by Lucy Hay
The Decision:
Lizzie’s Story
Lucy Hay
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the author.
© Lucy Hay, 2013
http://www.bang2write.com/
Cover Image and Design © Peter O’Connor, 2014
http://bespokebookcovers.com/
CONTENTS
Prologue
SAL
MUM
MIKE
SHONA
ALL OF THEM
ME
Epilogue
Prologue
Line – to show it worked. Dot – you’re pregnant. Congratulations, commiserations, all separated by two symbols. Which is it to be?
I stared at the pregnancy tester stick; I couldn’t quite comprehend. There must be some kind of mistake. I’d had unprotected sex, sure, but it had only been the once. People have to try for years normally! They have to go on special diets; take up exercise; not wear tight pants; even have laboratory help. But oh no, not me. I’d had to try at everything I’d ever done before now: study like mad for tests; take three separate auditions for the netball team; it had even taken me about twenty goes to climb the rope ladder into our old tree house! But this? First time: score!
I’d had my suspicions, of course. I wasn’t far enough gone to have morning sickness or cravings, but now I felt somehow… different. There was a metallic taste in my mouth and my usually small breasts felt three times bigger; more than that, they hurt like hell. But I’d told myself, over and over: You can’t be.
Yet here I was.
I’d bought the test in Boots, since the only other pharmacy in Winby fulfilled my mother’s many prescriptions. (In my paranoid mind, I could see Mr. Edwards going straight to the phone… “Mrs. Carmichael? Your Lizzie’s been in… Buying a PREGNANCY TEST.” Well, pharmacists don’t have to take an oath of confidentiality like doctors… Do they?). I’d taken the test right away, unable to wait the forty minute bus ride back home to the village. I had to do it right there and then. So now I was seated, pregnancy tester in a hand, in a rank, foul-smelling public toilet with slit windows and ultraviolet light, its graffittied door and walls shouting out various slogans. WANT LESBIAN SEX? CALL 788996. IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU’RE A BITCH. KATIE DORRIGAN IS A SLAG. Some start to a new life. Well done, Lizzie.
Panic struck me, my heart hammering. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to feel? Thoughts clammered in my head, swirling around, trying to make themselves heard. I’d never been against having kids, but at the same time the thought of having one right now terrified me. There were so many things I had taken as red: going to university. Going travelling. Living with my best friend, Shona. Going out; having a laugh; doing what young people do… just because they do. Getting away from this rural backwater, having a career, people thinking I was important: that’s Elizabeth you know. But was this what I was destined to be now … Someone’s Mum before I had I even been me?
I stood up to leave the grotty toilet cubicle, but sat down again. I couldn’t face the world outside. I tried to compose myself, empty my brain in the hope I could gain some clarity. Yet random images and thoughts kept creeping their way in, uninvited. I could already see my mother’s face, pinched tight in that way of hers: “Oh Lizzie.” She would simply sigh, though her meaning would be clear: I’m very disappointed in you. I could see all five of my sisters, their eyes wide, at least one of them delighted I had fallen from grace with such a bump. Worst of all, I could see Mike, his hands dug in his pockets in that way of his, but also Mike’s Dad Francis’ slack face, his yellow teeth clamped on his pipe, puffing away his disapproval.
But it would be fine… Right? Because this was just about logistics. Inconvenient. Scary. But I would be okay. Because I had Mike; Mike loved me. He and I could decide what to do. We would work this out. Together. But I didn’t move. I sat there for what felt like hours, though looking at my watch about twenty minutes passed. Time had slowed down within those toilets. Suddenly I was struck by the silence. I could hear nothing of Winby marketplace: the shouting of stallholders, desperately trying to offload their stock. No one came into the toilets. There was no creak of rusty door hinges; no splash in the wet patch around the sinks; no blare of the hand dryer. I was alone in the world.
