by Leanne Burn
The house was a tip when we let ourselves in the next day. It smelt to the high heavens, that old smell I remembered so well from the flat, piss soaked. He hadn’t hoovered and there was a thick layer of dust everywhere. My mam snorted but said nothing. There wasn’t anything a bit of elbow grease wouldn’t put right.
That night, when the kids were back in their rooms, I roamed the house. There were memories everywhere, some good some not so, but this was our home now so I was going to have to put the demons to bed. The whole place looked shabby, just like me I thought, but a
lick of paint would do the trick, and maybe get the carpets cleaned. As I locked up that night I felt happy, this was a new beginning for us and I intended to give the house lots of good memories to store in its old thick walls.
When a letter from the mortgage company arrived a few days later alarms bells started ringing. The mortgage was in arrears by 3 months and it looked as though Keith hadn’t taken his name off the deeds. After a sleepless night, a phone call confirmed my worst fears. There was arrears of over £500 plus the next payment was due in a matter of days. I asked them if they could bear with me until I had sorted everything out and they said I had one month and then if a recovery plan wasn’t in place they would have to take further action.
I rang Keith at his work. He no longer worked there and they had no forwarding information. I felt ill. When I got home that night I pulled out all of the other bills for the house, gas, electric, telephone. None of them had been paid. I didn’t know what to do. I rang my bank. I had already opened an account in my name for my wages to be paid into, I explained the situation and although they were sympathetic they didn’t hold out much hope of me getting a loan to cover all of the arrears.
I had only just moved back into our home and already I was losing it. How could Keith have done this to us? For the next few days I fretted and fretted. I thought about going to see my Granny, but I wasn’t her only grandchild and if she did it for me then she would have to do it for the rest of them too. I didn’t want to ask my mam and dad, they had already paid Keith off for me, so I continued to fret, hoping that something would magic out of thin air. I couldn’t eat and I
couldn’t sleep.
When the bank rang me at work I almost collapsed. They said that they had put my loan to the underwriters and they had decided that they would be able to help me. If I went into the branch and signed the documentation I would have the funds in my account straight away. I took the rest of the day off work and did just that. When I got home I wrote cheques out for all of the outstanding amounts, there would be a small amount left over to keep in my account and God was I going to need it. Mortgage, bills, loan repayment and child-minder fees. I would be lucky if I had a spare penny at the end of the month never mind a few pounds. But the house was mine.
Keith hadn’t taken his name off but the mortgage company were aware of when I had left the house and when he did so if he did decide to come back and try to take the house off me, he wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.
Over the following weeks I still didn’t feel any better. My eating was poor and I was light headed and tired. I woke up in the middle of the night one night in a cold sweat. I can’t remember if I had had a nightmare but as I lay there in the darkness a sudden thought hit me.
I hadn’t had a period for months. I put it down to the stress I was under, but the light headedness, lack of appetite and when I thought about it I had been nauseous, this all spelt out one thing. I was pregnant. Not Michael, we had been careful. Keith. In all that violence and hate and fear I had got pregnant. I didn’t stop the tears as I lay in the darkness. What the fuck was I going to do?
Black Magic Woman
The next day went by in a daze. I needed to be sure I was pregnant, so I detoured to the supermarket on the way home and bought a home pregnancy kit, swerving the small chemist in the village where the purchase of a pregnancy kit would send the local gossips into amber alert.
It wasn’t until the kids were tucked up in bed that I got chance to do it. I had deliberately not had a wee for hours and decided that I would wee into a pot and use both tests if need be.
The little window showed 2 little pink lines immediately. “Fuck, fuck, fuck” I thought to myself. Test number 2 - same outcome. I sat on the toilet in the bathroom with the little sticks covered in wee and rocked. I rocked and rocked and when I couldn’t think of what else to do. I rocked some more.
This wasn’t happening. I didn’t want this this and the thought that I didn’t shook me. All my pregnancies had been a surprise, but I had never once thought that I didn’t want them. Even the one long ago when I had been so young and I didn’t have the guts to stand up and say what I wanted. I had wanted all of them. This was different. I didn’t want this thing. I didn’t want Keith’s thing. How it had been conceived put paid to that. I felt like I had a monster growing inside me and the longer it stayed there, the bigger it would get and in the end it would kill me.
I shuddered. Pulling up my knickers and jeans, I gathered up the evidence of the monster’s existence, took it downstairs and threw it in the bin. “Tomorrow I would make plans to sort it, the quicker the better”. I opened the fridge door and did something I never did, I poured myself a huge glass of wine.
At the doctors a couple of days later, I was back into 3rd person mode. I spoke in clipped tones, saying I knew I was pregnant, didn’t want it and wanted to arrange a termination. I produced another pot of wee and waited patiently as the doctor did the test. When he confirmed what I already knew, he asked if I wanted some time to think about it, I replied as politely as I could, that no, I didn’t need time I just wanted it over. If he was shocked at my non-plussed attitude he didn’t show it.
He asked me to go back into the waiting room while he made a phone call.
