Stolen Child (2 page)

Carla Kelly is everywhere. The public face of Anticipation. I see her on billboards and bus shelters, in glossy advertisements. Her white teeth, her full pink lips, her long blonde hair, and that look in her brown eyes, that amber shimmer of contentment; earth mother-to-be, with attitude and glamour.

These days, she’s the first celebrity to be interviewed in the media whenever the subject of pregnancy is aired. She writes a column in
Weekend Flair.
‘My Pregnancy Diary’ she calls it. How to retain one’s sexuality and sense of fashion during those long nine months. Promoting Anticipation all the time. One thing about her, she always was professional.

The Anticipation maternity collection, Dee Ambrose told me when I called into the Stork Club boutique this afternoon, is the most popular label she’s ever carried. Lorraine Gardner is an excellent designer and she’s touched gold with Anticipation. I was so impressed, I bought a pair of fine wool trousers and a silk twist top.

Perfect for the final trimester, said Dee, and wrapped them in tissue paper before placing them in a carrier bag.
Anticipation
was written in gold lettering against a black background. An elegant bag for an elegant collection. On the way out of the boutique, I almost collided with a lifesize cutout of Carla Kelly. Dee laughed, noticing how my mouth opened with an apology in the same instant that I realised it was part of the promotion.

Only the big campaigns can afford her now. Her career took off after that lingerie promotion. It gave her an edge, a notoriety, all that sleek flesh and red lace flashing from the billboards. Drivers rang talk radio and complained that her image distracted them during rush-hour. Lorraine Gardner wouldn’t have had a chance of running her Anticipation campaign if Carla Kelly hadn’t been her sister-in-law.

I carried my carrier bag like a banner to the Nutmeg Café where I’d arranged to meet my mother-in-law. The rain fell steadily as I crossed Market Square and I walked carefully on the slippery cobblestones. A wretched day for the Saturday market, what with the wind billowing the awnings and people scurrying past the stalls towards the nearest shelter.

The Nutmeg was crowded. The smell of damp wool reminded me of crowded buses on muggy school mornings. Women stopped at my table to tell me I was blooming. Even the cashier, a frail, round-shouldered woman, smiled as if she’d known me all her life and said my bump had become enormous since the last time she saw me. I’ve no memory of us ever meeting but she knew that David had returned to the rig and that I’m planning an end-of-season discount sale at Miriam’s Glasshouse. I grew up in the solitude of crowds but here, where the population is sparse, everyone seems to know my business. Miriam arrived at the Nutmeg shortly afterwards and apologised for being late. Something to do with bumping into acquaintances on every corner she turned. She hugged me. Took me quite by surprise. No time
to move before I was enveloped in her arms. My motherin-law has a habit of nudging and hugging and tapping me when I least expect it. I’ve never grown used to her effusiveness. I expect it’s to do with my upbringing – nothing touchy-feely about my parents. I’ve told her about my childhood. The silence and the separation, two people living on either side of a glass wall of indifference, so steeped in their own unhappiness they were incapable of reaching out to me.

‘It explains a lot,’ Miriam said, and pitied me for the tenderness I’d never experienced.

I’m willing to endure her pity but not her touch. ‘Don’t tempt fate,’ I warn her when she asks if my baby is moving. Now she no longer seeks permission to rest her hands on my stomach, but today in the Nutmeg she hugged me so tight I thought my heart would flip over.

Phyllis Lyons entered and came straight to our table. No asking, just an assumption that, as Miriam’s school friend and my nearest neighbour, she had every right to join us. She picked up my Anticipation carrier bag and placed it on the table.

‘Go on, girl,’ she said. ‘Give us a look.’

I lifted out my new purchases and held them up for inspection. Miriam thought the twist top was a wonderful colour. ‘Sapphire blue, a perfect match for your eyes,’ she said, and ran her hand over the silky fabric. ‘So glamorous,’ she added, ‘yet it looks so comfortable.’

Phyllis checked the price tag. ‘Mother of God,’ she said. ‘Are you made of money or what? What’s the sense of glamour when you look like a whale? If I were you, I’d just keep letting out the waistband.’

What does she know? She’s a middle-aged spinster and gone beyond all that now.

