Ricochet Baby (6 page)

‘Shouldn’t we ring for help?’ I say, eyeing the little box on the wall, with the sign about it being for use only in an emergency.
Anything to take my mind off throwing up, off my own kind of high altitude sickness.

‘No cause for a fuss,’ says the second woman. Her breasts are like ledges of rock. I can’t turn around properly without bumping into them.

There is a grinding lurch, and the lift slips downwards and stops again. I hear a thin scream that is mine but seems dissociated from me. A more palpable silence ensues.

‘We should all sit down with our knees braced,’ says the man in the tweed cap, after a minute or so. ‘Like in an aeroplane when it’s going to crash.’

I grab the phone, and a telephonist answers. ‘Help us,’ I shout. ‘The lift’s broken down.’

‘Which department?’ She doesn’t sound very interested.

‘I don’t know. How the fuck do I know where I am?’

‘All right, keep your hair on. What department were you heading for?’

‘I’m in the wrong lift, I don’t know.’

‘Are you on your own?’

‘Where are we going?’ I ask the people in the lift.

‘I was on my way to respiratory medicine,’ mumbles the big woman.

I repeat the information to the woman on the telephone. The lift lurches again.

‘Get me out, I’m pregnant.’

‘For God’s sake keep your hair on, you stupid cow.’

I put the phone down, not believing what I have heard. But it is true, this is what she said, and I am stuck here with these
expressionless
, apparently unmoved people.

I sit down on the floor of the lift, and try to bunch my knees up to my chin. Soon the man in the tweed cap sits down beside me. Glancing up, I see a glint of tears in the eyes of the boy, and am curiously comforted.

‘Sit down beside me,’ I say. The boy squats down, and
suddenly
, without a hiccup, a stream of vomit gushes out of him over the lift floor. Orange liquid mixed with fish and chips spills round our feet. I stand up again, and hold the side of the lift, gagging in the stench.

I grab the phone and shout down it. ‘I’m the medical
superintendent’s
daughter,’ I say.

There is a hurried conversation. Another woman comes on. ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry,’ says the second telephonist, ‘we’re doing the very best we can.’

I hang up, and begin to sob. The Asian woman takes a Walkman and earphones out of her handbag and puts them over her ears. I wish I had some too.

‘Stop it,’ the big woman says to me. ‘Think of your baby instead of yourself. If you go on like that I’ll have to slap you.’

‘Mother,’ I say. ‘MumMum.’

I
SEE HER
in another lift, a different hospital, some other time. My father has hit her with the back of his hand and she has fallen and hurt her shoulder. It is the only time I have ever seen him hit her, and I believe, though I have no way of knowing this, that he has never done it again. She has been screaming in incoherent rage, hurling all manner of objects, dinner plates, vases, a half-full bottle of whisky in his direction. He grabs her, holds her, while the boys and I look on. The farmhouse kitchen is splattered with scraps of food, shards of crockery, the rotten water from the vase. When she falls she lies among the mess before slowly rising to her knees.

‘You’ve hurt me, you bastard,’ she says to my father. ‘Take me to the hospital.’ Her arm dangles at her side.

I have to go with them. They try to leave me with my brothers, but I throw myself after my parents as they stumble out to the car.

‘Take me with you, please take me,’ I beg, clinging to my mother’s jersey.

‘I didn’t mean to hurt your Mum,’ says my father. I am lying on the grass of the lawn, beside the car. As my mother drags
herself
into the car, I seize my moment and tear the door out of her hand, so that I can jump inside too.

At the hospital we ride up in the lift to the X-ray department. My father, still angry, is tense and defensive as my mother cries messily in a loud, whining monotone. Her luxuriant hair is tousled and matted.

‘I fell,’ she says to the examining doctor.

‘Easy, I should think,’ says the doctor. ‘You’re not very steady on your feet now, are you?’

She stares right back at the doctor out of bloodshot eyes. But there is something defiant, even calculated, in her response. ‘No, I’m not, am I?’

‘It’s lucky you were drunk,’ says the doctor. ‘You might have hurt yourself badly, mightn’t you, if you hadn’t had something to relax you.’

A look flashes between the doctor and my father.

‘Give her an aspirin and put her to bed,’ he says.

