The 500
by
J.D.Hughes
Copyright © 2011 J.D.Hughes
Published by Northwood eBooks at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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The right of J.D.Hughes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. In this work of fiction, the characters, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or they are used entirely fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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*****
The 500
The traffic was especially bad as Gemma Thornton turned out of the cul-de-sac and onto the main road. A few drops of rain fell from a sulking sky onto the windscreen.
Concentrate, she told herself between gritted teeth, today of all days I must stay calm. The decision had been made, simple as. There was no going back now, and it was all for Gareth. She thought of her boyfriend as the stream of traffic temporarily halted to allow a silent ambulance through, blue lights flashing in the morning gloom.
Gareth was the most beautiful man on earth. Not too bright, admittedly, but that hardly mattered when they were in bed. Then, all she could think about was the delicious shape of his toned, fit body, pecs to die for, and the small beads of sweat at his temples. Of course, there were other things she thought about too, but they were a lot lower down than his temples or his pecs. She shivered involuntarily at the memory and caught a glimpse of her own face in the rear view mirror, grinning like a loon. When she looked again, the smile was gone, replaced by another expression, the one she had worn for several weeks now.
The congestion eased a little and ten minutes later she turned from the main carriageway into a tree-lined avenue of Victorian detached houses. It was somewhere along here.
“You have arrived at your final destination”, the satnav said in its usual condescending tone. It was her own voice recorded as a joke, but it didn’t sound so funny today.
A wave of panic splashed about in the pit of her stomach. She took a deep breath and stopped the car. For a moment all she could hear was the rapid beat of her own heart, but it gradually diminished like a receding tide, and the fear subsided.
She watched a young mother cross the road towards her car with a small boy. The boy was wrapped up against the cold in a huge scarf that swamped his tiny frame. As the pair crossed in front of her car the boy looked up and smiled at her. Gemma could feel her lips smiling back, but something about the boy or perhaps just about his smile made her want to cry. Everything is ok, she told herself. This is all completely normal. There is nothing to worry about. Abso-bloody-lutely nothing.
Once again, Gareth’s face came to mind: his deep blue eyes the colour of the sea off Magaluf, where they had met two years ago. She remembered that first meeting as if it were engraved on a stone tablet in her soul. The foam party at El Casa, slipping on the floor and Gareth catching her just before her head contacted an iron rod sticking out from an unfinished piece of concrete stairway. She felt like a child in his arms. He picked her up and took her to the edge of the floor, away from the foam. That was the moment, the precise moment, she had realised that he was the man with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life: the man who would be the father to her babies.
Her friend Ellie was scathing. “He’s only a fucking bloke, Gem. Take a look - the place is full of them. Dicks on legs, sweetie.”
But he wasn’t.
“It’s just lust at first sight,” Ellie grumbled.
But it wasn’t. Oh no. That first night together had been like no other in her experience and had led her to depths of pleasure she had barely been able to perceive with other lovers. It was trite, but he handled her like a rare violin, running up and down the scales of delight like a master, making her beg for more and deliciously delaying her orgasm until she felt like bursting. In retrospect perhaps it was more like a man taming a feral cat, but that didn’t sound as romantic. After that night the sex had become less of an adventure into the unknown – still intensely pleasurable, of course - but replaced by a bond of love and trust that neither of them could ever see being broken.
Lovely, beautiful Gareth. The love of my life.
And now I am killing his baby.
The redbrick Victorian building in front of her loomed out of the darkening day like an ocean liner destined for hell.
No. I am terminating a blob of jelly.
It was just like a period really. A simple removal of unwanted material. It happened every day to every sort of woman in every situation. Two hundred thousand terminations a year in the UK. It seemed a lot, but was completely normal: a rational response to an unwanted pregnancy, a choice that every woman could make if she were to regain control over her own body after a mistake.
It wasn’t a mistake.
Gemma pushed the thought away. Then, it wasn’t. Now, it is. I can change my mind any time I want to. It’s a woman’s right. And it’s not as if it’s a baby. It’s just a collection of cells that has the potential to be a baby, not an actual baby. She remembered the words of her G.P. “The Law says it is not a baby until it reaches twenty four weeks, so I can approve a termination any time up until the limit. This foetus is only eighteen weeks. It’s nothing to worry about; you are doing the right thing. It can’t feel pain, you know, and it doesn’t look like anything but a lump of jelly. My colleague will concur that your mental well-being would be damaged by continuing this pregnancy. You are only nineteen, Gemma, far too young to be ruining your life with an unplanned pregnancy.”
I planned it, she wanted to say. I came off the pill and made sure that he stayed in me on that night. I wanted my baby. But not now. Now I just want to get rid of it. To make him pay.
