by Holly Seddon
Robin stood up from her chair and came over to me, slipped her hand into mine.
Afterward, my belly was wiped clean with a scratchy tissue and my blood pressure was taken. After that, vials of my blood were siphoned by the midwife while Robin still held my hand, then I was given a narrow jar to pee in.
When I came back into the room, I heard Robin say, “You should ask my sister that, not me.”
Whatever it was, the midwife didn’t ask it. Instead, she told me that I had already missed one standard scan at twelve weeks and was already due for the next one.
“Can she find out if it’s a girl or a boy then?” Robin had asked.
“If she’d like to know,” the midwife said. I just sat numbly while they talked about what would happen, and that I’d get a letter with a date and time, that I’d need to arrive with a full bladder. That Robin—or someone—could come if I wanted them to, but that only one person could come in with me. “So you couldn’t bring your mum and the baby’s dad or—”
“I’ll be going with her,” Robin interrupted.
—
We walked back from the surgery in silence. Robin’s jokes had run out and she seemed distant, almost anxious. As we turned in to our road, my sister turned to me and said, “Who’s the dad, Sarah?”
I stared dumbly. It was a reasonable question. “The boy at the party,” I answered, and the third-person script of it hung in the air.
“Okay,” she said after a moment. “You don’t have to tell me.”
—
I’m awake. It’s still black outside and my heart races with the shock of being conscious. I look at the alarm clock next to me. It’s just gone two. I don’t understand why I’m awake, until I hear voices downstairs. I get up, wrap my big dressing gown around me and tread carefully onto the landing. Robin’s heading down the steps, and Hilary and Dad are already downstairs talking quietly to each other and someone else.
Callum. Apparently he’s been dropped off at the house by Rez’s cousin. Even by peering down the stairs I can see he’s far thinner than before. Tall like his dad, but he still has a skinny child’s body. As I take a few steps, I realize the sour smell rising up is from him.
In the dim hallway light he looks pale and yellow. He’s slid down the door so he’s squatting on the floor, leaning back. His eyes roll around like loose marbles, and when he focuses, he screws his nose up and spits at whoever he’d focused on. I’ve never seem him like this. I’ve never seen anyone in this state.
Dad sees me on the stairs and tells me to go to my room, a chastising voice I’ve not heard since I was small. I don’t argue. As I walk back up to bed, Callum asks whose room I’m staying in.
“Her room,” Dad says sharply. “This is her home.” As I shut my door, I hear Callum’s garbled protests.
—
He’s been in Robin’s bed for two days, sweating and raging. She sleeps on the sofa; there’s no room in my bed. When he emerges from his pit, Callum’s different. Apologetic, embarrassed, he avoids all our eyes.
“I’m really sorry if I said anything to you,” he says to me as he makes instant coffee and offers me tea. “I was on something. Mum said Rez didn’t know what to do with me so he brought me here. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t say anything to me,” I lie. He looks relieved and stands up a little straighter.
“How are you?” he asks quietly, stirring sugar into his mug.
“I’m okay.” I wrap my cardigan around me, hug my belly to obscure the small bump.
“How come you’re living here? Had enough of my dad?” he asks, without looking up from his work with the spoon.
“Both of them,” I say. He grunts in recognition.
I want to ask him so many things. I want to ask so many questions to which, maybe, I don’t really want answers. But instead we just sit at the table together in quiet understatement.
—
He stays another two days, calling in sick to his call-center job and having angry calls with his boyfriend that he thinks we can’t hear. With every hour that passes, he and Robin giggle more, play each other songs they’ve found in their time apart. They warm up old jokes, and color fills in both their faces.
Robin is less interested in me, partly because I’ve sworn her to secrecy about the baby, so her chief source of interest is off-limits. She isn’t unkind to me though, and I find myself tearful with gratitude.
When Callum disappears again this afternoon, collected by his grubby-looking boyfriend, Rez, who’s hanging out of someone’s Vauxhall Corsa with a joint in his hand, Robin is inconsolable.
