Wicked Game

  December 2003 We still haven't decided where to spend Christmas. My mum says we might go to my aunt. She lives just round the corner from where the hospital I was born in used to be.    Imagine, I think, if I go back to my place of birth on Christmas Day and then I go into labour early...    This is ridiculous. My baby is not the Messiah and I am definitely no Virgin Mary. Steve has lost his passport somewhere in New Zealand. He's having a stressful time sorting out a replacement. His tenants are moving out of his house and he doesn't know how long it'll be till he can get new ones. Not till after Christmas at least.    I feel guilty that I've added to his stress with my pregnancy.  At work there is a sort of secret Santa. We pull little gifts out of a large stocking.    'There's some children's toys somewhere in there,' a woman in my team says as she holds it out to me to choose something.    I hope I don't get one of them. ...

  December 2003 I'm in the kitchen making toast. I open the drawer to get a knife to spread the margarine. The sharp knives are nestling in the tray. An urge comes over me to grab one and carve an X over my stomach, to cross that baby out.    I can't. I'm a mother. Even if I don't keep this baby I'm still a mother. I have to act like one. I have to be sensible. I can't just do whatever I want.    When I was fifteen I had a fantasy that I was the singer in an insanely popular alternative band. Every man was in love with me of course. The fantasy constantly altered but one strand included a storyline where I got pregnant at twenty three. It made a dramatic plot but then I couldn't make a baby fit in with the rest of the story so I imagined it being taken from me at birth because the scars on my arm made everyone think I was unfit to be a mother.     It's easy to imagine traumatic situations when you think they'll never happen to you.    No...

  November 2003 My mum comes with me to my doctor's appointment.    'He might think I'm forcing you to have the baby adopted,' she says.    The doctor asks how I'm feeling about having a baby.    'Actually,' my mum says, 'that's why I'm here with her. She thinks she wants to have the baby adopted.'    The doctor says I need to contact Social Services.  Steve emails. He says he'll be in Asia till at least June, so there'll be time for me to come and travel with him.   I ask him if he's sure this is what he wants. If he's sure he doesn't want me to keep the baby. He says he's sure.    I phone Social Services.  I tell work I have an appointment with the health visitor. I'm sitting in the waiting room at Social Services opposite another pregnant young woman.    Someone comes out. She looks at the other pregnant woman.    'Amy Chapman?'    'That's me,' I say, standing up as the other woman sha...

  October 2003 Lucy is the only person I've told that Steve and I plan to give the baby up for adoption.     How do you tell people you don't want your baby? But maybe I do want my baby. They'll think I'm a monster.    At work I hear someone say to one of the women in my section, 'Does the girl who's pregnant have a boyfriend?'    'You don't have to have a boyfriend to get pregnant,' she says.    'So she doesn't?'    'She does but he's in Australia.'    They all assume Steve will be coming back in time for the birth. They all assume he's a decent man who'll do the right thing.    I can't bear to tell them that he's booked flights to New Zealand and Asia.     I'm not worth coming home for. I'm not worth doing the right thing for.    Steve asks me to tell him everywhere worth visiting in New Zealand. I send him a list of all the places I visited with information about them.   ...

  October 2003 I walk to work through the park, past the squabbling geese, past the playground with the paddling pool and the sand. It's empty except for one woman and a little girl. The woman sticks her hands in the sand.    'Handprints! Handprints! Handprints!' she says. The little girl laughs.    I wonder if that will be me in a few years.    The woman looks older than me, early thirties. A normal age to have a baby. No one has a baby at twenty three. Teenagers have babies. Thirty-somethings have babies.    I get everything wrong.    I have to tell people at work that I'm pregnant. I need time off for appointments.     'And after you told me you weren't pregnant,' says my supervisor.    'I didn't know I was then.'    'How can you not know you're pregnant?'     She thinks I'm stupid. Everyone thinks I'm stupid.    I walk home in the dim evening light. I wish Steve wasn't ...

  October 2003 I don't know what to expect at the Brook Clinic. I imagine myself bursting through the door and dramatically announcing I'm five months pregnant and I can't have this baby in front of a group of tense young women and girls in a waiting room.    In the event I walk into an empty room, carefully closing the door behind me. A member of staff appears. I tell her I think I'm pregnant and I need to do a test.    'How old are you?'    'Twenty three.'     She tells me Brook Clinics are for women up to twenty five, so I can have a free test.    I get the feeling she disapproves of me using the service. I'm an adult. I'm wearing my smart office clothes. I don't look like someone who needs a free test. I don't look like someone whose life is in crisis.    I go to the toilet with the test.    As we wait for the result to appear she asks me how far along I think I am.    'Maybe five months.' ...

  September 2003 My parents are waiting at the barriers at Heathrow.    'She doesn't look fat,' my dad says. 'Everyone says people come back fatter from a year in Australia but, she doesn't.'    See? I'm not pregnant. I would look fat if I was.      But what about-    Don't think about it.     My friends seem to be mostly on holiday but Lucy tells me Becky's having an Ann Summers party next week. This seems completely out of character for Becky. I feel lost. Has everyone changed while I've been away? I don't think I've changed. Except-     No. Nothing's changed.     I go to the employment agency I got my job at the bank with. In a couple of days I've been offered my old job back.    I'm back in the same rut I ran away from.    But it's different now. This is only temporary. In a few months I'll be in Asia with Steve.    He emails. He's still lonely in Broome. Soon he'll go back ...

