by Lisa Jewell
‘Well, no, not for the right reasons, but I hope you feel like you’ve had time to think things through properly, that you haven’t rushed this decision …’
‘Ralph! This is all I’ve thought about for the past ten days! Literally! I’m half insane with it!’
‘No, no, I know, I just mean, you have a very busy life, you don’t get much time just to sit and, you know, think. Would it help if you went away for a couple of days? I could look after the kids. Blake’s almost off the breast now. You could go away and really, really think about what you want to do. Another couple of days won’t hurt.’
Jem shook her head. ‘No!’ she said. ‘I want this thing out of my head and out of me. I don’t need to go away anywhere to know that.’
‘But are you sure? Are you really sure you haven’t just made this decision in a state of panic?’
‘Of course I’ve made the decision in a state of panic!’
‘Well, then …’
‘Well, then, what?’
‘Well, then give yourself some time to stop panicking. Give yourself another couple of days. Please. What I would hate more than anything, more than you getting rid of the baby, more than you having the baby, is that you would make the wrong decision. Do you see? That you would look back and think: if only I’d thought it through calmly and properly, I wouldn’t have done that. I couldn’t bear there to be any regrets.’
‘There won’t be any regrets, Ralph.’ She wasn’t one hundred per cent convinced that this was true, but she knew that any small regrets would be a price worth paying to avoid the potential devastation to their relationship of another baby.
‘Ghosts,’ he said suddenly.
Jem squinted at him. ‘What?’
‘Ghosts. We’ve already lost two babies. I know you still think about them. But this one, could you live with that? Could you live with that date, January 2009? It’ll be there every year, every January we’ll think: baby would have been one, baby would have been two, baby would have been starting school this year, baby would have …’
‘Yes,’ said Jem, ‘I could. I could live with that.’
‘Fine, then,’ said Ralph, in that soft, controlled voice, holding her head against his chest. ‘Whatever you want to do, whatever you want to do.’
They stood for a moment or two like that, the moonlight on their crowns, rocking gently back and forth. And then, hand-in-hand they went back to bed where Jem slept and Ralph lay wakefully until Blake’s first murmurings at 5 a.m.
Chapter 10
Ralph flipped open the lid of his laptop at nine o’clock the following morning, clicked on his Outlook icon and waited impatiently for his in-box to load.
Nothing from Rosey. He sighed. He always felt curiously uplifted when he saw her name in his in-box. He clicked on her last e-mail to him and pressed reply. The words poured from his thoughts on to the keyboard.
Hi! Me and Jem talked last night. Late last night. She’s decided to get rid of the baby. I mentioned everything that you said. I even offered to look after the kids for a couple of days so that she could get away and really think about stuff. But she’s adamant. When she told me, I was really angry at first. I could feel all the old negativity coming back. I just wanted to shout and rant and have it all my own way. But then this weird thing happened – I felt something, like strength, but not inner strength, not like I was having to tell myself to feel a certain way or behave a certain way, but like something external. It was like I was taken over by something …
Anyway, I know you won’t think I’m crazy for saying something like that, I know you understand. Jem’s downstairs now, phoning the clinic. I can’t watch her do it. I’m not happy with the situation, but I’ve accepted that there’s nothing I can do about it, that Jem’s happiness is paramount. I just really hope that this brings her the happiness she thinks it will. I really hope that it brings us ALL the happiness she thinks it will.
Sorry to load you up with all this shit, I just haven’t got anyone else I can talk to about it, and I know you understand. Now I’m just praying (yeah – literally!) that she has a last-minute change of heart. And if she doesn’t, well, then I will just have to try my hardest not to hold it against her and assume that this has all happened for a reason.
Hope you’re OK. Lots of love, R x
He pressed Send and then pulled on his running shoes. As he sprinted through the house he heard Jem’s voice, a thin ribbon of sound, somewhere out of sight, saying words he did not want to hear, and he felt a sense of blessed escape the moment his feet touched the street outside the house.
