by Jane Rogers
Chapter 19
I should have taken the opportunity when it was offered. Because it certainly didn’t get any easier. I promised myself I’d do in on Monday evening. Then Mum came in quite late (she’d been to visit Mand) and started pouring something out to Dad, I could hear them from my room. I was half afraid the whole thing was flaring up again. When their voices finally quietened I went down to the kitchen. Dad was loading the dishwasher and Mum sat at the table stabbing out a fag as I walked in. I pretended not to notice. ‘I’ve come to tell you my news,’ I said. ‘I’ve decided to volunteer.’
‘Hi Jess,’ said Dad. ‘Can you finish up this fruit salad?’
‘To be one of those surrogate mothers.’
Mum stared at me blankly.
‘You know, the ones who’ll have MDS-free babies.’
Dad grinned at me. ‘You still thinking about your seahorses?’
‘No. I’m thinking about me.’
‘I should go back,’ Mum said to Dad, and he glanced at his watch.
‘D’you want me to take you?’
‘I’ll get my stuff together.’ But she didn’t move.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I’m trying to tell you something. I’ve been to the clinic to volunteer.’
‘Which clinic?’ said Dad.
‘Yours. To Mr Golding.’
‘What are you on about?’
‘To be a Sleeping Beauty, for one of the frozen embryos.’
‘Joe? What is this?’ asked Mum.
‘I’ve no idea. Jessie?’
‘I keep telling you. I’m volunteering to be a surrogate mother.’
‘Oh Jess. Look sweetheart, it’s a noble idea, but now isn’t the moment.’
‘I’ve done it. I’ve put my name down.’
‘Jessie,’ he put on his warning voice. ‘Enough. Look – your Mum’s had some bad news, this isn’t the time for this kind of discussion.’
‘I thought we agreed – ’ Mum said to him.
‘It’s not fair,’ he said. ‘She ought to know. Listen Jess, Mandy – Mandy’s been trying to get pregnant.’
I started to ask but he gestured to my Mum. ‘Tell her, Cath.’
‘It’s Paul,’ she said. ‘The carer. Mandy decided it was a good idea to take out her Implanon and get herself pregnant. She thought – she thought they’d let her have a baby. At her age.’
I had a sudden vision of Paul with his sleek smiling face in the fog. Of him disappearing into Mandy’s building. ‘She had sex with him?’ I asked, and Mum burst into a laugh that was more like a sob.
‘Yes love. It’s how babies used to be conceived.’
‘Is she pregnant?’
‘We don’t know,’ said Dad. ‘We can get a pregnancy test done tomorrow.’
‘But it won’t necessarily show yet,’ my mother pointed out. ‘Even if it’s negative, we’ll have to test again in a couple of weeks to be sure.’
‘Will she get MDS?’
They looked at each other. ‘Well Jess,’ my Dad said gently, ‘what do you think?’
‘Yes.’
‘With any luck she won’t be pregnant. But if she is, then yes.’ He came over and hugged me, and kissed the top of my head.
Mum reached in her pocket and pulled out another fag. Dad and I watched as she concentrated on lighting it. I thought about Mandy – happy, pretty, together, with her smoky eyes and glossy hair, waiting for Paul to come and see her. She was doing what she wanted, why was it wrong? But it was so contradictory. If she died, for no reason – then everything would be wrong.
From then on, everything was wrong.
Mum did a pregnancy test for Mand, which turned out to be negative, and took her to have a new Implanon. Mand had cut the old one out with a razor, Dad told me. He said Mand was very angry with Mum for getting rid of Paul. They were trying to make sure someone was with her 24/7 because they didn’t trust her. As he said to me, it was hardly a long-term solution.
I realised neither of them had remotely taken in what I’d told them. At night I heard Mum sobbing in their bedroom, and I knew it would be impossible to talk about it now. Even though what I was doing was volunteering to produce a child, and what Mandy was doing was simply suicide, I could see it might be difficult for Mum to grasp the difference. She’d never liked the idea of girls volunteering anyway – she wasn’t like Dad.
