by Tammy Cohen
‘She’d been outside,’ I say, ‘and one of the guys from the downstairs flat had let her in. She said she was a friend of Danny’s. She’d come to surprise him.’
It was a Friday evening. We were getting ready to go out. I had a new top. I can still remember the joy of getting it out of the bag. The rustle of tissue paper. The whisper of oyster-coloured silk. I had on my favourite black jeans and was planning to finish off the outfit with a pair of black suede wedge boots, but I hadn’t quite got there yet when the knock on the door came. So I went to open it in my bare feet, the silver varnish on my toe nails chipped and peeling. Afterwards, that stuck in my mind, that she hadn’t given me a chance to put on my shoes.
When I opened the door I was expecting Marco or Phil from downstairs.
I saw black curls under a white bobble hat. Leggings. Biker boots. A leather jacket with the zip undone to accommodate her stomach.
Pregnant.
I sit back in my chair. ‘I don’t want to talk any more.’
15
Corinne
Six thirty in the evening in London, which meant it was just after lunchtime in New York when Corinne Skyped her, but already Megan looked tired. That’s the first thing Corinne noticed. As her younger daughter talked in that jerky way she had, lurching from one topic to another without the connecting bits in between so you felt like a passenger on a particularly bumpy plane journey, Corinne studied her face on the computer screen. Megan had always been gaunt, but now dark shadows striped her cheeks and the dome of her pale forehead was like the shell of an egg that could shatter in an instant.
Corinne wished she could step through the screen into her daughter’s tiny Brooklyn living room with its wooden floor piled high with books and video games and coats and shoes, as if she’d just moved in, although she’d been living there at least six months. She’d sit down next to her on the shabby couch and put her arms around her bony shoulders and tell her to be calm.
Breathe, she’d say. Don’t take everything so much to heart.
‘I don’t understand why she’s still in there,’ Megan was saying. And because the connection wasn’t brilliant, and because Megan was a bit like that anyway, her words were erratic and staccato, shooting out of her mouth as though someone were typing them on an old-fashioned typewriter.
‘She wants to get better, darling. She wants to be as well as she can be before she goes home to Danny.’
Megan put a hand to her mouth and started tugging at the skin around her thumb with her teeth. Corinne bit back the urge to tell her to stop. Megan mumbled something but, because her thumb was still in her mouth, Corinne couldn’t understand it.
‘I said, I don’t know why she’s even going back to him. He’s no good for her.’
‘Megan!’
Corinne’s voice was heavy with warning. When Hannah and Megan had fallen out about Hannah’s relationship with Danny just before Megs left for New York, the rift had cast a long shadow over Corinne’s life. She’d always thought they were such a strong little unit, and the distance between her daughters, still ongoing despite everything, caused her acute emotional distress.
On the screen Megan was fiddling with her hair, twiddling it round and round her finger, as she used to as a child, and Corinne began to feel a chill trickling like icy water down her back.
‘You know something, don’t you?’ Corinne said.
‘What? I don’t know anything. What are you talking about?’
‘You know something about Hannah and Danny and you haven’t told me.’
Megan’s eyes flicked up to the side and then down again, looking anywhere but at her mother’s face.
‘Wait there.’ Something sewed itself tightly across Corinne’s chest as she crossed the room to riffle through her bag. Got it. ‘Who’s this?’
She held the photograph up to the computer camera so it blocked her screen. BITCH, said the angry red letters on the back, and even though Corinne knew Hannah had written them, it still felt as if the woman in the photograph were talking directly to her.
‘Well?’
One thing about Megan. She was incapable of lying.
‘I promised her I wouldn’t tell you.’
‘Tell me what, Megs? This is something to do with Danny, isn’t it? Was he having an affair with this woman?’
Megan glanced up. Glanced down again. Nodded.
Though it was only confirmation of what she’d already suspected, the revelation left Corinne winded and breathless.
