by Alison Moore
‘Jam and tomato?’ said Gail.
‘Yes,’ said Jessie.
Gail pulled a face. ‘We ate with Michael and Linda,’ she said. ‘They came over for dinner. They’re not staying over; there isn’t anywhere for them to sleep.’
There was Eleanor’s bedroom, but Jessie did not say this to Gail.
‘Linda’s got good news,’ said Gail. ‘She’s pregnant. It’s the very early stages, so she has to be careful. Normally, she wouldn’t have told anyone yet, but she told us, and she said to tell you as well, so that you would know to be careful.’
Gail lived in the same suburban area in which they had grown up. She made a series of familiar turns, driving slowly down the empty streets. Beyond the deserted primary school, she pulled into her driveway. Jessie saw the Christmas tree in the front window, the twinkling of its many tiny lights.
‘It seems like a long time since I was here,’ said Jessie.
‘It is a long time,’ said Gail. ‘You haven’t been here since New Year. You haven’t been back since the party.’
Jessie carried her travel bag to the door and Gail let them into the hallway. ‘I’ll go and see if Gary’s all right with the washing up,’ she said, heading towards the kitchen. ‘You go into the living room – Michael and Linda are in there.’
‘Shall I come and say hello to Gary first?’ asked Jessie.
‘I’ll tell him you’re here,’ said Gail. ‘You go through. I’ll bring you a drink.’
Jessie went into the living room, where Michael and Linda were sitting on the sofa. When they saw Jessie, they stood to meet her. ‘Don’t get up,’ said Jessie, but they were already up. She hugged Michael, and then very carefully hugged Linda. ‘Congratulations,’ she said. Her hand had gone, very gently, to Linda’s stomach, and Linda took a step backwards, covering her stomach with her own hand.
‘Please don’t,’ said Linda.
‘Sorry,’ said Jessie.
Linda and Michael returned to their seats, and Jessie followed them, taking the free end of the sofa. The journey and the visit to her parents’ house had tired her out, and perhaps she sat down too heavily, too close to Linda. Both Michael and Gail, who was coming into the room with a glass of wine, said, ‘Be careful, Jessie.’ Linda shifted an inch or two away, and Jessie recalled a New Scientist article that she had read, about how fetuses could learn to recognise the predators that they would need to avoid.
‘Linda wants a girl,’ said Gail. To Linda, she added, ‘I really hope it will be.’
Jessie had barely started her wine when Michael and Linda decided they were ready to leave. ‘I need my sleep now,’ said Linda.
‘Quite right,’ said Gail. ‘You need to look after this little girl.’
Gail was to drive them home as they were without a car and it was raining. At the door, Gary took out a pack of cigars. That was what he smoked: cigars rather than cigarettes, as if there were always new babies to celebrate, which of course there were. Gary handed a cigar to Michael, who took it, though he said it was a bit early for such things. ‘I’ll keep it,’ he said, ‘until the baby arrives.’
They left, and Gary went back into the kitchen. Jessie returned to the living room and her glass of wine.
Gail had been gone for about ten minutes when Jessie heard someone singing at the door: a child, she thought, carol singing, even though Christmas had passed. She wondered if the child didn’t sound rather young to be out so late. She waited for Gary to go to the door, but she did not hear him. She could hear the child’s voice coming through the glass and down the hallway:
O bring us some figgy pudding
O bring us some figgy pudding
O bring us some figgy pudding
and bring it right here.
She wondered if anyone had figgy pudding these days; she was not even entirely sure what it was. Well, of course, that was not really what the child wanted; it wanted sweets or money. Or no, she thought, that was Halloween. The child wanted money: this was like Halloween but without the sweets. She could hear the child chanting:
We won’t go until we’ve got some
We won’t go until we’ve got some
We won’t go until we’ve got some
so bring some out here.
She did not want to go out there, but she could not hear Gary going, and the child needed money, then it could leave. Jessie got to her feet and went out to the hallway. ‘Gary?’ she said. She could see the kitchen – the sink, the running dishwasher, the clear surfaces – from where she was, but she could not see Gary. Nonetheless, she walked down the hallway to the kitchen doorway. ‘Gary?’ she said, though she could see that he was not there.
She turned back to the front door. She could see the child’s face, blurred and distorted by the window and by the rain on the glass. She could not see an adult standing with it. Jessie’s shoulder bag was hanging on a peg by the door. She would pay the child and then it would move on.
She took some coins from her purse, opened the door and saw – standing on the rain-wet doorstep – Paul, with a begging tin in his hand. Except that this boy was eight or nine years old, and, as he held his tin out towards her, a woman moved into the light and Jessie recognised Amy. Jessie had heard that Amy and Brendan were back together, married with a child, as if that summer had never happened, as if any wrongdoing on Jessie’s part had been erased, or so she liked to think. Jessie dropped her coins into the tin, at the bottom of which rainwater had collected; it was like dropping change into a tiny wishing well. She wanted to give him more, but while she was reaching back into her shoulder bag, Amy was taking his hand and leading him away. Jessie watched them walk to the next house, where the boy took a deep breath and sang again.
