by Clare Boyd
She breathed, short and sharp, in and out, holding on to the bench. Her mind blanked, and short-circuited to the past. She was in labour, holding onto a metal hospital bed, hanging her head, holding the plastic mask to her face, delirious with the pain. The stretching and cramping was more like a ripping of flesh; a torture wrack rigged to her womb, twisting the handle, pulling her insides apart, until she thought she might die. Never could she have imagined such agony, such a possession. She moaned as the contraction began and, as it built to its excruciating heights, she roared like an animal.
‘Push, Mira, push, that’s it. I can see Baby’s head, good, that’s it, push... And again, good girl, push,’ the midwife insisted.
And then similar to a black-out, the final push, where she left her body behind to break through barriers of pain into the unimaginable new world of motherhood.
But where was her baby? Where did he go? He was there on her chest, warm and mucky, ice-blue skin, dry lips parted for a nipple, black shining eyes searching for hers. Where has he gone? He was there a minute ago. He was there.
‘Where is he?’ she cried, patting her chest, straightening upright on her knees.
‘Are you okay, Mrs E?’
‘Where is my baby?’
‘What baby?’
A little girl was standing next to her. Wide-eyed, tear-stained. She grabbed the girl around her head, feeling the warmth of her young cheek on her chest.
‘Are you okay?’ the girl repeated.
‘I’m fine. I’m fine,’ Mira panted, coming to, releasing the past, enduring a surge of love for the baby she had lost. She clung to Rosie as though she was he.
Rosie pushed Mira’s arms away. ‘You’re squeezing me to death.’
‘Sorry, pet,’ Mira said, suddenly revolted by her, the imposter who was not her baby. ‘Off you trot. Mrs E’s got a bit of seeding to do. Off you trot,’ Mira said, shooing Rosie out.
Chapter Forty-Eight
We were lying next to each other staring at the ceiling. The radio alarm clock was muttering away in the background. Neither of us had had a wink of sleep. Rosie had woken up twice in the night after complaining of a headache.
‘You’re still worried?’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘As I keep saying, I really don’t think she hit it hard enough.’
‘You’re sure.’
‘Yes, honestly.’ But I was feeling jaded, infected by his worry and I began to doubt myself. ‘But if she’s still got a headache this morning, we should probably get it looked at.’
The second time Rosie had woken, at about two in the morning, I had talked Peter down from taking her to A & E, guessing that her wakefulness had been emotional rather than physical.
When I had come in from work yesterday evening, having missed her on the morning after our big blow-up, she had been grumpy and tearful over her maths homework – not surprisingly – and, rightly or wrongly, I had not talked to her about our row and my exit, unable to bear a face-off. I had known it was the wimp’s way out to pretend nothing had happened, but I had been in a volatile mood too. After very little sleep, I was too tired for Rosie’s hysteria.
‘Symptoms of concussion can appear days after the accident, you know.’
‘Yes, so you’ve said a hundred times.’
‘I didn’t see what happened clearly enough.’
‘All I wanted was the diary and she just wouldn’t move off it...’ I stopped. Did he really want me to go through it again?
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Peter, I really think she’s fine. It’s more likely she was anxious after our fight. I should have talked to her last night. I was just too bloody knackered.’
‘Maybe book an appointment anyway.’
I thought of Miranda Slater and DC Miles.
‘It will look bad if she goes to the doctor’s.’
Peter frowned at me. ‘I don’t bloody well care.’
‘Of course. I didn’t mean...’ I trailed off, realising how awful that had sounded.
‘Hmmm,’ he mumbled, climbing out of bed.
Without uttering another word to me, Peter dressed and left the bedroom. His bad mood unsettled me profoundly. If Peter wasn’t on my side, who would be? I had a palpitation, a precursor to all-out, blinding panic. Peter was the only one who understood me and loved me and defended me and put up with me. And we were having another baby together. I couldn’t survive all this without his support.
