by Lucy Clarke
‘I didn’t want to hurt you.’
‘You aborted our baby!’ He is shouting now. ‘It was eighteen weeks old. I looked into it, did I tell you that? By that age, it would have been moving – tiny dance-like movements in your womb. Did you feel it kick?’
‘Please—’
‘I read that it would’ve been the size of an apple. Its features would have started to develop – perfectly formed little ears, lips, eyes. It would have had eyebrows. Can you believe that? Our baby already had eyebrows!’
‘Flynn—’
‘I read an account about a late termination – a baby a few weeks older than ours – and when it was removed, the mother heard a sound. Her baby was alive. The sound was its unformed lungs gasping for air. It took thirty minutes before—’
‘STOP!’ I am on my feet, lips drawn back across teeth. ‘Don’t you say another fucking word!’ My fists are gripping the lapels of his suit jacket, pushing him back in his chair so that it teeters on two legs.
‘It was my choice! Mine! And I am the one who must live with it! Don’t you think I regret it? Have you ever wondered what it was like for me to put my hand on Fiona’s stomach and feel Drake kicking? Or to cradle him when he was born? Thousands of women have terminations, but only a handful of those terminations ever lead to what’s happened to me, to my uterus. And do you know what I think about that? I think I deserved it. I deserved to be punished, to be childless, because I chose not to keep that first baby. That only baby.’
I release him, twisting away. Hot tears streak my face.
This, I remember, is why we are over.
2004
‘Have a good shift!’ one of her housemates called from the lounge, as Elle opened the front door, stepping out into the night.
Pushing her arms into a too-thin coat, she set off in the direction of town, her trainers beating a steady rhythm against the pavement.
She realised with a sigh that she’d forgotten her book. The only enjoyment in her cloakroom shift was the dead hour between midnight and one o’clock when few people arrived, and even fewer left. With no coats to check in or out, she could disappear into the world of her novel, while bass thundered through her chest. She was thinking about this when she heard them: footsteps.
They were slow, purposeful. Leather soles against concrete some distance behind her.
She’d never liked the walk into town. It was poorly lit, the roads uncared for, the parade of shops mostly unoccupied or else inhabited by takeaway joints.
Reaching the end of the street, she turned right.
The footsteps followed like an echo.
This stretch of road ran along the back of the university buildings, which were vacant at night. She scanned the dark street and saw that she was alone.
The footsteps were a little closer now. A heavy tread. A man’s footsteps.
Her fingers searched out her mobile in her coat pocket, met the heavy rectangular shape of it, felt the curve of its buttons.
She wanted to stop, turn around, face whoever was behind her, but she was afraid that it would confront something, put something in motion.
Her heart rate increased as she picked up her pace. Blood pulsed in her ears as the footsteps behind her sped up, too.
In the darkness, her imagination flamed. Had someone been waiting outside her house? Were they following her?
At the end of the road, the next street was wider, well-lit, lined with houses. She could knock on someone’s door. Call out.
Her heart thundered as she strode on, telling herself not to run. That she was fine, strong, safe.
Turning onto the next street, she was relieved to see a middle-aged couple walking towards her, arms linked. Emboldened, she spun round, looking over her shoulder to see who’d followed her.
A man was several paces away, his concentration not on her – but on the mobile phone pressed to his ear. She stared into the darkness, trying to make out his features.
For a moment, she thought that it was Luke Linden, but then he’d taken a sharp turn, disappearing down a narrow walkway between two houses, and she couldn’t be sure.
19
Elle
‘At the heart of all good stories is character. Your reader doesn’t have to like them, or even trust them, but they must be rooting for them.’
Author Elle Fielding
Standing outside Fiona’s house, I check my watch. It is after eight – Drake will be in bed. I knock quietly.
It is Bill who answers. I’d assumed that he’d be working away.
‘I’m sorry – I didn’t know you were home.’
‘Elle,’ he says, brows lifting. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘Yes, I was just … passing.’
