Sail Upon the Land

by Josa Young

  ‘No.’

  ‘When are you going home? This close to the birth beds are limited, and you may not have a choice. Luckily there are plenty of maternity units in London.’

  ‘I’m not going back to London just yet. After the pregnancy ends, maybe.’

  The girl looked intently at Damson as she said this, and the doctor detected something in her look that was out of place. It was questioning, defiant.

  ‘Booking you in somewhere is the most important thing right now. The pregnancy and you both look healthy, and your age is in your favour. It seems a bit pointless to get you scanned now, but we can if you like.’

  ‘I don’t think any of that is necessary.’

  ‘As you know, we can detect many conditions in the foetus early, which gives the parents time to prepare or make decisions. There are other conditions that affect pregnant women exclusively that can be quite dangerous, but have no symptoms until it’s too late.’

  ‘I know. Pre-eclampsia. More common if the couple haven’t been having sex very long, or in first pregnancies. And diabetes, but I’m so skinny I figured I could ignore that one.’

  Damson sat and let all this wash over her.

  ‘You said my blood pressure is fine. And I’ve been taking it myself, just in case, as I don’t want to die of this. As I only had unprotected sex once and I read about that new partner risk in the New Scientist, I bought a blood pressure monitor at the chemist. I figured the odds were pretty low for any other problems. If the baby’s disabled, well so be it. I won’t be keeping it anyway.’

  Damson absorbed this information. ‘Are you in touch with social services about adoption?’ she enquired gently.

  Really, the consultation was going on far too long.

  ‘Not yet.’

  So, late pregnancy, no antenatal care, medical student giving up baby for adoption, social services not aware (at least she herself had done things properly). Had answered no to drug and drink questions. But also possibly homeless while wearing cashmere. Damson examined these anomalies, unable to make sense of them.

  Damson was quite used to the peculiarities of pregnant girls. It was just that the more problematic ones were never Indian, and seldom educated. And often in their mid-teens, not grown women in their twenties. Damson, particularly when she was tired and had PMT, had to suppress a desire to point out that some of the problems she was presented with could have been avoided with the application of common sense. Her grandfather Dr Reeves had been famous for scolding his patients. They’d found it comforting. If he didn’t scold them, they knew something was seriously wrong.

  ‘Where do you think you’ll be living until the baby is born?’

  ‘I don’t know. It all depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  Then the girl said: ‘Well, on you actually.’

  ‘On me? Why?’ Mental health issues after all. Here it comes. Not the first time a patient fixated on their GP, but unusual during a first consultation.

  ‘You are Damson Hayes, aren’t you?’ The girl’s voice had dropped to a whisper.

  ‘Yes?’ Damson was bewildered by the question. The unease in the room uncurled itself from the corner and came cringing towards her, tail clamped between its meagre buttocks, tip wagging, ears close to its head. Damson’s skin crawled.

  ‘I lied about my date of birth,’ the girl was saying, hurriedly, as if trying to get the words out of her mouth fast before she changed her mind.

  ‘Why?’ Damson continued to stare straight ahead at her screen, blinking.

  ‘Because I wanted to talk to you first. To see what you were like.’

  ‘Why?’ Damson repeated. The situation was sliding from her control but she tried to summon all her professionalism to take what was coming.

  ‘Because my birthday is the twenty-fifth of June?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Damson.

  Her hands reached for the keyboard, to correct the date in the form.

  ‘Also, I was originally called Mellita.’

  ‘You said your name was Leeta,’ she heard herself say.

  ‘I am called Leeta by my parents. I think Mellita is what you called me.’

  Damson buzzed through to reception with a trembling hand.

  ‘Tina? I’ll need a double appointment for this patient. Can you push my others forward. Oh, and apologise for the delay? Thanks.’ She didn’t wait for Tina to acknowledge.

  She swung her office chair round and looked at the girl.

  ‘Mellita?’ she repeated.

