Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [202]
Tara nodded miserably.
‘I wanted to take away my stomach. I used to wish I could be the girl in the circus who gets sawn in three and who has her midriff moved in a nice wooden section out to the side. I just wanted all the offending parts to be removed.’
She looked at Tara, desperate to be understood, then told her how she’d sometimes plucked at her skin in an impossible attempt to tear away her body, to leave just the unpregnant Katherine, the real Katherine, remaining.
‘Did you have an abortion?’ Tara, very gently, suggested.
Abortion.
‘You know that I don’t – at least I didn’t – believe in it.’ Katherine couldn’t meet Tara’s eye, as she remembered how, at school, she’d always made mealy-mouthed pronouncements along with the nuns about how abortion was murder, about how no one had the right to deny life to the unborn. But all that had been swept away by the terrible terror that had possessed her. From the moment Lorcan had run out on her she’d wanted to have an abortion. She could see no other way to avoid her life falling apart. She’d known she’d burn in Hell, but she didn’t care. She was in Hell already.
If she could only get rid of the baby she’d draw a line in the sand and from that day forth she’d be the best person who ever lived. Redoubling her efforts to live a controlled, careful life. She’d known that other single girls got pregnant, that they had their babies and loved them. But, she, Katherine Casey was different. Somewhere, not so far beneath the surface, she’d felt that pregnancy was a punishment for girls who lived profligate, promiscuous lives. Because she’d always been so well behaved she’d thought it was the last thing that could happen to her. The last thing she’d deserved.
‘Katherine…’ Tara’s voice crooned. ‘Come in, Katherine.’
‘I couldn’t tell anyone,’ she beseeched, her throat aching from the onset of tears. ‘I’d never felt so alone.’
‘You could have told me and Fintan.’
‘I couldn’t, Tara, I couldn’t. If I admitted it to you then I was admitting it to myself. I just wanted it to be over, and it was far easier to close the door on the past if I was the only one who knew about it.’
‘Jesus, that’s dreadful.’ Tara was snow-white. ‘So you went through it all on your own.’ Then she thought of something. ‘You could have told your mother, she wouldn’t have condemned you.’
‘No,’ Katherine agreed, with an attempt at being rueful. ‘She’d probably have been delighted. Would have organized a termination and might even have tried to make me a test case.’
But Katherine would never have had the moral high ground again. It was bad enough to be the same as her mother, but for her mother to know…
‘So what did you do?’ Tara prompted softly, convinced that it was very important for Katherine to talk about this.
Katherine sighed wearily and braced herself for a trip back to Hell. ‘I hadn’t a clue how to go about organizing an –’ even now she found it hard to say the word ‘– abortion. All I knew was that it was illegal in Ireland and that I’d have to go somewhere in England.’
Tara nodded sympathetically, hoping her distress didn’t show as Katherine related the whole story. How – nauseous, tender-breasted and terrified, two hundred pounds in her bag – she’d got the train to Dublin where there was a place that could help her. How she’d hardly been able to believe the enormity of her position or what she was contemplating. How she’d tried to keep her mind fixed on the future when she’d be liberated from the nightmare.
She’d been mortified walking into the centre, sure she’d be spotted by someone who knew her. But they were kind and gentle with her there. She was examined by a doctor who confirmed that she was eight weeks’ pregnant, then she was forced to have a chat with a counsellor who tried to point out the alternatives. ‘I don’t want to hear,’ Katherine had choked. ‘I just want… Please, I just want it gone.’
The counsellor nodded. She’d seen it so often before, these young girls in a blind panic, so frightened