‘Don’t take it personally, Mum.’ Megan guessed what was going through her mother’s head. ‘She didn’t want you to judge Danny, that’s all. She wanted you to carry on liking him. That’s why she got the hump so badly with me. Because I couldn’t go on pretending Danny was some kind of perfect man.’
‘But it must have been so devastating. She loves him so much. When did it happen?’
Shrug. ‘Last year, I guess.’ Megan was still not looking at her.
‘There’s something else, isn’t there? What aren’t you saying, Megan?’
The tugging on her thumb became more frantic, drawing a small bulb of blood. Corinne tried to focus on something else. The window behind Megan through which she could see a grey smudge of daylight, reminding her of the five hours’ distance between them. Her own curtains were already drawn against the cheerless London night. There was a cold cramp in her stomach caused by the things she didn’t know. The things she hadn’t been told. But she was certain there was more to come, and she needed to hear it.
‘She was pregnant, Mum.’
For a moment, shock made Corinne stupid, and she said, ‘Hannah? Well, I know—’ and Megan snorted, looked annoyed.
‘She was pregnant. Her. Steffie Garitson.’
Corinne’s stomach spasmed. The fact that this woman had a name, and that Megan knew it, seemed to her obscene.
‘Why didn’t I know?’ she wailed. ‘I could have helped.’
‘Oh yeah, and how could you have done that? Could you maybe have made the foetal cells join back up again? Sent the sperm back from whence it came?’
‘You don’t need to be facetious, Megan.’
‘Sorry.’
It all made sense now. All of it. All those unexplained incidents that had kept her awake night after night, wondering. All those whys. The time Hannah had thrown Danny out. The bust-up with Megan. There was an anger building inside her stronger than anything she’d felt in a long time, and Corinne realized how much she’d been holding her feelings in check since the thing that had happened to Hannah, because she didn’t dare let them go. She was afraid of how deep her feelings went.
Danny. How she’d tried to support him since Hannah had been ill. How sorry she’d felt for what Hannah had done. How she’d apologized over and over. Justified her daughter to him. And all the time …
And now she remembered something else.
‘I was just there,’ she spluttered. ‘A few days ago. Clearing out Emily’s room. So he didn’t have to do it himself.’
Now it was Megan’s turn to look angry.
‘What the fuck, Mum? How’s Hannah ever going to get well if you do that?’
‘Do what?’
‘You know perfectly well what! Listen to yourself, would you? Emily’s room?’
Corinne closed her eyes, felt the world lurch horribly around her, as her own words repeated in her ears.
16
Hannah
‘I understand this is painful for you, Hannah. But you’re doing so well. I’d like you to carry on, if you can.’
When Dr Chakraborty raises his hand in a gesture of encouragement, his jacket sleeve rides up, revealing a silver watch setting off a smooth, brown wrist. I concentrate on the watch to take my mind off the things he is making me remember.
Emily calls to me from a far-off room. I try to fix the sound in my mind but it keeps fading in and out of range.
‘Yes, you’re doing brilliantly, Hannah,’ says Odelle, once again flicking a
glance to the camera.
The movement incenses me.
‘Can you get them to turn that fucking thing off!’ I snap.
Dr Chakraborty raises his eyes to the back of the room. ‘If you gentlemen wouldn’t mind?’
‘No problemo,’ says Justin.
Drew puts down the camera and stares until Justin says sharply, ‘Come on, mate. Let’s go!’
Once the door closes behind them, there is nowhere else for me to aim my anxiety but at myself. I hear it in my ear, like the high-pitched whine of a mosquito.
‘So you were saying, Hannah?’ Dr Chakraborty’s calm, slow voice.
I try to tune him out so I can find Emily again, but she’s not there.
‘This woman – Danny’s “girlfriend”—’ Dr Chakraborty makes quote marks in the air with his fingers, but still the word hangs there. ‘She turns up at your door. Pregnant. That must have been a terrible shock.’
Not just for me either. Danny’s face when he saw her. The colour draining, like it was being bleached out by the sun. I was hyperventilating. I thought I would be sick. My hands on my knees.
