Motherlove (9 page)

‘You stupid cow.' He snarled at her lump. ‘It's not mine.' He stared at her with the look he used on customers who wouldn't pay up.

She didn't dare reply, just waited.

‘Are you so fucking stupid you didn't think of getting rid of it?'

‘I didn't know how, Gary. Didn't know what to do.'

‘Stupid cow! Well, you can fucking get rid of it now.'

‘I can't, Gary.' She was half crying, half pleading, knowing that neither would work with him. He didn't like whiney women. ‘It's too late. They won't do an abortion or nuffin' now.'

‘I told you, get rid of it, bitch.' Here it came. She could see the explosion rippling up within him, bursting out at last. ‘Or I'll get rid of it for you.'

Even in the middle of the night it was never quite dark in the room, because of the street light outside and the thin curtains, but the light was softer tonight in the freezing fog. Lindy shivered under the quilt and tried to get more comfortable on the mattress, rubbing her feet up and down to warm them. No Gary to share his body's heat. He was out, she didn't know where. Didn't know if he was coming back. She'd asked but he was still too mad to reply.

Maybe it would make a difference if she lost the baby. She might. He'd punched her so hard she'd almost passed out. But she hadn't started bleeding or nothing. Now she didn't know what to do. There were ways of dealing with babies, other girls had told her, but that was for when you first got pregnant, not for when you were eight months gone. Things she just hadn't done. Like she hadn't accepted Carver's help. What if Gary found out about that? He'd be that mad.

Carver was the bloke upstairs. Top Dog. She was always a bit afraid of him. No, really afraid. Big black guy with eyes like bullets. Nobody messed with Carver, not even Gary. She'd delivered stuff for him now and again, because he'd asked, politely, and she'd pretended it was fine, too terrified to refuse. But mostly she ducked out of sight if she saw him first. Then one day he'd caught her on the stairs, looked her over, and asked her what she was going to do. Like she had choices.

She couldn't tell Gary that. Couldn't tell him that Carver had asked her if she wanted to him to fix something up for her. Or that she had shaken her head. Better let Gary believe she'd been just too stupid to know what to do.

Perhaps she was stupid. Lindy couldn't understand her own impulses. What happened in this world, or at least what happened to her, just happened. No rhyme or reason, no good or bad. So, lying alone on her mattress, she just hoped that Gary would forgive her and accept the baby because it was too late to put right her mistake. She never paused to think that maybe she had said no because she, Lindy Crowe, actually wanted the baby. She had been too useless to get rid of it, but not too useless, in her own small way, to look after herself and the spark of life within her. She'd stopped drinking – couldn't afford it, could she? Hardly ever smoked. Tried to remember to eat. Had dreams sometimes about holding her baby, cuddling it, having its fingers grab hers. Someone of her very own to offer her the one thing she had ever craved.

It was Gary's, whatever he said. She hadn't been sleeping around while he was inside, at least not for the first four months. She hadn't slept around before, neither, not once she'd moved in with him, though he'd kept telling her his friends would pay good money if she gave them one. She'd hoped she wouldn't have to do that anymore. She would have done it, for him, in the end, but he was still bullying her about it when he'd got done for demanding money with menaces. Leaving her to cope all alone.

She'd started off well. Got a job, night cleaning. Greg paid her cash in hand and she'd enjoyed it, working through the night hours with old Sal, in brightly lit offices like another world. She was good at it too, sweeping, cleaning, polishing, making things neat and pretty. And even if Greg wasn't quite legal, it was like Christmas every week, knowing there'd be cash at the end of it. But then she'd starting throwing up and showing and Greg had told her to get lost and she was stuffed, in every possible sense. She was driven back to the inevitable round of prostitution and shoplifting. Not that many men were that keen for a fuck with a pregnant woman. Shoplifting was easier though. No one thought twice about her bulges.

