by Alice Feeney
She enjoys the sound of snow being compacted beneath her feet, it’s the only noise to dent the silence, apart from the distant clicking of bats. She likes to watch them swooping over the loch at night, it’s a rather beautiful sight to see. Robin read recently that bats give birth to their babies while hanging upside down. Then they have to catch their children before they fall too far, but that part is the same for all parents. Her path tonight is lit by the light of a full moon, without it the night sky would be a sea of black, as the clouds have hidden all but the brightest stars again now. But that’s OK: Robin has never been afraid of the dark.
She isn’t bothered by a snow storm or howling wind, and she doesn’t mind being cut off from the rest of the world for a few days – it’s not so different from her normal routine if she’s honest. And Robin does always try to be truthful. Especially with herself. She has got used to living here now, even though she only planned to stay for a short while when she arrived. Life makes other plans when people forget to live. Weeks turned into months, and months turned into years, and when what happened, happened, she knew she couldn’t leave.
The visitors won’t be able to leave when they want to either. Not that they know that yet. It’s impossible not to feel a tiny bit sorry for them.
Robin reaches their snow-covered car and stops for a moment. She recognised the man as soon as he got out, and the memory of it winds her. She didn’t know if she’d ever see him again. Wasn’t even sure she wanted to. He’s older now, but she rarely forgets a face, and could never forget his. Her mind wanders back in time, and she thinks about what happened when he was a boy. What he saw and what he didn’t. The story is as tragic now as it was then, and Robin wonders if he still has the nightmares about the woman in red. She thinks the time has come for him to be told the truth, but he isn’t going to like it. People rarely do.
When Robin reaches the chapel’s large wooden doors, she takes one last look around, but there is nobody here to see what she is about to do. The moonlight that was kind enough to light her path reveals the loch and the mountains in the distance, and she can’t help but notice how unspoilt and beautiful this place is. People who do ugly things do not belong here, she thinks, as she looks at the visitors’ Morris Minor covered in snow. It’s her favourite kind of weather, because the snow covers the world in a beautiful blanket of white, hiding everything that is dark and ugly underneath.
Life is like a game where pawns can become queens, but not everyone knows how to play. Some people stay pawns their whole lives because they never learned to make the right moves. This is just the beginning. Nobody has played their cards yet because they didn’t know they were being dealt.
Robin takes a key from her coat pocket and quietly lets herself inside the chapel.
Linen
Word of the year:
hornswoggle verb to get the better of someone by cheating or deception.
29th February 2012 – our fourth anniversary
Dear Adam,
I feel as though we have always shared the same dreams – and nightmares – but it’s been a difficult year. You let me down should have been by my side, but you weren’t. I sat in the waiting room alone and afraid, despite you promising to be there with me.
After three years of trying, two years of appointments, a whole cast of different doctors and nurses, seemingly endless trips to hospitals and clinics for the last twelve months, and one failed round of IVF, I feel broken. This was not how I wanted to spend our anniversary.
I should have known today would be awful, it didn’t start well.
Two young dogs were rescued last night from a flat in South London. They were brought to Battersea and I was one of the first to see them. Despite all my years in this job, even I was shocked. The beagles had been left alone for a long time. The on-call vet guessed at least a week. If they hadn’t drunk water from the toilet they would have been dead already. Their emaciated bodies made them look like toys with all the stuffing pulled out. We did everything we could to try and save them, but they died this morning. In the end there was nothing more we could do and it was kinder to put them down. Their owner was on holiday in Spain and I wish we could have given her a lethal injection instead. Sometimes I despise human beings, so maybe it is just as well we’ve never been able to make one.
We were supposed to meet at London Bridge at one o’clock this afternoon. I’ve been having problems sleeping recently, I’m exhausted, but I was still there and on time. Because the appointment at the fertility clinic was important to me. I thought it was important to us, but you’ve been more selfish distracted than ever lately. I was worried you might forget, so I texted to remind you.
Five times.
You didn’t reply.
On this occasion I really do think you should have put your wife before your writing.
London Bridge was busy and loud, and not just with commuters. Men in hard hats seemed to be everywhere when I stepped outside the station, and there was an impressive collection of cranes blocking my view of the sky. The Shard is very much under construction and, according to the passers-by that I eavesdropped on, it is going to be the tallest building in Europe. I’m sure it will be for a while. Until someone builds something taller. I’m willing to bet it won’t take long, because humans are always trying to outdo one another.
Even when they pretend to care.
I called you when I reached the entrance of the clinic. Your phone rang twice before being diverted to voicemail. I know who you were with. A producer who has shown an interest in your first ever screenplay: Rock Paper Scissors. It’s the manuscript I found in a drawer that inspired me to write secret letters of my own, to you. A flicker of attention from someone in the business about a story you have written, opposed to an adaptation of someone else’s, and you’re like a dog in heat. I wonder if all writers are ego maniacs with low self-esteem? Or is it just you? You said the lunch meeting with her wouldn’t take long, but I guess getting your firstborn into production was more important than us making a real child of our own.
