The Mother of All Christmases

by Milly Johnson

  ‘Thank you,’ said Annie, taking the glass from her, noticing her bitten nails. She must be feeling so very alone now that they were so near to their birth dates, Annie thought. Maybe all this stuff was nest-building, a protective wall around her and her baby, over-compensating for not being able to supply the baby with a second parent.

  ‘Do you want to tell me about Tommy, Palma?’ Annie asked softly, seeing how her hands formed a nervous knot as she sat down on the sofa.

  ‘There’s nothing to tell, Annie,’ said Palma.

  ‘I think there is, Palma. Why did you really split up?’

  ‘He needs to concentrate on his boxing,’ said Palma, her voice level as if delivering a rehearsed answer. ‘I didn’t want to get in the way. It wouldn’t have been right. I’ve got nothing to offer him.’

  ‘You had yourself, Palma, and the baby. That’s what he wanted.’

  Palma’s face creased. Whatever scaffolding was propping up her composure was failing under the strain.

  ‘I can’t give him the baby that’s inside me, Annie. I can’t keep her.’

  Annie moved across to the sofa to be next to Palma.

  ‘Oh love, you can, Palma. Joe and I will see to it that you get as much help as you need. You’ll make a great mum, don’t doubt yourself . . .’

  ‘I don’t mean that, Annie. I have to let her go, I have no choice.’

  Chapter 57

  Palma had known from the moment that Lesley the sonographer smiled at her that something was wrong because it was a smile that was frayed at the edges and there had been no eye contact.

  ‘I need you to stay put for a couple of minutes so I can check on something,’ she’d said. Palma had lain on the couch, a heartbeat pounding in her brain. ‘Please God, make everything be all right,’ she had chanted like a mantra, over and over until Lesley came back with a man, shirt sleeves rolled up, Asian, black hair shot through with white at the front like a Mallen streak. He exuded experience and the pair of them talked quietly whilst looking at the screen, the words a blur apart from the odd one that stood out from the others. Hard medical words. Bilateral. Renal. Agenesis.

  The Asian doctor had a soft voice; he’d introduced himself as Dr Jindal. He turned the screen, explained what was there. No amniotic fluid around the baby. Absence of kidneys, no bladder. He wanted Palma to see this for herself first. Then he asked her to follow him out of the scan room. She passed a woman waiting to go in and see her own baby on the screen, cushioned in fluid, floating around in it and protected by it. A cushion her baby didn’t have.

  It was rare, Dr Jindal said, once they were in his consulting room. It was nothing she had done, it happened sometimes. It couldn’t be picked up in the first scan.

  Her body was the only thing keeping the baby alive; once she was born, she would die. Palma had two major options: to abort or to carry on with the pregnancy and give birth. There was a sensitive third option: if the baby was born at 5lb 5oz, Palma could consider donating her tissue, heart valves, pancreas. It was something to think about, Dr Jindal said. It wasn’t an easy decision but it might help her to think that her daughter could help other babies to live.

  ‘I don’t want other babies to use my baby,’ she’d screamed at him, tears rolling down her face and Dr Jindal hadn’t shouted back at her. He’d handed her a tissue and said he understood, but to take time to think all the same.

  He wanted her to come back tomorrow and discuss the options, have another scan. Did she have someone she could bring with her? She’d said no, she was alone.

  She’d tried to look the condition up on the internet but she couldn’t stand to see the images and the words gave her no hope . . . She didn’t sleep. She tried to hold it together as she walked into the hospital the next day, sat in a sea of heavily pregnant women in the waiting room like a damaged boat about to sink.

  An MRI scan had only confirmed that the baby could not survive outside the womb.

  There was no question of aborting the baby, she said. She could feel Gracie moving inside her, snuggling to get comfortable underneath her skin. She watched her stomach change shape when she lay in the bath. Babies responded to light, her book said, and when she shone the torch of her phone down onto her, it was as if Gracie turned to face it. She told Dr Jindal that she would have the baby. There was always the chance that they’d made a mistake, wasn’t there? That when she was born, they could check properly? Dr Jindal had told her that, unfortunately, there was no mistake.

