What Lies Between Us(16)

An hour passes before we move into her bedroom. And as I lay her down, her body folds in on itself like a fragile sheet of origami. I pull the duvet over her and up to her chin, then remove two painkillers from a packet, offering them to her with a glass of Lucozade. ‘Thank you,’ she mutters. It feels like so long since she last showed me gratitude for anything, so I cling to it. For the first time since her father disappeared from her life, I feel a bond between us. I love her more than anything I have ever loved or will ever love again. And nothing she does will ever change that.

But there’s something I have to tell her, while the memory of what is happening to her body is fresh and in case she is tempted to be careless again.

‘I need to explain something that’s not going to be easy to hear,’ I begin. ‘And I’m sorry because I should have told you a long time ago. But I’ve never known when to bring it up.’

‘What?’ she asks. ‘Is it about Dad?’

‘Yes, and no,’ I reply.

Her eyes widen, the whites still red. She is desperate for even a fragment of information as to his whereabouts. His silence has devastated her and I blame him for setting her on this self-destructive path just as much as I blame myself.

‘Do you know why I haven’t heard anything from him apart from the birthday card?’

I shake my head. ‘No, I’m sorry, I don’t,’ I lie. ‘This is about something that Dad carried inside of him and which he’s passed on to you.’ I pause to choose my words carefully. ‘Your dad was the carrier of something called estroprosencephaly. And it means that if he has a daughter and she falls pregnant, her baby would be very, very poorly if it managed to survive the full nine months.’ Nina looks at me, perplexed. I place my hand in hers and hold her fingers tight. ‘A baby with estroprosencephaly is likely to be born with a lot of problems, Nina. And I mean a lot of problems.’

‘Like?’

‘Like severe facial disfigurement and with its brain not properly developed. Most babies pass away before they’re born and that’s probably what’s happened today. So while it doesn’t feel like it, this is the best possible outcome. Your body knew something was wrong and rejected it. The worst-case scenario is that you would’ve gone the full nine months and been forced to have a baby that died as soon as it was born.’

‘How . . . how do you know this?’ she asks.

‘When you were a little girl, your dad had these horrendous stomach pains and he ended up in hospital for a time. Eventually and after all sorts of blood tests, the specialists told us he was the carrier of a chromosome deficiency that was causing it and that he may well have passed it on to you. And then they told us what happened to babies born with it.’

‘But why was I born okay?’

‘It’s complicated,’ I reply. ‘It has to do with how many of the faulty chromosomes you’re carrying, and when you were tested as a girl, we learned you are carrying a high number.’

‘So I’ll never be able to have a normal baby?’

I pause, then answer her quietly. ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

I feel the rustle of her duvet as she draws her knees closer to her chest. ‘I want to go to sleep now,’ she says.

‘Shall I stay?’

‘No, thank you.’ I kiss her on the forehead and reluctantly leave her be.

I make my way back downstairs until I am in the kitchen. I need to take my mind off this hellish day, even if it’s just for a few moments. There are dirty dishes lying in the sink from yesterday. I’ll wash them, I think. But before I do that, I take a box of tablets from my handbag. ‘Clozterpan’ reads the label, and inside there are three empty spaces in a strip. I slip it into my pocket and make my way to the basement door. I pull the light switch and a bulb illuminates the storage area.

As I head towards the suitcases hidden away under the stairs, I am grateful for my job as a doctor’s receptionist. It allowed me to slip into Dr Fellowes’ office when he was on call and tear off a blank script to write my own prescription. After using the surgery stamp on it, I forged his signature that I am so familiar with and later had it dispensed by a chemist in town. Last night, I crushed the tablets with the back of a spoon and added them to the gravy I poured over Nina’s Sunday roast. She didn’t notice any difference in taste.

As I watched her eat, I questioned whether forcing my daughter’s body to miscarry without her knowledge was the right thing to do. My mind goes back to 1981 when I was two years into my midwifery training and fell unexpectedly pregnant with Nina. My plan to return to complete the course never materialised. But I know for sure from my studies that Nina has been pregnant for much longer than she thinks. I swallow a good measure of bile rising from the pit of my stomach.

You did the right thing, I repeat. In taking this away from her, I have given Nina so much more.





CHAPTER 12





NINA


Madonna’s greatest hits album Celebration plays through my headphones on the bus home from work. When I was six years old I’d take the lace doilies hanging over the back of the sofa and put them on my head, tie shoelaces around my wrists and pretend to be the Queen of Pop. Apparently, Dad didn’t like hearing his little girl miming about being ‘Like a Virgin’ so Mum and I would tease him by singing ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ in response. The memory tugs at my heart and I feel myself taken over by a longing to return for even a moment to those innocent times.