Angels (48 page)

386 / MARIAN KEYES

were they to know that I'd spent the last six weeks before the exams sitting in my room straining to hear imaginary babies crying?

The aftermath lingered for a very long time. Almost from the moment I was no longer pregnant, guilt and regret arrived and I began to think that having the baby wouldn't have been so bad.

(Although I was just about together enough to understand that if I was still pregnant, I'd be yearning not to be.) Contradictions pulled me this way and that. I felt I'd had a right to have an abortion—but I was still bothered by horrible uneasiness.

No matter how cleanly I lived the rest of my life, till the day I died this would always be with me. I couldn't exactly find the right description; “sin” was the wrong word, because that was about breaking someone else's laws. But a part of me would always be broken and I would always be a person who'd had an abortion.

I felt so trapped by this irreversibility that I thought about killing myself. Only for a few seconds, but for that short time I sincerely wanted to. It was like being shackled to something shameful and painful forever. Not like having points on your license or a criminal record that lapses after five or ten years. It could never be fixed. It would never be fixable.

And yet…I was relieved that I didn't have a child to bring up.

What I really wished was that I'd never had to make the decision to begin with. And of course it was my fault, I should have kept my legs closed in the first place, but life isn't like that—even then I knew it—and it's easy to be wise after the fact.

Occasionally antiabortionists paraded through the streets of Dublin, campaigning to make abortion in Ireland more illegal than it already was. Carrying rosary beads and waving placards with pictures of unborn fetuses. I had to look away. But when I listened to them, condemning abortion so vehemently, I wanted to ask if any of them had ever been in my situation. I would've bet money that they hadn't. And that if

ANGELS / 387

they had, their commitment to high-minded principle might have wavered.

What bothered me most were the men—men protesting against abortion! Men! What did they know, what
could
they ever know, of the terror I'd felt? They couldn't get pregnant.

But I never voiced any of it at home because I didn't want to draw attention to the issue. And—at least when I was there—Claire never said anything either.

At the end of September, Shay went to London to do his degree in media studies. That had always been his plan because Irish universities didn't offer such imaginative courses.

“This changes nothing,” he promised me as we said good-bye at the ferry port. “I'll write lots and see you at Christmas.”

But he never wrote. I'd had a premonition that this might happen—I'd already started having dreams about trying to catch him even before he'd left—but when it did, I refused to believe it. I watched the mail every day and after seven wretched weeks I took my pride in my hands, visited his mother, and gave her a letter to give to him. “Maybe I've been sending them to the wrong address,”

I said. But she checked and the address I had was the right one.

“Have you heard from him?” I asked, and flinched when she said in surprise that of course she had, that he was getting on great.

I regrouped my hopes and instead hung everything on his coming home at Christmas. From the twentieth of December onward, I was a ball of adrenaline, waiting for the phone or the doorbell to ring. But when they didn't, I began walking past his house, up the hill, down the hill, shaking with cold and nerves, desperate for a sighting of him. When I saw Fee, one of his sisters, emerge, I nabbed her and in a high, wobbly pretense of unconcern said,

“What day is Shay coming?”

Looking confused, she broke the news. He wasn't coming, he'd gotten a holiday job. “I thought you'd know,” she said.

388 / MARIAN KEYES

“Oh, I thought there was still a chance he might get here for a couple of days.” My humiliation had me stuttering.

Easter, I thought, he'll come home at Easter. But he didn't. Or for the summer. I waited for him long after most people would have given up hope.

In the meantime I'd gotten a job, where I'd made a new friend, Donna. Like my other friends, Sinead and Emily, she went out a lot, on the hunt for men and good times. I used to tag along and, with them urging me on, if some decentish bloke asked me out, I'd say yes; nothing much came of any of them. There was someone named Colm who gave me an engraved lighter for my birthday even though I didn't smoke. Then, for about six weeks, I saw a man who ditched me when I wouldn't sleep with him. After him was a cutish one called Anton, even though he wasn't foreign. I towered a good three inches over him and he kept wanting us to go for walks. I actually went to bed with him—probably, I later suspected, because I found it so embarrassing to be upright with him.