  August 2003 I'm staying in a hostel in Los Angeles. It claims to be right by Venice Beach but I can't find the beach. Instead I find the internet cafe Global Gossip.    I haven't checked my email since the north shore of Oahu. There is a message from Steve telling me I should find a rich "scetic tank" to buy me drinks in Waikiki. I assume he means "septic tank." I frown at the words till I work out it's rhyming slang for "yank." I tell him about the free tours I went on with the hostel. I don't tell him about Justice. I don't tell him any of the things I wrote in French in Waikiki.    I find the beach, a vast expanse of sand. The sea seems a million miles away. I take off my flip flops and trudge across it, feeling the damp sand between my toes.    The sea is cold. I didn't expect this. It's the Pacific Ocean, it's LA, isn't it meant to always be warm here?    I sit on the beach, writing in French again.     Je ne ...

  August 2003 I go to Waikiki for my last week in Hawaii. I check into the hostel and am put into an empty dorm. I go for a walk in the evening. It's different here from the north shore. Busier, more built up. I think maybe I should have stayed in the tranquility of the north.    I sit on a bench, looking out to sea. A man sits next to me. He is tall and thin with dark skin. He looks like he's in his late thirties. He talks about how he's struggling to find work, how it's hard for native Hawaiians. I awkwardly make sympathetic noises. He asks me where I'm from.    'England,' I say.    He frowns at me. 'You don't look English.'     I shrug. I don't know what to say. I don't know what it is about me that doesn't look English.    He asks me if I want to go and eat with him.    I shake my head.    ''Please,' he says. He tries to persuade me but I tell him I have to go. Back in my dorm a man has moved in. He's sh...

  August 2003 I arrive in Hawaii the day before I left New Zealand. In my head I pretend I've travelled back in time rather than crossed the international dateline.     I wish I could travel back in time to before I met Steve, then I could tell myself never to approach him in that bar in Cairns. Or to walk away when Brandon told me he was an asshole, walk away the first time he bit me, walk away when I realised he wasn't going to use contraception, walk away when he dumped me in Darwin, walk away that night in Perth when he made me bleed.    But that would have been too late, in Perth. I was already pregnant by then.     No. I wasn't. I'm not. I've bled since then so I can't be. I go to the north shore of Oahu. I'm feeling better, that fluey feeling leaving me. It's peaceful here. I lie on the beach. I swim. I snorkel, watching bright fish dart beneath me in the clear water.    Looking at the sunshine coloured yellow tang I wonder w...

  July/ August 2003 I hike on the Franz Josef Glacier. I am told that the Maori name for it means "tears of the avalanche girl." I feel like an avalanche girl right now, my life tumbling down a mountain with a force and momentum that will destroy anything in its path.     I have no tears though. My feelings remain locked inside me, refusing to flow from my eyes     I struggle to keep up on the hike. I am tired and fluey and unbalanced. My stomach, once so small, so flat I was barely aware of it is now pushing at the waistband of my jeans. It's heavy, weighing me down.    I always pictured glaciers as smooth, flat blocks of ice floating in the sea, but this is white with snow and full of crevasses and ridges.    As I trudge through a crevice, legs aching from carrying the extra weight of my stomach, from forcing my feet through the snow, the icy walls seem to close in on me. This is how it feels to be loved by Steve, I think, to be t...

  July 2003 I sit on the ferry to the South Island with Catriona, Sarah and Lou. I was expecting to feel sick, to be running constantly to the toilets or the side of the deck to throw up, but there is no sickness, no nausea, just the numb, achy feeling of the flu.    We are opposite a New Zealand family, parents, a three year old girl and a baby boy. The girl talks to us, she whines at her parents, she runs around in the small space between our seats.    As we move through Marlborough Sounds we stare at the strange shapes of land jutting from the water, almost unnatural looking.    The New Zealand family leave their seats.     'The little girl was really well-behaved,' says Lou, 'for a three hour journey with nothing to do.'     Catriona and I nod in agreement.      'No,' says Sarah. 'Not compared to my nephew, he would have sat still with his crayons and wouldn't have complained.    I wonder what my baby wi...

  July 2003 We go to Taupo and walk round the edge of a giant lake. The water is blue-green and endless. Beneath its calm surface lies a volcano, just as something explosive lies beneath my calm surface.    No.     It doesn't. I'm not pregnant. There's no baby. Nothing to shatter my life into little pieces.    We go to Huka Falls. Turquoise water crashes down, spraying like a cloud in the gorge. It's so loud it fills my head, drowning out my thoughts. I feel a sort of wordless peace there, by the thundering water. I don't want to leave.    Nearby I see two kiwi birds strutting on rocks. Their legs look too thin to hold their round bodies.     I sign up to do a 17km walk in Tongariro National Park but it's cancelled due to the bad weather. I am almost relieved. I feel so weak and ill. I think I might be going down with the flu.    I'm lying in bed in my dorm when I hear someone come in. I lift my head out from und...

