by Linda Green
I pulled her back close to me again. The baby was grasping at my breasts through my nightshirt. I hadn’t even thought about how I would feed it. The only mums I knew used a bottle. I’d never even seen anyone breastfeeding. But suddenly I felt the need to do what she wanted. To feed my baby.
I started to lift my nightshirt. I had no idea what to do but I wanted to try. Mum immediately took the baby from me.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘You’ll get attached to it.’
‘I was attached to it, for nine months, until you cut the cord. It’s my baby.’
‘You said you didn’t want it.’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘It’s too late. All the arrangements have been made.’
‘Well, you’ll have to unmake them.’
‘I can’t. Anyway, you can’t keep it. You’re fourteen, for goodness’ sake.’
‘You could help me look after it. I’ll learn what to do.’
‘What on earth would people think, seeing you pushing a baby about in a pram?’
‘I don’t care what people think.’
‘Well, your father does. He wouldn’t stand for it.’ She took a blanket from the chair and wrapped it around the baby. She started to walk towards the door.
‘You’re not taking her now?’
‘I’ve got to. It’s for the best.’ Her voice cracked as she spoke. I saw tears welling in her eyes. I couldn’t understand how she could do this to me.
‘No, it isn’t,’ I shouted at her. ‘You can’t take her. I haven’t even washed her yet. Let me clean her. Let me have her for one night.’
I could see Mum’s body shaking. Tears were pouring down her cheeks.
‘I promised your father it would be gone by the time he came home,’ she said.
The baby started crying again, as if it knew what was happening. I tried to get out of bed, but my legs were weak and the umbilical cord was still hanging out of me.
‘What do I do with this?’ I shouted.
‘It will come out soon. You have to sort of give birth to it.’
I collapsed back in a heap on the bed, sobbing uncontrollably.
‘Give me my baby. Please don’t take my baby.’
Mum let go of a noise so primeval that at first I didn’t realise it had come from her, and then she ran, the baby hugged close to her, out of my bedroom and down the stairs.
I lay back on the bed and screamed, my fists beating the mattress, feeling worse now than when he’d done everything to me. I heard Mum pull the front door shut behind her. I would never see my baby again. For all those months I had hated it, wanted rid of it, wished it dead, yet the second I’d laid eyes on her, I’d known I would never love anything more than I loved that baby. The baby I would never see again.
I felt a clenching and cramping inside and realised I was about to give birth to the placenta. I struggled to the bathroom and sat down on the toilet, just in time. My body expelled the very last part of my baby from me. I sat there in tears, unable to stand up for fear of seeing what was there. In that instant I knew that, if my baby was gone, the only way I could survive this was to flush away every last trace of her. I reached up and pulled the chain. The water cascaded down beneath me. I waited until the cistern started refilling before I eased myself up to look in the toilet bowl. She was gone. It was like Mum said: it was as if she had never existed. And I knew she would never be spoken of again.
21
Mum didn’t want to go home. She didn’t want to be on her own. We went to a little café and sat at a table in a quiet corner, both of us seemingly lost in our own thoughts.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said eventually. ‘For not telling you, I mean. I’d always hoped and prayed that one day I would see my baby again. And when you told me about Maisie finding that bone, I was so scared. So scared that it belonged to my baby.’
‘And that’s why you didn’t want me to go to the police?’
‘I didn’t think I could live without hope. When I heard that baby were Mum’s, that both of them were Mum’s, I were so relieved, although I know that must sound awful. It meant I still had hope, you see. I thought that was the end of it. I was trying to gather the strength to get in touch with you to explain. I missed the girls so much.’
She started to cry again. I fished in my bag, found a clean tissue and handed it to her, staring straight ahead as she blew her nose.
‘And then when they found the other bones, in his garden, well, I haven’t really slept since.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have realised.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I hid it so deep that no one could have guessed.’
‘Dad didn’t know?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you tell a fella you’ve just met, is it? And there were never a right time to tell him, even after we got married. He offered to be there for your birth but I wouldn’t let him because I didn’t want him to find out you weren’t my first baby. And after I gave birth to you, I cried and cried for days. The midwives thought I had post-natal depression. They didn’t understand that I were crying because it had brought it all back. They thought I were tired because you were keeping me awake at night. That wasn’t it, though. I was tired because I wouldn’t allow myself to shut my eyes for one second in case someone took you away too.’
I reached for her hand. ‘Thank you for telling me now,’ I said. ‘We’re going to get through this together.’
‘Yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘No more secrets.’ I gave a little smile and looked down at the floor.
When she’d finished her tea, Mum popped to the Ladies to redo her make-up. I got my phone out. There was a message from DI Freeman. John had been arrested. He was in custody. I hoped he was sweating, hoped he was going to suffer in the way Mum had for all these years. And, most of all, I hoped he would provide some answers. For her and for everyone.
‘He’s in custody,’ I said, when she finally emerged from the toilets, her glasses cleaned and a slick of lipstick freshly applied. ‘How about coming back to ours to have tea with the girls?’