I got a text from the clinic with my counselling appointment, and went along to it as if I was going to an exam, afraid I might give the wrong answer. The counsellor’s room was on the top floor of the clinic; a quiet, carpeted, secret-feeling place with corridors of closed doors. I had never been up there before. Below was the hospital part, with the wards – and on the basement floor below that were the labs where Dad worked.
The counsellor was about 30, I guess. She was very grave, with a flat unemphatic way of talking, as if everything was of equal, measured importance. It began easily, because she was asking if anyone had influenced or pressurised me in any way and of course the answer was no. But then she started on Why? Why did I want to do this? And when I gave my reasons she kept on asking, ‘but why?’ Why did I want to help humanity survive? Why did I want people to be able to breed naturally again? I felt embarrassed, repeating the obvious things, and she still kept patiently repeating, ‘Yes but why?’ I wondered if I was supposed to boast about how heroic and self sacrificing I was, but I knew that couldn’t be what she wanted. ‘Tell me about your friends,’ she said patiently. ‘What’s different in your life, that makes you the one to volunteer?’ So I told her about Sal and how she came to join FLAME; about Lisa, whose mother had died, telling me it was a good idea to stay alive.
‘You’re saying they’ve both had difficult things to reckon with in their lives,’ said the counsellor. ‘D’you think you haven’t?’
‘Not really.’
‘And d’you think that’s part of it? That volunteering makes you more like them, evens things up?’
‘No. It’s like a pressure that builds – men crying in the street, my aunt Mandy cracking up, the way there are always sirens and bad things on the news … I can feel it all – filling me up.’ I stopped myself. If you said the wrong thing, they might reject you.
But she gestured for me to continue. ‘Look – what you say to me is confidential. My job is to help you think it through.’
‘Sometimes I feel like my brain will explode and I want to bash a nail into my head to let some of it out – ’
‘To get relief,’ she said quietly.
‘Yes. Because my heart’s pounding like mad. And when I remember I’m volunteering and imagine the injection, and everything draining away from me – it makes me feel peaceful.’
‘Isn’t there anything else you can do?’
‘Like what?’
‘Well you could work with some of the distressed people you mention – you could train to be a therapist, for example, and work with childless women like your aunt – ’
‘But how can anyone help them? No one can give them what they want.’
‘Help can be as small as taking someone to the park to look at the flowers. Distracting them.’
‘But I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it to be small, and slow, and pointless. I have to do something that will make a real difference – ’
‘Have you ever hurt yourself deliberately? Have you ever self-harmed?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘But you understand why people do?’
This wasn’t like that. Not remotely.
‘It’s all right,’ she said gently. ‘I’m not here to judge you.’
‘Look I’m not trying to make myself feel better,’ I explained. ‘I just – I want it to stop being like this.’
She nodded.
‘I want it to stop.’
There was a longish silence then she asked about my parents. Which was a relief; rattling off their sorry story was easy and I hope made me sound more sensible and objective. At the end she gave me a card with
her number and told me we could talk again anytime I wanted. I felt awkward leaving; I couldn’t see that we’d got anywhere. I’d said some stupid things.
‘You don’t think I’m mad do you?’
She smiled. ‘I don’t believe in madness.’ We shook hands and said goodbye.
Walking down the corridor I wished I’d told her that everything people do is pointless – none of it fixes anything, and their lives just go on more and more disastrously. The only solution is a new beginning. And the only relief is in doing something to make that happen. That’s not mad. It is completely sane. It’s everyone else who’s just pottering along in the same old way, who’s mad.
I needed the toilet so I automatically headed down to the basement. I didn’t even think – but there, as I was coming out of the Ladies, was Dad, making for his lab.
‘Jessie, what’re you doing here?’
‘I’ve been to my counselling.’
