Where Women are Kings (22 page)

BEAST, FULL OF NAMES OF BLASPHEMY, HAVING SEVEN HEADS AND TEN HORNS
.

Obi paced the room as Nikki sat with her legs curled under her. She couldn’t think straight. His voice was so loud it filled her entire body.

‘I’ve read it, over and over again, when the parents have a birth child after adoption there is a higher percentage of failure. Of disruption. Do you know what that means? I think we’ve been over this before. I think I explained it to you a little after you took me for a nice dinner and threw a twelve-week pregnancy at me. Do you remember what a failed adoption means? Do you remember our adoption training all that time ago, when they told us that twenty per cent of adopted children go back into care?’

Obi paced round and round.

‘A life in care. Completely preventable. A childhood ruined by the parents’ selfishness.’

‘My selfishness,’ she said, quietly.

‘Yes!’ said Obi, swivelling to face her. He locked his eyes on hers. ‘Elijah was settling in, Nikki. We had a family. We had a son.’

Nikki uncurled her legs. ‘We have a son,’ she said.

But Obi didn’t draw breath. ‘And there might not even be a baby! Even with anticoagulants, how is he supposed to cope with an eighty-per-cent chance? The worry, the rushing
to the hospital in the middle of the night, all those tests and all that waiting and all your tears? How can he feel safe if you’re in bits? What will happen when the baby dies? Elijah is covered head to toe in scars. He has lost his mother. You want him to lose a baby too? To lose you?’

‘Please!’ Nikki thumped the sofa. ‘We have been over this. What does it change? We have said all this.’ Her voice sounded muffled, like she was talking through glass.

‘So, once it’s been said, that’s it? We can move on? These are the facts. Elijah has a twenty-per-cent chance of losing a sibling. He had a twenty-per-cent chance of ending up back in care. But that has gone up, now you’ve been so stupid.’

Nikki felt her mouth open, the air rush in. ‘What can I do? What can I do?’

‘Elijah should not be put through this.’

‘But this is the situation and I don’t know what you expect me to do. It’s your baby too. You want me to have an abortion? Is that what you want? You want me to kill our baby?’

Obi turned on her and pushed his face towards hers. ‘Did I say that? Would I say that?’ He pulled back. ‘You know full well that, by leaving it till twelve weeks, you took that discussion off the table.’

Nikki was burning up from the inside out. She cradled her arms over her stomach and watched Obi closely. ‘It’s still possible,’ she said, slowly, not blinking.

His lips made a tight line and he shook his head. ‘You knew. You knew. Twelve weeks! When you found out at eight! Of course it’s possible.’

‘And?’

‘You know my views on this! You knew! So now we’re stuck again with something that may or may not survive and will ruin everything either way.’

‘Just say it. You want me to have an abortion, anyway.’ She clenched her fists. ‘I won’t do it, Obi; I won’t do that to our baby. But we might as well be clear about what you’re saying.’

‘That is not what I’m saying.’

‘Then what are you saying? What are you saying?’ She was screaming now.

‘Everything was working. Did you hear Ricardo? Did you see how worried he was as soon as we told him? He knows Elijah. He knows he won’t cope.’

‘Stop saying this!’

‘That tantrum? All those scratches on Elijah’s arms?’

‘What?
What?
’

Obi wasn’t looking at her any more. He shouted on and on, going over and over the same ground: how good it had been, what they had promised the team, the research, how Nikki had let Elijah down. He was stuck. Obi could not get past the facts of the situation.

Nikki wiped her eyes and sat forwards. She made her voice soft again. ‘Obi, I am pregnant with your baby and we have Elijah. That is the situation and I have taken all the blame and now we need to start dealing with it.’

‘Oh, it’s so simple, is it? I don’t think you understand the magnitude of this, Nikki, I really don’t.’

‘Please; I understand, and we need to work together now.’

‘Work together?’ Obi laughed.

‘What Ricardo said – we need to include him in everything. Ricardo said it was natural for Elijah to feel like he was being replaced, like we didn’t love him any more.’

Obi just stared and shook his head. ‘This didn’t need to happen,’ he said.

Nikki closed her eyes. ‘Please, Obi, we need to try. More
than ever, we can’t be fighting now. It will unsettle Elijah.’

‘I think that’s already taken care of, don’t you, Nikki?’

Nikki’s eyebrows creased together. What did he want her to say?

