with her.’
‘I didn’t fall in love with her,’ he scoffed.
‘HA!’ she spat again. ‘Even before you did it you had. All those long meaningful gazes you threw her way. You think I didn’t notice? You think that wasn’t the reason why I didn’t want to wait for the clinic? I wanted her out of my house and out of our life as soon as possible. I thought you would actually use a turkey baster – there’s about a million of them in the kitchen. Didn’t you get the hint? How many turkeys have we actually basted, ever? Ever? But no, I tell you I can’t wait for the clinic so you screw her the first chance you get.’
‘You told me. You told me to do it,’ he said in despair. ‘I said no for over a year. I said no but you wouldn’t stop going on at me. You told me to get her knocked up. “Fuck her every day until she’s pregnant,” you said. For over a year, you said that to me. Over a year.’
I gasped. I was so naïve. Utterly stupid and naïve. They had never cared about me. It was only about them having a baby. All they ever wanted was a baby, and they had simply played the long game with me to get it.
Ed’s head snapped to look at me after I gasped, and his face suddenly changed from a look of anger and frustration to one of horror at the realisation of what he had done. Or maybe it was the shame that I had found out how they’d used me.
‘And there you have it!’ Bronwyn snarled. ‘Proof positive that you’re more worried about her and her feelings, and couldn’t care less how it felt for me to know you’d screwed the little bitch, probably in my bed.’
He looked as though he was about to shout, then remembered the baby. ‘Upstairs,’ he said to her. Before she had a chance to respond, he left the room and took the rickety stairs two at a time from the sound of his footsteps.
She ignored me as she went up after him, running to get up there as soon as possible.
‘Do you have any idea what we did?’ I heard him say as soon as she arrived in their bedroom. The words were muted, softened out by flooring, but I was standing right below them, so I could still hear them. ‘We broke the law. We paid for a baby. And we put that girl through hell.’
‘Really, is that what we did? We gave her a lot of money for something she should have been willing to do for free; we gave her a job, a home, somewhere she felt like she belonged.’
‘Do you really not see how wrong we were?’ he replied. ‘Really? I mean, what was it about her that made you choose her? Was it that she wasn’t like the others? That she didn’t fall for it completely? That she didn’t “seduce” you like the others had despite how much temptation you dangled in front of her?’
‘What are you talking about?’ she scoffed.
‘Oh, you think I didn’t know that you’ve screwed every single one of your acolytes, all those gorgeous little versions of yourself that you have help you do your “research”? That it’s a sport to you? Get them out here, tell them how special they are, kiss them, wait for them to take the bait and make them believe it’s all their idea to seduce you and become your lover. And then when you’re bored of them, you pay them off to disappear. You’re the original dirty old woman. You seriously thought I didn’t know?’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. And if any of that was true, why have you stuck around for so long?’
‘Because I love you! I know it seems an impossible thing to you, but I love you. And I convinced myself that – deep down – you loved me. That it’d be OK and that once we had a baby, things would settle down. How fucking stupid that was, eh? You’re a complete narcissist, as you keep joking. Actually, I think you’re a sociopath.’
‘You’re just trying to cover up for what you did.’
‘Yeah, maybe I am—’
From the room off the living room, I heard a gurgle. A small little baby cough. I stopped listening to the two people upstairs and went towards the sound. The nursery was downstairs. The room, which had been a small study for me to work in before, was now full with everything a nursery needed: plush cream carpet, the walls painted a soft, buttery yellow, a beautifully carved cot in the corner, an open unit stuffed with toys, and the same style of rocking chair that had been in that room where I met Bronwyn.
The baby was asleep on his back, the blanket pulled up to his chest. His eyes were shut but his mouth was open while he gurgled and snuffled in his sleep. I was melting all of a sudden. I’d never felt anything before, I realised looking at the little boy in the cot. I had never had a true, real feeling ever in my entire life until that moment when I saw my son properly for the first time. I hadn’t seen him alone before. There had always been someone – usually Bronwyn – standing on the periphery, lurking, hovering, making sure I never had a proper look, a complete look-see at the person I had made. He was something I could not describe. A word beyond human language. I, who loved to talk, could not verbalise how incredible he was. He was a human being, my human being. I had made him and then I had let him go. I didn’t want to wake him, certainly didn’t want to break him, but I had to touch him, I had to feel what he was like to hold.
Gingerly, I slid my hands under his body, then carefully lifted him out of his cot, taking his blanket with him. He was soft, plump, as I settled him in the crook of my arm and held him close. His eyes fluttered briefly, but he didn’t really stir, seemed to almost sigh and relax a little more against me.
It was because he knew me, I decided. He knew it was me, that was why he hadn’t stirred, hadn’t been disrupted at all. He knew who it was and he was pleased I was back. In the quiet of the house, I could still hear them. Rowing upstairs. Saying all the things they’d probably bottled up for years, deconstructing their extremely messed-up relationship while their child slept downstairs, and the person they’d dragged into this mess waited patiently to learn what the outcome would be.
I’d allowed myself to be flattered into doing this thing for them. I’d thought I was doing something noble, something good for two people I adored. They had shown me a different type of life, and I was repaying them by fulfilling their greatest wish. My arrogance had led me here, to a place where I was sneaking into a room to have a cuddle with the child I had given away. Given away? Sold. I was a terrible person. I’d had a child and I’d been given money for it. Didn’t matter that I hadn’t asked for or wanted the mo
ney. Didn’t matter that they had insisted and then had paid it once I’d transferred my parental rights to them. Didn’t matter that I hadn’t spent a penny of it, that it sat there in the bank account I’d opened especially for it, a festering reminder of the awful thing I had done, I was still a terrible person. I’d thought I was doing something good, but that was my arrogance and naïvety.
The longer I held the baby, and the longer no one came to snatch him away, the clearer everything became. I could sort out this mess; I could start to make things right. I had already decided to give them their money back; being here, listening to how they plotted to use me, had made me realise the last thing I needed to do was to get back to that state of supposed nirvana I’d existed in when I was with them. I needed to start again. Find out who I was after nearly five years of letting Bronwyn and Ed define me. I had been young and stupid, it was time for me to grow up. To be an adult. To be a mother.
I glanced around the nursery, looking for the stuffed toy that I’d bought him before he was born. I’d wanted him to have something to remember me by. I couldn’t see it. They’d probably binned it, just like they thought they’d binned me. That was the final push I needed.
When I stuck my head out of the little room, the living room was still empty. I could hear them, upstairs: screaming at each other, throwing swear words and insults, accusations and short, nasty laughs through the air. I moved quietly, quickly to the front door, where I gently laid the baby down in his car seat. I had to take off his blanket to strap him in, but he didn’t seem to mind, didn’t move at all. Maybe he knew what was happening and had decided it was for the best. Maybe he couldn’t face kicking up a fuss when what was happening was going to happen anyway. Or maybe he was an extremely chilled baby who would sleep through pretty much anything.
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