‘I didn’t know,’ he kept saying. ‘I didn’t know she was coming.’
And there she was, standing in my living room with her cute white hat and her curls and her mouth, saying sorry, but her eyes were dancing on my grave. And her stomach. Not huge. But big enough.
‘It was the way she stroked it with her hand,’ I say. ‘Like she’d made it herself in a pottery class.’
The new girl – whose name I now remember is Katy – nods vigorously, as if to say she quite understands. I catch Stella’s eye and she smiles. The optimum outcome from this story would be … for it never to have happened.
‘How did you feel, Hannah? When you realized who she was, and her condition?’
By ‘condition’ Dr Chakraborty means ‘pregnancy’.
I think I might love him.
‘I felt … numb.’
But that’s not exactly true. I felt all the emotions so strongly they cancelled each other out, just as white isn’t an absence of colour but all the colours blending together, giving the illusion of no colour at all.
‘And after she’d told you that the affair had never stopped? How did you feel about her then?’
‘She wasn’t exactly high on my NBF list.’
I feel bad after I’ve said that, seeing Dr Chakraborty’s sad, puzzled face.
‘“NBF” means “New Best Friend”,’ Odelle translates for him.
‘I hated her, obviously,’ I say inadequately. ‘There was something scary about her.’
‘That’s you superimposing your own fears on to her,’ says Judith, who is on her fifth stay here and sees herself as something of an expert. ‘She represented a threat to you, so you perceived her as threatening.’
It’s a good theory. But it’s not the truth. Despite the cute hat and the bouncing curls, I was sure there was a darkness under the surface of Steffie.
‘Did you talk to her? Try to find out more details?’
‘I didn’t want details. I just wanted her out of my flat.’
Sitting on the sofa with my head bent and my hands over my ears like a child – if I can’t see or hear you, you aren’t really there. ‘Get her out, get her out, get her out, get her out.’ Repeat, repeat, repeat.
‘And afterwards?’
‘I kicked him out. And fell apart.’
Literally. Bits of me fell off. My hair came out. My skin turned dry and flaky. I left a trail of dust wherever I went. I made excuses to the office, to Mum. I drowned in shame. The woman who wasn’t enough for her husband. The woman who couldn’t make a baby.
Danny came over to the flat and wept when he saw me. He tried to explain. His life was with me but, paradoxically, she was the one who’d made him feel alive. His beating heart. I raged at him. Hated him. Begged him. And then fucked him. Wanting to reclaim every inch of him.
I had become the woman I’d always sworn I’d never be. The woman I’d always despised. Bending herself this way and that to fit the shape of a man, dissolving herself in him until there’s nothing left, just a film of powder to show she ever was.
‘Can you tell us about the pregnancy now, Hannah?’ says Dr Chakraborty gently. ‘Your pregnancy, I mean.’
I feel a terrible pain when he says that. Why does he have to say it? Why couldn’t he have stuck with ‘condition’? I close my eyes, straining to hear Emily, but she’s not there. In her place is just a dark, shape-shifting grief. I force myself to remember how I began to feel poleaxed with tiredness, though at night sleep refused to come. I felt nauseous all the time. Becs was worried. She tried to make me see someone. She rang Megan, who threatened to call Mum.
I went to the doctor to get some pills. ‘Could you be pregnant?’ I laughed at that.
But afterwards I couldn’t shake off the thought. It was possible. The doctors had always said there was no reason for me not to get pregnant again. The nausea got worse, especially in the mornings. My breasts were heavier. I did a pregnancy test. Nothing. But, by that stage, I was a world expert in margins of error, the percentages of tests that give a false result.
Every morning there were new changes to my body. A tugging low down in my abdomen, a feeling of things adjusting. A supernatural tiredness, a sudden and violent aversion to things that before I had tolerated perfectly well. Olives swimming around in orange oil; the smell of coffee, which I’d previously loved.
