by Marian Keyes
‘So what isn’t it?’
It’s a struggle to express myself. ‘It isn’t a relationship. And it isn’t okay. Your wife … I can’t feel not guilty. And I don’t want to.’
‘So, as long as you don’t enjoy yourself too much, you can do this?’
‘No. It’s as long as I don’t lose sight of what’s right and what’s wrong.’
His expression is a mix of exasperation and affection. ‘My little Sackcloth. You don’t know the first thing about my wife. For all you know, she might hate me – she might be glad about this.’
It’s hard to believe that. But who knows? People are endlessly surprising.
‘What’s she like?’
‘You sure you want to know?’
‘Yes.’ Maybe.
‘She’s … confident. When I met her, I just knew that, yeah, I’d met my match. First woman I knew wouldn’t take shit from me.’
‘So why are you doing this? With me?’
He takes a while to speak. ‘Things change, don’t they? The kids. I love them, I’d kill anyone who tried to hurt them, but they’re tough going.’ He sighs. ‘When you have kids, you live your life under a permanent shadow.’
I don’t know what to say. The kids brought me and Hugh closer together. And yet Hugh is on the other side of the world and I’m in bed with Josh Rowan, so maybe I’m the very same as Josh.
As Josh drifts off to sleep, he turns over, snuggles into me and murmurs, ‘My little Sackcloth.’
73
Wednesday, 23 November, day seventy-two
For once my flight home isn’t delayed and the traffic isn’t horrific, and when I arrive home on Wednesday evening, Neeve, Sofie and Kiara are clustered in a huddle on the couch. They’re talking intently and, when they notice me, abruptly fall silent. Anxiety seizes my chest – something’s up.
I’m not really superstitious, I don’t believe in a vengeful God. But words flash through me – punish, amoral, harlot.
‘What?’ My breath won’t come.
After a weighted hesitation, Neeve flicks her glinty eyes between Kiara and Sofie and says, ‘She’s pregnant.’
The internal condemnatory voices intensify: bad woman, bad mother, bad example.
‘Who is?’
‘Sofie.’
I drop my bag and go to her. ‘How are you, sweetie?’
‘Scared.’ She begins to cry.
‘Tell me.’ I curl on the couch and gather her tiny, bony body to mine. While this isn’t ideal it’s not the worst thing that could have happened.
‘It was an accident.’ She sobs into my shoulder. ‘I’d left my pill in Mum’s but I was staying in Granny’s.’
‘She took the morning-after pill,’ Kiara says. ‘It cost sixty euro.’
‘But it mustn’t have worked,’ Neeve says. ‘She should get her money back.’
‘What does Jackson say?’ I ask.
‘He’s scared too.’ Now she’s really sobbing, the hard, out-of-control convulsing that comes from terrible fear. ‘We’re both so scared.’
‘Shush, shush.’ I stroke her head of soft bristles and let her cry. Already I’m in crisis-management mode. ‘It’ll all be okay.’
‘Please can I have an abortion?’ Sofie sounds piteous.
‘If you’re certain that’s what you want?’
‘You’re kidding, right?’ She pulls away from me. Paradoxically she’s never seemed so grown-up. ‘The state of me, I can’t even take care of myself.’
I’ll have to take her to London. Unless I can get my hands on some illegal pills and we do it here at home. But wouldn’t that be dangerous, doing it without medical advice? How would you know the pills were the correct ones? How would I take care of her during it? And after? With sudden fierce force, I miss Hugh desperately – his kindness, his good sense, his reassuring presence.
I wouldn’t be doing the right thing as Sofie’s sort-of-mum if I didn’t offer an alternative path. ‘You know we’d all help you, if you decided to go ahead with the pregnancy.’
She stares in shock. ‘Are you trying to make me have it?’ Her voice gets high-pitched. ‘Because I can’t.’
‘She’s only seventeen!’ Kiara is equally high-pitched.
‘She’s still at school!’ This from Neeve.
‘I’m shit-scared!’
‘You can’t make her have a baby!’ Kiara says.
‘I wish I hadn’t told you now.’
