HCE received a lot of high-quality submissions for The Green Issue – sadly, too many to fit inside the magazine! So we offered some writers and artists who’d sent in work the chance to be published here on the website. Keep an eye on our social media for more great work like this, now that The Green Issue print magazine has been released! (For more information or to purchase your copy, visit our shop.)
William Harris
Stop, Go
An impatient Claire Hulme swore loudly as her car came to a stop.
Trapped behind a lorry behind roadworks, and the clinic just round the corner.
‘It’d be quicker to get out and walk from here’, she said to no one, checking the dashboard clock (itself unreliable since British Summer Time ended).
There was a word she was trying to avoid thinking about. It felt too…ultimate. But really, she thought, it was as ultimate as you could bloody get: the doctor told her that because of her age (38 – and a bit), this could be her only chance.
She hadn’t been so timid when she’d told Rob.
‘I’m going to have an abortion,’ she’d said, flatly and resolutely.
He was leaning on the kitchen side, staring at the toes of his trainers. A minute earlier, when she said she was pregnant, he’d met her eyes. She saw no panic, no heartbreak; just a look. Was it empathy? Whatever it was, it confirmed everything Claire had suspected about Rob: he was a genuinely lovely guy. He faced downwards and did his daft thinking face, looking like an eight-year-old who’d been given a maths problem.
He knew what she thought about kids; they’d been dating seven months, and these conversations happened early at their age. He lifted his eyes and nodded, eyes softening again. ‘Okay,’ he smiled gently. ‘Of course.’
He went in for a hug and she pushed him off, demanded he say what he was thinking. He said he’d support her whatever, and she told him to get off the fucking fence. He swallowed, then straightened in a way she couldn’t help think was funny, like a volunteering soldier. ‘I’m willing to try it,’ he said. ‘To be a dad.’ He’d said early on he wanted kids.
Even if Claire had felt the same way, she couldn’t trust him. He was hands-down the nicest guy she’d ever met, but it was not a dead-cert that daddy would stick around.
Cars exchanged angry horns in front of her. This is taking ages, she thought, winding down the window. She stuck her head out to see down the road, smelling hot tarmac. A lorry and three cars away, a lad in high vis was holding a lollipop stick saying ‘STOP’. What on earth are they playing at? She pulled her head back in.
Most of her friends had kids. Her decision not to was a defiant one, but she was good at the grown-up act now: explaining things, playing, telling off, helping them put shoes on. She enjoyed it, she just didn’t feel any urge to raise children, to shape new people or pass herself on in any way. There were times, though, that she’d see one of her friends’ families, and she could sense the bit you can’t see with the naked eye, the love that held them together. She thought of her brothers, and reminded herself that families don’t stay that way forever.
She caught her eyes in the mirror. Beneath them the lines, faint etchings at first, were getting deeper. She was glad she’d dyed her hair; the new colour suited her eyes better. She was proud of her irises: hazel – sometimes green, sometimes brown. She liked the idea she could always change. Those wrinkles, though, she thought. Wish I could do something about those.
She was drinking too much and too often. It was still a lot of fun, though the calories were really sticking now – piling up around her arse and hips. Up two jean sizes in two years, and that was before she found out she was pregnant. In her darker hangovers she’d asked herself whether she needed kids just to stop the boozing. With a clearer head, she’d assured herself that was not a sensible reason to have children.
The wait was stressing her out. That light on the dashboard was still on; she’d taken the car to the garage, they changed the oil, did some other work under the bonnet (apparently), charged her 150 quid, and the light remained. She was sure she could smell weird exhaust fumes. Was it just the lorry, or the roadworks? She tried not to taste the pollutant air – she thought about it harming her lungs, her body, harming…
Her dad would’ve been over the moon with a baby. She suspected he was disappointed she hadn’t given one to him, and she could never be sure if that was part of the reason they’d grown apart over the years. Her parents were Catholic – mostly restricted to christenings, weddings and funerals, but still came from big families, and believed that’s the way they should be. As a shy child she always found the family gatherings intimidating, and in her teens they became a painful obligation, but as an adult she’d started to appreciate the unconditional warmth and togetherness they brought. That was the joy of a family, she supposed.
Her mam would’ve loved a grandchild too – she’d always been mad about kids. When she died, the fractured family she left behind was barely capable of supporting itself. Claire and her dad got closer, to start with, but in the end it was just out of necessity, for comfort – her three brothers shed silent tears at the funeral, then did everything to avoid acknowledging mam’s death every day since. Once time had begun to ease father and daughter’s grief, they drifted apart again, friendly but short on things to say.
If mam was here, she thought, this would be easier.
She was staring at a garden near the road. Small clothes on a washing-line lifted in the breeze; a tired woman put a wheelie bin outside the gate. Nearby, Claire saw the green buds of daffodils, poised to open.
She jumped – a taxi blared its horn behind. The lorry was already passing the workman, who’d flipped his lollipop stick to green, GO. She inhaled deeply, took off the handbrake, and drove.
William Harris is a writer, poet and journalist. You can follow him on Instagram (@harriswords). He lives in Manchester.