LOSS by Jane Lightbourne

Author:Jane Lightbourne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nevada Street Press
Published: 2021-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Guilt. Desire. Guilt. Desire came in waves; fleeting, intangible as moonshine, and easily quelled, for it was as fragile as butterfly wings, but the guilt that followed was heavy as a tombstone, a tonne weight. And that crushed me completely. Alcohol was my only anaesthetic, and I drank a great deal of it, much to my wife’s despair.

One night I called Peter from my cab home. I’d had a few drinks - so many, in fact, that calling my brother, in a conciliatory vein, seemed a sensible thing to do.

“All ok, Jamie?” Peter asked in a steely voice.

“Rachel’s furious with me,” I told him. “She knows, Peter. She just knows.”

“How can she? Have you told her?”

“No.”

“And nor will you. Pull yourself together.”

“You make me feel like a child.”

“You’re behaving like one.”

“Do you remember that hollow tree, Peter?” I blurted out suddenly.

“What tree? What are you on about?”

“In the grounds of Felbrigg? I used to run and hide in it. It had very shiny sides...”

“Well, you can’t go hide now. Just enjoy the moment, revel in an unbridled fuck, then put this girl out of your mind. Didn’t I give you the key to my flat? Use it, for Christ’s sake.”

I looked out of the cab, as the clubs and restaurants of Shoreditch bloomed into sight, then faded.

“You don’t get it.”

“No, I don’t. Go home, drink two pints of water, go to sleep. Get up and resume your duties as husband. And possible father.”

“I’m not going into battle, Peter.”

“Ah, Jamie - there, you’re mistaken - that is precisely what you are going to do. Give her a kid, she’ll be happy as Larry. What do you have to do that’s so very hard? Wank into a test tube?”

I lay back against the smooth leather seat of the cab, eyes closed. The taxi rocked slightly. “I never told you something about Sarah…”

Peter’s voice was suddenly tight, wary.

“What’s that?”

“That last night she came to see me-”

“You sent her packing with some cash. You told me.”

“I didn’t tell you something else. She…she was pregnant.”

A stunned silence. “What the fuck?”

I closed my eyes. Thoughts of my younger sister blossomed in my brain: a headstrong five-year-old, working our garden swing too hard and too fast, while I, pasty and pock-marked, stood beneath it, pleading with her to stop. Aged seven, running out into the sea, out of her depth, and being rescued, screaming outrage, by our terrified father. A louche teen, recklessly promiscuous, raucous, bawdy, lolling on a sofa in a fog of cigarette smoke, eyes ringed with kohl, hair in the dark, hard bob she favoured, listening to Vision Thing and LA Woman and The Dark Side of the Moon, and wearing those high-heeled croc-skin boots she lived in. She had loved those boots…

“How pregnant?”

“I don’t know. She wasn’t….she wasn’t showing.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I…I don’t know.”

“For fuck’s sake, Jamie.”

“She said she was going to have a termination.” I struggled to get the words out.

“But what if she didn’t? What if she lied about that, as well as everything else?”

He was right, I thought.

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