‘Sofie, sweetie, it’s okay. It’s okay, it’s okay.’ I make shushing, soothing noises. ‘Just letting you know that, whatever you want, we’ll help.’
I look over Sofie’s shorn head at Neeve and Kiara. ‘Maybe Sofie and I should have this conversation alone.’
‘No.’ Kiara grasps Sofie’s hand in a we-shall-overcome gesture. ‘We’re in this together.’
‘Yeah, what she says,’ Neeve says.
I hesitate. It’s hard to know whether to treat them as children or adults – and I wonder where Hugh is right now this minute, if he’s on a beach, drinking a beer, utterly carefree.
‘I just want to wake up tomorrow morning and not be pregnant,’ Sofie whispers. ‘I wish I didn’t have to decide this. I don’t want to bring a person into the world who is like me. And to be brought up by a mum who can’t be a mum, and a dad who isn’t there. And I don’t mean anything bad on you and Dad, Amy, you’ve been great. If it wasn’t for you, I’d have no family.’
‘You’re not your mum.’
‘But half of me is her. Maybe I can’t love properly.’
‘You can love. Of course you can.’ This isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation. ‘You love Kiara and Neeve.’
‘And we love you,’ Kiara says.
‘And you love Jackson,’ I say.
‘I love him so much,’ she says fiercely. ‘And you, I love you, Amy, and Dad. And I love Granny. But I’m not ready to love a baby.’
‘Not yet.’
‘Maybe not ever.’
I let it go at that. ‘So you’re absolutely certain you’re pregnant? You’ve done a test?’
She cry-laughs. ‘I’ve done about a thousand.’
‘Do you know how many weeks you are?’
‘Six. Maybe seven.’ She sounds uncertain.
‘Six or seven weeks since you had a period?’
‘No, since we had the unprotected, you know.’
‘And you’ve been worried all that time?’ I’m ashamed I hadn’t noticed – and, quick as a flash, that mutates into rage at Hugh. If I hadn’t been dealing with his absence I might have picked up that Sofie was worried.
‘We need to get you to the doctor,’ I say. To establish exactly how far along she is. An unexpected thought impacts: could the doctor report us for procuring an abortion? Our family practice is a busy one with lots of GPs, and while I trust the women, I’m not so sure about the older men.
I mean, I know abortion is illegal in Ireland but, until now, I’d never fully understood that I could actually be put in prison. Maybe that’s the only time anyone knows anything – when it impacts them directly.
This is crazy. A civilized country, where I work and pay taxes, and yet I could be criminalized for helping my pregnant niece.
‘Are you angry with me?’ Sofie asks.
‘Of course not.’
‘Do I have to tell Joe?’
I sigh. ‘Yeah.’
‘Do I have to tell Mum … Urzula?’
I think about it. It’s tricky being in loco parentis to someone else’s child. ‘Joe can tell her.’
‘So do I have to go to England?’
‘Unless we can get pills. We might be able to order them online.’
Neeve is scrolling away on her iPad. ‘If she’s under eight weeks, she can do the pills.’
If she’s under eight weeks.
‘Do Jackson’s parents know?’ I ask Sofie.
‘Are you going to tell them?’
‘We need to talk with Jackson.’ Flickering in my head is so
me vague memory of a case where some man tried to sue his girlfriend retroactively for having an abortion, and Sofie needs to be protected from any such likelihood.
‘But she’s the one who’s pregnant,’ Kiara says. ‘It’s no one else’s business.’
‘Yeah, but he should pay half,’ Neeve chips in. ‘If we can even manage to get the pills.’
God, my head is melted. So many tricky questions and no one to offload on to.
74
‘Amy, can I ask something else?’ Sofie says. ‘You know the people who say that abortion is killing a baby?’
‘… yes?’
‘Is that what I’m doing?’
Kiara and Neeve jump in, protesting, ‘You’re not! Not at this stage!’
I take a while to answer. I’ve always felt it’s up to the individual woman to decide what’s right for her, but opting to end a pregnancy is a choice no woman is ever happy to have to make. I know of three women who’ve had abortions – Derry, Jana and Druzie. All three were terrified at finding themselves pregnant, yes, even Druzie, and not once have they expressed regret for the choice they made.
