Motherlove

by Thorne Moore

‘Lindy Crowe.’

  ‘Lindy. Is that Linda?’ As she wrote, the nurse checked Linda’s hands, her fingers – no ring.

  ‘Rosalind.’

  ‘Oh what a pretty name. And your address.’

  They wanted everything, her date of birth, her place of birth, her doctor. Wouldn’t believe she didn’t have one. Hadn’t she had any medical check-ups while she was pregnant? No clinic? Nothing at all since she’d been at the home down in Barking? Who were her parents? Long gone. Mum dead, dad in gaol. Next of kin? Brother Jimmy, she supposed, but she hadn’t seen him for eight years. Probably banged up too by now. She was too scared to name Gary; he wouldn’t like it. But she’d given her address in Nelson Road so maybe they’d find him anyway. She should have said 28. That way, if they did track her down, she could say it was a mistake. 28 instead 128. Too late now. She wasn’t thinking straight because of the pain.

  And then there was so much pain she didn’t want to answer any more questions, and she didn’t want to be here, with all these strangers, people in white coats, people with forms to fill in. No one was telling her that she shouldn’t be here, and that was scary. But the pain was scary too and she just wanted it to end.

  ‘Breathe,’ the nurse said, panting at her. ‘Like this. Don’t push.’

  And then, ‘Push. That’s right, push. Good girl, keep pushing.’ She thought she was being ripped open, ripped in two, and soon she would be dead and she didn’t care.

  But then it all drained away, all the pain and the pressure drifting off in a blur. She was floating, and there was something on her face. Floating.

  A hand on her brow, fingers on her wrist. ‘She’s all right now, aren’t you, Mrs Crowe.’

  Was she? The huge pain had gone. No, not all right. Something was missing. She was too groggy to think, but something was missing. Something vital taken away.

  Then she heard it, the faint wail, and her eyes began to focus again. She fixed on the little wrapped bundle they were holding out to her. The baby. Her baby. Rosalind Crowe’s baby, her family, her everything. She reached out.

  ‘A little girl. A teensy bit underweight, but not too bad, all things considered. See? You’ve done all right. Now would you like to feed her?’

  They wanted to help. They wanted her to breastfeed. She wasn’t sure about that. Didn’t seem natural. She’d fed babies before. Angie’s baby, with a bottle. This wasn’t right, this tit stuff. Not with all of them watching.

  ‘Maybe you’d feel better with a bottle? Just for now.’

  Then she was all right, even if one of the nurses looked at her like she was a lump of shit. This was what she wanted, to be here, all alone with her baby, feeding her, cradling her. Her little girl.

  ‘Have you got a name for her?’

  Lindy looked into the hungry blue eyes. No reason. It just came to her. ‘Kelly,’ she said.

  CHAPTER 5

  i

  Kelly

  ‘Joe?’

  ‘What? Is that you, Kelly?’ He answered at last, raising his voice over the music. After her mother’s medical crisis, she’d had the landline reconnected in the living room. Joe must have his radio right by it.

  ‘Course it is,’ Kelly shouted, clamping the mobile between shoulder and ear while she unpacked. ‘How’s it all going?’

  ‘Fine, you know. No probs.’

  ‘Sheep okay?’

  ‘Yeah, fine. And Eleanor and Rigby – well not Rigby; she ate my jacket.’

  ‘Oh dear. All of it?’

  ‘Na, just a bit of one sleeve.’

  ‘Is she all right? Not choking or anything?’ You had to be careful with goats. ‘What about the chickens? Have you collected the eggs?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. They’re fine.’

  ‘That’s great. Do you think you’ll be able to manage for a few more days, Joe? Like, another week?’

  ‘Week? Yeah, okay.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘You don’t mind if I have a few of the guys round, do you?’

  ‘No, of course not. Just try not to mess with Mum’s things. You’re going to need more feed. I’ll order it if you can pick it up. Can you find the number? I’ve scribbled it on the fridge.’

  Organising Joe over the phone was surprisingly easy. Of course, Kelly knew he might not remember to pick up the feed, or keep ‘the guys’ out of her mother’s room, but she was sure that nothing could go seriously wrong. He wasn’t likely to burn the house down, and the animals could forage for themselves at this time of year, if he forgot. There was a good chance of losing a couple of the chickens to foxes because Joe would forget to round them up, but that had probably happened already.

