by Cole Morton
‘Not until now. Not really. I forgot about it by tea time. It’s only lately, these last few days, going over everything, I remember. It was always there, growing up. Like a curse. Granny cursed me.’ She catches the way he is looking at her and smiles. ‘That’s a bit hard on her, isn’t it? I don’t really believe in curses, but if it was one, it did come true. We were trying for a baby for three years before they told me what I already knew, that it could not happen naturally. I had to have an operation. A little one. Keyhole surgery. Put a camera in there, have a look at my ovaries and zap the cysts. Simple.’
‘It wasn’t?’
‘No. Thank you. I remember thrashing about and shivering a lot when I came out of the anaesthetic, really shivering. I was scared. I had this big pain right across my stomach, and could not feel parts of myself. Something terrible had happened. The nurse said the doctor would be there soon, doing his rounds, but he was not. He did not come that night. Jack did. He held my hand, and sorted out the television that was on a swivel arm over the bed, so that I could watch EastEnders. It was a bit of a blur. Then he went and I lay there and listened to the pipes gargling all night. I was not sure if it was the pipes – the noises sounded human. I dropped off about half five in the morning. They woke me at six-thirty for my medicine. The doctor said they had cut me open, to get at all the cysts. There were too many. I kept thinking of the blade. Not the real blade, something like a cutlass.
‘I went home to my grandmother, who made me toast and let me doze on the sofa and helped me up to my old room at night. Jack was away. He kept his distance anyway, and I do not blame him because when he did come round I had nothing to say that was not about how I was never going to have a baby now. Then the tears, always the tears, every day, several times a day. I was swimming all day and all night. Floating. The drugs, pain-killers and anti-depressants, made me sleepy. The tears made me hollow out. I was not eating. I was getting lighter and lighter, drifting, looking down from the ceiling. Floating away.’
‘For how long?’
‘Three months. All that, and the cysts were still there. I was given a drug to try and shrink them, because that would make it easier to conceive. It made me feel sick all the time. Like morning sickness. Worse. There was bile in the back of my throat all day. I just wanted to sleep. Jack was not coming anywhere near me, and I just was not interested in him. What was the point anyway? You get like that. You shrivel up.
‘I went back to work and tried to carry on, but that first day, Jack does not know this, I put my battle clothes on for school and I got on the Central Line in the morning and there was a pregnant woman who got on at the next stop. She was huge, sweating, it looked like the baby was coming, and I thought, You lucky cow! Nobody would give her their seat, but I did and as I stood up I thought, I am going to go, I am going to faint. So I got off and sat on the bench there with my head between my knees.
‘People were milling all around, the service was so bad. I do not know how long I sat afterwards, watching the trains come and go. Floating. The crowds thinned and disappeared. A woman with a baby strapped to her chest came with her hand out for money. I wanted to give her money for the baby, honestly. “I will take the baby.” I couldn’t say that, though, could I? It was quiet. Drugged maybe, like me. I just sat and sat, feeling everything and nothing – the clouds changing colours were like magic. My body was numb. Then it got busy again, the evening rush hour was starting. Can you believe it? So I got on a train going the other way and went home. Do you know what the nurse said?’
‘When?’
‘At the hospital. I went for an injection. She said it was cruel. I said, “What is?” She said, “This. Has nobody told you? The best way to cure what you have is to get pregnant.”’
Gabe watches her rubbing the palm of one hand with the thumb of the other, reddening the flesh, digging in her nail.
‘What kind of teacher are you?’
‘History, English, drama.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘The school is not so bad.’
‘The operation,’ he says.
‘I know. I was joking too. Do you want to hear all this?’
He indicates that he does and holds out the bottle.
She shakes her head and says, ‘I am glad to be saying it. Get it out. Always best. Do you think they’re coming?’
‘The police? I don’t know. Not tonight, maybe.’
‘Tomorrow then. First thing. After . . . I had better write something so they know . . . What do I do about Jack?’