He stared at me. ‘You’d better come down to the lab.’ I told myself it was for the best, because he had to know I meant it sooner or later. There was no one else in the lab and he boiled the kettle and made us both a coffee, while I peered down the big microscope.
‘Can I switch it on?’ He turned it on for me and the light came on, and I pulled out a hair and put it under the lens. I tried to adjust the focus, like he’s shown me to before, but it was way too high and I couldn’t even see the edge of the hair, just great big blobby shapes that could’ve been anything. He didn’t offer to help me. ‘Here,’ he said, and put the coffee on the bench. ‘Who did you see?’
‘She was young, dark brown hair. Serious.’
‘Susie Kenyon. Have you really volunteered?’
‘Why else do you think I’ve been for my medical and for counselling?’
‘But – ’
‘But what?’
‘I don’t understand. What happened while I was away?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Did something happen? To make you think of this? Has somebody been talking to you?’
‘No.’
‘But I don’t understand why?’
Again! Over and over again! ‘To help end MDS.’
‘Look,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of other people in the world taking care of that. Scientists. People whose job it is.’
‘But nobody’s got an answer, have they?’
‘It’s only a matter of time.’
‘Dad you said girls need to volunteer, and be honoured for that.’
‘Jesseroon, I didn’t mean you! Look chicken, if you want to make things better why not use your brain? Why not pass your exams and train to do MDS research? Why not work to help solve this wretched thing, instead of – ’
‘Lots of people are doing research. You said so yourself.’
‘There are ways and ways of helping people. Think about something you can actually do to help someone else, instead of these great heroic gestures.’
‘It’s not a gesture.’
Before Dad could say anything else, Ali bumped the swing doors open and came into the lab backwards, dragging a trolley after him. ‘All sweet,’ he said to Dad, and smiled hello at me.
‘Tell Jess what you’ve just been doing, Ali,’ said Dad. ‘She’s very interested.’
Ali pulled a wry face. ‘Wouldn’t call it interesting myself. It’s the Sleeping Beauties, you know. We have to take blood for tests.’
‘Any of their mothers in?’ asked Dad.
‘The chipmunk woman. Wanting to know if she can play Mozart to baby.’
‘What did you say?’
Ali shrugged. ‘Told her to ask a nurse. I don’t see why they can’t tape an Ipod to the belly.’
‘That’s all these girls are, you see,’ Dad said to me. ‘A belly.’
I wasn’t about to be brainwashed by him. I told him I had to get back to college. He followed me out into the corridor and down to the service doors. ‘There’s a lot you don’t understand about all this, Jessie. This isn’t the time or place, but – ’
‘OK. Bye, Dad.’
‘Let’s go for a walk together on Saturday.’
‘Fine.’ I walked across the slushy little road and when I turned along the path between the parked cars, I gave him a wave. He was still standing there in his white coat, holding the double doors open. He looked a bit pathetic. I supposed I should be glad he wanted to talk. At least now he was taking me seriously.
Chapter 20
On Saturday morning Dad packed a rucksack with snacks and a flask of cocoa, like he always did when we went for a walk. ‘I’m not going in the car,’ I told him.
‘Well how are we going to get to Dovestones?’
‘Bus to Greenfield then walk.’
Dad rolled his eyes. ‘We’ll die of hypothermia before we even get there.’
‘You don’t listen to anything I say, do you? People have to stop guzzling oil.’
‘Yeah yeah yeah,’ he said. ‘They have to squat in their hovels gnawing root vegetables by the light of a smoky fire. And never go further than they can walk.’
‘Ha ha.’
‘That’s what you lot are advocating, isn’t it? A return to the dark ages. Have you got a bus timetable?’
‘Online.’
‘Tssk tssk. Electricity!’ he grinned.
I was putting on two pairs of thick socks when he called me into the spare room. ‘Regard, wise child.’ The next bus was at 12.15, in two and a half hours. ‘Come in the car with me and I promise you faithfully that I will get the bus to work one day next week to offset.’
