Chapter 19
A smile made of bruises
They did have hope. That’s what the Boy had said when the Girl asked him about whether he had an actual method for what she was beginning – perhaps overdramatically – to think of as her escape plan.
It was two nights after he left that she woke up in the night and realised what he really meant. Not hope the feeling, but Hope the boat. She sent him a text: Doh. I just got it. Hope floats, right?
Because he was midday on the other side of the world she received an almost instantaneous thumbs-up, a winking smiley face and an injunction to go back to sleep, which she did, to dream happily of the racing sea beneath a white hull and the fresh wind in her hair.
And the next morning as she and GJ sat waiting for their weekly injections in the treatment room, GJ told her she looked a bit more relaxed than normal and then spoiled it by asking if she’d been up all night having phone sex or something.
The Girl had told her to bugger off but had quite enjoyed being teased by someone she’d come to like.
It was a kind of belonging in the otherwise softly impersonal place they found themselves in.
She and GJ also shared a dislike for the way all the staff seemed to take their cue from the Chief Psych and contorted themselves to put the rosiest spin on everything.
Part of the IVF treatment involved many subcutaneous injections in the abdomen, injections that left their mark both physically and emotionally.
One of the perkier nurses made the mistake of telling them that morning that she liked to do them in a curve so they made “a smile of bruises” to remind her patients that the small jag of pain now was worth it “because of the happy joy to come”.
“Happy joy?” GJ had said, spearing her with a look that stopped her in her tracks. “You ever had a kid?”
“No,” said the Nurse. “Er. No.”
Something small fractured behind her eyes and put a momentary glitch in her normally cheery smile.
“Obviously no,” she said, her voice quieter.
The Girl had felt bad for her.
“Well how do you know it’s always a fucking joy?” said GJ.
The moment had hung there, strung between awkward and dangerous. Then GJ took the edge off things with a sudden smile of her own.
“Nah. Sorry,” she said. “Ignore me. I’m just cranky because we’re late for our swim and I’m still half asleep. I’m just messing with you, pet. Stick the needle where you like.”
The perky nurse took her at her word, but the Girl noted that GJ’s smile was so dazzling it was easy to miss the fact that this time it didn’t make it all the way up to her eyes.
The early morning sea-swimming had become a ritual that the Girl looked forward to, as much for GJ’s company as the bracing happy-to-be-alive shock of the cold water and the warm afterglow once they’d got out and dried themselves.
They took to taking a Thermos of tea with them, and would sit on the gritty sand, hunkered down behind a rock against the wind that always seemed to blow across the beach, cradling the hot drinks in both hands and often not even needing to talk to feel the bracing effect of their shared friendship and the sense that they were somehow playing truant from the facility.
The swimming felt rebellious and, in its own way, empowering, maybe because they were the only ones doing it.
That morning, after each had had their smile of bruises extended by another injection, she broke the silence to ask GJ if she’d ever had a baby.
“Miscarriage,” said GJ.
“Me too,” said the Girl after a beat. They sat in silence watching the strengthening early morning sunlight beginning to bounce off the waves.
“My mam said not to fret,” said GJ after a bit. “Said it often goes like that first time. First pancake she called it. First pancake is usually a mess. Said it all goes back up to heaven and comes out right second time.”
“She’s Christian then?” said the Girl.
“Fuck no,” said GJ with a snort. “She’s a school cook. Or was. When they still needed such things.”
“Now?” said the Girl.
“Now?” said GJ. “Now she takes it all out on my dad. Poor bugger. She’s got the mood swings of a mob boss, but she does know her way around a frying pan.”
She scowled at the horizon and looked suddenly sadder than the Girl had ever seen her, like a mask had slipped. The Girl held out her tin cup.
“Here’s to Second Pancakes,” she said.
GJ found her grin and turned back to meet her eyes.
“And all who toss ’em,” she said.
They clinked in a toast.
“To the tossers,” said the Girl.
“To the tossers” said GJ, and then after a long beat, “You know that’s us, right?”
The Girl had never been in a gang or a clique at school or anywhere else – she was, if anything, one of nature’s non-joiners – but she found she liked the gang of two that she and GJ were becoming.
It cut through the loneliness and made the strange smiley-but-strict atmosphere of the facility easier to bear, especially as the tempo of the place changed subtly as more and more specialists began coming to see the small cohort of would-be mothers.
“We should charge admission,” said GJ. “Feel like a bloody freak show. And have you seen how some of them look at us? Little flashes of resentment, because we can and they can’t.”
“It’s not that,” said the Girl. “I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s that something’s changing. And they’re not telling us what it is.”
“Christ,” said GJ. “I’m just having a whinge and you’ve gone full blown conspiracy theory.”
“No,” said the Girl. “Something’s up.”
GJ shook her head and pushed her.
“Give over,” she said. “Of course something’s up: our bloody hormones. They’ve been pumping them into us like a firehose. That’s what’s making you jumpy.”
The Girl had to admit she might be right, but she also knew that in her working life in NGOs she’d been around enough government people and different levels of officialdom to know the look when they were smiling at you but not giving you all the information you needed.
And this felt a lot like that. She decided to discuss it with the Boy when they next met – but not to do so on the premises.
Just in case it wasn’t just hormones. Just in case they were overheard.
Just in case the walls had ears, which was something GJ was convinced of.
“Aye well, paranoid doesn’t mean wrong,” she’d said when the Girl had expressed doubts. “Look it up in the dictionary.”
So they might not have been wholly surprised that the facility’s surveillance cameras extended to the local railway station, but the Girl would have been cheered that if anyone had been monitoring them, they didn’t notice that when she went to meet the Boy on his next visit, he didn’t get off the train, but in fact surprised her by appearing from behind her and wrapping her in a tight hug as the passengers filtered out of the turnstile.