Our GP referred us to the clinic in London Bridge. Eventually. Everything to do with us trying for a child has been a battle from day one. I just never thought it would result in us fighting with each other. I’ve become familiar with the sterile, soulless place over the last few months. If I were to add up all the hours that I sat in that waiting room – often alone – I suspect I must have spent several days of my life there. Waiting for something I always knew might never happen.
It took months to get an appointment, followed by several more months of being prodded, poked, and interviewed by counsellors who intruded into our most private sorrow. Looking back now, I sometimes wonder how we managed to survive this long. Whenever I felt most alone, I told myself that you loved me and that I loved you. It became a silent mantra inside my head, there to steady me whenever it felt like I might fall. But our marriage isn’t as solid or stable as I thought.
I know you found the appointments difficult. I’m sure stepping into a private room, being able to lock the door, choose some porn to look at, and jerk off into a sample pot must be very stressful. Sorry. I don’t wish to belittle your experience, but I think most right-minded people would agree that your contribution to this process was less dramatic, albeit still psychologically invasive.
I’ve had to spread my legs, sometimes for a room full of doctors and nurses, and let them put metal instruments in my body. The same strangers have seen me naked, scanned me, felt me, touched me, some of them even put their hands inside me. I’ve been tested, repeatedly stuck with needles, pumped full of drugs, put to sleep and operated on. I’ve had my eggs harvested, pissed blood for days afterwards, and couldn’t stand, let alone walk due to crippling pain after a bungled operation. But we got through it, together. You said everything would be OK. You promised, and I believed you.
After all, other people have children.
People we know, people we don’t. They make it look so easy. Some of them ev
en get pregnant by accident, they don’t even have to try. Some of them kill the children growing inside them, because they didn’t want them in the first place. Some people we know didn’t want to have children, but had them anyway. Because they could. Because everyone else does. Everyone except us. That’s how it feels: as though we are the only couple in history that this has happened to. Sometimes it’s even worse than that: it feels as if I am alone in the world, and that you are the one who abandoned me.
I wanted a baby so badly that it physically hurt. Then today, at our first appointment after our second – and possibly final – round of IVF, you weren’t there.
You weren’t there when the receptionist called us and I had to go into that room alone. Or when the man we nicknamed Doctor Doom sat down behind his desk, and gestured to the two empty chairs opposite him. Or while we waited for you in awkward silence, and he checked his folder to remind himself of our names. The clinic never really treated us like human beings, more like lonely walking chequebooks.
Worst of all, you weren’t there to hear the news we had been waiting for.
After everything we have been through, the doctor finally said that I was pregnant.
I didn’t believe him at first.
I made him repeat it. Then made him check the file, convinced he was reading the results from someone else’s notes. But it was true.
Doctor Doom even got me to lie on the bed and scanned my tummy. He pointed out a tiny speck on the screen and said it was our embryo. The contents of your sample pot and my egg, grown together in a lab, had been successfully implanted in my womb, and it was there on the screen. Alive and growing inside me.
You missed it.
You arrived in the reception of the clinic just as I was leaving, and when you started trying to explain, I told you not to bother. I’m sick of hearing you talk about your work as if it’s the only thing that matters. You make shit up for a living and your agent sells it. I think it’s about time you all got over yourselves. The producers, directors, actors, and authors you tell me stories about sound like a class of spoilt children, and I don’t understand why you indulge them, or their temper tantrums. You’ve been truly hornswoggled by at least one of them, even if you are too blind to see it.
I’m sorry. I hope you never find this letter and in the unlikely event that you do, I didn’t mean what I said. I’m just hurting too much right now; and that hurt needs somewhere to go. It breaks my heart sometimes, the way you give these people all of your time and save none of yourself for me. I’m your wife. My stories are real. Does that make them not worth listening to?
I wanted to get the Tube, but you insisted we take a cab. I refused to speak to you for the first half of the journey. I’m sorry for that now, too, but I’ve never been one to wash my dirty linen in public. I do wish I’d told you sooner, though. We could have been happier for longer than we were.
I didn’t tell you until we got home. I’d already laid the kitchen table with a linen cloth – an anniversary should always be celebrated – but my face gave the news away when I took a bottle of champagne from the new Smeg fridge. Renovating the house has helped keep me busy and take my mind off other things. The ground floor is finally finished, and I’m proud that I did most of the work myself: sanding floors, plastering walls, making roman blinds – it’s amazing what you can learn just by watching a few videos on YouTube.
You cried when I told you I was pregnant. I cried when I showed you the scan. Having dreamed of that moment for so long, that black-and-white image was the only thing that made any of it feel real. Because you weren’t there to hear it, I kept worrying that I might have imagined what the doctor said.
‘I hope it’s a girl,’ I whispered.
‘Why? I hope it’s a boy. Let’s rock paper scissors for it.’
I laughed. ‘You want to play rock paper scissors to determine the sex of our unborn child?’
