The Abortion

The dull grey morning woke me, nagging, tugging, and the thick fog outside my window seemed to have permeated my body with a sweet sickness. Just thinking about it made me gag. When I opened the curtains a crack and the neon light right outside my window flooded my bed sitting room with yellow, I thought about custard, that powdered, sweet, Birds custard that my mother had made up so often in my early childhood, stickily clinging to various sponge puddings, and that did it. I shot up the steep, thinly carpeted stairs to the bathroom and vomited into the cold white porcelain.  

I was pregnant, I had already guessed that much. But what to do? I was nineteen, living in a bedsit in a small town in the north of England with no hope in my heart, and no future that I could see. I had left home the year before, flunking school (to the delight of my stepmother); and though I didn’t know it then, I had some serious emotional problems, not least of which was my complete inability to even have an emotion. I was shut down, and had been since my own mother had left us when I was ten. This was my second pregnancy, a physical manifestation of the shame that festered, unknown to me, in my core.  

I had been seeing someone, though not for long. My inability to communicate, to be spontaneous, to simply be me, and in particular, to take care of myself as a woman, were insurmountable for anyone but the most emotionally impaired and desperate man. He was not that, not quite. But it wasn’t him.  

I had met my mother again, for the first time since she left our family, the previous summer, and she had begged me to go on holiday with her husband and herself and their young son this year, a week in Tenerife. It wasn’t very appealing to me quite honestly, and I felt disloyal to my father and especially to my brother, but I couldn’t find sufficient reason to say no. In those days, I just couldn’t say no.  

I don’t remember the guy’s name. He smelled sweet. I met him in the hotel nightclub my mother and her friends frequented every evening after dinner, where we drank till midnight, oneish. After the first night, I regularly got back to my hotel room at 5 or 6 in the morning, shuffling back silently, dragging my dark shame through the brightening dawn. Days were spent recovering: lying around the pool drinking Sangria, having lunch, showering, dressing for dinner. And then, another night . . .       

I leafed through the yellow pages, just not knowing what to do, but denial had given way to panic once the morning sickness began and my body was plumping up. I earned very little money and had no-one to turn to.  

The British Pregnancy Advisory Service was housed in a blackened Victorian stone building monumental enough to shut out the sky. The woman sent to counsel me was eyeing me skeptically. At the end of her graphic descriptions of the fetus inside me and its capabilities at this thirteen week stage, and during which I sat girded as though by steel, she sighed, as if in pain.              

“You’re sure there’s no possibility of having this child?”            

“No,” I replied, frightened. “No, there really isn’t.”            

“Well,” she continued, “you are young and healthy and certainly, physically, there’s no reason why you couldn’t be a perfectly good mother…”             

I had to say no this time, and say it emphatically. No-one must know. Ever. And when it was over, I would – I would improve. I would do whatever I had to, to become… OK.    A gentle rain pattered, quietly, persistent against the misted windows.  

Tom, an acquaintance, a friend of a friend who couldn’t take time off his job, drove me to Liverpool and dropped me off at the hospital. It was post-exam time at the comprehensive school where Tom taught, and he had arranged to work in the library all day and pick me up early evening for the drive back. I stepped out of his little eggshell blue Citroen, thanking him for his part in the dark conspiracy, and headed for the hospital entrance as a cold wind started up.  

It was dark. I was ushered into a room with half a dozen or so other women, some of whom appeared extremely young, many with Irish accents. They chattered amicably, as though about to go off and see a movie or have dinner together.   

We were shown into a small ward where we each dropped our bags onto a narrow cot of a bed and were told to undress. The nurse in charge, Nurse Battry, was rotund, dressed in navy, and had the attitude of a military person.  

She rounded us up with a bellow and herded us along a short corridor into the open showers where she shouted instructions that we were to wash thoroughly and rinse thoroughly, we didn’t want infection did we, and infection was the most likely complication from this kind of procedure. She looked at us with obvious distaste, and about-turned.  

The light came in green, a sickly pale colour that started my nausea. I inched my way into a small gap between the gossiping women, and stood under a paltry, chill drizzle. With a shard of carbolic soap the colour of yellowing toenails, I washed myself thoroughly while my teeth chattered and I felt the bile rising.   