She'd signed on too. She hadn't dared try before because they'd have just put her back in care. But now she was seventeen, they couldn't send her back, so a month ago she'd finally made it into the Job Centre, and found herself filling in a load of forms. Did she have a permanent place of residence? Yes! What rent did she pay? None. She shouldn't have said that. Did she have a partner? Yes, but he was in prison. Name, age, date of birth, National Insurance number… She didn't know nothing about half of it, all the questions and the boxes and the haranguing woman with big shoulders and steel glasses who looked at her like she was a worm. It was all just another of those processes that happened to Lindy, inflicted by other people, the usual round of meaningless battering. But she had emerged with the promise of a giro and leaflets on maternity welfare. Not bad for all that bother. The money didn't go far, but it was regular, enough for some food and light and weed, and a bit of heat if she was careful, and with an occasional bit of shoplifting, she got by. Waiting for Gary to come home.

She was stiff on the mattress. Aching. He really had hit her hard. She couldn't feel the baby moving tonight. Maybe it was dead. The thought left her numb with helpless grief, but there was nothing she could do about it. He was her man and if he chose to kill it, or kill her, or throw her out on the streets again, how could she stop him? She'd never said it, even to herself, but she'd known he would go mad when he found out. That was really why she'd stopped going to visit him in prison. Putting off the moment. She just hoped now he'd come round. Maybe he'd come home flush and feeling generous towards her. Maybe…

She was too cold to sleep, and yet she must have because she woke with a start when the quilt was snatched off her. It was still dark, lit by the glow of the street lamps, strong enough for her to see Gary standing over her. Staring down at her.

She shivered. She couldn't tell if he was still angry or what.

‘Get us something to eat,' he ordered.

She struggled up. It was difficult in her state, getting up from a mattress on the floor. As soon as she was off it, he flung himself down in her place, dirty boots raking the quilt as he groped for his cigarettes.

She put the kettle on, opened cans, made tea and beans on toast with ham. Not much you can do with one ring and a grill that half works. She placed the plate on the table, but Gary grunted, so she gave him the plate where he half lay, half sat, on the mattress, and watched him shovelling the food into his mouth.

He wasn't talking, so she cleaned out the remainder of the beans from the battered saucepan, first with a spoon, then with her finger. The taste reminded her she was famished. She helped herself to another biscuit, then handed him the packet.

He grabbed her wrist, his eyes running over her, head to foot. ‘Too late then, for an abortion.'

‘I'm eight months, Gary. They wouldn't do it now.'

‘Have you seen a doc?'

She shook her head. The local surgery, busy with old dears and bright mums with pushchairs had been too alien. She didn't like doctors. Too many memories of unfriendly examinations.

‘Okay.' Gary nodded. Pleased? ‘That's good. No one knows, right?'

What did he mean? She knew. He knew. Everyone who took one look at her knew.

‘You listening? You haven't gone telling doctors you're pregnant. They haven't got you booked into hospital or anything like that. Right? So no one knows.'

The woman who fixed up her weekly giro knew. But no need to tell Gary that. Lindy shook her head.

‘Right. So you keep your mouth shut about the baby, and when you've had it, we get rid of it.'

She went cold inside, colder than the icy fog. ‘You wouldn't kill it, Gary.'

He laughed, cruelly, then like he was just laughing it off. ‘We dump it, that's all. Leave it somewhere. No one need know nothing. Right?'

She wanted to say ‘But I want my baby,' but she didn't dare, so she began to cry.

Tears never worked on Gary. ‘Shut up, you stupid bitch. If you'd got rid of it in the first place, there wouldn't have been no trouble. Your own stupid fucking fault. If you want to stick with me, you dump it. And you want to stick with me, don't you, girl.'

She sniffed back her tears and nodded.

CHAPTER 3

i

Kelly

A long gravel drive led up to the house. Nothing like the farm tracks Kelly knew, but a farm it officially was. Some rare breed of cattle on one side, and an organic wheat crop on the other, sprinkled with wild flowers among the green spears.

