by Clare Fisher
The look on her face yelled STOP. It yelled that if I went home right now, we’d give each other the evils for a couple of days, but after that we’d get bored, then we’d start to miss each other, and then finally we’d forget about it. But the bad voice was back again, snarling at me that I’d already fucked everything up anyway so why not fuck it up a bit more? I didn’t stop.
‘Everyone thinks that, you know. And that you’re dumb. You talk shit about doing shit that you’re never going to do. And, and, you’re a bad mum. Your kids are gonna grow up like –’
‘Enough.’ She pushed me on to the kids’ rocket-shaped rug. ‘Get your slutty arse away from my daughter’s bed. It’s no wonder your real mum walked away. Jesus Christ.’ I clung to the rocket, hoping it would shoot me to some other, better place. She jabbed me with her heel. ‘You deaf? Get the fuck out.’
See? said the voice, over and over, as I dragged myself back to the flat that no longer felt like home. You deserve to be alone.
My stomach churned. I squatted down on the pavement and waited to be sick, but I wasn’t, and then the other voice, the wise one, it whispered: But you’re not alone. You’ve got a human growing inside of you, remember?
I rolled up my top and looked at myself in the mirror. There was no baby belly, not yet, but there was definitely more of me than there had been before. Despite everything, I smiled.
‘The thing about history,’ said Erika, when I’d finished, ‘is, it changes.’
‘Not with me, it doesn’t. It’s just the same thing, over and over.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Beth. Do you remember how you were when you started this list?’
‘Yeah. It was only a few months ago.’
‘Do you feel the difference?’
The Beth at the beginning of this list was scared. Scared of the world inside of her and of the world outside. Scared to look. Scared to connect, ask, feel. Remembering her made me want to cry, so I just nodded.
‘Good. Because I see the difference, I really do. But that doesn’t make it easy. It’s hard. Very, very hard. And you should feel proud of yourself.’
I did feel proud. But I also knew that little things – a nasty look from a screw in the corridor or a comment from someone at dinner – could knock the pride right out of me for whole hours or days at a time. I pushed the letter into the middle of the table. ‘Mind if I open this now?’
Erika half-smiled. ‘Of course not.’
My heart was banging and my hands were shaking and the bad voice was screaming but I still ripped the envelope open. I unfolded the paper and I read it.
Dear Beth
I’ve been meaning to write this letter for a long time. Too long. Since I read what happened in the papers. There are all sorts of excuses I could come up with but the real reason is fear. Fear of what to say and how; I was waiting for the perfect moment, the moment when I knew exactly how to tell you what I’ve been feeling all these years, what I felt when I read about your case, etc., etc. But then various things happened and they showed me that that moment would never come. I just have to go with the bits I can say now, which is: I’m here, if you want to write. Or talk. Or for me to visit – even if it’s just so you can shout at me/tell me how angry you are, which is your right.
I’m writing this from a desk at the window of my flat and through that window I can see next door’s cat rolling in a patch of sun. Its eyes are closed and its paws are curled and its belly is tufty and fat. It’s almost always lying in a patch of sun, even on those days when the sky seems to forget the sun ever existed at all.
Love, Joanna, your Mum
‘How do you feel?’ asked Erika.
‘I feel . . . Everything. Everything at once.’
‘Deep breaths. Let it in.’
We shared some silence, but then it was the end of the session and I had to follow the screw back to my wing, and I couldn’t help eyeballing every person I passed. Could they tell? Could they see I was different? That I was now a person with another person outside of this place who was thinking of them?
As soon as I was back in my cell, I wrote to Mum:
Dear Mum
Thanks for your letter. I liked the bit about the cat. It’s the things like that I miss most. Things you don’t think you’ll miss when you’re on the outside. Everyday things.
It’s actually not as bad in here as you might think. I guess I just try to be like that cat: rolling in the sun whenever it’s out, if you catch my drift. I’ve been reading and writing a lot in here (I’m re-doing my GCSEs but I take books out of the library and read them whenever I can, too) and it’s making me think and feel a lot. It’s good but hard. Right now I’m thinking about being pregnant, and I guess what I want to know is, how did you feel when you were pregnant? How did you imagine our life would be?