My belly started to swell. My breasts ached.
‘When did you start telling people, Hannah?’
‘I didn’t need to. They noticed.’
When Megan came over just before we had that terrible row, I was still in my nightie – well, the thin T-shirt I wear to bed – and as soon as she saw me she said it. ‘Oh my God, you’re pregnant.’ My belly, at just two months, already swollen. My boobs a whole cup size bigger. And once she’d pointed it out, Mum couldn’t understand why she hadn’t noticed it too.
‘I bet Danny freaked,’ says Judith, with some satisfaction. ‘Two women pregnant by him at the same time. Doesn’t look good, does it?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Katy. ‘Some men go in for that sort of thing. It makes them look virile.’
‘He went white when I told him. The kind of white when you press on sunburn and it blanches out.’
I demonstrate on the skin on the top of one hand.
‘And then?’ prompts Dr Chakraborty.
‘Then he moved back in.’
It hadn’t been that simple. There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. Some days, I wanted him back. Other days, I couldn’t stand the sight of him.
He went to see his parents for a few days. And when he came back he was different. Contrite. He’d made a mistake. He wanted to put things right. His mother had made him see that his life was with me. I never thought I’d be grateful to uptight Victoria Lovell, but the pregnancy finally brought her around to the idea of me and gave me hope of a more harmonious future.
She – beating-heart Steffie – had gone back to stay with her parents in Tunbridge Wells. Shortly afterwards, she told Danny she’d lost the baby. I felt for her then. Briefly. I knew what that particular pain was like.
I held out. At night in bed I stroked my growing belly and told it – told her, because I knew already that it was a girl – that we’d be fine on our own. Some nights I even believed it. But in the end I took him back. I loved him.
He moved back in and when I called him a shit, he agreed, and when I told him I hated him, he understood, and when I cried, he held me.
Meg told me I was an idiot. We had a hideous row the last time I saw her. Then she left for New York without us making it right. We haven’t spoken since.
I miss my sister.
But I chose my husband.
I grew bigger. Things became calmer. The baby, Emily, made it possible for me and Danny to coat ourselves anew in a veneer of togetherness.
Some days we were even happy.
We painted the spare room, bought a cot and moved the low blue chair from the living room. Danny’s parents gave him the ugly mobile he’d had when he was a baby with all the farmyard animal shapes and I didn’t object when he insisted on putting it up.
Mum was uneasy. She thought we were tempting fate. But we needed to do it. She didn’t know that, sometimes, we even spoke to each other through our unborn child. ‘Tell Daddy he needs to brush his teeth. I can still smell last night’s garlic chicken.’ ‘Try to sort it so that, when you arrive, Mummy still gets to keep those boobs, will you?’
Danny was still going to Edinburgh for work, but I knew through subtle enquiries at Dad’s company that Steffie had left Scotland for good. And he rang me all the time and got the first flight home even if it meant travelling half the night.
‘And all this time, the tests were still coming back negative?’
Katy has a face like a fifty-pence piece, very wide across with a shallow pointed chin. She is determined to get her facts straight.
‘I stopped doing the tests. I’d read magazine features about women who’d gone out binge drinking because the test had been wrong and they’d believed they weren’t pregnant.’
Listen to your body, those features said. I listened to my body. It told me I was pregnant.
I sit up suddenly, straining to hear Emily, but there is nothing.
‘When was the first time someone mentioned the possibility of pseudocyesis, Hannah?’ Dr Chakraborty asks.
Odelle leans towards Katy.
‘That means phantom pregnancy.’
Everything goes dark.
17
Corinne
Megan was still glaring at her through the computer screen, and Corinne felt ashamed. After everything that had happened, here she was, saying ‘Emily’, as if she were real. A living creature, a cluster of reproducing cells growing fat in the shelter of Hannah’s swelling belly.
A grandchild.
Even now, after all the psychiatrists’ reports and the medical explanations and the sleepless nights lost to Google, Corinne still couldn’t quite believe it had happened.