The Child (Kate Waters #2)(79)

Kate is nodding and never takes her eyes off me. I know she wants to ask lots more questions about how I got pregnant and what happened to my baby, but there is too much to tell. I have to let it out a little at a time or it will flood out and drown me. I feel dizzy. As if my head is going to explode.

“What happened when you went into labor, Emma? You couldn’t hide that,” she says.

“No, it was like a nightmare,” I say. “But I was on my own.

“It happened so quickly, the actual birth. I’d had some pain in my back for a day or so and then I wet myself and my stomach went rigid. It was my body but not my body, if you know what I mean. It just went out of control, and every time the pain came, worse and worse, I held on to the edge of the bath and shouted myself hoarse. I thought I was going to die. I remember calling for my mum, knowing she wasn’t there. Knowing I was alone. I had to be. No one could know.”

Kate is gripping my hand like I gripped the bath. And the deep-buried memories are crowding in on me, banging on the door to get in.

I can see myself, as if through a window. When the thing slithered out, shiny and steaming in the cold bathroom, I lay in the mess of blood and sheets on the linoleum beside it. It just grew cold beside me.

It wasn’t like it said in the pamphlets. While other girls at school were secretly reading the one copy of Fear of Flying, I’d been looking at booklets about placentas and cords, stolen secretly from a hospital waiting room. The words made me want to throw up but I read on, just in case.

In the bathroom, I cut the cord with scissors from the first aid kit and wrapped it and the other stuff that had come out of me in a copy of the Sunday Times from the box beside the front door. I turned on the taps of the bath and climbed into the lukewarm water, watching the shreds of blood move around me.

“It’s the silence after the shouting I remember,” I tell Kate.

“I’d been lucky. Jude and Will were at work. It was just me and the thing. I don’t remember looking at it, but I must have done. Like when there is something scary on the television and you watch through your fingers so you don’t see the full horror. I’ve got no memory of its face. I don’t even know if it was a boy or a girl.”

“Oh my God, is this the first time you’ve told anyone this?” Kate asks.

“Yes,” I say. “I tried to tell Harry once but she didn’t understand what I was saying. And I couldn’t tell anyone else. You see, I did something terrible.”

“What did you do, Emma?” she says gently. “Did you do something to your baby?”

“I buried it,” I say.





SIXTY-FIVE


    Emma


SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 2012

Kate stops talking when I say I buried the baby.

I can hear my voice, as if it is someone else’s, telling her that burying the baby was easy.

“It was like burying my pet rabbit when I was nine,” I’m saying. “I wrapped it in newspaper and a carrier bag so you couldn’t even tell what it was. I dug a hole in the garden and put it in and just scraped the dirt over it. It only took a few minutes and it was gone.

“I dragged the big pot that my mum had planted with daffodils over the top. You could see the little green tops, just poking through. Then I walked back to the house.”

I remember thinking that all I had to do was throw away the bloody towel I’d used and it would be as if nothing had happened. Everything back to normal. I was so young. I didn’t know that nothing was ever going to be normal again. I remember I put my hand on my empty stomach and it felt like a balloon at the end of a birthday party, soft and puckered. I twisted the loose skin through my jumper to see if it was still me. To feel something. Anything.

“Stupidly, I’d thought the danger would end when I’d given birth,” I tell the reporter.

“I’d had it all planned.” I almost laugh at the naiveté of it now, but then, I was so alone.

“When I finally accepted that there was going to be a baby, I decided I was going to leave it at the local maternity hospital for a nurse to find and look after. I’d seen it on the news, how the nurses gave abandoned babies names—Holly if it was at Christmas, or after the policeman who found it, that sort of thing—and held them tight in their arms. And loving families adopted them and everything turned out fine as far as the public was concerned. Happy endings all round.”

I tried to see my life in terms of a heroine in a novel. Everything clean and tidy. No loose ends.

“I was convinced it was going to be so easy. I was going to pop the baby out like in the drawings in the pamphlets, wrap it up in a white blanket I’d bought secretly, and lay it down quietly in the toilets and walk away. People are in and out of toilets all the time. It wouldn’t take five minutes for the baby to be found.

“But I hadn’t needed to do that. I’d used newspaper and the Boots carrier bag to wrap it instead.”

“Oh, Emma,” Kate says. “And you’ve kept all this inside until now. Until Alice’s body was found.”

“It’s my baby in the garden,” I hear myself shout. “My baby.”

I can see Kate is shaking and she’s gripping the steering wheel to steady herself. I’m frightening her. I’m frightening myself. I sound mad. I must stop this.