This Is Your Safe Place by Claire Gleeson

The name is familiar, maddeningly so, but Emily can’t work out who it is. Not because it is an unusual name, but rather because it is such an ordinary, placeholder one, instantly forgettable. It could be her hairdresser, or one of the juniors at work, or the woman six doors down with all the dogs. It is only when they update the story after lunch, this time with a picture of the dead woman, that she realises who it is. Her hair is shorter, and lighter in colour, and she is even thinner than she’d been at school; but it is her, all right. Looking straight at the camera, mouth half open, as if she is about to speak. On her right side, at shoulder height, is a tuft of sandy hair, where the child she carries on her hip has been cropped out of the picture.

The news site doesn’t name the 36-year-old man who has been arrested in connection with the death, but then it doesn’t need to. It is like those logic problems in the puzzle books Emily used to like as a child; you put all the statements together, and then there is only one explanation that allows all the facts to be true. She lived at the address with her partner and their two young children. The dead woman, 32, and her 36-year-old boyfriend. The man who was arrested was present at the scene when Gardai arrived. Nobody else is being sought in connection with the incident.

Emily has to stand up from where she is crouching over the laptop; her back is starting to ache. She straightens, and reaches up high with both arms, and groans with relief. Her belly is enormous; it is not possible to be this big, she thinks, and to survive it intact, to avoid some wild internal derangement as her body stretches and strains. She thinks of her vital organs, shoved and squeezed into each other; she imagines them loose and tumbling in an orderless cascade, liver upon spleen upon right kidney, perhaps, once her abdomen finally has space to hold them all again. Once her baby is born.

It is the wrong way around, the baby. Head up, bottom down; appropriate for a living human walking the earth, but apparently all wrong for the process of being born. There is still time, said the consultant at the last visit, for things to change; but she did not sound very hopeful, and Emily has been booked provisionally for a Caesarean section the week after next. She is not sure how she feels about this; disappointed, officially, and secretly somewhat relieved. But she has been dutiful, she has contorted herself into the positions from the website the midwife directed her to; she has tried long walks, and swimming, and even a session of acupuncture, during which she relaxed so completely that she fell asleep, and woke with a pool of saliva crusting under her chin. None of it has worked, and now her baby will be born in an operating theatre, and really, this is fine. It will all be fine.

During the long, humid afternoon, the back door open wide to the sultry air and the high, excited squeals of children playing, she cannot stop thinking about the dead woman. She hesitates to call her a friend, even to herself; their relationship had never been one of equals. But she had been kind, that’s what Emily remembers the most. Or not remembers, exactly, for at the time her kindness had been incidental to her glamour - the cascade of dark curls; the make-up, far more expertly applied than that of the other girls; the older boyfriend who loomed in the shadows. But looking back now, it is the kindness that stands out.

She had not been like the rest of them, too wrapped up in their own self-consciousness to risk generosity; she had been friendly and open in a way that seemed to cost her no effort, no internal wrangling or weighing up of social capital. Emily remembers standing diffidently in the doorway of the classroom one lunchtime, the beginning of first year, and the decision about where to sit, which little grouping to attempt to infiltrate, seemed both insurmountable and all-important. And then the girl had looked up and smiled, and shifted her long legs to the edge of the desk where she sat, one of a cluster of five or six in the same hideous maroon, and patted the space beside her.

“There’s room here. Come on.”

It wasn’t that they had become close, exactly; Emily understood, even then, that they existed on different planes. But it was her doorway into the group, her ticket to acceptance, and it was this way that Emily had met Yvonne, and Carol, and Maeve, the girls she had gone on to grow up with; the ones who texted her now to ask if the baby had arrived yet, and sent her memes of brightly-coloured cocktails with silly names.

The girl’s mother had died while she was still at primary school. Emily remembers that vividly, the day in first year she had mentioned it; so casually, as part of some different conversation. And the horrified thrill it sent through her - through all of them, Emily knew, wide-eyed and gormless as they were at twelve - to think of it. She had not known anyone else without a mother, not then, and it was awful and tragic and fascinating all at once.

So she lived in a houseful of men; a strange, largely absent father, and the two older brothers, with whom she used to spend Friday nights in the pub from the age of fifteen. The boyfriend - was it the same one still, Emily wonders? - had been a friend of the eldest brother, already well into his twenties by the time they left school. Although it was never stated, nor even really alluded to, it was understood by everyone that they were having sex. And this, too, was dark fascination.

