In Her Mothers' Shoes (5 page)

Why had she let him do it? What had scrambled her mind so much she’d been oblivious to where it might lead? He had a mesmerising effect on her: he could have said follow me to moon and she would have gone. She thought about his cheeky grin, his blue eyes, his shiny silver buttons.

And how it had ended, on a cold concrete floor in the Men’s toilets.

‘Come on, Elizabeth. You have to tell us. Was there someone?’ Her mother’s tone was flat, sad almost.

She looked out the window and focused on the trees at the end of the lawn. Their branches bare and stark, their leaves long ago swept into neat piles and burned, emitting thick plumes of dirty brown smoke.

Not so long ago, she was out there with her little sister Penny, rolling in the leaves, throwing them at each other, shrieking with laughter. It was one of those rare still autumn days, the leaves falling on their heads like shreds of brown crinkly parchment. Mummy joined in, scooping up armful after armful and giggling with them as she let it drop on her girls. Lizzie could still smell the damp decay, the earthy mustiness as she burrowed into a mound of fallen leaves under the big chestnut tree, its harvest of prickly hedgehog balls scratching her skin. When she was a child, she used to collect the spiky shells, taking them up to her room to crack them open in the hope that the shiny hard conker would reveal the chestnut fairy from her favourite book
Fairies of the Flowers and Trees.
She could picture him still, an impish brown elf in tights and jerkin, his head covered by a hat of tiny barbs, his wings speckled with white like a moth’s, his hands offering up the chestnut, ‘silky within’. 

‘Elizabeth!’

Her mother never called her that. She was really in trouble. She swivelled her eyes from her mother to the doctor and back again. They were both looking at her sternly, waiting for her to tell on Peter. Well, she wasn’t going to.

‘I don’t know.’

‘This isn’t like you, to be so wilful.’ Her mother’s stern expression belied the sadness in her eyes. ‘You just don’t think. You never think of the consequences.’

‘Mrs Hamilton, perhaps I could have a word with her.’ Dr McQuilkin’s red nose flared, making it stand out even more than usual.

‘Very well then.’ Her mother left the room without glancing at her daughter.

Lizzie kept staring out the window; she didn’t want to face the doctor and his questions. She hated him for his smugness, his superiority.

‘You can tell me, Elizabeth. I’m your doctor. If you’re in trouble, I can help you. You’ve got a boyfriend, haven’t you?’

She wouldn’t look at him. 

‘You don’t have to tell me his name if you don’t want to, just tell me what happened.’

He was so persistent. She glanced at him, annoyed, wishing he would just go away.

Dr McQuilkin was watching patiently.

She realised she had to say something or he’d just go on and on. Gripping the chair for support she said, ‘I think I’ve done it with a boy.’

‘Ah, I thought you had a boyfriend. Can you tell me more?’

The doctor’s glasses glinted in the afternoon sun; his nose shone even brighter red; a drip hung on the end of one of its long whiskers. His uneven, brown-tipped teeth were bared in a greedy smile.

She hadn’t told him she had a boyfriend. How dare he make that assumption? Was Peter a boyfriend? Not really, not like Julia’s boyfriend at Scots. They went on dates to the movies, they met up at the milkbar on the corner of Julia’s street, they wrote each other silly notes. Peter didn’t do anything like that. And he wasn’t a boy either. He was a man. All of twenty, and working in a real job. No, she didn’t have a boyfriend. The doctor was quite wrong.

The trees continued to hold their fascination. She wasn’t going to tell this man anything, not Peter’s name, nor anything that might identify him; nothing about the tram or about the pavilion, and especially nothing about the men’s toilets. Then her mother would never know.

She shook her head. She’d said enough.

‘Did he use a condom?’

‘A what?’

‘A condom? A rubber sheath. To stop you getting pregnant.’

A rubber sheath? It sounded revolting. There hadn’t been anything about rubber sheaths in
You and Your Body.
Perhaps there should have been; if it could have stopped all this – the creepy doctor, her mother’s disappointment and missing school – it might have been worth it. Why hadn’t Peter thought of it? Did he want her to get pregnant?

‘No.’

The doctor asked her if she’d be able to tell her mother, or would she like him to tell her.

‘I don’t want you to tell her anything.’ She was glad she hadn’t given him much to tell.

He folded his arms and looked exasperated. ‘Very well then,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll leave that up to you.’

She stood to ready herself for the confrontation she knew would follow.

The doctor brushed past her on his way to the door to fetch her mother. His elbow touched her chest. ‘My, you have grown up to be a big girl.’

He stopped and raised his hand - a huge hand ridged with dark veins and dotted with liver spots. She stood very still. But he didn’t touch her again.

