by LK Fox
‘Forget how it started. It ended up being against your will even if you didn’t tell him, and that’s the only part that counts.’ Marleena stuck a fat finger in her crisp bag and licked it. ‘I get it. You have authority issues, you act on impulse. You think you know everything but, actually, you don’t know shit. In other words, you’re a typical teenager – to a point. But there is something you need to know. There’s a flag on your file.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means there have been questions raised about your mental wellbeing in the past. Do you remember what happened when your mother died?’
‘I had a bad time.’
‘You made some accusations against your father. You had some sessions with a child therapist, yes?’
‘I was very upset. I apologised.’
‘What about your sister’s little boy?’
‘We had a fight.’
‘He was smaller than you. He could have been very badly injured. It’s only because your sister loves you that she didn’t make things difficult for you.’
‘Will I have to give my baby up?’
‘Not if you prove yourself stable.’ She crumpled the crisp bag and buried it in her coat pocket. ‘Ideally, we’ll find a way for you to support and raise the child. But look at it logically. You’re going to need your family’s help, whether you like it or not. You may find this will bring you all closer together.’
‘I don’t get on with Karen. She’s not my mother.’
‘Well, no. You only get one of those.’
‘My father always takes her side. I know why, too. It’s because I remind him of Jean. He was going to leave her, and then she got sick and died. Now, when he looks at me, I think he sees her.’
‘There’s stuff like this somewhere in every family, Ella. It’s rough, but you just have to deal with it. You don’t have to make an immediate decision about the baby, but I want to get the ball rolling. I’ve got plenty more appointments to deal with today.’
I knew Marleena wasn’t messing around. ‘What do you think I should do?’
She held up her hands in warning. ‘I don’t get to have an opinion in this unless there’s a health issue involved. I just dispense advice and allow you to decide. But if I feel you’re making the wrong choice, I can and will override you.’
‘Then what’s the point of telling me anything?’
‘You may not care about screwing up your life, but I do. Now, you could decide to terminate and, apart from your father, nobody else will need to know what happened. If you choose that path, the clinic can’t help you because it’s a faith-based charity and accepts Church sponsorship, and I don’t need to remind you where they stand on the subject. If you do terminate, you could go back to school, pass your exams and achieve something real, something you care about. I’m not saying you can’t do that with a baby, but it’s going to be harder, especially if you refuse to help us contact the other parent.’
‘If I name him, you’ll try to have him arrested or something.’
‘I’m not interested in what went on between you. I only deal with the consequences. Your biggest problem is a practical one. You have no money of your own, your father is upset right now, and you don’t get on with his partner, which means you, and you alone, will have to be there for your child. But you’re one of the lucky ones – you’re not harmed and you’re not homeless.’
‘Yeah, well done me for not living in a council house or a crack den.’
‘Listen, some of the most loving environments you’ll ever find are in working-class neighbourhoods, so you need to get off your high horse and sort yourself out.’ She checked that. ‘Actually, some of the most shit ones, too, but that’s beside the point. If you fail to care for your baby, I will not think twice about having it taken away from you. So it comes down to a clear set of choices. The main thing is to pick one and make the best of it.’
‘Thank you, Marleena.’ I rose from the bench. ‘I’ve already decided I’m going to keep my baby. Being a mother isn’t going to ruin my life, it’s going to make me a better person.’
I could tell she was disappointed, but my mind was firmly made up.
‘Ella,’ she said. ‘I know you did something you regret, but I still think you should tell us who the father is.’
I knew she was really trying for me, but I couldn’t give it up. ‘He was stoned. Someone had made him take something. He’s a musician, for God’s sake.’
‘And you knew that when you—’
‘I only realised afterwards. He was behaving weirdly. He has this kind of girlfriend, she’s a junkie.’
‘I see. Well, you know where to find him, at least.’
‘Yeah, sure.’ I’d already tried looking but had drawn a blank. Marleena gave me a doubtful look. I knew she must have heard all the stories before in every possible combination. I could imagine she had taken care of girls in infinitely worse situations than mine. Even so, I knew my attitude upset her. I wanted to be kinder to her, and yet I couldn’t help myself.
‘Marleena, can I ask you something?’
‘Shoot.’
‘Did you ever have another kid?’
‘Yes, I did. A little girl. She lives with me. She’s the light of my life.’
‘My baby will be the light of my life, too.’
‘So you want me to recommend you for the Dentworth?’
‘Yes, so long as they let me keep him.’
‘You’ve already decided it’s a boy.’ Her smile faded. ‘I can’t promise anything for the future, except that they’ll take good care of you during the birth.’
Removing one of the blue cards in her pocket, she wrote on it and handed it to me. ‘This is the number. If you fail to keep your appointment, you won’t get a second chance, understand? There are plenty of other mums-to-be who’d take your place.’
‘I understand.’
As I walked home, I grew furious with myself. I had behaved like a spoiled child. Now I had to consider my alternatives. Whatever happened, if the high heavens fell or the earth split open to swallow me, I was determined to have the baby. After all, it would be half his; it was something we could share.