Miriam looked apologetically at me and placed my clothes
back in the carrier bag. She finds Phyllis as irritating as I do, but neighbours, she warned me when I first came to live in Maoltrán, have long memories. It’s wise to keep on their good side.

‘I feel sorry for her,’ she said, when Phyllis finally left to pick up a prescription for her mother. ‘It’s no joke looking after a creaking door and that mother of hers has been creaking for as long as I can remember.’

She asked when I was due to see Professor Langley again. ‘Next week, I told her. I’ll take the afternoon off, if that’s okay with you?’

‘Of course…absolutely.’ She nodded vigorously. Her anxiety smothers me. The harder she tries not to show it, the more obvious it appears. She’s nervous about the long distances I drive. But I’m her marketing manager. It’s my responsibility to meet with customers. She keeps telling me to start my maternity leave and take it easy for the final months.

‘But what on earth would I do,’ I ask her, ‘sitting all by myself in an empty house? I’m fit and healthy. I intend working until the last minute.’

‘David warned me to keep a close eye on you and not let you overdo things,’ she said. ‘It worries me,’ she added, ‘him being on that oil rig. If anything…’ She paused, uncomfortable at having to remind me that I’ve a bad track record when it comes to bringing her grandchildren into the world. I try not to give her cause for concern.

It has not been difficult to maintain the illusion of pregnancy. I’ve made a harness with bindings that fit snugly below my breasts and under my stomach. I pad it with firm fillings that outline my expanding curve. I’m so conscious of avoiding contact with anyone that my antennae remain on full alert, tremblingly cautious, always watchful. My face
looks too gaunt for a woman in her last trimester but people see what they want to see and their eyes are always drawn to my stomach.

Hopefully, Professor Langley has forgotten my existence. His secretary handled my decision to change gynaecologists with chilly politeness and sent me a bill for my last appointment and scans.

At the start of the month, David arrived home on leave, his skin tanned and taut from the harsh North Sea gales. I hid the harness then, and drank so much water every day that my stomach felt as tight and swollen as a drum. My food was fat and starch, it sickened me, but my weight kept increasing. He transformed the spare bedroom into a nursery. He painted the walls a pale apple green and hung one of Miriam’s seahorse mobiles above the carry-cot. We travelled to Dublin and stayed for a weekend with my father and Tessa. We bought a pram and the carry-cot, a feeding chair, a changing station. The whispering grew more intense as we made our decisions. Each time I faltered they whispered…
Remember us…remember us…no turning back
…Whenever I felt the urge to run free from the shadow of that cottage and bring the dream to an end, they’d whisper
stay…stay. Be silent
, they urged, when the truth pressed against my teeth so hard it ached to be heard.
Be brave
, they whispered, when David laid his ear too late to my stomach and said, ‘I can’t feel anything…Well, maybe I do…it’s
so
hard to tell.’

What he’d felt was my shudder of fear, my womb contracting with dread determination.

That is how our baby grows, carried into being on a whisper.

I met a horse whisperer once. He was small and stout and wore a wide-brimmed hat with a jaunty feather in the side.
To be called a horse whisperer sounded mysterious and powerful, but he said he was simply a man who understood horses. He came to us soon after we purchased Augustus – the horse had too many bad habits for us to handle alone. I’d watched him stand before Augustus, face to face and then cheek to cheek, not threatening, just empathising, reaching deep into the horse’s psyche and connecting with the rage that lay at the heart of his flailing behaviour. By the time he’d finished, Augustus was still a spirited horse but he was biddable. He’s gone from the meadow now, sold to a horse dealer. I told David he broke loose and almost knocked me to the ground. Seeing him at the gate every time I passed was too much to bear. I want amnesia.

It will happen
, my whisperers promise.
Trust us…believe in us…we are the whispers of what should have been.

David was reluctant at first to move from my bed, but when I told him I’d suffered some spotting, he understood. Nothing must endanger this new life we’ve created. I reassured him of my love, explained how hormones go berserk during pregnancy and lovemaking is impossible. ‘Afterwards,’ I promised him, ‘afterwards when our baby is born, everything will be different.’

When I came home from the studio on the night before he left, he asked me to sit down and talk to him. He placed his hands on my arms and sank me into a chair.

‘Be still,’ he’d said, ‘and listen to me. All this rushing around and working such late hours. Apart from our trip to Dublin, I’ve hardly seen you since I came home.’