She smiled. The first smile I’d seen her give that day. ‘I’d like that,’ she said. ‘I’d like that very much.’
*
‘Grandma!’ shouted Maisie, running to greet her with a hug as soon as we walked in. ‘I’m getting a puppy and my own bedroom when we move to Great-grandma’s house.’
‘Are you now,’ said Mum, glancing at me. ‘Aren’t you lucky?’
Maisie took her by the hand and led her into the living room. Ruby got up and went over to give her a hug. Mum hung on to her for an awfully long time. When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes and in Ruby’s too.
‘Right then,’ I said. ‘I believe Grandma’s favourite is macaroni cheese. Why don’t you all play a game together while I make tea?’ Maisie gave a little cheer. I left them to it and went into the kitchen, where I stood silently, staring out of the window.
‘Are you OK?’ asked James, following me in and putting his hands on my shoulders.
‘Yeah,’ I replied. Even though I wasn’t.
*
We lay in bed, James’s arm draped over me. The streetlight outside was shining through the curtains. James had suggested getting blackout blinds a few times but I liked it as it was. I hadn’t been able to tell him why, of course. I simply said I found it comforting.
I thought about what Mum had said earlier. How she’d lain awake in hospital after she’d had me, too scared to close her eyes in case someone took her baby. I understood that. Understood it more than she would ever know. My terror had never subsided. Not at night when I lay there with my eyes open, not daring to close them for fear of what I might find when I woke. I had resigned myself long ago to the fact that it would alway
s be like that. Some things you simply never got over. But that night all I could think about was what Mum had said. How she had never forgiven herself for something that was so clearly not her fault. The sea of shame had washed over her, leaving its debris on the shore. She had very nearly gone under. It had certainly dragged her down for most of her life, probably screwed up her marriage, although Dad had made a pretty good job of that from his end too. The years of suffering she had endured to get to today. The first time in her life when someone had believed her, had looked under the blanket of shame and seen she was drowning. That she had been drowning all those years but no one had noticed.
I hadn’t realised I’d been crying until James brushed a tear from my shoulder.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘It’s OK. It’s over now.’
‘It’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s never going to be over, that’s the trouble.’
‘The worst is over. We can get through the rest together. Everyone’s going to be fine.’
The tears came faster. James pulled me into him. It hurt sometimes, how much he wanted to make things better for me. It was cruel to let him think the hurt inside me could be healed. Because he would go on trying to do so for the rest of his life, oblivious to the fact that it was like trying to mount a clean-up operation on a beach after an oil-slick. He needed to be told – needed to understand that sometimes the nasty stuff got so far into you that no one could get it out.
‘I was asleep,’ I blurted out.
‘What – just now?’
‘No. Back then. When it happened.’
‘When what happened?’
‘I woke up, you see. It was dark, pitch black. There wasn’t even a window in the room. They seemed to think they could get away with that for student accommodation.’
James was listening now. I could hear him listening. Straining to make sure he didn’t miss anything.
‘My head was swimming. It was hardly surprising, given how much I’d had to drink that night. At first I thought I was actually swimming and the movement was me being buffeted by the waves. It took a few moments before I realised the movement was coming from inside me. And the weight on me wasn’t the weight of the water at all.
‘It was then I smelt him. Smelt him and felt him all at the same time. It was like an attack on the senses. I thought for a second I was going to throw up all over him. He didn’t say anything. That was the one blessing. I never heard his voice, so I can’t be haunted by that, as well. But maybe that was also why it didn’t seem real. Maybe if he’d said something, it would have provoked a reaction. Woken me from my stupor. Only he didn’t, so I thought it must be OK. Thought I must have wanted it. That we’d already done our introductions and I’d somehow nodded off in the middle of it.’
I paused. James was stroking my arm. He was here and I was safe now. Safe to go on.
‘It wasn’t like that, though. Maybe I’d talked to him at the party – I’d talked to a lot of people. But there were a lot of people I hadn’t spoken to either. If he kept quiet, I wouldn’t know either way, would I? And if I couldn’t hear him and couldn’t see him, there was no way I could identify him, was there?’
I felt one of James’s own tears fall on to my shoulder. Soothing, healing, like antiseptic. Except this was a wound buried too far deep inside me to be able to get to.
‘I didn’t move,’ I went on. ‘I didn’t hit or kick or bite. None of those things. And I didn’t say a word either. Whatever had rendered my limbs useless also rendered me speechless. Because at some point I knew that, however drunk I was, I had not wanted it. Had not invited him into the room or into me. I was being violated and still I said nothing. Did nothing. It was as if I somehow thought that if I made no connection with him at all, didn’t acknowledge his existence, he might not be real but just a figment of my imagination. I didn’t want to make him real, so I told myself it wasn’t happening. Even when it hurt and when he clawed at me and when he spat in my face before he left. I told myself it hadn’t happened. That I’d imagined the whole thing. That something like that cannot happen to you one night when you go to a party with your mates.’
James was wiping the tears from my cheeks but no sooner had he done so than some fresh ones fell. The dam wall had been closed a long time: the pressure inside was immense.
