This is the last of a multi-part series reviewing the 1994 anti-abortion novel ‘The Lost Child’, in which protagonist Caz reacts to her mother’s abortion by constructing an elaborate lifelong fantasy about the younger sister she imagines she would have had. Part One is here and contains links to all the other parts.

At this point in the book, Caz has finished writing and publishing her book, in between a rapid and intense romance with her next-door neighbour Will, to whom she is now engaged.

Content warning: Talk of child death, life support cessation decisions, ablism (though this is presented as wrong in-story), inappropriate pressure from the medical profession, description of callous treatment of a body after death, and suicide plans.

 

The highbrow despair

Having ended the previous chapter (the conclusion of the book-within-a-book) on a positive note, with Caz looking forward to the future, Atkins starts this one with Caz in the depths of despair. In a very highbrow literary way, to the point where she actually lampshades it; ‘Oh, Caz, can’t you even watch your heart break without quoting effing literature?’ she writes after quoting Macbeth and rambling about how Laurence Olivier managed to howl effectively on stage when required by learning it from trapped minks.

The next several pages are Caz a) lamenting how awful she feels and b) telling the Greek myth of Cassandra because Atkins wants this for symbolic purposes which I’ll get to shortly. One slightly odd thing here (which will be relevant in a few minutes, so bear with me) is that Caz claims that, as part of the curse, Cassandra knows her prophecies will be believed just once in her life, on the day that she dies.  This would be a brilliantly effective addition to the curse (imagine not only never being believed, but knowing that when it eventually happens it won’t be a relief as it’ll be a sign of your own imminent death), but it isn’t one that I can find in any version online, nor could I find anyone who’d heard of it when I asked on Reddit. I’m not sure whether Atkins took liberties with the story deliberately, whether she actually had heard this version somewhere herself, or whether she simply got it wrong.

Anyway, we eventually find out what all this is about; her lover Will has finally told her the full story of his child’s death, and it turns out that he gave the doctors permission to turn off the life-support machine, which Caz finds unacceptable.

Will’s story (as told by Caz)

Late in her pregnancy, Will’s wife was hospitalised and unconscious with severe pneumonia. The baby was delivered by emergency Caesarean and put on a life-support machine. The next day, the paediatric team came to Will (his wife was still unconscious) and told him that ‘there was a considerable possibility of brain-damage to a greater or lesser extent’. We’re not told what sort of level of brain damage the doctors were suspecting here, but Caz implies that it’s on the level of ‘won’t get qualifications or go to university’. The consultant’s response to this level of uncertainty was…

Their medical opinion was that the continuance of life-support for the foetus was strongly contra-indicated.

As before, Atkins apparently doesn’t know that ‘foetus’ is a term specifically used for the stages of development prior to birth and thus no-one would have been referring to a child after birth by this term. However, that’s far from being the worst plausibility problem with this story. We’re told that the consultant not only recommended switching off the life-support machine, he wanted a fairly quick answer from Will about this because…

[…] as there was no knowing how long the machine would be needed … well, suffice it to say that Will would have to make up his mind while there was still the choice.

… and so the consultant was going to come back to Will at the end of the ward round, forty-five minutes later, and get his answer then, the clear implication thus being that this was framed as ‘switch off the life support right then or risk being saddled with a brain-damaged child which will, of course, be too awful a prospect for you to even consider it as a possible option’.

Aaaaand no, Atkins, that is not how decisions about switching off ventilators are made in real life.

There are rare and tragic cases where brain damage is so severe and the predicted quality of life so poor or non-existent that doctors will advise that life support be turned off. Typically, in such cases, the medical staff will do everything they can to be sure that the prognosis really is that bad. They will sit the parents down for a sensitive conversation about it. They will give them time to think about it. And, above all, they won’t make the suggestion in the first place unless they’re sure that the prognosis really is hopelessly dire.

This idea that a consultant would railroad a parent into making this sort of decision about a child who was already showing enough signs of improvement that they anticipated her shortly being able to breathe independently is just so far away from the reality of these sorts of situations that I’m flabbergasted that Atkins had the brass neck to write this. This is deeply insulting to all the doctors who’ve had to guide parents through these horrible decisions with sensitivity and professionalism. While I disagree with Atkins’ views on abortion, at least with abortion she’s objecting to something that actually happens and not to some strawman she’s invented.

Oh; we also get told a few pages later that the baby’s body was thrown out with hospital trash after death. Again, no. I get that Atkins is probably trying to make some sort of point about how much she disapproves of fetuses being treated this way after abortion or miscarriage, but that isn’t what happens when children die after birth. (For that matter, it’s also not what happens with stillbirths after viability or even with late miscarriages.) Both parents would have been given a chance to hold and say goodbye to their child and then a chance to plan a funeral and choose either burial or cremation. Atkins is arguing against a strawman.

