Читать книгу He Is Mine and I Have No Other - Rebecca O'Connor - Страница 14

I said nothing.

Mam was forty-four. That was way too old to be having babies as far as I was concerned. I suddenly felt a terrible itch at the back of the knees from the damp tights I had on me.

Dad said nothing.

The first thing I asked was ‘How long?’ I might as well have asked them right out when they’d last done it. It made me feel sick, talking about this here in our kitchen. After dinner. On a school night. They were still at it. At their age. Under this roof. While I lay innocently tucked up in bed. All the filthy details rushed into my head then: they mustn’t have used a condom, or, worse than that, they had used one and it had come off or broken. My mind’s eye was forced to zoom in to the moment of its removal from the penis. (I couldn’t think of it as anything other than a ‘penis’. The names the girls at school used seemed inappropriate.) I thought about gobbing on her.

‘Baby’s due tenth of May,’ Mam said.

‘Tenth of May, love,’ Dad said.

He was turning one of Gran’s sachets of salt over and over between his thumb and forefinger. It made a tiny swishing noise like surf.

I fucking heard you, I wanted to say. Shut your fucking mouth.

Then, to make things worse, they suggested that I move to the big room downstairs so that they could use my room as a nursery. I’d been in that room since I could remember. But that didn’t seem to concern either one of them.

The whole time Mam was stroking my shoulder with one hand while her other lay protectively on her belly. It was too much. I tore out of the room and bolted myself into my bedroom for the rest of the night. They didn’t follow me. They knew better than to do that.

That night I dreamed all the little orphan girls were living with us. Only there wasn’t enough room in the house so I had to sleep outside in the shed. And I watched them through the kitchen window, all bawling and clawing at my mother for milk. And then I was watching myself watching them through the window and I woke up in a cold sweat.

Mar was warming herself on the classroom radiator, her skirt hoiked up just under her buttocks, her long skinny legs resting on the back of one of the plastic chairs.

‘You look like shit.’

‘Thanks.’

I couldn’t tell her. I don’t know why. I told her I hadn’t slept.

‘Thinking about your man again?’ She wiggled her hips. ‘Disco is on the twen-tee-fourth. I heard on the bus this morning.’

I felt a little faint with excitement.

Mar underlined ‘come’ in the last line of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ in English class that morning – ‘Of what is past, or passing, or to come’ – and pushed her book in front of me. I didn’t even laugh. Usually I would. Usually we’d both nearly choke laughing. But it just made me want to cry. And the words ‘perne in a gyre’ spinning round in my head.

After lunch we went out to the woods to collect specimens of moss and fern and suck insects into pooters. Beetles, mostly. And woodlice. I walked a little behind the rest of the class, the sleeves of my jumper pulled down over my hands. I had this weird feeling I was being watched, and even glanced quickly behind me a few times to make sure. The trees were bare; I could see right to the road; there wasn’t a soul about. Not even a car passing. The sky was milky blue. It looked as though it might snow.

Soon the walls of my bedroom would be painted in pastel shades for the baby, and my bed replaced by a cot. And how was I going to convince Mam and Dad to let me go to this disco when they’d already said that I could only go out (maybe) during the holidays? What if I never got to meet this boy? I could hardly approach him in the cemetery. It had to be a slow set. Somewhere dark, crowded, noisy, so that he couldn’t see or hear me too well. My mother was going to swell and give birth. I wouldn’t be the only one anymore. I would have to look after it when they were too old. They were going to die.

Mar ran back and handed me a woodlouse in a jar. ‘Here, you can look after this.’

‘Great, thanks a bunch, Mar,’ I said, putting a foot out to trip her up. At least I had her.