Free Shadow Baby by Margaret Forster Page B

she’s young. I wish you were young.’
    Catriona for once had the good sense to laugh. ‘Well, I was once.’
    ‘When?’
    ‘Don’t be silly, Shona - when I was young, of course, when I was lona’s mother’s age.’
    ‘When was that though?’
    ‘Oh, about twenty years ago, I suppose, I don’t know how old Jean Macpherson is, twenty-eight or nine maybe.’
    ‘Why didn’t you have me young?’
    ‘I tried, but you just came when you were ready and that wasn’t for a long time.’
    Shona frowned. She recognised the tone in her mother’s voice without being able to label it and she didn’t like it, it made her feel cross, though she couldn’t understand why. She felt she wanted to attack Catriona in some way, so she did. ‘Why haven’t I got brothers or sisters? It’s not fair.’
    ‘No, it isn’t.’
    ‘It’s your fault too.’
    ‘Fault doesn’t come into it, Shona. I’ve explained before, I lost my other babies.’
    ‘Why didn’t you find them then?’
    ‘You’re being silly now, you know what I mean when I say “lost”. I told you all about what happened and how sad it makes me talking about it.’
    ‘Where did you have me?’ Shona suddenly asked, in that abrupt, intense the way she had, the way that always disturbed her mother because it seemed as if a much older child was speaking.
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Yes. Was it upstairs?’
    ‘Upstairs? Good heavens, no, it was in hospital.’
    ‘But where?
    ‘Abroad.’
    1 Where abroad?’
    ‘In Norway.’
    ‘Where in Norway?’ Shona was almost shouting now.
    ‘Really Shona, the name of the town would mean nothing to you.’
    ‘I want to know.’
    ‘Bergen. There you are, you see, it means nothing to you.’
    ‘Why did you have me there?’
    47
     
    Once more Catriona told the well-known story of Shona’s birth and once more Shona hardly listened. Her mother never seemed to tell her what she really wanted to know, but then she didn’t really know what that was. She craved detail, the kind of detail Kirsty boasted about - ‘My mammy was making a cake and she’d just cracked an egg on the side of the bowl and she felt me drop inside her, and my daddy said she looked funny and he told her to lie down, but she said she had to finish baking the cake and she did and he phoned the doctor and she put the cake in the oven before she went upstairs to have me, and just as I was born two hours later the oven timer pinged and the cake was ready and …’ There was nothing about cakes or ovens pinging in Catriona’s account of Shona’s birth. Shona didn’t want the hospital described, it didn’t mean anything to her The only part of the story of her birth that she liked was the bit at the end, when her father came rushing in to see her and said, ‘She’s the loveliest thing I ever saw.’ She told that bit to Kirsty and lona only to find it didn’t go down at all well. ‘Babies aren’t lovely when they’re born,’ Kirsty announced. ‘They’re ugly wee things, all of them, I’ve seen them, I saw my sisters just when they were born and they were horrible, screwed up and red and yuck all over their heads.’
    ‘Well,’ said Shona, ‘I was lovely, that’s all.’
    To her fury, Kirsty and lona mimicked her and laughed and she didn’t know how to stop them.
    Often, when she was walking home from Kirsty’s or lona’s house she wished she were going somewhere else, especially when her father was away. She’d walk along the shore road and look out to sea and think first of her father and then of where she had been born. It was like a speck in her mind’s eye, fixed far away on the horizon, and she wanted to travel towards it and see it open up into something recognisable, the way lumps of blackness became land the nearer you approached them in a boat ‘One day,’ she told her mother, ‘I’m going to go and see where I was born.’
    ”Where you’re born isn’t important,’ Catriona said, ‘it’s just a place. It’s where you’re