Out of My Depth (28 page)

‘Sam!’ said Izzy. ‘Don’t do that. Pick it up, please.’

‘It wasn’t me,’ Sam said, reaching down to get it.

‘Then who was it?’

He smiled triumphantly. ‘Gravity!’

I smiled, in spite of myself. ‘Gravity was keeping it on your plate until you picked it up,’ I pointed out. ‘So it was you.’

‘Gravity put it on the floor,’ he insisted.

Izzy looked at me. ‘Consider yourself lucky,’ she said mildly. ‘Childfree, indeed.’

I smiled and nodded. I was annoyed with Sarah Saunders, because I knew I should do something to help her, and pissed off with Amanda, and agitated about Tamsin, who was contentedly eating and talking to Patrick. I tried hard to ignore Sam, but there was something about his innocence and his pride in himself that broke my heart.

And suddenly, it was too much.

I leaned to Izzy, and spoke quietly so no one else would hear.

‘Come to the kitchen with me,’ I said. ‘I want to tell you something.’

She looked at Tamsin. ‘Could you guys keep an eye on Sam for a sec?’ she said.

‘Sure,’ said Tamsin, turning back to the intense conversation she was having with Patrick. It seemed to involve the disparity between Sydney and London house prices.

I led Izzy into the kitchen, desperate to share this thing that I thought I had long since left behind. Of all my recent worries, I had thought that this was the least pressing. The oven was still hot and the room was uncomfortable. I never spoke about the baby, or thought about it, these days. That, though, was not completely true.

I composed myself. I took a few deep breaths, lifted my chin, and pulled in my stomach. I was exhausted. It was hard work looking after all these people. I reminded myself that I was a famous artist, that I looked lovely in my dress, that I had good hair and a delectable tan. I wondered why I had ever thought things like that were important.

‘Urgh,’ I said, pulling a face. ‘It’s unbearable in here. Shall we go out the front?’ Izzy nodded.

She pulled out a chair at the wrought-iron table in the tiny front garden, but I looked up and saw that Amanda had her bedroom window open. I was not going to allow her to eavesdrop. I pointed to the open window, and set off down the road, with Izzy following me, looking apprehensive.

We walked slowly away from the solid stone house. The midday sun was unforgiving, and our pace slowed further. We passed the boundary of my garden, and walked alongside a huge field of maize, which was turning from green to a dry, dusty brown. Patches of tarmac on the road were melting, squishy. I was nervous. I had never told anyone this story, not properly. It seemed, suddenly, that my life was full of shameful secrets.

‘About Tamsin,’ I said. ‘I’m going to tell her tonight.’

‘Susie,’ Izzy said quickly, ‘I know that’s what you want. But do you think it’s wise? Really? What good could ever come from it?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. I just think she needs to know.’

‘She doesn’t. She wouldn’t want to.’

‘I’ll try to talk to Amanda first. But otherwise, I’m going to do it anyway. She’s being so difficult.’ I swallowed. Amanda had been my best friend. I was disturbed by the fact that I didn’t even like her any more.

‘Is that what were you going to tell me?’

I shook my head. My mouth was dry. ‘It’s to do with babies.’

‘Babies? So you are pregnant?’

I huffed a little. ‘Not at all. It’s something else. I really don’t talk about it. But, I don’t know what it was. Sam is adorable, and I can suddenly see why you’d buy a Buzz Lightyear suit rather than a Chanel one. And that’s something I’ve never understood before. And I can see how your priorities have changed. Everything’s looking a bit hollow in my life at the moment, and there’s all the worry about Tamsin, and then that Sarah woman has been spinning me some crap story.’

‘And . . . ?’

I picked a daisy from the verge, and put it behind my ear. ‘I’ve never told Roman this,’ I said. ‘Here goes. There’s a bit of a story leading up to it. When I was in London, you know, after we all lost touch, I was drifting. You know that. But drifting is a polite way of putting it. I was living the crap-piest, most miserable life you can imagine. We’d move around, me and this bunch of losers I’d fallen in with. We’d live in squats, which I shudder to think about now. Word would come of a house which was empty, and we’d just go and move in, use all the tricks to get in with no apparent damage, and we’d live there, in these people’s homes, and then we wouldn’t leave again until they got the police. Paint graffiti on their walls and hang banners in the windows. It seemed exciting at the time. There was an adrenaline thrill in the idea that we were breaking the law.’ I could remember it all so clearly. Now Izzy would know that my current life was a sham.

