I Won't Forgive What You Did (18 page)

I’d hardly seen Joe since we’d agreed to get married, and we’d not spoken at all about our feelings. We’d not discussed what we wanted; just been swept along, our assent to all the plans being made for us simply assumed. But how could I argue anyway? It was me who’d caused it all to happen.

I was deeply ashamed of my pregnant status and, as the time went on, rarely went out. I was terrified of being pregnant and terrified of giving birth and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. At my antenatal appointments I couldn’t hide it, however. I’d be called out as Mrs Wicks, which was Joe’s surname, examined internally and asked questions about the conception. That this
was
real was in no doubt.

On the day before our wedding (I was now roughly five months pregnant) the kitchen was in a state of chaos even more extreme than usual. My mother had made lots of fairy cakes, and was now sitting at the table, icing them. She was also making buttonholes from a pile of carnations, and had set aside horrible dark brown, orange and white bridesmaids’ dresses ready to be ironed. I’d not seen her so animated in my entire life. Yes, she’d always had these phases where she went into overdrive, during which she knitted obsessively or made mountains of cakes, but it was as if marrying me off so young, in such circumstances, wasn’t tragic, but actually all she could have wished for. Though she never held back in telling everyone that I was pregnant, she behaved almost as if elated by it all.

In contrast, I was completely overwhelmed. I felt like a spectator watching all this being organized around me, unable to comprehend what was going on, and feeling I had no more control over it all than I’d had over my ‘decision’ to try to make a baby.

That night, Joe and I had a meeting with the vicar, who told us that at this point it was customary for him to talk to us about what marriage meant. And also, he added, to discuss the fact that children often come along soon after. ‘But in your case,’ he said sternly, his disapproval plain, ‘I believe it’s not necessary. I understand you’ve done that bit already.’ I sat there beside Joe feeling so ashamed.

The day of the wedding saw my mother up early and straight down to the village hall to start arranging all her food. I was sent to the hairdressers where I’d done my brief apprenticeship, where it was decided I should have all my hair scraped off my face, tight almost as a drum, with ringlets at the back. It made my face look really long, and was horribly severe, as if indicating what a big mistake all this was. Once finished, they sprayed it with clouds and clouds of hairspray, so that I felt I could barely move my head. I could hardly stand looking at my reflection. I looked so ugly – especially when I climbed into the heavy dress and veil. The latter was so thick you could hardly see my features, and I worried what on earth Joe would think when he lifted it in church and saw my face for the first time.

But if he was disappointed, then we were probably quits. He’d been kitted out in a double-breasted jacket and too-short trousers, and had so obviously made an effort, which did move me, but at some point the previous week he’d got into a fight, and was now missing one of his front teeth. All I could think, as my father marched me down the aisle towards him, was what had I done in that one moment of madness? What were the pair of us doing getting married and becoming parents? We were like two rabbits blinking in a car’s headlights.

There was no going back though and, after the ceremony – and the bells having duly been rung – the reception passed in a blur. My only clear memory is of watching Joe and his little brother playing chase all round the stage. Just like two excitable children.

Joe and I were deposited at our new home that evening by my brother Phillip, who’d driven my father’s car. He dutifully unloaded all the presents while I watched, and then drove off, leaving us alone.

I immediately burst into tears. Joe, as was his way, seemed completely bemused by this and suggested the best thing to do would be to go to bed.

The bed itself had been made honeymoon-ready, and was full of rice and other decorations, but I was too drained to even brush them aside, I just crawled into bed and lay on top of them. I then turned on my side, away from him, and cried myself to sleep.

I continued like this for several days. Where Joe knuckled down to it, I couldn’t get used to any aspect of it. I was now Joe’s wife. I was going to have a baby. I was supposed to just get on and accept it. Which was something I knew I had to – I’d caused this, after all. But unlike Joe, who seemed to treat marriage and impending fatherhood as ‘just another thing’, I didn’t seem able to do it. In the space of six weeks, everything had changed so completely, and I was reeling from the sheer magnitude of it all.