He considers me for a moment. ‘Then come in, m’dear. Have a glass of wine.’
As I step inside, I have a prickling sense of unease, remembering the figure moving along the dark perimeter of my house.
‘Where’s Fiona?’ The question comes out sharply.
‘Working upstairs.’
‘I thought the brochure copy was finished.’
He shrugs. ‘A new project, I suppose.’
I unbutton my coat and drape it over a chair. When I turn, Bill is looking at me.
I need to ask him while it’s just the two of us. ‘Bill, were you over my way last night?’
‘Your way? No. Why’s that?’
‘No reason, really. I thought I saw someone who looked like you, that was all.’
‘Were they also marvellously handsome and well-dressed?’
The comment makes me smile and I feel the tension easing back.
‘Anyway, what’s with the black dress?’
‘I’ve been at Alison’s funeral.’
‘Of course! I’d forgotten it was today.’ He steps towards me, placing his warm hands on my shoulders. ‘How are you?’ His eyes – an indistinct brown, with a short spray of lashes – hold me comfortably in their gaze.
How could I suspect Bill? I feel like I can’t trust my own thoughts. I’m fighting with Flynn, distrusting Bill, worrying about comments from readers. I’m letting things get out of control. Ridiculously, tears well in my eyes as I struggle to frame a response.
‘A difficult day,’ he says gently, removing my need to answer.
Behind me, the stairs creak as Fiona descends. My sister’s dark hair is loose and kinked as if it’s been recently taken out of a hairband. Her glasses are pushed onto the bridge of her nose and she is wearing pyjamas. She reminds me so much of our mother that, for a moment, I can only stare as I study the straight line of her nose, the loosening of skin beneath her eyes.
‘Thought I heard your voice.’
‘Sorry to show up unannounced.’
Fiona bats away the apology with a flick of her fingers. ‘The funeral. How did it go?’ She kisses me on the cheek.
‘I missed the actual service—’
‘What?’
‘Food poisoning, I think. Seafood pasta. I’ve been sleeping on my bathroom floor.’
‘Oh Elle! You should’ve called us!’
‘I couldn’t even make it downstairs to the phone.’
‘Would you like something to eat?’ Bill offers. ‘I could do you some toast?’
‘Thank you, but I’ll grab something when I get home.’
Bill looks unconvinced, but he doesn’t push me. He checks his watch, announcing, ‘Right, I’m going to leave you girls to it. I’ve got shirts to iron for the week.’
‘Don’t go making me look bad,’ Fiona says.
‘I think your sister knows that I didn’t marry you for your home-making capabilities.’ Bill places a kiss on my cheek, telling me, ‘You take care.’
We listen to the tread of his footsteps up the stairs, and creak of the bedroom door closing, then I sink into the armchair, drawing my legs up beneath me.
‘You look terrible,’ Fiona says.
‘Don’t hold back, will you?’
‘Bill told me a
bout your starring role in Supermarket Sleep.’
‘The gossip. I was tired. I just needed to close my eyes for a moment before driving back.’
‘Is it even safe to be driving when you’re so exhausted?’
‘I’m fine,’ I say firmly.
Fiona eyes me for a moment, then lowers herself onto the sofa. She changes the subject. ‘How was Flynn?’
‘I arrived at the pub about four whiskies too late.’
‘That bad.’
‘He brought up the abortion.’
‘Jesus, you’ve been trying to get him to talk about that for the past two years – and he decides the funeral is the right time.’
‘I know.’
‘I take it his view hasn’t mellowed.’
I shake my head. ‘The thing is, I understand. I do. He’s not anti-abortion … he’s just …’
‘Anti-lying?’
I nod.
‘If it wasn’t for the abortion, do you think you’d still be together?’
This is trademark Fiona: sending a bullet direct to the heart of the issue. I know marriages rarely end because of a single incident. But maybe one event is enough to shine a light on the cracks you hadn’t paid attention to before.