At seven o’clock Karl texts to say he will be another hour at least and, restless and uncomfortable, she grabs the car keys and squeezes into the driver’s seat of the Focus. The woman had still been living in the area in which they’d both grown up; she had recognised the street instantly when it flashed up on the six o’clock news, the white-suited forensics people moving in and out of the house, brisk but unhurried. The reporter had tried to eke words from various neighbours and passers-by, but it seemed nobody wanted to say much; one woman, her hair a startlingly bright red beneath a pair of sunglasses, shook her head wordlessly with tears in her eyes. Had it been a rural village there would at least have been a parish priest to tap for a few well-chosen words; but this was not that kind of place. The children, Emily had learned from the report, were five and three.

It is a summer evening, and there are kids still out playing on the streets; even on this street. Emily drives slowly along it, afraid that she will not know the specific house; but no, there it is, the white suits now gone but their apparatus remaining, police tape fluttering in the breeze and a solitary Garda shifting restlessly from foot to foot by the front door. It is an ordinary house; small, terraced, but a proper solid old council house, with a small front garden and, Emily knows, a long, narrow rear one. There are two women standing talking in the garden next door; as Emily drives slowly past they pause to stare at her, and she reddens and presses her foot to the floor.

But she does not go home; she drives aimlessly around these familiar streets for twenty minutes more, passing her own mother’s house with her head down, afraid she will be recognised, and stopped, and brought in for a cup of tea and a quick interrogation. And by the time she gets back to the road again the gossiping neighbours are gone, away no doubt to late dinners and noisy bathtimes and whatever the TV has to offer for the lassitude of an August evening. And so she can take her time now, driving slowly past as she stares at the white front door, the cobbled driveway, the child’s scooter lying on its side on the grass. In one of the bedrooms upstairs a single curtain is drawn halfway across, and it looks untidy and wrong, and she wonders suddenly if this is where it happened.

When she gets home Karl’s bike is in the hallway, and she can hear the low thrum of the shower upstairs. She stands at the open front door for a minute, reluctant to close it on the low evening sun that is pooling in the garden. The driveway needs weeding again. She wonders if it would be permissible to take a chair out here, to sit for a few minutes in the light of this west-facing garden rather than the slightly dreary rear one, which is in shadow at this time of day. She is not sure; they have lived here for almost a year, and yet she does not know if sitting in your front garden might be the sort of thing that would have the neighbours whispering behind their hands. There is a residents’ WhatsApp group, which does not seem auspicious. Instead she sits tentatively on the front step, stretching out her bare legs. The baby gives one sharp kick, and she rests her hand on her belly admonishingly. She closes her eyes to the sun.

“You can’t have long to go now.”

Emily opens her eyes guiltily. It is their neighbour; the nice one, on the left, the one who brought over the cake and the armful of daffodils the weekend they moved in.

“Only ten days or so.” She puts her hands to the ground to lever herself up, and the woman — Teresa is her name — waves an arm at her.

“No, no, don’t get up. You look lovely and comfortable there.” Emily searches this remark for disapprobation, but finds none.

“Is it a boy or a girl you’re having?” Teresa is putting something into her brown bin, which is full to overflowing; she spends hours each day in her garden. She is perhaps ten years younger than Emily’s mother; she has grown children who visit at weekends.

“I don’t know. We didn’t find out.”

“Oh, good for you. A surprise is best, isn’t it? There.” She presses the lid closed with a satisfied grunt, and turns back to the house to avoid seeing it spring open again.

“You enjoy the sunshine, now.”

“I will. Thanks.” Emily waves her hand, but she is gone already. She thinks of sunshine, and of babies; of sandy-haired toddlers; of half-drawn curtains, and a scooter tossed carelessly on the grass.

Upstairs, the shower stops abruptly, and immediately she can hear Karl singing, deep and throaty. She struggles to her feet, hoping that nobody is watching this undignified manoeuvre, and steps inside, and closes the door.

The baby turns within her, a large and majestic roll, and her breath stops, and when all is still again she knows that something has changed. The child has righted itself, and now there will be no sterile operating theatre, but instead more waiting, and uncertainty, and then pain. And she finds that she does not mind, now. It feels like valuable work.

And at the end there will be a baby; this shining, singular thing. A boy, or perhaps a girl. Emily has not cared before now; she had been telling the truth when she insisted to friends that she did not have a preference. It never seemed to matter. But now, suddenly, it seems like something that might matter a lot. And yet still she does not know which one to hope for.

………………..

Claire Gleeson comes from Dublin, where she lives with her young family and works as a GP. Her stories have been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize and the Anthology Magazine Short Story Competition.

Twitter: @cmgleeson