When I found Gareth riding Ellie like a dog in our bedroom, on our bed, with her stupid face pressed up against the pine headboard his Mother gave us, I wanted to kill him. Not Ellie, she was always a slapper. Just him. I hit him and hit him but he just smiled at me and said don’t be silly, it’s only a one-off, just a friends-with-benefits job, it’s you I love, but I knew he was lying.
Now I have a way to show him how much he hurt me.
*****
Gemma could just see the ultrasound monitor, but the picture was vague and not at all like a TV picture. Something squiggled about in the centre of the picture and she could just about make out…what was it? The monitor was swivelled away by a masked nurse.
“Just relax dear, let yourself drift off, it’ll all be over before you know it.”
Gemma felt herself losing consciousness, and just as she slid down a long and pleasantly dark tunnel she heard another voice, tiny and frightened. It was imagination, of course, brought on by the anaesthetic, but she could have sworn it said just one word.
Help.
*****
Drifting in and out of consciousness, the voice worried her. It must have been a Doctor or a Nurse, but why would they say ‘Help’?
She was vaguely aware of a feeling of wetness between her legs and a sense of relief, like she usually had when she had drunk too much Bacardi and was sick. She felt her eyelids flutter open. A clock on the wall said ten minutes past eleven and she heard a clinking sound of metal on metal. She could see her right foot, ridiculously higher than her head and wanted to laugh. Gareth would have loved that, the bastard.
Her gaze wandered down past to where her hand rested on a white sheet. It seemed as if the hand did not belong to her. She tried to move it and found that no amount of effort could twitch even a solitary finger, like those dreams where you can’t run away, or even scream. The idea made her feel as if she could giggle, but her mouth wouldn’t work, so she contented herself with an internal grunt.
Someone, somewhere was making a screeching noise.
It sounded like a cat. What were they doing allowing cats in hospital? Not very hygienic, that. Why were they torturing the poor thing? She searched for the cat, allowing her eyes to drift around the white room, taking in a fat nurse with spots and the shoulder of a man in a blue shirt doing something between her legs. Cheeky bugger. Oh well, he wouldn’t be the first and certainly not the last.
What am I doing here?
A termination, an internal voice responded. You are here for a termination to remove Gareth from your life forever.
Ah yes. I knew that. Gareth. Ellie. Bad people. No cat.
The screeching continued, ending in a wail, cut off suddenly as if by a switch.
Gemma watched the nurse - moving in slow motion - produce a shallow metal bowl from a mysteriously hidden metal bowl repository and place it next to the bed on a chromed trolley. A red soaked piece of cotton wool was thrown into the bowl, then some other vague stuff, followed by what looked like a pink Satsuma orange.
A female voice said “She’s coming round” and a male voice replied calmly, “Deal with it, please”. Gemma saw the nurse gesture to someone out of her sight and felt a sudden rush of warmth pass through her body.
So tired. Gareth. My love.
It must have been some sort of hallucination, Gemma thought, similar to popping an E tab (once), but the last thing she saw before the approaching black shroud covered her in delightful warmth was a pink blob land beside the Satsuma in the metal bowl.
She smiled as a memory slid into her mind. The blob was like something copied from Madonna, the vintage Pedigree doll Gemma had owned when she was eight.
Or rather a part of Madonna.
Very like a hand.
A tiny, pink hand.
*****
.
It was impossible to sleep, even with the aid of the temazapam sleeping pill the clinic had handed her. Gemma felt restless and her next-door neighbour, an elderly sousaphone player insisted on playing what he described as ‘boogie’ tunes well into the night. Normally, she would not have been bothered, and quite liked the circus ‘oompah’ sound of the instrument, but coupled with an inordinate amount of traffic noise for 11 pm, someone having a blazing row in another part of the building, distant police sirens, incontinence, and her iPhone complaining about her failure to recharge it, she was fast approaching a state of hysteria.
“Shut the fuck up!” she screamed, hearing her voice break like that of a teenage boy half way through. Surprisingly, the ‘boogying’ and the arguing stopped. The traffic, police and iPhone were oblivious to her polite request, whilst the incontinence remained smugly itself.
The clinic had released Gemma later that day. They were concerned that she had arrived without a companion – which was usually a stipulation where late termination dilation and evacuation surgery was involved - and were reluctant to let her leave until the anaesthetic had worn off, but Gemma insisted that she be allowed to go. She felt fine, she said.
Now, in bed, back in her new, one bedroom, fully Ikea’d apartment she rationalised the events of the day and the nagging thought that she needed to feel guilty in some way. The truth was she did not feel guilty, but did feel freed from the thing Gareth had planted in her. She remembered reading about a wasp that laid its egg in other creatures and the egg then matured into a pupa and ate its way out. Not nice. No chance of Gareth eating his way out now. Gareth and his blob were history. It would be a fine pleasure to see his face when she told him. It would also be good when he discovered that Ellie had persistent genital herpes.
