by Thorne Moore
She was stiff on the mattress. Aching. He really had hit her hard. She couldn’t feel the baby moving tonight. Maybe it was dead. The thought left her numb with helpless grief, but there was nothing she could do about it. He was her man and if he chose to kill it, or kill her, or throw her out on the streets again, how could she stop him? She’d never said it, even to herself, but she’d known he would go mad when he found out. That was really why she’d stopped going to visit him in prison. Putting off the moment. She just hoped now he’d come round. Maybe he’d come home flush and feeling generous towards her. Maybe…
She was too cold to sleep, and yet she must have because she woke with a start when the quilt was snatched off her. It was still dark, lit by the glow of the street lamps, strong enough for her to see Gary standing over her. Staring down at her.
She shivered. She couldn’t tell if he was still angry or what.
‘Get us something to eat,’ he ordered.
She struggled up. It was difficult in her state, getting up from a mattress on the floor. As soon as she was off it, he flung himself down in her place, dirty boots raking the quilt as he groped for his cigarettes.
She put the kettle on, opened cans, made tea and beans on toast with ham. Not much you can do with one ring and a grill that half works. She placed the plate on the table, but Gary grunted, so she gave him the plate where he half lay, half sat, on the mattress, and watched him shovelling the food into his mouth.
He wasn’t talking, so she cleaned out the remainder of the beans from the battered saucepan, first with a spoon, then with her finger. The taste reminded her she was famished. She helped herself to another biscuit, then handed him the packet.
He grabbed her wrist, his eyes running over her, head to foot. ‘Too late then, for an abortion.’
‘I’m eight months, Gary. They wouldn’t do it now.’
‘Have you seen a doc?’
She shook her head. The local surgery, busy with old dears and bright mums with pushchairs had been too alien. She didn’t like doctors. Too many memories of unfriendly examinations.
‘Okay.’ Gary nodded. Pleased? ‘That’s good. No one knows, right?’
What did he mean? She knew. He knew. Everyone who took one look at her knew.
‘You listening? You haven’t gone telling doctors you’re pregnant. They haven’t got you booked into hospital or anything like that. Right? So no one knows.’
The woman who fixed up her weekly giro knew. But no need to tell Gary that. Lindy shook her head.
‘Right. So you keep your mouth shut about the baby, and when you’ve had it, we get rid of it.’
She went cold inside, colder than the icy fog. ‘You wouldn’t kill it, Gary.’
He laughed, cruelly, then like he was just laughing it off. ‘We dump it, that’s all. Leave it somewhere. No one need know nothing. Right?’
She wanted to say ‘But I want my baby,’ but she didn’t dare, so she began to cry.
Tears never worked on Gary. ‘Shut up, you stupid bitch. If you’d got rid of it in the first place, there wouldn’t have been no trouble. Your own stupid fucking fault. If you want to stick with me, you dump it. And you want to stick with me, don’t you, girl.’
She sniffed back her tears and nodded.
CHAPTER 3
i
Kelly
A long gravel drive led up to the house. Nothing like the farm tracks Kelly knew, but a farm it officially was. Some rare breed of cattle on one side, and an organic wheat crop on the other, sprinkled with wild flowers among the green spears.
Roz was looking out of the window, apparently serene, though her fingers were twitching on her skirt.
‘Nearly there. We’ve made it.’
‘Yeah. It’s lovely.’ Another twitch. Roz’s old East-End accent, usually smoothed to the faintest nasal twang, reasserted itself. ‘A bit posh, innit?’
Kelly laughed. ‘Mum, it’s Rog and Mandy. I don’t suppose they’ve grown horns or anything.’
Roz smiled, nervously. She had lived comfortably with Roger and Mandy Padstow when they had been tepee-dwelling activists, dividing their commitments between Gaia, Wicca, road planning, and the ever-niggling internal politics of the commune, but here in Dorset she felt inadequate, all her old insecurities bubbling up again.
