‘I’d love that. We all get on so well, it’d be great.’
‘Yeah, we could have dinner once a month or something,’ Leonie suggested enthusiastically. ‘We could meet at some midway point between where we all live.’
She thought about it. Her home was in Wicklow, south of the city and an hour’s drive from the centre of Dublin. Emma was in Clontarf in north Dublin, which was a forty-minute drive into the centre of the city, while Hannah lived in the city near Leeson Street Bridge.
‘My place is pretty much half-way between you two,’ Hannah said. ‘Sorry. You’ll have to do all the driving.’
‘I don’t mind,’ Leonie said. ‘This holiday was about starting something new and since I didn’t fall in love with some Omar Sharif lookalike, making two fabulous new friends is the next best thing.’
‘You mean we’re second best?’ asked Emma, throwing her cocktail umbrella at Leonie.
Leonie laughed and threw it back. ‘Only kidding. Right, let’s plan the first get-together now. Two weeks after we get back so we still have a bit of a tan to wow the rest of the world. Oh, yeah, we can get our photos developed and bitch about our fellow travellers.’
‘It’s a deal,’ Hannah said.
They clinked their now-empty glasses.
‘To the Grand Egyptian Reunion,’ Emma said loudly. ‘Now, shall I order more drinks?’
Dragging her suitcase behind her, Emma opened her front door and breathed in the scent of a house where the windows hadn’t been opened since she left. The peace lily in the hall looked like a weeping willow, its leaves drooping with thirst, while the newel post of the banisters was armour-plated with a selection of Pete’s raincoats and sweaters. Ignoring the mess, Emma abandoned the suitcase at the bottom of the stairs and headed for the kitchen.
There was a note on the kitchen table, lying amid a week’s worth of newspapers, supplements and junk mail. Emma put down her handbag, shivered in the chill of the Irish August which seemed so icy after Egypt, and switched on the kettle. Only then did she read the note.
Can’t wait to see you, darling. I’m at a match. Back at seven. I’ve dinner under control. Don’t do anything.
Love, Pete
She grinned. Dinner under control probably meant he’d stop off at Mario’s on the way home and pick up a giant Four Seasons pizza with a side order of garlic potatoes.
She brought her tea and the luggage upstairs and started to unpack. Out of the suitcase came skirts, T-shirts and underwear, all mingled up with the postcards she couldn’t resist and the pretty fake alabaster Egyptian figurines she’d bought in the souk in Luxor. She took one out of its tissue wrapping, marvelling at the detail of the carving on the falcon god, Horus.
It’d fall apart given a sharp knock, Flora the tour guide had warned the Nile cruisers, explaining that real alabaster statues were hand-made and built to last, unlike their cheap street-market relatives. Emma hadn’t cared. She’d wanted some cheap’n’cheerful souvenirs for the people in the office and, at three Egyptian pounds each, these statuettes fitted the bill perfectly. Happy with her purchases, she pulled the others from their wrapping until all six were uncovered and she began to plan which one she’d give to which colleague.
She took her sandals from the plastic bags she’d wrapped them up in and threw dirty clothes into the laundry basket which was already groaning with Pete’s stuff.
Her mind wasn’t really on unpacking: she was dying to see Pete and tell him everything; about her new friends and all the places they’d been…Then her hand touched something cool, soft and plastic. From under the folds of clothes she hadn’t worn, she unearthed the big pack of sanitary towels, an Egyptian brand she’d never heard of with a picture of a dove on the front. She took the packet slowly from the case and the pain hit her again. The pain of knowing that there had been no baby growing safely inside her, wrapped in fierce love and protected from the world by Emma’s body. No baby to rest its downy head against her breast, no soft mouth instinctively searching for the nipple, no crying, innocent little creature utterly dependent on Emma for everything.
The pain came from deep within herself. Her chest hurt, her head hurt, it felt as if even the bones of her body ached with the very hurt of it all. She heard a noise and realized it was herself, crying, keening like a woman at a funeral.
After days of holding on, she finally let the heartache out: every twinge of anguish, every pang of loss. It was as if a dam had burst.
Now that she was here, crouched on her own bedroom floor, leaning against the bed, she could cry to her heart’s content over her lost baby. Because it was a lost baby to her. Another chance lost, another life she’d been so sure had been inside her gone. Leonie and Hannah had been good to her; they’d tried their best to understand and comfort her. But they didn’t understand. Leonie had children, three lovely kids. Hannah didn’t seem to want children yet, although Emma would never be able to understand how any woman could not want children. But she didn’t. So it was different for them.
But Emma, she wanted her own baby with an intensity that was killing her. It had to be killing her, she thought as the tears ran unchecked down her cheeks, it hurt so much. That much hurt couldn’t be good for you. It had to be like cancer, eating away inside you until there was nothing left but a shell, nothing but hate and rage and anger at anyone who had that one simple thing denied her.
Everybody else had children so effortlessly. People had babies by mistake, people had abortions. Emma was always reading about women in the newspapers who said things like: ‘Little Jimmy was an accident after the other six, we’d never planned him…’
Even worse, her work with KrisisKids meant she was constantly exposed to the stories of abused and abandoned children, defenceless kids who’d been let down by the people who were supposed to love them most: their parents. It was as well, Emma reflected, that her role in the charity was administrative because if she had to personally deal with the crying kids who rang their helpline, she didn’t know how she’d have been able to cope. The counsellors found it hard enough, she knew. Sometimes they left abruptly after their shift, white-faced and drained, unable to chat with their colleagues because there was simply no way to go from hearing a child’s most terrible secrets to idly discussing the weather or what was on the TV that night. Emma knew she’d have been hopeless when faced with a child haltingly telling her about the cigarette burns or how daddy climbed into her bed at night and told her to keep a secret. Those people weren’t parents: they were evil creatures, demonic. What she couldn’t understand was why God gave them the gift of a child.
But then, how did God work out who got kids and who didn’t? Who decided that Emma would remain childless while some blithe, unconcerned women had families the size of football teams? The rage she felt for those mothers shocked her. She wanted to kill them, women who took it all for granted. Who had no idea what it was like to yearn for a child, who simply laughed when the pregnancy test was positive, and said things like: ‘Oh well, another kid for the football team!’ or ‘We’ve always meant to start a family, we may as well start now!’
She hated them, hated them with all her being.
Nearly as much
