And so I ignored phone calls. I gave curt responses to texts. I resolved that, after the abortion, and when the fog had cleared, I would resume being his long-distance girlfriend. But even then, I knew it was doomed. Carey could be at home for months, maybe years. I realised, with a stunning pain to the heart, that I might never see him again.
And then on Thursday I found the clot.
I was at work when it happened. I left my desk and walked across the by-pass to call the clinic. I was eventually passed on to the nurse who had spoken to James and me. I told her what I had found.
“Did you keep it?” she asked.
“No, I…” I was astounded by the question. “I was planning to get rid of it.”
“The clot. Did you keep the clot?”
“Oh. No. I flushed it.”
She tutted, like I had cut the tags off a dress I was trying to return.
“What did it look like? Liver?”
“Yes.” I nodded, remembering the dark, shining substance. “Yeah, liver.”
“All right. We better make you an appointment, then.”
“At the clinic?”
“No, at the hospital.”
She was moving through every step too quickly, and it frightened me. I kept begging her to slow down and explain things to me, but she had already moved on to the next phase of planning.
“I can get you in tomorrow morning? Ten a.m.?”
“I have work.”
“Well, that’s all I can do,” she said.
“Am I miscarrying?”
“I can’t diagnose that over the phone. You need to go to A&E, if you can’t make an appointment.”
“Is this what it would look like, though? If I were miscarrying?”
She took a moment to answer. “Yes. It would look quite like this. Do you want the appointment, or will you go to A&E?”
“I’ll take the appointment,” I said weakly, and hung up the phone. I stood at the side of the road, wearing a blazer over jeans, in a look that my mother described as “smart casual” but made me look like an estate agent.
I’ve tried not to stay angry at the nurse. Sexual health clinics have never been particularly well funded or well staffed in Ireland, and she was probably thinking of the abortion she had to cancel, and the other girl she could slide into my appointment’s place.
There was a petrol station near the call centre. I bought a packet of the thickest Kotex pads I could find and went back to work.
I wish I had more to say about the clots, or the appointment the next day that confirmed the end of my pregnancy, or the days of heavy bleeding that felt like they might go on for ever. Those days have always been a strange, cold shadow in my memory. Years ago, I asked James what they were like, and what I was like during them.
“You were miles away,” he said. “I was afraid your brain had broken for ever.”
“In what way?”
“Like you’d butter some toast and walk away from it. Do up your buttons wrong. Be all chatty and hyper one minute, then all gloomy and distant the next.”
“God.”
“If you weren’t looking closely, you would have seemed fine.”
“Right.”
“But I was looking closely, so.”
There seemed no right way to feel. I was conscious that I had been let off the hook and that I should be grateful. I wouldn’t have to go on a frightening trip to England, and I wouldn’t have to bankrupt myself doing it. I knew that this was a net positive overall. But I could not shake the feeling that Carey’s baby had died inside me because I was rotten, and did rotten things. I bled for so long that I started thinking of myself as a person who had made a bad bargain with the fairies. I had got my gold, and now I was paying for it.
Then my mother called.
“We really think you should reconsider this graduation thing, Rachel,” she said sternly.
I felt like I was drowning and someone was asking about my tax return. “Oh?”
“It would mean a lot to your father,” she continued. “He’s very low. He needs a day out.”
“It’s too late anyway, Mum. All this stuff is arranged months in advance. Seating and gown rental or whatever.”
“Don’t mind all that,” she said. “If you can sort the gown, I can sort the rest.”
I didn’t see how. My graduation was Monday, on what had once been the planned date of my abortion. “What do you mean, ‘sort the gown,’ Mum?” I said. “How on earth am I meant to ‘sort the gown’？ I don’t have any connections at Big Gown. I have no idea where you even get them. It’s all done through the college.”
“You’ve gone very ratty,” she said.
“I’m just trying to be realistic.”
“Listen, I’ll call the college. We’ll pick up the degree, take a few photos, go for a nice lunch. We’ll bring James. What’s wrong with that?”
I had already taken two days off, for my appointment and for my miscarriage, and knew I was on thin ice at the call centre. I phoned my manager and asked for the time off. She sighed.
“Rachel, I think it’s better if you don’t come back in. I’m not sure if this is the right fit for you.”
“Will I still get paid for my sick days?”
“What? No.”
I hung up the phone.
My mother got her way. Well, most of her way.
She pestered the administration office all day to let me go. She invented various problems as to why I hadn’t RSVP’d or booked my gown rental, hinting heavily at mental illness, financial ruin and general poor health. It was incredible how accurately she had nailed my situation while ostensibly lying about it. Eventually, she was allocated three guest passes to the ceremony, but was told that there was no scroll prepared for Rachel Murray, and that I would have to watch everyone else graduate. My mother thanked her, and then rang back an hour later. How could we get the scroll prepared? The woman said she had nothing to do with the scrolls. My mother asked for the phone number of the scroll people.
After a solid eight hours of pestering, bribery and exquisitely performed small talk, my mother called me to say that I would be collecting my scroll, after all. I had to sit in the guest section, and I would be permitted to collect it on stage after everyone else had picked up theirs. If I could not procure a gown, I had to wear “dark, loose-fitting formal wear.”
“I have a black dress,” Mum said triumphantly, and started talking about getting my hair blow-dried.
It seemed to me that this was the worst of all possible worlds. You could go to your graduation or you could not, but this in-between state was humiliating. It was too late to do anything about it. My mother had already worked too hard, and all I could do was wearily go along with it.
“How did you manage it?” I asked. “With the scroll people?”
“Oh, I promised everyone I spoke to a free teeth cleaning,” she said.
I was in no position to complain about my fake graduation. Even if half the people my mother spoke to didn’t accept the free teeth cleaning, it was still a huge expense that she couldn’t afford.
My parents called to Shandon Street at 11 a.m. the next morning, my mother with her lipstick on, my father in a grey suit. The graduation had been sold to me as something my father desperately wanted and needed. That morning, however, he would have obviously rather been at home. He was utterly sullen, a mood that was in keeping with the tone of me and James’s home at that time, and I began to wonder whether depression was coming out of the walls.