Gilly MacMillan - What She Knew

She’d brought takeaway food and a bottle of wine with her. Before she arrived I thought I’d tell her everything that had happened. But I didn’t. I couldn’t find the words, they felt trapped inside me, made prisoner by my numbed senses and my decaying ability to trust. Within my head I was jittering, like a withdrawing addict, obsessing over my sister, and what she’d told me, replaying my loss of consciousness at the school.

Laura let me jitter. She calmly laid out our food on the kitchen table and poured us glasses of wine. ‘I know you probably don’t feel like this,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to do it anyway and I won’t be offended if you don’t want it.’

The food and drink she’d brought looked like ancient relics of a life that I’d once enjoyed, but I went through the motions of appearing grateful. I picked at one or two of the dishes, managed just a sip of the wine, which had lost all of the comforting qualities it had before Ben disappeared and tasted like acid in my mouth.

‘Do you want to talk about him?’ Laura asked, breaking our silence. ‘Would it help?’

Laura never ate much; she had the appetite of a sparrow. She toyed with her food for a few moments, while I failed to answer her question, and then she said, ‘Do you remember when you had him? At the very beginning? We couldn’t believe how tiny he was, do you remember that?’

I found my voice. ‘You wouldn’t hold him at first.’

Laura hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him when she came to see me in the hospital. I lay exhausted in the bed, my body bruised and sore, hormone-drenched and soft, and watched her while she’d stood beside his Perspex crib all trim and well dressed and tanned and pretty in a little summer dress and big sunglasses pushed up on her head – like a postcard from my life before motherhood. I told her she could pick him up, but she’d shaken her head at first.

She smiled at the reminder. ‘I’d never held a baby before. I didn’t want to break him, or drop him.’

‘But I made you.’

‘And he puked on me.’

‘He puked everywhere for the first few months. It was constant washing.’

‘But it was love at first sight, wasn’t it? For you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I envied you that. It was so intense, so private.’

Her fingers sat on the stem of her wine glass and she turned it slowly, delicate wrists flexing. Then she refilled it. More than half the bottle was gone, and I hadn’t had more than a sip.

For the first time I noticed that lines were beginning to form on her elfin face. It was just an impression, they seemed to be there one moment, and gone the next, but they were a reminder that she was ageing, that we were all ageing. I stretched my hand across the table towards her and our fingers linked briefly.

‘I can’t believe this is happening to you,’ she said. ‘It’s like a bolt of lightning came out of nowhere and struck you, and Ben. I can’t imagine what you must be going through.’

‘All my feelings hurt.’

Her eyes brimmed with unshed tears, and she said, ‘Can I tell you something? I want to say it so you know that other people know how you feel. Just a little bit of what you feel anyway.’

‘Tell me,’ I said, and instinctively I felt a reawakening of the feelings of dread that our reminiscences about Ben had briefly put to sleep.

‘I had an abortion.’

‘When?’ This was startling news, shocking too. I thought Laura and I had had the kind of friendship where you lay yourself bare, where the only secrets you keep are to do with your plans for each other’s Christmas or birthday presents.

‘Before you had Ben.’

‘I don’t know what to say. Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘You were pregnant.’

And there it was: a wedge in our friendship that I’d never known about.

‘Who was the father?’

‘Do you remember Tom from Bath?’

I did. He was a married man, who she’d met through work.

‘Did he know?’

‘He paid for it. God, Rach, I’m sorry. It’s stupid of me even to mention it now. I don’t even know why I’m telling you. It’s nothing compared to what you’re going through.’

And here’s the thing: I couldn’t deal with it. If Laura wanted us to feel solidarity at that moment then she’d just said completely the wrong thing. It was simply too much to cope with: the intentional loss of a child.

A week previously I would have been there for her, supported her, but at that moment it was viciously, unbearably painful to hear, and my brain, addled with her news, with everything, did a flip.

The exquisite and painful pleasure of our reminiscences about Ben disappeared in an instant. The earlier warmth of her friendship, and her company, suddenly felt frosty and brittle. Goose bumps ran across my skin like squalls agitating glassy water.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, no, no. I can’t hear this now. Why are you telling me this?’

And then another thought, a corrosive one, as the distrust that my sister had sown as a seed now bloomed freely in my mind. I voiced it with a tone that was raw enough to surprise even myself, the tone of somebody who has reached the end of her tether. ‘Are you feeding stories about me to the other journalists? To your friends out there? Is that why you wanted to talk about Ben?’

I got to my feet, and my wine glass tipped over in my hurry to stand, the wine everywhere, pooling on the table, on me, dripping onto the floor and Laura stood too and shock had peeled away any softness in her expression so that her cheeks looked cold and smooth as marble.

‘Jesus, Rachel! I know you must be feeling desperate, but…⁠’

I pushed her. She came around the table towards me, wanting to hug me, and I pushed her away. I grabbed her coat, and her bag and I shoved them at her and I hounded her all the way to the front door, ignoring her pleading words, and her tears, until she was out, and gone, like Nicky, and the press, her so-called friends, took photographs of her on the doorstep while I sat back down at the kitchen table, on the chair that was damp with wine, and I sobbed.

We worked closely with John Finch all day. The feeling of recognising myself in him didn’t abate, if anything it got stronger as we talked. It troubled me.

He waited at Kenneth Steele House with me while my officers began checking out families who he’d identified for us. We sent a pair of DCs down to the hospital, hoping there weren’t going to be too many confidentiality issues and bureaucratic hoops to jump through before they would release information to us.

‘Do you ever tire of it?’ Finch said to me in a long moment of silence when my thoughts had flown to Emma, to when I might see her next. ‘Do you ever tire of the daily contact with people when their lives are shattered?’

We sat in a windowless interview room around a grey-topped table. A strip light above us threw out a glare that made my temples ache. I didn’t answer him. If I had, I would have lost my separateness, my professional distance. I had to remember that John Finch was not my friend, but it was hard not to answer, because there were parallels between what he did and what I do. For a moment or two I was overwhelmed with a desire to say yes, to talk to him, to compare notes and admit that there were times when it was very, very difficult to stand back. In another universe, I thought, we might have been able to do that, and it would have been nice, but not here, not now.

‘Do you know what this room reminds me of?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘We call it the bad news room at the hospital. It’s where we take families when we have to tell them the worst. It’s exactly like this, except that there are brochures.’