Beth
15. Baby bellies
It’s been three days since I posted that letter but I’m not freaking out. When the bad voice creeps close – she’s got so many bad things to write about you, it’ll take her MONTHS to get through them – I chase it away by doing whatever the voice is telling me not to do, like eating one of the chocolate bars Linda keeps giving me to say thank you, or jumping up and down on the spot, or running as fast as I can on the treadmill, or starting a conversation with Linda or the Lee or Jeannie, even if I don’t have anything to say. At first, your mouth or your legs or your heart or whatever it is you’re trying to move, it will moan and groan and creak. But you put one foot in front of the other. You chomp down and you chew. You say some ready-made sentence like, ‘Do you reckon this chicken curry is worse than last week’s?’ And the ground pushes back, the sugar sparks you awake, or someone says, ‘What? This week’s is way better, no contest. Although do you remember how the curries were when Sabrina was in the kitchen? She was magic, was Sabrina. Shame she got ghosted to Sandwood, she was on Enhanced and everything, but they didn’t even give her any warning. I guess that’s why they call it ghosting . . .’ By the time you notice that you’re out of breath or answering back – ‘Which Sabrina was this? Sabrina the teenage witch?’ – it’s too late: life is happening to you and you’re happening to it and there’s nothing either of you can do about it.
While my mum is probably staring at that sunbathing cat, wondering how to begin her letter about being pregnant with me, I’m sitting in the library, watching the librarian read her own book under the desk, writing about being pregnant with you. And you know what? Once I’d stumbled through the exhaustion and the sickness and the constant cloudiness, it was great.
Chantelle wasn’t speaking to me, and Chantelle not-speaking to me meant that the Chuckle Sisters weren’t speaking to me and that I got the worst shifts, but I didn’t care; I’d either just been for an appointment or was planning my bus route to the next one. The feeling I’d had in the first few months, like other people were dangerous, it had turned inside out; now, I couldn’t stop talking to strangers. I say strangers; mostly, they were women. Women who had kids snoozing on their laps or a tired-yet-satisfied look in their eyes that made me sure they were mums. Women who looked kind.
‘Mind if I sit down?’ I asked this granny-like woman on the bus. The seat beside her was free so I didn’t need to ask, but I was on my way to my twenty-week scan, and the words just rushed out of my mouth.
‘Oh, a nice polite one!’ the woman said. ‘A slim one, too.’ She shuffled about in her seat, trying and failing to make her bum fit into the space meant for one person. ‘Wish I could say the same for me.’
‘I won’t be for much longer,’ I said.
The way she looked at me, you could tell she wasn’t used to strangers talking to her on the bus; not just that, but she was glad. ‘And why’s that?’
‘I’m pregnant.’
She stared at my belly and shook her head. ‘You can’t be far gone.’
‘Twenty weeks. I’m on my way to the scan.’
‘Oh! Lovely. That’s the exciting bit. When you see the litt
le blob on the screen. A blob that can be anyone, anything. With my first, I was thinking, nuclear physicist. Engineer. By the time the third came along, I’d already learned that they were just going to be whoever they were, no arguing. Which is for the best, I think.’ The bus lurched around corners and over speed bumps but I didn’t mind; looking straight into her round, creased face, her brown eyes shining with years and years of happyish life, I felt like I was somewhere much cosier. Like her living room, or something. ‘Take my sister. Years and years, she wasted, trying to make her son into a genius. Private tutors, extra classes and what have you. Turned him off it completely. He flunked his O-levels, or what is it now, his GCSEs. But he ended up a very successful builder. Got a big house down Mitcham way with two garages, a garden, and everything. What I mean is, whatever you want for them won’t be half what they can build for themselves, if you let them.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘The other day, I was in the park and I saw this mum and her daughter running. The mum kept yelling at the daughter to hurry up. The daughter kept stomping and sticking out her bottom lip. But as soon as the mum stopped to chat to some other woman who was walking one of those annoying little yappy dogs, as soon as the daughter knew she wasn’t looking, she started to run really fast.’