‘He can’t get in here, Sarah. I won’t open the door until you’re ready.’
‘You are a good man.’
‘I’m not so sure. Go on.’
‘Ah yes, you want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,’ she says, swilling the mostly undrunk whiskey around the glass. ‘I don’t know the truth. I do know they lied to me, that time and next time. Then again after the second operation. We had artificial insemination. It’s as romantic as it sounds. They give you more drugs to regulate the ovaries.’
‘I know.’
‘Oh.’ She pauses. ‘You know about the scans then. I did not produce enough eggs the first month. Then the next month there were not enough staff to do the scan. The month after that, the nurse was not around to read it. This went on and on, for a year nearly, Gabe. Then someone new said she was really sorry but the clinic was closing because they didn’t have enough staff to cover for the nurse, who was going on sabbatical.’
‘On the NHS? That’s unlikely.’
‘Yes. I heard someone talking about it on the reception desk. They were not allowed to say.’
‘What?’
‘Catch up! The nurse was pregnant.’
‘God—’
‘. . . wants nothing to do with this. Clearly.’
She’s quick, thinks Gabe, noticing the fine hairs at her temple as she asks him: ‘Are you a believer? You have the right name. . .’
‘My mum loved One Hundred Years of Solitude.’ Examining his untouched glass of bourbon, he makes a decision, puffs his cheeks for the sake of marking it, and puts the glass down on the window ledge, undrunk. ‘Apt, really. Haven’t thought about that until now. I don’t know the answer to your question. I was brought up to believe, like you. I lost that faith a long time ago. Saw too much. But living here, I wonder if heaven and hell are the same. This place is beautiful, staggeringly so. Heavenly. If you treat it with respect there is no finer place to be. If not—’
‘How far did you get?’ she asks.
‘With the treatment? Ah. Not far.’
‘IVF?’
‘What I’m trying to say is that heaven and hell are the same place – the same cliff, the same sea, always changing with the weather but still basically the same – but it can be heavenly or hellish depending on how prepared you are—’
‘You don’t have to answer,’ she says, cutting him off. ‘Not sure I care about God just now, to be honest. I am going to tell you how it is for me. You did ask. Nobody else does any more, they have learned not to ask, but as you insist, I will tell you.’
Sarah takes a breath. ‘Let me see. You must know about hospitals and clinics, but once you get into the actual treatment, things change. You have to go late at night, when the pubs are closing and all the happy couples are walking arm in arm down the street. It feels furtive. You have an injection, one you cannot give yourself. Profasi.’
‘Sounds like a tribe of ancient Greeks who swear a lot.’
Her thin smile says, Please shut up, I am trying to talk; you wanted me to talk and now I am talking, so please listen. That’s a lot for a thin smile to say, but he gets the message. Her voice says, ‘It ripens the eggs, whatever that means. You go home and you can’t sleep, so you watch ice hockey, or whatever is on. Your husband gets up and sits with you and asks why you didn’t want him to go wit
h you to the clinic, and he talks some more but you’re not listening and you don’t want to talk. You can’t talk. Shall I go on?’
He says yes. What else can he do?
Forty-two
Miracles never happen, thinks Sarai in the desert, four thousand years away. Or if they do, they hurt. A daughter is born, her cry makes the soul sing, but when she is lifted to the breast there is no sound and her mouth is cold. The soft wind blows on her face but there is no breath. Where is God then? Where? A son comes at last, a great blessing, an answer to prayer, but he is born to a servant girl and the longing remains. It gets worse. It used to hurt so much she doubled over in pain and then she got used to the hurt and forgot to notice that it was still there, but now the old fool has stirred it all up again.
‘Abraham, where is your wife, Sarah?’
