‘What’s wrong?’
‘I feel awful.’
‘There’s something going round,’ he says. ‘McPherson was off for two days and now, Suzanna’s down.’
He leads me back to bed, tells me I need rest. ‘I’ll check on you later, my darling,’ he says. I almost cry. I’d be sick every day, just for him to look at me in daylight as he is now.
Later, something else wakes me, a smell – frying, cooking. My mind explodes with the veins of chicken breasts, the bloody ooze of steak, the textured muscle of meat. I don’t make it to the toilet. I fling open the window, push my head outside.
Truth comes to me hanging half in, half out. My heartbeat slows as I breathe in the resinous scent of the pines, the wild garlic beyond, but my mind is busy, scrambling to fit in this wild card of my sickness, shuffling and reshuffling the deck until I realise it fits perfectly, just into a very bad hand.
The sex.
The sickness.
I can’t remember when I last had my period.
I blink at the pines. There are two types of cones among the glossy sprays of needles: smaller, yellow ones growing in heavy clusters at the tips of the branch, and large, reddish-brown cones. Male. Female. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. How is it possible to know how pines are fertilised while ignoring thateverything – trees, flowers, butterflies, my own body – is straining for two things? Survival. And reproduction.
I retch over the side of the cottage.
I crawl back to bed, pull over the checked quilt. A few weeks ago, all I wanted was to be the girl in this bed. Now, I’d give anything to go back to the evening when he touched me in his study, further, further still, to that golden afternoon in the field of thyme when I asked Daniel to help me net a Blue. I’d drop the net. Let the butterfly fly free.
My mind crawls over all the warnings I’ve ignored. ‘Kissing is fine, beyond that, no more,’ Mama used to say to me, as she dressed for rehearsal. I thought she was talking to herself rather than me, she was the person about to go out, I was staying at home. ‘Men only think of their fun, not the consequences. They’ll get you pregnant and then—’ she clapped her hands together like that was it, a life ruined, over. ‘Do you understand?’ I nodded solemnly.
Now, I press a pillow to my mouth, whisper, ‘No, I didn’t understand. I didn’t realise it could lead to this.’
Is that true? Should I have known? We were taught contraception at St Matthews, Aditi was my lab partner in biology, we took turns sliding condoms on a banana, egging Tanya on when she threatened to catapult it at Mrs Griggs. I remember the serrated edge of the foiled packaging, how easily it tore, the smell of the rubber as I unrolled the fop of it, and then I layer over each time I’ve had sex with Daniel – the cottage, the woods, the car. Not a single instance was interrupted by the sound of a packet opening or him rolling it on. Even now, as I run mad about thelife fluttering inside me, I see so clearly why it was impossible. It would have changed the moment. It would have broken the spell.
Pots clang downstairs, he is doing the dishes, tidying up, cooking for me, something plain to quell my stomach. Looking after me, adult things, and then I realise that where things are fuzzy to me, for him, the inevitable march from the exploration of each other’s bodies to pregnancy is crystal clear. He is thirty. Contraception is not bananas in biology but a mitigation of risk. He must have used it before. Then, why didn’t he with me?
The thought, when it comes, is frightening.He wants me pregnant. It would bind me to him, isn’t that really why he’s angry about Alex, he wants me all to himself, to have no other choices, that’s what he whispers to me in the dead of night,I can’t lose you, his desperation seeping into his kisses, the urgent way he parts my legs. My promises aren’t enough. The surrender of my body is not enough. Only this will bind me to him.
I take in the bedroom, the chest under the open window, the floorboards, the enormous bed. I used to love this cottage. Now, it is nothing more than a sealed tomb.
The next day, when Daniel goes to the field, I go straight down to the beach. I press my elbow to my nose so I don’t smell the meat of a half-rotten crab or the bladderwrack drying on the rock. My body has turned traitor, things which once delighted me are now repulsive: the suck of the tide; clam holes; mussels puckering open to drain sea water. I need things still. I need things to stop.
Alex comes after hours. When I am at my worst, slumped against the rocks, my head in my hands, about to give up, go home.
‘I almost didn’t see you here.’
The sun is a halo around his brown hair. I start to cry.
‘Hey, hey, what’s wrong?’
I hold out my hand, try to get him to stop asking me questions.
‘Are you all right?’
I shake my head.
‘What’s going on?’
‘I need your help.’ I stare at the wet shingle. A shard of quartz glints in the sand. ‘I’m pregnant.’
From: Kit McDermott
12:05