I pretended to study the menu of terrifying body art options on the wall until the man with all the followers came and took me out the back, directing me to a reclining chair, drawing up next to me on his saddle stool. I showed him a picture on my phone.
I said, ‘Not coloured in. Just the outline of it. As small as possible.’
He took the phone and made the picture bigger. ‘What is it?’
I told him it was a barometric map of the Hebrides. I wanted it on my hand, I didn’t care where.
He said cool, picked up my hand and rubbed his thumb over the fine cross-hatched forty-year-old skin of mine. ‘Yeah, I reckon just below the nail.’ He let go and pulled a trolley towards him, picking things out of its small drawers.
‘Is that where you’re from or what?’
I said no and then nothing for a second, unsure whether to tell him the reason. I wanted to, but worried that it would be as incomprehensible, then as quickly boring, as someone’s explanation of a dream, a revelation had in therapy or a description of what their wedding dress was going to look like.
Then I remembered I didn’t care about anything any more.
He had picked up my hand again and was washing alcohol over my palm with cotton. I said, ‘The weather there is generally just cyclones and torrential storms and hurricanes that are unpredictable and devastating which, I assume, makes it hard to live a normal life. It’s how I feel. I have ——。’
He swivelled, and tossed the cotton in a bin and said, ‘Who doesn’t, love?’
It made no sense and felt like the most intense kindness – that this man with a crucifix and a snake and a dead rose and a knife with blood dripping off it tattooed on his neck, and the name Lorna which, based on the date of birth underneath it, might belong to his mother, was so unperturbed by my revelation that he didn’t look up or ask me anything else until he’d finished drawing on my thumb with pen.
‘But you’re alright now, are you? You don’t seem like a mentalist.’
‘Yes, I’m fine now.’
‘So why do you still want your weather on you?’
‘I think –’ I said, maybe ‘– a memorial. I lost things.’
He had been about to start. The point of the needle was against my skin but he took it away again and did meet my eye then as he said, ‘Like what? Friends?’
I opened my mouth and said, ‘No, when –’
– when I was a teenager, a doctor gave me some pills and told me not to get pregnant. The next doctor gave me something else, but said the same thing. Another doctor and then another one and another, diagnosing and prescribing and insisting their predecessor had been wrong, but always issuing the same caution.
I took everything they gave me, imagining the pills dissolving into my stomach, whatever was inside them spreading through my body like black dye or poison, making it toxic to the foetus I was told strenuously and repeatedly not to conceive.
I was seventeen and nineteen and twenty-two and I was still a child who didn’t think doctors could be wrong, or I did not suspect they might warn me against pregnancy, not because the medication was dangerous but because in their minds I was dangerous. To myself, to a baby, to my parents, to their excellent and unblemished professional records. Not a single unplanned baby born to a mentally ill girl on their watch.
And so I did as I was told and I made sure I did not get pregnant and I never stopped being scared, until I met Jonathan. Briefly, with him, I was allowed to think I was a different person. If I stopped it all, I could have a baby.
But I couldn’t stop it all. My body could not live without the black dye flowing through it. And then Jonathan saw who I was, someone with tendencies, and he said thank God. And I said yes, thank God that I did not manage to get pregnant.
Because even if a baby survived inside me and even if it was born and I could care for its body, one day a little bomb would go off in its brain and all the pain and sadness it would feel in life from then on would be from me, and my guilt at what I had given it would make me hate it like my mother hated me. I accepted it. A biblical genealogy.
Depressed seaside mother begat Celia.
Celia begat Martha.
Martha should not beget anyone.
And then, a doctor said I’d got it wrong. Robert said, ‘—— is not a reason to forego motherhood.’ He has many patients who are mothers. They do very well. He has no doubt I would be a wonderful mother. If that is something I want.
Listening to him, sitting on the dirty platform, is when I realised that what I had always believed to be true was the understanding of a sick child. I had never thought to question it when I became an adult. Instead, I put evidence to it and stoked it, all those beads on the one long string. I imagined more than what I’d been told and whenever I imagined my damaged baby, a child damaged by the kind of mother I would be, I felt fear and worse shame, and that was why I had been lying.