“Every time Cal pulls himself out, he gets sucked back in. I don’t know what the fuck he sees in that rat-faced little weasel. He’s not even funny. He’s got shit taste in music. He’s nothing.”
ROBIN|1998
Nobody says anything in this family. That’s the problem, as far as Robin can see it. They didn’t speak up fast enough when Callum started giving up on who he was, started sliding down this shitty road instead.
She swipes at the guitar in her lap again, enjoys the ugly clash of notes, bends them into shape. She hears her twin moving position on the bed in the room next to hers, the mattress creaking and complaining under the increased weight.
Robin swipes again, then walks her callused fingers along the fretboard as if she’s reading braille. The band started as fun and grew into something that earned a bit of cash but is fast opening up as an escape hatch.
Sometimes it’s unbearable living somewhere so small, all the oxygen sucked up by secrets. The world is bigger than this bedroom, than this village, than this country even. Robin wants to get out there—she’s hungry for it. The thought of being cooped up in a small family house for the rest of her life makes her want to stick a gun in her mouth.
She reaches for her notepad. Angry lyrics about small-town suffocation start to bubble up. She jots them down in her illegible form of shorthand, tinkers with some clashing chords to sit beneath them.
She turns the page, stops dead. Sarah’s neat handwriting is right where it shouldn’t be. “Romper suits, age 0–3 months, newborn socks, breast pump,” it says. What the fuck is a breast pump? It has no place among her angry lyrics.
All Sarah seems to do these days is make lists of things she needs for when the baby comes. Nobody asks how she’ll pay for them. Or where the baby will sleep. Or what Sarah will do for money. Or why Sarah won’t ask their mum and that piece of shit for some cash. They have more than they need.
Robin likes the idea of being an aunt, loves the idea of some fresh untainted blood around the house, but the inertia of the adults turns her stomach.
What will it take for them to do anything?
SARAH|1998
We watched a comedy rerun tonight, but neither of us was in the mood to laugh. Robin was tired, a bit grumpy. Had that heavy forehead she gets, loaded with things she wants to say. I just hoped she wasn’t going to ask me—again—about the baby’s dad. Every single day, I choose to be happy about the baby and I choose to smear a thick black line over the memory of its creation. That’s the only way to survive, to keep my baby pure.
Robin’s been spending more time with her band recently, rehearsing in bedrooms and garages and occasionally village halls that I’m not entirely sure they have permission to be in. Some weekends they play at weddings and she comes back with pockets full of tenners and slices of cake.
Dad and Hilary are out, dinner with a regular customer of Dad’s who has a big enough house and garden to need regular landscaping. Robin and I peeled away from each other on the landing and went to bed early, plodding into our respective rooms. I felt full and warm, my scalp beating with the central heating, my blood thick and heavy. Robin dragged herself into her room. I heard her putting music on—I think Jimi Hendrix, but I don’t know. That’s not my forte.
I don’t know if she’s fallen asleep yet, but I haven’t. My eyelids are heavy but my brain is twitchy. Too many thing
s squirming to climb out from under thick black lines.
Suddenly the front door bangs open downstairs. It’s too early for Dad and Hilary. There are heavy footsteps crashing up the stairs and I sit up, instinctively putting a pillow over my belly.
I hear the flurry of footsteps crunching along the landing and someone pushing a nearby bedroom door open. I hear Robin yell with that gale-force voice: “Hey, what the fuck do you want?”
I hear a male voice snipe, “Wrong room, you idiot!”
Robin’s bedsprings squeal urgently. I don’t know what to do or who it is. And then I hear her say, “What the fuck do you want, Cal?”
Mumbling, moaning, swearing. The thud of feet along the hall to Dad and Hilary’s room, doors banging open, male voices mumbling, Robin yelling now. “What the fuck are you doing, Cal?”
“Get back in your box,” I hear a voice say. I can only guess it’s Rez.
My knees tremble. I feel a sloop in my gut that I think could be, could be, the baby. I don’t want my baby’s first fluttering movements to be out of fear, so I swallow the thought away. That has to come on another day. Another thick black line.
