A Daughter's Secret (23 page)

‘I’d make it into a bird,’ she says, animated, ‘but like, a really big one. An eagle or something. They can just swoop down and eat stupid, crappy things like mice.’

‘So would you like to be the eagle? Be a big predator that swoops in and takes little animals away?’

We stare at each other now, our gazes locked. My heart’s hammering in my chest. I don’t want that to happen to you.

‘This is just another one of your stupid riddles,’ she says, head jerking away. ‘You’re just waiting to get back to my dad, start slagging him off. I’m on to you Mia.’

She rips open her bag, the sound of the zip loud in the silence. She drops her iPad in, fiddling with it as she does so. This time there’s no mistaking it: Lorcan’s voice fills the room, swooping over the familiar chords, every line soaked through with emotion. Tears spring to my eyes before I can stop them.

‘Gemma—’

‘I like this one. It’s definitely my favourite.’

Mine too.

‘You
little
bi—’ I stop myself, horrified by my reaction. ‘You should
not
have done this,’ I say, injecting myself with a syringe of fake calm. I watch her, that maddening half-smile playing across her blanched face: just for one awful unprofessional second, I would do anything to be able to reach across the room and slap her without being struck off. ‘You had no right to go poking around in my life.’

‘Ditto,’ she says, triumph in her eyes. Right now this second I hate her.

‘Gemma, I’m your therapist. We’ve been exploring your life together. This is very different. It’s . . .’ I want to say abusive, but I stop myself. ‘It’s totally unacceptable.’ Maybe it’s me who’s been abusive. I should never have given this mixed-up child enough rope to weave us a double noose.

‘I just wanted to know who I was dealing with,’ she says, standing up. ‘I’m sorry if I upset you. See you next week.’

‘I’ll need to think very seriously about that,’ I say, my voice shaking. Gemma looks at me, stricken. ‘Gemma, I’m not sure we can continue. The boundaries have got very confused. I don’t know if I can help you any more.’

Now it’s her eyes that fill with tears.

‘I’m coming back,’ she says. ‘You can’t just get rid of me. Don’t think you can.’

And then she’s out of the door. I think I’d have preferred her to slam it. The smooth click feels more sinister to me now.

March 1995 (sixteen years old)

I’d hoped that it was a temporary break in service, like when the BBC puts up that picture of the chubby-faced girl with the blackboard as a reassuring reminder that there’s nothing much to worry about. Surely Lysette would go away and think about it, her anger burning itself out as harmlessly as brandy round a Christmas pudding, and then realize that this really could be a good thing? Her upsets were normally transitory, clouds scudding across a blue sky, but it seemed that now I’d brought down a thunderstorm.

‘Please will you talk to her properly,’ I begged Jim, my hand gripping the receiver, wishing he’d hurry up and come home for the weekend. We loved each other, we were spit sisters, and yet now, when Lysette saw me at school, she’d turn on her heel theatrically, her hazel eyes as narrow as a cat’s. I’d taken to sitting with the geeky girls from my Oxbridge classes, but their dry conversations about how to balance out the prestige of the college against the likelihood of getting in made me want to scream. I wanted to laugh like we laughed – stupid private jokes which would make my stomach heave and my breath escape me like air from a whoopee cushion. I’d tried approaching her, but she’d just stalked off, and my letter – logical and pleading in equal measure – elicited nothing but more stony silence.

‘Stop your fretting, little mouse,’ said Jim. ‘She’ll be right as rain before you know it. She’s probably on the blob or something.’

But if she was going to get over it, surely she’d have got over it by now? It had been over a fortnight. School was torture – I felt like a spurned lover, but one who deserved the rejection, denied the luxury of a warm bath of self-pity. The mention of periods, however crude, had sent up a warning flare. I didn’t want to read the flash. Couldn’t face it, not yet.

‘But have you really tried to talk to her?’ I pleaded.

‘She doesn’t want to talk about it,’ he said, exasperation mounting, his engraved silver Zippo, his eighteenth birthday present from his louche-sounding Parisian father, flicking open down the phone line. ‘I really don’t need this aggro. I dunno why you went on such a spastic truth-telling crusade, Mia. Sis-ter Mia,’ he added in a holy voice.

