Everything appears to be in order, he said. We’ll just have to wait and see. He leaned forward. How often are you thinking about your family, lately?
Not often at all, I told him. I’m coping fantastically with everything.
Doctor A smiled at me. Good girl, he said. Look at you, doing so well.
11
In the bars after work, my body felt different. Alcohol tasted metallic, as if somebody had dropped a coin in my drink. It acted on me quicker. I started drinking gin and tonics rather than wine because I thought the quinine might be healthy. Cigarettes started making me feel sick, and I didn’t like to think of smoke curling around the organs and veins of my new, strange body. One night, my colleagues spoke about summer holidays, asking me where I was going. I said that I hadn’t decided yet. Maybe I’ll try for a visa this year, I said, and the second the words were out of my mouth I hated myself for saying them, for wanting to brush up against risk even here, like a cat with a post.
I caught sight of R. He waved, walked over and kissed my cheek. It felt good. We moved on to another place, the bar where we’d met, and we sat at the table we had that first night, but neither of us acknowledged it. Maybe he was too drunk to remember. Maybe I had made it up. I picked a small fight in retaliation, because what was meaningful to me was not necessarily meaningful to him, but mainly because there was a part of him literally inside me, growing, and he didn’t know.
Why do you need proof of everything? R asked me at the end of the argument. Why can’t you live in the present moment? But even the present moment seemed too slippery to rely on. Suddenly the change in me was unbearable.
What do you want to do with your life? I asked. I was looking at him and he was looking at me, but not really looking, not seeing.
What’s there to do? he replied.
I don’t know, I said, suddenly overwhelmed—desperately wanting to lay my head down on the table, feel my cheek make contact with a hard surface, puddled beer. I stayed upright.
Cheer up, he said. Everything’s fine and we’re having fun. A song came on that he liked and he nodded his head hard to the beat. He surveyed the room and I surveyed him: the surprising tenderness I felt at the shape of his ear, the part of his hair that was greying, how decisively he held the glass containing his drink. These were things I might contain now. I’m sorry, I said, but he wasn’t listening.
My dreams were as vivid as being hit with water. They were edged with a crystal menace that I thought might itself be a symptom. That it confirmed I had the dreams of two people inside me now, and of course the dreams of a child would be as fresh and as strange as this, wet with colour and hung out to dry like a photograph on a line.
In my dreams sometimes I was the girl walking along the deserted road towards the city, and sometimes the girl in pale blue satin walking into the forest, then in the car, keeping silent as the miles were eaten up. In my dreams sometimes I chased the girl and ripped the locket from her neck. Other times I knelt in the slush of the leaves and held my hands out in supplication. Other times I threw myself out of the car. Please, I begged, every time. Please.
Or I was back alone in the bathroom of my father’s house, or in the forest and filling my hands with the pine needles, and my body was not changing, and my future was still in everything—the countryside scent, the other clapboard houses, the rabbits whose bodies beat inside the traps.
The next morning I threw up upon waking, though I hadn’t drunk so much, doing it very quietly so that R would not hear. I will bide my time, I told my reflection in the mirror. It was a Saturday and I walked back home through the city, too early. There was a scoured, ascetic purity to the deserted pavements, to the absence of noise. The sky was an ugly pink, and the glass towers reflected it. It looked like the sky was bleeding. The entire world was bleeding, apart from me.
12
You have two ways to do this, said Doctor A, the day he found out. He had asked me for the date of my last bleed, and I hesitated. He had me lie down on the white-papered examination table while he felt my abdomen, and then he gave me a paper gown and told me to get undressed. My body slicked up with cold jelly, he scanned me with the small probe, from the heart downwards. Liver, stomach, kidneys. The screen was turned away from me. He frowned, pressed buttons, looked closer at whatever images were being transmitted. It was only a matter of time. I pictured the electricity of my heart jumping, the sea-noises of it steady, rapid. I prayed for the baby to stay still if it knew what was best for it, but it turned out the baby would not, could not.
In the waiting room beforehand I had put my head between my knees momentarily, and then staggered to the bathroom to throw up. It seemed that the baby was making me sick, poisoning me from the inside like a virus. The thought was alarming. I made half-hearted peace with the idea of dying there, in the cubicle, bile burning my throat. The clattering feet of impatient women waiting for me to be done, their eyebrows raised when I got out, wiping my mouth. Women would be the ones who knew. Women were my enemies now. My dress was a billowing cornflower-coloured cotton, a disguise that definitely wasn’t necessary yet, but I felt compelled to hide my body. Just in case.
After wiping the sweat and jelly from my body with paper towels, I came out from behind the curtain and sat in my usual place. He took a sip from his herbal tea, and mist fogged his glasses temporarily. My fingers pushed the beads of the painted abacus he kept on the table between us. Green, red, blue, yellow. One two, one two. Brown carpet. The institutional orange plastic of my chair. The dictaphone whirred.
I closed my eyes, waiting for him to do something, for someone to break down the door and arrest me, but nothing happened.
Choose now, he said eventually. Opening my eyes, I could see that he looked solemn, but that part of him was also enjoying feeling so important.
Let me take care of it here, today, and you can walk back into your life like nothing happened. You’ll wake up and we’ll forget all about it.
What’s the other option? I said.
I’m not going to force you to get rid of it, but we can’t let you keep it either. You’ll have to go. You’ll be sent away.
Sent where?
He frowned. I can’t tell you that, Calla. But I can tell you that you don’t want to be on that journey.
I made no move.
Listen to me, Calla. How many chances do you get to make a fatal mistake and have it reversed—forgiven? They’ll come for you. There’s no escaping it.
He leaned forward and kept talking but I was distracted by the smell of my own sweat. The choice seemed simple and yet the wrong answer was pulsing in me. The hour was almost over. I made a pact with myself to stay silent until the minute hand crossed the line. Finally, he stopped staring at me.
Very well. You can go home. But you’ll be under observation from now on, he said. So don’t do anything stupid.