He pounded the streets that he had only just grown to love, thinking of the baby he had been looking forward to meeting. He tried to be philosophical. Maybe the baby would have been stupid, ugly, evil, hyperactive, a nightmare. Maybe they’d have looked at the child and sighed and thought, we should never have had it, should have stuck with the two we already had.
But Ralph knew that was drivel. Of course they would never think such things, even if the baby arrived two-headed and breathing fire. Well, possibly not, but really, a baby would have to go a very long way indeed not to be innately lovable.
He would go with Jem to the appointment, of course he would. He would tell her all the right things, hold her hand, tell her he loved her, tell her it was fine. But it wasn’t fine. It was far from fine.
His feet hit the pavement, thud thud thud, his heart pressed against his ribcage, two lines of sweat formed on his temples and rolled towards his eyes. He found himself, as he did more and more often these days, at the small chapel on Underwood Street. He pushed open the doors and then pulled out his earpieces. The sun was angled through the small windows at the front, filling the room with chunks of rosy May sunshine. He sat on a pew and closed his eyes. Whatever it was he was finding when he sat in this place, he was needing it more and more every day, like a tincture. He found it here, he found it when he ran, he found it when he exchanged e-mails with Rosey. He’d alluded to God earlier when he was writing to Rosey and although he still wasn’t sure that that’s exactly what it was, with every day that passed it was seeming more and more likely.
He prayed as he sat there. He prayed a lot these days. He wasn’t ashamed to call it that any more. There was nothing wrong with prayer, as long as it was private, and well-intentioned.
After a few moments, once he felt filled with the stuff of this place, he got to his feet, reinserted his earphones and then left, hoping that someone, somewhere had heard his plea for a second chance for their unborn baby.
His head was stuffed full with the business of his life and Elbow were on volume 22 in his ears so it took him a moment to realise that he was being watched. A man, across the street. He’d been there when Ralph arrived at the chapel and he was still there now. And yes, as Ralph gazed at the man he realised that he recognised him. It was him, that strange man he’d seen when he was out with the kids. The dad. The one that Jem knew. Ralph stopped for a moment, his hands on his hips. A car zipped along the road between them. Then a van. The man still stood and stared. It was possible, of course, that he was staring at some random point just behind Ralph, but no, Ralph could see the man’s gaze following his, even from here. Ralph lifted his hand from his hip and held it up to the man, in a kind of neutral greeting. The man mirrored his movement. Ralph smiled, tentatively. The man did not. A small line of cars passed between them then, and by the time the road was clear again the man across the street had gone.
Ralph looked from left to right, grimaced and then headed towards Brockwell Park.
Chapter 11
Jem took the first available appointment.
‘Is tomorrow morning, 8 a.m., too early?’
‘No,’ said Jem, ‘no. That’s perfect.’
She knew that meant that Ralph wouldn’t be able to come. He’d have to stay at home to get the children up, to take Scarlett to nursery. She was sure if she’d asked she could have been given a later appointment, something that Ralph could hav
e attended. But she didn’t need him there. It would have been nice to have had him there, nice but not altogether necessary.
In her bag, Jem packed photos of her children, a banana and a book. At the last moment, just before she left the house in the early morning sun, she took the photograph of herself and Ralph at her sister’s wedding from the album in the kitchen. She put it in her handbag, in case she lost her resolve and needed to remember why she was doing this.
Ralph saw her off at the door, Blake in his arms suckling on a bottle of formula. He looked tired and wan, but managed a smile and a lingering kiss. She brushed the kiss away. She did not want lingering kisses or any kind of intimacy at all until this was done. Jem, who spent most of her life feeling like pretty much everything could go either way at any time, who left most of her decisions until the last minute, who believed in fate and destiny and the theory of probability, had never felt so certain or in control before in her life. This was absolutely the right thing to be doing, she had not a shadow of a doubt.
‘I love you,’ said Ralph, ‘I’ll come and pick you up at eleven, OK?’
‘I’ll call you,’ she said, ‘once I know for sure.’
