“Or we could sit in my car?” Kate suggests as if she understands. Maybe she does. I don’t know why, but I trust her to understand.
In the car, she starts with gentle questions, asking if anyone else had known. Had Jude or Barbara Walker known?
I shake my head.
And she says: “How did you keep it a secret? You must have been so scared.”
There’s no judgment in her tone, just empathy. She isn’t telling me to stop talking about it like Harry. She doesn’t think I’m mad.
I want to tell her about the lies and hiding my pregnancy in big jumpers and I know she will listen.
SIXTY-FOUR
Emma
SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 2012
At first, I couldn’t believe it,” I say. “I told myself you couldn’t get pregnant from one time. Told myself periods came and went at my age—all the agony aunts in the magazines said so. Told myself I’d counted the weeks wrong. Told myself I was putting on weight because I was eating too many sweets. Told myself the fluttering in my stomach was anxiety over exams.
“But my body was telling another story.”
Kate puts her head on one side. “Oh, Emma,” she breathes.
“When the sickness started, I thought I had food poisoning. My mum had had it and I’d looked after her. But mine didn’t get better and I was retching most mornings, turning on the taps in the bathroom so no one could hear me and spraying the room with deodorant so they couldn’t smell my disgrace.”
I turn to Kate. I need her to know that I wasn’t a stupid girl. I was a bit of an innocent about boys and sex, but I wasn’t stupid.
“I know it’s hard for anyone else to believe—especially now, when sex is everywhere—but even though I knew what was happening, I thought I could will it away. I didn’t consider an abortion or drinking gin in a hot bath. That would’ve meant admitting it was real.
“I believed I could stop it by the power of thought. I would ‘get better,’ as if it was just an illness. I hadn’t even worked out when the baby was due to be born. It wasn’t going to happen.”
Kate shifts in her seat beside me and rummages in her bag for a tissue and hands it to me. I hadn’t realized I was crying.
“But Emma,” she says, “how did no one notice what was going on? It must have been so obvious.”
“Well, they didn’t. I didn’t let them. I led a double life: Emma the schoolgirl and Emma the girl who’d got herself in trouble.
“But it couldn’t last. The truth was battering down the door, demanding to be acknowledged, like a madwoman in the attic. I suppose it was a kind of madness.”
“You must have been out of your mind with worry. And at that age. How did you cope?” Kate says.
“I don’t know, now. But it’s when the dread started, that overwhelming feeling that the world is about to end.”
“But what about when your pregnancy started to show?” Kate says.
“That was the worst part,” I say. “I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror. My stomach wouldn’t stop growing. I wrapped it tightly in scarves and I wore big jumpers and I stayed in my room, away from friends and family, saying I needed my own space. I was terrified they would see and know.
“Sideways, I was sure you could tell, so I became obsessed with always standing head-on with my mum, Jude, and I stopped hugging her. I could see she was hurt when I pushed her away, but I couldn’t risk it.”
I can’t stop talking now. Now that I’ve started. And I tell Kate how I took my meals upstairs to eat. “Jude wasn’t happy but her boyfriend, Will, told her not to make a fuss. He was glad to get me out of the way. And as my stomach grew, I piled more food on my plate to throw away later so I’d have an excuse for my weight gain.”
I was so resourceful. My quick brain spotting the dangers.
I almost feel proud of my child self. I would have got an A grade for deception.
Kate is nodding and never takes her eyes off me. I know she wants to ask lots more questions about how I got pregnant and what happened to my baby, but there is too much to tell. I have to let it out a little at a time or it will flood out and drown me. I feel dizzy. As if my head is going to explode.
“What happened when you went into labor, Emma? You couldn’t hide that,” she says.
“No, it was like a nightmare,” I say. “But I was on my own.
“It happened so quickly, the actual birth. I’d had some pain in my back for a day or so and then I wet myself and my stomach went rigid. It was my body but not my body, if you know what I mean. It just went out of control, and every time the pain came, worse and worse, I held on to the edge of the bath and shouted myself hoarse. I thought I was going to die. I remember calling for my mum, knowing she wasn’t there. Knowing I was alone. I had to be. No one could know.”
Kate is gripping my hand like I gripped the bath. And the deep-buried memories are crowding in on me, banging on the door to get in.
I can see myself, as if through a window. When the thing slithered out, shiny and steaming in the cold bathroom, I lay in the mess of blood and sheets on the linoleum beside it. It just grew cold beside me.
It wasn’t like it said in the pamphlets. While other girls at school were secretly reading the one copy of Fear of Flying, I’d been looking at booklets about placentas and cords, stolen secretly from a hospital waiting room. The words made me want to throw up but I read on, just in case.
In the bathroom, I cut the cord with scissors from the first aid kit and wrapped it and the other stuff that had come out of me in a copy of the Sunday Times from the box beside the front door. I turned on the taps of the bath and climbed into the lukewarm water, watching the shreds of blood move around me.
“It’s the silence after the shouting I remember,” I tell Kate.
“I’d been lucky. Jude and Will were at work. It was just me and the thing. I don’t remember looking at it, but I must have done. Like when there is something scary on the television and you watch through your fingers so you don’t see the full horror. I’ve got no memory of its face. I don’t even know if it was a boy or a girl.”
“Oh my God, is this the first time you’ve told anyone this?” Kate asks.
“Yes,” I say. “I tried to tell Harry once but she didn’t understand what I was saying. And I couldn’t tell anyone else. You see, I did something terrible.”
“What did you do, Emma?” she says gently. “Did you do something to your baby?”
“I buried it,” I say.
SIXTY-FIVE
Emma
SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 2012
Kate stops talking when I say I buried the baby.
I can hear my voice, as if it is someone else’s, telling her that burying the baby was easy.
“It was like burying my pet rabbit when I was nine,” I’m saying. “I wrapped it in newspaper and a carrier bag so you couldn’t even tell what it was. I dug a hole in the garden and put it in and just scraped the dirt over it. It only took a few minutes and it was gone.
“I dragged the big pot that my mum had planted with daffodils over the top. You could see the little green tops, just poking through. Then I walked back to the house.”
I remember thinking that all I had to do was throw away the bloody towel I’d used and it would be as if nothing had happened. Everything back to normal. I was so young. I didn’t know that nothing was ever going to be normal again. I remember I put my hand on my empty stomach and it felt like a balloon at the end of a birthday party, soft and puckered. I twisted the loose skin through my jumper to see if it was still me. To feel something. Anything.
“Stupidly, I’d thought the danger would end when I’d given birth,” I tell the reporter.