  She phoned the feed supplier, then called Roger and Mandy.

  ‘Kelly!’ Mandy answered. ‘Home safely? Did the car behave all right?’

  ‘Perfectly. Just checking on Mum.’

  Roz was fine. Everything in Dorset was fine, everything in Pembrokeshire was fine, the whole world was fine.

  Joe was going to let them know at the Moon and Tuppence that she wouldn’t be able to do her shifts for the next week. Too late now to ring the office. She’d do that in the morning, tell them she needed time off. They wouldn’t query it, not with her mother being ill.

  All sorted. She was free to go with this river she had jumped into. Had she been rash? She could see potential rapids ahead. But what the hell, she was a good swimmer. At best she would find herself a potential kidney donor and a sister of sorts. At worst, she wouldn’t find anything. Nothing more disastrous than that. How could there be?

  ii

  Vicky

  Vicky paced the street, watching, trying not to be seen. It was a part of Lyford she didn’t know, so it had taken her a while to find it, but getting here had been the easy part. The woman had moved since their last confrontation, and no one at the old flats had been sure where. So Vicky had lain in wait for the postman. It gave her a sense of cool satisfaction when it paid off, although the postman had probably been breaking regulations in telling her that Mrs Parish had moved to Salley Meadows. He couldn’t tell her which number though. They’d know at the sorting office, but that was far out on the other side of town. It was more tempting to take the number 16 bus to the Brookdale estate, hoping her luck would last, and she’d find another door sprayed with accusing graffiti.

  No graffiti. Salley Meadows, the name promising lush grass and shivering willows, was just a dull anonymous street of dull anonymous houses and flats, not squalid enough to raise eyebrows, not deluxe enough to envy. Vicky walked up and down it twice. No sign of her birth mother. She’d recognise her. Even a glimpse from behind and she’d know her.

  She returned, frustrated, to the bus stop, to wait for the next bus back to the town centre. Thirty yards away, across the street, the number 16 pulled up to let off passengers.

  It moved on and there she was. The woman. Mrs Parish, gathering bags, heading for home. Vicky ignored her own bus, stepping back as it slowed, and the driver scowled at her indecision before accelerating again.

  Thirty paces behind, Vicky followed her quarry back into Salley Meadows. Twenty. Ten. The maisonettes. The woman put her bags down at the door of 28, searching for her key. Vicky speeded up.

  Mrs Parish turned, alert, sensing the movement, looking Vicky full in the face. She recognised her. ‘Oh. I see. You again.’

  ‘Me again. Mother.’

  ‘I’m not your mother. Just go away, will you?’

  ‘No. I won’t. I’ll be here. Always. Just so you’ll never forget.’

  ‘Whatever your game is, I’m not interested.’ She was in. Slam. The door shut. Vicky could hear bolts being drawn.

  What was her game? Vicky wasn’t sure herself. She knew she had to keep punishing this woman.

  Someone had to be punished. Vicky wanted it to be Gillian, beaten and begging for forgiveness. But she knew that if she cast Gillian into outer darkness Vicky would be alone. She didn’t have the courage. So it would have to be this woman instea
d. The one who’d failed to kill her, but left her to be fed to Joan. The one the whole world itched to punish.

  Mrs Parish had moved, but she hadn’t escaped. Number 28, Salley Gardens. No need to stay further today. Vicky would keep returning and returning and returning, because there was no way she could get past this thing.

  iii

  Kelly

  The Lyford Herald came out on Thursday. Kelly bought it at the local newsagents and pored through it as she walked into town. Just a classified ad, in pages of others, under Personal. It looked nice and bold; Emma must have pulled some strings. Even so, maybe Kelly should have gone for something bigger, more prominent. Cost, that was the thing. She couldn’t justify spending their money on a more expensive ad. But then she couldn’t really justify spending their money on bed and breakfast in Colney Road either, so maybe it should have been in for a penny, in for a pound. There was always next week. If she got no response to this one, perhaps she would stay around long enough to put a bigger ad in the next issue. If she could endure Mrs Hanshaw’s guesthouse that long.

  She was sure the ad would be a waste of time, so when her mobile rang in the middle of the afternoon, she assumed it must be Joe or Roger, and was puzzled by the unknown number.

