For the rest of the evening, I tried very hard to maintain a buoyant mood. All three of us did. We upheld the pretence of being a normal family, although we probably sensed that normal was a thing of the past.
I wondered whether there was a part of me that had wanted my mother to challenge our decision. Her surprising and unquestioning acquiescence and her desire to keep the truth hidden away had prodded at a ball of shame, lodged somewhere deep inside me that I hadn’t known was there. I was taken right back to the doctor’s box of tissues on the mantle, to my inability to cry, to the strange embarrassment I had felt about being infertile, about being imperfect, about being desperate. The memory of those messy, disturbing feelings overwhelmed me. I wanted to crawl into bed and pull the duvet over my head and sleep like the dead.
I looked at my watch. My jaw clicked as I yawned.
‘I’ve got to be up in four hours for an early meeting.’
Tomorrow, I would be slinking out of the house before everyone woke up.
Chapter Forty-Seven
URGENT
Dear Mrs E (I can’t spell it, sorry)
Can I come to your shed please? Please bring some chocolate biscuits.
Love,
Rosie.
P.S. I really like the dark chocolate digestives.
* * *
Mira had found Rosie’s note in the blue bucket just before she left for work. The lined notepaper had almost broken apart in her fingers, suggesting it had been in the damp air all night. Mira had sent back a mini-gingerbread man wrapped with a reply:
Dear Rosie,
Do please come over any time after four thirty today. Eat his toes off first!
Love Mrs E.
* * *
The blue bucket had flung itself about on the dank line as though the gingerbread man was on a rough sea, which had made Mira giggle. It reminded her of how much joy she had felt when Rosie had first moved in and delivered her I’m called Rosie and I’m 3 note, which she had kept in a drawer with all her other cards from her children at Woodland’s.
Having returned the latest blue bucket message, Mira had been distracted all day at school, counting down the minutes until she could leave.
At four o’clock she raced to the supermarket to buy the biscuits, and then to the garden centre for some seeds, which she took straight to the shed.
With two pairs of socks on to keep her toes warm, and the radio to keep her company, she shook out the soil into green trays ready for her cabbage and leek seeds.
There had been no time or date on the note from Rosie, but she suspected she meant after school sometime today. Or maybe after dark. Either way, Mira planned to wait in the shed all night if she had to.
It had been about a quarter past five when Rosie had burst in on her.
‘Did you get the biscuits?’ Rosie said, out of breath. Her ponytail skewed to one side, a sore rough patch edging her bottom lip.
Mira gave her the packet of biscuits.
‘I’m really hungry,’ she said, picking at the packet frantically, checking behind her at the door, her breathing ragged.
‘Give them back to me, Rosie,’ Mira said sternly.
Rosie stopped fidgeting, and handed them over.
‘Sit down and calm down.’
She sat down, but her teeth bit at her bottom lip and her eyes darted behind her frequently.
‘Nobody followed you here did they?’
‘No, definitely not,’ she said earnestly.
Mira gave her a biscuit. Rosie nibbled it around the edge with quick mouse-like bites. ‘I’ve’ – nibble – ‘got’ – nibble – ‘to get’ – nibble, nibble – ‘get back in ten minutes.’
Mira was bitterly disappointed. She had hoped for some more time with Rosie.
‘Your note said urgent. Is something the matter?’
‘It’s so urgent I can’t even tell you.’ She was leaning forward, gesticulating at Mira, waving the half-chewed biscuit above her head.
‘You know you can trust me.’
‘Cross your heart, hope to die, stick a cupcake in your eye?’
Mira tried not to laugh at this reworking of the phrase. ‘Yes, cross my heart.’
‘I think I’m adopted,’ Rosie blurted out, stuffing the rest of the biscuit into her mouth and taking another.
Mira wiped her mouth, tasting metallic earth, soil across her lips. She stared bug-eyed at Rosie, who she had never thought looked like her mother. Her whole body flushed with heat.
At first Mira couldn’t hear any sound coming out of her mouth, so she cleared her throat. ‘Why do you think that?’ But it had come out too loudly.
Rosie’s chin dimpled and her face crumpled. ‘I heard her say that Catrina Doo-doo Shitface or something mega weird was my real mummy,’ she cried, her face mottling red and white. The bad language was like needles in Mira’s eardrums.
‘Are you certain?’
Rosie spoke through sobs. ‘I opened my window in my bedroom to tell Mummy not to go in the car but then Granny Helen came out and they argued and I heard it.’
Mira knew she should go to Rosie, to hug her, but she was rooted to the spot, looking on at the child as though she were a stranger or an apparition.
‘When did this all happen?’
‘Last night.’
‘Didn’t you ask them about it today?’
‘Mummy had a work meeting and I was too scared to ask Daddy or Granny Helen.’
‘Why were you scared to ask your daddy?’
‘I’m worried that my daddy isn’t my real daddy either,’ she cried, heaving out her tears, her little shoulders rounded, her arms wrapped across her stomach as if it ached.
‘Shut up,’ Mira snapped.
Rosie held her breath, stunned by Mira’s outburst, but her face fell apart again and quieter tears rolled, one after the other, down her cheeks. ‘I thought you were nice,’ she sniffed.
‘I am nice, but you don’t want Mummy or Daddy to hear us, do you?’ Mira knew that nobody could hear them. The shed was too far from the house.
Rosie’s expression darkened. ‘Why don’t you call them Peter and Gemma?’
Mira didn’t like her melodramatics and she turned to her soil trays and ripped open a seed packet.
‘It’s not such a bad thing to be adopted, is it?’
‘What? Are you kidding me?’ Rosie shrieked.
Mira’s jaw tightened. ‘You’ve got a roof over your head and food on the table, haven’t you? It’s not so bad.’
‘How can you say that? It would be the worst thing in the whole world!’
‘It depends who your birth parents are, doesn’t it? They might be murderers and rapists.’
Rosie looked petrified. ‘What are rapists?’
‘Horrible, horrible people.’
‘If they’re horrible then that means I’m probably all horrible too, just like them.’
‘Don’t be silly, you’re not all horrible.’
‘Mummy thinks I am.’
‘Your mummy is the horrible one.’
‘Don’t say that! I want her to be my real mummy!’ Rosie sobbed, her face paler with each juddering breath.
Mira raised her voice, ‘Your real mummy is the mummy who gives birth to you, and don’t you forget it.’ Black spots were swimming before her eyes and headiness weakened her knees. ‘Your real mummy loves you so much.’ Mira groaned, dropping to her knees, holding the side of the workbench with both hands as she let her head hang between her arms.
She breathed, short and sharp, in and out, holding on to the bench. Her mind blanked, and short-circuited to the past. She was in labour, holding onto a metal hospital bed, hanging her head, holding the plastic mask to her face, delirious with the pain. The stretching and cramping was more like a ripping of flesh; a torture wrack rigged to her womb, twisting the handle, pulling her insides apart, until she thought she might die. Never could she have imagined such agony, such a possession. She moaned as the contraction began and, as it built to its excruciating heights, she roared like an animal.
‘Push, Mira, push, that’s it. I can see Baby’s head, good, that’s it, push... And again, good girl, push,’ the midwife insisted.
And then similar to a black-out, the final push, where she left her body behind to break through barriers of pain into the unimaginable new world of motherhood.