After You'd Gone (9 page)

'They're just pills,' he said cheerfully, but Elspeth was not to be put off.

'I know that, sonny, but what are they for? What do they do?'

The man consulted the piece of paper again, 'They're tranquillizers.'

Elspeth's mouth thinned. 'In that case, we won't be needing them. Come along, Ann. Good day to you.'

Through Kenneth's medical contacts and Elspeth's deter mination, Ann and Ben got an appointment to see Scotland 's leading gynaecologist, Douglas Fraser. For five months, she travelled to Edinburgh once a week and was punctured for blood, probed with cold, slim metal instruments and inter rogated on her diet, medical history, menstrual cycle and sexual habits. She and Ben had tussled and fumbled like teenagers behind impervious white screens to produce a sperm sample, while Elspeth sat a few metres away reading maga zines. Then, almost two years after they had first married he called them for a final diagnosis. They sat on red leather chairs and watched while Dr Fraser shuffled papers on his desk. He was a large, kindly man with watery eyes. As he

faced them, he was struck by how young they looked, and felt it almost indecent that he was discussing their having children.

'There is nothing wrong with either of you. Both of you are normally functioning, fertile human beings.'

Ann sighed tearfully and Ben asked, 'Then why is it we've been unable to conceive?'

'The problem lies in the combination of the two of you. The fact of the matter is that you, Mrs Raikes, are rejecting your husband's spermatozoa.'

Ann tossed her head. 'What do you mean "rejecting"?' . 'You are - if you like - allergic to Ben's sperm. Your body has an allergic reaction and gathers all its immunity against it and - rejects it.'

Ann looked at the doctor. 'So you are saying if I had, say, married another man, there would be no problem?'

'Well, you could put it like that. What's happened to the two of you is a one in a million occurrence. And, yes, if you'd married a different man there probably wouldn't have been a problem. It is just an incompatibility of yours and Ben's individual antibodies. '

'But what can we do about it?' asked Ben, reaching for Ann's hand.

'At the moment, there is no proven treatment,' Dr Fraser said carefully, 'but there is something that I would like to try on you both. I can't see why it won't work.'

'What is it?'

'What I propose to do - and this is something that has been researched for some time now - is take a section of your skin from here,' and he indicated Ben's upper arm, 'and graft it on to here,' and he indicated Ann's upper arm. 'Ann's antibodies will assimilate themselves to the new graft and stop rejecting your sperm. It's as simple as that.'

Their faces reflected, just as he'd expected, a mixture of astonishment and hope.

'It will be a very straightforward operation. You won't even have to stay in overnight.'

'But it sounds so . . . so . . ' Ann groped for the right word.

'Medieval? Yes, I know. But a basic physical problem requires a basic physical solution. Saying that, I'm not promising anything.'

'Is this . . . is this the onlv solution?' Ben asked.

J

'Yes,' Dr Fraser said gently, 'it's your only hope.'

Elspeth picks them up in the car from Edinburgh General Infirmary. They are holding hands as they cross the car-park and have matching bandages on their left arms. Ben is left with a puckered, translucent scar and Ann, a two-by-two-inch square of slightly darker skin that soon grows and breathes as if it has always been a part of her. She also becomes pregnant within a month.

Ann's first was a long and difficult birth. She began to understand the true semantics of the word 'labour'. For a day and a half the dome of her belly contracted and raged and she saw the heartbeat of her child echoed in an undulating red electronic line. When the line went flat and the machine cried out a monotonous bleep, they cut her with one slash and dragged the baby out by the head with cruel steel forceps. Seconds later they were staring into each other's eyes in shock. She never strayed far from Ann. In time she would bear a daughter and give her Ann's name.

In the second hour of her second daughter's life, Ann wrapped her baby tightly in a shawl. She thrashed her red, angry limbs until she was free, her tiny starfish hands clenched

in defiance. They called her Alice - a short name that never seemed to contain her character. The word starts deep in the back of the mouth and ends with you expelling air from your lips. She had black hair and black eyes from the moment she was born. People bending over her pram would glance at Ann and at the cherubic older child and then back at the baby with olive-black eyes. 'She's like a wee changeling, isn't she?' said one woman. Ann's fingers tightened around the pram handle. 'Not at all. ' When Alice was still young enough to seem like a child to Ann, she left to travel the world. She waved goodbye from a train window, beads looped and plaited into her long black hair, rainbow skirts trailing the ground. She returned crop-haired, in tight leather trousers, an Oriental dragon rampant on her shoulder-blade. 'How was the world?' Ann asked. 'Full,' she replied.

Her third daughter was watchful and loved. She drank in the sights of her two older sisters and was like both of them at once, and so not like either of them at all. She saw, copied, emulated. She was cautious, made no mistakes because they'd made them all for her. When Ann visited her, she made her tea from the herbs that grew in her window-boxes.

Jamie screams and batters the tray of his highchair with his plastic trainer cup. Annie joins in the wailing gleefully, letting her cornflakes get soggy and unappetising in the milk.

'Quiet!' Neil roars from behind the
Scotsman.

The children ignore him. Kirsty crams a spoonful of baby rice into Jamie's mouth, hoping to thwart the noise. 'Eat up your breakfast, Annie, or you'll be late for playschool. '

'I
hate playschool.'