‘OK,’ he said, ‘I’ll keep my phone on loud.’
Jem smiled, pulled her hand from his.
‘Say bye-bye, Mummy,’ Ralph flapped Blake’s hand from side to side, ‘bye-bye, Mummy.’
Jem smiled at Blake and kissed his tiny hands. ‘See you later, baby boy! And give your sister a big kiss from Mummy when she wakes up!’
Jem ignored the film of tears she’d seen over Ralph’s blue eyes and the dull sadness in his voice. He’s just tired, she told herself, just tired and full of sleep.
In the waiting room she read a copy of Grazia magazine and tried not to look at the two other women – not actually women, but girls; eighteen, twenty, possibly twenty-four. Here she was, nearly forty, the twilight of her fertile years, a nice house, a good man; would either of these conflicted, surprised, unprepared girls have had the slightest understanding of what she was doing? She didn’t suppose so.
She pulled out the photo of Blake.
Her baby.
Now he would get to stay her baby, unusurped.
She pulled out a picture of Scarlett. Sweet, kind, shirty, opinionated Scarlett. Enough personality for all of them.
And then she took the Tuscan photo from her bag. She stared into the bright, shining eyes of the girl and the boy in the photograph. I’m doing this for you, she told them, for you and for all your silly, wonderful, crazy dreams.
‘Jemima Catterick?’
‘Yes.’ She slid the photograph back into her bag and looked up. ‘Is it time?’
Ralph dropped Scarlett at nursery fifteen minutes earlier than usual and found his way, as fast as possible, to the Marie Stopes clinic in Streatham. He could not let her do this. It would destroy them. They would never be able to tell their children about it and there it would be: a secret, a lie, buried within the heart of their family. Ralph did not want secrets and lies inside his family. He wanted transparency and honesty. And how would he and Jem ever be able to talk about this to each other, let alone their children? It was a conversation that they would never be able to have. One or other of them would end up hurt. There wouldn’t just be a ghost in their house, there would be a chasm.
He pulled the car up on a yellow line on Brixton Hill opposite the clinic – forty pounds was a small price to pay for stopping a cataclysm – and unclipped Blake from his car seat. He was about to leap, hero-like, up the front steps and into the building when it occurred to him suddenly that he would be carrying a small and very appealing baby into a room full of woman about to get rid of theirs. He stopped, halfway up the steps. He considered Blake, fat in his arms. He considered the front door. He peered through the window. He saw a woman behind a desk smiling beatifically at another woman carrying a set of notes. He saw a row of chairs and he saw Jem, upright, prim, reading – not flicking mindlessly, he noted – but reading a copy of Grazia magazine. My God, he thought to himself, she’s studying seasonal trends, in an abortion clinic. He felt a rush of strangeness to his head then, of unreason. Surely this wasn’t his Jem? His Jem would not abort a baby. And even if his Jem had good reason to abort a baby, she would do so with a grey face and wrung hands and an air of desperation. His Jem would not be sitting there so coldly composed.
As he watched, the kind-faced receptionist put down her phone and trained her kindly smile upon Jem, uttered some words which gave Jem cause to discard her fashion magazine and loop her bag across her shoulder and head to a door to the left where a less kindly-faced nurse was waiting to meet her. Peering from left to right Ralph could see that there was nobody else in the waiting room, that Jem appeared to be the only woman in south London at this particular moment with a taste for killing an unborn child. He rang the intercom and told the receptionist that his name was Ralph McLeary that he was here to collect Jemima Catterick. He held up the baby Blake as if to prove his credentials and then as the lock clicked, he pushed open the front door and stormed (yes, he felt that stormed was the correct term) through the waiting room and down the corridor where he could see Jem and the nurse slipping through a door. He ignored the over-excited shouts of the receptionist: ‘Sir! Sir! You have to sign the register. Sir!’ and pushed open the door and then he was there, face to face with Jem, and all he could say, in a voice quiet with fear was: ‘Don’t.’
Jem looked at him blankly, as if trying to place his face. The consultant got to his feet as though he fancied himself as something of a hard man.