Roz was looking out of the window, apparently serene, though her fingers were twitching on her skirt.

‘Nearly there. We've made it.'

‘Yeah. It's lovely.' Another twitch. Roz's old East-End accent, usually smoothed to the faintest nasal twang, reasserted itself. ‘A bit posh, innit?'

Kelly laughed. ‘Mum, it's Rog and Mandy. I don't suppose they've grown horns or anything.'

Roz smiled, nervously. She had lived comfortably with Roger and Mandy Padstow when they had been tepee-dwelling activists, dividing their commitments between Gaia, Wicca, road planning, and the ever-niggling internal politics of the commune, but here in Dorset she felt inadequate, all her old insecurities bubbling up again.

Kelly had no such qualms. People were people to her, wherever they lived, however they dressed or spoke. To her, Roger and Mandy would always be the couple with whom she grew up, models of easy confidence and kindly authority, with quirks that she could handle.

There had, of course, been no official leader in the commune, but Roger and Mandy had been the most articulate and rational of them all, the ones best at dealing with authority, perhaps because, whatever their radical views, they preserved the social confidence of their educated middle-class origins.

Raised in the commune, Kelly had no instinctive yearning for nuclear family structures. She had no grandparents, but she did have Roger and Mandy, and she imagined that grandparents must fulfil a similar role; wise people who could advise and support, and take over in crises. Except that grandparents would be much older. The Padstows' two children had been Kelly's commune siblings. It had probably been the children, Kelly thought, lacking any cynicism, that had led them to quit the commune a couple of years after she and Roz had moved out with Luke Sheldon. Now Mandy wrote books on life/work/health balance and Roger ran an IT company and together they farmed (organically) this estate in Dorset and produced (or their workforce produced) expensive brands of yoghurt and wild boar pâté.

They'd always kept in touch with Roz and Kelly. Not so much with others from the commune, who saw the Padstows as traitors to the cause – whatever it was. Roz had always been too needy for their approval to question the changes, but she did feel intimidated by their worldly success. Kelly was neither intimidated nor impressed, nor resentful. The Padstows were friends, in the commune or here in their six-bedroom semi-mansion in Hardy country, where their activism had transmogrified into buying the
Guardian
and donating to Oxfam.

Kelly steered the battered Astra down the drive, listening to the pop and rattle of the semi-detached exhaust as they rolled into the broad gravel between the house proper and the converted barns. She parked up between a Range Rover and a sleek black saloon with tinted glass. Roz's fingers were twitching at her skirt again, but Kelly was unfazed. She jumped out of the Astra, hoisting up the door to make it shut, just as Mandy and Roger appeared on the steps.

‘Hiya!' Kelly waved happily, then hopped round to the passenger door to release her mother. ‘Don't try to open it, Mum. I need to do it from this side.'

‘Here, let me help.' Roger eased the door open with her. He crouched on the gravel, looking in at Roz. ‘How's my dreamer?'

‘Roger! It's really great to see you,' Roz said. The bone-rattling journey from Pembrokeshire had not been pleasant for her, but Kelly could see her relax at the sight of the man she had always trusted.

‘Let's get you out then.' He smiled at Roz, still smiling as he looked up at Kelly, though she could see the alarm in his eyes. Roz was looking a thousand times better than she had a couple of months ago, but a hundred times worse than she had looked the last time Roger had seen her, a couple of years earlier.

‘Kelly.' Mandy had joined them and hugged her, before reaching out to hug Roz too as she emerged from the car. ‘Roz. My poor Roz. What has been happening to you? Let's get you into the house.

‘Roger?' She looked askance at her husband.

Kelly kicked strategically to open the boot, so that Roger could haul out Roz's suitcase, a hessian bag of medications and herbal remedies, and Kelly's bulging kitbag. ‘Thanks for asking Mum down. I can't get her to sit still at home. She thinks she ought to be doing things.'