Jon McGregor - So Many Ways to Begin

David, his mother said.

She looked smaller than he'd always thought of her as being, and suddenly much older. As she spoke, her words came out on the back of long sighs, as if she'd been holding her breath all those years and was finally able to let it go. David, she said, you mustn't be angry with us.

Later, he realised that by us she'd meant only her and Julia. But at the time, it sounded as though she was saying us to include Susan, his grandparents, Laurence, his aunts and uncles, his teachers, the neighbours, anyone and everyone he had ever known or met. He had a sudden feeling of the walls of the house being pulled down, and of everyone he knew standing there behind the settling clouds of masonry dust, sniggering and smirking behind their hands.

Please, David, let me explain, she said. The room, the whole house, felt very quiet. He looked at the photos of his father on the mantelpiece, the one taken during the war, the one taken shortly after they moved to their new home, the one taken a few years before he died. He looked at her. Later, he would go for weeks without speaking to her, without looking her in the eye or even acknowledging that they were living in the same house. But for the moment, before Julia's words had properly begun to settle into his ruptured thoughts, he wanted to talk.

Is it true? he asked her first. She looked surprised that he was asking. If she'd been quicker, then, or on the journey home, or in Julia's room, she could have laughed the whole thing off, putting it down to the confusion and muddle of Julia's illness. Perhaps if she'd been ready, she could easily have convinced him that the whole idea was ridiculous, and perhaps he would have thought little more about it. But her immediate reactions, and her reactions in the days and weeks that followed, were a helpless confirmation of what Julia had so casually and forgetfully blurted out. Is it true? he asked her, and what he actually meant was: tell me yourself, say the words, I want to hear it from you.

The story was simple enough, and, when it came down to it, not so unusual. There was a girl; she had a baby she wasn't supposed to have; she gave the care of the baby to someone else and she disappeared. It happens. It has always happened. In those days, his mother said, it was considered neither unusual or fit for discussion. It was kept a secret, or else it was ignored, unstated, denied. Children grew up to realise their sister or their aunt was actually their mother, or they grew up with the names of orphanage directors who had taken them in, or the name of the street where they'd been abandoned. The tale of Moses, floating downstream in his woven rush basket, would not once have seemed so strange, in the days when baskets and blankets placed on doorsteps could turn out to contain wrinkled babies still dazed from the shock of birth. David's story, or the fraction of it which Julia and his mother had known between them, and kept to themselves all those years, did at least have a little more detail than those tales of early morning finds.

Her name was Mary, his mother said. She was young, fifteen or sixteen or seventeen, it was never quite clear. Julia was working in the ward when she gave birth. There was no father pacing expectantly in the waiting room, and she refused to give the name of one. There was no one in fact, no relatives, not even a friend, and afterwards, when she'd come round from the sedatives they'd given her, Julia had sat and talked with her for a few minutes, held her hand, comforted her.

Sometimes he thought he could picture her there. Young, too young, her limbs a little too long and slim for her body, the way that teenage girls' limbs sometimes are, her face small and neat and framed by a damp slick of dark brown hair. Or perhaps broad-shouldered, with taut muscles running down her arms and a slightly squared jut to her jaw. Blonde hair, or auburn, pale brown, coal black. Long hair, tied up, curled, straight, cut sensibly short around her face. Brown eyes, flecked with grey. Green eyes. Blue eyes, a pale watery blue. Sitting quietly in the bed, her chest heaving, trying to catch her breath, the curtains drawn around her and the rest of the ward quiet for a moment. She was Irish, his mother said. She told Julia she was from Donegal, and had been in London for two years, working in a big house, saving money to take back to her family. She told Julia her family wouldn't have her back if they knew, that she couldn't go back but she couldn't stay in London, she had no work, there were too many people she knew, the shame was too much. Afterwards he was surprised by how easily his mother had spoken the words. Her voice quivered a little, but she spoke clearly, and laid out the few facts for him as though she had long been practising them in her head. The poor girl asked Julia what happened to babies whose mothers left them, his mother said, and Julia told her what there was — Barnardo's, St Catherine's, social services — and the girl, Mary, said she didn't want that for a child. Julia asked her what she was going to do. Mary said that if she could go home she could find someone who would take you, without her parents knowing, and then at least she would see you growing up. Julia asked who that would be, and Mary said she didn't know, she would find someone. She said she would find someone and come back for you, but Julia told her it might be difficult to place you in a home and take you out again. His mother faltered here, bringing a hand to her face and squeezing her cheeks, and from behind her hand he could hear her whispering sorry. She breathed in sharply, put her hand down, and continued. Julia always said she didn't know why she'd done it, she said. There were plenty of hard things happened in that hospital, especially then; we couldn't let it get to us. Julia always said the words came out before she knew what she was doing, she said. He watched his mother going over the well-rehearsed words, the sunlight fading through the back garden and the photos of his father looking down on them both. Julia told the girl, Mary, she said to her, you can leave him with me, I'll look after him until you get back, and before she'd even finished speaking Mary had turned to her and said can I? Will you?

These things, the way they happen. The way they begin. Sometimes he felt as though he could hear the words being spoken. Sometimes he felt as though he had been there, sitting up in his cot, studying the two women's faces, wondering which way the conversation would go. But he hadn't been there at all. He'd been off in some other ward, a numbered baby in a row of numbered babies, sleeping or stretching or wailing, waiting to be taken back to his mother. And these words became something like a treasured fragment of parchment script, studied over and over again, handled in a humidity-controlled room, learnt by heart. It didn't matter that they were second-hand, third-hand, blurred by time and mistranslated, rubbed smoother and cleaner by his own re-telling. These broken pieces were all he had; like keepsakes pulled from the ruins. Fragile traces, dug from the cold wet earth.

A young woman, too young, fifteen or sixteen, crying it's no use, I can't do it; one of the nurses turning to her, brushing her hot damp hair away from her eyes and saying yes you can, come on my darling, you're nearly there. Slumping back on to the bed, giving up, and the nurses saying her name, saying, come on now, come on, Mary, raising their voices as if calling her back from another room. Covering her face with her hands and crying louder to block them out. Or not even thinking of giving up, even when the pain and the fear were enough to make her pass out breathe, they tell her, keep breathing, as if her body had become so alien that she couldn't remember how to work it properly — sitting up, and grinding her teeth, and doing what young women have always had to do, her body and her choices no longer her own. Calling out for her mother, or her eldest sister, or her father. Calling out a man's name, and two of the nurses catching each other's eye. Or perhaps even in the middle of it all managing to keep such a thing to herself, not out of loyalty but out of fear and an instinct for self-preservation. Slamming her hands down on to the mattress, clutching at the cold metal rails of the bed; soiling herself, more than once, a nurse reaching quickly beneath her to clear it away, her humiliation complete, the nurses looking at her that way, knowing the sort of girl she was, thinking only that she was paying the price and it was too late to go crying now, but not saying this, maybe not thinking it at all. Praying aloud, oh dear lord Jesus have mercy on me now, her voice quiet and song-like between screaming contractions. Or not daring to pray, thinking who was she to turn to God at a time like this?