‘What?’ said Jem, quietly.
‘Don’t,’ he repeated. ‘Don’t do this. Don’t kill our baby. We’ll never get over it. We’ll never recover.’
Jem gazed at him in awe. ‘But … that’s exactly why I’m doing it, because I honestly believe that if we have this baby we’ll never recover …’
‘No!’ cried Ralph. ‘I mean, yes, I know what you mean, and it will be tough, of course it will, but not as tough as the repercussions of doing what you’re about to do. I –’
‘Erm,’ came a third voice, the consultant, still on his feet, looking from one of them to the other, his hands outstretched in a conciliatory fashion, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt but there’s something you both need to know.’
They turned to look at him. Ralph bristled slightly.
‘You’re not pregnant,’ the consultant said flatly.
‘What?’ said Jem.
‘You’re not pregnant,’ the man repeated.
‘But … I took five tests. I mean, I even took a test yesterday, just to be sure, I …’
‘Yes, well, you might well have been pregnant yesterday but today, I can guarantee you that you are not. I promise you.’
A small silence filled the room while Jem and Ralph digested this announcement.
‘So you mean,’ he began, ‘that we’ve lost the baby?’
The man nodded and sat down, very slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘or so it seems. And now you have two options. You can either go home and wait for the baby to miscarry naturally, or we could go ahead with the D&C today, as planned.’
Ralph felt his brow gather tightly with confusion. Was this man offering to abort Jem’s non-existent baby? It didn’t make sense.
The consultant looked at Ralph and sighed. ‘The advantage to having the D&C now is, of course, that there will be no waiting. You will not have to leave here knowing that you are carrying the foetus. You won’t risk miscarrying somewhere where it is not convenient. You are also sparing yourself the possibility of a missed miscarriage. The advantages to not having the procedure are more personal, really – you may feel you’d rather leave it to nature to choose its moment, you may feel more comfortable with coming to terms with the loss, believing that it is true?’
Ralph and Jem looked at the doctor, looked at each other, looked again at the doctor.
‘You can go outside and discuss it, if you’d like?’ suggested the
doctor.
‘No,’ Jem looked at Ralph, slightly desperately and shook her head. ‘I’d like the procedure, now, today, please,’ she said, in a small, soft voice, tinged with tears.
The doctor nodded, with the suggestion that he approved of her decision.
Ralph glanced at her. Her eyes were watery but her neat little chin was set with certainty. She wanted to finish what she’d come here to do, it was clear. She wanted herself empty. He made a shape with his face that was meant to convey understanding but probably more resembled weary capitulation. And then he took his baby boy to the waiting room where he sat in a state of warped shell shock for twenty-five minutes, mentally saying goodbye to a baby that had never stood a chance.
That night Blake slept through from 8.30 p.m. until 7.15 a.m. Jem blinked at her radio and then peered across the room into the cot. She racked her memory for the bit where she had pulled her sleep-heavy body from the warmth of her bed and put a warm baby to her breast and sat upon her bed with her eyes closed, half awake, half asleep, waiting to be released back to her dreams. But it wasn’t there. Her heart began to beat wildly at the possibility, always there, that her baby had died in his sleep. She saw his arm twitch, heard a small puff of air leave his nose, felt her heart slow down. He lived. She smiled.
She turned then and looked at Ralph. He was starting to stir. She leaned down and whispered into his ear: ‘Ralph. Blake slept through!’
Ralph opened his eyes and turned to face her. ‘What?’
‘Blake. He slept through. No wake-ups! We’ve cracked it!’
Ralph grunted and turned again on to his back. Of course, thought Jem, he is not the one who has had to get out of bed two, three, four times a night for the past six months, this is not such a huge marker of progress for him as it is for me. She smiled again but then stopped as she felt the damp between her legs, the bulky towel, the stark reminder of yesterday’s events. She would bleed for another week or so, she would continue to feel sick, her breasts would remain sore and swollen. Her baby was gone but her body was playing catch-up.