Caz’s reaction

So, Caz has told us this heart-wrenching story of Will, left alone and without guidance under this sort of pressure while his wife is still unconscious. She tells us about how he desperately tries to get through to someone he trusts with whom he can discuss this horrible decision, and can’t manage it within the short time he’s been given, and how he prays for an answer and doesn’t get one, and eventually, after forty horrible minutes of this, tells the doctors that he’ll ‘be ruled by them’, because he just can’t think of any other way to make the decision. Regardless of what you think of the rightness or wrongness of the decision itself, it’s very hard to read this without your heart going out to anyone faced with such a horrible situation and so little support.

Well, except apparently for Caz. She writes in her diary that he ‘murdered his child’ and that he ‘must be a monster’ who ‘destroys everything I’ve ever lived for’. That’s the level of compassion she’s able to show for the man she supposedly loves so much.

And that’s completely in line with the way Atkins has written her character. So far, through the book, we’ve seen a judgemental woman with rigid views on right or wrong, whose main relationship has been with an imaginary person she can idealise, who doesn’t seem able to extend sympathy or grace to the flaws of real people, and who doesn’t even seem to understand the concept of being able to sympathise with a decision with which she disagrees. Meanwhile, she’s seen no problems with making a decision to marry her first serious partner only a few months after meeting him, while still in full-on NRE stage.

With that background, it feels very realistic that she has this kind of 180^o reaction to finding out something about Will of which she disapproves. She doesn’t seem to have any kind of framework for accepting and forgiving someone who has done anything with which she disagrees, however long ago and however deeply regretted. And, now that she can no longer idealise Will (the way she idealised her imaginary sister), everything has crashed down for her.

But I don’t get any sense that this characterisation was deliberate on Atkins’ part. It could, in fact, have worked really well to present Caz deliberately as a flawed protagonist and unreliable narrator. But Atkins is trying to present her as Cassandra the ignored prophetess, the truth-speaker we should all believe. Atkins is on Caz’s side here.

Having given this scene a lot more thought than it actually deserves, I’ve eventually realised that Atkins is clumsily trying to make some point about non-Christians supposedly being unable to forgive:

So what do I do? I honestly don’t think I know anyone who’d understand. I once knew a man [her grandfather] who would have done. But then he had a future and a city with a crystal river to look forward to, where the sun never sets. He would have known what to do. But this, all this futility, wasn’t the end for him.

I don’t have his future or his faith, and my point of reference isn’t the Bible but the classics – which he understood well enough too – so I’ll have to look for my answers there.

So it seems Atkins thinks nonbelievers are incapable of forgiveness. At the same time, she seems to have no concept of reacting to a disagreement by thinking about the person’s reasons for acting the way they did and/or their feelings about it now and whether they regretted it and forgiving others in that way. In other words, she doesn’t really seem to understand forgiveness at all. I’m left with the impression that she sees forgiveness as ticking off a mental ‘there, forgiven’ box rather than actually trying to understand anything about the other person’s viewpoint or actions.

Atkins does not seem to see anything wrong with Caz’s lack of any such attempt to understand. As far as I can see, the only problem Atkins has with Caz’s reaction seems to be that she isn’t able to tick the mental ‘there, forgiven’ box which (in Atkins’ eyes) a Christian would be able to make everything all right by ticking. Other than that, Atkins seems to see this harshness and lack of compromise as completely justified. If this is how Atkins really feels about the matter, then that tells us quite a lot about her.

And just when you thought this was bad enough… (further content warning)

Caz, having broken up with Will because of a decision he made years ago under great pressure and clearly deeply regrets, feels she also can’t face living without Will. So, her reaction is to start planning her own suicide.

She doesn’t go through with it; after a few days of relating her despair at great length (and, to be fair, with beautifully written vivid description; Atkins is good at the wordsmithery part of writing), she posts a more positive diary entry which is all very vague but does effectively imply that she’s going to go and make it up with Will. On top of which, she is apparently a major character in Atkins’ next novel, and, from the look-inside feature on Amazon, it seems she is back with Will, so clearly that’s what happened. But we do get these few days in which, although she never specifically says in so many words that she’s planning to kill herself, she makes it very clear that that’s what she’s thinking.

Now, I’m trying to think how to say this next bit, because I do not want either to minimise the horrendous pain that leads so many people to take their own lives or to make assumptions about what anyone does or doesn’t feel they have to live for. I know that people whose lives seem wonderful on the surface can have unsuspected torments beneath that surface. I know that depression is a tricksy lying weasel that can convince someone that their life is hopeless even when it seems objectively good. So please, please, do not take my next comments as being any sort of judgement on the real people who are faced with real problems that drive them to suicide, and please, if anyone reading this feels that way themselves, know that I believe in your pain and hope for you that you have people who will take it seriously and help you.

But here is the problem with Atkins’ portrayal: We’ve been reading Caz’s diary all along, so we know that she doesn’t have that level of problems. This isn’t a case of someone who seems fine on the surface while feeling terrible underneath. This is someone who has not been suffering from depression, who has not been struggling with hidden problems, whose life has by her own account been going splendidly up until the point where she chose to break up with her fiancé purely because she is too rigid and lacking in compassion to accept that he once, long ago, did something she believes to be wrong. And the result of writing Caz as planning suicide solely for that reason is that what would otherwise have been a genuinely excellently written portrayal of someone struggling with despair comes across more as a teenager having an ‘I shall DIE and THEN they’ll all be sorry!’ strop.