“The fuck you say to me?” I hear Robin spit. “You pair of dicks barge into my house and tell me where to go? Get the fuck out of here.” She sounds weary, but the dismissive tone is replaced with something else and she cries, “Get off me!”
I hear Callum’s voice clearly for the first time. He sounds relatively calm. “Don’t, Rez. Robin, just let us get this stuff and we’ll go.”
Should I hide in my room with my baby bump or help my sister? I don’t know what to do, but inaction feels worse than action, so I stand up and step out quietly into the hall. A few feet away on the landing, Robin and Rez are tussling in the dim light. He’s much taller than her and bending like a reed. Callum, exasperated, is trying to separate them. “Give that stuff back!” Robin’s screaming, grasping at Callum’s pockets while he tries to pry her fingers away. Rez looks panicky.
“How could you, Callum?” Robin yells.
“He’s owed it,” Rez says, his voice soft but cold.
Robin struggles free, kicks back wildly and catches him somewhere near the crotch. “You’re not though.”
Rez and Callum both reach for Robin. I don’t know what they’re going to do, but without thinking I run at them, pushing Rez.
I hear Robin pleading with me not to and Callum yelling at me to leave it. I realize he’s drunk again, or maybe stoned. I feel hands shunt me around. I feel fingertips on my fingertips and it not being enough. The feel of the top-stair carpet under the arch of my foot, the swooping tickle of it, the lurching sickness in my gut.
I open my eyes at the bottom of the stairs and close them again.
I open them again in the bright light of an ambulance.
I see Robin’s tears. I see her rage. A twin fury that passes through me too and burns so hot and so bright that I pass out from it.
—
“I shouldn’t be in hospital yet,” I croak. They just look at me, big-eyed and nervous.
My appointment isn’t for a couple of days. My scan, it’s not yet. “Too soon.” I hear my muffled voice, the words drawling slowly from a mouth that doesn’t feel like it belongs in my head.
The sea of faces around the bed just nod. Red eyes, hands on my arms. Dad, Hilary, Robin.
I try to sit up, and it hurts so badly that I slide back down even farther under the sheets and blankets than I’d been before. And suddenly Robin is on me, stuck to me, her skinny arms around my neck and her lips on my face, kissing me, resting her forehead on mine. “I’m so sorry, Sarah, I’m so sorry,” she breathes into me.
Dad’s pulling her off and whispering to her—“She’s too sore, you need to be gentle”—while I’m trying to sit up again and failing.
I hear myself: “The baby?” A quieter voice than I knew I had. And the tiniest shake of Hilary’s head and the power of Robin’s rage slam into me like a bulldozer.
In two days I was due to go for a scan where I would have found out in a more routine way that my unexpected baby was a little girl. I would have realized then just how much I could love her, in spite of her creation. Instead, I’d found out too fast and too late, just as I tumbled down the stairs.
She—she, my God—was eighteen weeks. They called her a “miscarriage” and put her in a special box. But she was my baby. Was. The worst word in the dictionary.
When I was able to sit in a wheelchair, they took me down to the chapel, where we all stared numbly at a priest I’d never met who read words I hadn’t chosen about a heaven I didn’t believe in. And slowly, with each word, every single piece of the girl I’d once been seeped out of me.
In that girl’s place, my family wheeled back a shell. They placed the shell carefully on the hospital bed, kissed it goodbye and turned out the light. And I lay there, this shell I now am, and I tried to understand how any of this stuff could have happened.
Callum and Rez had been there that night by the stairs, I remembered that. They were taking Hilary’s jewelry, tangling it up as they shoved it in their pockets. The bright gold stuff from the Drew days that might have been worth a little bit but was probably just gold-plated costume junk.
Robin told me later that they hadn’t even taken the jewelry, just dumped it on the landing and fled from the house.
“He’s dead to me,” she’d said. “He’s fucking dead to me.”