  Chapter 58

  ‘I finally accepted it this week, Annie, after my last scan. There is no hope. Gracie will be born in six weeks, that’s all the time I have left with her.’ She cast her eyes over all the boxes and bags in the room. ‘She won’t ever use the bath, I won’t be teaching her how to tell the time on the clock. I don’t know what I was doing. Hope can be very cruel. Is there anything here you can use?’

  ‘My darling Palma,’ Annie put her arms around her young friend. ‘Let me help you deal with this. You can’t do it on your own.’ She made Palma’s shoulder damp from her own teardrops and pulled away and apologised.

  ‘Daft as it sounds, once it had finally sunk in, once I knew for sure . . . I could make plans. I was born needing medical help, Annie. If someone hadn’t donated blood, I wouldn’t be here today. I have to pay that forward, it’s the right thing to do. I’m going to write some letters for the children who will benefit from what she leaves them. I have a recording of her heartbeat and I’ll put it in a teddy bear.’ The big yellow teddy that Tommy had bought, the first thing her baby ‘owned’. ‘I’m eating all I can, Annie, because I want to make sure she makes the weight. I don’t want all this to be for nothing.’

  Annie snapped a tissue out of a box on Palma’s coffee table. ‘What about counselling? Have you been to see anyone?’

  ‘It’s hard,’ said Palma. ‘There’s counselling for bereavement, there’s not much to help you prepare for the loss of a baby that’s presently living inside you. All the midwives and the doctors have been so kind, though. Dr Jindal has given me his mobile number. I can ring him any time.’

  ‘Does Tommy know all this?’ asked Annie.

  ‘God, no. I couldn’t drop this on him. This would have broken us up anyway, all that pressure. He’d have resented me in the end, so what would have been the point?’

  ‘You should have told him, Palma, given him the choice.’

  ‘It’s complicated. He—’ She broke off abruptly. She couldn’t tell Annie that Clint had called over that night and how his presence had added to the mess. ‘It’s for the best.’

  ‘Pack a bag, you’re coming home with me,’ said Annie. ‘You’re not staying here by yourself.’

  Palma smiled. ‘I’m fine, honestly. I’ll be in work tomorrow. I need to keep busy during the day.’

  ‘But what about the nights, when you’re alone? Please, Palma.’

  ‘That’s our time together,’ said Palma, hand on her stomach. ‘I tell her things, you know, about me, to take with her when she goes. Do you believe in heaven, Annie? I don’t know if I do anymore. But just in case, I talk to her, read her stories. I tell her what her life would have been like and all the things we’d have done together.’ We would have bought wellingtons and splashed in mud, picked bluebells, grown tomatoes. We’d have had a cat called Cinders, a black one. I’d have brushed your hair until it shone. We’d have read books about folks in Faraway Trees and chocolate factories. I’d have taught you how to make the best spaghetti Bolognese in the world.

  ‘I can’t leave you,’ said Annie, unable to wipe the tears as fast as they were flowing. ‘Please stay with us for a night at least.’

  ‘Go home to Joe and I’ll see you in the morning.’ Palma smiled, gave Annie a gentle kiss on her cheek. ‘Thank you for being my friend,’ she said. ‘I may need you in a few weeks. But for now, I’m okay.’

  ‘I – we – will be there for you, Palma.’

  She had to stop off twice on the way home because she co
uldn’t drive for the tears clouding her eyes.

  Chapter 59

  When Annie had returned from seeing Palma, Joe had wept too. He couldn’t imagine anything so cruel. He had thought not being able to have a child the biggest slap nature could administer, but to conceive and then to discover that by giving birth you consigned your baby to die was worse. Annie had said they should tell Tommy. Joe had advised her to think about that. They couldn’t put themselves in Palma’s shoes, he said. They shouldn’t be the ones to overrule her decision to not burden him with this. Sleep on it, he’d said and though Annie had slept on it, she was still of the same mind.

  They’d told Iris when she got into the car the next morning. For all her age, Iris was a woman with a great heart and she was a loving mother who’d had a miscarriage at seven months sixty years ago.

  ‘Poor lass,’ she’d said and foraged in her bag for a tissue.