But no matter how I tried, I just couldn't get worked up about any of them.

The current of life was trying to drag me forward, but I resisted.

I preferred the past, not yet convinced that that's what it was—the past. And I would never have believed when I'd said good-bye to Shay at the ferry port that it would be fifteen years before I saw him again.

I DROVE FROM
the Mondrian back to Emily's. Roars of laughter and a smell of burning were coming from the goatee boys' back garden. Ignoring it all, I let myself into the mercifully empty house and made straight for the couch. I didn't even turn on the lights, I just lay in the dark, feeling flattened, soulless, lost to myself.

As time passed after Shay's departure for London, occasional news reached me of him; he was spending the summer working on Cape Cod; he'd graduated; he'd got a job in Seattle. At some stage I understood that it was over, that he wasn't coming back to me.

I tried my best with the other men I met, but I couldn't move forward. Then one night, when I was twenty-one, I bumped into Garv in a pub in town. It had been more than three years since I'd seen him. Like Shay, he'd gone away to college—Edinburgh for him. Now he was back, working in Dublin, and as we swapped autobiographical details, I felt so guilty about the way I'd treated him that I could barely look his way. Mid small talk, I blurted out a shamefaced apology and, to my relief, he began to laugh. “It's all right, Maggie, take it easy. It was a lifetime ago,” he said, and he looked so cute that for the first time in a long, long time I got a
feeling
.

It was a great surprise to find myself going out with him 390 / MARIAN KEYES

again, the boyfriend I'd had when I was seventeen, my first-ever boyfriend. I was wildly entertained by the novelty of it, as, indeed, so was everyone else. But then it stopped being funny the day I lifted a snail off his windshield and threw it at a passing car of nuns—because I realized that I'd fallen in love with him.

I loved him so much, he was such a good man. Though he didn't have Shay's quicksilver charm, he enchanted me nevertheless. And I thought he was gorgeous. Again, he didn't have Shay's full-on hunkiness, but he had subtler good looks that had worked their way under my skin, so that whenever I looked at him I got a rush.

His eyes, his silky hair, his height, his big hands, the way he smelled of ironed cotton—I was mad about him.

Above all we were mates—I could tell him anything. He even got chapter and verse on myself and Shay and was nothing other than entirely sympathetic. Not even a flicker of judgment came from him.

“I'm not a murderer who's going to burn in hell, am I?” I asked anxiously.

“Of course you're not, but no one's saying it was an easy decision.”

And I felt so, so relieved to have met a man as benevolent as Garv was.

But some people went a bit weird when we got engaged. Emily, in particular. “I'm afraid you're playing it safe by marrying him,”

she said.

“I thought you liked him!” I said, wounded.

“I love him. But you got so badly burned by Delaney and Garv is so crazy about you…Look, I just want you to be sure. Just think about it.”

I promised I would, but I didn't because I knew what I wanted.

So we got married, moved to Chicago, moved back to Dublin, got the rabbits, started trying for a baby, had one miscarriage, had a second miscarriage, then watched my past come back to haunt us.

ANGELS / 391

For a long time I was the only person I knew who'd had an abortion. Then, when she was twenty-five, Donna had one, and Sinead's sister had one when she was thirty-one. Both times I was called on to relate how it was for me and I told them honestly what I thought: it was their body and they had the right to choose. They shouldn't give any credence to those pro-life bullies. But—at least if they were anything like me—not to expect to emerge unscathed from the experience, but to brace themselves for fallout. Every emotion from guilt to curiosity, shock to regret, self-hatred to wretched relief.

Though I was glad to no longer be the only one, both those terminations churned up memories so I almost felt as if I'd gone through it all again. But it passed and, mostly, I lived with being someone who'd had an abortion. As the years went by, I thought about it less. Except for every anniversary when I felt awful, sometimes without even realizing why, at least not immediately. Then I'd remember the date and understand and wonder what the baby would be like now, aged three, six, eight, eleven…

But I thought it had been absorbed safely into my past—until that last visit to Dr. Collins, the day of reckoning, when I had to vent the worry that had been gnawing away at me.

