Before She Was Mine (29 page)

I drew in a sharp breath, but they didn’t hear me over the swooning guitars. The next moment I’d got myself together and was scuttling past into my room where, even through the
locked door, the music followed me.

I climbed into bed and pulled the duvet up round my ears. My mammal chart, I noticed, was peeling off the wall, the dream-catcher over my bed was furred with dust. Several of my model toadstools
lay scattered underneath the dressing table. Still the image of Geraint and Liv hung in front of my vision.

This house was feeling less and less like somewhere I belonged.

From Liv’s diary,
12/05

Worst Christmas since Col died. She’s been over, opened her presents, but it wasn’t the same. Watching clock all time because Melody was picking her up &
none of us could cope with M coming up path & knocking on door. I had the old decs out, Col’s star & the cedar nativity set, had a go at popcorn chains (though got involved watching
fieldfares on lawn & singed some of corn). Had done a stocking too, even though she wasn’t there in morning to find it by her bed. When I handed it over she just looked
embarrassed.

She took some cups through to kitchen for me & said ‘You’re managing without your home help, then?’ Took me a moment to realise she meant herself. Obviously she
can’t have had remotest idea how hurtful that comment was. G furious. But I know if I say anything it will make F resentful & drive her even further away. No one likes to be made to feel
guilty. Have to keep the way open for her to come back.

After she’d gone, went & lay on her bed for a while. G came up & gave me warm brandy. I said, ‘She’d have taken all her posters down if she’d moved out
permanently.’ Because there’s a lot of her stuff left, waiting. G says to hang on. He’s convinced she’ll come home. He says, ‘Of course she will. You’re her
mother.’

For a week I was too frightened to do the test. Then, in the end, there was no need.

A whole twenty-one days after I should have come on, I got my period. I’d woken up feeling fine, hopped into the shower, and that was it. No baby.

Legs trembling, I perched on the edge of the bath and watched the water swirl down the plughole. I felt as though something had struck me a hard blow on the head.

I’d been so sure I was pregnant.

So that was that. I made myself wash my hands, brush my teeth, extract a pad out of the airing cupboard, get dressed. But when I got down to the kitchen I found I was shaky and weepy, and I
couldn’t eat the toast Liv put in front of me. Luckily no one noticed my heart was breaking. Geraint had received an email saying a member of the public thought they’d sighted a pine
marten in the woods round the Moss. Liv was arguing it was probably a polecat and Geraint was busy checking the internet for maps of UK mustelid distribution. You’d think someone had reported
seeing a snow leopard, the way they carried on.

I swallowed some tea and went to the toilet and washed my hands and came out and put my coat on and grabbed my phone and opened the door and got in the car and drove to work. At the nursery I
sorted through some late deliveries from the day before and re-stocked the bird food section. I took the pressure washer and cleaned the paving outside Greenhouse One, and did a litter pick along
the outside verge. I wiped the entrance sign with a wet sponge. Ray came and asked me to chase up an order for slate chippings, and after that to check on the state of the herbaceous plants and
pluck off any shoots or buds that looked dodgy. From there I took myself to Polytunnel Two and did some potting-up, mainly salvia and pinks. I’d felt no physical pain at all, just a general
aching heaviness and a sick clamping round my chest that came and went. Melody, I kept thinking. Oh, Melody.

When work finished, I went round to Oggy’s to break the news. It being a Saturday he was crashed out on the sofa in his usual weekend pose, this time watching
You’ve Been
Framed
. I didn’t even bother asking him to mute the TV, I just told him straight out.

‘Thank fuck for that,’ he said. There was a wave of laughter from the television. Then he remembered himself. ‘Aw, shit, sorry. Are you OK and that? Do you need an
aspirin?’ His contrite face made him look like a droopy hound.

‘I don’t need anything from you. In fact, you can have your key back,’ I told him, and threw it at his head. It missed, but I had the satisfaction of seeing him duck and
curse.

‘Calm down, Frey. I’ll get us a drink.’

‘I’m not stopping.’

‘OK.’

But I didn’t move. I suppose I was waiting for him somehow to make it better. Eventually he heaved himself off the cushions and came to put his arms round me.

‘Sorry, yeah. There’s no point me lying, is there? You knew what I thought about a baby.’