Stiff with self-loathing, I lay in bed until I heard my mother next door, turning on taps in her bathroom, which usually meant she would go straight in to wake up Noah and Rosie.
I wanted to see Rosie first.
‘Rosie?’ I whispered, sitting on her bed. ‘Rosie? Time to wake up, poppet.’
A smile appeared on her face. Her eyes fluttered open and the scowl appeared instantly. The duvet was yanked from under me to cover her head.
‘Can we talk?’
No reply.
‘How’s your head?’
Again, nothing.
‘Rosie, do you want to take the morning off school today? I’ll call and tell them you’ve got a doctor’s appointment or something.’
‘You’re going to lie?’ she mumbled from under the duvet.
‘Well if your head doesn’t feel any better we’re going to have to go anyway. So it’s not really a lie.’
‘A little white lie.’
‘For now, yes.’
‘I don’t want to go to the doctor’s.’
‘Either way it’d be nice to stay at home for a bit, wouldn’t it?’
‘Why?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘I thought we could cosy up with a hot choccy. Just me and you.’
I imagined Miranda Slater peering in through the window, spying us alone together during school hours, and calling the police.
‘But you have to go to work like always.’
‘I’ll tell Lisa I’m working from home.’
‘Another lie.’
‘It’s up to you,’ I sighed, standing up. Her uniform skirt was crumpled on the floor. While I waited for her answer, I picked it up, plucked off the odd leaf, and placed it back neatly into the drawer. Her tights were muddied at the knees. I wished she would change into her scruffy clothes when she was den-building, but I would not be saying anything about it this morning. I stuffed them in the laundry basket.
She piped up finally. ‘Hot chocolate’s got sugar in it by the way.’
‘I know. It doesn’t matter.’
I stuck a few loose pencils into her pen-pot, feigning nonchalance.
‘Can I have frothy-coffee milk in it too?’
‘Sure.’ I smiled, rescued. ‘After Daddy and Noah are gone we’ll get it on the go. You can stay in your jammies if you like.’
* * *
Downstairs, I frothed the milk in our coffee machine and heated up two chocolate croissants from the freezer.
Upstairs, my mother remained in the house, in her room ‘reading’, just in case Miranda Slater paid us a surprise visit.
I laid the table for two and sat down with the photograph album under my drumming fingers.
The album cover was embossed with silver: 2006–2009. The Baby Years: Rosie and Noah Bradley. At great expense, I had hired a company to collate all of our photographs from our computers to make hard copy albums. It was like looking through the book of a life perfectly lived. There weren’t any unfortunate photographs of post-pregnancy tummies or of broken cots in bad holiday rentals or of pooey nappies around ankles or of double-chinned snoozers in the sun. All of those rejects were on a memory stick somewhere long lost.
When Rosie came in, I jumped up. Her ponytail from last night was still in her hair, scrunched round by one ear and her pyjama top was back-to-front. I noticed the raw skin under her bottom lip and resisted the urge to get some balm. No nagging or picking or neatening allowed, I told myself sternly. Anyway, her cheeks were bright as though she had slept much better than Pet
er and me.
‘My head doesn’t hurt any more,’ she said, sitting down. ‘I don’t need to go to the doctor.’
‘Oh phew, good, I’m so glad it’s better,’ I said, kissing where she had hit it. ‘I’m so sorry, so, so sorry,’ I added, knowing how inadequate my apology was, wishing with every fibre of my being that I could take back our fight. The guilt was sliding around inside me like a black serpent.
She let me hug her, but she didn’t reciprocate. ‘That’s okay.’
When I brought out a chocolate lollipop stir-in from the treat jar, she gasped, ‘Am I allowed one of those?’
‘Yup.’ I placed the lollipop and a mug of frothy milk in front of her.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, pointing at the album as she stirred the lollipop into her milk.
‘I want to show you some photos.’
