‘So you went through the whole thing alone?’
I nod my head. The sharp hospital smell still lingers in my nostrils as I try to recall the events of that evening. But it’s all a blur. I was in so much pain I could only make out faint outlines; the doctors and nurses were just bluish wisps on the edges of my consciousness.
‘How far into the pregnancy were you?’
‘Four months,’ I tell her. ‘But according to the doctor the baby had died two weeks earlier.’
The guilt is still as raw as it was when it happened. Even knowing that he had been dead throughout it all and had nothing to do with Chris or the bottle of wine, the fact that I failed my baby gnaws away at me. I should have been strong for him and I wasn’t.
‘You spent the night in the hospital?’
‘Yes.’
I look down at my feet as I recall the tiny room with a curtain separating me from the corridor. I was handed a cardboard potty and told to pee into that rather than the toilet so they could monitor the stages of the miscarriage. It was undignified in the extreme but I was so full of painkillers I barely registered when the nurse came in to take the potty away.
I birthed the dead baby sometime around dawn. I remember the sun was just coming up through the wire railings of the hospital car park. I was standing by the window when I felt something shift. I ran to the bathroom with the potty and watched as this tiny, grey creature slipped out. My child.
I blink my tears away as Shaw plunges into her next question.
‘The baby’s father?’ she asks. ‘Did he come to see you?’
‘No,’ I reply. ‘He didn’t know I was pregnant.’
‘Why didn’t he know?’
‘I didn’t have the chance to tell him,’ I reply. ‘I’d planned on telling him that day, over lunch, but before I could he told me the relationship was over.’
I see him in my mind’s eye, sitting at the table waiting for me. His hands were clasped in front of him and he was staring fixedly at a picture on the wall: a Chagall print of a naked woman, hanging like a piece of fruit from a heart-shaped tree.
‘That must have been hard,’ says Shaw.
‘Yes, it was,’ I reply. ‘But then part of me had been expecting it for years.’
‘Why is that?’
‘He was married.’
I remember walking over to his table. He looked up at me and his face was so sad. He kissed me clumsily. His lips missed my mouth and caught my cheek instead. I went to kiss him but he turned his cheek. I just thought he was tired. I never would have imagined . . .
‘Married,’ says Shaw, interrupting my thoughts. ‘And how long had you been seeing him?’
I bristle at the term she uses. ‘Seeing him’ makes it sound like a casual fling when it was so much more.
‘Ten years,’ I reply. ‘Though we’d known each other much longer.’
I want Shaw to know that it was serious. I want her to know that I am capable of loving and being loved; that I am not some messed-up crazy woman. So I tell her about him, my Chris, my love, the man I can’t live without. The man I must live without.
‘We met in New York just after 9/11,’ I begin. ‘He was a forensic anthropologist. He and his team were exhuming body parts from Ground Zero. I was reporting on the work they were doing.’
My thoughts drift and I see myself standing looking at this beautiful man, his black hair covered in dirt, his large hands clasping a shovel. He was very tall, around six three; and, though strong, his body was lean and wiry. With his sharp cheekbones and thick beard he looked like a pioneer from the Midwest. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was only twenty-six and it was one of my first big assignments. I was nervous but when he introduced himself in his gruff Yorkshire accent I immediately felt at ease. It was as though we had known each other before. We spoke for about an hour. He answered my questions as best he could; he was polite, professional, but I knew, we both knew, right then, that something had happened between us, something unspoken.
I look beyond Shaw’s head and stare at the pockmarked wall. I see us sitting outside a wine bar in Victoria. It was three years after our first meeting that we finally got together. He’d come down to London from his home in the north to attend a conference and we’d bumped into each other in the street. He asked me out for a drink and that was it. I can see his pale blue eyes twinkle as he tells me what he wants to do when we get back to my flat later. I hear him whisper every little bit of you; his low voice caressing each word as he takes my hand in his and rubs the dry surface of my skin.
‘Did you know he was married when you started seeing him?’
Shaw’s voice brings me back to the room. I look at her, noticing a glint of gold on her wedding finger, and suddenly the pen in her hand is a weapon.
‘Yes, I knew.’