Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I
Then
Mabel
Dundee, Scotland
May 1959
I
have a ghost in my knee. There's a small pocket just behind the kneecap
and she's hiding in there, all tucked up in the soft mattress of
cartilage. She's very small and terrified, so I'm sitting with that leg
slightly straightened so I don't disturb her. I've not said a word about
this to anyone. They'd think I'm mad.
"Mabel? Are you listening?"
Ma's
eyes are wide, as if she's trying to wake herself up, but her hands
tell a different story. She's holding on to the strap of her handbag,
knuckles white, as though we're on a fairground ride.
"Did you hear what Dr. McCann just said?"
I
nod, but I didn't hear, not really. I'm always doing this-sliding off
into a daydream. I look over the file on the desk beside us. I can see
my name. Mabel Anne Haggith. Date of birth 12 March 1942, ninety-eight
pounds, five foot two. Dr. McCann peers down his spectacles, his fat red
fingers laced together like a sea creature. The air in the room pulses
with the sense that I've done something wrong.
"When was the date of your last menstrual period, Miss Haggith?" he asks.
"I'm not sure." Embarrassment hits me like a slap. Nobody has ever asked me that before. It's a private thing.
"Do try and recall," he says wearily. Ma nudges me as though I'm being rude.
"My . . . my monthlies have always been irregular," I stammer.
"I only need to know about one menses, Miss Haggith." Dr. McCann sighs. "The last one."
"Just
before Christmas," I say, remembering how the ground seemed to tilt
that morning in the bakery when I was putting in the first batch of
mince pies. A strong twist in my groin, and I knew what was happening.
Unlike now.
Dr. McCann scribbles something down before flipping
through the calendar on his desk. More scribbling, and muttering. The
ghost in my knee gives a cough.
"Five months," Dr. McCann
announces suddenly. "Which suggests a due date around the end of
September." He licks his finger and thumb and plucks a leaflet from a
pile on his desk. "Here," he says, passing it to Ma. "I expect you'll
wish to make inquiries as soon as you can."
Ma takes the leaflet
with a sob. The ghost is restless, unable to sleep now. I rub my kneecap
furiously until Ma pulls my hand away, irritated.
"Who was it?" she snaps, her eyes flashing. "Was it that awful boy, Jack?"
"Jack?" I say, frowning. "I don't understand. What's wrong with me? Am I dying?"
"Dying?" Dr. McCann starts to laugh. "Come on, Mabel. You're seventeen. You're not a child."
".
. . would have thought you'd keep your legs crossed," Ma hisses, angry
tears wobbling in her eyes. "And that dirty, disgusting boy. I knew it
would come to this. I knew it."
It's only when I see the title of
the leaflet that it dawns on me, a slow realization like creeping
fingers along my neck. St. Luke's mother and baby home. The front of the
leaflet bears a picture of a woman sitting in bed, a man and woman
beside her. They're all smiling, and she's handing a baby to them. A
subheading reads, Adoption is the best option for unwed mothers.
They think I'm expecting a baby. That's what this is.
"I'm
not having a baby," I protest loudly, and I almost go to tell them
about the ghosts that sometimes sleep in my lungs or hide in my gums,
and that maybe there's a ghost in my womb and they've mistaken it for a
baby. But instead, I say, "I'm a virgin," which causes Dr. McCann to
splutter into a laugh. But it's true-I am a virgin. I've never had sex,
not even the type you do with your hands.
Dr. McCann looks at Ma,
whose face is tight, lips pursed. A fact I heard once drifts into my
mind-the average person tells one or two lies a day, but is lied to up
to two hundred times a day. I know I've told the truth. So is Dr. McCann
lying?
My stepdad, Richard, is waiting for us in the car when we
go outside. "Everything OK?" he asks Ma, and she presses her face into
his chest as though we've just fled a war.
He narrows his eyes and looks from her to me. "What did you do?" he says.
I keep my knee straight for the ghost, but she's moved. I can feel her in my tummy now, dancing.
"It's that Jack," Ma whispers, stricken. "He's got Mabel in trouble."