On my return into his surgery, he gave me a slip of paper. It had an appointment date and time on. “Caroline, I have known you a long time, I saw you through your last 2 pregnancies and I saw you a few months ago when you needed time off work. I would never recommend that you went through with this pregnancy if it was not what you wanted. What I am asking you is to talk to someone. A counsellor, a friend, your family. You don’t have much time. From the dates you have given me I think that you are already about 10 weeks pregnant. But please don’t do something in anger that you may well regret later.”
I was shocked, Dr Mayer had always seemed so aloof and professional, uncaring even. “Okay, I will” I said, but I wouldn’t. I needed the monster out and Dr Mayer had just taken me another step nearer to that happening.
Life went on as normal around me. I went to work, but wasn’t really there. I looked after the kids, but wasn’t really with them. I saw my Granny, mam and dad, but didn’t hear a word they said. I was on automatic pilot. I counted the days down to my hospital appointment, I needed an assessment first and then they would give me a date for ‘monster removal’.
The nights were long, even after a couple of glasses of wine, which had quickly became my night time ritual didn’t help me sleep. I would toss and turn, get up, go back to bed, toss and turn some more and then when I did eventually fall asleep I would be woken at the crack of dawn with the sickness and had to run to the bathroom.
Everyone asked if I was all right, I shrugged it off and said I just thought that the move and the past few months’ events were catching up with me. I was on lock down. The wall had come up and I had bolted the doors so no one could get in. The monster was my problem, I didn’t need to share the misery.
The first hospital appointment went smoothly enough. They scanned me and clarified that I was 11 weeks and 2 days. I didn’t need a calendar to work out when the ‘monster’ had been conceived. Any hope that I might have had that somehow the lovely Michael could have been the dad were well and truly scuppered. The monster in my tummy had grown a pair of horns before I even left the hospital. But I had a date and it would all be over soon.
As I made my way over to my c
ar, a woman ambled towards me. She was old and dressed in a strange fashion. She had a shabby old shopping bag in her hand. She was heading straight towards me and as I went to dodge out of the way of her, she grabbed my arm.
“Oh my lovely!!’ she said in a soft voice. I looked at her, I didn’t recognise her, but she seemed to think that she knew me. “My lovely” she said again. She placed her hand on my tummy and started to rub it. “Don’t do it, my lovely. He is a gift for you. Don’t hate him”. I looked at her stunned. She continued to rub my tummy, but using her other hand she produced a sprig of heather. “Cross my palm, my lovely and all will be well”. She stopped her rubbing and I fumbled in my bag for money. I gave her a £10 note just to get rid of her, she was scaring me. “Thank you my lovely, hear what I said, he is a gift”. With that she was off.
Getting into the car, I sat. The old gypsy had really taken the wind out of my sails. “A gift” I thought, “a gift just like the plants, well they went out with the rubbish…….”
The following few days took on much the pattern as the previous ones, up, sick, smile, kids to child-minder, smile, work, smile some more, pick kids up, tea, laugh, bath time, laugh some more, kids to bed, glass of wine, maybe 2 or 3 or 4. When, by the time I was downing a bottle of wine by the 3rd or fourth night after my gypsy episode I knew I was in trouble.
I was out of my depth. I was on automatic pilot and lock down, drinking my way through my pain. On the Friday morning as I hung over the toilet bringing up the contents of my bottle of wine, I decided that I had to do something. My hospital appointment was still a week away. I could do a lot of damage in a week, I wasn’t bothered about me, but I was bothered about Thomas and Bethany and I wasn’t functioning properly, I was sure that if they needed me through the night I wouldn’t hear them. I was no drinker and a whole bottle of wine was probably the equivalent of one of Keith’s bender’s. I was no better than him. The thought of Keith made me feel even sicker and for the next 15 minutes I clung on to the basin.
Nevertheless as the day went on I was still no clearer about what I was going to do. I had no plans for the weekend. Usually the thought of a free weekend with the kids filled me with excitement, we could go where we liked and do what we liked with no one to answer to, but this baby was wearing me out and I wasn’t sure if I would have the energy to keep Thomas and Bethany amused all weekend on my own. I stopped in my tracks. “Rewind, rewind back, rewind back and play” I said to myself. “This baby!!” I had said “this baby!!” For the first time since I had found out I was pregnant I had referred to the thing in my tummy as a baby. “What the fuck” I said to myself. I sat at my little desk in my little office and thought about what I had just said. As I sat there thinking, it dawned on me, it didn’t matter how hard or how long I thought about it, it didn’t happen. It was no longer a monster. The monster had gone. It was a baby. “What the hell was I going to do now?” I picked up the phone.
“Karen, it’s just me, I really need to talk!!!”
I Want You Baby
When Karen came, the kettle went on and apart from getting the milk out, the fridge door stayed firmly shut on the wine. Thomas and Bethany were tucked up in bed, Karen sat at the dining room table. Putting the coffees down in front of us I smiled. For the first time in weeks I actually smiled. “I don’t know where to start”, I said, “so maybe if I start where I’m at now and work backwards, I’ll get there”. “I’m pregnant”.