But even when you’re certain it’s the best option, alternative scenarios inevitably present themselves. Like if Sofie had a baby, Joe would be a grandfather and Mum and Pop would be great-grandparents and Sofie might crack up and leg it, leaving the child to be brought up by someone else, just as she has been.
On the other hand, could having a baby be the making of her? I can’t see it, but who knows? And that’s the thing, we can’t know. We can only make the best decision with the information we have at the time.
I settle for saying, ‘I think your body belongs to you so you should be entitled to make any choices you want about it, but it’s much more important what you think.’
‘I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong either.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
I want to believe her but there’s a free-floating sense that I haven’t done or said enough to give her all the options. I mean, I never feel I do anything right or fully, but I’m not sure what else I can say. Maybe the doctor will provide some advice. ‘I’ll investigate the pills.’
‘And everything will be okay?’ Sofie asks, her little voice plaintive.
‘Yes, sweetie, everything will be okay.’
‘See?’ Neeve declared. ‘Didn’t we tell you Mum would make everything all right?’
Cripes, I’m not sure I’m worthy of being the receptacle for all their hopes.
‘Mum.’ Kiara is gentle. ‘You need to go to bed, you look really tired.’
‘Everyone go to bed.’ I wrap my arms around Sofie. ‘You like to sleep in with me, sweetie?’
‘I’ll sleep in with Kiara,’ she says.
‘I wish we could all sleep in the one bed,’ Neeve says. ‘Like when we were kids.’
And when Hugh was here.
‘Oh!’ Sofie breathes. ‘They were lovely times.’
Memories stir of little bodies squirming and clambering over each other in the dark. Or waking to find one of the girls curled into me, deep in sleep, her sweet breath exhaling hotly into my face.
‘Or the Saturday mornings,’ Neeve says happily, ‘when we’d all pile into the bed with you and Hugh.’
‘You’d beg us to go down and watch telly.’ Sofie is smiling at the memory. ‘But we just squashed in with our toys.’
‘And you and Dad were too tired to make us breakfast,’ Kiara says. ‘So we’d all share a big tub of ice cream in bed.’
‘Or those mint and chocolate biscuits. With the shiny paper?’
‘They were yummy!’
‘But sometimes they were orange instead of mint. Those were rotten.’
‘I liked the orange ones.’
‘You’re weird …’
Leaving them discussing the merits of mint versus orange Viscounts, I trail up the stairs and wish, wish, wish someone would invent self-dissolving make-up. Micellar water was such a godsend, until I read some article saying you shouldn’t rely on it incessantly, that you should double-cleanse at least every third night and, oh, Christ, isn’t life hard enough?
I text Derry, asking her to call me. Suddenly I really miss Steevie, I wish I could talk to her, especially about Sofie. But – with a flash of wild paranoia – what if I told her our plans and she reports me to the law?
In bed my fingers are shaking as I start googling pills. Immediately I’m into a whole new set of worries: what if something medical goes wrong? What if Sofie starts haemorrhaging? Every site advises that if she has to go to hospital to say she’s having a miscarriage. If I tell the truth, I’m confessing to a crime.
But if I don’t tell the truth, how can she get the correct medical care? What if she dies?
This is a strange, strange situation, the sort of thing I’ve only seen in movies. I’m not a natural criminal. Nor am I a natural nurse, I’m not good with pain, especially other people’s.
What if I do get caught? What if I am sent to prison? Because it happens. A woman in Northern Ireland was sent to jail for three years for procuring pills for her daughter.
There might be a public outcry, but I don’t want to be the poster-girl for a cause. I just want Sofie to be all right.
Then I remember the dream I’d had, where I’d been carrying all the babies. Most of them had been Sofie, and the baby I’d dropped and picked up by the ear had been a tiny, tiny version of her.
I must have suspected she was pregnant, subliminally catalogued that she was paler than usual, eating even less than normal, hadn’t had a period in a while … My subconscious had been trying to break the surface when I wasn’t ready to face the truth.