Jack's
my friend from two doors down. We've been seeing each other, but we've
never gone further than kissing. "It's not Jack!" I say, afraid that
she's going to pin blame on him when he's innocent.
"Mother of God," she hisses, crossing herself. "There's a squadron of potential fathers."
Richard stares at me, his face darkening. My heart flutters in my chest. I don't know what I've done wrong.
We
pull off for home. Our house is a four-story terrace on Rotten Row.
There are nine bedrooms, seven of which are usually occupied by
strangers. It's only been a guesthouse since Dad died ten years ago.
It's how Ma met Richard. He came to stay six years ago and never left.
We
stop outside Mr. McGregor's butcher shop. Richard winds down the window
and the smell wafting from the shop door is like an open crypt. I
scramble for the door handle, certain I'm about to be sick.
Adoption is the best option for unwed mothers.
"You
can go for the mince, Mabel," Ma says, handing me some coins. "A
quarter pound and not half an ounce more, do you hear? On you go."
I
press the lapel of my coat to my nose and walk into the butcher's. An
inch of sawdust carpets the floor, plucked chickens are strung up by
their necks, and a row of dead pigs hang upside down along the back
wall.
Mr. McGregor's son Rory is working today. He's a little
older than me, and he's deaf. When Rory's working, they use a notepad
and a pencil for the customers to write down what they want. Sometimes
Rory writes back little messages, like "Nice day for a BBQ!" or "You're
looking well today, Mrs. Haggith!"
What was I to order again? A
dead chicken? When I reach the top of the queue, Rory has been replaced
by an older man I've never seen before. He must work for Mr. McGregor
because he's wearing a bloodstained striped apron and he's wiping his
hands on a towel and staring at me. He has a tattoo on the side of his
face. A spider's web.
"What'll it be?" he says. "Got a great deal on pork sausages today. A pound for ten pence."
I'm still too deep in my body to speak to him. I pick up the notepad and pencil.
Chicken, was it?
I take a fresh page on the notepad and write, but the words don't make sense. They say:
There's a man in the car with a knife to my ma's neck. He'll kill her if you don't give me everything in the till.
I
hand the note to the man with the spider's web tattoo. He looks up at
me with a look of wild confusion, and suddenly I'm relieved because he's
every bit as green about the gills as I feel after what happened in Dr.
McCann's office. Why did I write that? One of the ghosts must have
written it. I can feel one of them lengthening along the bone of my
index finger, fidgeting.
The shop is empty. The man glances again
at Richard's car parked outside, and whatever he sees must convince him
because he makes a quick dash for the till and starts stuffing handfuls
of money into a plastic bag. He hands it to me with a grim nod, the bag
full of coins and notes swinging in the foul stench of the dead things.
I find my arm lifting, my fingers unfolding from my palm, the bag
jangling in my hand, my feet turning and cutting a fresh path through
the sawdust. And then I'm outside, and I get into the car and hold on to
the bag of money. I'm not sure what's going on.
"Pass me the
mince," Ma says, snapping her fingers at me. "And the receipt. He better
not have overcharged you. Always adding on a few more ounces than I
asked for, that McGregor."
I hand her the bag. She opens it and
stares down at the cash. There's a moment of complete silence, when all
the ghosts inside me are still and Ma's too bewildered to say anything
at all. But it doesn't last. She turns sharply and stares at me in
alarm.
"Mabel?" she says.
Now
Pearl
Scottish Borders, Scotland
September 1965
1
This
place is in the middle of goddamn bloody nowhere. It's getting dark,
and I swear my bladder is going to explode if I don't pee in the next
two minutes.
"Do you think we could pull over?" I ask Mr. Peterson. He's the Church of England's Moral Welfare Officer.
"Oh
no, is it that time?" he says, tearing his eyes from the road to glance
at me with horror. "Do we need to find you a hospital?"
"What? No!" I say. "I'm not in labor. I just need to empty my bladder."
The
car wobbles slightly as Mr. Peterson decides what to do with this
information. He flicks the indicator-a pointless act, given that we're
the only car for miles-and slams the brakes on, pulling to the side of
the road in a cloud of gravel dust.
