Angels (47 page)

She nodded. I had her there. “But I still don't think you should see him,” she said. “It's not going to help.”

“We'll see about that,” I said, then went to my bedroom to try on everything I owned several times.

The Mondrian is another of those hotels where you'd get snow blindness; any color so long as it's white. The lobby ANGELS / 379

was overrun with chiseled, bronzed men in Armani suits, and they were just the staff. Kitchen porters, probably. I jostled my way through them to the desk clerk and asked him to call Shay's room.

“Your name, please?”

“Maggie…um…Walsh.”

“I have a message for you.” He handed me an envelope.

I tore it open. It was a slip of paper, with a typewritten message:

“Had to go out. Sorry. Shay.”

I couldn't take my eyes off it. “Had to go out. Sorry. Shay.” One more time. “Had to go out. Sorry. Shay.”

He wasn't here. The fucker. My tense anticipation flipped into hollowed-out letdown and I was so disappointed I wanted to kick something. I'd dressed so carefully, I'd spent so long taming my hair, I'd been so buzzy and hopeful. All for nothing.

Well, what did you expect? I asked myself bitterly. What did you expect after the last time?

I am bad at being bad. Terrible, actually. The one time I tried shoplifting, I got caught. The one time I sneaked in Shay Delaney when I was baby-sitting for Damien, I got caught. The day I bunked off from school to go to the snooker match with Dad, I got caught.

The time I threw the snail at the Nissan Micra packed with nuns, they pulled over, got out, and told me off. So you'd think that that would have taught me that I couldn't get away with stepping out of line. But it didn't, because the one time I had unprotected sex with Shay Delaney, I got pregnant.

Perhaps it wasn't the only time it was unprotected—the way we had sex was often so fraught and hurried that slips and spills might have happened anyway. But there was one definite occasion when we didn't have a condom and we couldn't help ourselves. Shay had promised that he'd pull out in time, but he hadn't, and somehow I'd ended up assuring him that we'd be okay, as if my love for him was so powerful I could tame my body into obedience.

380 / MARIAN KEYES

When the time for my period arrived without anything happening I told myself that it was study stress that was keeping it away—our final exams were in less than three months. Then I tried the trick of telling myself that my period wouldn't come until I stopped worrying about it not coming. But I couldn't stop fretting—every twenty minutes I ran to the bathroom to check to see if it had arrived yet and I analyzed everything I wanted to eat to see if it could be classed as a “craving.” But that I might be pregnant was literally almost unimaginable.

I couldn't bear the not knowing, I had to find out that I wasn't pregnant, so when I was three weeks late I went into town and—anonymously, I hoped—bought a pregnancy kit, and while Shay's mum was out, we did the test in the Delaneys' bathroom.

We grasped sweaty hands and watched the stick, willing it to stay white, but when the end of it went pink, I lapsed into deep shock. The kind of shock that people end up going to the hospital and getting sedation for. I couldn't speak, I could barely breathe, and when I looked at Shay, he was almost as bad. We were terrified children, the pair of us. Sweat broke out on my forehead and gaps began to break up my vision.

“I'll do whatever you want,” Shay said dully, and I knew he was just acting a part. He was petrified as he watched the bright star of his future implode. A father at eighteen?

“I'll stand by you,” he said, as if he was reading from a crappy script.

“I don't think I can have it,” I heard myself say.

“What do you mean?” He tried to hide his relief, but already it had transformed him.

“I mean…I don't think I can have it.”

The only thing I could think of was that it didn't happen to girls like me. I know unplanned pregnancies happen to lots of women; even then I knew it. And I'm certain most people are distraught and wish it hadn't happened. But I felt—and maybe everyone feels this—that it was somehow
worse for me
.

ANGELS / 381

I suspected that if someone wild and breezy like Claire had gotten pregnant at seventeen, it would be as if everyone had almost expected it from her, and would just sigh a little and shake their heads, saying “Oh, Claire…”

But I was the well-behaved one, my parent's comfort, the one daughter they could look at and not have to say, “Where did I go wrong?” The idea of having to break this news to my mother was unimaginable. But then I thought of having to tell Dad and I shriveled up entirely. It would kill him, I felt.

