And then, one morning, lying on her bed, Ellie felt something very strange. A small judder, like a pop going through her middle section, as though a person living under her mattress had just nudged her in the back. For a terrible moment Ellie thought she was lying on a hamster and quickly jumped to her feet to check. But no, there was nothing there.
She sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, waiting to see if the sensation returned. But it didn’t so she lay back down on the bed. As she lay down it happened again. This time she could place it. It was coming from within her. Bubbles popping inside her stomach. She rubbed and rubbed at her stomach, trying to ease the bubbles away. Eventually the pops dissipated and the inside of her own body stopped doing surprising things and by the evening of that same day Ellie had forgotten entirely about the other-worldly feeling, the sense of being occupied, the sense of no longer being alone.
Forty-two
You may recall the exact night of conception. It was the night after I came over to yours all dressed to the nines in my satin blouse and my high heels, the night we drank two bottles of red wine and had sex three times.
I’d thought it would be a long-term project. I had more plastic pots waiting in the freezer, let’s put it that way. But it turned out I didn’t need them. I’d been charting Ellie’s ovulation for a couple of months, making sure to dole out the pads and tampons on a day-by-day basis so I’d know exactly when she was bleeding and how much. And I hit the jackpot first time. I stood by with the tampons and the towels, waiting for Ellie to ask me for them. But two weeks passed, three weeks, then four. And then she started to be sick every morning and I knew.
I waited until Ellie was about four or five months along before I told you about the baby. I put it off for as long as possible so the period of subterfuge would be as short as possible, because of course if it was to be your baby then you needed to think I was pregnant. And in order for you to think I was pregnant I needed to look pregnant. And if I was going to fake a pregnancy then that was the end of our sex life. So I told you the doctor had said the placenta was low-lying and so there was to be NO SEX. So, there was no sex, but as you probably recall we did plenty of other things because of course I had to keep you, more than ever then, I had to keep you.
I said I’d been to the scan alone, really hammed it up, do you remember? ‘Oh, I couldn’t take it if the baby was gone again. I couldn’t bear to let you down again.’ You were sweet about it, but I could tell your heart wasn’t in it. I could tell that without the sex, without the intimacy of sharing a bed with me, of passing your hands around my body, of the shared bottles of wine and the lie-ins on a Saturday morning, that I really wasn’t a good fit for your life. The baby was neither here nor there to you. I could tell. I felt, in a way, that you were hoping I’d take the baby as a consolation prize and disappear somewhere with it, like a low-ranking lion taking a scrap of old skin from a kill and slinking away with her tail between her legs. We’d never been close, not in the way that other people see as close, and the little that had held us together all those years was starting to crumble, like mortar between bricks. I could feel us coming loose from each other and I didn’t have a clue what to do about it.
The only hope I had was that when the baby came you’d fall in love with it, that you wouldn’t be able to live without it and that we’d be inextricably linked. Forever.
Forty-three
Then
Her stomach was stretched as taut as a spacehopper, laced with bluish veins and dissected by a long, brown line. She could sometimes see the vivid outline of a small foot pressing at the paper-thin skin, elbows and knees, once she even saw the delicate pencil shading of an ear. The person inside her rolled and roiled and danced and kicked. The person inside her pressed hard against her lungs and her oesophagus, then the person turned over and pressed hard against her bladder and her bowels.
Noelle bought her pregnancy books to read and medicine to counteract the indigestion and the constipation and the backache. She bought her a special pillow, shaped like a banana, to keep her knees apart at night. Ellie liked the pillow: it felt like a person; sometimes she spooned herself against it, laid her cheek upon it. Noelle bought a book of baby names and she’d sit and read them out to her. She bought a doctor’s stethoscope and together they listened to the baby’s heartbeat. Noelle would run her hands around the bump and talk about what she could feel. ‘Ah, yes, that baby’s on the move,’ she’d say. ‘It’s turning beautifully. It’ll be engaged before we know it.’
Ellie had suspected she was not fat but pregnant a few weeks after she’d first felt the baby moving. She couldn’t pinpoint the precise moment; it just became increasingly obvious, day by day. She’d stared at Noelle one afternoon, trying to think of a way to ask the question whilst simultaneously not wanting to know the answer. Eventually she’d said, ‘Something’s moving inside my stomach. I’m scared.’
Noelle had put down her cup of tea and smiled at her. ‘You have nothing to be scared of, sweet thing. No, no, no. You just have a little baby in there, that is all.’
Ellie gazed down at her belly and stroked it absent-mindedly. ‘That’s what I thought,’ she said. ‘But how could it be?’
‘It’s a miracle, that’s what it is, Ellie. And now you know. Now you know why I chose you. Because I couldn’t have a baby of my own and I asked God to find me a baby and God told me that it was you! That you were special! That you were to have my baby!’ Noelle looked rapturous, elated, her hands clasped together in front of her heart. ‘And look,’ she said. ‘Look at you now. An immaculate conception. A baby sent from the Holy Father. A miracle.’
‘But you don’t believe in God.’
Noelle moved fast and Ellie was too big to move swiftly enough to get out of her way.
Whack.
Noelle’s hand hard across the back of her head.
Then Noelle was gone from the room, turning the locks hard behind her.