Kelly had no such qualms. People were people to her, wherever they lived, however they dressed or spoke. To her, Roger and Mandy would always be the couple with whom she grew up, models of easy confidence and kindly authority, with quirks that she could handle.
There had, of course, been no official leader in the commune, but Roger and Mandy had been the most articulate and rational of them all, the ones best at dealing with authority, perhaps because, whatever their radical views, they preserved the social confidence of their educated middle-class origins.
Raised in the commune, Kelly had no instinctive yearning for nuclear family structures. She had no grandparents, but she did have Roger and Mandy, and she imagined that grandparents must fulfil a similar role; wise people who could advise and support, and take over in crises. Except that grandparents would be much older. The Padstows’ two children had been Kelly’s commune siblings. It had probably been the children, Kelly thought, lacking any cynicism, that had led them to quit the commune a couple of years after she and Roz had moved out with Luke Sheldon. Now Mandy wrote books on life/work/health balance and Roger ran an IT company and together they farmed (organically) this estate in Dorset and produced (or their workforce produced) expensive brands of yoghurt and wild boar pâté.
They’d always kept in touch with Roz and Kelly. Not so much with others from the commune, who saw the Padstows as traitors to the cause – whatever it was. Roz had always been too needy for their approval to question the changes, but she did feel intimidated by their worldly success. Kelly was neither intimidated nor impressed, nor resentful. The Padstows were friends, in the commune or here in their six-bedroom semi-mansion in Hardy country, where their activism had transmogrified into buying the Guardian and donating to Oxfam.
Kelly steered the battered Astra down the drive, listening to the pop and rattle of the semi-detached exhaust as they rolled into the broad gravel between the house proper and the converted barns. She parked up between a Range Rover and a sleek black saloon with tinted glass. Roz’s fingers were twitching at her skirt again, but Kelly was unfazed. She jumped out of the Astra, hoisting up the door to make it shut, just as Mandy and Roger appeared on the steps.
‘Hiya!’ Kelly waved happily, then hopped round to the passenger door to release her mother. ‘Don’t try to open it, Mum. I need to do it from this side.’
‘Here, let me help.’ Roger eased the door open with her. He crouched on the gravel, looking in at Roz. ‘How’s my dreamer?’
‘Roger! It’s really great to see you,’ Roz said. The bone-rattling journey from Pembrokeshire had not been pleasant for her, but Kelly could see her relax at the sight of the man she had always trusted.
‘Let’s get you out then.’ He smiled at Roz, still smiling as he looked up at Kelly, though she could see the alarm in his eyes. Roz was looking a thousand times better than she had a couple of months ago, but a hundred times worse than she had looked the last time Roger had seen her, a couple of years earlier.
‘Kelly.’ Mandy had joined them and hugged her, before reaching out to hug Roz too as she emerged from the car. ‘Roz. My poor Roz. What has been happening to you? Let’s get you into the house.
‘Roger?’ She looked askance at her husband.
Kelly kicked strategically to open the boot, so that Roger could haul out Roz’s suitcase, a hessian bag of medications and herbal remedies, and Kelly’s bulging kitbag. ‘Thanks for asking Mum down. I can’t get her to sit still at home. She thinks she ought to be doing things.’
‘Well, we won’t let her overdo things here, don’t worry. She can relax and get better. Mandy knows how to manage her.’ He took the kit bag from Kelly as she was hoisting it on her shou
lder. ‘How are you doing, Kelly?’
‘Oh, I’m managing fine. You know me.’
‘Yes, I do.’ He swung his arm, loaded with the suitcase, round her and gave her a squeeze. ‘My sunshine soul. Always riding high on every wave. Trouble is though, Kelly, you’re such a competent little manager it’s easy to take you for granted. This couldn’t have been easy for you. But you got her here.’ He looked at the Astra. ‘Just.’
‘Don’t think it’s going to get through the MOT this time. It conked out on us once around Chippenham, but I got it going again.’
‘Sure.’ Roger ushered her towards the house. ‘Kelly copes with everything.’
