The light faded and hunger overtook me. When I stood, pain shot down my leg and along my arms and I fell and could not get up. I called for help but no one came and I lay on the floor unable to move as the night came on.
5
Another kind of memory
Runanga, 1983.
When I came to, I was on the floor. Jim and Bruce were kneeling over me, imploring their God to free me from the spirit of harlotry. My teenage self disappeared. It was dark and all I could see were our reflections in the big window. Three hopeless people surrounded by the blackness of the night. I felt a pain deep in my chest, a sense of time running backwards. Past the birth of my three girls. Beyond my unmoored life before Bruce. Back further than the flattened plain of childhood. To memories that were not memories.
With closed stranger adoption you have no birth story, as if you exist by magic alone. But that day, on the worn carpet in my lounge, the story of my birth rushed at me. As if I’d actually been there. As if my mother and I were one. I have never experienced that exact feeling again, but the story stayed with me.
It began with drizzle, a dark corridor and an image of curtains, luminous as mist. A woman I knew was my mother stretched her hands towards a baby in a stranger’s arms. The curtains were like wedding veils between them. I was then in an old graveyard. She was sitting in a white-painted portico surrounded by mossy gravestones. She wore a coat that did not cover her belly; her eyes were closed against the slant of the early winter sun.
Beside the graveyard, the city fathers (never the mothers) had planted a park on the sides of a gully. Low walls of volcanic stone led down to a grassy meadow. I found myself walking along those paths as if I was my mother, the baby that would be me heavy within her. The moo of cows drew her on. She dozed against a tree, watched by the cows, curious and indifferent. When she woke, it was dark. The baby curled tight inside, calm for once. She held the weight of her belly and trudged back up the steep path. The restless cows ran to the edge of their meadow, their breathing heavy behind her.
Her name was Pamela. She was tall and auburn-haired. In the photo above my desk she is modelling swimwear. She looks right down the lens, all eyeliner and the puffy hair of the early sixties. She was nineteen when I was born, a vulnerable new immigrant from London. Her parents were here too. On the evidence of her belly, her father, Fred, had thrown her out of their new home in Tawa. Her mother, my grandmother Jessie, was dying from breast cancer.
On the day she went into labour an anticyclone covered the country. A slow-moving depression deepening in the east, bringing fog and low cloud.
Mesmerised on the lounge floor in Runanga I saw a doctor take her arm. He led her past a nursery of swaddled babies. When one began to wail, the child inside her shifted. In a windowless room at the end of the corridor, she removed her faded dress. She slid her arms into a gown washed almost transparent, climbed onto a narrow bed and pulled up the sheet.
In the late stage of pregnancy you are lethargic and drenched in dreams. I imagine her facing the wall, whispered incantations rising from heart to mouth. She tells her baby everything as the contractions merge, propelling me from her.
And there my dream state ends.
I’ve had four children, so what comes next is easy to imagine. The way a contraction rises up, feathery as a shadow, stealthy as a rogue wave. Each surge breaks through the silent conversation you’ve been having with your baby. It is only as your body splits itself in two to expel the child that you understand what it means to be pregnant. To hold life within and feel it grow till it might break through your blue-veined skin.
I want to think we had some time together. On the outside, as it were. That I lay in the curve of her naked body, my mouth inching instinctively toward her breast.
But I think she woke in an empty room bright with light, groggy from the drugs they would have given her. She was alone on a distant beach far above the high-tide line with the sure knowledge her baby was gone. Removed from her bruised body as if it never belonged there. As if I had had no right to be there.
Was it Dr Gerald Gleeson who took me from her? By the time he retired, he’d delivered ten thousand babies. He was the doctor of the day for the good married ladies of Napier. In his general practice, he discussed their infertility. In his obstetric practice, he canvassed for the cure. Young, single, pregnant women were the answer.
Women like my mother. With three months to go, her parents sent her to stay with Dr Gleeson and his wife. A woman who knew the doctor described him to me as a friendly man who let women birth without their legs in stirrups. She’d been to dinner at his house but seen no sign of pregnant girls scrubbing and cleaning.
But the files don’t lie. It’s clear they put my mother to work cooking and cleaning the three floors of the Gleesons’ large house on Hospital Hill. He’d trained as a priest and I’m told he was surprisingly light on his feet for a man of his size. Not tall, but heavyset,