I burst out of the car and
scramble through the bushes at the roadside, arranging my heavily
pregnant body before squatting down with relief. It's only when I'm
finished that I realize I'm ankle-deep in a bog, and my attempts to yank
my feet free of the sucking mud flicks up enough of it to ruin the
expensive dress my mother bought for me to impress the Whitlocks. Fat
chance they'll be anything but disgusted now.
"Oh dear. Did you
have a fall?" Mr. Peterson asks when I return to the car. I had to reach
into the bog to retrieve one of my shoes, so I'm now sleeved and socked
in black slime. He produces a handkerchief from his breast pocket, and I
use it to scrub off the worst of it, but the smell makes me gag.
"Let's go, shall we?" I say.
"Right."
He clears his throat and turns the radio on before heading back to the
road. The Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" comes on, and he moves a
hand from the wheel to change the station.
"Oh, can you not?" I say. "I love the Beatles."
He's miffed, but leaves the radio as it is.
"I went to see them, you know," I tell him. "Last April. When they came to Edinburgh."
"Did they?" he says, and I laugh. As if anyone on the planet didn't know this.
"I signed the original petition to get them to come to Scotland."
"You must be quite the fan," he says.
I
tell him how Lucy, Sebastian, and I camped out for two nights on Bread
Street to get tickets. It was freezing cold, a long row of sleeping bags
huddled together on the pavements, but I never laughed so much in my
life. And then, the night of the concert, the sight of the four of them
on the small stage of the ABC Cinema, all in gray suits. When they
played "I Want to Hold Your Hand," you could barely hear them for the
hysteria. Everyone around us immediately burst into tears, even
Sebastian. It feels like a hundred years ago that we did that.
"I'm
more of a Glenn Miller man myself," Mr. Peterson says, and he gives in
to the urge to flip the station to the eight o'clock BBC News.
I
wonder how often he makes this trip, driving knocked-up girls to mother
and baby homes-although the place we're headed to isn't a mother and
baby home, per se. It's a residential home. Lichen Hall, a sprawling
sixteenth-century manor house owned by the Whitlock family, who lovingly
take in girls like me on occasion to spare them the indignity of
entering an institution. I'm grateful for this, really I am. But I'm so
anxious, I've broken out in hives. Lichen Hall is situated on the
Scottish Borders, half an hour from the little fishing village of St.
Abbs-or, like I said, in the middle of goddamn nowhere. What am I going
to do all day? I should have asked if they have a record player, or, at
the very least, a television. I'm used to being busy, up at five to
start my shift at the hospital, then straight out to dinner or a
nightclub with friends.
"I don't suppose you know if this place has a television?" I ask Mr. Peterson.
"I'm afraid I don't."
"They'll have a phone, won't they? I'll be able to ring my family?"
"You didn't find that out before you agreed to stay?"
Truth
be told, I was too ashamed to do anything other than resign myself to
whatever fate my parents planned out for me. Pregnant and unmarried at
twenty-two. I'm such a disappointment.
"It's not too late to
apply for a place at an institutional mother and baby home," he says,
hearing the fear in my silence. "They've changed, you know. Not as
Dickensian as they used to be."
I don't believe this for a
moment. I visited a mother and baby home last month. It was one of the
smaller ones, in a terraced house on Corstorphine Road, run by the
Salvation Army. The atmosphere inside chilled me. The matron was
charming, but the walls were cold and bare, and from the pale, fearful
expressions of the girls there I suspected she ruled the place with an
iron fist.
"Ma says she knows the owners of Lichen Hall," I tell
him. "She says they're my kind of people. Mr. Whitlock's retired. He was
a scientist. A pioneering microbiologist, if I'm correct."
"A microbiologist? And they own a mansion?"
"He
held professorships at Edinburgh University and Yale. Mrs. Whitlock's
father bought Lichen Hall, back in the day. I'm sure they'll have a
telephone." I say this more for myself than for Mr. Peterson. "And
anyway, how would it look if I canceled so late in the day?"
He arches an eyebrow. "Your mother is a friend of the Whitlocks?"
"Well,
friends of friends." I try to read his look. "Why? And don't even think
about telling me the place is haunted. My brother's already tried that
one."
9