I couldn’t even cope with cooking dinner. I could cook it, and Joe would eat it – would tell me he enjoyed it – but it felt all wrong for me to be sitting eating food I was convinced my mother needed so much more. The guilt I felt about leaving her – not being there to take care of her – was completely overwhelming.

But eventually, little by very little, I adjusted and settled and grew calmer. I even began to admit there were things I quite liked about marriage. I kept the house clean and tidy and there was space, now, for me. I could light the fire and sit by the television, all cosy, and watch whatever programme I wanted. No one was swearing or shouting (either at me or about me) and my home felt like a place of peace and order.

And also solitude, of a pleasing, rather than oppressive, variety. Though we did have neighbours – another young couple with a baby – I saw very little of either of them. They were hippies and they were also a little strange. His hair hung right down to his waist, and he smoked pot all the time, and though Joe worked with him, they didn’t get on. They seemed to be in permanent competition for the estate manager’s affections. His wife wore bright-orange dresses and had a fringe that fell almost to her nose, and I used to hear her shouting at her baby daughter through the wall. I was quite happy she rarely spoke to me.

I was also working, three days a week, for a lady who lived close to where I’d lived previously. I cleaned for her and looked after her three children. She’d collect me in the mornings and drop me home at the end of the day, and in between, when she went out, she left my routine up to me. So I’d wash and clean and shop for her, play with the children and feed them, and found the work absorbing and enjoyable. I particularly liked looking after her children.

I realized also that I was beginning to look forward to the evenings and Joe’s return home from work. I enjoyed our evenings sitting in front of the fire, watching the TV as the sky darkened outside. Getting to know him better now, I began to realize I did have feelings for him and knowing those feelings were reciprocated made everything feel fun and exciting and secure. I also found him attractive and for the first time in my life enjoyed and felt relaxed about sex.

The only time we’d see my parents was at the weekend, when we’d take a taxi to their house so we could go with them to the supermarket when they did their weekly shop. We’d always have to dash around with my mother at breakneck speed, because if we didn’t, my father – who always waited in the car – started shouting and swearing about us taking so long.

It was always a relief to finally get dropped back home by my father, and for the first time in my life I really began to appreciate the sanctity of having my own home.

The only blot on my horizon was my ever-expanding bump, which reminded me, however much I tried not to think about it, of the upsetting memories of my mother’s childbearing years. The visions in my head were all so horrible. Chief among them, and the one I couldn’t shake from my mind, was of the baby she conceived two years after Adam died – the one she said she had to have to ‘replace’ him.

She’d been seven or eight months pregnant and it was just after Christmas, when she accused my father of not only sleeping with the ‘whore’ in the local pub, but also of sleeping with the ‘polo girls’. These were the female grooms that accompanied the ponies my father transported to polo matches. There was lots of swearing and shouting, and as the argument escalated my father became violent, grabbing stuff to throw at her – cushions, piles of magazines, random clothes and so on – and then he began pushing her around the sitting room. I’d watched – too terrified to move and draw attention to myself – as she finally decided to flee the room.

In her haste, she missed her footing on the first step of the staircase, and fell heavily. She screamed immediately she hit the hall floor and clutched at her stomach, and I watched as a clear liquid began running down her legs and pooling on the tiles. Still weeping, she pulled herself unsteadily to her feet and climbed the stairs, my father following behind her.

I heard their bedroom door shut and then the house fell silent. I got up and walked with dread towards the liquid, which at first sight looked like water, but I could now see also contained blood. What had happened? Was she now going to die? It was then I remembered about the blood when she had babies. All the congealed pools of it, in her bed. All the mess and the gore and the smell.

Some instinct that night had me fetch a cloth and bucket, so I could clear the wide pool of liquid from the hall floor. As my hands touched it – it was slimy, not like water at all – I felt repulsed at the idea of touching something so intimate; something that had come from inside her. I retched continually as I cleared it up. I’d just finished when my father came down and told me, in tones that were very subdued, that my mother was okay and was asleep. When I woke the next morning my mother had gone. She gave birth to my sister Mary the same day.

