Chapter Sixteen
You know I managed to kid myself that you were dead? That maybe you’d died giving birth and no one had told me, or that you’d been unable to live with what you’d done and ended it all?
Because I was there when Cerys was born. Wasn’t meant to be, of course, not much more than a kid myself, but when she started coming and it was too late to get Merion to the hospital . . . well, I stayed, held her hand while some woman we’d had to shout at from the window came in and sorted things out. And so I held Cerys, seconds old, face all screwed up as though this world was the nastiest thing she’d ever seen. Held her, covered in blood and mucus, the colour just coming to her limbs, watched her take her first real breaths and make her first real noise. I held her and I cried.
Because I saw what it cost Merion to give birth. How it hurt. How she had to work and pant and push that baby out of her body; the pain and the blood and, oh yes, the swearing. And despite all that pain, her first thoughts, her first words were for her baby. ‘Hello, love’ she said. ‘Hello, my little girl’.
All that suffering, and she could love immediately. She was consumed with it, wanting to hold Cerys, whispering to her, words even I wasn’t allowed to be part of. Mother and child, together. And I was nowhere. So, afterwards, while Merion got cleaned up and this lady made her a cup of tea, I stood and I held my daughter as she squirmed and yelled in my arms, treating me like no more than some weird bloke who’d wandered in to her life; feeling gravity for the first time. Wanting her mother, wanting the person who’d carried her for nine months, wanting the familiar smell and the comfort. Wanting what I’d wanted for sixteen years.
Hadn’t known I wanted it until I was ten. Had my parents then, not birth parents but that hadn’t mattered, they’d been all I knew, all I loved. And then — they were gone, you were gone — they hadn’t wanted to go but you had. You’d left me on purpose. And there was Cerys, crying for her mother, and Merion, who would hardly let go of her long enough to get washed . . . and me. Whose mother hadn’t even held him long enough to leave an impression.
And now I know that you didn’t forget. I have to rethink what I thought about you all these years — you loved me. Does that make it better or worse? Did you think of me with that kind of half-pleasurable pain that I get when I think of some of the women over the years? Had to leave them, no other way, but the sense of freedom made it worthwhile, that terrific, buoying sense of not having to consider another human being’s feelings any more. Of being my own person. Did you enjoy it, the way I did? That self-flagellation that gives you the shudder, remembering what you did, hoping and wishing until it’s real in your head, that it all turned out well. For the best.
And then you come shouldering your way back in, trying to hand me a guilt I never wanted.
Suddenly, sex isn’t enough, it won’t blot it out any more. Can’t use heat and friction to drive you away as though you’re some kind of evil spirit to be kept at bay with fire and light. And when sex isn’t enough — what else is there? What steps into the breach? I need something I don’t understand, something I’m not sure I can recognise, something that will soak up all this confusion and anger and turn it to the good. Another hand to hold.
Someone. Her.