‘Yes,’ I answer eventually.
‘Do you regret it?’
My eyes widen. ‘You’re asking me if I regret having an abortion?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve spent my thirties trying to get pregnant – but I can’t because of a decision I made a decade before. My marriage has collapsed. I’m living alone, and childless. Of course I regret it!’ I shake my head. ‘I came over hoping you’d cheer me up.’
‘Cheer isn’t my forte.’
‘You’re not kidding.’
‘I take it you didn’t tell Flynn that you’d like your house key back?’
‘Not quite the right time.’
‘Suppose not.’ Fiona gets to her feet to adjust the position of a candle on the mantelpiece, then uses a fingertip to prod at the softening wax at its edge. She glances at me sideways. I can tell she wants to say something further.
I wait.
‘Sometimes I think about the abortion. You asked me what you should do, didn’t you?’
I nod. I’d gone to London to see Fiona, waited on her doorstep until she had finished work, watching the traffic and buses crawl by, people nipping into stores to buy cigarettes or newspapers. I’d only visited Fiona once before in her south-east London flat, which she shared with two other male journalists. It had an air of neglect, as if the importance of the work undertaken within it was highlighted by the lack of time they had for domesticity, Fiona’s room pointedly the untidiest.
As I’d sat on the concrete step watching a woman sweep the shopfront opposite, I’d tried to picture Flynn somewhere in the South Pacific. He had no idea that, safe in the warm folds of my body, there was a cluster of cells with his DNA, growing, beating.
Pregnancy was so far off my radar that I’d been slow to connect the dots between my tiredness, the weight gain, my missed periods. I’d finally taken the test earlier that day, gripping the stick that contained my future, while a housemate barrelled up the stairs, shouting, ‘Where the fuck is my phone?’ As the blue cross materialised, a vertiginous feeling overwhelmed me. I’d found myself on my hands and knees, forehead pressed against the swollen lino.
I’d no idea that, several years later, I would find myself on a different bathroom floor, another pregnancy test gripped in my fist, the pale blue cross markedly absent. For the twelfth time, the thirteenth time, the fourteenth …
I’d no idea that the yearning to have a baby growing inside me, to feel the butterfly kicks within my womb like a secret, would be so powerful that it would seem like a hunger.
I’d no idea that it would strike me almost daily – when I would see a heavily pregnant woman sitting at the table next to me in a café, or when I’d watch a mother buttoning her small child inside a coat, or when I’d have to celebrate a friend’s news that she was pregnant with her second child, her third.
I’d no idea, as I waited outside Fiona’s flat, that the person I was about to take advice from – someone who claimed they would never marry, never wanted children – would in fact have her own family one day.
Fiona eventually arrived wearing a black military coat buttoned to her collar. She’d drawn me along the hallway, straight into her room, which was littered with books and reams of paper bearing scribbled annotations. Wherever Fiona lived, her desk had always been awash with paper, books, Post-it notes.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I’d said, head in hands.
‘You’ve got no partner. No job. No qualifications.’ Fiona had a blunt fringe at the time, cut an inch above her brow line, which lent an extra degree of severity to her face. ‘Can you imagine living in your house-share with a baby?’
I couldn’t. It was already cramped – five of us squashed into three rooms, with only one bathroom between us. But it was all I could afford on my barmaid’s wage.
‘What would you do?’
‘If it were me, my body,’ Fiona had said, unfolding her arms and setting them at her sides, ‘I’d have a termination.’
Terminate. Abort. They were brutal, abrupt-sounding words. Endings.
I’d tried to picture Flynn with his sun-struck skin, snorkelling over coral reef. He felt so impossibly far away – as if we were living in different universes. Why would anyone leave all that, come back for me?