'You do not. You liked it last week.' 'I hate it today. '

'You haven't been yet so how do you know you hate it?'

59

'I just do. ' Annie swishes her spoon around her bowl, making the milk skirl around the rim.

'Don't play with it, just eat it,' Kirsty says. Jamie chooses that moment to spit out his rice which spatters Kirsty' s shirt. 'Oh, bloody hell,' she exclaims, jumping up for a cloth.

'You swore! You swore!'

Neil appears from behind the paper. 'Eat that up at once, young lady,' he thunders at Annie.

'No, I won't, I don't like it!' she shouts. Neil smacks her hand. 'Do as I say!'

Annie begins to scream in earnest. Over the racket, Kirsty hears the telephone ringing. 'I'll get it.'

She picks up the receiver with one hand, wiping down her shirt with the other.

'Hello?'

'Kirsty, it's Dad.'

'Hi, how are you? Listen, can I call you back? It's feeding time at the zoo here and as you can probably hear, things are getting out of hand.'

'I'm afraid I've got some rather bad news.'

Kirsty turns her back on the kitchen and clutches the receiver with both hands. 'What is it? Is it Mum? What's happened?'

'Your mother's fine. She's here with me. It's Alice.' 'Alice?'

'She was hit by a car. She's in a coma.' 'What? But when?'

The kitchen has become deathly quiet. Annie is holding her spoon to her chest, staring open-mouthed at her mother. Neil comes across the room and stands behind Kirsty, listening. Jamie, sensing a change for the worse in the atmosphere, begins to snivel.

60

Ben listens to his daughter's sobs down the telephone. Ann moves in and out of the room, putting things into suitcases.

'It was last night. They called us early this morning. We thought we'd wait until now to call you. There seemed no reason to wake you all up.'

'But, but . . . I don't understand. I only saw her yester

day.'

'Yesterday?'

'Yes. She came up to Edinburgh on the train. Completely out of the blue. Beth and I met her at the station. She seemed fine. For a bit anyhow. But then she went all peculiar and said she had to leave. And then she just got on a train and left.'

'Really?'

'Oh, my God, oh, my God, this is so awful. I can't believe it.'

'I know, love, I know,' Ben says. 'Your mother and I are going down there today. I asked if she could be transferred to a hospital in Edinburgh, but they said there was no way they could move her.' Ben's voice catches for the first time. There is a pause in which he tries to collect himself. He doesn't want to upset Kirsty even more by crying himself. 'The other thing is that we have to contact Beth. '

'What? What do you mean?'

'Well, I rang the payphone at her halls of residence, but she doesn't seem to be there. I don't want to just leave a message saying . . . this.'

'Of course, of course.'

'It's so difficult to get in touch with her sometimes. '

Neil takes the receiver off Kirsty. 'Don't worry about that, Ben. You and Ann just get yourselves down there. I'll sort Beth out.'

'That's very good of you, Neil. We're going to catch a train now. I'll call you again tonight.'

61

pa rt two

The sun is burning off the mist. revealing the snaggled rocks that

rear up at intervals along the sand. On the beach is an odd, broken assortment of my family my older sister is away at college with the man she will eventually marry, my grandmother is off visiting friends in Glasgow, and Mario is with us.

I left without telling him and offered my parents no explanation as to why I had arrived home a week before term ended. Mario turned up on the doorstep the next day, having charmed the address from the housing officer. My family have accepted his arrival with unexpected and unprecedented equanimity and here we all are, playing happy families on Gullane beach.

My mother has nested herself down beside a rock with the
Scotsman on Sunday
keeping the water that the sand holds from seeping into her skirt. Arranged around her are a black snakeskin handbag, her shoes, laces tucked in under the tongue, my father's book on seashore birds and a number of white plastic boxes protecting the picnic Beth and I made earlier. Beside her, in a deck-chair, my father sleeps with his mouth open.

Beth is twisting her hair into silky, flaxen coils and snipping off her split ends with nail scissors from my mother's handbag.

The scissors flash with light and she gives Mario long, sideways glances as he resolutely chews his way through sandwiches he picks from the boxes by my mother. He eats with a concentrated seriousness, his jaws slapping open and snapping closed. He is not speaking. His eyes scan the slowly appearing horizon. In about two hours' time I will tell him that I don't ever want to see him again and he will return to America. But we don't know this yet. For the moment, there is only the beach and the gulls going schree-schree over our heads.

The bruises on my thighs and hips have faded to yellow and I have only just stopped bleeding. Above my left breast is a round, red bite mark, pitted deep into my skin. Every night, blanching, I dab it with acrid-smelling witch hazel, but its bright colour refuses to dwindle. I am thinking about this when my mother catches my eye. I look away.

My father wakes and starts asking my mother what time it is. She ignores him and he reaches for the paper instead, crushing its pages into a methodical square before reading it. 'Have you had enough to eat, Mario?' my mother asks, in a way so barbed it makes me look up. His name puzzles her. She can't say it without frowning. He nods with a mouthful of food and gives her a thumbs-up. Beth titters. I stand up. 'Shall we go for a swim?' I ask Beth.