‘This shouldn’t be happening to Elijah.’

Nikki nodded. ‘I know,’ she said.

‘This shouldn’t be happening.’

She closed her eyes again and sighed. ‘We agree on that, Obi. I promise, I agree.’ Huge tears pressed out from under her lids and her whole body shook.

Eventually, Obi sat at the table and pulled his papers towards him. He opened a file and got out his pen.

When Elijah came downstairs later, she tried to hold his hand, but he twisted away. They ate dinner in near-silence, and Nikki couldn’t stomach more than a few bites. Neither Obi nor Elijah would look her in the eye.

As she washed the dishes, Elijah disappeared out into the garden with his torch to look for bats, and Obi went back to his work. After a while, Obi stood up. ‘I’m going for a walk.’

Nikki leant against the counter and tried not to cry. She folded the drying-up towel and wiped the hob. It was dark outside, now. She peered into the shadows then pushed through the door. ‘Elijah?’ she called. She squinted.

He was crouching by the pond. It was cold and she pulled her cardigan around her as she hurried across the lawn.

‘Elijah?’ She squatted down next to him, but he wouldn’t look at her. She wrapped both arms around him and pulled him close. ‘I’m sorry Dad and I were fighting, Elijah. Dad was upset with me. But it’s OK now.’

She felt his hot tears on her neck.

‘Poor Elijah,’ she whispered. ‘We love you, Elijah. Nothing will change that.’

He leant into her. He was so small. She scooped him up and carried him back to the house. When she tucked him in he clung to her hand, so she sat down on the mattress next to him. He pulled at her so she lay down and he curled against her, squeezed as close as he could, and she buried kisses in his hair. Slowly, he fell asleep and his body relaxed, and Nikki lay stroking his hair as she waited for the sound of Obi.

When Elijah woke up, he felt empty, as though there was nothing inside him at all. Over the next few days, Mum watched Elijah like he was a television and Dad started coming home from work on time to play with him, but Elijah couldn’t stop pinching his nostrils to stop the wizard getting out. He could feel it pressing against him from the inside, pushing everything out of its way. The wizard was going to make Elijah do something really bad. At school, he could try not to think about it and concentrate on his lessons. His teachers told him he was learning well, and the wizard was quiet. But at home all he could think of was the wizard. Sometimes, Elijah watched Mum and the wizard whispered in his ear,
She doesn’t belong to you
. And, even when he told it to be quiet, it still carried on.
She’s not your mum. You stole her
.

*

At night, he could feel there was something very wrong. Dad was sitting in the living room opposite Mum when he went to find them. They both looked up from the books they were reading, and smiled. Mum was reading a book about gardening, with a picture of a beautiful flower on the cover, wide open and yellow. Dad was reading a book that had no picture on the front and only long words. Dad’s book couldn’t
have been a very good one at all because he suddenly threw it down on the sofa.

In the weeks since they had told him about the baby, even though sometimes things were almost normal, it was too quiet and Dad kept his eyes on Elijah the whole time, as if he knew Elijah had some badness inside him.

‘Are you OK, son?’ Dad’s eyes narrowed.

‘I’m fine,’ said Elijah, but everything felt different. The wizard was crawling all the time, creeping around inside him. And, even as he said the words, they didn’t sound real.

‘Go up to bed, Elijah,’ said Mum. ‘I’ll be up in a minute, OK?’

He looked at Dad but Dad’s eyes were not looking at him any more. They were looking at Mum’s growing tummy.

Elijah climbed the stairs and into his empty bed. It seemed bigger somehow. It matched the size of the emptiness he felt inside his chest. Mum came into his room and looked out of the dark window. She pulled the curtains.

‘There’s no story tonight, Elijah,’ said Mum, leaning close to his face. ‘I’m just too tired. Being pregnant makes you very tired …’ She looked down at her middle and smiled. Her face kept changing since Ricardo had come. Sometimes it looked frightened, and sometimes happier than he’d ever seen it.

‘OK,’ he said. But it was the first night she’d not read him a story. He looked at Mum’s face. Then he looked closer. Elijah could only count five freckles. He clenched his fists and knew that the angels were losing. God was losing. The air became dangerous. He looked at her tummy, at the space where something was growing inside her.