Small pleasures; just recompense for all the pain and hurt she had suffered, and was still suffering.
But it still nagged.
Help. The little hand.
It must have been the anaesthetic causing hallucinations. Like a dream. Nothing more. The iPhone gave up the last of its battery, and the sousaphone began a timid rendition of ‘My Heart Will Go On’ from the movie, ‘Titanic’, as she turned over and dropped into a troubled sleep.
*****
It was as dark as mud in the bedroom. Even the sounds that had plagued her before had gone, but somewhere, someone was playing a drum repetitively. The muffled beat must have been amplified, it seemed to be everywhere, but there was a peculiar comfort in the cadence and rhythm.
For the first time that day Gemma felt comfortable and relaxed. The incontinence had gone and she was surrounded by a warm fuzziness, caused, she guessed, by the effects of the temazapam. Wasn’t that Valium? She remembered her mum taking something ending in ‘pam’ after Dad died. It had taken her three years to get off it.
Gemma turned over and noticed that a flickering, rosy light was creeping under the door, as if someone had started a log fire in the ubiquitously named lounge-diner. Drowsily, she dismissed the idea. The apartment was all-electric.
All-electric.
Fire?
The idea of a fire in the lounge jolted her from the warm feeling. She glanced towards the door.
The door that was not a door.
The door that was pulsing.
She twisted with some difficulty to face the….what was it? The light blossomed in intensity, becoming brighter, pulsing in time to the thing that should have been the door.
And something was coming.
She could see the shadow approaching and for some reason felt a sudden overwhelming fear: a fear beyond any reason. Something evil was in the
door not a door
glow, approaching fast, gleaming with a wicked light.
run
She tried to run but her legs wouldn’t work. Bloody temazepam. Her breathing was fast now, heart pounding as she tried to scrabble away using her
tiny
arms, but they were so weak, so weak. She heard her voice crying a word.
Help.
But her voice is small, the drums are getting louder drowning out the words, and the shadow is getting closer and closer…
run run run
Oh and there is no running, no escape, she arches her spine to get away but there is no away and the shadow blocks the light reaching out with gleaming jaws and…
THE PAIN…
The jaws clamp on my arm, crush and shake me like a terrier with a rat. Whirled around I feel my hand tear free, then there is light and the jaws again, tearing at my legs and body ripping through my stomach my chest severing my head from me and fear pain my head clamped in a silver vice o the bones the fragile bones twist crack explode… my eye burst voice lost cannot cry…. a rush, a swirling, and suddenly, glaringly bright with a chaos of blue…. the drums stop.
Cold. My hand beside me, alone. Not me now. What am I?
I.
Just before the brightness turns to dark I see a woman’s face.
Over a mountain of white, a lovely face.
Help. Please.
The face is smiling.
My face.
*****
Gareth was not answering his Blackberry – the one Gemma had given him on his birthday - so she left a calm, collected message. He must not have any inkling of the emotional devastation that awaited him. Would he be devastated? Would he even care? If he could betray her with Ellie, what sort of moral compass existed in his beautiful, empty frame? She felt the pang of loss like a sharp pain. Two losses. For the first time since they had parted she began to cry for herself, not the tears of anger and retribution that had occupied that first lonely week, but ones from that place in her heart that had been opened like a surprise present, then cruelly sealed shut with the savage, still photograph imprinted by one moment in the bedroom they had painted together in Farrow and Ball’s Classical Cream.
She watched television for a while: a dreary daytime soap where everything worked out in the end and always conformed to left or right wing prejudice pretending to be human concern.
It was very hard to recall that night, or rather that nightmare. As the night receded so too did the feeling that it had been real. She had awoken in a bed wet with urine, blood and sweat. Fortunately, after a brief check, she was sure that the blood was a temporary flow; she had been warned by the Clinic that the incontinence would last for several weeks. The bedroom door was a door once more.
She spoke to the room as if there were listeners. “I don’t care, you hear? It’s not my fault, and even if it was I still wouldn’t care”. There was defiance in her voice, but even as she spoke she knew the words were those of Gemma aged twelve when Mr Brice, the English teacher, had criticised her crumpled essay on John Donne. She knew it was bad, knew she could do better, but had expected Mr Brice to be kind and let his favourite off, as he always did. But he hadn’t. He had betrayed her in front of the class, just like Gareth had betrayed her with Ellie. Life was about deceit and betrayal. She had never betrayed anyone until…
“I don’t give a flying fig, understand?” It did not matter that she sounded peevish, but just who was she talking to? Flying fig? It was as if she were talking to a child. She pushed the thought away. There was no child.