On top of which, we get this:

Cassandra died the moment she’d been believed; with the truth, as always, on her lips.

…which Caz ties in to the fact that she got such good reviews of the advance copy of her book:

My book has been hailed as prophetic, the catalyst to change the law. ‘The tide of morality is turning (I quote) and soon the law will protect the unborn child again, as it has throughout most of history until 1967.’

Oh, yes, they believe me now.

They believe me now.

So, Atkins is trying to draw a parallel between Caz’s planned suicide and Cassandra’s death, with both of them presented as the prophets who die only at the point where people finally believe them. I’m sure she meant this to be powerful and symbolic, but it doesn’t stand up well.

Firstly, Caz isn’t making a prophecy; she’s expressing an opinion. So people aren’t disbelieving her, they’re disagreeing with her. There’s a difference, although Atkins doesn’t seem to get that.

Secondly, the reason Cassandra’s realisation of her upcoming death was a tragedy was the inevitability of what she predicts. She knows that she’ll die later that day and she knows that there is absolutely nothing she can do to prevent it. Caz, on the other hand, is making a choice. She has the options of either facing the grief and learning to make a life without Will, or being less unbendingly rigid in her requirements for the people in her life, forgiving him, and taking him back. However much she might dislike the idea of either of those choices, they still exist.

The result of all this is that her comparison of herself with Cassandra comes across as not so much powerful as grandiose. (It also occurs to me that it is really quite rich for Caz to be comparing herself to someone who had ‘the truth, as always, on her lips’ when she has in fact spent years lying to her publishers.)

However. We are not done yet; there is still a layer of hypocrisy icing on this particular intolerance cake. Because we now find out…

Will and I are having a child.

This, by the way, is written on August 26th. Caz also says it’s a boy, so she’s supposedly far enough along to have had some sort of test for (apparent) gender. Caz and Will met on the first of May and became lovers some time in the middle of June. If Caz is not only pregnant but far enough along to have had a gender check, she must have conceived almost as soon as they started going to bed together, which was only about a month and a half after they met. That is… not a good timescale for making decisions about creating a new person for whom the two of you will be forever jointly responsible.

However, setting that aside; Caz, ferocious defender of fetal life, is pregnant. And considering suicide. So, surely, according to her own beliefs she should be planning on postponing her suicide until the baby is born? Nope. We’re back to the Greek mythology-based symbolism:

Procne took her beloved son, her Itylus, and killed him out of vengeance for her sister.

[…]

Will and I are having a child. A boy. Our Itylus.

…so Caz’s plan is, apparently, to commit suicide while she is pregnant and to view this as some kind of symbolic vengeance against Will in a gospel-according-to-Greek-mythology way.

And she’s planning this despite the fact that her defining character trait throughout the book has been her utter opposition to abortion, which she firmly believes to be child murder. Despite her protest in the end of her book, written only weeks ago, about how having to live through ‘a few short months’ of unwanted pregnancy shouldn’t outweigh a child’s right to life. Despite her childhood vow ‘never to kill my children, I mean a baby in my tummy’. Despite the fact that the entire reason she’s upset in the first place is because she’s angry at Will for what she believes to be child murder on his part. The hypocrisy is utterly breathtaking.

And it could still have worked in-story if called out. After Caz’s eventual decision not to commit suicide after all, she could have had a scene of looking back with horror at how nearly she had done something she found abhorrent. It could have been a learning moment in which she realised for the first time what it was like to be desperate enough to get to that point. She wouldn’t even have needed to change her views on abortion; just find the understanding and compassion that has been so missing from her character until now, maybe look back at her mother’s decision with new insight and sympathy. But we don’t get any of that.

The outcome, and final thoughts

After several entries in which Caz despairs of ever feeling happy again (and also some letters, including one from Caz to her niece for her sixth birthday in which she sends her the story she once wrote of Procne and Philomela, because of course that’s a totally appropriate present to send to a six-year-old, especially when you’re planning to commit suicide knowing what a traumatic event that will be for her), we get a final entry in which Caz seems to have found her way back to inner peace and a wish to go on living. And, again, the wordsmithery part of the writing here is very good. Caz goes out to look at the Thames and we get shown-not-told that she’s focusing on more positive imagery, in ways that are very nicely bookended with the negative images she was writing about back in the novel’s opening pages. The final line, in a callback to a pleading letter Will wrote Caz a few days earlier in which he told her he’d get a bottle of Moet and wait for her, is:

Well, I thought as I turned away, who ever said you couldn’t have Moet for breakfast?’

So, without being explicitly told that Caz has decided to try again with Will, we can still pick it up from that line. In these ways, this chapter is good writing.

The problem with it, however, is that we’re given no indication of how Caz got mentally from Point A to Point B. In real life it is of course fairly normal for a few days of letting the dust settle to be enough for people to find they’ve moved quite naturally from ‘LET’S CALL THE WHOLE THING OFF’ to ‘Potayto, potahto, whatever’; not every argument needs a big definitive resolution. But, when you’ve gone to the trouble of throwing a nuclear-level disagreement in as a plot twist forty pages from the end of your novel, you need to actually address it in some way, not just let it peter out vaguely into nothingness.