I touched my own bump now, appalled at my inescapable fate. Like it or not, I was soon to do the same.

In the last weeks leading up to the birth, I began having nightmares. In these, I found myself alone in the house, and the baby just dropping out of me without warning.

So vivid were these visions I was beside myself, and in an attempt to make the hospital do something to get the baby out of me, I lied about my original dates. I also kept turning up at the hospital, believing I was in labour, only to be examined and sent home again. It’s because of this, I think, they decided to induce me; I lived, after all, in a very isolated place, and perhaps they thought my nightmares might come true.

To be induced, I had to arrive the day before and when I got there I was so terrified I couldn’t stop being sick, but I couldn’t now tell them the truth. If I did, they might decide not to induce me after all, and the thought of that was even more scary. So I rushed back and forth to the bathroom, pretending all was well, and awaited my fate the next morning.

I was taken to the labour suite after breakfast. They’d given me a boiled egg, which I’d been unable to eat, and I felt weak from the lack of food and repeated vomiting. I’d also begun to shake – by now uncontrollably.

The nurse put my legs into stirrups and told me that the next thing would be that I’d feel a sharp pain, when she went in to ‘hook the bag’. I then felt something pulling and a pain in my stomach, and she told me my waters had broken. It was a horrible sensation which really upset me and I wished I’d properly understood what ‘being induced’ meant, for if I had I’d never have tried to make it happen.

An hour or so passed, with nothing happening. I asked the nurse, who was occasionally popping in and out, whether my baby would be coming soon. She looked a little shocked, but examined me again, and then told me, no, it wouldn’t. I was only one centimetre dilated, apparently, and I needed to be at least eight.

A similar number of hours then elapsed, during which I remained mostly alone, with the nurse popping in and out to check on me. By the time Joe arrived, having finished work, my contractions had started to become stronger, and he seemed to find the sight of me rolling around, breathless with pain, a highly amusing spectacle. In hindsight, he was probably not so much amused as trying to make light of it, perhaps because he couldn’t cope with seeing me in pain. It was as if we were still children, neither of us adult enough to deal with the terribly adult thing we were facing. In any event, he was flicking through a magazine from my bedside cabinet, resting it against my back as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

Eight hours later, shocked and exhausted, I finally gave birth to our 6lb 2oz three weeks premature son. When they passed him to me I promptly threw up. Joe was really excited, however, and took him readily, then went off to find a telephone to tell everyone.

Back on the ward, a depression that had come almost out of nowhere grew deeper and darker, and increasingly impenetrable, and all I could do was curl up into a ball feeling weak and pathetic and hopeless. I spent my ten days in hospital feeling like an automaton, being shown how to feed and dress and change my baby, and in between would just lie on my bed facing the wall. I was the only mother on the ward who didn’t attend the twenty-first birthday party of another mum. Not even when she came over to my bed to persuade me could I rouse myself to go and join in.

Today, my condition would be so obvious to everyone, and steps taken to alleviate its severity, but back then post-natal depression was, like so many other unpalatable truths, not widely or routinely diagnosed. ‘The baby blues’, as it was so gently described, was something you just ‘shook yourself’ out of.

But I couldn’t. My baby terrified me, made me feel guilty, and he was such a beautiful baby, so fragile and innocent. I felt too young and inadequate to be a mother. I was afraid of him, afraid he had needs I couldn’t even understand, let alone meet. I could barely look at him, let alone name him. Much as I enjoyed looking after my employers’ children, this tiny thing was so different – so overwhelming. He was mine, and mine alone, my sole responsibility. It didn’t occur to me he was Joe’s responsibility too. I was also scared I would hurt him – not surprising, given my own babyhood – that I would abuse him, or even try to kill him. In the midst of this, Joe, who still seemed so excited about being a father, was popping in to see us both, genuinely happy, and then popping off again to ‘wet the baby’s head’ with his friends.