He kissed me, his mouth seeking some response. My body clenched in protest, and I accused him of being demanding, selfish, thinking only of his own needs. How was it possible that he could not hear the terrified whine behind my bluster?

‘Why,’ he’d asked, ‘do you spurn me? Do you think I’m a beast, incapable of lying by your side without wanting to invade your body?’

I almost told him. I could feel my knees weakening, the urge to kneel before him and confess. But the whisperers moved from gentle persuasion to implacable authority and straightened my spine. I faced him down, this man whose children I carried so briefly, all five of them, and who now urge me onwards…
No more…no more…no more.

He drew away from me and wished me goodnight, chastely kissing my forehead. I understand his desire to be part of my experience but this is a journey I must take alone.

The rain had stopped by the time we left the Nutmeg and shoppers were drifting back to the market stalls. A traveller sat on a blanket outside the café. She was young, twenty at most, a baby in her arms, and a dull-eyed small boy hunkered beside her. I searched in my purse for coins but Miriam went back inside to buy coffee and sandwiches for the mother, milk for the boy.

‘It’s a boy child, missus,’ the traveller said. ‘A big boy child for his fine strappin’ mother.’

Her hard, experienced eyes seemed to sear through my secret. The pavement swayed, or perhaps I stumbled, and the coins fell from my hand, rolling across the uneven surface until they were clenched in the boy’s fist.

Phyllis Lyons arrived back from the pharmacy with her mother’s medication and asked if she could get a lift home with me. Her car was being serviced and she’d missed the twice-hourly bus that runs past her house. Miriam waved and left us together, glad, I suspect, to escape to her house on the other side of Market Square.

Throughout the journey home, Phyllis talked non-stop
about her mother’s ailments and her efforts to alleviate them. I stopped outside her gate and waited for her to leave the car.

‘Come in and say hello to Mammy,’ she said. ‘She loves the bit of company.’

I stared at the grey lace curtains on the front window. Her mother would have been watching us, stooped on her Zimmer frame. Inside, the air would be stale and smoky.

‘I’m expecting a call from David,’ I said, and Phyllis nodded, as if my excuse echoed all the others she’d ever heard.

She stepped from the car and walked around the side of her house, squeezing her stocky figure past the tractor. Farming her few acres and looking after her mother…it can’t be an easy life but she accepts it without complaint.

I turned down the lane and drove into the grey arms of Rockrose. I locked the front door behind me. Such relief, being alone again, able to breathe, to open my waistband, to allow the silence to settle until only the whisperers were audible.

I speak to women all the time. They look at my bump and confide in me. One woman told me she’d never once, during the nine months of her pregnancy, felt her baby move. He’s eighteen years old now, on a track and field scholarship in the United States. Another woman was told by her gynaecologist that he could not detect her baby’s heartbeat. That night she felt the first fluttering of life in her womb. Put a group of women together and they’ll tell stories that mystify the medical profession.

Carla Kelly writes about them in her pregnancy diary. The happy, clappy stories about babies who kick and jog and elbow their way towards birth. I sent her a letter shortly after
that night. I asked her how it was possible to keep hoping when the womb rejects the dream. An anonymous letter, of course. She could not deal with my story. She passed my letter on to Alyssa Faye for her advice column. As a psychologist, Alyssa Faye believes she has a deeper understanding of the human psyche than the average journalist. Human suffering is grist to her mill. For three weeks she analysed my miscarriages, analysed my head, analysed my emotions. I did not write my story to pad her column. I wanted to see if Carla Kelly could understand, empathise. I got my answer.

Last week in Dublin, I saw her in Brown Thomas with her husband. At least I assume that’s who it was. He stays out of her limelight but she held his arm in a way that suggested he was her rock. They were looking at baby clothes. I followed them from the department store and up to the top of Grafton Street. The flower sellers were busy. Birds of paradise flamed against white chrysanthemums and tightly coiled rosebuds jutted like spears from overflowing buckets. She bought the roses and continued onwards. I lost sight of them when they entered the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre. I probably could have found her. She’s tall and distinctive enough to stand out from the crowd but I was too weak to move any further. I sat down in a coffee bar and asked for a glass of water. The waitress had the experienced eyes of an older woman counting months. She brought the water sharply and asked if I’d like her to call a taxi.