Caz could have realised that, while she still disagreed with what Will had done, she could nevertheless feel empathy for him and forgive him. Even better, she could have come to the obvious realisation about her own hypocrisy in planning suicide while she was still pregnant and could have learned the more general lesson of ‘people can make decisions they deeply regret later, especially in acutely stressful circumstances, while still being basically good people’ and extrapolated that to understanding and forgiving Will. But we don’t see any of that. We just go from Caz being all ready to commit suicide to make a point, to Caz waking up feeling a bit better, to Caz apparently feeling positive about life again and being about to go back to Will. So, as plot resolutions go, it’s a damp squib.

However, good or bad (I’m voting ‘indifferent’), it is the end of the book. As I mentioned, Caz does show up in a subsequent Atkins novel titled ‘On Our Own’, and if anyone does happen to have read that I’d be interested to know what happens with the plot and whether the dangling threads from the end of this one are ever addressed. But I’m not interested enough to bother ordering the book, so unless I happen to find a copy in a charity shop somewhere I will not be reading any more about Caz.

And, since I have finally ranted myself out on the topic, this is also the end of this book review. I am sadly behind on responding to comments – for which my apologies – and will try to do so in upcoming days. Meanwhile, I will close by once again channeling Richard Ayoade: Thank you for reading, if indeed you still are.

This is part of a multipost series about ’90s anti-abortion novel The Lost Child, by Anne Atkins. The first post is here; other posts will be linked back there as I post them.

This part of the review will be about the third of the three alternating story strands that I described in my initial summary. In this strand, protagonist Caz tells the story of her relationship with her sister Poppy as part of the book-within-a-book she’s writing, thus giving us what seems on the face of it to be a rather sweet story about the lifelong bond between two sisters. However, in her book’s conclusion, Caz will reveal that Poppy was in fact imaginary. In response to her mother’s abortion, Caz invented the sister she thought she could have had and spent the next twenty-four years picturing the different things she might have been doing with this imaginary sister, and her book has actually been telling the story of her memories of imagining these things.

I originally planned to get through all of this part of the story in one post. However, Atkins has a tendency to weave in bits of anvil-dropping moralising, and there was so much to discuss that I’ve finally decided to split it into two posts. As I still have two concluding posts planned after that, this will make the full review six posts long.

Content warning: Greek myth involving rape, body mutilation, silencing, and child murder.

 

The imaginary baby sister

This strand of the story starts out with what are supposedly Caz’s memories of the day Poppy was born. This scene works well in light of the reveal; the scenes Caz describes are blurred and confused in a way that could work equally well for ‘adult remembering something that happened when she was six’ and ‘six-year-old’s imagined version of what a baby sister’s birth would be like’. However, the next scene doesn’t. It’s a lengthy anecdote about how six-year-old Caz and her grandfather get left in charge of baby Poppy one afternoon and chaos ensues, which works well when we think it’s an actual story of someone looking back on what a mess they now realise they made of something as a child and joking about it all in hindsight, but doesn’t read like something that a six-year-old would have had the self-awareness to invent.

The imaginary justifying quote

As Poppy gets older, Caz and Poppy play together extremely well despite the age gap. That fits perfectly with the reveal (of course Caz would want to picture this imaginary sister as someone she loved playing with). However, what doesn’t fit well with the reveal is that Caz ‘quotes’ her mother as telling other people that it’s actually really easy to have a fourth child because Caz and Poppy just amuse each other all day long and her mother has hardly anything to do. Since under the circumstances her mother clearly couldn’t have said any such thing, what this means is that Caz has blatantly invented a quote from her mother to convince us and herself how easy it would have been for her mother to have the baby. (As Atkins herself has four children, she might well have been trying to get in her own opinion about her own experience. However, she doesn’t seem to have realised what an inappropriate comment it is from Caz in this context.)

The Greek myth

When Caz is twelve and Poppy supposedly six, they spend a holiday with her grandfather, who is apparently a retired classics teacher and who is ‘appalled’ to find out that Caz’s private school no longer teaches classics. Caz is in fact interested in learning the subject and thus her grandfather starts telling them various Greek myths, including the particularly gruesome one of Procne and Philomena. In this story, Procne’s husband King Tereus rapes her sister Philomela and cuts her tongue out to prevent her from complaining; when Philomela nevertheless manages to communicate the terrible truth to her sister by weaving a tapestry which shows the story, Procne gets her revenge on her husband by killing their son Itylus (or Itys, in most versions, but this is the name Atkins used).

Atkins had a few different Doylistic reasons for including this myth, which I’ll get to, but first Caz asks her grandfather the obvious question; why would Procne get revenge by killing the child who was her much-loved son as well? This seemed like a good question, so I did a fairly small amount of internet research and found a point which hadn’t occurred to me; Procne, in the story, would not actually have another option for getting any sort of justice for her sister. Her husband was the king in a country with an absolute monarchy, so he was above the law. I realised that the power of the myth was in Procne’s dilemma; she either had to let a hideous crime against the person she loved the best go unavenged, or avenge it in a way that would hurt her even more. We can disagree with her solution and still recognise why the story of the dilemma is powerful.