‘Mmm.’

‘I had that boyfriend, Steve. I was in such a state. You know why. Because of Mrs Grey, and Tamsin, and that total, consuming guilt... I think I was very depressed, which was only right, but I would never have put a label on it. I wasn’t even articulate enough to realise that there was something wrong, that feeling like I did wasn’t normal. I knew that Amanda and I had murdered Mrs Grey, as surely as if we’d cut her brake cables. I knew that I didn’t deserve to be happy, so I thought that this was how my life was going to be as a result.

‘I met Steve because we were in the same crowd. He was good-looking, in a stinky sort of way. He had a wispy beard and round glasses, but behind all that there was a nice face. He wanted to move to Cornwall and be a gardener. For ages that was our dream. We kind of drifted together, slept together, abused various substances together. It was him that got me to art school.’ I laughed. ‘God knows what he must think of me now, wherever he is! Anyway, he was my boyfriend, in a casual sort of way.’ I remembered Steve as if it had been yesterday. He was earnest, always dreaming of a miraculous future built around a rural idyll. He had been skinny, because he never ate. I remembered, once, trying to put on a pair of his jeans and finding I couldn’t haul them above my knees. But he was kind, in a slightly pathetic way, and he was, for a year or so, all that I had. I never even mentioned my private education, or my school friends, and when Amanda wrote me letters, I ripped them up and threw them away without opening them.

‘And one day,’ I continued, ‘I realised it had been ages since my last period. And so I went to the doctor’s for a pregnancy test, because I couldn’t afford to buy one, and found that I was having a baby. It turned out I was already three months gone.’

I didn’t look at her face. I remembered being twenty, and miserable. I remembered asking about abortion. I remembered the doctor making me an appointment with a counsellor. Then I remembered Steve’s reaction. His face had changed. He had been overjoyed at the idea of a baby. And, gradually, I came round to the idea.

‘I decided to have the baby,’ I said, still avoiding eye contact. And I was pleased about it. Very pleased. And, you know, as the months went by, the pregnancy changed me. It gave me a bit of focus, and I started to think that, even if I’d been lost myself, I needed to get myself together for the baby. That responsibility was an amazing feeling. And because I’d come from a nice stable home — and of course my parents had no idea how I was living in London because I was barely in touch with them — and because I’d got good A levels only two years earlier, I was actually reasonably well set up to pull myself together. I started thinking of the life I wanted my baby to have, and it made me make some changes that I’d never have been able to make otherwise.

'And I thought about Mrs Grey, and I knew that I would always live with it, but I felt my baby didn’t deserve the guilt, so I thought I had better try to move on, although I didn’t quite know how I was going to do that.’ I looked at Izzy. ‘I still don’t, as you will have noticed. I wanted to include Steve in my plans, and he was desperate for us to be a family unit, so we started looking for a proper place to live, and we went on the council waiting list. I was at art school and I got a job in the Body Shop on Saturdays, which was a big step for me because it meant I had to look presentable and be at work on time. At the Body Shop you even have to smell presentable.’

‘But Susie,’ said Izzy, peering into my face and forcing eye contact. ‘I can’t believe you ever had a problem with looking presentable. Look at you now!’

‘Oh, I did, believe me. I was fatter than I had been at school — size sixteen I think, at that point — and I didn’t have any money for clothes. So I just wore any old crap. Remember those faded black skirts with tassles on the bottom?’

‘And a band of black embroidery just above the tassles?’

‘I wore those because we knew someone who sold them on Camden Market so I got them practically free. And other stuff like that. Cast-offs. Oxfam stuff. Things people had died in. Clothes that belonged to the squat owners.’

‘I get lots of my stuff from Oxfam.’