I said nothing.

‘And be honest, you didn’t
really
want all that bother, did you? You must be able to see it’s for the best. I bet there’s a part of you that’s relieved. Go
on, look me in the eye and tell me you’re not.’

I wrenched myself free. ‘What would you know about the way I’m feeling?’

‘I know
you
. I know what you’re capable of. What kind of a lifestyle you like. You wouldn’t have coped with a baby. You wouldn’t, though, would you? You know
nothing about them. You’re not the maternal type. Anyway, you’ll soon be back to normal. Once the fog’s cleared.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘You got hooked on an
idea, that’s all. It’ll pass.’

At that moment I hated him more than I’d ever hated anyone. He was the voice of the person I’d been, the person destined to measure out her life in plug plants and vodka shots, and I
didn’t want to be anywhere near him. I wished I still had his ring so I could make some other dramatic gesture, but even the green stain had faded to nothing. I took a breath: all the
frustration of the last months gathered itself into a great furious lungful of air, so the next thing I knew I was yelling into his face.

‘I COULD have! I could, I could! I could!’

Oggy bent backwards, cartoon-style, under the force of my shouting. Any minute now the old lady in the flat below would be calling the police about domestic violence and affray.

‘Could what?’

‘Have brought up a baby!’

‘OK. Get a grip, love. Yeah, all right, you
could
have brought up a kid. God knows, when you see some of the scuzzers who push buggies round. But you wouldn’t have
liked
it. Not day after day. It’s dead-end stuff. It wouldn’t have got you anywhere.’

‘Oh, just what I need, careers advice from the man who models himself on the three-toed sloth – actually, no, on second thoughts a sloth’s way too energetic for you.
You’re more like one of those Antarctic starfish who only move a centimetre a year.’

‘Cheers for that.’

‘So don’t you dare tell me how I should be living my life.’

He shrugged despairingly. ‘It’s no good, Frey. You’re the same as me. You don’t want to be tied to anything. That’s why it works, you and me. Neither of us want
baggage. We’re drifters. We bob along in the stream.’

Happy music blasted from the TV. I wanted to hit him and hit him.

‘
No
, Oggy. The reason we hang about together is because I’ve never bothered to find anyone better. I got it into my head you were all I deserved. I’ve convinced myself
proper boyfriends were for other people, boyfriends who were prepared to talk about the future, who took you out places and acknowledged you as a partner and didn’t regard you as a
filler-in—’

‘Don’t give me that line,’ he snapped.

‘Why not? It’s the truth.’

‘Yeah? Then it’s true for you as well. You get back from me exactly what you give. What have I really been, for years, except someone you call when you’re fed up? We knock
about but we never
do
anything. We don’t
go out
. So? Why’s that matter all of a sudden? Basically, I’m a mate you shag whenever. I thought that was what you
wanted.’

There was a pause while I considered this. ‘Then what was all that other stuff you said?’

‘What other stuff?’

‘How I was really “the one”, how it had taken you ages to realise it but now was the time to stop mucking about? Didn’t you mean any of that? Or was it just the
Tennent’s talking?’

For a moment he looked genuinely confused. ‘I did mean it, yeah.
Then.
’

‘But today you don’t. Brilliant.’

‘No, I do, sort of. Jesus, Frey, I’m not dicking about for the sake of it. I’m trying to be honest here. It’s just, I dunno. The way it works is I can feel a certain way,
and then a week later – a day later – I can feel different. I can’t explain why. That’s how it is.’

‘For you, maybe.’

‘For you as well.’ His voice rose indignantly.

‘No! I’m not like you, Oggy!’

‘OK, then. So tell me how you feel right now.’

‘Huh?’

‘Do you still love me?’

I laughed drily. ‘Not much. No.’

‘Well, then.’

He had me skewered on my own argument.

‘But it’s only because, because you—’

‘Listen, Frey.’ He moved away from me and collapsed back onto the sofa, swinging his legs up to lie prone once more. ‘This is all the truth you need to know: we work because
we’re the same. Oh yes we are. You can kick against it all you like but it won’t make any difference. You and me, we travel the same kind of track—’

‘Like hell we do.’

