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 some 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.