‘And at some point afterwards, I must have fallen back to sleep,’ I went on. ‘You wouldn’t do that, would you? Not if a complete stranger had just violated you in that way. But I did. Because I woke up a second time and he wasn’t there. And I thought at first I must have dreamt it but then I felt the burning pain down below and I reached between my legs and found all the evidence I needed.
‘Do you know what I did with it, though? I got up, went to the toilet and wiped it away. I crept out of the house while everyone else was still asleep, and when I got back to my digs, I got into the shower and washed every last trace of it away. Well, I thought I did. It was only a few weeks later when my period didn’t come that I discovered I hadn’t managed to get to it all.
‘And that was when I made up the story. The one about me shagging some guy at a party when I was pissed. And when you tell a story so many times, you start to believe it. And because it was an easier story to believe than the truth, I let it become my truth. Everyone else seemed to accept it, so why shouldn’t I?
‘I took all the crap that was thrown at me, heard all the comments about me being a slag, and when I had to quit the course because of the pregnancy, I got packed off home to a mother who bought it, who believed that was what her daughter had become. And I’ve spent my life struggling with the shame of what people thought of me and the shame of knowing what really happened. Until today, when I sat in a police interview room and heard my mother tell the very same story of blaming herself and letting it eat away at her for years, only she was fucking fourteen at the time. And all I know is that I cannot go on like this. Living a lie and hurting the people I love. I must not let it destroy me.’
I beat my fists against the mattress as the final part of the dam wall came away. James held me tightly, but not so tight that the tears couldn’t find a way out. He stroked my hair, kissed my eyelids softly, and kept saying the same thing to me, over and over again. The same three words I had needed to hear for so long: ‘I believe you.’
I don’t know how long we lay there like that, just clinging to each other, as if we were on an upturned life raft being buffeted by the sea. But at some point, much later, when we had both stopped crying, James said something. The one thing I had not expected.
‘I think you should tell Ruby.’
‘No,’ I said straight away.
‘I understand why you haven’t and why you don’t want to now,’ he said, ‘but she needs you to be honest with her. I think that’s what she wants more than anything else in the world.’
‘What she wants more than anything else in the world is to have a father whose name she knows. A name that’s written on her birth certificate. And that’s the one thing I can’t give her.’
‘So give her this. Give her the truth. Because if you don’t, she’ll go on being angry with you, thinking you brought this on yourself, that you did this to her.’
‘I did do it to her. I got drunk, didn’t I? So drunk that I was practically comatose when a man started having sex with me.’
James turned my head to face his. ‘He raped you, Nic. You have to call it what it was. You have to acknowledge it to yourself and to Ruby.’
‘She’s still too young. It’s too much to ask of her to cope with that.’
‘I don’t think it is, not the way she reacted yesterday. She’s wise beyond her years. She’s tough too.’
‘I want to,’ I said. ‘I had to sit there today and listen to Mum go into detail about what John did to her and how she kept it a secret all these years, and the truth is, I’m the one who persuaded her to tell the truth, who came out with
all the it’s-better-to-get-it-out-in-the-open stuff, and I’m such a hypocrite because I’ve been doing exactly the same thing. Only I’ve been doing it to protect Ruby. Because I cannot begin to imagine how horrible it would be to know that was how you came into the world.’
‘I get that,’ said James. ‘Believe me, I want to protect her from it too. But I can also see how generations of your family have suffered because of the shame heaped on them and I don’t want that to happen to Ruby. And if you keep it a secret, it becomes something shameful, something to hide from others. But if you call it out, speak it out loud, it’s not a dirty secret any more. You’d be showing her that it was nothing to be ashamed of.’
I wondered how the man who always said he was no good with words had pulled that one out of nowhere. He was right, I knew. But that didn’t make it any easier.
‘I’m scared,’ I said. ‘Scared I’m going to make her hate me even more than she does already.’
‘She doesn’t hate you,’ James said. ‘She hates not knowing the truth.’
‘But it’s such a massive thing to put on her. It could screw her up for life.’
‘I know. But so could the shame of having it kept a secret.’
*
I lay awake for a long time afterwards. James eventually dropped off, although even when he did so, his arm was still over me, protecting me. All I could do was lie there and try to work out what I would say to Ruby. There was no easy way to tell some stories. Especially when they’d been locked inside you for so long. They had a habit of rushing out in a torrent, mangling words and sentences, making no sense at all. Most of all, I wondered if Ruby would ever forgive me. I doubted it. But it was a price I had to pay to break the chain.
*
I waited until James took Maisie swimming the following morning. He’d drop her off at Emily’s straight afterwards, ready for the firework party and sleepover. It would give Ruby space on her own to deal with it, and I’d have time to try to limit the fallout before Maisie returned.
I knocked on her bedroom door and went in when she answered. She was reading The Secret Garden. We’d first read it together years ago. It threw me, though, because she was mostly reading Young Adult books now. It reminded me that she was still a child, or at least in that awkward in-between phase. Maybe she wasn’t ready to hear this. Maybe I was making a terrible mistake.