  ‘Hello. Is that Kelly Sheldon? The one who put the ad in the paper? About kids born in March, in the hospital?’

  ‘Yes! Hi. March 13th to the 19th, 1990.’

  ‘Oh. Has to be 90, does it, ’cos I was born there March 16th but it was 1988.’

  Kelly’s pulse, which had started to race, slowed again. ‘Sorry. It’s got to be 90.’

  ‘So I don’t get it, then? The prize or whatever?’

  ‘No, sorry. There’s no prize.’ Was a chance to give a kidney a prize? ‘Just trying to contact people.’

  ‘Oh. Well, it’s not me then.’

  ‘No. But thanks for phoning.’

  After all, she thought, look on the bright side. It did show that someone had noticed it. There might be more.

  There were more, that night and the following morning. Two people who’d misread the dates, two men who thought it must be a coded invitation to kinky sex, one who wanted to know what colour her knickers were, three who were convinced there must be some cosmic significance to those dates or evidence of extra-terrestrial landings and one a very vague old lady who wanted to talk about crochet patterns.

  But also two people born in Lyford and Stapledon General, in the week of the 13th to 19th, March 1990. One of them, Christopher, was a man, and couldn’t possibly be her missing phantom sister, but he sounded so excited by the idea of a post-cot reunion, as if he had been waiting twenty-two years for someone to suggest it, that she invited him along to the meeting she had arranged with Andrea, born on the 17th.

  ‘So, anyway, it will be September next year.’ Andrea sipped her drink and looked at her engagement ring. A large diamond. At least Kelly assumed it was a diamond. She only bought jewellery from the stall in the market that made stuff out of recycled tin cans. The diamond might be glass, but she guessed Andrea wouldn’t be looking quite so smug if it were.

  Andrea Marley. A girl born in the same week as Kelly, in the same hospital. And for all that, Kelly realised, not really on the same planet. She was getting married to her Matthew in fifteen month’s time because apparently weddings took that long to arrange. In Kelly’s world, weddings were a quick trip to the registry office. Or a bit of tantric chanting on Carn Ingli. Or once, at the old church by the beach, with the bride arriving along the sands on Maddy Davies’ almost white pony in a high wind. Why did you need a year and a half to book church, flowers, dresses, morning suits, country house, photographer, hair-dresser, manicurist, sunbed?

  ‘Wow,’ she said, smiling at Andrea, wanting to set her at ease. Why was Andrea so stressed? She was beautiful and knew it. Beautiful with all the perfection of a boiled egg. She was dressed perfectly for this bar, Rick’s Place, brushed steel and smoked glass, Space Age superimposed on Art Deco, with its tapas bar and continental beers and barmen doing little dances as they whisked up cocktails.

  Rick’s Place had ambitions to be somewhere other than Lyford. It wanted to be the place where people who were Somebody came to be seen, to be photographed on their arrival by lurking paparazzi. Except that there weren’t any Somebodies in Lyford, or paparazzi either. They were all twenty-five miles down the motorway in London. But Rick’s Place clung to the hope that one day, maybe, Somebody would walk in.

  The aspiration had rubbed off on Andrea. For her it was the place. She had dressed up and Rick’s Place was probably delighted with her, because most of the customers were increasingly loud topers working their way round the watering holes of Lyford’s civic centre, before heading on to the Desert Dunes nightclub.

  ‘And we’re thinking of the Seychelles for the honeymoon, but we still need to decide on a hotel. It has to be just right, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Wow. Seychelles,’ said Kelly.

  ‘I don’t even know where the Seychelles is,’ grinned Christopher. He was just as excitable as he had sounded on the phone. Gawky, sandy hair that stuck up, and a tendency to jump up and down in his chair. He seemed genuinely impressed by Rick’s Place. He’d seldom been to pubs. He spent most of his time on the computer, at work at J C Electronics or at home playing Warcraft.

  There was a pause. ‘They’re islands,’ said Andrea witheringly. She was sure of that, if nothing else.

  ‘In the Indian Ocean, near Madagascar,’ added Kelly.

  ‘Oh Madagascar! Great film!’ enthused Christopher.

  Andrea sighed. ‘Well, anyway, until the wedding, I’m working for Catterick and Mayhew’s, but I’ll probably quit when I get married.’