‘Oh, running! I wish I could run. Definitely missed that boat.’
‘I love it. At least, I did. But I’m not going to force my kid to run if they don’t want to. I’m not going to force them to do anything. I’ll show them the things I like, like running and reading and walking around and looking at things. But I want them to learn all sorts of other things – things I don’t know about, like, like . . . Well, I don’t even know what – that’s how little I know. Point is, I want them to be able to choose.’
She tilted her head and looked at me like I was surprising her in a good way. ‘You’ll be a brilliant mum.’
‘Thanks.’
Her words stayed with me all the way into the hospital and up in the lift and along the corridor and down another lift and through two sets of heavy swinging doors, to where my appointment was. When they called my name and the nurse asked whether anyone was coming with me, I had to look all around me before I was sure that the right answer was no.
The woman who was going to scan me – her official name was something like a snoreographer but I was so excited to see you pop up on the big screen, I didn’t really listen – told me to lift up my top and pull down my trousers.
‘Lie down on this couch,’ she said. Recently, I’d only been told to pay, hurry up, clean the toilets, and other bad things, so to be told to lie down, it was nice.
‘Comfortable?’
‘I could fall asleep.’
‘Bless you! Feel free to close your eyes. I’m just going to rub some gel over your bump.’
The gel was all cold and gooey; it made me laugh. She laughed with me, then wrapped me in some sort of tissue paper.
‘I feel like someone’s Christmas present!’ I said, which was true. Me being able to say exactly what was going on inside of me was another new, strange thing that had started happening. I guess it was because I’d gone for so long without talking that when I finally did, the words just spilled out, like they knew this was their one chance.
‘I’m well excited. You know, it kicked for the first time last week. At first, I thought it was because of a dodgy panini, so I stopped with those paninis, but it carried on. Then I, like, really listened to it, and I realized, it felt different. More like fluttering. Like butterflies but, you know, real ones.’
‘That’s lovely. Sounds like your baby is a gentle one – they don’t all feel like butterflies, that’s for sure! Now,’ she waved what looked like a remote control in the air. ‘Are you ready?’
I nodded.
She rubbed the remote over my belly, back and forth, back and forth. It tickled, but I didn’t laugh, I didn’t yell; my eyes were fixed on the big screen.
‘And here it is!’
Water wobbled all over the screen, and in the middle was what looked to me like a question mark; your head was the balloon-like body of the question, your body the squashed-up bottom. Here was a human, wrapped in wobbles, in a hollow that was inside me.
‘Here we are. It looks a healthy size. Would you like to know the sex?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s a girl.’
And it wasn’t until the smile pushed and pulled at my lips that I realized how much I’d been hoping for this. You being a girl made it even more likely that you weren’t just one flukey good thing to happen in a bad story; it was the start of a whole new one, a better version of me.
Women in newspapers and women in magazines, women in TV shows that are supposed to be funny and TV shows that aren’t supposed to be funny and even real-life women – they’re always on about their baby bellies like they’re a bad thing: ‘People are still asking me when it’s due, and Bella’s seven!’ and, ‘You’d never guess she’d given birth two weeks ago – apparently she had this live-in paleo PT who’d wrestle her to the ground every time she went at the fridge. Lucky for some!’ And on the fronts of the magazines I read while waiting for my scans and my doctor’s appointments: ‘How I Lost My Baby Weight in Just Two Weeks!’
Well, I loved it. I loved watching my body grow into something bigger and better and stranger than it already was. By thirty weeks, my bras, my pants, my tops, everything had got tight; my belly was starting to push a gap between my tops and my trousers, but I didn’t mind; I wore the tightest things on purpose. I wanted everyone to know that the person I was then wasn’t the only one I was ever going to be.