There was no pre-op sedative.   

The walls of the corridor reeled by, and I was suddenly frightened, feeling nervous and very alone, when I glimpsed the shiny surface of a something dark and deep and vast within me, like a lake, moving and heaving with my heartbeat and my nausea, ready to flood its shores.                 

“Too late for that” snapped the man in the surgical hat, looking down on me as a tear made its way down my face. Ashamed, I rubbed it away.    

I was on the table.    


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *  


Grey. The room was grey. There was a sound of chatter, and a chinking of crockery. Tea was being poured.  

My lower abdomen churned and cramped as though trying to expel something large and dreadful. I wanted to groan. Around me, the women were sitting up in their beds chewing thin sandwiches of white sliced bread out of which something like ham drooped. I was beyond nausea. I couldn’t sit up. Finally, my voice came out:

“Nurse.”  

Nothing. No-one.              

“Nurse . . . I think there’s something wrong.”  

Nurse Battry’s navy bulk swam before me, churlish and admonishing.              

“What.”

It was a statement rather than an inquiry.              

“I feel . . . terrible . . . cramps . . . please, can you get the doctor?”              

“The doctor’s gone” she announced, and marched away.  

I rolled and groaned gently and felt the blood pulse out of me, felt warm solids pass out of me and cool on the periphery of the gathering mass between my legs. I thought of the ham.    


****************************    


It was dark, about 7 in the evening I guessed, when a younger nurse came over to my bed. There was someone here for me, she announced in Nurse Battry’s voice, and if I wanted to go, I would have to sign myself out at the desk because I was supposed to be staying the night. By law.   

When I rose from the bed there was no longer any gravity in the ward, and my body floated into the bathroom. I sat on the toilet, and looked for the first time at the bloody mess my womb had expelled. The sanitary towel was drenched in deep crimson and had become a solid, heavy object, and to my nightdress flushed red in back. Solid bits like liver stuck to my thighs, and warm red blood pulsed steadily out of me into the clear water of the toilet bowl. I replaced the sanitary towel with a fresh one from a box on the windowsill, and set about cleaning myself.  

Tom sat on a seat near the reception desk and I floated over towards him, grateful for a familiar face, but as I approached his eyes hardened and squinted so that for a moment, I wasn’t altogether sure it was him. His voice had changed, too, but I put that down to the lack of gravity. It was lighter, more airy than I remembered.              

“Where are you going?”  

A different voice boomed through my senses, deeper even than Nurse Battry’s. I swung towards the reception desk, where its owner stood erect in a strange shadow.              

“Home. I’ve been picked up and I’m going home.”  

The corridors stood silent, waiting.              

“Home?” the voice boomed. “Home?”  

Primrose yellow walls nodded and smiled.              

“You can’t leave tonight young lady, the law says you have to stay 24 hours.”  

From some far corner, a man I vaguely recognised stood up and floated over to the desk. Roses flowed from his smile, but the nurse didn’t seem to appreciate them at all. She opened her mouth in response and produced a scythe, but it must have been blunt because it couldn’t cut anything she tried. Falling stone hurled through the air like vowels: “aye, aye, aye” and the nurse produced a sheaf of papers attached to a clipboard which had the consistency of petals.   

The familiar man looked my way and offered me a caterpillar for a pen that writhed around in my hand. I aimed it at the page and made some marks on the black line that I hoped indicated a name that would suit the new me. The man then took the clipboard and placed it before the nurse before putting one arm around me and leading me off down the primrose path. The commotion of stone continued behind us.              

“If you get an infection it will be in the first 24 hours and you can bleed to death…”         

Echoes alarmed the walls like bats flying senselessly with too much noise, but I kept walking, I walked through the open door straight down the stone steps and into the waiting car nestling, blue as a bird’s egg, at the kerb.  

It was over. It was easy. I knew I’d improve. It was all so light and young and easy.   

The car started and smoothly turned into the main road that would lead to the motorway home, and as it did the sky bruised over and all the blackened buildings leaned in on us.