‘But you don’t get old men’s cardigans or enormous lumberjack shirts.’

‘No.’

‘And you wouldn’t have worn such items as maternity wear, either.’

‘I might.’

‘Anyway, the Body Shop made me dress well, because wearing a Body Shop sweatshirt counted as dressing well for me, then. It was a big thing just to buy some reasonable looking clothes that fitted me. Correctly gendered and everything. And I started wearing a little bit of make-up for work. I’d go in early and the girl who did the make-up demonstrations would do it for me. Then I bought what she used and practised.’

‘But you already knew how to wear make-up. Remember you at the ball?’ As soon as she’d said it, Izzy obviously regretted it, but I didn’t care.

‘You have to remember, Izzy, I’d sunk really low by this point. The Suzii I used to be at school was gone. I was in a terrible state. I had to learn some of that stuff all over again. So, I started to do it, to get my act together. And the pregnancy was brilliant for me.’ I took a sharp breath and felt the hot air in my lungs. A trickle of sweat ran down my back. It was a moment before I could speak. ‘Sorry. I’ve never talked about it. But I do remember what it’s like, feeling a baby kicking you from the inside, and the heartburn, and that exhaustion that’s unlike any other kind of tiredness. All of that. I do remember it, so vividly.

‘By the time she was born, we had our own place. Steve was working as a waiter and for an office temping agency, and I was still at art school and had my Body Shop job too, and we were getting there.’

‘She?’

I forced myself to say the word. ‘Stillborn.’ I breathed deeply. That was a word from which I recoiled. Midwives and my mother had tried to substitute ‘born asleep’, but I had never gone for that. A brutal fact needed a brutal word. ‘I knew there was something wrong,’ I continued, speaking blankly ‘I hadn’t been feeling much movement for a few days, but people said it was because the baby was so big that it didn’t have space. I tried to believe that. I had a thirty-eight week midwife’s appointment, and she couldn’t find the heartbeat, and I was in an ambulance and having a section. Even then, I was waiting for the cry.’ I stopped still and used my powers of self-control. ‘Steve kept telling me it would all be all right,’ I explained. And I was letting myself believe him. She was blue.’

I looked up at the deep blue sky. How could I ever have thought I could get over this, and leave it all behind and never speak of it again?

‘Susie,’ said Izzy. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Don’t say anything,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s OK. It was ages ago now Steve and I crumbled instantly. I never wanted to see him again and I barely did. I was horrible. I told him to fuck right off and never try to contact me ever again. I had that chat with the woman at art school, Janet, that I mentioned yesterday, because she knew what had happened. She was the only one who sought me out to talk about it. And I channelled myself into succeeding.’ I wanted to laugh, for some reason ‘The weirdest thing is that it worked.’

‘And you truly don’t want another child?’

I shook my head, trying to look more certain than I felt. ‘I’ve got one child, and that’s Roman. I couldn’t take the pain of anything else. I’ve locked it all away. I never imagined that seeing you and Amanda with your children, and having Tamsin here and thinking about Mrs Grey... I didn’t imagine that it would bring all this to the surface.’ I swallowed and looked up at the blue sky. ‘I know, Izzy, I absolutely know that losing my baby was my punishment for what I did. And I think Amanda’s suffered, too, in a different way.’

Izzy put a hand on my arm, and I turned towards her, desperate for comfort. ‘But Susie,’ she said. ‘That’s ridiculous. You must know that. What you did was not murder. You’re not being punished. And it wouldn’t happen next time. And you have so much to give as a mother.’

I felt despair. ‘It wouldn’t happen next time? Do you promise? Can you give me a one hundred per cent cast-iron guarantee? Can you protect it from illness, too, and cot death, and heart conditions and everything else that can happen?’

Izzy put her hands on my shoulders and hugged me close to her. I closed my eyes, and let her. Izzy was the only person who knew my secrets, and she still wanted to hug me. That gave me more comfort than anything else in the world.

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘It’s the risk you have to take, and the odds are stacked in your favour, and the risk is worth it, Susie, believe me.’