‘Aren’t you going to do anything for me?’ my mother says, and her eyes are wide with a pleading I cannot interpret, although I guess she was trying to say that she does not want to go home with my father.

‘I’ve got sick people to look after,’ the doctor says coldly.

‘I’m sick,’ she says.

‘You’ll get better,’ he says, and shows us the door. We ride in the lift in a silence broken only by more of my mother’s muffled, hiccuppy weeping.

‘I’m sorry, Glass,’ she says, dull and exhausted. Neither of them looks at me. This is the same woman who imposes control on the chaos of nature. It would be easy to think that the difficulty has gone away.

‘We won’t say any more about this,’ my father says, when we reach home. Michael and Bernard are nowhere to be seen. I agree with my father that I will never tell anyone.

T
HE LIFT GRINDS
into action again and my fellow prisoners and I are swerved into another steep downwards dive, before we come to a halt. This time the doors open. A knot of people clusters below us. The lift is halfway between floors, which is as far as it will go. Someone has brought a chair for us to climb down on to. I see the dark space of the lift well at our backs as we slide over the lip of the lift floor.

A pert, confident woman, blonde hair piled up on her head, stands holding the chair. I look for kindness in the upturned faces, expecting someone to comfort me, a pregnant woman crawling out of a lift.

‘You’re not the medical superintendent’s daughter,’ says the blonde woman. ‘We checked up.’

‘Bitch,’ I scream. ‘Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch.’

The woman holding the chair ducks, and someone goes to grab me. I am quicker than they expect, jumping with a gymnast’s fluid leap towards the fire door, finding myself in a stairwell,
running
down, not looking back. I hear, among the voices behind me, someone calling, ‘Mad as a maggot’, but I don’t care.

W
ENDY
AND
S
ARAH
quarrel as they walk around Edith’s garden. Wendy carries the floppy velvet bag over her arm. On her head she wears a huge sunhat, tied beneath her chin with a paisley scarf.

‘It’s a man, isn’t it?’ Wendy asks. ‘You were expecting a man. I stood in the way of some fellow coming to slink into your bed after dark.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘He’s let you down, hasn’t he?’

‘Why do you say that?’ Sarah knots and unknots her hands. They are too thin and her veins stand out.

‘Ha.’ It is more of a bark than a comment.

‘I made a bad marriage — am I supposed to behave like a nun? Do penance?’

‘A touch of classical Renaissance here,’ says Wendy, looking around the garden. ‘Interesting.’

The garden is laid out from the house in a rectangular lawn with low narrow walls down which erigeron and rock plants fall beneath Italian lavenders. A central middle path leads across the central axis to a gazebo and an organised cluster of rose gardens; it is only beyond this point that a certain wildness takes over, as the garden fans into serpentine grassed paths among brilliant displays of annuals. These walkways meander towards a large avenue of trees that lead to the paddocks beyond.

A spare, suntanned woman with dark hair turning white in slashes round the temples, is surrounded by day trippers to the
garden
. She wears a pale green silk shirt and severely tailored slacks, casually elegant in a way that those of her guests are not. They are a mixed lot: mothers and daughters like Sarah and Wendy, grateful for an interest they can share; a sprinkling of older men shambling behind wives with crimped blue hair, pearl button earrings and winged glasses, their angora cardigans buttoned across their
stomachs
; Japanese tourists taking photographs of each other in the swings beneath the trees, a small outing of the wheelchair-bound (to whom the organisation who has hired Edith’s garden today will make a donation); a group of private school girls carrying
notebooks
and piping with excitement as they discover botanical labels on the plants.

‘Who does your landscape design?’ asks a visitor intensely, pen poised over a notebook.

The owner looks surprised, and raises her eyebrows. ‘Nobody.’

‘You must visit other gardens?’

‘Never,’ says the woman in the green shirt.

‘Oh. Photographs, books, perhaps?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Well’ The woman gestures helplessly. ‘You do seem to have a painterly eye.’

‘So what do you want, Wendy?’ Sarah asks her mother.

‘Ssh,’ says Wendy, her fingers to her lips.

‘Up here,’ says the owner, tapping her forehead with her
forefinger
. ‘It’s all up here.’ Finishing the conversation, she walks briskly to a long table where food is being set out.

