61Past
Queen Alexandra Hospital, Cosham, Portsmouth
Little girl, far away in a world of your own, in a world built of dreams that are yours and yours alone.
Fighting back the tears that were blurring her vision, the girl began to dress her baby in the pure white sleepsuit she had bought. She thought of the little girl in the advert she used to watch – that perfect, soft-focus blonde child playing in a meadow full of wild flowers – and she felt a sadness debilitating in its intensity. She would never get to see her own child in a meadow, never get to see her play. She would never even get to hear her daughter’s laugh or know her voice.
She lingered as she dressed her child, savouring every second, committing each detail to her memory – the feel of her skin, the crease in her brow when she frowned, the grip of her tiny hand, the perfect pink crescents of her fingernails – knowing that by the time the images in her mind began to lose focus and fade, her daughter would have changed beyond recognition. She had only known her daughter for a few hours, but she already knew that no one else would ever know her as she did. Love her as she did.
The door to the hospital room opened. Through the fog of her tears, she saw a woman, blonde like her, and a man wearing a navy-blue uniform. A policeman. Why had the social worker brought the police to take her baby away? What did they think she was going to do?
The blond woman walked to the bed and held out her arms. ‘I’ll take her now, thank you,’ she said. There was no emotion in her voice.
‘Anna,’ the girl said. ‘She’s called Anna.’
The blonde woman wouldn’t meet her gaze.
‘Anna,’ she repeated desperately. ‘I named her Anna.’
The blonde woman didn’t acknowledge that she had spoken. Her gaze was fixed on Anna. ‘I said, I will take her now.’
The girl tried to shield her daughter’s body with her own, but the pain in her ravaged stomach was unbearable and she couldn’t bend.
‘Please don’t.’ Her voice, barely there, was choked with tears that she had promised herself she wouldn’t shed. ‘Please don’t take her from me. Please.’
Chill hands slid between her stomach and Anna’s tiny body and though she tried to cling tight, her daughter was wrenched from her arms.
‘I’ll take her now.’
62
A cross.
Jessie felt as if she had been punched hard in the gut. Doubling over, she clutched her arms tight across her stomach and rocked backwards and forwards, smothering her growing howl in the dome of her knees.
Oh God, no. A cross, signalling a seismic earthquake in her life.
She checked the test again, knowing that she didn’t need to, that her first fleeting, horrified look had told her all she needed to know. There was no one close by her on the beach, the walkway behind her deserted. She could scream, yell, cry all she liked and no one would hear. But it wasn’t her style. She had always turned trauma inwards, internalized it, the damage that suppression had caused over the years leaking out through the cracks in her emotional defences in the form of her OCD and the electric suit.
Pressing her head between her knees, she jammed her eyes shut and tried to send her mind to a place of calm, but there was nowhere she could go, no emotional reserves to draw upon and the only thing her mind found was Jamie: a freeze-frame image of her little brother hanging by his school tie from that curtain rail, his beautiful face bloated and purple.
A loud squawk, close by, cut into her consciousness and she raised her head. A seagull was standing on the sand in front of her, so close that she could almost have reached out and stroked its petrol feathers. The pregnancy test on her lap seemed even more alluring to this seagull than her phone had been to the one who had dive-bombed her yesterday. She was tempted to toss it to him. If he carried it away, perhaps that would negate the result and she’d wake up with a sunburnt face, the imprint of beach stones on her back and a sense of intense relief that it had all been a dream. Wishful thinking.
The seagull’s webbed feet, the same buttercup yellow as his beak, left ghostly fan-shaped imprints in the wet sand as he paced in a semi-circle around her.
‘Nothing to see here,’ she murmured, wiping away the single tear that had escaped from her eye. She needed to get a grip, stop obsessing about her own problems and focus on what she was supposed to be doing down here at the beach – and it wasn’t sobbing into her knees or conversing with local wildlife.
The seagull had stopped pacing. Head tilted to one side, he seemed to be studying her, sizing her up. He must have flown here from the dunes, as pale talcum powder sand dusted his webbed feet. The sight dredged a memory.
‘How was the beach?’
‘Huh?’
‘Sand. Your feet.’
‘Oh, I thought you were a mind reader for a second.’ A tentative, distant smile. ‘I’d hate you to actually be able to read my mind.’
She had been the antithesis of a mind reader with Carolynn. Five intensive hours spent in her company and Jessie felt as if she had only seen the inside of a fairground funhouse filled with distorting mirrors. Every view that she’d had of the woman a fake one, warped, disfigured.
‘I have scars too. And not just psychological ones.’
Both of them giving nervous half-laughs, grateful for the opportunity to break the tension, Jessie knowing that the subject matter was minefield-sensitive. Carolynn spreading her toes to show Jessie the pale scar running around their inside edges.
‘I was born with webbed feet, like a seagull. Perhaps that’s why I love the sea.’
Jessie had paid no attention
