Free The Twisted Way by Jean Hill Page A

expecting were all he needed.
    ‘I wonder if it will be a boy or a girl?’ she often said to him. ‘It’s kicking, darling, feel it, the doctor told me it is a good healthy child,’ and she would press his hand to her stomach.
    ‘A fluttering, just like a tiny bird,’ he would marvel and looked forward to holding their first child in his arms. A child that would be part of him, his own flesh and blood. He would never treat it like his father had treated him. Their baby would be loved and cherished.
    Two months before the baby was due Pamela slipped on ice on an old patch of cobbles that formed a short path from the kitchen to the dustbins at the back of the cottage. Nobody could see her or hear her when she cried out for help though she called out many times as loudly as she could manage.
    ‘Somebody help me, please, somebody ... oh, help me,’ she called until her voice grew faint and weak.
    Tears trickled down her face and cramping pains determined to assail increased in strength as her womb reacted with strengthening contractions in an effort to abort the baby. Her voice became weaker as the minutes passed. She tried to cry for help but soon found it impossible to make any sound. Her mouth felt dry and her skin cold and clammy.
    ‘My baby,’ she mouthed. Have I damaged my back? Oh God, she thought. Someone help me. Her legs had begun to feel strangely numb. She tried to drag herself a few inches, holding on to the branch of an old plum tree that grew nearby. The sharp flinty stones that were interspersed in the cobbles dug into her legs, tore her fine silk stockings and inflicted deep scratches but she could hardly feel them. Dampness crept deep into her bones and she lifted her right hand to button the top of her cardigan to keep out the cold wind that licked her neck without mercy. The branches of the large trees at the bottom of the garden rustled and creaked as the wind found its way through her clothes. ‘My right arm,’ she groaned. ‘It’s difficult to move it. Have I broken it?’ The mounting shock threatened to overcome her. She could feel the warmth of what she thought was liquid creeping down her legs. Perhaps her waters had broken, or was it blood? Her hips started to shake uncontrollably as fear gripped her. How could her bones keep jogging about like that?
    ‘Pray God, stop the dreadful jerking, the awful pain!’
    She turned her head and looked at the large white snowdrops nodding their heads under the trees. Purple and yellow crocus too were evident, their buds shut firmly as though objecting to the harsh frosty weather. The daffodils and tulips had yet to burst through the cold ground. Her attention momentarily shifted towards them.
    ‘They’ll be lovely in the spring, Pam,’ she recalled John saying when they planted them together in the autumn. ‘They’ll give us pleasure for many years. They’ll form part of our future together.’
    Was there a future now? That thought became uppermost in her mind as her body foisted painful spasms upon her.
    She managed with fresh resolve to cry out once again in a voice now reduced to a faint quivering whisper, tempered by the shaking that her body was enduring. Nobody answered. It was futile.
    The back door she had painted with zeal a bright deep blue shortly after they had first moved into the cottage now beckoned her. If only I could open that door and feel the warmth of my small kitchen, she thought. Tears trickled again down her cheeks. A vision of the new units they had installed recently passed through her mind. She was proud of them and had filled some of the shelves with goods that would be useful when the baby arrived. She thought too about the small white wool jackets she had recently knitted, booties and hats stowed carefully away in the small bedroom that they had equipped as a nursery.
    ‘Oh, thank heavens, the pain is going and the shaking is stopping, perhaps I will have some bones left,’ she told herself with relief. She