Celia slumped in the chair, hungry but too tired to move, her dark, greying, wiry hair pulled back into a functional ponytail and a bobbly pink cardy drawn over the top of her uniform. As she stared up at the clock noting it was well past bedtime, her 17 year old daughter Bridget padded into the living room in pink flannel pajamas, smiling with a steaming mug of tea in each hand. Celia kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on the coffee table. Bed could wait for now.

“Hi Mum” Bridget said, brown eyes smiling brightly through an unruly mane of golden brown curls. She handed her mother a Winnie the Pooh mug with the teaspoon still in it and sat down cross-legged on the sofa, turning up the volume on the family friend; a 1980’s telly that blended in a comforting way with the furniture. Mum smiled, happy to be back at home.

Bridget, eyes glazed over and unflinching from the screen reached her arm down under the coffee table; her hand went straight to a tin of biscuits like the automatic arm in a car factory. She still hadn’t uncrossed her legs and, in shifting weight to bend down for the tin, she almost went head-first off the sofa, but still her eyes never left the telly. Drawing herself back up she opened the box and only then did she dart her eyes away from the screen for a second, to choose a custard cream, then back again to the fascination of a car chase on some American cop show. She passed the tin to her Mum and Celia took a choc-chipper to dunk. She stared at the curling flowers on the curling wallpaper. Her mind was still buzzing with the pace of her day; thoughts that easily drowned out the sound of the TV. She was always far too busy in her working day to indulge herself dwelling in thoughts and feelings. It had been another long day and now Celia began dunking around in its events with a cookie of contemplation that began quickly to crumble into a limp soggy mess.  

Celia was reminded by many of the women who passed through her work of the girl she was when she had been passing through there twenty years ago. You see them sitting there in the pre-counselling waiting room, new faces every day, looking uncomfortable. Steeling themselves. Making occasional nervous discussion with the person next to them, reading the sexual health awareness posters covering the walls preaching safe sex, and safer sex, and, if the worst comes to the worst, counselling. Celia saw herself there again; she’d taken the day off at the print factory where she worked saying she had to visit her Dad in Barry. She got the bus alone to the clinic, guilt-ridden and scared, and when she came to its imposing front driveway she crumpled in fear at the gate and had to steady herself on a lichen-covered stone gate post.

There was a good hundred yards of driveway, cars parked between neatly trimmed gardens rimmed with rhododendron bushes, leading up to an arresting four story Victorian manor house. “South Yew House” had, in the late 1920’s been converted into a private Sanatorium and later was taken over by the NHS. It had three tall archways leading through to the large oak doors; the grey stone façade masked by Virginia creeper and crust of unusual gothic turrets around the roof made it feel on the approach about as welcoming as Manderley. Celia had since wondered if many girls had simply turned away at the sight of that place, but maybe that was the point. She had herself continued to crunch up the path once her emotions settled down and joined the other stony faces in that waiting room. That was only a year and a half before Bridget had been born, but a very different time she rarely spoke of. Never to Bridget, despite how close they were.

As the show ended Bridget noticed anxiety in her Mum’s face and asked how her day had gone. Celia sighed, sat up and began to tell a familiar story. Celia recalled today’s events to her daughter in a matter-of-fact voice, that of a trained detachment yet with the openness of an old friend “There were four of them today; two who I didn’t deal with myself, Karen took those. I was speaking to one girl of 28. She was a business student with uterine scarring from a past Chlamydia infection, acquired through a relationship of 4 years with some cheating arsehole.” She scowled and continued. “She hadn’t thought she was still able to get pregnant, so the abortion for her was an extremely difficult choice.”

Celia’s voice softened with a distant affection as she spoke of the young patient. “She was clearly such an outgoing person normally; when she spoke to the other girls, she sparked up a little. But for the most part she looked deathly pale.” Celia remembered how the girl, Rose, sat; shoulders dropped, with her gaze following the dust particles which were blowing about the floor in the light summer breeze from the window above the desk. It was a sunny day and the occasional breeze that wafted in seemed like an intruding phantom moving unpredictably in the uncomfortably austere waiting room. 

 “Though she’d known something was wrong, she hadn’t realised she was even pregnant at first; she had continued to get two full periods whilst pregnant. So she’d continued to drink throughout and there was also a great risk of toxaemia and other infections in her case if she continued with the pregnancy, due to the scarring. I discussed her situation with her and it seemed, because she was still a student, and her relationship was fairly new, she hadn’t realistically contemplated pregnancy. But she seemed perked up by the news that she was at least able to carry a child after all.” 

“The other girl in my care was 19, she was going to a Girls Aloud concert after her abortion and when I was taking her history she says “do you think we’ll be done by 5?!”’ Celia shook her head scornfully, and didn’t even notice as she spilled tea on the skirt of her tunic “…apparently she needed time to get tarted up”.

The girl, Clair, had arrived with make-up that was immaculate and her blonde hair flowed down past her cheeks in unnaturally perfect straightness. Her dark eyes, heavily caked in mascara, flitted about whilst Celia had taken her medical history. She habitually flicked that hair and met each of the procedures of the day with a routine but impatient distraction. “She hadn’t taken any notice of anything said” Celia recounted wearily “She just didn’t care.”

Her eyes appealed to her daughter’s recognition “I asked her to take her nail varnish off because the anaesthetist has to be able to see your fingers and toes. It’s the quickest way of telling if the patient is dying when they’re out cold. The stupid girl had had candy-pink acrylic ones done earlier in the day and wouldn’t remove them!” As her mother’s eyes gaped incredulous, Bridget cried “Never!” hopping up an inch or too in excitement and repositioning herself directly facing her mother, chuckling, she exclaimed “Oh my God! Some people! That’s hilarious!” Her eyes, sparkling at first, dulled now as Bridget checked herself; continuing, “but how dreadful really…” in a humourless tone that overcompensated in its gravity. Both mother and daughter then simultaneously shook their heads gravely and sipped their tea, sharing looks of disbelief between them. 

Now, sitting with her treasured daughter in her comfortable home, Celia’s thoughts became angrier, competing for prominence in her agitated mind. “For the sake of her own goddamn life, the stupid girl wouldn’t remove her fake nails! It’s those that really get to me. I didn’t become a nurse to do things like that. She had no grasp on the gravity of what she was doing.” Celia had found herself drawn towards a bluntness of approach with young Clair that emphasised the true nature of a termination… tried to show her that it was something to be taken seriously. She felt a little guilty about the colourful detail she’d used in describing how the foetus was removed and left this lapse of professionalism out of the narrative she now gave to Bridget. 

“Of course I realise it’s not my job to teach people to care. But you can’t treat every patient the same. How do you teach someone to be human? It was useless anyway. She’ll most likely be back to me within a year.” 

She appealed again for understanding to her attentive daughter’s dark brown eyes, “There’s the other girl; who thought she could never get pregnant and then had to make the difficult decision to end this life inside her... fully formed after 2 and a half months, you know.” Bridget nodded slowly allowing Celia’s eyes to drop to the limp and soggy remains in the bottom of her cup as she continued in broken monotone “…the child’s head crushed in the forceps and its tiny corpse removed by suction from her haemorrhaging body…”

“Suffering the feelings of loss and the bloods of miscarriage for the succeeding three weeks."

“Questioning.”

“Drained.”  

She paused and took another cookie from the tin. 

 “And then there’s Girls Aloud.”