  The girl looked back at her. Damson smiled to see what would happen. Her heart pounded in her chest. She realised the girl was still talking:

  ‘I came to find you. I’m sorry I didn’t warn you. I need your help. I didn’t realise you were a GP actually, until I googled you. I didn’t know anything else about you before, I didn’t even know you existed. I only recently found out I was adopted.’

  Damson was finding it hard to breathe, and her mind flashed back to the only practical things she had been able to do for her child in the lonely years since she had given her away. ‘I registered with various things such as NORCAP contact register. And then I waited and registered with the Adoption Contact Register to be ready in case my child wanted to get in touch when she turned eighteen. But I heard nothing then.’ She realised she sounded as confused as she felt.

  ‘I didn’t know when I was eighteen,’ Leeta said. ‘It was only in January this year. I was listening outside the door when my parents were talking to my Dadima – my father’s mother – about finding a good husband for me. To tell you the truth, I liked the idea. I have cousins in the USA who’ve had a great time, they’ve got excellent bridegrooms. I had no idea how to go about finding a husband for myself and my parents are fairly traditional, although they had a love marriage.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Do you want to hear all this? I realise this is a very odd situation.’

  ‘Tell me. But I have to warn you that we don’t have more than a few minutes.’

  ‘I overheard Dadima, who’s even more traditional and bossy and grumpy, saying something about how difficult it was going to be to find a good groom, and whether anyone would want me as I wasn’t their child and, “I told you no good would come of it when you went against me and adopted her”, and no one knew who I was. And hoping my parents had an extra big dowry organised to make up for it all.’

  The last time Damson had seen Mellita – if this woman was her Mellita – she had kissed a tiny version of that face, placed her gently in a basket and walked out of the social services contact centre into an empty future.

  Damson’s arms jerked forwards. Reaching for that long-ago baby, her small girl with eyes of purple-grey who’d stared at her with primeval calm. Whose nose was dappled with tiny yellow dots. Whose skin didn’t fit very well. Wrinkly knees, non-existent bottom, tiny neck like a ridiculous stalk on the top of which bobbed a flower of infinite beauty.

  The only thing oddly that hadn’t altered much was the colour of her eyes. They had lightened but not changed colour. Babies’ eyes nearly always change colour. Leeta’s grey eyes still had the slightly purple look that a new-born baby’s eyes have. And she didn’t smile. New-born babies don’t smile either.

  Damson glanced down at her hands which she found were grasping the girl’s upper arms. Leeta didn’t move at all. She just looked into Damson’s face, closer now. The desire to pull Leeta into her arms and kiss her pale cheeks was so strong that she had to let her go and turn back to the computer. Her face caught fire. With shaking fingers she typed her own address into the online form.

  ‘Dr Hayes?’

  ‘You’d better call me Damson.’

  ‘Damson? What shall I do now, do you think?’ She sounded young and uncertain for the first time.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry but I have to work the rest of today. One of the other doctors is off sick and I have a double caseload.’

  Damson didn’t want to leave Leeta, whoever she was, wander
ing around all afternoon in Fenning in her condition. She made up her mind. There was nothing valuable at the cottage and little harm she could do even in the most troubling interpretation.

  ‘I’ll give you my key and you can go to my home and rest. You can stay tonight and we can talk this evening about how best to help you.’

  ‘OK. Thank you.’

  Damson found her door key with the silver Tiffany key ring (a present from Noonie) in her bag and gave it to Leeta, hurriedly drawing a little map on a piece of paper to show her the way to Swine Cottage.

  ‘There’s a spare room at the top of the stairs on the left. You’ll have to make up the bed, the linen cupboard is on the landing. This is my mobile number and you can call at any time. Do help yourself to food and tea and so on. Make yourself at home. And, Leeta?’

  The girl turned towards her, and Damson looked at that face again, trying to find her baby there. ‘You do sincerely believe that you are Mellita?’

  ‘Oh yes, I applied to see my birth and adoption certificates. Your name was there, and mine, Mellita. But no father’s name?’

  Damson left the question of Mellita’s father.

  ‘Do you have them with you?’ was all she said.