Jessie was still in the hallway when Gail’s car pulled into the driveway, and at the same time Gary came in from the garden, through the back door, smelling of his cigar smoke. He came into the hallway as Gail came in through the front door.
‘I’m going up,’ said Gary, looking past Jessie – looking through her, it felt like – at his wife.
‘You’re going to bed?’ asked Gail.
‘I’ll read,’ said Gary, who was already climbing the stairs.
Gail and Jessie stayed downstairs for a while longer, and then Gail, collecting up the glasses and cups from the coffee table, said, ‘Perhaps we should all turn in.’
She took Jessie up to the spare room and switched on the bedside lamp. ‘Here’s your towel,’ said Gail, who always put one out for her, at the end of the bed, and Jessie thought of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the towel that you would always want to have with you when travelling through space.
‘Gary and I will be off to work early tomorrow,’ said Gail, ‘but you’ll be all right, won’t you? You can help yourself to breakfast and you know your way around.’ She checked that Jessie had her travel bag and that she would need nothing more, and then, saying goodnight, she closed the door.
In the morning, after showering and dressing and dealing with her hair, Jessie went down to the kitchen and looked for fruit, but she could only find tins, and no tin opener. She ate the bread that Gail had left out for her, put a bottle of water into her shoulder bag, and left the house. She pulled the door firmly to behind her, but still when she reached the end of the driveway she went back to check it.
She took a bus into the city centre and walked the route she had walked many times before, past all the places that had once displayed their flyers – Missing . . . – which had over time become rain-damaged and had now disappeared altogether.
At the museum, she visited the exhibits, the cafe and the gift shop and the toilets. Inside her orange cubicle, she said quietly, ‘Stay here. Talk to me so I know you’re there.’
Over dinner, she told Gail where she had been, and Gary said, ‘What for? What do you go there for? She isn’t there, you won’t
find her there.’
The following day, Gail stayed at home with Jessie, although Gary went to work again, leaving the house early. Gail and Jessie went for a walk by the river. Gail asked after Will, and Jessie mentioned the postcards.
‘He’s still in touch, then?’ said Gail.
‘Just about,’ said Jessie.
At lunchtime, they drank wine, and Jessie told Gail that her period was more than a week late.
‘It was the same with me,’ said Gail.
‘You mean with Eleanor?’ asked Jessie.
‘What?’ said Gail. ‘I mean the menopause. A few years ago, I was expecting my period to come as normal, and at first I just thought it was late, and then it never came, and that was that.’
Jessie returned to Gail’s house with a headache. Looking in the bathroom cabinet for painkillers, she found an unused pregnancy testing kit. She opened the box.
Throughout the soup, Jessie prepared to tell her sister. She was not sure how she would react, but she thought of Linda; she thought of Gail being happy and protective, and of Gary’s celebratory cigar. It was hard to believe that, after all this time, she could once again be in the club.
In between the soup and the beef bourguignon, Jessie said, ‘I took a pregnancy test and it was positive. Faint but positive.’
Gail took a moment to swallow her mouthful of beef. ‘That’s very unlikely,’ she said.
‘It’s unexpected,’ agreed Jessie.
Gary said to Gail, ‘Is Will back?’
Gail shook her head and Jessie said, ‘I’ve been seeing someone new. His name’s Robert.’
‘You’ve not mentioned him before,’ said Gail, as if there were something suspicious about it, as if he might be imaginary. ‘You can’t be pregnant. It’s impossible. You’re nearly fifty.’
‘It’s not impossible,’ said Jessie. ‘It happens.’
‘You can’t be,’ insisted Gail. ‘You shouldn’t be.’
Gary said nothing. He continued to eat, as if she had not spoken. When he had finished eating, he took his plate into the kitchen.
There was to be another New Year’s Eve party to which Jessie had been invited and which she had expected to attend, but she decided not to stay. ‘I wouldn’t be drinking anyway,’ she said.
‘You’re not pregnant,’ said Gail, ‘get that idea out of your head,’ as if thinking it or not thinking it could make a baby come or go.
Jessie texted Robert from the train. I’m on my way home, she wrote. He had not replied when she texted again to say, I’m late. This was, she realised – as she pressed the little envelope icon, sending the message through the ether – ambiguous in the circumstances, and she composed a third text saying, I think I’m pregnant. She added a smiley face, and then was unsure; she deleted the smiley face and sent the message.
She did not hear back from Robert.
By the time she got off the bus in Hawick, it had been dark for hours, but Morrisons was still open and she went in to buy fruit and other perishables. She filled her basket and then, on the way home, wondered if she would be able to get through it all before it spoiled.
There was post on her doormat. There was a postcard from Bruges, from Will. The two of them were once in Bruges together. There had been a plague of insects, flying ants, which settled on their arms, their legs, their clothes; they got into Jessie’s hair and in between the pages of the book that she had been trying to read. This postcard did not say that he was coming, that he was on his way; it said he liked it in Bruges.
The dog and the cat were pleased to see her. She asked them, ‘Has Robert been looking after you?’ She looked to see if he had left her a note, but there was nothing.