‘If you keep lying to people, everything rots,’ I said, my voice low: the last thing I wanted was a row. Lorcan kept telling Mum he was coming home, and now she was convinced he really was, would be walking through the door in a fortnight. I wanted to wrap her in cotton wool, cushion her from the almost inevitable disappointment of a no-show, but instead I was being extra specially snide and secretive. I couldn’t work out how to make my insides match the outside, however hard I tried.

‘Thanks for the tip,’ he said, snarky, but then his voice softened. ‘I’ll be home this weekend. We’ll sort it out, promise.’

I melted, like I always did.

‘But you can’t promise,’ I said, even though I loved that he had.

‘You don’t have a big brother. Big brothers rule. I’ll sort it.’ He took a drag on his fag. ‘Now I’ve gotta go. Keep your chin up, little mouse.’

Miss Dicker, newly hatched from teaching training college, was obsessed with
The Waste Land.
Gingery-blonde and geeky, a lover of twee cashmere cardigans and, Lysette and I suspected, Mr Harlow our chemistry teacher, she would well up at almost every line, intoning it as if she was on stage and beseeching us to reflect on what it ‘truly meant’. I looked over to Lysette, smirking, as she trilled ‘cruel-est month’ through her pale pout. I knew she felt my gaze on her, but she looked straight ahead, her mouth a grim line, as if she was taking Miss Dicker deadly seriously.

That was when I felt it, a heaving monster deep in my belly. I’d been feeling intermittently queasy for a while, but I’d ignored it at first, then blamed it on the row. This was bigger and fiercer. I stood up, my hands covering my mouth, but it was too late: I threw up right there and then, the vomit forming a watery pool around my feet.

‘Mia!’ squeaked Miss Dicker. I sat back down, lightheaded. I wanted to stay that way: the truth was becoming almost impossible to dodge. ‘Lysette, I think you should take Mia to the nurse. Anna, you get some paper towels from the lavatories.’

Just for a second, Lysette forgot she was meant to hate me. She was looking straight at me, concern and kindness writ large, and I allowed myself a spurt of hope. Then she hardened, crossing the room on taut legs and slipping her hand under my elbow.

‘Come on,’ she said, the kindness still there despite her best efforts, and I stood up, leaning on her more heavily than I maybe needed to.

‘Thanks,’ I said, hoping she could hear how much the single syllable contained, and she squeezed my arm in reply, her fingers clam-tight around my grateful flesh.

I sat on the thin mattress, the curtains drawn around the cubicle. The privacy was a nonsense: I knew Lysette would be able to hear every word. The nurse turned her owlish gaze on me, disapproval etched deep into her features. I’d already admitted that my period was weeks late, that I’d put it down to stress. It was true that I didn’t eat much, and sometimes my periods would stubbornly refuse to play ball.

‘Are you sexually active?’ she asked.

My cheeks flamed, my heart racing like an engine.

‘Yes,’ I said, my voice barely a whisper.

Her springy hair was a grey artillery helmet, a wedding ring jammed firmly on her meaty left hand. I reckoned she hadn’t had sex since the Falklands War was won.

‘And are you using contraception?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Sort of?’ she said, voice rising in disbelief.

‘He withdraws,’ I muttered, wishing I was a slimy snail, wishing I could wind in on myself and hide somewhere dark and inaccessible.

She exhaled with self-satisfied exasperation.

‘If you girls are going to insist on starting these relationships – behaving like you’re grown women – the least you can do is employ a modicum of womanly wisdom. I assume you’ve
heard
of the pill?’

I looked down at the linoleum floor, shame spreading through me like a lethal injection. I suppose the convent setting gave her carte blanche to humiliate us at will, but I wanted to fight back. I was no fool, I had an A in GCSE biology, and in January I’d taken myself off to an overstretched clinic behind Tottenham Court Road where they’d scribbled me a hasty prescription for the pill whilst lecturing me about the importance of using condoms (fat chance). I’d been waiting for my period – my longed-for period – so I could pop the first one, the packet lodged under my mattress where I hoped Mum wouldn’t find it. I’d lied to her of course, pretended I was still a virgin when she’d clumsily tried to ask if it was ‘getting serious’, and luckily, or unluckily, she was too distracted and sad to call my bluff.

‘Yes, I’ve got some. I just haven’t started taking them yet.’

Nurse Brown’s beetle brows shot skywards.

‘Too little knowledge, far too late – I rather suspect the horse has bolted. You’ll need to take a pregnancy test. I’ll go and find you one.’ She flounced through the green curtains, spotting Lysette. ‘Are you still hanging around? You should have gone straight back to lessons.’