  ‘No, but I can get them for you. I understand, Damson, this must have been a shock. I am sorry. I am me though, I promise.’

  Damson watched her as she left the room, then pushed the buzzer on her desk for the next patient, her heart thumping in her chest as hope mixed with doubt.

  Twenty-nine

  Leeta

  October 2008

  Leeta let herself into Damson’s cottage, putting her small bag down on the stone floor and looking around at the plain, pleasing room. She was eager to pick up clues about herself from her birth mother’s tastes and habits. The bare uneven walls were whitewashed and Afghan rugs were scattered about. There was a computer on a table in the corner. It wasn’t a feminine room, but then her birth mother was clearly not a feminine woman. Leeta was incredulous when she compared Damson, with her cropped mousy hair and baggy sexless clothes, with her mother Mira’s long plait, soft curves and gorgeous saris.

  Thirsty, she found the kitchen through an arch to one side of the inglenook, and made herself a cup of sweet tea. Taking a biscuit she went back to settle herself ponderously into a deep red linen-covered armchair. She slipped off her boots to curl her legs up beside her, and found that the stone flags were warm underfoot. Damson had a comfortable home at any rate. She sighed and drifted, tired after all the courage it had taken to meet Damson. Hoping this might be a refuge at last, even if it did come at a heavy emotional price, at least until the end of the pregnancy.

  She had been so desperately frightened that her parents would reject her if they found out about the baby. It had been such a struggle being away from them, staying in a scruffy bedsit in Bournemouth, lying about working in a medical mission in Uganda ‘to gain a bit more experience’. Luckily a Ugandan Indian friend was there doing exactly that, and she used details from Parvati’s blog to lend colour to her emails to her parents. Mira’s responses expressed so much concern for her safety and their careful, irrelevant medical advice made her feel guilty and sad.

  She remembered the year before sitting in a booth at the back of an Ealing café comforting Padme Patel, both of them in the West London girls’ uniform of skinny jeans, Ugg boots and huge cashmere jumpers. Padme’s mother had found her pink bubble packs of the Pill in her bathroom and the row had been horrendous and terrifying.

  ‘I suppose they expected me to go through life in a restrained way, but not my bloody brothers,’ her friend had whimpered.

  ‘How did she find them? Weren’t you careful?’

  ‘I was. They were in my sponge bag. She must have gone in there for something. Or maybe she suspected. Anyway, I got home yesterday and they were both in the sitting room. Neither of them is usually home that early. I knew something was wrong immediately as they looked so grim.’

  Leeta reached a hand across the table and squeezed her friend’s forearm.

  ‘I had to see you, Leeta, I knew you’d understand.’

  At that time, Leeta’s parents correctly had no reason to suspect she was anything but a virgin, so there had been none of those scenes in the Delapi household.

  ‘Papa shouted at me. He’s never shouted at me before. He told me I was bringing shame on the family and called me dumb for being stupid enough to have sex with some randy English boy. He threatened to throw me out of the house and stop my allowance.’

  ‘Oh, poor you, was it as bad as that?’

  ‘Worse. He’s had email approaches about marriage from “nice” boys’ parents. He told me he was so ashamed he’d deleted them all because I was “soiled goods”. They’re going to throw me out. I know they are. Oh, what am I going to do?’

  ‘What do you want to do? What did you say?’

  ‘I was so scared. But I managed to stay calm and just told them that the Pill had been prescribed for PMT as it was disrupting my ability to work hard at my studies every month. I reminded my mother about how moody I always am just before my periods. I said I would have hidden them much more carefully if they’d been for anything else. They seemed to calm down a bit after that. But it’s been awful in the house.’

  Leeta remembered the lovely Patel home on Mountbar Hill, a palace of polished floors and professional interior decor, with a rambling garden. Padme had a whole floor to herself, with her own kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and sitting room now her brothers had set up homes of their own.

  ‘I don’t want to have to move out and get any old job now. Just when I’m getting qualified.’