  July 2003 I'm not free from Steve. His teeth are still in my neck. His voice is still in my head reminding me that I'm weak, fragile, scared.    If I'm pregnant  I'm not pregnant  then I'll never be free of him. I'm not pregnant I'm not pregnant ImnotpregnantimnotpregnantImnotpregnantimnotpregnant    If I keep thinking it over and over it'll have to be true. We visit a lake that mirrors the sky, the surrounding trees perfectly. I wonder what would happen if I walked into it. Would I fall into a different version of this world? A world where I never met Steve, a world where Adam and Nick never found me and I never went into that room in Sydney. A world where my life isn't disintegrating into dust.    Someone asks the tour guide if the water is drinkable. It looks so pure and clean. The tour guide says lake water is never drinkable, it's stagnant. I'm with Catriona and the English girls, Sarah and Lou. Lou talks about a colleague back home in...

  July 2003 We go to Piha Beach with its dark sands and Lion Rock. At the right angle it really does look like a giant lion turned to stone. Maybe if I stay here long enough I too could turn to stone and never have to face the future.    I think my heart might already be stone.    In Waitomo we see the glow worm caves. I am claustrophobic, afraid the caves will fall on me, but they are lit up like a night filled with stars.     I walk in the farm near the hostel, following a path by a field of bulls. They hurl themselves at the fence as I pass. I am afraid they might break it and trample me to death but I keep going. I wonder if they smell pregnancy hormones on me, if that is somehow enraging them.    Of course not. I'm not pregnant. Whatever is happening to my body, there must be another explanation. I can not have a baby with Steve. I make a sort of friendship with an Irish woman and two English women. I don't know why they're being ni...

  July 2003 I feel ill on the flight to New Zealand. The chicken they serve for dinner makes me gag. I have to drink bottle after bottle of water to avoid throwing up.    At the airport a sniffer dog goes crazy round my backpack. I have to open it up, pulling out all my clothes. I'm glad I did my washing before I left. There's nothing illegal in there. The woman with the dog- is she police or a customs official, I don't know- asks about what I've had in my bag. We establish the dog must be smelling orange peel I put on top of my backpack while eating the day before.    I book a ticket on the Kiwi Experience bus that will take me round both islands and a flight from Christchurch that will take me to Auckland in time for my flight to Hawaii.    I email Steve and tell him about my flight, my plans. He jokes that he sewed heroin into my backpack and I can pass it to his friend Neil when I get to Heathrow. Neil, his one black friend. I feel a sense of disgu...

  July 2003 Back in Sydney. Full circle. I thought it would feel like coming home but there's something missing.    Friends. Excitement. Hope. Freedom. I book into a hostel in King's Cross, just a short walk from the flat I lived in in Woolloomooloo. It means navigating what we called the death stairs, a long, steep flight of steps, every time I go to the city centre.    I go to the pie cart in Woolloomooloo. I never went when I lived here. I should have done. I buy a curry pie. I never liked hot, spicy food before but now I crave it. Steve loves his food as spicy as possible. Maybe the baby takes after him. Maybe- Stop thinking that. There can't be a baby. I feel uneasy walking around the city. I keep expecting Adam or Nick to appear round every corner. I see that large black eye staring out of every shadow. It's only in the botanic gardens that I feel safe, under the branches hanging with sleeping bats. I long for wings to wrap myself up in.  Steve emails...

  June 2003 I'm cold and wet. I miss the sunshine. I miss who I was in the sunshine.    No one speaks to me in the hostel. I wander around Melbourne alone looking for things to do.    I wonder if I will see Nick who I met in Byron Bay. He said he was from Melbourne. Would he recognise me now? It was less than six months ago but so much has changed. I've been changed by Steve, changed by the weather that seeps gloomily into my bones. He said I was beautiful then. Would he still think that if he saw me now?    I go to the Theatres Building and look for the Museum of Performing Arts. I can't find it.     There has been no more blood. My stomach isn't shrinking.     Maybe that wasn't a miscarriage after all.    But then why was there blood?    It must have been a miscarriage. I can't be pregnant. I absolutely cannot be.    Steve and I email. He's found work as a labourer in Perth. I'm eating free ...

  June 2003 Tasmania feels like some forgotten wintry part of England.    They have free bread in the hostel. I eat nothing but bread for two days. Now I never want to eat bread again. The thought of it sickens me.    An elderly English lady is staying in the hostel. She says she's lived in north Queensland for forty years and now she's house hunting in Tasmania because she misses seasons. I can't imagine missing the cold.    I go on a tour of the island. There are sandwiches for lunch every day but I take the filling out and eat it without the bread. It's a small group, another English girl, a newly wed Singaporean couple who seem lost and confused, and a Swiss man who is frighteningly serious about cake.     I find myself no longer able to eat cake.    We go to Freycinet National Park where the air is fresh and looks across the still blue waters of Wineglass Bay. The tour guide points at a distant shape and says it's a humpba...