That is not her name. She is Sarai. It’s not even the name of her husband, Abram. But he has been trying to force these different names on her lately, with some crazy idea that their fate will change. He says God told him to do it, but she knows the trouble that comes when men say such things. They are small changes, but in her language the new sounds alter the meanings in a way he seems to find inspiring. She finds it cruel. Abram becomes Abraham, Father of Many. Sarai becomes Sarah, Mother of Nations, which is not funny. It stings. She is ninety years old and has no children and knows she never will.
Sarai watches from the shadows as her wizened husband dips both his aching hands into a bowl, fingers and fists, and rubs his face and eyes with the water. She hears him mutter to the strangers and hopes there will not be trouble. In the days of her great beauty, she was sold as a slave – to the pharaoh, no less – for gold, and animals and food. The man who did that to her so many years ago is still her husband now. He is forgiven. You have to compromise if you want to live. But there is no danger of being sold again, not at her great age.
‘She’s going to have a baby, wait and see,’ says the visitor, wiping meat grease from his fingers with the end of his robe before taking his turn with the bowl. ‘I’ll be back this way next year and she will be nursing a son.’
Sarai cannot help herself then. She laughs out loud.
‘Why are you laughing, Sarah?’
It’s a good job you can’t see me, she thinks. I am exhausted. If you saw these gnarled fingers, these slack breasts, you would know. I have lost hair in some places and grown it in others I never expected. My beauty blew away like sand years ago. As for that old man who lay down the skins for you, he is losing his mind.
She calls back from the darkness, unwilling to show her face: ‘I did not laugh.’
‘Oh, you did,’ says the stranger. ‘No matter. You will see.’
Madness. Utter madness. But later, when she thinks about the voice of the visitor who called her Sarah and her mad old husband Abraham, a question forms within her like a tiny spark that might so easily blow out. ‘Do I believe this nonsense? Do I dare?’
Forty-three
‘So the happy day arrives. You can’t eat breakfast but you must. You feel strong, in your blood, like this is the day you become invincible; but afraid, like you’re made of glass. Brittle. You go to the clinic together, but in the car on the way there is nothing to say.’
Sarah goes on, but Gabe is lost in thinking about Rí and wondering if he ever really realized what it was like for her when they were trying for a child. They didn’t get far. There wasn’t time.
‘The clinic is like a bad hotel. There are flowers, and prints on the walls. It isn’t like the hospital that failed you, that was knackered and run-down and free. You are in safe hands now. Expensive hands. The anaesthetist is like an uncle, an older man who would pat your knee if that sort of thing was still allowed, and he says, “Everything will go smoothly. We do this every day.” But you do not do this every day. You are scared stiff. Do you have a cigarette?’
She’s caught him out – listening but not really listening, letting it slide over him – then he realizes she’s serious. ‘Sorry. I don’t any more.’
‘Good. I’m glad. Thank you. Right then. Sperm. You may wish to go together, the nurse says. You may not. You may wish him to get it over with on his own, as quickly as possible. Too much information?’
‘A bit.’ Helping? He doesn’t want to think about her doing that. Not to Jack.
‘You may then relax. They give you the anaesthetic. You count backwards from ten and drift away. You wake up unsure of where you are, with pains in your shoulders and you feel bloated, but this is normal, says the nurse. They’ve inflated your abdomen in order to aspirate and flush out the eggs. You’re halfway there, she says, but she’s wrong.’
Now Sarah is in full flow, transformed by the chance to say all this out loud, and Gabe is listening, properly. As hard as he can.
‘You can go home this afternoon, but you want to stay and be safe. You don’t want the cold of an empty house. You don’t want to go back to work in a couple of days’ time. You don’t want to walk or do anything at all that might agitate your womb and the contents thereof. You want to be still and sleep,’ she says, pushing fingers into her hair and pulling out the curls. Her scent reaches him across the room. Somehow, she smells of oranges. It’s getting colder. He switches on a single bar electric heater as a help to the other fire, and the smell of burning dust rises to mingle with that of paraffin.
