Read Online After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell - Free Book Online

understand the true semantics of the word 'labour'. For a day and a half the dome of her belly contracted and raged and she saw the heartbeat of her child echoed in an undulating red electronic line. When the line went flat and the machine cried out a monotonous bleep, they cut her with one slash and dragged the baby out by the head with cruel steel forceps. Seconds later they were staring into each other's eyes in shock. She never strayed far from Ann. In time she would bear a daughter and give her Ann's name.
In the second hour of her second daughter's life, Ann wrapped her baby tightly in a shawl. She thrashed her red, angry limbs until she was free, her tiny starfish hands clenched
in defiance. They called her Alice - a short name that never seemed to contain her character. The word starts deep in the back of the mouth and ends with you expelling air from your lips. She had black hair and black eyes from the moment she was born. People bending over her pram would glance at Ann and at the cherubic older child and then back at the baby with olive-black eyes. 'She's like a wee changeling, isn't she?' said one woman. Ann's fingers tightened around the pram handle. 'Not at all. ' When Alice was still young enough to seem like a child to Ann, she left to travel the world. She waved goodbye from a train window, beads looped and plaited into her long black hair, rainbow skirts trailing the ground. She returned crop-haired, in tight leather trousers, an Oriental dragon rampant on her shoulder-blade. 'How was the world?' Ann asked. 'Full,' she replied.
Her third daughter was watchful and loved. She drank in the sights of her two older sisters and was like both of them at once, and so not like either of them at all. She saw, copied, emulated. She was cautious, made no mistakes because they'd made them all for her. When Ann visited her, she made her tea from the herbs that grew in her window-boxes.
     
Jamie screams and batters the tray of his highchair with his plastic trainer cup. Annie joins in the wailing gleefully, letting her cornflakes get soggy and unappetising in the milk.
'Quiet!' Neil roars from behind the Scotsman.
The children ignore him. Kirsty crams a spoonful of baby rice into Jamie's mouth, hoping to thwart the noise. 'Eat up your breakfast, Annie, or you'll be late for playschool. '
'I hate playschool.'
'You do not. You liked it last week.' 'I hate it today. '
'You haven't been yet so how do you know you hate it?'
     
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'I just do. ' Annie swishes her spoon around her bowl, making the milk skirl around the rim.
'Don't play with it, just eat it,' Kirsty says. Jamie chooses that moment to spit out his rice which spatters Kirsty' s shirt. 'Oh, bloody hell,' she exclaims, jumping up for a cloth.
'You swore! You swore!'
Neil appears from behind the paper. 'Eat that up at once, young lady,' he thunders at Annie.
'No, I won't, I don't like it!' she shouts. Neil smacks her hand. 'Do as I say!'
Annie begins to scream in earnest. Over the racket, Kirsty hears the telephone ringing. 'I'll get it.'
She picks up the receiver with one hand, wiping down her shirt with the other.
'Hello?'
'Kirsty, it's Dad.'
'Hi, how are you? Listen, can I call you back? It's feeding time at the zoo here and as you can probably hear, things are getting out of hand.'
'I'm afraid I've got some rather bad news.'
Kirsty turns her back on the kitchen and clutches the receiver with both hands. 'What is it? Is it Mum? What's happened?'
'Your mother's fine. She's here with me. It's Alice.' 'Alice?'
'She was hit by a car. She's in a coma.' 'What? But when?'
The kitchen has become deathly quiet. Annie is holding her spoon to her chest, staring open-mouthed at her mother. Neil comes across the room and stands behind Kirsty, listening. Jamie, sensing a change for the worse in the atmosphere, begins to snivel.
     
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Ben listens to his daughter's sobs down the telephone. Ann moves in and out of the room, putting things into suitcases.
'It was last