Now, if I can work that out I’m fairly sure a classics teacher should be able to work it out. And surely someone who’s ‘appalled’ that his granddaughter isn’t being taught the classics should be eager to seize the chance to explain this. However, here’s her grandfather’s take on it:

‘Well, it was an ancient feminist protest, I suppose. Like Medea. Men could be pretty beastly in those days, and what else could she do?’

‘But didn’t she love him?’

‘Her son? Indeed she did: she died of grief afterwards. She and her sister. That’s why nightingales and swallows have such sad voices.’

‘Then why did she do something which would upset her even more than it would upset her husband?’ I wanted to like Procne, as her story was such a romantic one, but she did seem to me to have behaved idiotically.

‘Ah, now, some people would say that’s what Women’s Lib. is all about,’ Grandfather said with a bit of a twinkle in his eye. ‘Cutting off your nose to spite your face. I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t dare: your mother would give me a frightful ticking off. But it’s only a story, darling. You mustn’t take it too seriously.’

So, there you have it. Raping and mutilating your sister-in-law, leaving her voiceless, is ‘pretty beastly’. But clearly the only reason a woman might not want her sister treated in such a way is that she’s making some sort of ‘feminst protest’ (really, darn those feminists!). And, even if you’re appalled by children not getting to learn the subjects you think they should learn, don’t bother taking the chance to fill in the gaps if you can instead take a dig at ‘Women’s Lib’ while pretending you’re not doing so.

Anyway. One of Atkins’ reasons for including this myth was, of course, so that she could throw in this mention of a woman killing her child because Incomprehensible Feminsty Reasons, Really, These Feminists. Another reason will come up in the final chapters. The other reasons (one thing I do respect about Atkins’ writing is that she does get in a decent amount of layering in this way) are that this helps to set up Caz’s future career and Poppy’s future imaginary career, and it gives us our title grab. Caz writes a short story based on the myth, with illustrations supposedly done by Poppy, and submits it to a publisher under the title ‘The Lost Child’; it gets published in a collection of children’s stories.

Moralising in India

Caz and Poppy drift apart somewhat in Caz’s teenage and university years (which, again, makes meta-sense, since it can reasonably be interpreted as Caz’s interest in her imaginary friend waning quite naturally in her teenage years). Caz then goes travelling through India after university to get some life experience, and meets up with her older brother, who’s working there as an engineer and living in what seems to be a very remote rural village, where he’s formed a relationship with a local woman. Would there be long-term engineering projects in very remote rural villages? I’m a bit dubious, but the Doylist reason is that Atkins wants to set things up for a speech from him about The Evils of Modern Western Society.

‘What d’you imagine it felt like,’ Jack asked me, ‘to be living in the Roman empire at the time of its collapse?’

I was completely stumped. ‘Well, I suppose … er. What did they have? Orgies and things. I guess if you were rich enough …’

‘Exactly,’ Jack said. ‘It probably felt all right. Perhaps quite fun: they might even have argued that that kind of sexual freedom, for instance, was an advance on the strictness they’d had before. […]’

It sounds from this as though Atkins went along with the view that the fall of Rome was related to their sexual activities. From what I can find out on the subject, that idea now seems to be thoroughly discredited. By the way, the actual answer to what it would have been like to live in the Roman Empire when it collapsed seems to be, for the most part, ‘Horrible, with severe food shortages and a high death rate‘.

‘[…]Anyway, that’s what Europe looks like to me now: a society in decline. […]’

[…]

‘But how does it affect things? What d’you mean?’ After all, does it matter if society’s in decline, if people are fed and warm and comfortable?

If people are fed and warm and comfortable, that sounds like a society that’s doing rather well. But what Atkins is talking about, apart from the implication about what she sees as sexual immorality, is the society’s attitude towards having children.

‘It affects everything. It means children over here are more important than cars or telephones. It means people would rather have a family than an electric oven. It means there’s a hierarchy, and people have duties to one another, instead of simply having rights.[…]’

I’ve never understood this particular either-or; it’s like saying ‘coins should have a tail side as well as a head side’. The existence of rights automatically implies the existence of duties.

‘[…] It means I have to decide whether I want to give up my way of life back home and stay here and marry Shangani; or take her home with me; or give her up. If this were Europe we would have been living together for the last year, and she would have had a child if she wanted one, and wouldn’t have if she didn’t, and if she wanted a career she’d have a career, and if she didn’t she wouldn’t; and if I wanted to leave I’d leave, and if I didn’t I’d stay for a while.’

And you’re talking as though having those choices was a bad thing. Yes, I do much prefer living in a society where creating new humans or entering into permanent unions are choices rather than obligations and where women as well as men get the opportunity of having careers. I notice we aren’t told what Shangani thinks of the issue; how does she feel about living in a society that expects her to have children whether she wants to or not?

