April #4
All those years before, after I’d peed on a stick at Starbucks, I wasn’t in any doubt about what I would do – perhaps it was my ‘gut feeling’, but at the time it felt even more physical than the bodily sensation my mother had described to me when I was a child.
I was only just learning how to look after myself.
I’d worked hard to get into university, and now I was working hard to get a good job when I came out the other end.
I had a plan, and me getting pregnant wasn’t a part of it. I just hoped Noah would feel the same.
Walking back to the flat with Anna, the positive test wrapped in a wad of blue paper towels in her bag, I could feel myself shaking.
I didn’t say anything, but Anna must have sensed it, or seen it, because she linked her arm through mine and quietly guided me along the pavement, past strangers chatting and laughing and generally going about their day.
Back in our kitchen – which was also our hallway, dining room, living room – she told me to sit down while she made me a cup of tea.
After putting it in front of me, along with a packet of chocolate biscuits, two of which she’d nervously nibbled while waiting for the kettle to boil, she sat down opposite and asked if I wanted to call Noah.
I didn’t hesitate, which I think surprised her – or at least that’s what I remember thinking when she coughed and said a piece of biscuit had gone down the wrong way. In an instant, I’d pulled my phone from my pocket and started typing.
Still sputtering, she leapt to her feet. ‘You’re not telling him over text, are you?’
I laughed, or I tried to laugh. I’m not sure any sound came out.
At the whoosh of my message sending, she clapped her hand to her mouth. ‘Fuck.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, waving the phone in front of her face. ‘I’ve just asked him to come round.’
It was the weekend, and my message sounded mildly urgent, so he came within the hour.
Anna answered the door and led him to the table, where I was still sitting, cradling my tea, now tepid and with a thin layer of skin.
One look at me and he knew something was wrong.
Later, he told me he’d never seen me that pale, that it was as though even my freckles – another feature I’d inherited from my mother – had faded from my face.
He held my hands in his and I told him. I managed not to cry until, tentatively, he asked me what I wanted to do.
I remember searching his eyes for some sort of clue, and when I couldn’t find one, telling him, in a small voice that didn’t sound like mine, that I wasn’t ready to be a mother.
He held me close and told me everything would be all right, that he understood.
Taken aback by how easily he’d accepted my decision, I asked him what he wanted, but he wouldn’t say until he was sure of my own feelings.
Eventually he told me he hadn’t wanted to sway me, and that if I’d said I wanted to keep it we would have made it work.
The main thing I remember about the clinic was the smell – like everything and everyone in there had been doused in disinfectant.
We sat side by side in the waiting room, not talking, but together, his arm around me.
When the nurse called my name, Noah turned to me and asked, one final time, Are you sure?
I nodded. He wasn’t allowed to come in with me, but he was there waiting to take me back to his place when it was over.
He made me dinner – cheese on toast, my favourite whenever I’m unwell – and we went to bed early, our bodies touching.
It was the following week that we spoke about children and how he felt about the future.
It’s funny – or not, really – but when we went to Florence for that long weekend, we walked past the Ospedale degli Innocenti , the Hospital of the Innocents.
I paused, wondering whether to go in, recalling what I’d learned about it as a student.
It had a seventeenth-century hatch, sort of like a hole in the wall, where parents could abandon unwanted babies without being judged or seen.
For a moment, I imagined all those babies as children, and my own baby among them – a girl, just like the daughter Noah had lost. She had my hazel eyes and wispy hair, and Noah’s ears, sticking out slightly.
She had his laugh, loud and, like a cold, catching.
Noticing me hesitate, Noah asked if I wanted to go inside.
I decided against it. It’s silly, stupid even, but I let myself imagine walking in and people turning to look – they could tell what I’d done, that I’d got rid of our almost-baby.
I visualised a sort of aura outlining my body, an unholy halo, marking me out as someone who’d selfishly denied another human life.
Other than Noah and Anna, I’d never told anyone what had happened, not even my mother, to whom I tell everything.
I don’t know why. That same vague sense of guilt, perhaps. I wondered if Noah also felt it.
Having agreed with Noah that it was probably Anna’s pregnancy that had thrown me, I tried to believe it, and to banish the whole idea of motherhood. I began each day with a half-hour run along the canal, before launching myself into the seascape.
It worked, until, again, I was thrown by my period.
As I walked through Trafalgar Square, I wondered how many of the hundreds of women around me were bleeding – a peculiar thought, maybe, but it wasn’t the first time it had occurred to me.
Perhaps it was prompted by those adverts for sanitary pads and tampons that, lo and behold, onlookers would never know were there, their wearers smiling and stretching and swimming.
It turned into a challenge : could I tell if another woman was ovulating from her damp brow or rosy cheeks?
