Ch15: Stolen May 22nd

Seven days until I’m rescued. I am stranded on a deserted island, all by myself. There’s something silly about saying this in my head, and before I know it, I’m collapsed on the sofa laughing myself into a stitch. I clutch my side and try to catch my breath as the moment passes.

But there are things to do, tasks I would prefer to ignore. My humour suddenly dissipates. I have one more diary entry to write. One more memory to purge. There’s rain coming down today, heavy rain. The tint of the clouds tell me there might even be a thunder and lightning on its way.

There’s an urge to grab my coat and walk in the storm. But that’s just avoidance. I need to finish what I came here to do. First, a cup of tea.

I put a pot of water on the stove and wait for it to boil. The radio is on, and I jig around to a Miley song. The larder seems disorganised to me and I lose myself for ten minutes rearranging the food stuffs. I’ve been through the bookshelves a few times, and for a while I try to work out where the original place of each book I’ve had out was. I doubt Ian will care, but this is his cottage, I am here because of his kindness, the least I can do is keep the place tidy. Finally I make a second cup of tea.

Sitting on the sofa, sipping slowly as the tea cools and watching the weather as it gets ever wilder outside, my thoughts go to the diary. I fetch it, turning it over in my hands a couple of times before opening the cover. I’ve only written on a handful of pages, but these words describe the biggest event in my life. Time to complete the tale.

I move back home the day Chris dies. Jo tells me to stay at the little flat, wants me to stay, even needs me to stay, but I can’t. The bed is huge without Chris, the flat a vacuum. She’s all by herself in that house, her only child dead, and I can’t comfort her. I can’t stop my own tears, how am I to help her?

Mum and Dad both take the first week off. I feel stifled by their attention after only a few hours and when they go back to work all I can feel is relief. Then the sadness takes over again and I lie on my bed curled up in a ball sobbing into my pillow.

A week turns into a month and my baby bump is finally beginning to show.

“I’m twenty-one weeks today,” I say to a picture of Chris that sits on my bedside cabinet. His image is the first thing I see when I wake, the last thing I see before I sleep. “I can feel the baby kicking now, she’s at it all the time.” I’ve decided the baby is a girl, but I don’t really know. Chris and I hadn’t got around to talking names, and I don’t want to name the baby without him.

The week before I had a scan. Mum came with me and we both cried the whole time. Chris should have been there with me, holding my hand. He wouldn’t have cried. He’d have been so excited he’d have been jumping around the place until they told him to calm down. He was so excited about having a baby.

I’m by myself in the house, Mum and Dad long gone to work. Slowly, I get out of bed. My back is aching and I want to lie still, but my bladder is aching more. The loo seat is cold, someone left the window open. I rub my back as I pee, thinking to myself that pregnancy is turning out to be a random jumble of pains and inconveniences. It’s when I wipe that the panic sets in.

Blood. The toilet paper is covered in blood. I check the pan, and the water is ruby red.

“Oh my God, oh my God.”

I pull my underwear up and clutch my belly. Please no, not this. I trip out of the bathroom out onto the landing. There’s a phone in my parent’s room. I head there, grabbing the handset and dialling the doctors.

“I don’t know who to call, I’m five months pregnant and I’m bleeding...”

The receptionist takes my details and tells me there’s an ambulance on the way. I hang up and redial, this time to Mum’s work.

“Mum, I’m losing the baby.” They are the only words I manage before my emotions take over and I can’t talk.

“I’ll be right there,” she says and then she’s gone, racing from the office to my side.

There’s a patch of blood on my parent’s bedcovers where I sat and more dripping from inside me. My baby, I can’t lose her as well. There’s the sound of a siren in the distance, and suddenly I’m back in the post office with Chris dead on the floor. They arrived too late for him, and history is repeating itself. They’ll be too late for my baby as well, I’m sure of it.

A pain grabs at my stomach as I make my way downstairs to the front door. The paramedics come in and before I know it I’m on a trolley in the back of the ambulance. Another pain takes hold and I know this is labour. It’s too soon, my baby isn’t big enough to be born and survive.

At the hospital, Mum has found me and sits at my side holding my hand. The docs are worrying because I’m haemorrhaging blood and they need to save me by sacrificing my baby. Then they scan me and the decision is made. There’s no heartbeat. The only part of Chris I had left is gone.

We bury Gemma in a tiny coffin next to her father on a day that is far sunnier than it has rights to be. My parents flank me and I place a white rose on her coffin before it disappears into the ground. There are only a few people here, not like Chris’s funeral when the mourners spilled out of the church. This time there’s me and my parents and Chris’s mum, Jo. Chris’s best friend Tom is here with his girlfriend and that’s it, I didn’t want anyone else to come.

I am all done in watching her coffin go into the cold earth. It’s no place for a tiny baby. I would have been twenty-three weeks pregnant today. My stomach is flat again, like she was never even there. It’s then that my dad decides to speak up.

“It’s probably for the best.”

My insides go cold and I grab onto Mum’s arm, squeezing hard. “What do you mean?” I whisper the words.

Mum is shaking her head at Dad, but he’s ignoring her.

“Being a single parent is hard. Maybe it was for the best.”

I stare at him, unable to form words.

“And with her being mixed race and all…”

“Don, shut up.” Mum pulls me to her, away from him, but he follows.

“I’m just speaking the truth. It’s a hard world out there. What normal guy would want you with a mixed race child?”

“Don, she’s burying her baby, will you just shut up?”

Mum marches me away. Jo is standing nearby, her expression one of astonishment. Tom looks ready to let a fist fly at me Dad. I wish he would.

There’s a small wake at my parent’s house, sandwiches and a few cakes are on the table ready and waiting for us. No one talks. Dad’s words swallowed up anything anyone had to say. He’s not here. Mum banned him. I think he’s hiding out in the shed. He can die out there, for all I care.