(On a separate issue, I can’t find the name ‘Shangani’ on any of the main name sites. I might be wrong but I have the feeling Atkins might have pulled a Panju here.)

Caz says that surely that approach is ‘much more convenient, after all’, which doesn’t sound at all to me like an actual response anyone would make to this; I suspect Atkins is working from some kind of pro-choice stereotype (as per the ‘they have abortions for convenience!’ myth). Jack says that it’s more convenient but he’s not sure it’s right, and he’s considering whether to stay in India with Shangani.

‘I don’t want a child in England,’ he said. ‘Europe doesn’t value children. I think that’s what I’m trying to say.’

First, a disclaimer: India and Europe are both huge areas with populations in the hundreds of millions, so I’m very wary of generalisations about how people in one of these places think X while people in the other think Y. However, taken in the context of Jack’s speech and the fact that he’s living in a particularly poor and remote area, what Atkins seems to be trying to say is that subsistence societies place a greater level of importance on having children than Westernised societies do. And, while this is true overall, I think Atkins has completely missed the point of why this is. It’s not because children in subsistence societies are more valued as individual people; it’s because, in a subsistence society, children are your workers and your pension fund. I suspect Atkins might be less keen on the reality of that attitude to children.

The reappearance of Poppy

Caz gets a job as a correspondent in Iran and moves there. After a bit more than a year and a half, she starts up with Poppy again, with the in-story explanation supposedly being that Poppy is travelling for a bit after finishing art school so will come out and see her. How this is supposed to fit with the reveal is extremely unclear. We do learn that Caz is really lonely and longing for another British woman to talk to, but taking up with your childhood imaginary friend again seems a bit of an odd way for an adult to deal with loneliness, and doesn’t go that well with Atkins’ main storyline about the Poppy invention supposedly being Caz’s reaction to the effect on her of her mother’s abortion. There’s then a whole bit about Caz waiting for Poppy and getting so worried when she doesn’t turn up that she phones her parents daily, and Poppy eventually hitch-hiking to get to Caz who then berates her for taking such a terrible risk. Again, I’ve no idea how any of this is meant to fit with the reveal. I suspect that at this point in the story Atkins had temporarily lost sight of the fact that Poppy wasn’t supposed to be real.

Caz loves spending time with Poppy and ends up deciding to come home to London. As it happens, Caz’s parents have just moved to the country and are letting ‘Poppy’ have their London house, so Caz moves in with her. No mention is made of how the finances work out; do Caz’s parents just let her have a family-sized house in London for little or no money while still somehow affording a second place themselves, or is Caz paying a London-rate rent or mortgage on a house that size on a freelance correspondent’s pay? The former sounds implausible but the latter would be downright impossible, so, on Sherlock Holmes’ famous principle, I’ll go with the explanation that her parents were letting her spend years living in a very valuable house for at most a peppercorn rent. That adds an even more pronounced level of poignancy to the way Caz is currently treating her parents.

Anyway, that issue aside, Caz finds that sharing a house with her imaginary friend works beautifully:

In some ways we were happier than the happiest of cohabiting couples. We never quarrelled, as couples inevitably do because they have so much invested in each other. We were never jealous, because we had no rights to each other. If we found each other irritating we could ignore each other for a few days. If either of us needed a change, we could go on holiday with someone else, or simply travel, for a couple of weeks or more. If one of us had a new boyfriend, as I did seldom and Poppy did frequently, the other would simply take a delighted interest in the progress of the affair. [p 251]

That’s the nice thing about imaginary friends; you can picture their interests and wishes as harmonising exactly with yours. I do wonder if Atkins realised this or if she really thought this was a realistic description of what a beautiful relationship Caz could have had with her younger sibling if her mother had continued her pregnancy. Of course an actual relationship with a real sibling – with someone who would have been hanging around hogging the bathroom when Caz wanted to ignore them, who probably wouldn’t have wanted to disappear on holiday conveniently just when Caz wanted them to, who would have had actual new partners whom Caz might not have got on with, who would have had all sorts of traits that would have grated on Caz’s nerves, who might well not have wanted this convenient house-share in the first place – wouldn’t have gone this well. Maybe it would still have been a great sibling relationship, maybe not; but it would never have lived up to the idealised image Caz is picturing.

I think this is a good place to break the post, so I’ll post the rest of my review of this part of the story in a few days, followed up by two more posts as per the original plan.

This is part of a multipost series about ’90s anti-abortion novel The Lost Child, by Anne Atkins. The first post, which contains the summary, is here; other posts will be linked back there as I post them.

In this part of the review, I’m going to discuss the second story strand, which is protagonist Caz’s experience of her mother’s abortion when she was a child, including her family’s vote on it. These sections are part of the book-within-a-book that Caz is writing, and alternate throughout with sections from the two other book strands (read my summary in the previous post and it’ll hopefully make more sense). Caz writes this part of her book in third person and refers to herself as Sandy.

The timeline

Sandy is five when this part of the story starts and has her sixth birthday during it. The timeline is accordingly vague, but here’s what I’ve managed to glean. (This is, of course, all based on the assumption that Caz is accurately remembering events from when she’s five and six, but since that’s what Atkins wants us to go with I’ll go with it.)