The first hour after waking she had been consumed by an awful, bottomless grief. She remembered something about a baby, but it was mixed up with images of Gareth and a holiday taken with her parents in Norway when she was eight. Her doll, Madonna, or Madge as her Mum had christened it (stupid name), had accompanied her on that holiday and seemed to be a part of the dream, if that is what it was. She was sure that she had remembered more at the time.
There was something else, too, but it eluded her, like the silverfish sliding away into cracks and crevices at the old house in which they had lived for the first ten years of her life.
She had taken the remainder of the week off from her job at the public library. It meant three days less holiday but it seemed the right thing to do.
From the solitary bay window of the apartment she could see down to the river – a sluggish ribbon of brown. Beside it a playground in which two children were playing. Their mother was on a bench a short distance away, rocking a pram.
“That could have been me”, she said absently and turned from the window. But it was not, not right now, and not with that flake, Gareth. There would be plenty of time for children, with the real Mr Right, whoever he was, once this unpleasant episode had run its course.
Help.
The voice sounded as if it was in the apartment.
Her eyes darted into the shadows. There was nothing. Imagination. She breathed out realising that she had been holding her breath and her head felt light.
“Shit” she said, grabbing the back of the sofa for support. “There is nothing here. Nothing at all. It’s all in your mind. You had a dream…”.
She switched on an imitation Tiffany table lamp, and sitting on the table was the hand.
Tiny, the size of a postage stamp, fingers perfect in every detail, nails faint marks on the tips, the beginnings of fingerprints, but bloodless and severed crudely at the wrist, the doll-like hand lay innocently on the polished, wooden surface.
As if awaiting the cue, the memory of the previous day thundered back with vicious clarity. Every detail of the clinic, the dream, isolated in stark relief, played rapidly like a movie in her head then looped back to the beginning and played again.
She ran to the bathroom, vomited into the sink and drank from the tap to rid her mouth of the foul taste.
Help.
She raised her head to the mirror, expecting to see the unbearable, but it was only her face, wan and drained, but her face nevertheless…the same face she had seen smiling above the mountain of white…the same face that had watched as her baby’s crushed head was thrown like a Satsuma…she pulled her gaze away as the movie continued to play on that evil, endless loop.
Someone screamed and she knew the sound had come from her own throat. She ran through to the lounge. It was empty, as she knew it must be. She spun to the table, but the hand was gone and that too was as it should be.
Forty-three million worldwide, every year. Two hundred thousand in the UK alone. Five hundred a week in England. Lost souls. Including one that was her own flesh, her own blood. It didn’t matter whether they were blobs or babies; they were alive and were deprived of life, without respect, in cruelty and blood.
One of them by me. Mea culpa.
“Come out”. Her voice sounded hollow in the empty room. “I’m sorry”. She knew how weak and meaningless the words were. “I didn’t know. They lied to me”.
For the first time the tears came, not self-pity but grief for the lost one, for all the little lost ones.
As if a thick, woollen blanket had been thrown over the world, silence descended. A memory intruded, grainy and wobbly like an old VHS clip from YouTube. Eight-year old Gemma on the ferry to Hogsfjord with Madonna clutched in her hands. Watching the foam from the ferry’s wake bubble and roil, she had made a promise.
“I’ll never leave you, Madonna. Never ever.”
Here in the silence she remembered seagulls screaming in the wake of the ferry and the roar of the engines drowning out her own small cry as the doll slipped from her hands into the water, disappearing immediately in the turmoil, re-emerging a distance away, waving a tiny, pink hand before sinking from sight.
Only a doll. The tears were not for a doll.
“Forgive me.” The words dropped through the thick air.
Silence. The tears were drying now, salt tracks on the skin. Still the room was silent. Gemma felt an empty ache begin in her stomach. There would be no release, no forgiveness.
The thought seemed so obvious, so appropriate, and it came from nowhere, like the first winter robin, or perhaps it had been there all along.
There had to be a promise: one to be meant. One to be kept.
She turned to the room. “I will never leave you. Never ever.”
At first the voices were a murmur, a susurration whispered in corners, growing louder as the first one, then the five hundred, peeped out shyly. And in the distance, their friends gathered.
“Help?” she said.
The small voices became a clamour of softness and one voice stood out from the rest. Gemma smiled fondly. “Never ever,” she said.
Alone in the room and arms outstretched she welcomed him, welcomed them all, home.
*****
Thank you for downloading and reading this story. If you enjoyed this one you may also enjoy my other short stories, BOMBER and ISSUE 49, also on Kindle and other platforms.
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