The doctor said that, given my low weight and my bad eating habits, I was lucky to conceive. Lucky that you were growing as fast as you were. ‘But you’ve got to make every effort,’ he said, ‘to look after yourself.’ He paused, licked his lips and added: ‘That includes eating and sleeping as well as you can.’ I took all the vitamins he told me to take. I read all the leaflets he gave me and I checked out as many of the library’s pregnancy books as I could carry. Some of these books were jammed with sentences which began ‘You must . . .’ ‘Never . . .’ ‘Always . . .’ ‘Whatever you do, don’t . . .’ Others had long sections about the dangers of eating non-organic vegetables and of breathing in too many car fumes. I didn’t get far with these books: they just made me angry and scared.
I focused on the books with more words like ‘You could . . .’ and ‘How about . . .’ The books with clear instructions, like: ‘Eat regular meals and plenty of whole grains, protein and fresh vegetables.’ This was a challenge enough: before you, I didn’t pay attention to what went into my mouth or, more often, what didn’t. I’d not bother to eat until my head was about to float away from my body and, if I stood up too quickly, everything would go black. When I did eat, I’d eat whatever was nearest and cheapest: popcorn, a pack of Maltesers, chips, paninis, etc., etc. At home I mainly ate Weetabix, spaghetti hoops and beans on toast. These were the things you could buy anywhere – and which I’d eaten and enjoyed eating in every single house I’d lived in growing up.
I took the doctor’s words seriously: for the first time in my life, I bought onions, garlic and cooking oil. I made pasta and tomato and vegetable sauce with grated cheese on top. It came out a bit burnt, but I didn’t mind; I was proud of myself for making it. Plus, the sickness had been replaced with hunger: I was eating, or thinking about eating, almost all of the time. I’d eat and I’d eat, often reading pregnancy books at the same time, or just staring at the books and imagining you in a few years, kicking your legs under the table, telling me you couldn’t eat spaghetti because it came from monsters, why couldn’t you have pasta twists? And I’d have to think up some story to convince you otherwise. One of the books suggested taking a Tupperware of finger sandwiches on ‘outings’ so that your kid wouldn’t pester you for sweets. I didn’t have any Tupperware so I bought them and made cheese and Marmite sandwiches and cut them into finger sha
pes. I’d go to the kind of place I could take the future-you – the park, the shops, and maybe, once you were big enough to walk and talk and scoot on a little plastic scooter, somewhere in Central, like London Zoo – and, as soon as I’d found a good seat, I’d eat the sandwiches and talk to the future-you. Mummy, why’s that missile so big? Mum, why are those women just standing in the tennis court chatting but not actually playing tennis? Mum, what do you think it’s like to be a tree? Mum, do you think that man over there with the weird glasses might be a spy?
The bigger my belly, the more people noticed me. They’d offer me their seats on the bus. They’d ask, in a soft, whispering voice, when it was due. But other people didn’t notice. Or if they did, they’d stare until I stared back, and in the split second before they looked the other way, their eyes would flash with what they thought of me, i.e. that I was an embarrassing and wrong thing.
‘Right.’
‘It’s a girl.’
‘Congratulations.’
Whenever I saw another pregnant woman, I’d stare at her as hard as I could and with any luck she’d stare back. Sometimes, when I was waiting for appointments, the woman sitting next to me would sigh, and I’d say, ‘Tell me about it,’ and she’d look at me like she was surprised and relieved, and then she’d tell me how much her back hurt from carrying heavy folders up and down two flights of stairs at work, and how her ‘so-called colleagues’ would gawp at her huffing and puffing but wouldn’t in a million years shave a few seconds off their lunch break to help. ‘I’m counting the days until maternity leave, I tell you. Are you on maternity leave yet?’ I didn’t know how to tell them there was no maternity leave on a zero-hours contract. Or about how it now took me twice as long to go up and down the steps and ramps between the road and my flat. Instead, I’d tell them something I’d read in a library book about how to relieve backache in pregnancy, only, I wouldn’t say I’d read it in a book; I’d say that I got it off my aunt or my mum. ‘Oh, I’ve tried that,’ the woman might say, ‘but it didn’t work. Your body must be a lot better at handling this, at your age.’ Then she’d smile at me and I’d smile back and in those few seconds, it didn’t matter that she was in a business suit and I was in a tracksuit; we were two women with two new people growing inside us and we were trying to grow them the best we could.