There had been a long stretch of time in my early twenties – before Flynn – when I used to feel a quickening in my chest, a heavy darkness moving in, the weight of memory pressing against my ribcage. I would do things to alleviate it: drink through the night; blast music into headphones to drown out thought; walk the streets of Bristol until my feet blistered and my mind turned blank. And then I had met Flynn. There was something about him – an openness, an intrinsic sense of integrity, of goodness – that somehow rebalanced me. I couldn’t bear to lose him, to sink back into the person I was before.
Fiona had booked the appointment, holding a brick-like mobile to her ear, speaking in a calm, clipped manner as she said the words, ‘It’s for my sister.’ She had sat beside me on the tube as we sped underground, my gaze straying to the pregnant woman sitting with her eyes closed, hands locked beneath her bump.
Fiona had made sure I walked through those automatic doors even when I’d hesitated in front of them, the glass opening and shutting impatiently as I said, ‘I don’t know … I just don’t know.’ Fiona’s practicality and efficiency and certainty had created a momentum that had carried me with it.
Fiona looks at me now and asks, ‘Do you blame me?’
I’ve often wondered that same thing. If our mother hadn’t been abroad visiting her aunt, if I’d gone back to our family home and been brought mugs of steaming hot chocolate as we’d discussed not options, but feelings, would the outcome have been different?
‘You influenced my decision,’ I reply simply, because it is true. ‘But I don’t blame you. I asked your opinion – you only gave it.’
Fiona nods, her expression serious. ‘But now I have Drake – and you don’t have …’
‘Anyone.’ I look away. ‘I know.’
Fiona goes into the kitchen to fetch two wine glasses. I slip my phone from my pocket, hoping for a message from Flynn.
There is no word, just a text from Jane. She typically emails or else calls – and she rarely gets in touch outside of work hours. I open the message.
Just a thought on your latest Facebook post – might be an idea to create a bit more buzz about the new book. Don’t want your readers getting cold feet! Cheers, Jane.
I know Jane keeps up-to-date with all her authors’ social media channels. She is great for sharing posts on the publisher’s main page, or circulating them with her team, but she’s never commented negatively on the content. It seems a strange thing to write: Don’t want your readers getting cold feet!
>
I open my Facebook author page to refresh my memory of my most recent post. My eyes widen as I read it.
Can you still call yourself a writer when you can’t fucking write?
I stare at the screen, a wave of panic rising. I don’t remember posting this.
I read it again, but this time the words feel familiar.
‘Fiona,’ I call, my cheeks blood-hot.
She comes into the room, brows dipped. ‘What?’
I’m on my feet, turning the screen towards her. ‘Did I text you this?’
She pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose, reads the message. ‘No, but I haven’t checked my phone in a couple of hours.’
‘Not today. I would’ve sent it yesterday. You texted me and I replied.’
‘What, yesterday afternoon? When I asked how the book was going?’
I nod.
‘You didn’t reply.’
‘I did. I thought I did. But …’ A hot flush of humiliation suffuses me as I realise what I’ve done. I’d been writing all afternoon – I was exhausted, on edge. I was rushing, switching between texting and using Facebook. ‘I must’ve typed it into Facebook by mistake.’
‘Just delete it. People will forget.’
‘Except thousands of people have already seen it.’ I scroll through some of the comments.
MattH: We all have crap days, you’ll get there.
ChrissieEdge: I still call myself a writer and I’ve had five manuscripts rejected.
SueRTerm: You’ve got this!! Loved your first book.
Booklover101: Swearing doesn’t suit you, Elle.
Fury spikes in my throat. Of course Booklover101 would have an opinion. And that tone – like a parent remonstrating a child. Booklover101 doesn’t have a clue who I am! None of them do. I want to scream at the screen, tell Booklover101 – tell everyone – that my last post is the only truthful thing I’ve written in weeks!
Fiona is staring at me.
I realise my fingertips have turned bloodless where I’m gripping my mobile.
I soften my expression, put the phone away. ‘Sorry … I just can’t believe I did that. My editor has seen it. She’s just messaged to ask me to create “more buzz” about the new book.’