Page 21 of Statistically Speaking
“Are you all right, love?” Margie asks, reaching out to touch my hand. She knows I’m not the most tactile of people, so I understand that she must be quite concerned. I squeeze her fingers very gently, not knowing how much pain she might be in today, and nod.
I wonder how it would feel to talk to somebody about all of this. How it would feel to hear those secrets spilled, those yearnings unleashed, to let all of this uncertainty fly away from me. How it would feel to share my past and my present instead of hoarding it, keeping it to myself like a twisted treat.
“You’re not all right,” she says more firmly. “I can tell, you know. My spider senses are tingling. What’s up? Is it work? Karim? Have you accidentally misfiled a book that starts withBin the D section?”
“Never!” I say, pressing my hands to my heart in fake horror. “And work is fine. Karim is—well, interesting, I suppose.”
“I’ll say!”
“Hush your mouth, you old pervert—I mean he’s an interesting person. And he’s asked me out again, and maybe I’d have said yes under normal circumstances, but right now I’m just not sure I can handle any more complications.”
I realize, as she twists her mouth into anOshape, that I have accidentally said too much. Margie does not need a lot of encouragement to prod and probe, and I have just given her the perfect opening.
Maybe, I concede to myself as I stroke Bill with my bed-socked toes, it wasn’t even an accident. Maybe some part of me needs to talk to someone, and I suppose Margie is the best I’ve got. She’s a friend, and I trust her. She knows verylittle about me, really, and certainly none of the big stuff—but somehow I still feel close to her. She has an accepting approach to life that I find refreshing and comforting.
Perhaps, after all, I need some comfort right now. Perhaps I am not as self-sufficient as I once was, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. I count everything, but I count on no one apart from myself—and even then I always second-guess my motives. Perhaps this latest turn my life has taken is too much for me to deal with alone. I stare at her for a few moments, an internal debate raging in my mind. Some instinct must tell her to be silent, to refrain from launching into an interrogation, and it strikes me that she actually knows me a lot better than I had assumed. That we are all made up of much more than facts. That in some ways, she has slipped stealthily into being pretty much the strongest maternal figure I have ever had.
I don’t even see her as old enough to be my mother, but of course she is, easily—and the way she is always interested in me, always supportive, always appreciative... Well, I suppose, in a less twisted world than mine, that is exactly what mothers are like.
I know I am safe with Margie, and even as I think it, I feel a knot untangle inside me. Of course, I am made entirely of knots, and it will take time to unravel them all—but this is a start. For now, for this one moment, I feel safe. I make my decision and act on it before I can talk myself out of it.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I say, getting to my feet and slipping them into my trainers. “Put the kettle on and bring out a bottle of something with a high alcohol content.”
“Aye, aye, Captain!” she replies, giving me a jaunty salute as I leave.
I go round to the front of the building and let myself into our communal door before running up the stairs to my flat. I find what I am looking for immediately, because it is never out of my mind, lying encased in a protective hard-backed envelope in a drawer in my bedroom.
I return to the terrace quickly, aware that if I linger too long I will probably change my mind, that I will chicken out and retreat back into my fortress of solitude. Or, more accurately, my one-bedroomed flat of solitude.
By the time I return, Margie has brought out a bottle of Baileys and two fleece blankets. It is nearing 9:00 p.m., and dark now. It is usually quiet down on the beach on these kinds of evenings, the gentle roll of the waves and the occasional lights of a ferry heading into port the only distractions.
“Didn’t bother with more cocoa,” she says, wrapping her knees up while I throw the blanket around my shoulders. “This seemed like a strictly alcohol kind of talk.”
I smile and nod, and hold the envelope close to my tummy. I have never shown anybody this in my entire adult life, and it feels strange—like I am giving a piece of myself away. My fingers claw against it, reluctant to part with its contents.
I feel Bill shimmy up by my side, the warmth of his large body against my legs. A moth flutters around the chiminea, and somewhere out there a small animal scurries in the dunes.
I open the envelope, and I pull out the flimsy black-and-white square of paper, and I hand it to Margie. She peers at it through her specs, then looks up at me, frowning in confusion.
“Gemma,” she says seriously, “are you pregnant? Is that why you’re so distracted?”
“No!” I reply, fighting down hysterical laughter. I can totally see why she has jumped to that conclusion, but it’s the wrong one. Unless you believe in immaculate conception, it would be impossible, as I’ve been firmly single for over a year.
“But this is a scan photo, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I reply. “A scan photo of a baby. But if you look at the date on it, in teeny-tiny writing, you’ll see it’s very old. About eighteen years old.”
“Right... and whose baby is this, love?”
I can tell from the gentle way she speaks that she already has her suspicions. She is a sharp cookie, and there probably isn’t much she hasn’t seen in life.
“It’s my baby. I had her when I was sixteen, and I gave her up for adoption. I couldn’t cope with a child. I could barely cope with myself. I was in and out of the care system, my mum had her own issues, and—well, I was sixteen!”
“Of course you were,” she says, stroking the picture in the familiar way that I have done so many times over the years. It is the only photo I have of my baby. Geoff had offered to take one for me to keep when she was born, but I said no—I was ruthless about it, in a way I barely recognize now, but understand. I couldn’t survive the pain of that, of having a reminder of her tiny body and her staring eyes and the sense that she somehow knew that I was betraying her.
What I didn’t realize then, of course, was that I didn’t need a photograph to remind me of any of that.
“How did it happen?” Margie asks, looking up at me. “How did you get pregnant that young?”