  Palma was waiting for them in her usual spot.

  ‘You okay, love?’ asked Annie, then cursed herself for the most inane question in the universe. People said it to her when her mum had died because they didn’t know what words to use. Tragedy robbed everyone of the ability to say the right thing, even the most eloquent. Shakespeare himself would have come out with, ‘You all right?’

  Joe didn’t know what to say either. He couldn’t do his usual jokey ‘Buon giorno, isn’t it a beautiful day today, Palma,’ whether it was thunderstorms or sunshine.

  Iris, despite the size of her mouth, could be surprisingly sensitive. She put her hand on Palma’s, gave it a squeeze, and said, ‘You’ll be all right love. In time.’

  *

  Effin lay back on Alex’s couch and closed his eyes. Davy’s words had been circling in his head all night, like a flock of confused crows. He didn’t have any real enemies that he knew of. The only person he didn’t get on with – and he could see the irony in it – was MacDuff himself, who’d warned him that he’d got an enemy. He knew the Welsh and the Poles both took in good humour what he said to them. He had about as much chance of putting the fear of God into any of them as he did getting an Olympic gold medal for pole-vaulting. He paid them more than fair money – no funny business or fuss; if they needed any time off for the dentist or family business, it was theirs. He felt he was a good boss. And a good husband, a good father, good uncle and a good friend.

  ‘So, Effin,’ began Alex in her rich, pleasant voice, like his favourite honeyed lamb made audible, ‘you felt as if you were in crisis? Can we start from there?’

  ‘I’ve been booted off my job until I get sorted out.’ The words stung the inside of his mouth as he said them and he had to clear his throat before continuing. ‘My boss’s heavily pregnant wife fell down a hole that I’d mended and I had mended it. I tested it out, a herd of pregnant elephants with wild rhinos on their backs could have danced on that after a full meal and it would have held. But the next day, it was as if I’d never touched it. I don’t think I’m losing my memory, I think I’m going mad, except—’ He stopped and squeezed the bridge of his nose with his finger and thumb.

  ‘Except . . . ?’ coaxed Alex.

  ‘I had a visitor. A hagg— . . . a bloke I can’t stand who works for me. He said that he’d checked one of the jobs I done and it was right, I had done it. He thinks someone broke it again to make me look bad. He thinks I have an . . . enemy. ’ He weighted the word with dry amusement.

  ‘It sounds as if you don’t like this man.’

  ‘I don’t. He’s a tw— . . . a . . . I don’t know what he is, but I don’t like him.’

  ‘Describe him.’

  ‘He’s tall, younger than me, beard, a Scot. Military.’ He wrinkled up his nose on the last word.

  ‘Military?’ Alex questioned, picking up on the distaste.

  ‘Ex-military, actually.’

  ‘Decorated?’

  ‘He’s got a swanky medal, so I believe.’

  Effin heard Alex’s pen move on paper. He could imagine what she was writing: that he was jealous. Of a haggis.

  ‘Is it the Scot part or the military connection that bothers you most?’

  Effin quickly protested. ‘Neither, I’m not racist or . . . or jobist. It’s just him. His personality. He thinks everyone likes him.’

  ‘And do they?’

  ‘Well . . . probably.’

  Scribble, scribble, scribble.

  ‘Does he remind you of anyone?’

  There was a definite pause before Effin answered, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Someone from your past.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Stu Stirling.’ The name came out in a hiss.

  ‘A soldier?’

  ‘He became a pilot. With medals,’ said Effin through gritted teeth.

  ‘And how did you and Stu know each other?’

  ‘We all went to school together. Carmarthen Boys Primary and Senior.’

  ‘A close friend?’ asked Alex.

  ‘Yes. There were three of us. Tight. Me and Stu and Brynn Evans.’

  ‘Tell me about the friendship.’

  ‘We were like brothers. We did everything together; walk to school, go to chapel, play out. Until . . . until I starting spending some time with a girl I’d known for a lot of years. Angharad. Beautiful girl. I liked her from the off, but she was a bit younger than me. It was just kids’ stuff, but when we got older . . . I knew she was for me.’

