This pregnancy was different. Her belly had popped early and she found herself relishing wearing bright, skin-tight clothes where as a pregnant twenty-year-old she’d slunk under men’s shirts nicked off the boys in the squat or bought three for a pound from charity shops. She walked belly-first, hands always cradling her boy from the world, making sure they all knew, realizing for the first time the herd instinct, pushing through centuries of London isolationism, which made strangers automatically protective of her body. It was not how she was used to being treated in a crowd. On the Tube, people stood for her. In the street, they made way, the women smiled, even white women; grandfatherly bus drivers asked how she was doing as she paid her fare. People talked to her, asking how long to go, telling her she looked well. Society had never reacted to her like this before and it had taken her a while to get used to it; her body and space invaded from inside and out.

‘Of course, you’ll have done all this before,’ said the midwife, trying to distract her from the stab and ache of blood-letting. ‘How old’s your first?’

The two pregnancies conflated, created a wormhole between two very different people, made it all impossible to forget. Thirteen years, the same womb. She’d wake up at night, her veins throbbing, unsure whether she was Sam Burke or scared little Sammi Smith, carrying a wanted and planned-for baby or a piece of collateral damage.

And she ached most for Debbie; for the retroactive shame and humiliation she felt about that birth. She’d never had a problem showing her daughter love but couldn’t go near her now without the churning of complication. Their interactions grew more and more clipped, Debbie’s voice rising higher and higher, and as Sam’s due date approached she shipped her lovely girl off to Avril’s every weekend, terrified lest she say something she shouldn’t in the heat of an argument. She spent the three weeks of her maternity leave before Elliot’s birth nursing hatred, pure, clean and focused, for the man she didn’t know how to name, an idea of his blondness always in the corner of her eye, light and lordly, clouding and ruining everything it touched. She hated at the mechanics of a system that had decided it had the right to use her, she hated at Clio for unearthing it all, and she hated herself. In the red height of labour she dug her nails into Dale’s arm and chanted Debbie’s name repeatedly, increasingly frantic.

Loaded, February 1996

Hot Scots!

As Trainspotting becomes the most successful Britflick in yeeeears, Pete Moss turns his eyes (and his, er, jockstrap) to the frozen north for this week’s Shaggable Six. Och aye the YES!

1. Kelly Macdonald