As Karen sat in shocked silence, I told her how everything had unfolded, the monster, the doctor, hospital, gypsy and then the baby. Over the next hour, I told her where I had been, mentally if not physically, how I had been drinking, how I had despised the monster and Keith and how the monster evolved back into a baby.
Karen stopped me in my speaking every now and then. She asked questions, she made statements like “why didn’t you ring me”, “you didn’t need to do this on your own” etc etc. When I was done, she asked quietly “What are you going to do?” “I want to keep him (if the old gypsy was telling the truth then this was a he), I don’t know how I will manage, but where there’s a will there is a way and Karen, I’m willing now”.
She stood up, came around the table and wrapped her arms around me. The cuddle was all I needed to open the floodgates, I sat at the table and cried. Karen held on to me tight. Through my sobs I said “I nearly got rid of him Karen, I really didn’t want him. What if I had gone through with the termination and then come to my senses, I would never have forgiven myself”.
“But you haven’t have you? For whatever reason that little baby in there has let you know he isn’t a monster”. “What about Keith, are you going to let him know?”
I hadn’t given much thought to what I was going to do. The only think that I was sure about now was that I would be cancelling my hospital appointment and re-booking the doctor. Apart from that, everything was still a grey area. But I felt better. I felt like I could take on the world, this baby wasn’t a monster, he was a gift. He was strong, my Samson and if he could be strong then I could too.
‘I don’t think I will’, I couldn’t cope with being in touch with him. Maybe later on, but I’ve got quite a way to go until I need to tell him anything. I think the main thing is to get myself organised. Thomas will be barely 3 and Bethany not even 2, I think I’m going to have my hands full”. But as I said it I was smiling.
After Karen left and I had tidied around, I made my way upstairs. I ran a bath and after a long soak I climbed into bed. I fell into a dreamless sleep. Waking the next morning, I had no sickness. Little Samson had got my attention and his actions had had the desired effect.
Jimmy Jimmy
James was born on a sunny May morning. He arrived when he was supposed to, no intervention was needed and the labour was quick and manageable.
He was beautiful. My mam and Karen were with me and we all cried with joy when he made his debut in to our family. He was our gift. Our little Samson.
After the initial trauma at the beginning of the pregnancy, the rest had been a doddle, baby wise anyway. Either my mam or Granny came to all my appointments and when I wrote up the birth plan, I asked Karen if she would be my birthing partner. It was lovely sharing my pregnancy with the family and my best friend and to be honest it was the first time I had any support at all during any of my pregnancies.
As I was so well I worked up until a couple of weeks before my due date. Work had been good, understanding the need for me to have more time after the birth than before and suggesting that I job shared when I returned. They even suggested that I did it with Jenny, she had been popular there, but turned out she was pregnant again so that was a no no.
When I was about six months pregnant I had managed to track Keith down. It had taken some doing, at first I thought he must have left the country. As it was, he was living about 20 miles away from us. I had bumped into one of his former work colleagues at the Metrocentre and he told me where he was working. A couple of phone calls later and I managed to get him on the phone. Deciding that it would be better to tell him in person, I asked if I could meet him at is work.
I think he thought that I was after money. I didn’t bother to warn him about the baby. So as I sat in the reception area of his work I smiled to myself. “Serve the bastard right”. He came bounding through the doors all smiles and cheap aftershave. I felt nothing for him. I stood up, I had dressed carefully to show my growing bump off to the best advantage. The look on his face was priceless. He looked at me, then the bump and then back at me. “Can we go outside?” I asked him. I don’t even think he replied, just followed me through the double doors. I headed over to my car. Even though I knew I shouldn’t be, I was still having the occasional cigarette, so when we got to car, I leant against the bonnet and lit up.
“Yes, it’s yours Keith. Nothing has changed, I still don’t want anything to do with you. But I thought you had a right to know.” He just stared. “I’m not expecting anything from you, you haven’t supported the kids you alr
eady have so there is no hope with his one. But like I said I wanted you to hear about it from me and not someone else.” “I don’t know what to say Caz. When is it due?” he said, suddenly his charming grin was nowhere to be seen. “In the summer. Thomas and Bethany are great, I know the shock has made you forget to ask”. I couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “If you let me have your contact details, I’ll make sure someone lets you know.”
He scribbled some numbers and an address on a scrap of paper. “Watch what you are doing Keith”. I opened the door, started the car and drove out of the car park. When I looked back in the rear view mirror Keith was still standing there, just where I had left him. It would be over a decade before I laid eyes on him again.
The pregnancy wasn’t all smooth. I used to have horrific nightmares. Everyone was different but I would wake up terrified and would be too scared to go back to sleep. When I became dark eyes with the lack of sleep my mam and Granny took turns to come over and sleep at my house. It was lovely to have them there. I had always been close to my Granny but my mam and me were also laying some foundations down. It had taken me until I was almost 30, but I finally started to get Margaret, what she had sacrificed to have me and even why hers’ and my dad’s marriage survived when on paper it should have been a write off years ago.
So by the time James arrived we were all in a good place. We were discharged from hospital within 12 hours and both my mam and my Granny insisted in staying with me until I was back on my feet. I was so grateful, James turned out to be a good baby, but with 3 under 4 I had my work cut out.