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everything that had happened. But I didn’t. I couldn’t find the words, they felt trapped inside me,
made prisoner by my numbed senses and my decaying ability to trust. Within my head I was jittering,
like a withdrawing addict, obsessing over my sister, and what she’d told me, replaying my loss of
consciousness at the school.
Laura let me jitter. She calmly laid out our food on the kitchen table and poured us glasses of wine.
‘I know you probably don’t feel like this,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to do it anyway and I won’t be
offended if you don’t want it.’
The food and drink she’d brought looked like ancient relics of a life that I’d once enjoyed, but I
went through the motions of appearing grateful. I picked at one or two of the dishes, managed just a
sip of the wine, which had lost all of the comforting qualities it had before Ben disappeared and
tasted like acid in my mouth.
‘Do you want to talk about him?’ Laura asked, breaking our silence. ‘Would it help?’
Laura never ate much; she had the appetite of a sparrow. She toyed with her food for a few
moments, while I failed to answer her question, and then she said, ‘Do you remember when you had
him? At the very beginning? We couldn’t believe how tiny he was, do you remember that?’
I found my voice. ‘You wouldn’t hold him at first.’
Laura hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him when she came to see me in the hospital. I lay
exhausted in the bed, my body bruised and sore, hormone-drenched and soft, and watched her while
she’d stood beside his Perspex crib all trim and well dressed and tanned and pretty in a little summer
dress and big sunglasses pushed up on her head – like a postcard from my life before motherhood. I
told her she could pick him up, but she’d shaken her head at first.
She smiled at the reminder. ‘I’d never held a baby before. I didn’t want to break him, or drop him.’
‘But I made you.’
‘And he puked on me.’
‘He puked everywhere for the first few months. It was constant washing.’
‘But it was love at first sight, wasn’t it? For you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I envied you that. It was so intense, so private.’
Her fingers sat on the stem of her wine glass and she turned it slowly, delicate wrists flexing. Then
she refilled it. More than half the bottle was gone, and I hadn’t had more than a sip.
For the first time I noticed that lines were beginning to form on her elfin face. It was just an
impression, they seemed to be there one moment, and gone the next, but they were a reminder that she
was ageing, that we were all ageing. I stretched my hand across the table towards her and our fingers
linked briefly.
‘I can’t believe this is happening to you,’ she said. ‘It’s like a bolt of lightning came out of nowhere
and struck you, and Ben. I can’t imagine what you must be going through.’
‘All my feelings hurt.’
Her eyes brimmed with unshed tears, and she said, ‘Can I tell you something? I want to say it so
you know that other people know how you feel. Just a little bit of what you feel anyway.’
‘Tell me,’ I said, and instinctively I felt a reawakening of the feelings of dread that our
reminiscences about Ben had briefly put to sleep.
‘I had an abortion.’
‘When?’ This was startling news, shocking too. I thought Laura and I had had the kind of friendship
where you lay yourself bare, where the only secrets you keep are to do with your plans for each
other’s Christmas or birthday presents.