—
I’m home now. My bruises and cuts have faded a little and my belly gives nothing away. Everybody except Robin seems either relieved or oblivious. Dad can now forget his daughter had ever shamed herself like that, with a fictional boy at an unlikely party. Hilary can get back to saying nothing and doing nothing about her son and the path he’s taken. And Mum and Drew could stay insulated in ignorance.
But me? I’ll never forget, and Robin will never forgive.
A baby girl. My baby girl. Robbed from me.
ROBIN|1998
Robin paws at her anger in private. Where once she’d been the only one to take a positive interest—touch Sarah’s belly, laugh about the size of her swelling bust, make up nicknames for her niece or nephew, like “little bean”—now she avoids her twin sister. In their brief conversations, Robin looks down at her shoes. When she’s home, Robin locks her bedroom door, creates a wall of sound to keep everyone out.
Despite promising Hilary she wouldn’t, after three sleepless nights in a row made her feel crazy with indecision, Robin called the police.
She gave them Rez and Callum’s names. Told the police that they were selling dope, that at least Rez if not both of them were shoplifters, told them that they’d tried to burgle the family home. Told the police that they’d pushed her sister down the stairs. Told them to check with the hospital, see the records for themselves.
Nobody else had wanted to involve the police. Not even Sarah, who just wanted to forget and to channel her anger and grief in her own way.
Instead, Sarah had to give a stilted statement to two uniformed officers, who came and perched on the sofa and drank tea politely. While Robin sat next to her, closer than they’d been in weeks, Sarah could hardly get the words out.
The policeman jotted down Sarah’s patchy statement and the policewoman looked at the sisters with concern, as Robin hugged her stomach like it was her body that had been hollowed out. Like they’d done it to her.
The police went to call at the flat while Rez and Callum were out. Their flat, which they shared with odds and sods of Rez’s extended family and network of shoplifters and rat-eyed drug dealers, was an Aladdin’s cave of minor crime. But, honor among thieves, no one told the police where to find Rez or Callum.
The police can’t have tracked them down yet, because Callum and Rez have just arrived at the Marshall house, their car exhaust banging an announcement as they pull up and crush the edge of the lawn.
Robin thunders down the stairs and flings open the front door, her dad shouting after her t
o wait.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” she rages, marching up to Callum and Rez so they both take a step back on the small lawn. Jack and Hilary have followed her out, Hilary small and exhausted, her cardigan wrapped around her like a swaddling blanket.
“You called the police, Robin,” Callum says quietly, and looks at Rez. “Do you know what you’ve done?”
“Callum, please, you need to go,” Hilary is saying, and she’s put her arm around his waist to try to nudge him back to the car, but he’s just twirling away from her and refusing to leave.
“The damage you’ve caused, Callum, you need to get the fuck away from here,” Jack is saying. The loudest voice Robin has heard from him in years. You should have acted this bravely years ago, she thinks through the red fog in her head.
“Please, Jack, don’t do this here—” Hilary tries.
“Enough, Hilary! Don’t you defend him,” Jack snaps, and Hilary sags even more.
Robin stands there on the lawn, barefoot in her shorts and T-shirt. She cannot say anything. She can’t catch a clear thought; they jumble in a ball and hurtle around her brain. She’s so angry, so upset, that she feels like her whole body is on fire and she’s just burning there on the grass, chest heaving.
Rez is trying to tug Callum away, but Callum is shaking him off too. “Robin,” Callum says, with no fight in him. He’s shrinking under the glare of Jack and Robin’s anger, Hilary’s shame. Robin looks away from him and up at Sarah’s window, where she sees the outline of her twin. The flames pick up even more and she stares at her beloved brother through them, still mute.
“I’m so sorry about that night.” Callum’s pleading now, new tears catching in his throat as Rez puts a hand on his shoulder. “I said I was fucking sorry, but you didn’t have to go to the police. Robin, you’ll ruin our lives!”
“Ruin your life, Callum? Your life?” Robin shouts. “You pushed my sister down the fucking stairs!”