“Of course.” I said it automatically. Once I’d put the phone down, I rolled back onto my front, prone, face in the pillow. I lay there for five minutes, cursing under my breath. Then I got up, got in the shower, and attempted to smile.
Becca had been crying – it was obvious. The tip of her nose was red, the edges of her eyelids were inflamed, and her face had that puffy, tear-soaked look. I gave her a hug and let her sit down at the kitchen table.
“Tea? Or something stronger?”
“It had better be tea,” she said, miserably.
I busied myself with the kettle and mugs. Cravenly, I wished I’d never picked up the phone. I didn’t want any more revelations. I didn’t want to hear anything bad, not now.
I plonked a mug down in front of her, and sat myself down with my own drink. Mentally, I braced myself.
Becca looked up at me from her red-rimmed eyes. “I’m pregnant,” she said.
I said nothing for a moment. I said nothing because I felt precisely as if someone had swung a heavy, booted foot into my lower belly. “Are you sure?”
“I did three tests. I thought the first must have been a mistake, but three – you wouldn’t get a false positive from three, surely?” She started to cry again and I could feel myself struggling not to grimace. “I can’t believe it, – I don’t know what to do, Maudie-”
I held onto my hot coffee cup, drawing meagre comfort from the heat of the porcelain. I thought for one awful second I was going to be sick.
“Is it–” for a moment, the name of her recent boyfriend deserted me. “Is it Martin’s?”
She nodded.
“Well, you can’t have it,” I said. The words came out of my mouth, abruptly, without me even thinking about them.
Becca’s eyes widened. “I haven’t decided–” she began.
I talked over her. I could hear my voice getting louder with every word. “You can’t have it. I won’t let you do this. You can’t do this.”
“Maudie–”
I stood up abruptly. My coffee cup fell out of my hands and smashed on the floor. A wave of coffee and porcelain shards splashed up against my legs.
Becca was getting up too, her eyes and mouth wide.
“Maudie, for God’s sake–”
“You can’t have it!” I bawled. “If you have it, it’ll die, don’t you know that? If you have a girl, she’ll die, they always die, you might kill it, you’ll kill it without even meaning to–”
She was coming round the table, her arms stretched wide, her face rigid with alarm. “Maudie–”
“Leave me alone! Just get out!”
She flinched back but I only kept screaming.
She stepped back, raising her hands. “Alright, alright, I’m going,” she said. “I’m going to call Matt.”
“No!”
“Alright, alright. Just – just calm down.”
I turned and ran into the bedroom, slamming the door behind me. I was choking with tears; salt water was blinding me. I fell onto the bed and pulled the pillow over my head, screaming and hitting out at the mattress beneath me. I thrashed around until I could barely breathe, until I had to stop and just lie there in the semi-dark, crying bitterly.
I hadn’t heard Becca leave but I could tell that she had because the flat had the empty feel to it. After a few minutes, the phone started ringing. I heard Matt’s voice, his worried voice, come through on the answerphone, repeating the same question. Maudie, are you there? Are you there? But I wasn’t there. I didn’t know where I was, but wherever I was, I intended to stay there for a long time. I kept still on the bed, my face buried in the sheets, not moving, not thinking, until I fell asleep.
Chapter Twenty Eight
Jessica hadn’t arrived yet. This time I kept my eyes open and I saw her come in through the doorway. I’d already bought her a drink. As she walked towards me, I thought she looked more there than she had before, her colours brighter, her outline more defined. I considered this for a moment and then shoved the thought away.
“Hey, Maudie,” she said, sitting down. “Thanks for the drink. And for meeting me.”
“No problem,” I said, as if it hadn’t been a matter for agonised decision. I had wondered how she was going to play it, our meeting after her horrible revelations of the last. I’d seen people confess something and then act as if the recipient of their confession had done something wrong. I’d done it myself. I remember the first time I told Margaret about what had happened to Jessica, and my part in it, and how I’d felt afterwards – angry at Margaret; ashamed, embarrassed. I wondered how I’d react when I next saw Becca. She’d phoned a couple of times but I couldn’t face speaking to her.
Jessica didn’t seem to be feeling that. Perhaps she’d told her awful story so many times it had ceased to hurt so much. Perhaps she didn’t feel ashamed – and really, why should she be ashamed? She’d come through the other side, she had got through it, she’d reinvented herself as a new person. I remembered that she had been through therapy, was, for all I knew, still in therapy. It made me feel another pull towards her – it was something else that we shared. Suddenly, I wanted to tell her about my own breakdown, to show her that there were bad things in my life too, that she wasn’t alone.
“You said you’d been in therapy,” I said, rather hesitatingly. Jessica nodded. I took a deep breath. “I have too.”
“You have?”
“I’m still going - I mean, I have a therapist – Margaret – she’s great. I go at least once or twice a month. It’s mostly – no, it’s all because of what happened. With you.”
She looked sober. “With me?”
Despite my good intentions, I was struggling. I didn’t want to say what I was going to say. It brought back all the bad memories, the same feelings surfacing; guilt, shame, misery, despair. “I felt so guilty. If I’d only gone with you – or I’d stopped you going – or told Angus what we were going to do – or anything – then it wouldn’t have happened.”
“You don’t know that,” said Jessica. “We both could have–”
“Could have what?”
“Well, that’s just it,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t know what happened.”
“But it wasn’t good.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
We both lapsed into silence. I wondered what she was thinking.
“Anyway,” she said, after a moment. “You were telling me about your therapist.”
"Margaret," I said. "Yes."
"Is that her name? Is she good?"
"Yes."
"And you go – because of what happened in Cornwall?"
I hesitated for a second. “It's also because of what happened to me when I was twenty-six." I started with the simplest explanation. "I went through a bad time."
"A bad time?"
I stared down at the table. "That's putting it mildly. I went - I had - I had an episode." It was still so hard to say the words. I tried again. "I mean, I was ill, became ill. Mentally ill, I mean."
"Oh," said Jessica. "That's not good."
I tried to smile. "No, it wasn't."
"What happened? Did you - what happened?"
I drained my glass. "I need another one of these."
Jessica went and got us both a drink. While she was at the bar, I thought back to that time; the dark figures, the jumble of images in my head. The mess that was left over; the fragments of myself that had to be stitched back together again.
"I saw things," I said, when she was sat back down again. "I saw figures. They were people at first and then as I got worse they started changing. They were dark figures, like they were wearing black cloaks."