The Scrapbook by Carly Holmes Page B

together, bumping hands against my arm. I recoiled, pushed past them both, harder than I’d intended, and she stumbled backwards. I didn’t pause to see if she was all right. I barely made it to the door of the shop before I threw up.
    They drove me home and I sobbed for the entire journey, doubled over with my face in my lap. The boy sat with me in the back of the car, his skin waxy with nausea and distaste. He patted me awkwardly, hissed his helplessness to his mother. He was terrified of my tears.
    The mother was terrified of something else. She stopped the car in the lane outside our house and helped me out, held onto me for a moment.
    Is this the only time you’ve been sick lately, sweetheart?
    I could make out the outline of mum at the living room window, lamp-lit, haloed in bronze. As I gently pulled away and started to walk towards the front door, the outline wavered and melted. This wasn’t the car she was expecting, but what joy must she have felt, just for a second, when it actually stopped outside the house? Enough joy to salve the last decade and more?
    As I walked up to the front door I realised that I had become my mother. But unlike my mother, I was going to learn my lesson, and I was going to learn it right now. We both loved too fiercely, and too much, but unlike her I wouldn’t ever again wrench at my heart with both hands and thrust it with such wanton eagerness at another person. I wouldn’t ever again scour myself out with love, until I was raw and emptied of me, ready to be filled by them.
    That’s the great thing about being sixteen, isn’t it? You really do believe that you can unhook yourself cleanly from a future dictated by blood and conditioning, simply because you want to, because you’ve decided to. I even had the audacity to pity my mother a little, for her helplessness in love and her lack of strength. So different from me, I thought. In the years since then, of course, I’ve been too busy repeating all of her patterns to have time for pity, for either of us.
    I lay in bed that night with my hands laid across my stomach, kneading at the tiny soul that squirmed and somersaulted beneath my palms. Tomorrow I would go to the doctor and ask him to help me destroy it. The next morning the cramps hit, and by the next night I had nothing left to show for my first love affair apart from bloodied bed sheets, a taste for olives, and a silver-framed photograph of strangers buried in a tree.
    *
    The standoff lasts for three days. I tend to mum’s needs with exaggerated care, checking and double-checking that she’s got enough cushions behind her back, or preparing meals from Granny Ivy’s old recipe books that neither of us enjoy. For her part, mum winces and gasps theatrically whenever I lift anything heavier than a mug and tries to lever herself from her chair every evening to take her own plate into the kitchen.
    â€˜I can do it, love. You just sit there and rest for a bit.’
    She’s determined that my pregnancy should trump her dodgy heart and I have to reluctantly concede that she’s scoring more points in our little competition. She’s clearly a pro. Neither of us has mentioned the argument that brought us to this and I’m guessing she feels as righteous and wronged as I do about the snooping accusations.
    I finally snap on the third evening when she follows me into the kitchen, intent on warming me a mug of milk (‘You need the calcium, lovey’) whilst I’m just as intent on mixing her a weak gin and tonic to wash down her bedtime painkiller. We use our hips as weapons as we jostle next to the fridge, both scrabbling to get the door open. I don’t want to knock her bad arm around too much but she’s not hampered by such qualms. Her nails are longer than mine and she doesn’t baulk at employing them to her advantage.
    I snatch the milk bottle from her and slam it onto the sideboard. ‘For god’s