I stood on the closed toilet seat, stretching towards the thin, lead-laced window next to the filthy, suspended cistern. I saw the shadows of people’s feet on the pavement above, moving past the glass. It was like peering through a dirty fish tank. Movement snatched away momentarily, then swimming up against the glass, then gone again. The silence was deafening. I sat back down. I knew to go outside, everything would rush in, become real. I would have to deal with what others would throw at me. Accusations. Demands. Disappointments. So many people were going to judge me, people I cared about. And even those I didn’t care about were going to talk about me and somehow that made me suddenly care what they were going to say.
I found myself muttering under my breath and I realised I was singing: Runaway train never going back… Wrong way on a one way track. Seems like I should be getting somewhere… Somehow I’m neither here nor there. Where had that come from? I didn’t even like that song much; it was well old. Then I remembered: me and Shona at her house, drunk on voddy again. We had sung that song at the top of our lungs watching an oldies music channel while her mother slept upstairs, whacked out on antidepressants while Shona’s father was away on “business”. A neighbour had come around shouting, but Shona’s mother had staggered downstairs and slurred at the neighbour since she had heard nothing when she was in the same house, she suspected the neighbour was just trying to cause trouble. Shona and I had stood there eyeballing the neighbour, forcing down laughter until the door was closed, which erupted from us as soon as the latch clicked. Shona’s mother had just stood there on the stairs, regarding us with that puzzled look of hers before taking herself off to bed again in her two hundred pound negligee.
Another image swam into my thoughts. This time it was an old teacher of mine, Mrs. Jenkin. “Jenkin, NO S!” she would always bark (me and Shona always described her as “Mrs. Jenkin-No-S” behind her back and once to her face too by accident. She’d simply laughed). She was typically eccentric for an English teacher, with thousands of bracelets and strings of beads and dyed bright red hair even though she was really old, easily fifty. She had died the year we’d taken our GCSEs. But even though she was terribly ill, she would come in to as many classes as she could.
“You have your exams.” She would say and a part of me admired her, even though she was a teacher. Mrs Jenkin-No-S died the same week we sat our papers. It was like she had waited for that moment, delivered us as far as she could go and then was gone herself. Just like that. I’d never liked English much before, but Mrs. Jenkin-No-S had changed all that for me. Seeing someone so passionate for her subject was infectious and I found myself actually looking at the websites she recommended, or checking the library for the plays and books she raved about, even though Shona poked fun at me and said I was turning into a swot.
“What’s the difference between the Big Bang and Hiroshima?” Mrs. Jenkin-No-S said one lesson, before I’d realised she was actually cool. Apparently her question had something to do with the text we were reading that term, but Shona had kicked me under the table at that exact moment, so I’d shot up in my chair with a squeal. A snicker went through the class like a Mexican wave and Mrs. Jenkin-No-S’s sights had firmly set on me, with a snake-like smile. “Elizabeth,” she said, she never called me Lizzie; “Would you like to share your
thoughts?”
Not really, I thought morosely. Big Bang? Hiroshima? What the hell was this mad old bird going on about? “One was the creation of the universe… and the other destroyed everything?” I said, sure this was the wrong answer.
“Exactly!” Mrs. Jenkin-no-S exclaimed, banging her book down on the desk with a slam. “There is no difference.”
Shona made a face at me that meant she thought Mrs. Jenkin-No-S was mad and she wanted me to shut up. For some reason, though I listened to Shona most of the time, I chose not to that day.
“Um, I thought I said there was loads of difference?” I said timidly. “Like, opposite ends of the scale?”
There was a titter throughout the class. Great. Now everyone thought I was a complete freak. But Mrs. Jenkin smiled and for a moment I forgot the rest of the class. It was just me and her. I’d never felt like that before. Always at home, it was a massive competition between us all: notice me, love me, watch me! At school too, just a mad melee of faces and names, usually fixed on the negative. I’d heard Mum’s friend Nora, a teacher, say once: How do we remember the names of everyone in our classes? We don’t! We only remember the troublemakers’. But then and there, I felt something pass between Mrs. Jenkin and I, though I didn’t understand what it was at the time. Then just as abruptly, the spell had broken and I was aware again of the glares of the others in the class, especially the contemptuous sneer of Helen Billimore to my left. Embarrassed, I averted my eyes.