I felt sure that, after some time had passed, I could get back in touch with Ryder. And once he had looked into our child’s eyes he would be ashamed of how he had behaved. A baby made by both of us – how could it be anything but a force for good? I wouldn’t accept his apology straight away, but I would give in if he earned my trust. I would forgive him, and the baby would unite us.
My blindness should have ended there. I should have opened my eyes to what was going on. I should have come to hate him. But I didn’t.
Nick
Overnight, I went from Nice Nick, Everybody’s Pal to Nick the Social Pariah.
My parents lived in the south-west and hadn’t spoken to me much over the years, but now they avoided my calls entirely. Our friends were divided; either they went out of their way to duck the subject, or they wanted us to open up and discuss every last grisly detail with them. The neighbours were invisible except for Kaylie, who staunchly stood by us; Phoebe, who moped on the staircase looking like she was the one who had suffered the loss; and Shirley next door, who finally broke her silence to ask, ‘Do you think it would have happened if Gabriel’s mother had still been here?’ At that point, I said something I later regretted.
I stopped using the local stores because, whenever I did, people would turn and stare at me until I confronted them. There were phone calls and emails. Someone threw red paint over our front door. One evening, a religious group stood outside our house with loudspeakers until the police removed them.
I remembered reading about parents who had lost children and how people still suspected them long after they had been exonerated from any culpability. Our child had been found, but still we faced the daily trial of closed minds, silent stares and rubbernecking neighbours.
Ben and I didn’t do anything that might help relieve the tension, l
ike going for a meal, in case people thought we were out enjoying ourselves instead of properly grieving. One night we went to the theatre to try to take our minds off all that had happened, and walked back along the river edge. We were followed by a group shouting something about ‘Dirty queers, leave our kids alone,’ but what shocked me most was that they weren’t teenagers; they were an adult family from a block of flats nearby – grandmother, parents, kids, all yelling and throwing stones as if it was just part of a regular night out.
I needed a drink after that, so we dived into a pub. ‘I think we should consider moving,’ Ben suggested. ‘Just get a little further out for a while and commute in. And maybe you should consider attending a support group.’
‘What? Why just me? I’m not going to run away,’ I said. ‘And I don’t want therapy. I don’t want to share or find closure or meet like-minded individuals who’ve suffered losses, okay?’
Ben looked genuinely puzzled. ‘Why are you being so aggressive?’
‘Because you don’t seem to care about what’s happened. You’re treating it as if it’s just another work problem to be sorted out.’
‘I just have a different way of dealing with it, that’s all,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in being angry about things you can’t change, is there?’ That was Ben in a nutshell.
Me, I needed to keep it all tightly locked inside. Our friends were all determined to give us advice. I finally went for counselling, but there were no hard and fast rules about learning to cope with loss. In time, you’re meant to put away the pain and come back little by little, but what the therapist didn’t explain is that you come back to a different version of yourself. The thing that happened is always there in your head.
Meanwhile, Ben became more distant, until he was no longer prepared to discuss what had happened. ‘What’s the point?’ he said one evening, after about five months had passed. ‘You haven’t got anything new to add so why keep going on about it? Gabriel got lost and drowned. It was a tragedy, not a mystery.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I told him. ‘He had no reason to be where they found him. He should have been in school.’
‘Yes, he should,’ Ben replied, ‘but he wasn’t entirely right in the head, was he?’
And that, of course, was the bottom line; how differently we had always felt about Gabriel. Even when Gabriel was still alive, it had occurred to me that maybe Ben didn’t want the added burden of looking after a child whose behaviour would become more challenging in the years ahead. I think, in the end, it came down to a clear choice between me and Gabriel and himself, and he decided to put his own needs first.
With hindsight, I could see I had never really been good enough for Ben anyway. We’d met in the Fox and Anchor, a metrosexual city bar frequented by nearly everyone who worked in the area. Ben always looked so focussed and earnest, locked into arguments with his co-workers, planning projects and plotting downfalls. He was smart and confident and crazy-handsome, which made me feel like a scruffy security drone trying to punch above my weight. I remember we had been standing at the bar together waiting to be served and got talking about karaoke.
I found an evening of bad singing to be cathartic. The Fox and Anchor was the only place I knew that had a dedicated Japanese-style karaoke bar upstairs, and people came to use it from miles around, so I saw the same group of people in there all the time, a bit like All Star Lanes, the nearby bowling joint where you quickly got to know all the regulars.
By the time we spoke, I must have seen Ben on half a dozen separate occasions. I couldn’t believe I got up the nerve to speak to him. And, incredibly, he talked back. Even then, it might have just petered out, as bar conversations do, except for two things. One, his company had a claim in with our company, so there was a work connection. Two, I realised with a shock that the attraction was mutual. Soon he left his work colleagues and we sat in a corner, talking unstoppably. And he suggested that maybe next time we should go to a quieter pub so we could get to know each other better.
‘Next time’. Are they the sweetest words in the English language?
I couldn’t believe it then, and that was part of the trouble; I never really did believe it, even after we had made our vows together at the registry office.
