Faith - Lesley Pearse [60]
There was not a shred of sympathy in his face and he looked as if he was tempted to slap her.
‘Then I’ll have to have an abortion,’ she threw back at him. ‘And if I die because of it, it will be your fault.’ Grabbing her bag, she ran out of the flat and clattered down the stairs.
She knew backstreet abortions involved knitting needles, enema tubes and such things, and she was sure this would make him come running after her. But it didn’t.
She lay on her bed the whole weekend crying, unable to believe it really was over. Each time the payphone rang down in the hall, she started, convinced it would be him. But no call came. Jackie didn’t phone either, and that made her feel even more desperate. All through the following week and the next weekend she could think of nothing else. She couldn’t eat or sleep, her mind churning over everything she and Steven had done together.
To gain sympathy at her work she told people that she’d caught him in bed with another girl, and Sonia, another wages clerk, invited her to spend the next weekend with her so they could go out dancing.
That gave Laura another idea, and on the Friday afternoon she rang Steven’s office.
A woman answered the phone and said he was in a meeting. Laura didn’t believe that for one moment, sure he’d given everyone instructions to fob her off if she phoned. But if he wasn’t going to speak to her, she was determined to make trouble for him, so she told the woman that she was about to go off to Brighton to have his baby aborted. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll care,’ she sobbed down the phone. ‘He just used me, then tossed me aside when he got bored. I’m really scared I might die from it, but I can’t bring a baby up on my own.’
She was delighted the woman sounded very shocked, and hung up quickly when she asked for a number Steven could ring Laura back on.
She had a great weekend with Sonia in Croyden. They went to the Orchid Ballroom at Purley on Saturday night, which took her mind off Steven and even made her think that maybe it wasn’t so bad being free again. But the weekend was all the sweeter for imagining Steven being frantic with worry. She hoped he’d gone down to Brighton to try to find her.
About five on Sunday afternoon she returned home. As she half expected Steven to be waiting outside her house in his car, she’d taken the precaution of putting on a black blouse that made her look pale, and left her hair all bedraggled. As luck would have it she’d got her period that morning, so she told herself that if Steven insisted on taking her to the hospital the doctor would think the blood was confirmation of what she’d done. She even staggered as she got off the bus at the end of the road, and kept stopping and holding her stomach as if she was in pain.
But Steven wasn’t there waiting. Jackie was.
It was a warm day, and she was sitting on the wall outside the house wearing a green and white summer dress, her auburn hair tied back with a ribbon at the nape of her neck. Clearly Steven had told her about the message she’d left, and suddenly Laura felt genuinely tearful because her friend was concerned enough to come round.
‘Thank goodness you’ve come, I feel terrible,’ Laura said, clutching at her stomach as she ran to her friend. ‘I wish I hadn’t done it now, I feel like I’m going to die. But I had to, Steven didn’t want it.’
But Jackie didn’t embrace her and there were no words of sympathy or understanding. ‘Stop right there,’ she snapped at her, her face stern and cold. ‘I know full well you weren’t pregnant, so you can’t have had an abortion. You disgust me!’
‘But I have,’ Laura insisted. ‘I’m bleeding really heavily.’
Jackie caught hold of her arm, and manhandled her in through the front door and up the stairs. It was very quiet; all the other tenants must have gone out.
Once in Laura’s room, Jackie pushed Laura down on to the bed. Her face was