  ‘To have babies?’ suggested Christopher.

  Andrea winced. ‘No, not babies, thank you. So. Kelly. Do you have a partner? Someone special? Any plans?’ She had been talking about herself since she came in, while desperately searching for clues. She knew exactly what to make of Christopher, in his Primark pants and his shirt with the egg stain, but she was at a complete loss with Kelly. How do you place someone in patchwork leggings, magic unicorn T-shirt, a velveteen waistcoat with feathers in its embroidery, a nose stud, a Buddhist tattoo on the back of her hand and a green streak in her hair? What sort of person would dress like that for a visit to Rick’s Place? Either a Big Issue seller or – and this was the point – a real celebrity, someone so gloriously successful that she could set her own rules. Andrea’s instinct, if they’d met in the street, would have been to step around Kelly as if she were a dog turd. In Rick’s Place, she was more circumspect, just in case Kelly really was the Somebody the bar had been waiting for.

  ‘Lots of special people,’ said Kelly. ‘And no particular plans. I just wait for things to happen.’

  ‘What do you do then?’ asked Christopher, and Kelly could see Andrea’s ears prick. The question she had wanted to ask but hadn’t dared.

  ‘Bit of this, bit of that,’ said Kelly helpfully. ‘A bit of hill farming in West Wales. In a, you know, amateur sort of way.’

  Andrea sipped her drink. That didn’t help. Amateur hill farming was just the sort of thing celebrities would take up as a hobby. ‘So, then, I saw your ad. For a reunion. Any particular reason? Just to see where we’ve all got to in life?’

  Kelly realised that was what Andrea had been doing from the moment she walked in. She had been presenting her CV, to prove that she too had been stunningly successful, in case they all turned out to be supermodels or millionaires or heart surgeons.

  ‘It is kind of fun, isn’t it?’ Kelly suggested. ‘Thinking of a bunch of babies that just happened to be born in the same ward at the same time, like an island in an ocean, and seeing where life has taken them.’

  ‘Yeah!’ agreed Christopher. ‘Like, my brother went to Scotland.’

  ‘But the real reason I put the ad in was this…’

  Kelly explained, as concisely and undramatically as she could. It had never seem
ed particularly dramatic to her, but she didn’t know how other people would react.

  Christopher gaped open-mouthed. ‘Like, you mean, they swapped labels, so we all got muddled up?’

  ‘Not you, Chris.’ Kelly smiled. ‘At least, you certainly weren’t muddled up with me, because my Mum definitely gave birth to a girl. But maybe Andrea…’

  ‘No way!’ Andrea was horrified. ‘No! I don’t care what you say! It’s not true!’

  ‘Well, it probably wasn’t you,’ agreed Kelly.

  ‘I’m telling you it wasn’t me!’ As if she had been accused of something. She was determined to prove it, for her own sake rather than Kelly’s. ‘It’s rubbish. I look just like my sister. Ask anyone. People used to think we were twins.’ She half rose, her voice upping an octave. ‘And I look like my mother. Anyone can see. So you got that completely wrong.’

  A couple sitting nearby, by mutual consent, picked up their drinks and moved to another table. A couple of men in suits at the bar swivelled on their stools to look.

  Andrea was turning lobster red, torn between denial and her embarrassment at making a scene.

  ‘Don’t worry, it was only a chance,’ said Kelly, hoping to calm her down. ‘She’s out there somewhere, but I wasn’t really expecting miracles. It’s just that, Mum being so ill and maybe needing a kidney transplant eventually, and I’m not a match…’

  If it were possible for Andrea to look more horrified, she did now. ‘You mean—’ She almost choked on the words. ‘You want to find someone so you can take their liver?’

  ‘Kidney. Only one. And only if they want. They don’t have to.’

  Andrea looked at her as if she were a bodysnatcher with a big knife. ‘You’re sick. You’re really sick. I’m not staying here!’ She gathered up her coat and bag, heading for the door in such haste she almost tripped over. One of the men in suits held the door open for her, and put a hand on her arm in concern as she pushed past. She shook him off and was gone. The man glanced back at Kelly and Christopher with a raised eyebrow and a smile. Kelly liked the smile. Quirky.

  ‘Oh well,’ she said, and looked at Christopher. ‘Do you think I’m sick?’