Gracious living at the Padstows’… Style with Feng Shui; designer porcelain with wholegrains; handcrafted woodwork with state-of-the-art electronics. Roz approved of the aromatherapy candles and Kelly loved the books and neither appreciated the market value of the Persian rugs or the bronze Buddha. They ate in the vast kitchen with its oak and granite, its Aga and Le Creuset casseroles, its immaculate quarry tiles and atmospheric under-lighting.
‘I expect you are both still vegetarian,’ said Mandy, busy with goat’s cheese and rocket. ‘We eat veggie quite often, don’t we, Roger, even if we’re not very strict about it anymore.’
Kelly, who had peeked inside a fridge the size of Belgium and seen a beef joint, two small partridges and a plate of Parma ham and chorizo, had already deduced that the Padstows had moved on from tofu and pulses, but if they were willing to pose as vegetarians again for Roz, that was very nice of them.
Afterwards, while Mandy fussed over Roz, settling her into her new quarters, Roger said, ‘Come and see the Dexters.’
Cows, not neighbours. Kelly obliged. They walked together through the summer twilight, chatting as if their paths had never diverged. Roger was still, after all, Roger. He might wear a quilted gilet but he still had a ponytail. He talked of Dexters and White Parks and Maris Widgeon wheat, and Kelly talked of lambing and dyer’s madder and St John’s wort.
‘So what are you going to do, Kelly?’ Roger straddled a five bar gate as they looked out across the rolling landscape. ‘How are you going to cope with Roz?’
‘I’ll do fine. She’s much better than she was, you know. Not really an invalid. Just needs to take care.’
‘Are you going to keep your smallholding on?’
‘Of course!’ The thought of leaving it had never occurred to her.
‘It’s a lot for you to cope with, if you’re dealing with Roz as well.’
‘I can cope.’ She looked at Roger, trying to assess his reasoning. ‘Why’s it worrying you?’
‘Because we worry about you. Both of you. We care hugely about Roz, you know we do, but we care just as much about you.’
‘Yes.’ Kelly laughed, swinging up onto the gate to sit beside him. ‘I know you do. Thanks. I know how much you’ve done for us.’
‘I wouldn’t say that we did that much.’
His demurral was fake, so she brushed it aside. ‘You know you did. Mum’s always been, always will be, well, a bit flaky. She was just a kid, wasn’t she, when she joined you. Without you, I don’t know where she’d have finished up.’
He smiled, remembering. ‘She was always fragile. I like to think we helped. We watched her blossom. But then she opted to leave with Luke and we thought that was it. We’d lost her. It was never going to work.’
‘Happy families,’ explained Kelly. ‘I think that was it. She always had this fuzzy goal of something “normal” and she thought marrying Luke would be as normal as it could get.’
‘We thought, to be honest, she was one of those women just doomed to fall for the wrong sort of man. I don’t want to bad-mouth Luke, but we all knew he’d never be able to give her the sort of support she needed, and she was never going to be the sort of woman who’d stand up to him.’
‘She did though, in the end.’
‘Yes! Yes, she did. Well done her.’
‘You see, your influence won through in the end, because she realised we could make it on our own.’
‘You think it was down to us?’ Roger laughed, with a hint of wistfulness. ‘We all knew the Luke business wouldn’t last and I thought she’d come back to us. Instead, she found her own feet. And you know, Kelly, that was down to you. She had you to care for, you to focus on, and even though you were a kid, you were there for her. Our little Kelly. Even now, I don’t think she’d cope on her own. She’s always going to be half in this world and half out.’
‘In a very nice way.’
‘Oh, a very nice way. Blind to all the nastiness of life. Does she still believe all your surplus lambs are living wild and free on the Preselis?’
Kelly laughed. ‘She still believes Gwynfor takes them off our hands because he wants to give them a happy home. Well, he really did want to keep the first one. Rambo. Very productive, apparently. I haven’t told her that the others go to market with the rest of his sheep, and she doesn’t choose to ask.’
