As Angela drove around the multi-storey carpark following the exit signs, Catherine appeared beside her. Angela told her about the extraordinary meeting she’d had at lunchtime with Christopher Moore.
“He just turned up?” Catherine was amazed. “What does he look like?”
“Well, you wouldn’t want him to come to a parents’ evening, not looking like he did today.”
Catherine asked, “Does he know about me?”
“Catherine, you are all we talked about,” said Angela. “You and his dog. He wanted to know if you were alive.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him the truth. I told him that you were dead.”
They both laughed, and Angela took her eyes off the road for a moment to glance at her impossibly perfect, beautiful, black-haired, laughing daughter.
“I got a hundred per cent in my mock A’s, Mum,” said Catherine, smiling and showing her dazzling teeth. Angela glowed with maternal pride as she stopped at the barrier and handed her ticket to the gloomy carpark man who sat in his little cubicle, listening to a Radio One traffic report. “You’re very young, but with your IQand exam results you ought to try for Oxford next year,” Angela said to Catherine.
“Oxford?” repeated the carpark man.
“I was talking to my daughter,” said Angela. The man looked into the car. It was empty, apart from the fat woman behind the wheel.
Her talking to herself was nothing new to him; he’d seen all sorts of mad behaviour taking place in cars. Have a butchers at her now. She’s crying her eyes out! She’s had to pull over. She’s dropped her head on the steering wheel and sounded the horn. She’s looking for a tissue, can’t find one. Ugh! she’s blowing her nose on her skirt. A respectable-looking woman like her. The public never failed to amaze him. He’d often thought of writing it all down. He could fill a notebook a day.
Angela couldn’t stop the water from pouring down her face just as the amniotic fluid had trickled from her womb, before Catherine had been born. They had given her prostaglandin intravenously in a drip inserted into the back of her wrist. She had not been able to watch while it had been inserted. She had looked at the glossy white walls and the metal shelves stacked with sterile packs and stainless steel instruments. There had been a haze of fear in her eyes as she had walked into the room, and climbed on to a high trolley, and this had prevented her from seeing where she was at first.
She had not remembered the doctor’s name. She could not properly understand his heavily accented English. He grew impatient with repeating himself to her, and looked frequently at his watch, as though he had a more important appointment elsewhere.
“Why did you not have an abortion earlier?” he said to her as he straightened up after examining her cervix.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“Why not earlier?” he said, raising his voice.
“Earlier?”
“A termination, before twenty-seven weeks. That is usual.”
“My fiancé wanted the baby,” she said.
“And is he still wanting the baby?” The doctor lifted the white surgical gown she wore, and palpated her abdomen with cold brown hands. Angela imagined the baby cowering away through the layers of skin, fat muscle, and fluid, from the roughness of his touch.
“Yes, he still wants the baby.”
“So you are defying him?”
“Sorry, what did…”
“You are aborting this baby against his will?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You know you will go into labour, and that we cannot predict how long your labour will last?”
“Yes, I understand that.” She had spoken to a counsellor and this kindly woman had explained that a late-term abortion was ‘particularly upsetting’. Angela had read in a gynaecological text book that labour would be painful and was often protracted. She looked at the counsellor’s floral print dress, and tried to put a name to the flowers. Freesias? Aquilegia? She looked up and heard her saying, “…psychological problems.”
Angela had wanted to shout at the woman. I don’t think you can properly understand how much I want to get rid of this baby. It is an alien inside me. It has filled my belly and my head. It has turned me into an animal with an animal’s responses. It is a loathsome parasite, feeding off me. Would you have me welcome a tapeworm into the world? I want all traces of it cleared out of my body. I will excavate the thing, by hook or indeed by crook. If the labour takes a year, and the pain makes me scream like an animal in a trap, I don’t care. I will face it with fortitude. When the invader has gone, I will reconvene: I will gather together the threads of my old life, and I will forgive myself and eventually forget.
The kindly woman in the floral dress said, “Do you have any questions, Angela?”
“Yes,” said Angela. “How soon can you fit me in?”