‘Goodnight, Elijah,’ Mum whispered. The room was darker than ever and there was a big feeling in his tummy, like he was hungry and was never going to get food again. He heard
the Bishop inside him:
But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, THOSE WHO PRACTISE MAGIC ARTS, the idolaters and ALL LIARS – their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulphur. This is the second death
.

Elijah watched the shadows for a while, then he felt what was happening. The Bishop’s voice couldn’t stop it. The wizard was pushing out of him. He could feel it. It was making itself small and pushing and pushing and squeezing through him until everything went quiet and dark and he couldn’t move any more. All he could do was listen to the wizard’s voice tell him over and over again:
Her freckles are nearly gone. I will eat her baby and then eat Nikki. She’s not your mama. Nobody will ever love you. The evil inside you killed your own father and hurt your own mother
.

They went to the hospital in Nikki’s car, and were all quiet on the way there, looking out of the window at the trees against the sky, the roads almost clear of traffic. She stopped at the lights and looked around at Obi and Elijah, but they were both looking out of their windows. She found herself biting her lip. It had to be OK. It had to be.

They walked through the hospital, a maze of corridors that Nikki knew too well. They were ushered in quickly, past the women in the waiting room who had babies already, or big swollen bellies. Nikki looked down at her stomach, hugged herself. She climbed on to the couch. ‘If you can lower your trousers, please, and pull up your top.’ A woman she hadn’t seen before moved around the room, grabbing bits of equipment and tubes of things, a handful of paper towels.

The room was silent and dark, but it was more than no noise; the only light was coming from a monitor; there was a feeling, a heaviness, contained in the air. She imagined the people who’d been in that room: the babies, the mothers who’d looked on the screen in front of them, waiting for the heartbeat, as they did now, waiting for that one moment when everything changes, when life forks.

And so they watched the screen together, and Elijah couldn’t possibly understand the significance of it all, he
couldn’t possibly, and yet Nikki knew that Elijah picked up on clues in the air better than she did. Nikki wanted to reach across and pull him closer to her, but he was out of reach. She looked at Obi. His face was completely unreadable.

She stopped trying to guess what he was thinking and focused on the screen, the picture of the scan: flickering, unidentifiable. Then suddenly something came into focus. And there it was. There
she
was; Nikki knew in a rush.

‘The points where the lady is marking with the computer is to measure the head circumference,’ said Obi. Elijah’s eyes opened wide. ‘And the long bone there is very important, in terms of scans, too. That’s the femur. If those bones are within normal ranges, it tells us a lot of information about the exact bone age of the baby.’

Nikki tried to tune out Obi’s hard voice and looked straight at the screen.

A flickering. A heart, beating. A life.

And all the worry and pain she felt suddenly melted. She. Her. A heartbeat. She smiled and her own heart flickered and beat inside her chest. She grabbed Obi’s hand and he let her hold it. She reached for Elijah’s hand – he had to shuffle his chair forwards – and then she held that too, and the three of them watched the screen.

‘There’s the heartbeat.’ The woman performing the scan started moving the scanner over and around Nikki’s stomach. ‘Yes, just one healthy heartbeat. All looks normal. All the measurements are good. A healthy baby. And I estimate you’re sixteen weeks plus four already. I’ll get Doctor Seaton to review the scan right now, as requested, and get you back for a routine anomaly scan in a few more weeks. If you can wait, you can see him this morning.’

‘Sixteen weeks,’ Nikki said. ‘Yes, please; we’ll see Doctor
Seaton.’ Apart from Ify, all her babies had fallen away earlier, at ten or eleven weeks. ‘Sixteen weeks,’ she said again, to Obi. ‘Healthy.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Obi. ‘Sixteen weeks?’

Obi was studying the angles of the picture, reading the numbers that appeared on the screen, asking the technician questions about the measurements of the head circumference, the femur, the amniotic fluid levels. As he read out the measurements, his frown disappeared and a slow smile appeared on his face. He looked from the screen to Nikki’s stomach then back to the screen. ‘This is real,’ he whispered.

Nikki closed her eyes. They wouldn’t lose anyone. Not this time. ‘Are you OK, Elijah?’ she kept asking him. And, although he was so quiet, he nodded. He looked overwhelmed. They took photos and gave one to Elijah. He folded it up very small, almost the size of a stamp, and kept it inside his clenched fist, before putting it in his pocket. He touched his pocket every so often on the way back, as though checking it was still there. Nikki took this as a sign that he was happy about things.