I was gripped by intense panic. Being pregnant felt like one of the most frightening things that could ever happen to anyone.

Within the boundaries of my middle-class world, it was as bad as it got. I thrashed around, like an animal in a trap, torn asunder and trapped ever deeper by the ugly realization that no matter what choice I made, it would have terrible implications that I'd have to live with for the rest of my life. There was no way out—every one of my options was terrible. How could I have a child and give it away to someone else? It would break my heart wondering how it was getting along, if it was happy, if the new people were looking after it, and if my rejection had scarred it.

But I was also terrified of having a baby and keeping it. How would I take care of it? I was only a schoolgirl and felt young and incapable, barely mature enough to take care of myself, never mind a helpless scrap of life. Like Shay, I too felt my life would be over.

And everyone would judge me: the neighbors, my classmates, my extended family. They'd talk about me and scorn my stupidity, and they'd say I'd gotten what I deserved.

Fifteen years later I can see that it wouldn't have been that much of a disaster. It was all survivable—I could have had the baby, taken care of him, eventually sorted out a career for myself. And, of course, while my parents wouldn't have hung out the flags, they would have gotten over it. More than that, they would have loved him, their first grandchild.

In fact, as the years passed, I saw people live with far 382 / MARIAN KEYES

worse stuff than being presented with an illegitimate child by their best-behaved daughter. Kieron Boylan, a boy from our street, a few years younger than me, got killed in a motorcycle accident when he was eighteen. I went to his funeral and his parents were beyond recognition. His father was, quite literally, wild with grief.

But, back then, I was seventeen and knew none of that. I was inexperienced at life, at standing up to people, at going against expectations. I had no capacity to be rational and I was in the grip of extreme fear that woke me on the hour every hour through the night and turned my days into lucid nightmares.

I dreamed about babies. In one dream I was trying to carry a baby, but it was made of something like lead, so it was far too heavy to carry, but I still struggled. In another, I'd had my baby, but it had an adult's head and kept talking to me, challenging me, exhausting me with the strength of its personality. I was constantly nauseous, but I'll never be sure if it was because of the pregnancy or the accompanying terror.

Shay kept parroting that he'd stand by me, no matter what I decided, but I knew what he wanted me to do. The thing was, he'd never say it straight out, and though I wasn't able to put words on it, I hated feeling that I alone was responsible for the dreadful decision. I'd have preferred him to yell at me that I'd better go to England and get myself sorted out pronto, instead of him acting all caring and “mature.” Even though he looked like a man and was the head of the Delaney household, it began to dawn on me that perhaps he
wasn't
as mature as he seemed, that it was merely role-playing. And despite us being inseparable, I felt oddly abandoned by him.

Three days after I'd done the test, I broke the news to Emily and Sinead, who were appalled. “I knew something was up with you,”

Emily said, her face white, “but I thought it was exam worry.”

They kept shaking their heads and breathing “Jesus!” and ANGELS / 383

“I can't believe it!” Until I had to tell them to shut up and advise me on what to do. Neither of them tried to convince me to have the baby, they both thought that not having it was the best—or least bad—option. Their eyes were so full of pity and relief that it wasn't them that once again I yearned for all this to be a terrible dream, for me to wake up, shaky with relief that I'd imagined it all.

They decided my best option was to go to Claire, who was in her final year in college and very vocal about women's rights and what bastards the priests were. In fact, she used to go on so much about the right to abortion that Mum often sighed, “That one'll get up the pole and have an abortion just to prove a point.”

So I told Claire my condition and she was staggered. In other circumstances it might have been funny, but at the time nobody was finding anything amusing. Claire actually cried and, peculiarly, I ended up comforting her. “It's very sad,” she wept, unconsolably.

“You're so young.”