She frowned, looking like Peter had earlier. ‘Of what?’
‘Me, when I had you in my tummy.’
Her whole face lit up. ‘You have photographs of me in your tummy?’
‘Yes, of course I do, darling.’ I reached for her hand and held it. ‘You’ve seen them before. When you were little.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Can I see?’
‘Don’t you want to finish your drink?’
She pushed it aside. ‘It’s too hot. Can I please see now?’
So I opened the album. As I flicked through briefly, I wished I could show Rosie some of the reject photographs. The funny anecdotes that went with them would make her laugh. As it was, I only had the glossed-over version of our past together, which seemed suddenly woefully simplistic.
Nevertheless, I started from the beginning, which was what this was all about.
‘That’s you in there,’ I said, pointing to my stomach in a series of four cheesy soft-focus photographs. I wore a white cotton maternity dress and a floppy hat and I stood in front of a field of vibrant purple.
Rosie brought her face up really close to the page. ‘How do I know it’s me?’
‘What do you mean? Because I’m telling you it’s you, silly. See? June 2006.’ I pointed at the black italics underneath. ‘You were born a month later.’
I tried to turn the page, but Rosie stopped me. She seemed fascinated by the photographs.
‘Where’s Daddy?’
‘He was taking the photos.’
There was a long pause.
‘So who’s Katrina Doobik then?’
It was like a thump in my head. ‘What?’
‘You told Granny Helen that she was my real mummy.’
‘You misheard,’ I said, my stomach lurching, my head spinning off my shoulders.
‘No... I didn’t...’ she stuttered, her lips beginning to quiver.
‘Yes, you did.’
‘But...’
My mother’s words rang in my ears. If she found out now, three weeks before the hearing, it would be catastrophic. Our family would meltdown. It was essential to maintain the equilibrium. The tightly run unit would only survive if I stuck to the script. Rosie had to fall into line.
‘That’s final. You misheard, and that’s that. Okay? Look I’m showing you evidence and you still don’t believe me.’
‘YOU’RE A LIAR!’ she screamed and she tore out the page of the album. ‘That’s probably a fake or something. Look it’s all blurry and weird like you you’ve smudged paint on it or something.’ And she screwed it into a ball and chucked it at my head.
I stood up, incensed by what she had done.
‘YOU’RE the little liar, young lady. Who the hell do you think you are?’
‘Who cares?’
‘Don’t speak to me like that!’
‘Shut up!’
‘How dare you? It is unacceptable to—’
‘Shut UP!’
‘If you carry on like this I’ll—’
‘SHUT UP!’
‘What are you trying to do to me?’ I howled, rising from the table.
Rosie repeated ‘shut up’, ‘shut up’, ‘shut up’, again and again and again like a mantra that had the power to eat into my sanity.
‘STOP IT!’
‘Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up,’ she screeched. I needed to leave the room but she pulled at me and yanked at my jumper until it cracked at the seams.
‘I said STOP THAT!’
And then my mother appeared at the door. Her small face was stern, her milky blue eyes fearful.
‘What’s going on in here?’
‘Mummy’s a LIAR!’ Rosie screeched and wailed, and clasped my arm, yanking it with all her might, her head pressing into my ribs.
‘DON’T TOUCH ME!’ I was trying to pull my arm away from her, but she was gripping on too tightly, an alien creature suckered to me, sapping my life force. Violence swarmed my brain. I imagined my hand rise above her head and coming down on her, anything to make her stop.
To Mum I begged, ‘I can’t cope, Mum, I can’t cope. Get her away from me.’
‘Rosie, come here darling.’ She moved towards her, as though moving towards a wild animal whom she wanted to befriend and tame. Prizing her off me, she held her hand and drew her back, protecting me from her, protecting her from me.
‘Look what she’s done!’ I brandished the destroyed photographs at my mother. My hands were quivering, more terrified of what I could have done than what Rosie had actually done.
