“We’re not that sort of organisation,” I said, the tears dripping onto my desk. “I have to take what’s given to me. It’s a new one every day.”
The woman on the other end of the phone softened, moved by my lack of conviction. “Oh, pet. It’s the recession, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“You should try to get a better job.”
“Do you know of any?”
“No.”
My manager, who was next to me, took the receiver out of my hand and finished the call. Then she brought me into her office and told me that if I didn’t cop on I would lose my job.
James was working six days a week in the bookshop now. Almost everyone else had been let go by that point. We never understood why he was always kept on, except for an, as yet, unproved theory that Ben was closeted, too. When we came home in the evening we talked past one another, poor receptacles for the other’s unhappiness because we were both so brimming with our own.
It was only a few days, I realise now, but it felt like a year.
I had made the choice not to tell Carey. I knew it would devastate him, and I suspected that—despite us never talking about it—he didn’t have wholly positive things to say about abortion. There was something ancient and Catholic in him, a pure defiant streak of old Rome that had been strong in his family and kept alive by living in the North. He wore a miraculous medal. He knew his saints.
I didn’t want to argue with Carey about abortion, but I didn’t want to burden him with it either. It seemed like I had unwittingly ruined the lives of so many people, and I didn’t want to ruin his, too. He was already going through so much.
And so I ignored phone calls. I gave curt responses to texts. I resolved that, after the abortion, and when the fog had cleared, I would resume being his long-distance girlfriend. But even then, I knew it was doomed. Carey could be at home for months, maybe years. I realised, with a stunning pain to the heart, that I might never see him again.
And then on Thursday I found the clot.
I was at work when it happened. I left my desk and walked across the by-pass to call the clinic. I was eventually passed on to the nurse who had spoken to James and me. I told her what I had found.
“Did you keep it?” she asked.
“No, I…” I was astounded by the question. “I was planning to get rid of it.”
“The clot. Did you keep the clot?”
“Oh. No. I flushed it.”
She tutted, like I had cut the tags off a dress I was trying to return.
“What did it look like? Liver?”
“Yes.” I nodded, remembering the dark, shining substance. “Yeah, liver.”
“All right. We better make you an appointment, then.”
“At the clinic?”
“No, at the hospital.”
She was moving through every step too quickly, and it frightened me. I kept begging her to slow down and explain things to me, but she had already moved on to the next phase of planning.
“I can get you in tomorrow morning? Ten a.m.?”
“I have work.”
“Well, that’s all I can do,” she said.
“Am I miscarrying?”
“I can’t diagnose that over the phone. You need to go to A&E, if you can’t make an appointment.”
“Is this what it would look like, though? If I were miscarrying?”
She took a moment to answer. “Yes. It would look quite like this. Do you want the appointment, or will you go to A&E?”
“I’ll take the appointment,” I said weakly, and hung up the phone. I stood at the side of the road, wearing a blazer over jeans, in a look that my mother described as “smart casual” but made me look like an estate agent.
I’ve tried not to stay angry at the nurse. Sexual health clinics have never been particularly well funded or well staffed in Ireland, and she was probably thinking of the abortion she had to cancel, and the other girl she could slide into my appointment’s place.
There was a petrol station near the call centre. I bought a packet of the thickest Kotex pads I could find and went back to work.
I wish I had more to say about the clots, or the appointment the next day that confirmed the end of my pregnancy, or the days of heavy bleeding that felt like they might go on for ever. Those days have always been a strange, cold shadow in my memory. Years ago, I asked James what they were like, and what I was like during them.
“You were miles away,” he said. “I was afraid your brain had broken for ever.”
“In what way?”
“Like you’d butter some toast and walk away from it. Do up your buttons wrong. Be all chatty and hyper one minute, then all gloomy and distant the next.”
“God.”
“If you weren’t looking closely, you would have seemed fine.”
“Right.”
“But I was looking closely, so.”
There seemed no right way to feel. I was conscious that I had been let off the hook and that I should be grateful. I wouldn’t have to go on a frightening trip to England, and I wouldn’t have to bankrupt myself doing it. I knew that this was a net positive overall. But I could not shake the feeling that Carey’s baby had died inside me because I was rotten, and did rotten things. I bled for so long that I started thinking of myself as a person who had made a bad bargain with the fairies. I had got my gold, and now I was paying for it.
Then my mother called.
“We really think you should reconsider this graduation thing, Rachel,” she said sternly.
I felt like I was drowning and someone was asking about my tax return. “Oh?”
“It would mean a lot to your father,” she continued. “He’s very low. He needs a day out.”
“It’s too late anyway, Mum. All this stuff is arranged months in advance. Seating and gown rental or whatever.”
“Don’t mind all that,” she said. “If you can sort the gown, I can sort the rest.”
I didn’t see how. My graduation was Monday, on what had once been the planned date of my abortion. “What do you mean, ‘sort the gown,’ Mum?” I said. “How on earth am I meant to ‘sort the gown’? I don’t have any connections at Big Gown. I have no idea where you even get them. It’s all done through the college.”
“You’ve gone very ratty,” she said.
“I’m just trying to be realistic.”
“Listen, I’ll call the college. We’ll pick up the degree, take a few photos, go for a nice lunch. We’ll bring James. What’s wrong with that?”
I had already taken two days off, for my appointment and for my miscarriage, and knew I was on thin ice at the call centre. I phoned my manager and asked for the time off. She sighed.
“Rachel, I think it’s better if you don’t come back in. I’m not sure if this is the right fit for you.”
“Will I still get paid for my sick days?”
“What? No.”
I hung up the phone.