Although Ben was Gabriel’s biological father, I’d always felt that my connection with the boy was stronger than his would ever be. Ben was too impatient; he didn’t understand what was going on inside Gabriel’s head and wouldn’t devote the necessary time to finding out. The unpalatable truth was that he needed his career more than he needed a son, and he didn’t seem able to appreciate just how amazing Gabriel was. He hardly ever spoke about his ex-wife and never looked me in the eye when the subject came up, as if he was ashamed of having had a hetero past.
I tried to draw Ben out of his shell. I told him that the children of gay parents had their own support groups, that the subject of sexual flexibility could be aired now in a way that was unthinkable even five years ago, but he refused to speak about it further.
I got so paranoid about his indifference that I started to believe he was hiding something from me. I wanted to understand what had happened, but it seemed he wanted closure so that he could move on as quickly as possible.
Soon after Gabriel’s death, I started to suffer from depression. I flew off the handle whenever Ben tried to talk to me about it. One day, he sat me down and told me that, unless I changed, he could no longer see a future for us. Gabriel had bound us together and, once he was gone, we drifted off into our own worlds.
‘I mean it,’ he said, sitting opposite me at the kitchen table one morning. ‘I’m not going to watch you sleep your days away on the sofa for the rest of my life. There’s nothing you can do to put things back the way they were.’
‘I know that,’ I told him, ‘but I can’t change. I know nothing can bring him back. I want to understand how this happened to us.’
He lost his temper then. ‘The police couldn’t help. Nobody could find out anything more. You want to end up like the parents of missing children who spend the rest of their lives sticking up posters in airports?’
‘I don’t see how you can be so callous. He was your own flesh and blood. It’s as if you know something more about it.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Nick. I’m trying to be practical. There’s no point in sitting around fantasising about what you would do if you ever found out the truth. What good can it possibly do? You’ll never find out why because there is nothing to find out. It just happened. We can’t see inside Gabriel’s mind. We have no idea why he chose not to go into class that day and went for a walk in the rain instead. We never ever knew what he was thinking anyway!’
‘I knew,’ I said angrily. ‘I understood him perfectly. I used to solve other people’s problems for a living. I should be able to solve my own.’
‘Blaming yourself is a cop-out, a way of eliciting sympathy, and you know it. Nobody blames you.’ He jumped up and paced around furiously. ‘Gabriel didn’t think or behave like other children, no matter how much you always tried to pretend that he was normal. He walked back out of school and climbed through the hoarding and got trapped.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Someone was waiting to take a child. He could have picked any one of the children going into class that morning, but there was something that marked Gabriel out. You know it, you saw it in his eyes often enough. Some of the kids had no parents to watch over them at all – did you think of that? They didn’t get taken. Predators look for vulnerability. He’d probably been studying the kids at the school for days.’
‘Then how come Redditch and the rest of them could find absolutely nothing unusual outside the school gates? You heard them – they went over months of footage.’
I knew I was clutching at straws. ‘Okay, this guy may have done some trial runs at other schools, in other counties. You saw the witness statements. Hardly any of them matched. He could be a neighbour, living in the houses opposite. Somebody could be lying, coveri
ng up for him.’
Ben exploded. ‘Will you just listen to yourself for a minute? Listen to how irrational you sound! People always ask themselves why tragedies single them out – why them? – but the truth is that there is no rational answer. It’s just really, really tough fucking luck, okay? And now, if you don’t pull yourself together, we’ll both end up losing our minds.’
But I couldn’t let it go. A few weeks after this we split up. It broke us up, this mysterious, unfathomable event in our lives that defied any attempt at rational explanation. The thing that was both impossible and probably very simple to explain.
We lasted a few years. We could have lasted a lifetime.
Ella
It was so quiet, so white and quiet.
Like an aftermath. Like death, like madness. White walls, white window, snow drifting across the flowerbeds outside, muffling all sound, as if a pillow was being pressed over the clinic. Ice ferns had formed on the glass, even though the room felt hot.
My breasts still felt full and uncomfortable. I tried to shift to an easier position, but the sheets clung to my thighs. There was an old-fashioned radiator hissing beside the bed. The sound was soft but insistent.
The dead streets were empty. At this time of the year, it was an indoor world. Television flickering from along the corridor. I could hear people laughing. I felt shut out of everything. I was a mother now, but it didn’t feel like it because my baby wasn’t with me.
Six and a half months after I met Marleena, I ended up giving birth in the place Marleena had recommended, the Dentworth Clinic. It had been built in the 1930s and looked like a pebbledash suburban house. I had been taken out of school as soon as I started to show, like I was the first schoolgirl ever to get pregnant. I don’t think Harry told them anything. He just stopped paying the bills.
I never got used to the sensation of having another life inside me. I hated every second, threw up constantly, just wanted it to be over. Stayed with my bulimic cousin Caroline in her flat on the coast for a while, until I couldn’t stand being around her any more. She always made stupid excuses to disappear after every meal and came back smelling of peppermints to cover the sick, like I didn’t know what she was doing. Some days, we were fighting for the use of the bathroom.