‘Okay, calm down, Gemma.’
‘Me, calm down? Are you fucking kidding me? She’s the one who needs to calm down!’
I bent down low and pointed right into Rosie’s face. ‘D’you realise that Mummy could go to prison because of your lies to DC Miles? And do you know what’ll happen? You won’t be able to live with me ever again. Is that what you want? Really? Really?’
‘That’s ENOUGH, Gemma,’ my mother hollered.
Rosie cowered behind my mother. ‘My head hurts,’ she sobbed, holding the back of her head.
And more quietly, my mother added, ‘You’re frightening her.’
I was dumbstruck, tranquilized. My skin turned to gooseflesh. Taking a step back, I thought of what might have happened if my mother hadn’t walked in.
I straightened up. ‘I have to get ready for work,’ I said mechanically, walking away, leaving behind the totemic union of my mother and Rosie.
As I went upstairs, I caught a snippet of their conversation. ‘But Granny Helen, I thought I was one of those adopted children.’
My mother laughed. ‘Goodness gracious, you’ve got an active imagination, my darling. Come on, let’s...’
But I switched off from them, closed my ears, took myself upstairs where I dressed and made my face up and left the house without saying goodbye.
* * *
I asked Peter to meet me in London after work, as we used to do often before the children.
The restaurant had been a nostalgic choice of mine. Peter and I had shared many candlelit dinners there in the past. For this reason, it might have been a bad choice. Possibly too romantic for the purpose. Then again, maybe that’s exactly why I chose it. If Peter didn’t like what I was going to say, he would be too self-conscious to cause a fuss, and he was too much of a gentleman to walk out and leave me there.
To be honest, I wasn’t even sure how he would greet me.
I was already seated at the table when he arrived, and as soon as I saw him I had a pang of regret about what I had planned.
Sixteen years ago, when he had walked into the cinema foyer to meet me on a blind date, his elegant features had rendered me weak at the knees. Before we had met that first time, Jacs had told me two facts about him: he grew up in the countryside and he had been in the year below Richard at their primary school. Knowing these two facts, I made two snap judgements: he wore green wax jackets like Richard and he was emotionally stunted – like Richard. A photograph of him in a fashionable black pea coat standing next to a very beautiful brunette in shiny red heels, who I had been told wa
s his ex-girlfriend, smashed at least one of those assumptions to pieces, which I replaced with another: I wasn’t pretty enough for him. But the doubts had melted away from the moment he shook my hand and said, ‘Gosh, you’re much lovelier in the flesh,’ with a familiarity – but not a hint of suaveness – that suggested he had known me all my life. He later admitted that it had simply tumbled out of his mouth when he saw me, but that it had ruined the whole movie for him, throughout which he had worried he had come on too strong and put me off before we’d even started.
Sixteen years on, I loved him even more than I had at first sight. I knew him better now, but my instincts about him had been right. He had turned out to be just as kind and trustworthy as I had suspected he was, if not more. When he kissed me under the streetlight, when our souls met, he became mine, as much as I became his, and I dreamed that it would always be that way.
Until this morning – when he’d barely been able to look me in the eye – I had been confident our feelings were as unshakeable as they had been back then.
I wanted one last shot to prove to him that anyone would buckle under the pressure Rosie put me under. He was the only one who had seen her in action, at her worst. Even a living saint would struggle to stay composed. However ashamed I was of what had happened, I needed him to stick by me, to believe in me, to know in his heart of hearts that I would never willingly hurt her. If he believed in me, then I could believe in myself.
The waiter led Peter to our table. We held each other’s gaze as he wove through the tables, just as we had when I walked down the aisle towards him, the rest of the room blurring into nothingness.
We were shy with one another, more so than on that first date.
‘You were so angry with me this morning.’
‘No,’ he said, shaking out his napkin onto his lap before we had ordered.
‘The photo album idea backfired rather spectacularly.’