Sandy’s story starts in the first week of her summer term in 1990 (which, based on the date of Easter that year, would probably have been latish April). Soon after this her mother mentions having forgotten her contraceptive pill, with the implication being that this is when she gets pregnant. The family vote is on the last day of the half-term holiday, and the abortion in the last week of Sandy’s summer term (which would make it the third week in July). The story then continues through to a point in the summer holidays of the same year, far enough into the holidays that it would have been some time in August.

Working out likely term dates for that year’s calendar, this all means that her mother would probably have been 8 – 9 weeks pregnant at the time of the family vote (making the embryo 6 – 7 weeks, since, for archaic reasons too ingrained to be changed, pregnancies are dated from two weeks before conception), and would have had the abortion around 5 – 6 weeks after that. In case anyone is wondering, that last sadly does fit with typical NHS delays at the time.

Setting the scene

We get a long-drawn-out chapter describing every random thing five-year-old Sandy’s thinking during a school afternoon, which, as you can imagine, is pretty much the opposite of gripping. Considering this is supposed to be the opening chapter of Caz’s book, I’m dubious as to how many readers she’d get. As far as I can see, it’s mainly there for the foreshadowing; in the course of lengthy stream-of-consciousness thinking, Sandy thinks about how she’d like a sister, she mentions to her friend that she’s not allowed to play shooting games because ‘it’s not very nice to kill people’, she thinks about how adults are usually good people with good reasons for the things they do, and she thinks about a book she has at home that shows the various stages of fetal development complete with fruit size comparisons and emotive thumb-sucking.

The story continues through a couple of chapters of very British-middle-class lifestyle, during which Sandy’s mother (Amanda) mentions having forgotten her pill and we gather that this is something she does quite often. This is an excellent example of why long-acting reversible contraception is so important, by the way; what a shame Amanda didn’t get an alternative that would have avoided the need for her to remember to take something on a daily basis. Shortly after that, Amanda tells Sandy she’s pregnant, and Sandy gets hugely excited at the prospect of a younger sibling and starts imagining all the things they’ll do together. This means that Caz/Sandy’s moral objections to the abortion are going to be inextricably intertwined with her crashing childhood disappointment about it. It’s sad that she had her hopes raised in this way.

The family vote

This is the scene that inspired Atkins to write ‘The Lost Child’ in the first place, after she heard about a real-life family who did this (for reasons that Atkins never found out). Here’s how she wrote it.

As per the timeline above, this seems to be several weeks into Amanda’s pregnancy. We don’t find out why it took so long, but maybe Amanda was struggling with the decision. Their father (Simon) tells the children to stick around after breakfast so that they can have a Family Discussion. He launches rather self-consciously into an awkward little speech about how Mummy’s pregnant but it was an accident, and how people used not to have much choice about how many babies they had, hence the huge family size/high infant death rate in Victorian times, and ‘Nowadays we have far fewer children and they hardly ever die, which is much better’ (we’re told, not surprisingly, that Sandy’s brother Jack is already looking bored by this point), but that with this increased choice comes more responsibility:

‘[…]But now we have no excuse for ever bringing a child into the world which isn’t wanted. So this means we have a decision to make. We have to decide whether to have the baby or not. And because the decision will affect you, we want to know what you think about it. We want to hear your opinions. We won’t necessarily do what you want, but we promise to listen to what you say.’

Sandy was listening very carefully, but even so she didn’t understand very well. The baby was already there, wasn’t it? She was in Mummy’s tummy. She was the size of a pear.

No, she wasn’t. Based on the dates I worked out above, it’s at most the size of a grape, if that. Let’s get background facts right, at least.

By the way, the Watsonian reason for Sandy coming up with the fruit comparison is the book she’s been reading about fetal development that uses fruit sizes for comparison. However, it’s not clear why Sandy picked this particular one. She doesn’t seem to have thought at all about what gestation her mother’s at (and, as above, she’s actually wrong about it anyway). So it’s not clear why she’s opting for ‘pear-sized’ with such apparent certainty.

Sandy could see that there might be other people, bad people perhaps, who didn’t like babies. But her parents loved babies. All good people loved babies. That’s what babies are for.

All right, let’s put that myth to rest. I think it’s reasonable to say that all good people want the best for babies and don’t want to see them hurt or neglected. Loving babies is a different matter. The whole matter of how you feel about beings who can’t make conversation, require intense round-the-clock care, and emit loud noises and noxious smells at unpredictable intervals is an extremely individual one, and it is absolutely possible to be a good person who’s indifferent towards babies, or likes them in very small doses, or actively dislikes them. It’s a really bad idea to judge morality by personal likes and dislikes.

Sandy’s mother talks about the practical side of having a baby insofar as it will affect the children; less time to spend on them, less space, difficulties caused by one of the parents having to give up work temporarily. Her father, in a pro-lifer stereotype of why people get abortions, tells them that they won’t be able to go away for expensive holidays or buy expensive things, and won’t be able to send the children to boarding school.

‘Well, I don’t want a baby,’ Jack said simply.

