to sit somewhere near the front. Callie didn’t know if she could have borne it if she’d chosen to sit beside her for the next hour or two. She wouldn’t have been able to resist the temptation of looking and longing and…
The two young women chattered their way towards the back of the coach, leaving a trail of perfume in their wake, unlike the cadaverous young man. She was uncomfortably aware of holding her breath as he stood for several seconds beside the empty seat next to her, but he, too, passed on down the coach.
It was the white-faced young woman who finally slid herself into place beside her and it was only then that Callie saw what hadn’t been visible while the youngster had been part of the queue. She was pregnant.
Callie drew in a sharp breath as the shock hit her, and closed her eyes while she battled against the jealous tears with the realisation that she seemed to be showing about the same as she had, just before…
‘It’s not catching, you know,’ the young woman snapped with an attempt at bravado that was completely destroyed by the wobble in her voice.
‘Unfortunately,’ Callie muttered, even as she felt guilt that her reaction had made the young woman feel uncomfortable.
‘You…what?’ Her garishly painted mouth fell open and eyes heavily outlined with kohl grew wide. ‘Did you say…unfortunately?’
‘Yes,’ Callie admitted uncomfortably, wishing she’d either kept her mouth shut or stuck to a simple apology for her apparent disapproval. Now she was going to have to make some sort of explanation even though she knew it was going to hurt more than ripping a scab off a wound that had barely started healing. ‘I lost my baby nearly five months ago. I was just over halfway through the pregnancy.’
‘Oh…! I’m sorry if it makes you…Look, would you rather I asked someone else to swap seats with me?’ she asked earnestly, revealing a far more considerate side than the initial belligerent attitude would have suggested.
There was a sudden rumble of sound as the driver started the engine and an explosive hiss of air as he released the brakes to start the next stage of the journey.
‘It’s too late now,’ Callie said, resigned to a companion who was managing, in her early teens, to do what she, a mature professional, couldn’t do with all the expertise of her health service colleagues behind her. ‘You can’t go changing seats while the coach is moving. If the driver had to brake suddenly you might injure the baby if you hit something.’
The youngster stared at her in surprise then she pressed trembling lips together and Callie was startled to see that her eyes were swimming with tears.
‘I’m sorry. Did I say something to upset you?’ Callie was suddenly concerned that she must have inadvertently hit a sensitive nerve.
‘No. It’s just…You said that as if you actually care what happens to it…to the baby,’ she said in a choked voice.
‘Of course I do. Anybody would,’ Callie said, knowing that this wasn’t the time to talk about her own desperate longing for a child.
‘Not everybody,’ she snapped bitterly, then suddenly seemed to remember that they were surrounded on all sides and lowered her voice so that her words would be masked by the sound of the other voices around them and the rumble of the coach itself. ‘My stepfather gave me money for an abortion even though he knows it’s too far along. He said if you pay enough money any doctor would do it.’
‘Most doctors wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole even if you offered them the moon on a silver platter,’ Callie said quietly. In her days on Obs and Gyn she’d seen botched abortions go horribly wrong. ‘And why would you want to abort the baby when there are so many people desperate to adopt?’
‘I don’t want to give it away,’ she said fiercely, a protective hand curving over her noticeably swollen belly even as she lost her battle with the tears. ‘But I’ve got no way of keeping it, have I? Not at my age. I’m still at school and a Saturday job won’t pay enough to find somewhere to live.’
‘What about your mum? Won’t she help you?’
‘Not her!’ she said, bitterness and devastation combining corrosively in those two words. ‘She kicked me out when she found out. She would have killed me if she knew it was his…my stepfather’s.’
Callie thought it would have been more to the point if the mother had killed the stepfather who’d been having sex with her underage daughter, but now wasn’t the time to voice those sentiments. She fished a packet of paper hankies out of her pocket and offered them to her companion.
‘Listen, we’re going to be sitting together for at least an hour. Shall we introduce ourselves? I’m Callie,’ she said, holding out her hand.
‘Steph…Stephanie,’ she said, and blew her nose furiously. ‘I didn’t want to cry, not over them.’
‘Hey, don’t knock crying. Sometimes it’s good to let some of the emotions out.’
‘It doesn’t solve anything, though—like, what am I going to do when the coach arrives at the depot? I’ve got nowhere to go and no one to ask.’
‘That makes two of us,’ Callie said, surprising herself.
‘You…what?’ Steph blinked. ‘You’re kidding! You’re a grown-up and grown-ups always know where they’re going and what they’re going to do.’
‘Newsflash, Steph. Grown-ups are just as mixed up as anybody else. They’ve just had a bit more practice at hiding it.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘SO, WHERE do we go?’ Steph said when the two of them had been reunited with their luggage.
Callie almost smiled when she realised that they had both opted for almost identical rucksacks in which to carry their worldly belongings.
‘First, we need to find somewhere to stay the night,’ Callie said, looking out at the rapidly darkening sky beyond the enormous doorway to the coach terminus. They’d managed to outrun the threatened bad weather so far, but it didn’t look as if it would be long before they’d get soaked if they hadn’t found somewhere. ‘That might be a good place to start,’ she suggested, pointing to the internet café on the other side of the road.
‘Uh, I don’t think the café will stay open all night,’ Steph said uneasily. ‘I’ve got a bit of money to find a cheap hotel or something. I told you my stepfather gave it to me for the abortion but I reckon it was a bribe, too, so I wouldn’t tell Mum it’s his.’
Callie chuckled. ‘I’m far too old to want to spend the night sitting in a café,’ she said. ‘I was actually going to go on the internet and see what I can find around here without having to march up and down in the dark.’
‘You can do that?’ Steph marvelled with all the arrogance of the very young for those they consider too ‘past it’ to cope with modern technology, and Callie suddenly felt as old as Methuselah’s grandmother.
‘Let’s find out,’ she suggested, and they set off into the chilly evening.
They reached the other said of the road and Callie was just stretching out a hand