“They’re both explosions. The only difference is…” Mrs. Jenkin-No-S paused for effect, “…The outcome.”
There was a kind of collective sigh in the classroom, the type that signified the teenagers in the room figured the only adult there was going senile. But Mrs. Jenkin-No-S didn’t seem to let that bother her. Though I didn’t want to, I found myself rolling my eyes with the rest of them and was annoyed to see Mrs. Jenkin still regarding me with those beady eyes of hers when I snuck another look at her.
“Crazy old cow.” Shona said under her breath. I mumbled an almost soundless agreement but guilt blossomed inside me for a reason I couldn’t quite fathom then. But now, I knew why: Mrs. Jenkin-No-S was right. Hundreds of thousands of girls and women take this same test every single day, yet how it works out is always different. Pregnant. Congratulations or commiserations: what is the outcome? For some, there will be a happy ending; for others no such fairy tale. Some will have no ending at all. What was it going to be, for me? What could it be? I suddenly wanted to go and tell Mrs. Jenkin my news, ask her what I should do. But of course I couldn’t. She had been gone nearly three years now. I had read about her death in the paper and seen the announcement about her funeral. Shona had said we should go, make sure the crazy moo was really dead.
“Knowing her, she’ll come out the grave like a frigging bright red vampire,” Shona had guffawed and for that split second, I had hated my best friend. But I’d just muttered she was being morbid and we should go out to town instead and see if we could get served at the pub. Shona had immediately thought that was a better idea and I had felt relieved I could distract her so easily and keep her away from Mrs. Jenkin-No-S’ family. ‘Cos she must have had a family, right? Now I wondered whether she had a daughter or son, whether they missed her and what the baby inside of me right now would think of me of one day.
Baby. Whoa. I’d been so busy trying to digest the word “pregnant” into my psyche, it was hard to believe the situation actually meant something else too. There was another person inside me. Or was there? What did I even think: life began at conception? Or would it be a while yet before it was “real”? I didn’t know. This all seemed just too huge. Panic struck me all over again. I tried to empty my head again of the accusatory faces, tried to concentrate on something else. I recalled a sleepover with Shona once. We were about eleven and we’d just met in our new class at “big” school. We were two outsiders drawn together by the politics of the schoolyard: she was fat, I wore glasses. It made sense two outcasts should be together. There were kids “sadder” than us. As long as we kept our noses out of the popular kids’ world and our heads down, we would be fine. So we became firm friends, because without each other we would have no one.
That first weekend after Shona and I had met at school, we made our very first pitcher of orange juice and filled it full of vodka from Shona’s father’s drinks cabinet; he would never notice. Shona’s family was stupendously rich (at least, in comparison to mine). Shona even had her own en suite bathroom, with a heated towel rail and the hot water was on all day. I was in awe: at my house, if you didn’t get up early, even at weekends, the hot water would be gone. Even then, you always had to wait. Our little country cottage was besieged by mice and we couldn’t afford central heating. In winter the house was so cold, the sheets on the bed felt wet and there was a constant sting of damp in the air. Our water was provided by a huge tank and pump, prone to leaking. One year I got out of bed to discover my bedroom was flooded right up to my ankles. The electricity would go off and stay off; we were the company’s last priority in the tiny hamlet of Linwood, out in the arse end of nowhere. My mother would keep big pots of candles and matches on the sideboard all year round, “just in case”. Every winter the patio would disappear under water. Once, my twin little sisters Clare and Charlotte could have been killed when a huge piece of the roof fell onto their beds, though luckily they had been sleeping downstairs in the living room, having had a horror film bonanza with two friends. Escaped animals from nearby farms would invade us on a regular basis: cows and sheep mostly, though once my mother went out to pick some flowers and came in white-faced, reporting there was a vulture sitting in the crab apple tree. We’d gone to investigate and sure enough, there he was. A few phone calls later revealed he had given his handler the slip at the local wildlife park. That was our life.