  He suspected that Alex had noted how his features had softened.

  ‘And how did your friends take that?’

  ‘They weren’t happy. But I enjoyed being with her. Always at me they were. “Come out with us, Effin. Plenty of time for girls later. Break it off.” ’

  ‘And did you?’

  Effin bowed his head. ‘I was stupid. I was nearly twenty but stupid. And I broke it off with Angharad and she was heartbroken. And guess what, bloody Stu Stirling asked her out. And she accepted. She told me later that she’d done it to teach me a lesson, but I didn’t know that at the time.’

  ‘You must have felt very betrayed.’

  ‘I was fuc— . . . furious. Then she broke it off with him and he ran off to the forces. Sent me a letter saying he was ashamed and that’s why he’d left. Hoped I could forgive him in time.’

  ‘Did you ever meet him again?’

  ‘No I bloody didn’t. After what he did to my An— . . . what he did to me.’

  ‘You were going to say, “After what he did to my Angharad.” What did he do to her?’

  ‘I don’t know. She wouldn’t talk about it. To this day. She left home and went to work in Llanelli and a few months later, I got a job working there for a builder and our paths crossed again and they never uncrossed.’

  ‘Tell me about your parents.’

  ‘Oh, they were lovely people. Really kind. My dad could be a bit strict but he loved us. Used to take me and my brother fishing early on Sunday mornings. Then Mam would cook what we’d eaten for tea and we’d have it with fresh bread she’d make every weekend. My four grandparents lived either side of us. Really happy childhood I had. They had us late, me and my brother. All of them gone now, except me.’ There was a tremor in his voice that Alex picked up on.

  ‘All?’

  ‘All of them. My younger brother died in a car crash. Left a lovely wife and a beautiful daughter. She’s like our own. She works up at Winterworld with me. I keep an eye on her.’

  ‘You’re protective over the women in your life?’

  ‘I am. After Stu attacked my Angharad – at least, that’s what I think happened. He was someone I trusted. Someone I’d known all my life. And because she refuses to talk about any of it, my brain thinks it must have been the worst thing I can think of that he did to her.’

  ‘What about Brynn? Do you keep in touch?’

  ‘When I moved away, we didn’t see each other much again. He lived on a farm and when his dad died, it was up to him to take it over. There was always that pressure on him, you know. He ne
ver enjoyed farming, he was so clever with his hands. My dad taught him loads of things but he was a natural at constructing and he could teach my dad a thing or two in the end. The pair of us could have built a house from the foundations up at fifteen. I thought he’d sell up but he resigned himself to his fate. He really wanted to be a pilot, in fact it was him talking about it that made Stu want to do it, but Brynn had a funny eye. His dad hit him, dislodged something inside. Horrible man he was. Brynn spent more time at our house than he did his.’

  ‘Now, our session is coming to a close today, Effin,’ said Alex gently.

  ‘Duw, that’s gone fast.’

  ‘Well, as I explained on the phone I had to squeeze you in between appointments this morning so it was a shorter than usual meeting, but I think we’re making great progress.’

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘Yes, we are. It might help if you revisit those early days in your head. Try and remember anything you’d put away, locked away because you didn’t want to face it.’

  ‘There’s nothing,’ Effin answered immediately.

  ‘Think of your mind as a loft,’ said Alex. ‘You’ve switched on the light and seen a lot of familiar things of not much interest. But then you go in closer. Open boxes, move objects and there are things underneath and inside that you’d forgotten about, each one with a host of memories attached.’

  ‘Loft, eh?’ said Effin, pulling himself to his feet. He felt lighter than when he came in. Talking did help. The doctor was right. He might not be so quick to scoff again about psycho bollocks.

  ‘Book in with the receptionist, Effin. I think another session soon would be best,’ said Alex, her pen going ten to the dozen in her notepad, and Effin would have loved to have been a fly sitting on her shoulder and seen what it was she was writing.

  Chapter 60

  The Sunflower Café wasn’t much to look at on the outside but push open the door and you could immediately feel the cheery welcome the place afforded. Bright yellow walls and blue curtains patterned with sunflowers, the interior really took a theme and ran with it.