She spent Hogmanay in The Bourtree. She drank orange juice and came home early, without having seen Robert. Of course, the original plan had been for her to spend the night at her sister’s house, to be at her sister’s party, and Robert had obviously made his own plans that involved being elsewhere. She had invited Robert to the party but he had refused to be drawn into her family circle; his own family was quite enough, he said. ‘You go on your own,’ he told her. ‘You need me here to look after the animals anyway.’ She imagined him now being somewhere remote, somewhere deep in the countryside or night diving, somewhere he could not get a signal.
Lying in bed, she counted the weeks, through the winter – when everything seemed dead but was really only resting – and into the coming spring. The fetus should be viable by the beginning of May, the month of Beltane, a time of year when, traditionally, livestock were driven out to pasture, protected from harm by fire rituals that appeased the spirits that lived underground or across the sea or in an invisible world existing alongside the human world.
The old year slipped away and the new year came in while Jessie was sleeping.
In the morning, she sent a text message to everyone in her phone’s contact list. The message said, Happy New Year!! and after it she added kisses, crosses. It would go to Gail. If it reached Paul, he would not reply. It would not go to Will, for whom she had no number. It would go to Robert, who might be somewhere without a signal but who would receive it eventually. It was only after she had pressed send that she realised that it would also go to Alasdair.
On the second of January, Jessie went to Morrisons, needing tinned and frozen food that would make her arms ache on the way home. She was in the freezer aisle, deliberating over the vegetables – thinking of her peas in Robert’s freezer, thinking, though, that they would be all right in there for months – when an arm reaching into the chest and taking out a bag of something frozen made her glance up. There was Robert, no more than a metre away. She was on the verge of saying his name, but she was suddenly so sure that he had seen her and was choosing not to look her way that his name got stuck in her throat; it would not come out. He was turning away now: she saw the frozen roast potatoes in his basket, and watched as he walked to the end of the aisle and went out of sight. She could not believe that he had not seen her. She had been blanked. She thought of her unanswered text messages – there were new ways to be blanked nowadays; they called it ghosting. She had to hold on to the edge of the vegetable freezer.
Perhaps her reading of the situation was wrong though. Perhaps he had not seen her after all. Perhaps he had only been thinking about his vegetables, his roast potatoes, about getting them home and into his freezer. Perhaps she was the one who had seen him and failed to speak. She had seen him and failed to speak.
Letting go of the freezer, she headed for the front of the shop, where she scanned the checkouts but could not see him. From the exit, she spotted him striding across the car park with his single bag of shopping, and hurried to catch him up.
‘Robert?’ she said.
He kept walking, looking dead ahead.
‘Thank you for looking after the animals,’ she said. She tried to walk alongside him even though the speed was uncomfortable for her. ‘I hope they behaved themselves for you. I hope the house behaved itself too.’
‘Just stop it, Jessie,’ he said.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Your house is just a house,’ said Robert. ‘There is no ghost.’ He did not slow his pace or turn to face her. ‘You have an old house that needs some attention. The door in your spare room needs rehanging. Your windows need new putty – or get some double glazing. And I already told you, I don’t want a kid.’
Jessie came to a stop. While Robert marched on, Jessie felt a hand on her shoulder, and she turned to see a man in uniform, and in her own hand was a basket of shopping for which she had not paid.
They used to make single women give up their babies; they used to take the babies away, and that was not so long ago. Or at least they did when the women were young; Jessie was no longer young.
She went online and did a search: ‘abortion clinic Hawick’. She clicked on a link. We are sorry, said t
he computer. There are no abortion clinics in the Scottish Borders. She tried again. We are sorry, said the computer. There are no abortion clinics in Scotland. She would try again. We are sorry, the computer would say. There are no abortion clinics. But a different search discovered an abundance: a clinic in Glasgow, another in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She had a choice. Each one was some hours away. She would have to catch the bus and then the train. Or not. She did not know who would look after the animals.
She had only ever known one person to go to an abortion clinic, and that person had not, in the end, gone through with it: she had got as far as the waiting room – and that, thought Jessie, would be the worst bit, waiting for it to happen – and then she had turned around and gone home again. Jessie could imagine doing just that. Months later, this same girl, walking through town, had bumped into the father, who spoke to her quite normally whilst never once acknowledging the baby lying in the pram between them.
Having abandoned her New Year shop and having, in the intervening days, felt unable to go back to Morrisons, Jessie had run out of fruit.
She had toast for breakfast, and dithered over whether to have jam or the new marmalade, which she had found – which she must mistakenly have placed – in the freezer. Physicists, so she had read, were coming to the conclusion that this universe was only one of an infinite number, and that all possible versions of her and her life existed somewhere. In this universe she might have jam and in another she would have marmalade, and in yet another she would have eggs, which she had not even got.
She cleared the junk out of the spare room. Vacuuming under the bed, getting right into the corner, she found her missing pieces of jewellery, which must have worked their way loose and fallen to the floor on nights when, unable to sleep, she had visited this cold little room in search of Eleanor. She put the locket back around her neck, the watch back around her wrist, the hooks of the turquoise earrings through the holes in her ears. She also found her wedding ring, but she was not sure what to do with that.