  Padme had finished her first dentistry degree, and was now studying at King’s for an MSc while working in her father’s thriving West End cosmetic practice. That little pink packet of pills might just scupper such a safe, successful future for her in the bosom of the family home and business.

  ‘Have you told Jake?’

  ‘No, and I never want to see him or talk to him again. I can’t risk my future for that silly disgusting nonsense, can I? How stupid could I be?’

  Jake was the elder brother of their mutual schoolfriend Annabel. He was studying for a MA on the metaphysical poets at Goldsmiths and had wooed Padme for years, sighing that ‘Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side/Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide/Of Humber would complain.’

  He had floppy hair and Leeta had always thought he was pretentious and annoying and that his great love for Padme was a pose. A year ago Padme had told a worried Leeta that she was so in love with him she’d risk anything. She was even contemplating running away from home to be with him. She’d only gone on the Pill a couple of months before, giving in as he had seemed so desperate. Leeta already had the impression that love in a bedsit with a mouldy shared student shower had been a bit of a wake-up call.

  Now the cold water of her family’s disapproval seemed to have sluiced away all that idealistic romantic nonsense, leaving icy facts in its place. If Padme wanted a nice, comfortable, safe life, she needed to toe the family’s party line. And that meant ‘virginity’, a good, probably arranged, marriage and a successful and very lucrative career as a cosmetic dentist. There could be no other options – certainly not sexual ones – and it was not down to Padme to plan her own future.

  Leeta was at a loss. Then, before she knew she was adopted and half-English, she had had no intention of spoiling her future for the sake of sex with some scruffy English boy. Now of course she wanted to kick herself for her smugness in thinking Padme had been a fool.

  ‘Do you think they believed you?’ Leeta had asked.

  ‘I think they would like to. I think they do love me and sweeping the whole thing under the carpet would be the best possible outcome. Can you go and see Jake and explain for me?’

  ‘Are you mad? Of course not. Look, let’s call Annabel and tell her what’s going on. She can tell Jake,’ Leeta suggested.

  Padme shuddered. She said she never w
anted to see Annabel again either. She didn’t want to be reminded of her dangerous folly. She wailed that she knew she was being horrible but Jake and all his silly poetry could go to hell.

  ‘He’ll probably love moping around and write a poem about his broken heart or something.’

  Leeta saw her friend was defaulting to traditional Indian daughter mode, and judging Jake’s emotions by her own, which had turned out to be puddle shallow. She leaned towards Leeta and whispered in her ear: ‘Sex is dull and disgusting. He asked me to do things that were sick. I tried to like it, but it wasn’t worth giving my life up for – so embarrassing. Don’t understand all the fuss. I didn’t like looking at him naked either. It looks silly, all red and flabby. And his room was so cold and messy.’ She’d giggled, close to tears. Leeta had given her a hug.

  Both Padme’s mother and her father had arrived as children with their parents from Uganda in 1972 when Idi Amin had done what was not called ethnic cleansing in those days, but amounted to the same thing. The families had been housed in an ex-RAF barracks while they recovered from the shock of having their smart, sophisticated lives in Africa stolen. Like other Ugandan Indian families, the parents had settled down and rapidly set up shops and small businesses, working hard to raise their own children back to where they had been before their expulsion. Padme’s mother Manisha was an accountant, and her father studied dentistry. Manisha now worked as business manager for the family’s thriving Busy Smiles Dental Clinic in New Cavendish Street.

  Both Padme and Leeta had been shocked when they met girls brought up in Chennai or Mumbai where, among the well-off, traditional values were being eroded left, right and centre. Hedonistic drinking and partying sounded wilder than in London. Ugandan Indians on the other hand, living in the UK or America, were known to be particularly keen to hang on to respectable Fifties Gujarati values.

  Both Padme’s parents were protecting something infinitely precious, something that had been hard won against bitter odds. There was no safety net that allowed for sloppy Western values to spoil what their parents had created for them out of their smashed lives, and what they had made for themselves. Leeta’s parents had been born in India, were both doctors and were not so insular, but she knew they still valued the traditions, and condoning a pregnancy outside marriage would have been unthinkable.