So I felt like I’d won the lottery at Shona’s: I must have stayed in her shower for twenty whole minutes and no one shouted at me. Later, we drank the vodka and watched DVDs – she had a player and television in her room, too! – and chatted like we’d known each other forever. I was struck by how peaceful it was at her house. There was no shouting, no arguing, no slamming doors. And unexpectedly, inexplicably, I felt a little bit homesick for the noise. But my attention was diverted whilst we were watching some lame DVD about a time-travelling guy, when a drunk Shona suddenly opened up and shared her theory:
“I think some moments are meant to be,” Shona declared, “You can’t change them. Other stuff can only change around them.”
My brain fuzzy from alcohol, I didn’t realise she was sharing something she was serious about with me. Later I would come to know Shona didn’t do that much. Usually everything to her was either a joke or tedious, but back then I had known her just a few days. It would be years before I would have the full picture of what Shona was: sexually precocious, flippant, self loathing, all wrapped up in a desperate bid to get her parents to notice her.
“Like it’s written in the stars?” I giggled.
“No,” Shona said, put-out. “Nothing cheesy like that. I just think some moments happen and you can’t undo them. But from there, that starting point, anything could happen.”
It was a sobering thought. “But doesn’t that mean we’re not in control?” I enquired.
“We all have choices,” Shona said with surprising authority for an eleven year old school girl.
“But how does it work?” I said, genuinely confused. “If there are some things that we have to do and others we choose to do, how can that make sense?”
“Life doesn’t make sense.” Shona said.
“That sounds like a cop out to me.” I declared.
“Not a cop out.” Shona countered, “A paradox.”
“How do you know which are those moments?” I asked.
Finally the mysterious and grown up Shona was gone and the giggly, drunken little girl was back. “I don’t know, do I?” She’d snorted, “I suppose you just know.”
We’d carried on drinking and the next day I’d had my first ever hangover, waking in a pool of vomit. Shona’s mother had freaked out, sure I was dying and driven me to a hospital. In contrast, Shona was well used to alcohol and wore only the pasty pallor of the seasoned drinker. When the doctor had informed Shona’s mother I would be fine as long as I drank plenty of fluids – “only not the type of fluids she had last night” – Shona’s mother finally clicked and called my mother. Mum had arrived in her little beat-up car, parking outside Shona’s parents’ palatial townhouse and I’d nearly died of shame. Even more so when my incredibly pregnant Mum got out of the car and I saw she was still wearing her pyjamas. She hadn’t had the twins yet and she was huge; how she even fit behind the steering wheel was mind-boggling. Even better, Amanda, Sal and Hannah were crammed in the back looking like woodland elves. I was sure they’d backcombed their hair just to show me up. But Shona’s Mother pretended not to notice my family in their states of disarray and as our mothers chatted idly, I wondered if Shona had ever shopped in charity shops for her stuff or had to make believe she actually wanted to be “different” to everyone else.
“Couldn’t Dad have picked me up?” I said dully as I got in the car.
“You know Dad’s not here at the moment.” Mum said, her lips pursed in disapproval. It was going to take me a long time to work my way back into her good books again.
“When’s he coming back?” I demanded.
“Don’t start, Lizzie.” Mum said, automatic.
Immediately my little sisters started chanting, “Don’t start, Lizzie! Don’t start!” Sal reached through the gap in the seats and pinched me. I reached back and tried to pinch her. Suddenly a fight broke out: Hannah was crying and Amanda’s shrieking that hideous laugh of hers whilst Sal’s telling me what a loser I am and how she wishes I was dead.
“Now look what you’ve started!” Mum hollered at me as the car sweeps past endless fields.