Mrs Sinclair's Suitcase by Louise Walters Read Free Book Online

plaque on the stone gatepost announces that this is the Evergreen Clinic. Evergreen is, I think, a strange choice of name for such a place. I know how Jenna must feel, sitting so still alongside me; yet she appears to be unmoved. I swing the car up the gravelled drive, and park in a marked space. As if on cue, heavy drops of rain falling on to the roof of the car break the silence.
    ‘Will you come in with me? Please,’ says Jenna.
    ‘Yes. I thought that was the plan.’
    ‘Oh, thank you. I’m grateful. But I’m scared.’
    Of course she is.
    ‘You don’t have to go in,’ I offer.
    ‘Yes, I do.’
    And I know she does. There is no point in prolonging the inevitable, no point in trying to dissuade Jenna. It’s a one-woman show.
    We walk across a neat lawn where a single magnolia stands alone in the centre – white, pretty, hopeful. We slowly ascend the imperious steps leading to the door marked ‘Entrance’. Inside is dark, oaky, leathery. A lady with long, long blonde hair and a name badge stating ‘Rita’ sits primly at a tacky, veneered desk. I don’t believe that Rita is her actual name. She invites us to take a seat in the waiting room, which was obviously once the large sitting room of a grand house. Daytime television blasts out from what appears to be a 1980s set. There are many women here, nervous, waiting, like Jenna, waiting to do something hellishly profound. Right or wrong. It isn’t my place to judge. Of course. Yet I feel vaguely nauseous, clammy. Some of the women are young, just girls, with mothers chaperoning them, mothers as nervous as their daughters. But, like Jenna, they look resolute. There are one or two couples, the men holding the women’s hands, stroking their arms. Why are they here? What events have led up to this day, this place, this decision? I shall never know. It isn’t my destiny to know.
    After an interminable half-hour, Jenna is called and she disappears like a ghost into an unseen room, the door closing quietly behind her. I watch the television and learn how to make triple-glazed chicken in honey, or some such concoction. I clamp my mind off from where I am, what I am doing, what is going on behind the door, the conversation that will be taking place.
    Jenna emerges after fifteen minutes or so, white-faced. She beckons me and I follow her outside, where the sun is shining and the birds are busying themselves in the trees, in defiance of this place. Jenna sits on the bottom step and lights a cigarette, which shocks me greatly. Her hand is trembling, cigarette smoke curling around her slender beringed fingers. I didn’t know she was a smoker.
    ‘I can have a tablet,’ Jenna says. ‘Today, once I’ve seen a doctor.’
    ‘A tablet?’
    ‘It will make the pregnancy come away and I’ll bleed. Like a period.’
    ‘You’re definitely pregnant, then?’ I say, disappointed. How lovely if she had been mistaken, there had been no baby to … deal with.
    ‘Oh yes. I could see it. A little flake. On the screen. It was like watching a film, but there wasn’t much to see. Just shadows and … pulses. Five and a half weeks gone. It’s a good job I’m on the ball, eh?’
    ‘Do you still want to do this?’ I ask, my voice high-pitched and laboured. ‘Are you going to go ahead?’
    ‘I am. Absolutely. This is just a mistake, a great big one. It’s not a baby, not yet. It’s just a blob of cells and matter. No eyes yet, no mouth or even a proper brain. No skin. There’s no crime here, Roberta. Don’t go all holier than thou on me. I’m within my rights to do this. It’s all perfectly legal.’
    ‘I know that. I wasn’t trying to … it’s okay.’ I have nothing else to say.
    Jenna obviously does not have a working knowledge of regret. Not yet, anyway. I don’t want to cry, so I think hard about triple-glazed chicken in honey, about driving home, being there, safe and alone. I have a sudden yearning to eat hot buttered crumpets dripping with gooseberry jam, the