‘You want to be able to believe that it might happen. You want to put all your eggs in that basket. That was a joke.’ She doesn’t bother to look round. ‘So. You will take the pain that burns like acid, you will accept it, for the few sweet moments when you think it might work. You’ll do nothing to endanger that possibility. You feed on it. At first.’
She stops and waits, scratching the side of her nose, checking he’s listening.
‘At first?’
‘I saw the cells. I looked into a microscope and saw five cells pulsing. It made me weak. It gave me hope. Jack was there too. Later, when they had been placed inside me, he said, “What shall we call him?”’
She pauses again and Gabe wonders if this is for emotion or to catch her breath.
What should he say? This mesmerizing woman is in his house, in his tower – in their tower – and she should be somewhere else.
‘What about Jack? How does he cope?’
‘He hits me.’ She says it simply, coldly. When he looks confused, she says it again. ‘He hits me. Every time we go through this. Beats me, if you like. I fail him. That is what he says. I am useless and I fail him.’
‘That’s not good,’ says Gabe, unsure of himself. Feeling stupid.
‘Ha! No. Very much not.’ Throwing off the blanket, she turns to sit facing him, leaning forward. ‘Thank you for asking me these questions. I’ve been silent. I realized that, on these hills, walking around, before I met you. I’ve been silenced by this man and his fists. You want to know about that? I will tell you. Jack is restless, you’ve seen it for yourself, he is quick to anger. The drumming is a warning. When that starts, watch out. He used to throw tantrums when we first met, but only ever little ones. A glass might get smashed, accidentally. It was never directed at me. I thought it would stop when he calmed down, and it did. But IVF is vicious. The frustration, the helplessness, gets worse and worse. The band around your chest gets tighter. I’m not making excuses for him, although I could make a case. I’m trying to make sense of it, you understand?’
She checks in with him, then goes on. ‘We stopped talking, really, about anything, and when we tried, there would be an argument. Everything I did was wrong, and he was just a jerk. The whole time. We were sick of each other. The love gets drowned out. So anyway, on the day of the first test, when I had built my hopes up so much and been so disappointed, I cried and cried. He held me, in the kitchen. I mean really held me. Tight. It was comforting at first, but then I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t move. I said, “What are you doing
?” I broke away and the tears came again – I had no control over that – and he hit me. I am not sure he even meant to.’ She sniffs and shrugs. ‘The back of his hand, out of irritation, more of a flick than a slap. It stung. Maybe he was trying to shut me up – you know, like in the movies. Shut the hysterical woman up by slapping her. Maybe that was it. Of course, he was horrified. Good for him. He was so, so sorry. So sorry. “It will never happen again,” he said. It did, of course. Every time, after every test. Every failure.’
So that’s why she doesn’t want to be found, thinks Gabe.
‘The first time, I did not see it coming. That seemed to give him permission somehow, he said he was taking control. For a change. As if. I don’t know. The second time, I freaked at the thought of what he was going to do and grabbed this knife from the sink top and threw it at him and missed – the handle hit the wall and it clattered into the sink – and he looked at me as if he was pleased. I was like him. I smashed a glass – the knife did – his best pint glass, but now I was down in the dirty place with him. The next time I was crying, he just hit me properly. Flat of the hand that time, like it was what I deserved, or even wanted.’
Gabe closes his eyes, and hears her tell him off.
‘I’m not a victim. I told you. No sympathy, please. It doesn’t help.’
Why does she stand it? The question is unspoken but she hears it anyway.
‘I love him, Gabe. I loved him.’ It sounds, even to her, as if she is repeating those words from memory. ‘I knew in my head that what he was doing was wrong, of course; it hurt like hell, but I was so numb, I couldn’t feel anything. Even when we went to the Long Man, he had this ridiculous idea that we would – you know – have sex on the hillside, by this fertility symbol—’
‘I thought it was graffiti. Civil war.’
‘Who knows? I said no, of course I said no, but he got angry, really angry. He pushed me down on the ground and winded me, then . . . well.’