The Right Thing Read Online Free

a dream in which her father, towering huge through candlelight, was thumping the edge of the pulpit and denting the wood like dough, leaving a caving imprint of his pudgy hand. His bulk loomed bigger than a Disney monster’s shadow and he leaned hard with the palms of his hands so the wood bulged forward, out like a ship’s prow. Beneath it in the congregation were hundreds of identical grey crocheted hats on heads that cowered and keened and wailed into white twitching hankies with hand-embroidered corner initials in pink. Kitty’s eyes flickered open with relief that this wasn’t how she would ever again have to spend a Sunday morning. Her father had been a vicar with a keen eye for promotion and a congregation of adoring old ladies squabbling over the church-hall tea urn and flower rota, just like characters in a Barbara Pym novel. Humble, penitent and pious during his fiery services, the faithful would emerge from his church shaking off their sins in the sunlight like dogs fresh out of a river. Thus purged, they’d go straight back to claim-staking over the post-service biscuit provision and whose turn it was to tidy away the vestments. ‘Worth your weight,’ he used to smarm and charm at them, though weight in what he never specified. In manky old tea-leaves, Kitty used to think whenever she found furtive pairs of these women hunkered down on the vicarage sitting-room floor, picking through bags of jumble like rooks on a run-over squirrel.
    Kitty’s waking mind found its way back to the present and she thought about Julia, the day before, referring to her ‘little bit of trouble’. It was just the sort of dust-under-the-carpet euphemism her parents had favoured. Julia enjoyed the phrase because it hinted at the privilege of knowing a secret; her mother liked it because it avoided uncomfortable truth. ‘Trouble’ was what Kitty had ‘got herself into’, as if no-one else could possibly be involved and she’d done it out of spite. With a father who feared his bishop far more than he feared God, this Trouble had to be got out of the house and away from sight as fast as possible. The right thing had to be done.
    The trouble hadn’t felt so little at the time, either. She hadn’t felt so little. Her grossly pregnant eighteen-year-old body, skin distended to near-translucency by a baby that must have been meant for a much bigger and more grown-up mother, had felt like a dragged sack of swedes. She’d felt as if between her legs some precarious collapsing bulge was threatening to thrust its way to her knees. Each day for the last four pregnant months, banished to one of the nation’s last mother-and-baby homes, she’d spent eight hours perched in cramped agony on a hard chair, sure that only the seat’s unyielding wood was forcing this parasitic growth to stay inside her as she sat with the other inmates addressing envelopes and stuffing them with flyers for cut-price garden equipment. ‘Anyone who wants a cheap tool can have my ex,’ one of the girls had giggled.
    Kitty remembered they’d all sworn to keep in touch, friends for life linked by their months of exile, but no-one really did. One by one, they peeled off to the hospital to give birth and were sent back to the home to be safely segregated in the baby-care wing, where they couldn’t contaminate those who still had the births to get through with any tricky and emotional changing of mind over adoptions. Arrangements had been made – any girl who made a fuss and insisted on leaving with instead of without her child was deemed thoroughly selfish, having no concern for the dashed hopes of the deserving childless. Leaving that place must have been like coming out of prison, she’d thought at the time, you didn’t want to be reminded, you just rushed to get on to the next thing and of course no-one outside wanted to talk about it in case you got embarrassingly upset