“Could I keep miscarrying because…because…I'd damaged myself?”

“In what way, damaged yourself?”

“By an operation?”

“What kind of operation? A termination?”

I flinched at his bluntness. “Yes,” I mumbled.

“Unlikely. Very unlikely. We can check, but it's highly unlikely.”

But I didn't believe him, and I knew Garv didn't either, and though we never discussed it, that was the very moment our marriage keeled over and died.

Some time later—I don't know how long—the phone rang in the darkness of Emily's front room; I had no intention of 392 / MARIAN KEYES

getting it. I let it ring, waiting for the machine to pick up, but someone had switched it off so, cursing, I dragged myself over to the phone.

The second I answered I remembered Emily's ban and said a silent prayer that it wouldn't be Larry the Savage. But it was Shay.

“Oh, hi.” He sounded surprised. “I thought I'd get the machine.”

“Well, you got me instead.”

“I'm real sorry about tonight.” He sounded so contrite that my bitterness began to melt. “It was a work thing, it came up suddenly.”

“You could have called me.”

“Too late,” he said easily. “You would have already left.”

“You're going back on Tuesday?”

“Yeah, so we're out of time.”

“But there's tomorrow. Or tomorrow night?”

“Bu—”

“Just for an hour or so.”

He was silent and I was holding my breath. “Okay,” he finally said, “tomorrow night, then. Same arrangement.”

I put down the phone feeling marginally better and decided to pop next door and see how the barbecue was going. To my great pleasure I was given a hero's welcome, as though it was years since they'd seen me instead of a few short hours. Then it dawned on me that they were all beyond tipsy, red-faced and rowdy, exhibiting the kind of aggressive drunkenness engendered by drinking tequila on an empty stomach. The smoldering grill had been abandoned and a dozen shrunken, blackened things that might once have been burgers lay upon it. When Dad sidled up and asked if I'd any chocolate in my handbag, it transpired that no one had been fed.

Troy and Helen were curled up on the flowery couch, looking very cozy; there was no sign of Kirsty. Either Troy hadn't brought her or she'd refused to enter the house on the grounds that it was a health hazard. Anna, Lara, Luis, Curtis, ANGELS / 393

and Emily were ensnared in a hard-to-follow discussion on the merits of brunch over TV. I would have liked to join in but I was so patently on a different wavelength from everyone else—i.e., not psychotic drunk—that it was pointless.

“You get freshly squeezed orange juice with brunch,” Lara said hotly. “When has your TV ever done that for you?”

“But you can watch
The Simpsons
on TV. Gimme that over french toast any day,” Curtis retorted.

I wandered away, over to Mum and Ethan, but they were toe to toe in a fight. “Who died for our sins?” Mum asked shrilly.

“But—”

“Who died for our sins?”

“Hey—”

“Tell me, come on, tell me. Who died for our sins? Just give me the name.” It was like being in an interrogation cell. “His name, please!”

Ethan hung his head and mumbled, “Jesus.”

“Who? Louder, I can't hear you.”

“Jesus,” Ethan said angrily.

“That's right. Jesus.” Mum almost smacked her lips with satisfaction. “Did you die for anyone's sins? Well, did you?”

“No, but—”

“So you can hardly go around being the new messiah, can you?”

After a pause Ethan admitted, “No, I suppose not.”

“You suppose right. Carry on with your computer studies, like a good lad, and less of the blasphemy, if you don't mind.” Then she turned the force of her personality on me and slurred, “Where's Shay?”

“Working,”

“Ah, damn,” she said moodily, lurching away.

I went and sat with the others and then we noticed that Troy and Helen had disappeared.

“Where are they?” Emily said, clutching me.

394 / MARIAN KEYES

“I don't know. Gone, it looks like.” I was baffled. Since when did she care who Troy went home with?

“Gone,” she wailed, clapping a hand over her mouth. “Gone!

He's going to fall in love with her.” Her face crumpled with sudden, drunken tears and she was snorting and coughing from crying.

When she hadn't stopped a full five minutes later, I said, “C'mon, I'll take you home,” and led her, bent almost double from hopeless sobbing, back to her own house.