The Sisterhood by Emily Barr Read Free Book Online

carelessness. To get pregnant by someone who had now, presumably, been voluntarily castrated also seemed perverse.
    I couldn't tell her. I didn't dare. I knew I could never contact her again. Neither of us would ever be able to look each other in the eye. If I tried to tell her about this, she would probably go ballistic. She would cry and she would hate me even more than she already did. I could not confide in anyone else until I knew what I was going to do, because to talk to anyone about this would make it real, and I thought that I preferred to keep it half imaginary for the moment. I was horrified by the idea of telling anyone about what I had done with Rosa. I felt terrible about it, and the idea that it seemed to have had the most serious of consequences was unbearable.
    On my own, I tried to see the future. If I did nothing, I could be a mother in seven and a half months. If I stepped in to prevent that happening, I would probably never have the chance again. I looked on this dilemma with a strange sort of detachment.
    I would have the baby. I would not. I hoped for a miscarriage. I worried about abnormalities. I stopped drinking. I started again, but found I couldn't swallow even a mouthful of my favourite white wine. I started being sick in the mornings. Symptom piled upon symptom. I went to bed at eight o'clock every night, and slept for twelve hours, even without tranquillisers. I lived my life, as far as I could, as normal. I did my very best to ignore it all.
    I stumbled along, teaching my classes on auto-pilot, using a fraction of the mental energy I usually used. During classes, I mastered the lazy teacher's manoeuvre of nodding and saying, 'That's a very good question. Anyone?' It occasionally made my life easier, though more often I was greeted with blank looks and shrugs. I marked homework without really looking at what I was doing, sitting in the corner of the staffroom nibbling a ginger biscuit, and waiting for this particular crisis to go away. I invented a mystery virus to throw colleagues off the scent, and when they looked at me knowingly, sympathetically, I realised that they thought I was still bogged down being devastated about Steve. That, I decided, was as good an excuse for wan, stressed sickness as anything. I agreed with them. 'It's only just hit me,' I said, sadly. 'Ten years of my life, down the pan.' In fact, I wasn't feeling anything any more. I didn't care about Steve, and I didn't care about anyone.
    After a week, on impulse, I went to the doctor. I sat in the waiting room for forty minutes, staring at an old copy of Marie Claire , and avoiding looking at a selection of posters about not drinking, smoking or injecting heroin while pregnant. I gazed, instead, at a government warning on osteoporosis. By the time I went in, I was starting to shake.
    My GP was a lovely woman, my own age but responsible. I had tried four different doctors before I found her, and I trusted her. I knew she thought I was coming for more tranquillisers. As I walked into the room, I saw her face arranging itself into a sympathetic 'you shouldn't get dependent' expression.
    I found myself unexpectedly holding back tears.
    'I'm pregnant,' I told her curtly, blinking. And, as you know, single.'
    Dr Grey gave nothing away
    'Oh!' she said, with a sage nod. 'Right. How do you feel about that?'
    I sniffed and rubbed my forehead. 'If you'd said "congratulations",' I told her, 'that would have been a sign. If you'd picked up the phone and booked me in to see a termination counsellor, that would have been a sign, too. Where did you learn to be so non-committal?'
    'It's my job.' Dr Grey smiled sympathetically. I knew she had three children. She had a photo of them on her desk, looking wholesome in their school uniforms. Each of them had a different variation on their mother's dark red hair, brown eyes, and freckles. She was, I always thought, my opposite; how I could have been, in a different universe. She had been to medical