I was busy sizing up a woman in a shaggy black coat when my thoughts were interrupted.
‘Catherine, everything OK?’
Frank was standing in front of me, an almost-spent roll-up pressed between his lips. He hooked his pass out of his pocket and looped it around his neck. He’d had a haircut, his greyish white hair a thin covering.
‘Frank, hi. Yes, sorry, I was miles away.’
‘Well, we better get you a strong coffee,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘Big day.’
It seemed only fitting that, as the lining of my uterus was shedding, I was due to start chipping away at the overpaint.
On the wood panel, as inside my body, old tissue had to be broken down before there could be any real hope of regeneration.
Frank’s scientific analysis had revealed that the overpaint wasn’t contemporary to the painting, and after infrared and X-ray imaging, we’d decided to take a closer look at what it might be hiding.
Quiet murmurings of anticipation could be heard throughout the conservation department.
‘Right, coffee. Can I get you one too?’ I asked, as he disposed of his battered stub and we entered the building. He would never say yes, but I would always offer.
‘Not for me, thanks,’ he replied, as he continued towards the stairs. ‘You go ahead, though.’
I kept at my game of who’s on her period as I walked to the café and waited in line, only ceasing when I reached the studios, where it was just me and Frank.
Unsurprisingly, no food or drink is allowed around the art, so rather than waiting for it to cool down, I swallowed my coffee when it was still scorching hot.
The burning sensation at the back of my throat was soothed when I saw the seascape, blustery and cold.
‘Better?’ asked Frank.
I nodded in confirmation, then smiled when I saw that he’d neatly lined up my solvent solution and a small surgical scalpel on the table beside the easel.
He pressed up onto his toes and his eyes flashed towards the painting, a combination of nervous and excited.
‘Hey, why don’t you stick around?’
‘No, I should probably do some work,’ he said, with a mock eye-roll. ‘But I’ll come back and see how you’re getting on before lunch.’
‘OK, then, wish me luck.’
A double-tap of his chest – courage – and, after stealing one more glance at the painting, he was gone.
The thin layer concealing the floating figure and whatever was beside it had dissolved while I was removing the varnish, but both still needed fully uncovering.
The rough patch of overpaint below was thick and hard.
It would require time and patience, which was presumably what had led the past restorer – who Frank guessed had worked on the painting in the nineteenth century – to abandon his removal of the alteration and simply cover what he’d unearthed back up again.
I pulled up a stool and slipped my optivisor onto my head, then I took a deep breath and slowly and carefully started to chip away at the overpaint.
I worked on a small patch at a time, starting with the dark triangular shape by the floating figure.
With a couple of bits that snagged, I made an initial incision with the scalpel and then, like a scab, picked at it with my fingers.
Before moving onto the next patch, I took the solution and cleaned off the residual thin layer of white lead.
As I chipped and dabbed, chipped and dabbed, my mind started to drift.
My womb was pulsing, and I couldn’t help thinking about what Anna had said in the café, that time was running out with my own bodily shedding.
I don’t know, maybe it had something to do with my suspicion that the artwork in front of me was no longer functioning as intended.
If that were the case, I felt fairly confident that I could fix it.
And me? How long before my body was past the point of repair?
I hadn’t moved from my seated position up close in front of the painting when Frank reappeared almost three hours later. He was saying something, but his voice sounded muffled, as if he was standing far away on the beach.
A little louder : ‘I’m no expert, but I’m starting to think you might be right about that being a fin.’
I rolled my stool back from the easel, and there it was, curved and coppery green. I twisted in my seat to meet his gaze, a smile tugging at my mouth.
By the time the fin was fully formed, my period was over.
Another month had passed, and my next cycle was about to begin.
Frank and I met with the curator and discussed what should be done, and the three of us decided – the air thick with excitement – that we should respect the original intention of the artist and uncover what we agreed was most likely a beached whale. That would explain the crowd then.
The quiet murmurings in conservation rose in volume and soon spilled over into the other museum departments.
It wasn’t long until my colleagues in education, press and sales stopped me in the corridor and asked how, what, why?
I told them what I’d told the curator. The whale had probably been concealed in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century to suit changing sensibilities.
Perhaps its presence offended its new owner.
Perhaps the painting was deemed more marketable without the stench of death.
That evening, as I reluctantly turned down the lights and left the whale buried beneath the paint, waiting for another day, I felt something like liquid guilt pool in the pit of my stomach.
My body might not be functioning as intended – but as intended by whom?
I’d never subscribed to the notion that women have a biological instinct to have children, and standing in the studio in the dark, I experienced a moment of clarity : even if I did, it wouldn’t make a difference.
What mattered was that Noah and I had made a promise to one another.
Like Hendrick, we had original intentions, and I had to respect that.