Shooting Butterflies by Marika Cobbold Page A

the baby after all.
    She fretted about the price of things, about how her friends would react to sharing the flat with an infant, about childcare and how to compensate the baby for having no father. She asked how she could be everything to this stranger when she meant not very much even to herself.
    But some days were spent happily dreaming. Would her child have bright-blue eyes like his father or green ones like Grace? And what would be his talents and interests?
    â€˜What are you doing sitting there grinning to yourself?’ Angelica asked one evening.
    â€˜I didn’t know I was,’ Grace said.
    â€˜You were. You were looking into the distance with a dreamy smug smile on your face.’
    Grace gave her friend an affectionate look. She had known Angelica since they were both fifteen. She was lucky to have a friend like that who she could depend on. When they were younger Angelica had been a left-wing radical who left her washing with her father’s housekeeper, she was a rebel who abhorred the use of the F-word. Now she was a young woman who wanted a career and knew it was her right to have a child, who did not believe in men but was forever on the lookout for the one true love. In a changing world Angelica’s perpetual state of contradiction was a comfort.
    â€˜I’m pregnant,’ Grace finally told her.
    â€˜You’re pregnant. How? No, don’t answer that. Who?’
    â€˜Him.’
    â€˜Oh,
him
. That little prick in America. Does he know?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜It is his baby too. Don’t you think he has a right?’
    â€˜No,’ Grace said. ‘He left me.’
    â€˜Be fair, he didn’t know you were pregnant.’
    â€˜Did he ask?’
    She lost the baby. She got up in the night to have a pee and found blood pouring out of her instead. Angelica drove her to the hospital. Grace was told that she was no longer pregnant. The baby that had grown inside her without as much as a byyour leave had left with the same quiet determination. Once again someone had come into Grace’s life, made themselves matter, and left. The doctors told her that a miscarriage at this stage was fairly common and often for the best as it could mean the baby had been malformed or sick. Grace could not help thinking that those early weeks of not being made welcome might have had something to do with it.
    In her mind she called the baby Gabriel. Gabriel Jefferson McGraw. Such a big name for a baby small enough to rest in the palm of a hand.
    For years afterwards Grace searched the faces of children the age hers would have been, if he had been born, not just dislodged.

And you complain that I make your life out to be miserable
. Grace, lying in the narrow camp-bed in Mrs Shield’s spare room with the seconds ticking by on the old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock, could hear that journalist, Nell Gordon, like some busybody imaginary friend.
    This is an interior monologue
, Grace said.
That means I speak and you don’t, so bugger off out of my head
. She turned on her stomach and put the pillow across the back of her head, folding the sides down like flaps over her ears. At last she slept.
    But sometime in the early hours of the morning she sat up with a start, not sure what it was that had woken her. Her head felt heavy and the room was stuffy. She got out of bed and, pulling back the curtains, opened the window wider, breathing in the night air. She slept well through the constant noise of a London night, but the countryside was different, its thick silence suddenly pierced by branches hammering on your window, an owl hooting, a fox crying out like a child in pain. And if you slept through that there was always the cockerel who, contrary to popular opinion, has no idea of time but just likes to pass the lonely hours crowing. Grace had not spent more than four consecutive nights in the country for twenty years. ‘Don’t you miss it?’ Mrs Shield was always asking