Well, I’m facing it now. I order the pills. The site is a friendly one but the whole business feels furtive and frightening.
75
Thursday, 24 November, day seventy-three
At four p.m. I stand up and say, ‘Right, Tim, sorry to abandon ship.’
I’m taking Sofie to the doctor, I’ve stipulated a woman but I don’t know which one we’ll get. I really hope it’s not Dr Frawley, the very young one, who’d told me I should reduce my stress and my weight, as if that could magically happen just because they’re desirable. Back then she’d told me to take up walking.
‘I do walk.’
She seemed surprised. ‘Great. Where?’
‘Aaaah … Glendalough.’ Well, I did that one time. Was it New Year’s Day? Or it might have been the previous New Year’s Day …
‘How many K would you typically do?’
‘Up to the waterfall.’
‘That’s quite a climb.’ Then she became suspicious. ‘Unless you mean the first waterfall? The little one.’
Of course I’d meant the first waterfall. Which was about four minutes’ stroll from the car park.
But who has time to exercise? In fairness, I did my best – on Tuesdays and Wednesdays I was in airports where I walked miles and every Sunday I cleaned my house.
‘Get a Fitbit,’ she’d said.
I’d kept my mouth shut. I had a Fitbit. I border-line hated it. I almost never reached the daily ten-thousand-step target. It was just one more way to feel like I’m failing life.
Mercifully, today it’s Dr Conlon, who is probably in her forties and has always struck me as sensible.
Sofie is weeping, and wants me in the room as she submits to the examination. Even though she knows, when Dr Conlon says, ‘You’re pregnant all right,’ she cries harder.
‘How far along?’ I ask.
‘Without knowing when her last period was, I can’t say for certain, but eight, maybe nine weeks.’
‘Not that long.’ Sofie is adamant.
‘We count from the date of your last period,’ Dr Conlon says. ‘Not since conception.’
This throws me totally. Is it already too late for Sofie to do the pills? Shock makes me careless. ‘Sofie isn’t going ahead with the pregnancy. But is it too late for th
e pills?’
‘Abortifacients can be used safely up to ten weeks.’
‘You’d say she’s definitely under ten weeks?’
‘She needs an ultrasound to say for sure. But probably.’
I decide to take a chance. ‘Is there any way you can prescribe the pills?’
She shakes her head. ‘I’d lose my licence. Worst-case scenario, I’d go to jail.’
‘Sorry!’ I’m mortified for even asking.
‘Why is it so illegal?’ Sofie asks.
Dr Conlon sighs. ‘Now there’s a question.’ She looks at us and there’s definitely compassion there. ‘Book the ultrasound as fast as possible.’ She picks up some pages and gives them to me. ‘Details of a few organizations who can give information, addresses in the UK, et cetera. A word of advice, if you use abortifacients bought online and someone reports it, you’re liable for fourteen years in jail each.’
‘That’s crazy,’ Sofie exclaims, all indignation and disbelief. ‘They should mind their own beeswax! This is my thing, my decision.’ This is what you get when a politically clueless seventeen-year-old finds her needs crashing against the limitations of the legal system.
‘Also, Sofie,’ the doctor says, ‘see a counsellor. Talk things through. It’s a decision you don’t want to regret.’
‘I won’t regret it!’ Sofie curls in on herself. ‘I can’t bring a person like me into the world. I’m so scared.’ She collapses into a wild storm of sobs. ‘I looked it up. Only two per cent of girls regret abortions and I won’t be one of them.’
‘Still.’ Dr Conlon is firm. ‘It can’t do any harm.’
In the car, I phone for a scan, and the earliest appointment at the hospital is next Monday. This is a worry, time is tight, but what can I do? I dearly wish we’d sprung for the spendier health insurance that would have allowed us to waltz in any time of the day or night (or so the ads would have you believe) and get any procedure we wanted.
Then I square my shoulders. ‘Sofie, you do know there are alternatives. Like you could have the baby and let it be adopted.’
‘Amy!’ She’s shrill with fear. ‘That would be worse than having it and keeping it, because I’d be worrying that it would be like me but I wouldn’t know.’ She begins to cry again. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be this scared.’