‘I want you to be happy’ says Wendy, as if there has been no interruption to the conversation.

‘Well, let me get on with it.’

‘Oh, I would, I would if you could. The trouble is, Sarah, you don’t know who you are. How can you make choices?’

‘I’m sick of all that, don’t you understand?’ Sarah says, more sharply than she intends.

‘Don’t be a baby, Sarah. How can anyone know anything if they don’t ask questions?’

‘That’s your problem. You’re the one who wants to know.’

There is a veto on the information in Sarah’s adoption files. Her birth parents cannot be identified. It is a wound Sarah has failed to lick clean.

A group of madrigal singers in period costume is gathering beneath a central wrought iron dome covered with Mrs Herbert Stevens roses, their white petals like a fountain. The singers have attracted the day trippers around them.

‘I have asked myself questions,’ says Sarah. She hasn’t intended to say anything, but the madrigal singers are humming softly to themselves, like an orchestra tuning for a performance, and the women in their absurd costumes, the high sweet buzz behind their closed lips and the scent of roses unleash an unintentional torrent of words. ‘At night, when I was supposed to be asleep in whatever Godforsaken hole we happened to be in at the time, I would lie awake and ask myself what I would do if I was given away a second time. I was afraid of being on my own. I was scared of the dark, because people could hide in the shadows and take me away.’

‘Oh Sarah, not now dear.’ People around them are raising their fingers to their lips, signalling for them to be quiet.

‘You started it. At least let me tell you what I think. Let me tell you the questions I’ve asked.’

The singers finish putting their song sheets in order. They begin to sing ‘Scarlet Ribbons’. Wendy eyes widen with longing.

Sarah touches her own hair in a surprised way, as if she is
discovering
something, and begins to walk away, moving so quickly that Wendy has to lengthen her stride to keep up.

‘I thought I was so lucky to be chosen by you,’ says Sarah.

‘And now you don’t?’ They continue through an avenue of elms planted closely together, their pleached branches forming an overhead tunnel.

‘To tell you the truth, Wendy, the question I ask myself is, what authorities in the world would have given me to a barmy
couple
like you and Mac. That’s the real question, isn’t it?’

Wendy sits down abruptly on a woodland seat, looking out towards the rolling farmland, her face drained of colour. She begins to burrow in her bag, searching for something. Already, Sarah has begun to regret her thin tirade, even though she believes that she has said what she means, that the question has been lying there waiting to catch up with them both, sooner or later.

‘Children think these things,’ she says lamely. ‘I’ve got kids of my own now.’

‘But you’re not a child, Sarah.’ Wendy produces what she has been looking for, one of the silver birds. The sight of it silences Sarah. The singers’ voices rise ever more sweetly in the summer afternoon: ‘If I live to be a hundred, I will never know from where, came those lovely scarlet ribbons, scarlet ribbons for her hair …’ It is like the setting of a period movie — the rustic seats, the splendid backdrop of trees, the country women’s pure voices soaring into the sunshine.

‘Why have you brought those?’

‘That, actually. I’ve only got one now. I want you to have it.’

‘Where’s the other one?’ Sarah is becoming frightened.

‘I sold it.’

‘My inheritance?’

‘Hardly important, by the sound of it.’

‘I told you I could give you some money’

‘Tony’s money So you did. Pay your debts, eh? Get me off your back.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘So what’s true? You’re the one telling all the truth, Sarah.’ Wendy stares into the distance, her knotted hands clutching the bird, her face closed.

‘Nothing’s the truth. I’ve been left in the lurch and I’m unhappy and I just want to forget all this, okay?’

Wendy doesn’t appear to hear her. In the distance something catches her eye and she almost rises to her feet.

‘I needed the money,’ Wendy tells Sarah in an offhand way.

‘For what?’

‘Oh for goodness’ sake, Sarah,’ says Wendy, ‘you do go on about things.’ She drops the bird back in her bag. ‘I met a man from the Welfare Department on the beach up at home.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No, no, why should you? Well, for a certain sum of money, he assured me he could find me the name of your birth mother. There are rotten apples in every basket, I suppose. It seems I was lucky enough to find one.’