All Sarah seems to do these days is make lists of things she needs for when the baby comes. Nobody asks how she’ll pay for them. Or where the baby will sleep. Or what Sarah will do for money. Or why Sarah won’t ask their mum and that piece of shit for some cash. They have more than they need.
Robin likes the idea of being an aunt, loves the idea of some fresh untainted blood around the house, but the inertia of the adults turns her stomach.
What will it take for them to do anything?
SARAH|1998
We watched a comedy rerun tonight, but neither of us was in the mood to laugh. Robin was tired, a bit grumpy. Had that heavy forehead she gets, loaded with things she wants to say. I just hoped she wasn’t going to ask me—again—about the baby’s dad. Every single day, I choose to be happy about the baby and I choose to smear a thick black line over the memory of its creation. That’s the only way to survive, to keep my baby pure.
Robin’s been spending more time with her band recently, rehearsing in bedrooms and garages and occasionally village halls that I’m not entirely sure they have permission to be in. Some weekends they play at weddings and she comes back with pockets full of tenners and slices of cake.
Dad and Hilary are out, dinner with a regular customer of Dad’s who has a big enough house and garden to need regular landscaping. Robin and I peeled away from each other on the landing and went to bed early, plodding into our respective rooms. I felt full and warm, my scalp beating with the central heating, my blood thick and heavy. Robin dragged herself into her room. I heard her putting music on—I think Jimi Hendrix, but I don’t know. That’s not my forte.
I don’t know if she’s fallen asleep yet, but I haven’t. My eyelids are heavy but my brain is twitchy. Too many things squirming to climb out from under thick black lines.
Suddenly the front door bangs open downstairs. It’s too early for Dad and Hilary. There are heavy footsteps crashing up the stairs and I sit up, instinctively putting a pillow over my belly.
I hear the flurry of footsteps crunching along the landing and someone pushing a nearby bedroom door open. I hear Robin yell with that gale-force voice: “Hey, what the fuck do you want?”
I hear a male voice snipe, “Wrong room, you idiot!”
Robin’s bedsprings squeal urgently. I don’t know what to do or who it is. And then I hear her say, “What the fuck do you want, Cal?”
Mumbling, moaning, swearing. The thud of feet along the hall to Dad and Hilary’s room, doors banging open, male voices mumbling, Robin yelling now. “What the fuck are you doing, Cal?”
“Get back in your box,” I hear a voice say. I can only guess it’s Rez.
My knees tremble. I feel a sloop in my gut that I think could be, could be, the baby. I don’t want my baby’s first fluttering movements to be out of fear, so I swallow the thought away. That has to come on another day. Another thick black line.
“The fuck you say to me?” I hear Robin spit. “You pair of dicks barge into my house and tell me where to go? Get the fuck out of here.” She sounds weary, but the dismissive tone is replaced with something else and she cries, “Get off me!”
I hear Callum’s voice clearly for the first time. He sounds relatively calm. “Don’t, Rez. Robin, just let us get this stuff and we’ll go.”
Should I hide in my room with my baby bump or help my sister? I don’t know what to do, but inaction feels worse than action, so I stand up and step out quietly into the hall. A few feet away on the landing, Robin and Rez are tussling in the dim light. He’s much taller than her and bending like a reed. Callum, exasperated, is trying to separate them. “Give that stuff back!” Robin’s screaming, grasping at Callum’s pockets while he tries to pry her fingers away. Rez looks panicky.
“How could you, Callum?” Robin yells.
“He’s owed it,” Rez says, his voice soft but cold.
Robin struggles free, kicks back wildly and catches him somewhere near the crotch. “You’re not though.”
Rez and Callum both reach for Robin. I don’t know what they’re going to do, but without thinking I run at them, pushing Rez.
I hear Robin pleading with me not to and Callum yelling at me to leave it. I realize he’s drunk again, or maybe stoned. I feel hands shunt me around. I feel fingertips on my fingertips and it not being enough. The feel of the top-stair carpet under the arch of my foot, the swooping tickle of it, the lurching sickness in my gut.
I open my eyes at the bottom of the stairs and close them again.
I open them again in the bright light of an ambulance.
I see Robin’s tears. I see her rage. A twin fury that passes through me too and burns so hot and so bright that I pass out from it.
—
“I shouldn’t be in hospital yet,” I croak. They just look at me, big-eyed and nervous.
My appointment isn’t for a couple of days. My scan, it’s not yet. “Too soon.” I hear my muffled voice, the words drawling slowly from a mouth that doesn’t feel like it belongs in my head.
The sea of faces around the bed just nod. Red eyes, hands on my arms. Dad, Hilary, Robin.
I try to sit up, and it hurts so badly that I slide back down even farther under the sheets and blankets than I’d been before. And suddenly Robin is on me, stuck to me, her skinny arms around my neck and her lips on my face, kissing me, resting her forehead on mine. “I’m so sorry, Sarah, I’m so sorry,” she breathes into me.
Dad’s pulling her off and whispering to her—“She’s too sore, you need to be gentle”—while I’m trying to sit up again and failing.
I hear myself: “The baby?” A quieter voice than I knew I had. And the tiniest shake of Hilary’s head and the power of Robin’s rage slam into me like a bulldozer.
In two days I was due to go for a scan where I would have found out in a more routine way that my unexpected baby was a little girl. I would have realized then just how much I could love her, in spite of her creation. Instead, I’d found out too fast and too late, just as I tumbled down the stairs.
She—she, my God—was eighteen weeks. They called her a “miscarriage” and put her in a special box. But she was my baby. Was. The worst word in the dictionary.
When I was able to sit in a wheelchair, they took me down to the chapel, where we all stared numbly at a priest I’d never met who read words I hadn’t chosen about a heaven I didn’t believe in. And slowly, with each word, every single piece of the girl I’d once been seeped out of me.
In that girl’s place, my family wheeled back a shell. They placed the shell carefully on the hospital bed, kissed it goodbye and turned out the light. And I lay there, this shell I now am, and I tried to understand how any of this stuff could have happened.
Callum and Rez had been there that night by the stairs, I remembered that. They were taking Hilary’s jewelry, tangling it up as they shoved it in their pockets. The bright gold stuff from the Drew days that might have been worth a little bit but was probably just gold-plated costume junk.
Robin told me later that they hadn’t even taken the jewelry, just dumped it on the landing and fled from the house.
“He’s dead to me,” she’d said. “He’s fucking dead to me.”