‘It’s cheating.’
‘Two days. I promise. I need to go over to Mandy’s this afternoon to give your Mum a break.’
‘Have you and Mum made up?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not going away again?’
‘No, Sweetie. We’ve had enough stupidity to last us a while.’
Thanks for telling me, I thought. But I let it go. It was a sunny day and he was in a good mood. I didn’t want an argument. As we drove up past the Pike the sun was shining and sparkling across fields of new snow, the light was dazzling. And up at Dovestones reservoir all the moors were blanketed, rounded and softened, and the fir trees’ branches weighted down in great white blobs, on the side the wind had blown from. ‘I’ve never seen so much snow up here,’ said my Dad. He’d started to turn into the top carpark but then backed out and parked on the road, for fear of getting stuck. When we got out the air was as sharp and bright in our lungs as the dazzle in our eyes.
‘Maybe we’ll see the kingfisher?’ I joked.
Dad laughed. ‘Bluest bird in all the land.’
‘Better than a peacock?’
‘Better than a peacock.’ We pulled on hats and gloves and set off down the steps into the little forest. The steps lead you from being level with the tree tops to being down amongst the roots and trunks, as if you’ve changed scale. The lower side is bounded by a big stone wall, and the only way out is over the stile. So when you’re in it you feel safe and cut off from all the rest of the world. When I was little Dad and I used to play hide and seek there. He’d shut his eyes and count to 100 and I’d hide, scrambling over fallen branches to find a good thick trunk to stand behind, peeping round to watch him crashing off in the wrong direction. I could just smell the resin and faint fungussy mouldiness of the trunk against my cheek, and feel the scratchy little pine needles that used to get inside my trainers and poke through my socks.
‘Remember playing hide and seek?’ I said.
‘I used to panic that you were really lost.’
‘It can’t be much bigger than a football pitch!’
‘I know,’ he said, ‘it’s ridiculous.’
I remembered trying to stand still as a statue, my heart hammering nineteen to the dozen. Listening to the snapping twigs and soft crunch of needles, his footsteps coming nearer then moving away. Judging when to make my dash for home. When I beat him he used to groan and pretend to tear
his hair, and I laughed so much I always got the hiccups. We went over the stile and down the lane and then straight on along the track by the top reservoir.
‘Well Jess,’ he said. ‘Shall we talk about all this?’
‘I’m not going to change my mind.’
‘What do your friends say?’
‘They don’t know. I’m not supposed to tell anyone.’
‘So what started you off thinking about it?’
‘You.’
‘I was afraid you’d say that.’
‘You said it was necessary. You can’t be so hypocritical – ’
‘I said it was necessary. That didn’t mean I thought it was necessary for you to do it.’
‘Every girl who does it is someone’s daughter.’
‘Right.’ We went on crunching through the snow in silence. I knew he would miss me – of course. ‘I’m not doing it because you made me think I should. I’m doing it because I want to.’
‘Tell me your other reasons.’
‘Lots of things.’
‘Like what, Jessie?’
‘How else can the world get back to normal?’ He just walked in silence. ‘Women having to die when they have babies,’ I said. ‘The gangs. People wanting to kill themselves. Stuff we discussed at YOFI.’
‘Ah, YOFI. Your friend Iain. What did they say?’
‘Nothing. Anyway, I’ve left.’
‘Look Jess, just because you’ve arrived somewhere in your thoughts it doesn’t mean I can automatically leap there after you.’
‘If you want things to get better, it’s no good just telling people what to do. Like you said, someone has to fire the first shot.’
‘Have they asked other people to set an example?’
‘No one’s asked anyone.’
‘But are some of the other girls going to volunteer?’
‘Not as far as I know. None of them went to the clinic. It hasn’t been on the news, has it?’
‘You only heard of it because of me,’ he repeated.
‘I would have heard later, is all.’