Claire was able to get information for me and Shay, and with unexpected ease the arrangements were made. A load lifted off me—I wouldn't have to have the baby and face the consequences—and then a whole host of new, horrific worries bobbed to the surface. I'd been brought up as a Catholic, but somehow I'd managed to avoid a lot of the accompanying fear and guilt. I'd always thought God must be a decent kind of bloke and I'd suffered only mild agonies of guilt about having sex with Shay because I figured He wouldn't have given us an appetite if He didn't want us to use it. It had been a long time since I'd believed in hell, but all of a sudden I started to wonder, and reactions that I didn't recognize as mine began to play out.

“Am I doing something terrible?” I asked Claire, dreading the answer. “Am I…a murderer?”

“No,” she reassured me. “It's not a baby yet. It's only a bunch of cells.”

I clung uneasily to that thought as Shay and I got the money together. It wasn't hard for me because I was a saver, 384 / MARIAN KEYES

and it wasn't hard for him because he was a charmer. And on a Friday evening in April—my parents under the impression that I was on a study weekend with Emily—Shay and I left for London.

Plane fares were out of our price range, so we went by ferry. It was a long journey—four hours on the boat, then six on the bus—and I sat bolt upright for most of the way, convinced that I'd never sleep again. Somewhere outside Birmingham I nodded off on Shay's shoulder and I remember waking up as the bus was driving past redbrick mansion blocks in a London suburb. It was spring and the trees were startlingly green and the tulips were out.

Even to this day, I shy away from London. Whenever I have to go there, I relive those feelings, my first glimpse of the place. Those redbrick mansion blocks are ubiquitous and I always wonder,
Were
these the ones I saw
?

I passed back into consciousness, like swimming to the surface, and I heard myself crying. A noise that I'd never before made was tearing itself from my gut. Stunned and still partially anesthetized, I lay and listened to myself. I'd stop soon.

And pain. Was there pain? I checked, and yes, there was, a lowdown, pulling cramp.

When I'd finished letting these yelps come out of me, I'd do something about the pain. Or maybe someone would come. In this hospital that wasn't a hospital, surely a nurse who wasn't a nurse would hear me and come.

But no one came. And almost dreamily, as if someone else was making those sounds, I lay and listened. I must have fallen back to sleep; the next time I awoke, I was silent. Bizarrely, I felt almost okay.

On Saturday evening, when Shay collected me and took me to the B&B where we were spending the night, he was immensely tender. I was relieved, yet I cried; only when it was all over and safe could I afford to let myself get sentimental about the baby. For some reason I'd decided that the

ANGELS / 385

baby had been a boy and as I wondered out loud if he would have looked like me or him, Shay was clearly uncomfortable.

We left for Ireland on Sunday morning, arriving back that evening. Unbelievably, less than two days since I'd left, I was back in my bedroom, where everything looked deceptively—almost baff-lingly—normal. My little desk was piled high with textbooks requiring my urgent attention; this was my future, it had never gone away, all I had to do now was reembrace it. Immediately, in fact that very night, I knuckled down and threw myself into my work; it was only six weeks to my exams. But over the following days, weird stuff began to happen. I could hear babies crying everywhere—when I was in the shower, when the bus was moving, but when the water stopped running or the bus came to a halt, the faint wailing stopped too.

I tried to tell Shay, but he didn't want to know. “Forget it,” he urged. “You feel guilty, but don't let it beat you. Think about exams instead. Just a few weeks to go.”

So I swallowed away my need to talk about it, to convince myself I'd done the right thing, and instead forced myself to list how many hours of study I'd managed. When the urge to talk about our baby got very bad, I'd ask Shay something about
Hamlet
or the early poetry of Yeats and he'd earnestly explain, mostly regurgitating study guides.

I got through the suspended animation of exam time and then it was all over. I'd left school, I was an adult, my life was about to begin. While we waited for our results, Shay and I were almost never apart. We watched a lot of telly together—even on the warm, sunny days when the celebratory sunshine made the corduroy couch and brown carpet look ridiculous, we stayed inside and watched the box.

We never had sex again.

In midsummer, we got the results of our exams—Shay did brilliantly and I did badly. Not disastrously, but I'd been such a good student that everyone's hopes for me had been high. My parents were confused and immediately set about reducing my poor marks into something unimportant. How