‘That’s Roz. I’m sure she could work it out if she chose but her motto has always been, “See what you want to see.” Always in charmed denial over anything uncomfortable.’
‘It doesn’t hurt.’
‘Except it’s why she’s in the state she’s in now, isn’t it…’
‘Yes, I know.’ Kelly picked at splinters of wood. ‘Wouldn’t dream of going to a doctor, but she must have known things were wrong. She’s been dosing herself up with herbal stuff for years. But you know what she’s like. It’s a bit like the rates. If she refuses to acknowledge something, maybe it will go away.’
Roger ruffled her hair. ‘Of course. You know exactly how she operates. Because you’re the one who sorts it all out for her. But it’s going to be a lot more than keeping an eye on the rate demands from now on, Kelly.’
‘I know.’
‘That’s what’s really worrying us. I know you can cope. No one can cope like Kelly. But what’s happening to your own life? Are you going to spend it all as your mother’s nurse and minder? Nothing for yourself?’
‘I have plenty for myself. Everything I want. I’m very efficient; I can multi-task.’
‘What about college?’
‘I’ve been to college.’
‘I mean university, getting a proper degree.’
‘Why would I need one?’
Roger looked away, over his rolling acres, with a twinge of embarrassment. ‘You can control her diabetes, but her kidneys are never going to improve, are they? At best, you’re going to be managing it. At worst, she’ll go downhill. Kidneys are tricky things.’
‘I know. I wanted to give her one of mine.’
Roger grimaced. ‘Of course you would, Kelly. Please don’t rush into anything. I’m not saying don’t do it, but think long and hard about it.’
‘No need. I’m not suitable. They did tests – Mum didn’t want it, but I needed to know, and there’s no match, blood and tissue, so my kidneys are no use to her.’
‘That’s that then.’ He was relieved. ‘And I suppose she has no idea where her family is. She used to speak about a brother, but she never had any contact with him while she was with us. Any other relatives?’
Kelly rested her chin on the gate. ‘The thing is, in a purely genetic sense, there might be.’
Roger sensed the hesitation, the way she was looking at nothing in particular, certainly not looking at him. Kelly always looked directly at the person she spoke to. He swung his leg over and jumped down from the gate. ‘How do you mean?’
Kelly chewed her lip, still gazing into the middle distance. ‘Mum’s terrified there was a mix-up at the hospital.’
‘With her treatment?’
‘No, in the maternity ward, when I was born. A nurse told her labels had got switched.’
Roger opened his mouth to speak, thought better, shut it, then started again. ‘You mean she thinks you’re not her child?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Kelly, I wouldn’t worry about
it.’
‘I don’t!’
‘I mean, I wouldn’t give the story much credence if I were you. Seriously. Your mother has always been, well, a bit paranoid. That’s exactly the sort of story she would hit on, like a focus for her fear. You were all she had, so she was terrified of losing you.’
‘I do know how she works.’
‘Yes, of course you do. And you must know how improbable it is. Things like that don’t really happen. Not without people noticing, not without a huge furore and legal action and heads rolling. God.’ He winced. Kelly could tell he was thinking now of his own children. ‘It would be a parent’s worst nightmare.’
‘Would it?’ She was Kelly again now, looking at him so directly he felt he was in the dock. ‘Would you stop feeling like Tanja’s dad if you discovered there’d been a mix-up at her birth?’
‘God, I don’t know. No, of course not, but – no, but I’d want to know, I’d need to know what had happened to my real child.’ He saw the disappointment in her face and blushed. ‘But of course Tan would still be my child. Hell, it’s just not that simple. And listen, Kelly, don’t waste your time thinking about it. It’s not true. Roz is your mother, and she had half a dozen doctors and nurses in that maternity ward witnessing your birth. So there’s not a blood match with your mother. That’s bad luck maybe, but it doesn’t prove anything.’
‘No,’ agreed Kelly. Why say more? Roger was not seeing this the way she saw it. No point in telling him that the blood and tissue tests might have proved nothing, but the other test had.
