Sanctus

Chapter 11

Liv pressed the buzzer and waited.

The house was a neat new-build in Newark, a few blocks back from Baker Park and close to the state university where the man of the house, Myron, worked as a lab technician. A low picket fence marked the boundaries of each neighbouring plot and ran alongside the single slab pathways to every door. A few feet of grass separated them from the street. It was like the American dream in miniature. If she’d been writing a different kind of piece she would have used this image, conjured something poignant from it; but that wasn’t why she was here.

She heard movement inside the house, heavy footfalls across a slippery floor, and tried to arrange her face into something that didn’t convey the absolute loneliness she’d felt since her lunch-time vigil in Central Park. The door swung open to reveal a pretty young woman so heavily pregnant she practically filled the narrow hallway.

‘You must be Bonnie,’ Liv said, in a cheerful voice belonging to someone else. ‘I’m Liv Adamsen, from the Inquirer.’

Bonnie’s face lit up. ‘The baby writer!’ She threw her door wide open and gestured down her spotless beige hallway.

Liv had never written about babies in her life, but she let that slide. She just kept the smile burning all the way into Bonnie’s perfectly coordinated kitchenette where a fresh-faced man was making coffee.

‘Myron, honey, this is the journalist who’s going to write about the birth. .’

Liv shook his hand, her face beginning to ache from the effort of her smile. All she wanted to do was go home, crawl under her duvet and cry. Instead she surveyed the room, taking in the creaminess and the carefully grouped objects — the scented tea-lights blending the smell of roses with the coffee, the wicker boxes containing nothing but air — all sold in matching sets of three by the IKEA cash registers.

‘Lovely home. .’ She knew that’s what was expected. She thought of her own apartment, choked with plants and the smell of loam; a potting shed with a bed, one ex-boyfriend had called it. Why couldn’t she just live like regular folk, and be happy and content? She glanced out at their pristine yard, a green square of grass fringed with Cypress leylandii that would dwarf the house in two summers unless pruned drastically and often. Two of the trees were already yellowing slightly. Maybe nature would do the job for them. It was her knowledge of plants, and their healing properties in particular, that had landed Liv this gig in the first place.

‘Adamsen, you know about plants and shit,’ the conversation had started prosaically enough when Rawls Baker, proprietor and editor at large of the New Jersey Inquirer cornered her in the elevator earlier in the week. The next thing she knew she’d been cut from the crime desk, her usual beat on the darker side of the journalistic street, and charged with producing two thousand words under the heading ‘Natural Childbirth — as Mother Nature Intended?’ for the Sunday health pullout. She’d moonlighted before with the occasional gardening article, but she’d never done medical.

‘Ain’t a whole lot of medicine involved, far as I can see,’ Rawls had said as he marched out of the elevator. ‘Just find me someone relatively sane who nevertheless wants to have their baby in a pool or a forest glade without any pain relief bar plant extracts and give me the human interest story with a few facts. And they’d better be a citizen. I don’t want to read about any damned hippies.’

Liv found Bonnie through her usual contacts. She was a traffic cop with the Jersey State Police, which took her about as far from being a hippy as you could get. You couldn’t practice Peace and Love when dealing with the daily nightmare of the New Jersey turnpike. Yet here she was now, radiant on her L-shaped sofa, clutching the hand of her practical, lab scientist husband, talking passionately about natural childbirth like a fully paid-up earth mother.

Yes — it was her first child. Children, actually; she was expecting twins.

No — she didn’t know what sex they were; they wanted it to be a surprise.

Yes — Myron did have some reservations, working in the scientific field and all, and yes — she had considered the usual obstetric route, but as women had been giving birth for generations without modern medicine she strongly felt it was better for the babies to let things take their natural course.

She’s having the baby, Myron added in his gentle, boyish way as he stroked her hair and smiled lovingly down at her. She doesn’t need me to tell her what’s best.

Something about the touching intimacy and selflessness of this moment pierced the armour of Liv’s good cheer and she was shocked to feel tears coursing down her cheeks. She heard herself apologizing as Bonnie and Myron both rushed to comfort her and managed to pull herself together long enough to finish the interview, feeling guilty that she had brought the dark cloud of her unhappiness into the bright sanctuary of their simple life.

She drove straight home and fell fully clothed into her unmade bed, listening to the drip of the irrigation system watering the plants that filled her flat and ensured, in the loosest sense, that she shared her life with other living things. She picked through the events of the day and wrapped herself tightly in her duvet, shivering with cold as if the solid ice of her loneliness could never be melted, and the warmth of a life like Bonnie and Myron’s would never be hers.