“Where did you…?” she began, turning in his arms to kiss him.
“Let’s go have lunch by the harbour,” he said,
“Did you get an earlier train?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “But I’m starving.”
And he wouldn’t tell her how he’d magically appeared from the wrong direction, no matter how much she asked or prodded him.
If she hadn’t been so pleased to see him she’d have found his silence unbearably smug and irritating, but she decided he would tell her when he wanted to, so let him play whatever game he was getting so much pleasure out of.
They ate outside the pub overlooking the harbour, and had got to coffee before he broke.
“Can you honestly not see it?” he said. “Come on!”
She leaned in and whispered in his ear.
“I saw it while you were getting the beers,” she said.
“Well why didn’t you say something!?” he said.
“Because you were getting so smug and then frustrated I thought you might pop,” she said. “Also, didn’t want to give you the satisfaction.”
“Mean,” he said.
“That’s me all over,” she agreed. “But you are a genius”
And she bit him, lightly-ish on the ear.
“Ow,” he said. “Bloody hell.”
“And now I’m not looking at her because I presume we don’t want to draw attention to her.” She grinned.
“She” was the Hope, nestled in among the other boats on one of the mooring jetties that ringed the harbour.
“That’s why you weren’t on the train,” she said.
“I’ll go back up to London on it though,” he said. “Mooring’s paid for a year, tanks are full in case there’s no wind and you have to go in a hurry.”
“I quite like you,” she said. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
And they sat leaning against each other on the old pub bench, letting the sun bake them as they tried not to look at their boat and she told him all about her misgivings about the facility, something about GJ, who had just been confirmed as pregnant, and a little bit about how it felt it might alter their friendship now she was still failing to cross that line.
“It’s not failing,” he said. “If it happens it happens. If not, it’s not a failure. And definitely not your fault. It’s just a thing we’ll cope with. It won’t stop us being happy.”
And for a while that stopped the conversation and they just enjoyed the sun and the lap of the sea on the quay and the noise of the seagulls pinwheeling high above them.
“We won’t starve on the island,” said the Girl, after a bit. “Not surrounded by a sea full of fish. And there are sheep and deer, and there’s oats and rye and potatoes, and we can grow vegetables…”
“And since the ferries stopped, they’re all getting much more self-sufficient up there,” he said.
“Those that are staying. Half of them are heading to the mainland, from what Mhairi told me,” she said. Mhairi was a crofter on Berneray who they had both known for years. “Makes sense if you think you might need to be close to a hospital.”
“Or close to the rest of your family,” he said. “People move because they’re worried about getting lonely as much as bad health, I reckon.”
“It’s always felt like the edge of the world,” she said. “It’d be a peaceful enough spot to sit out the end of it, I guess.”
“Be a good life. Even if it does all go zombie-apocalypse in the cities and on the mainland,” he said.
“Are we getting an actual zombie apocalypse?” she said, surprising him by finding a smile that he’d been seeing less and less of over the preceding months. “Cool! Shotgun the chainsaw…”
“Well,” he sighed. “Don’t think it would last long. Not if they eat brains. So much stupid out there in the world the poor zombie bastards’d starve to death.”
“Bad day at the office,” she said.
“Bad decade,” he said. “Still – the island. Good idea. Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Out of sight would be good,” she said, looking round. “This place is like living in a fishbowl.”
“Yeah?” he said, following her eyes as she looked back up the hill towards the facility.
“More like an aquarium,” she said. “Crowds shuffling past us all the time. Nurses. Doctors. Scientists, researchers… and recently a lot more of the sinister who-the-fuck-knows coming for a look at us lab rats.”
“Everyone wants to see the black swans,” he said.
“Black swan, lab rat, whatever,” she said. “We agreed to come and help. The longer I don’t get pregnant, the more they prod and poke, and you know? Maybe that was it, maybe we just had our one last shot and no amount of this in vitro shit is going to change that.”
“You want to stop, we just tell them,” he said.
“It’s easier for you,” she said. “You just had to leave a quick deposit in their sperm bank and get back to working in the real world.”
“What’s left of it,” he said, after a beat.
This was always a point of contention for them. As was the fact that he appeared to be sure that things would go bad sooner than she did.
“It’s not so bad. Not yet,” she said. “Much as I’m up for the zombie apocalypse, it’s not dystopia…”
“No. It’s this-topia,” he said. “And that’s bad enough.”
“What’s yanked your tail, Eeyore?” she said. “Thought you were meant to be boosting my morale here…”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just the usual. They’re flying me out east again. Private jet.”
“Fancy,” she said. “But you could say no.”
“Maybe I will,” he said.
“No you won’t,” she said. “You’re a systems engineer. You like fixing things.”
“That’s why I might say no,” he said. “I should stay here and fix us. Especially if you think they aren’t being straight with you.”
“We’re fine,” she said. “I was feeling a bit negative. You solved that. Now there’s a plan, now I have Hope I don’t feel so claustrophobic. It was just this place making me a bit nuts. And the hormones, I suppose…”
Two days later she waved him off from the station and walked back to the facility, unaware she was being watched, with approval, by the Chief Psych Officer who was monitoring the feed from the station camera.
“She’s fine,” she said, looking up at the scientist sitting on the edge of her desk who had one eye on whatever he was scrolling through on his iPad, the other on the grainy security camera feed.
“But she’s still not pregnant,” he said, swivelling the iPad and showing her a panel of test results.
“Frankly,” she said. “Not my problem. But you have a plan for that, don’t you?”