‘—and whether we’re apart or together, you’ll still be you. Motherhood? Don’t make me laugh. You’ve had a lucky escape, you have.’

Lucky escape. The words struck home painfully. That was the trouble with Oggy. Waste of weed-soused space he may have been, but sometimes he was right on the nail.

‘Well – oh, sod you,’ I said. And then I left, because there was nothing else to say.

The test was still in its packet under my bed. I drew it out and read the instructions, as I’d done a hundred times in the last week. Those days that pass when
you’re waiting to see if you’re pregnant last forever.

Now I turned the slim little box over and over in my hands and I thought, I could still do this test. It would still show a faint positive if there’d been any kind of baby. At least
I’d have that to hold onto, the knowledge that there really had been a new life growing inside me, and it wasn’t just a screwed-up menstrual cycle.

But the more sensible side of my brain told me to leave well alone. The point was, there was no baby, only a baby of the mind, of a few weeks. The faintest shadow of a baby.

Instead of taking the test, I unwrapped the stick and dipped it in the glass of Ribena by my bed. Then I bundled it and its box up in tissues, and stuffed the lot down to the bottom of my
waste-paper basket under the rest of the rubbish. That was an end of it. I wouldn’t be telling anyone. What was there to tell?

So I put on some music, sat down at my dressing table to re-do my make-up and hair. Almost instantly found myself back in that room where Melody had given birth; saw myself sitting outside in
the hospital corridor, resentful and embarrassed. A liability, a silly, useless girl.

I sprang up off the chair and ran my gaze around my bedroom, trying to shake the images out of my head. I blinked, for once seeing the room properly as though I’d just walked into it for
the first time. A child in a child’s room. All this junk! God. Did I need still to display my swimming certificates, school merit badges, cycling proficiency award? What was the point in
hanging onto my university folders? When I was never going back to college, and their presence on my shelf was just a reminder of another dead end? I wanted to sweep it aside, start again. Scour
and fumigate the lot.

I started to rip at posters. Poor, defaced Britney could come down off the wall – it would be a mercy killing – and
Children of the Damned
because it was creased and
dog-eared. Under the bed I knew there was still a box of action figures, trolls and orcs: well, those I could pass on to neighbours’ kids who’d get some proper use out of them. The
comedy fungi could go to a car boot.

—Again I was peering into the hospital blanket—

I kicked at a pile of
Dark Side
magazines, sending them fanning across the carpet.

—standing next to the pregnant lady in the chemist’s, thinking,
That’ll be me in a few months
—

‘It’s over!’ I said out loud. ‘It never properly began!’

—squatting next to a pushchair while ducks and geese squabbled over the bread I’d thrown—

I threw my Freddie Kruger gloves into the bin and pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes till I felt sick.
Pull yourself together, Frey
, I imagined Michael saying.
If Melody can
be brave
—

Then I spotted, wound round my jewellery box and holding the broken lid onto the base, one of those red elastic bands that postmen use. Dimly I recalled some American therapist on TV talking
about using a rubber band as a kind of aversion therapy. You could keep one on your wrist, she said, to stop yourself thinking bad thoughts. Every time you felt a destructive urge, you snapped the
band against your skin. The pain would be enough to divert yourself onto a happier topic. Eventually, avoiding the negative would become an unconscious mental habit.

Hell, it was any port in a storm. Without hesitation I slipped the elastic over my hand and pushed it against my cuff. Then I sat down and finished my make-up, spritzed my hair, and changed my
shirt.

Freshened up, I went downstairs for a roll of bin liners, brought them back to my room and had a thorough sort-out of what I wanted to keep. I made two piles: those few things that truly
mattered, and the leftovers from before. Year 7 exercise books, bent
Star Wars
trading cards, a flyer advertising a pond-dipping weekend in 1995, a bundle of notes from Oggy, they were all
as useless as each other. Why had I ever hung onto this stuff?

I was ruthless, it took me less than an hour. And I only had to ping my elastic band twenty or thirty times.

The doorbell rang as the text came in. By the time I’d got to the landing and peered over the banisters, Geraint was shuffling to open the front door so I took my phone
back to the bedroom to check the inbox. Would it be Oggy pleading for my forgiveness? Nicky announcing she and Michael were leaving next week for the Maldives? Or just Vodafone spam?