‘I’m here for my friend,’ said Lysette stoutly, and a sob immediately rose up in my throat.

‘Very admirable,’ said Nurse Brown acidly, but at least she didn’t forcibly eject her.

There was no real suspense: of course I was pregnant. We managed to persuade the evil nurse to let me take the test at home, and I perched on the loo seat, Lysette poised by the sink, waiting for the white plastic stick to confirm the inevitable.

‘Shit,’ she said, her hand covering her mouth as the blue line appeared. I couldn’t speak, I just sat there, the ridged plastic digging into my knotted palm. I thought of the kitschy Swedish snow globe Lorcan had brought back from a long-ago tour and left, pride of place, on our mantelpiece: the way you could shake it as hard as you liked, knowing with absolute certainty that the flaky chaos inside would return to perfect order within a few short seconds. It used to obsess me when I was little. This was the polar opposite: whatever I did, whatever happened, there was no going back. I was indelibly changed, one life left behind.

‘What are you going to do?’ said Lysette, white with shock.

‘I don’t know!’ I snapped. ‘Sorry,’ I said quickly, ‘it’s just – it’s too soon.’ The last thing I wanted to do was alienate her again. Why did it have to be her brother? I felt tender, defensive: I didn’t want her disapproval to start rolling over me, her cast-iron conviction that she knew him best. ‘Let’s go to my room.’

We struggled to find words, put on The Cure’s
Disintegration
and let Robert Smith’s gloomy vocals fill the space instead.

‘My cousin had to, you know . . . get rid of a baby, and she’s fine now. She’s at Manchester doing theatre studies.’ Normally I loved Lysette’s relentless buoyancy, her absolute commitment to living life sunny side up, but today I couldn’t take it. This was too big, too dark, to be tucked neatly into a box and tied up with a pink ribbon. Or maybe – just for a second I let myself imagine it – a giggly baby, as plump and easy to cherish as some of the ones I’d looked after, Jim smiling down at us both, unable to resist her charms.

‘I need to talk to him,’ I muttered, aware what a minefield I was walking into. I did need to talk to him, but a part of me wanted to put it off for as long as I possibly could.

‘Yeah, course you do, but . . .’ She looked at me, eyes wide, her pity visible. ‘Mia, he’s not gonna want to be a dad!’

I didn’t say anything, just mechanically ran my fingers across the raised diamonds of my green satin bedspread. It was my Christmas present from Mum a few years ago, even though it was me who actually bought it. She always wanted to get me the right present, but didn’t trust herself to meet my exacting standards. I couldn’t bear the idea of heaping more pain on her, but, now the school knew, there was no escaping it.

She laughed when I told her, a high-pitched hyena shriek which I knew came from shock and disbelief. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, tears rolling down my cheeks. ‘I know how stupid I’ve been.’ I couldn’t quite get over my own stupidity: I kept tracking backwards, ever more furious with myself. It never once occurred to me to hold Jim even partially responsible: I think it was a strange kind of self-protection, a half-knowledge that if I wanted to hold on to him I’d have to treat him like a skittish animal who needed careful handling.

Mum had no such timidity. She raged at me, raged at him, then hugged me, her tears raining down over us both. ‘You’re such a clever clogs, Mia, you can’t just throw that away.’ We looked at each other, both us still too squeamish to use the A word. She and I were fairly feeble Catholics – I was baptized because Lorcan’s Anglo-Irish family were Catholic, his parents religious enough to stump up the fees for my convent school – but despite our lack of religious conviction, we both shrank away from what seemed like the obvious solution. ‘I should be more sorry than you,’ she said. ‘I’ve been a hopeless, unfit mother. We’ve both been hopeless. I’m going to call your dad.’

‘No, don’t!’ I said, panicky, but she was determined. The phone in his apartment rang out – it was mid-afternoon in New York – and I wondered if I should steel myself and call Jim.

‘Not yet,’ said Mum, as protective as a lioness. I secretly liked it. ‘Let’s work out what you want to do before he gets to stick his tuppence’ worth in.’

We stayed up until midnight, Mum drinking red wine, me endless cups of tea, talking like we hadn’t talked in years. I’d somehow forgotten how much she loved me, how much I loved her, this crisis stripping everything as bare as winter branches. Could this be me in sixteen years, being wise and responsible for my own child? The idea was ridiculous.