‘Is there a more scientific way?’ you replied, with a serious face.
My scissors cut your paper, just like always.
‘You let me win!’ I said.
‘Yes, because I don’t really mind whether it’s a boy or a girl. I’ll love them either way, but I’ll always love you more.’
You opened the champagne – I only had a small glass – and we ordered a pizza.
‘I didn’t forget our anniversary, by the way,’ you said, gorging on your third slice of Pepperoni Passion an hour later.
‘Is that so?’ I asked, sipping lemonade from a champagne flute.
‘I struggled with the linen theme, and this morning I was worried I’d bought the wrong thing—’
‘So give it to me now. Then you’ll know.’
You reached inside the leather satchel I had given you the year before, and handed me a square parcel. It was soft. I’m normally so careful when I unwrap things, but I was aware the pizza was getting cold so tore at the paper. There was a linen cushion inside. It had my name stitched on it along with the following words beneath:
She believed she could, so she did.
I tried not to, but I cried again. Happy tears. It felt as if you’d already known I was pregnant. You believed in me, even when I wasn’t able to believe in myself.
I was about to thank you, when I looked up and noticed the strange expression on your face. You were staring down at my legs and when I followed your gaze I could see why. A thick trickle of bright red blood had made its way right down to my slippers. When I stood up in panic, there was more.
According to the first doctor we saw in A&E, I wasn’t pregnant long enough to call it a miscarriage. The gynaecologist who examined me next was a little more sympathetic, but not much. Looking back now, I wish I’d never told you at all – you wouldn’t be able to grieve for something you never knew you had. And I’m sorry and broken enough for both of us.
I went straight to our bedroom when we got home, even let Bob stretch out on the end of the bed. I tried crying myself to sleep, but it didn’t work, nothing does. I might talk to the GP about getting some sleeping pills. I noticed that my watch had stopped at three minutes past eight, and I wondered if that was the exact time our baby died. I took the watch off my wrist and I don’t want to see it, or wear it, ever again. I’ll always remember what you said when you came upstairs and held me:
‘I love you. Always have, always will.’
‘Not almost always?’ I asked, trying to make you smile, even though I was broken. But you didn’t. Smile. Instead, you looked more serious than I have ever seen you.
‘Always always. I’m so sorry that we can’t seem to have children, because I know how much it means to you, and what a wonderful mother you would be. But it doesn’t change a thing for me. I’m with you for life, no matter what, because this is our family: you, me, and Bob. We don’t need anyone or anything else. Nothing will ever change that.’
But words can’t fix everything, no matter how fond you are of them.
Hours later, when you were sleeping but I still couldn’t, I thought I may as well get up and come downstairs. Bob followed me, as if he knew something was very wrong. I put the cold, uneaten pizza – which was still where we had left it when I started to bleed – in the bin, along with the linen cushion you had given me. The words stitched on it are too painful to ever read again. You believed that I could, then briefly I did. Now I’m not sure of anything. I don’t know who I’m supposed to be if I can’t be the me I dreamed I would be. And I don’t know what that means for us.
I have grown fond of writing letters I will never let you read. I find it cathartic. They make me feel better, even though I know it would destroy you if you found them. That’s why I hide them away. I’ll keep the scan from the hospital with this one. A reminder of what we almost had. I’ve already tucked it inside the envelope the clinic gave me with my name on:
Mrs. A. Wright.
I’m holding it now. Can’t quite let go. The receptionist used swirly handwriting on my initial, as though it were something pretty. I
remember when we got married, and I first took your surname, I practised signing my new signature for weeks with swirly letters of my own. I was so happy to be your wife, but none of the wishes I’ve made since have come true. I think that might be my fault, not yours. I hope that if you ever find out the truth, you’ll be able to forgive me and love me no matter what. Always always. Like you promised.
Your wife
xx
Amelia
I hear another noise downstairs in the chapel and I know I’m not imagining it.
I reach blindly for the light switch by the bed, but it doesn’t work. Either there has been another power cut – which seems odd if there is a generator – or someone has cut the power. I try not to allow my overactive imagination to make this experience even scarier than it is. I tell myself that there must be a rational explanation. But then I hear the unmistakable sound of a footstep at the bottom of the creaking stairs.
I hold my breath, determined to hear nothing but silence.
But there is another groan from elderly floorboards, followed by another creak, and the sound of someone climbing the staircase is getting louder. And closer. I have to cover my mouth with my hand to stop myself from screaming when the footsteps stop right outside the bedroom door.
I want to reach for Adam but I am frozen with fear.
When I hear the sound of the door handle start to turn, I practically fall out of the bed in my hurry to get away from whoever is out there, and wish that I was wearing more than just a flimsy nightdress. I grip the unfamiliar furniture, feeling my way in the shadows, walking as quickly and quietly as I can towards the bathroom. I’m fairly sure its door had a lock. As soon as I find what I’m looking for, I close the door behind me and barricade myself inside. The light switch doesn’t work in here either, but maybe that’s a good thing.