‘I can see I’ll have to keep an eye on you,’ he said, wagging his finger at her like she’d been a naughty child.

Her tongue stuck to the back of her mouth; she was speechless. She nodded.

The rest of the doctor’s visit went by in a blur, with a red haze covering her eyes. The doctor did most of the talking. Her mother was so upset her lips disappeared in a thin drawn line, like a mailbox snapped shut.

No sooner had Dr McQuilkin departed than Lizzie’s mother ushered her into the kitchen and sat her down at the big wooden table.

‘You foolish, foolish girl,’ her mother cried – her mother who never usually raised her voice. ‘I don’t believe you can have been so stupid.’

Lizzie studied the marks on the table, the faint scorch from one of Mrs Mullen’s casseroles, the dish so hot from the oven it had glued the cork mat to the wood; the watermark from teapots and jugs with no coasters, which almost constituted a hanging offence; the scratches from carelessly held knives; the deep score her brother Jerry had made when questioning his mother’s ruling that he couldn’t go away on a weekend camping trip with his friends – the table bore all the hieroglyphics of the Hamilton family’s existence.

‘Are you listening to me?’

‘Yes.’ Sullen, withdrawn; she continued to study the table.

‘Well answer me then, who was he?’

The inquisition began. Did he go to Scots College? How old was he? Who were his parents? Where did they live?

Lizzie gave away nothing. She refused to say anything until the results came back.

Something must be up, she realised a week later, when her mother came running up the stairs to her room the moment she got home from school. She’d come in the back way, hoping to give her mother the slip, but the top stair always creaked, even when she tried to step across it. She’d flung herself down on her bedspread and was clutching her doll Jemima when her mother knocked briefly then came straight in, before she’d even answered.

‘The doctor’s letter arrived in the mail this morning and I opened it,’ she said then continued on before Lizzie had time to protest at her mail being opened. ‘It’s positive. You’re eleven weeks pregnant.’ She sounded businesslike, matter-of-fact.

Lizzie held Jemima tightly, holding her breath, determined not to show a reaction.

Not that it mattered; her mother was fired up and nothing would stop her. It seemed she had been thinking it all through since the doctor’s visit.

‘You’ll have to leave town of course and have the baby somewhere nobody knows you. You can’t possibly have it here. The neighbours would soon work it out and then everybody will know. You’ll have to go away. I’ll make some phone calls and find a place for you somewhere a long way off, like New Plymouth or Christchurch, where you’ll be looked after with other girls in the same situation until the baby’s born. Then you can come back here.’

‘Come back with the baby and live here?’

‘No, of course not. You can’t keep the baby. That’s simply not possible. What happens when girls like you get themselves in the family way, they go away for a few months, give the baby up for adoption to a nice family, and then come back as if nothing’s happened. Nobody except your father and I will know.’

‘A few months?’

‘Yes, what did you think would happen? We can’t have you growing fat and waddling around here. The Foster-Browns next door, everybody would know. You’ll be able to stay at school for maybe another two months if you can stop being sick, and then you’ll have to leave town before it starts to show.’

‘Before what starts to show?’

‘That you’re pregnant, you silly girl. Your pregnancy will start to show, probably in October, so that’s when you’ll have to go.’

‘October? But that’s only a few weeks away. What about my school work? I’ve got my final exams, and my art portfolio is due a month later.’

‘You should have thought of that when you got yourself pregnant.’

‘Then maybe I can take my schoolwork away with me? Maybe the school will let me take my exams in another town?’

Her mother sat back and looked at her incredulously. ‘You really don’t understand the consequences, do you?’ Suddenly, her expression softened. She sat next to Lizzie on the bed, put her arm round her shoulder and gave her a squeeze. ‘The school can’t know what’s happened, where you’re going or why because then everybody will know. We can’t tell anyone what’s happened, especially not the headmistress. Those things never remain a secret for long.’

Lizzie thought back to the girl who’d had to leave in her last year of school after she’d been sick in the corridor. Within just a few days, all the girls in her class knew why she’d gone. It remained a subject of gossip for months – sometimes of admiration, sometimes of horror. Why hadn’t she taken more notice, why hadn’t she realised she was putting herself at risk of the very same fate?

Her mother was right: she was a very silly girl incapable of recognising consequences.

She hung her head, defeated.

Her dream of becoming an architect was shredded in that brief and unhappy moment on the hard concrete floor. Her art portfolio would never be judged. Her Scholarship Maths exam would never be sat.

‘What will I tell them? What will I tell Julia?’

‘Nothing,’ her mother said emphatically. ‘You tell them absolutely nothing. Especially not Julia, nor any of your friends.’

‘But what will they think when I’m no longer at school. I’ll have to say something.’