‘I see.’ Daddy sighed. ‘I see, Jack. You don’t want to think about it any more than that?’

No shit, Sherlock, your child is not interested in thinking about the details of a potential baby he doesn’t want. What are you expecting from him; a well-thought-out debate speech that’ll make up your mind for you?

Sandy’s other brother’s view is that he doesn’t mind, which I would have thought counted as a neutral vote. However, because he adds that he’d like to go to boarding school and likes their holidays, it gets counted as a vote for abortion.

Sandy asks the obvious question:

‘What will happen to the baby?’

‘You mean if we don’t have it?’

‘Mmm,’ Sandy said, and the sound hardly came out at all.

‘It’s called a termination, sweetheart. It means ending. It means you stop the baby growing and don’t let it be born and become a person.’

I get that Atkins’ point is meant to be that if you describe abortion to a child she will see past your euphemisms and see that it is really MURDER MOST FOUL, but, even aside from disagreements over whether abortion is murder, I genuinely cannot see how a five-year-old would have got ‘killing’ from this. I’d have thought Sandy would interpret it as the fetus being forever frozen in time at whatever gestation she’s currently picturing it, or maybe thought they could start it growing again later on.

Strangely, we then get this:

[their father] ‘It’s not quite like our summer holidays, this. It’s not a decision where we all have an equal say. You see, there’s one person who’ll be influenced much more than the rest of us by this decision, isn’t there?

Sandy nodded. She thought of Poppy, the size of a pear, in a little pink bonnet and sucking her thumb.

‘Mummy, obviously. For myself, I’d like to have another baby. I think the financial considerations are secondary. We’d make do. But it’s Mummy’s body, and I really can’t ask her to have a baby she doesn’t feel she can cope with. No man can make that decision for a woman.’

So why are they even putting this to the vote? This should never have been a voting matter.

Sandy, of course, desperately wants the baby and is highly distressed by the whole thing:

She would keep the tears down if she had to fight them with all her body. She held her bottom lip with her teeth. Under the table her hidden fists kept seizing the air and letting go again in a quick little rhythm.

Also a reason why this should never have been a voting matter. I get that Sandy would have been upset about this however it was handled – on top of how she feels about abortion, there’s also the fact that she really wants a baby sister and now sees her chance disappearing – but putting a share of responsibility for the decision on her was never appropriate and just made it harder for her.

She knew what she could say. She would save up all her pocket money for all her life for the baby. She would give up school to look after her, so Mummy needn’t give up work. She would do her washing: Barney and Jack needn’t help. She could even feed her with a bottle like some people did, if Mummy was too busy to feed her properly. But somehow she knew these minute arguments of delicate and fragile logic would be useless against the vast tidal wave of adult feeling.

That’s not ‘logic… against a vast tidal wave of adult feeling’, that’s a five-year-old being age-appropriately terrible at thinking through the long-term problems of a plan that seems good in the short term. Of course Sandy’s parents aren’t going to opt for ‘our five-year-old can drop out of school and devote her life to taking care of the baby’ as a solution here, because that would be child abuse.

Sandy casts her vote for having the baby, but because her father is counting Barney’s neutral vote as a vote against (Fix! Fix! Fix!) she’s still outvoted. Her father comes out with some patronising guff about how this is a good lesson that you can’t always have what you want. I really hate it when people do that. If someone is dealing with disappointment, acknowledge that and sympathise instead of telling them what a great life lesson it is. And, yes, this is very much still the case when the ‘someone’ is a child.

Strangely, now that the vote is over we get a completely different explanation from her mother:

‘You see, I got quite depressed when I was pregnant . . . when I was last pregnant. Depressed means sad, but much worse than sad. Sad in a way that sort of destroys you. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. I love all three of you very much and I’m more pleased than I could be that I’ve got you all. But I was quite ill, and couldn’t be a proper mother to anyone, and I had to keep going to the doctor to be cheered up.’ She smiled. ‘It was beastly. I was horrible to everyone. I really don’t think I could go through it again. And I’d much rather have more time with you, than have to worry about a new baby all over again.’

So in fact, the actual issue for her mother is her history of significant pregnancy-related depression and her concern about the effect a recurrence will have on both her and her existing children. It’s extremely understandable that she wouldn’t want this to happen again. And so, once again… why was this being put to the vote? Why was Amanda’s mental health being treated as though it was a subject on which everyone got an equal say? And why was the discussion held in the way it was, with the parents talking about every potential downside of having a baby other than the actual main one that was the issue?

We know that the Doylist reason for the vote scene was that Atkins had heard a supposedly true story about a family who actually did this (or at least that’s how Atkins interpreted the story). However, I don’t get any sense that Atkins worked out a Watsonian reason. She’s trying to portray a Liberal Middle-Class Family who Have Discussions (and doing it pretty well, actually; the dialogue has a realistic feel to it), but even liberal middle-class parents don’t typically feel themselves constrained to run the really important decisions of the family past the children. Nor does it sound as though the parents in this story were genuinely running this past the children; rather, we get the impression that they’re trying to talk the children into voting the way they want.

The headcanon I ended up with here is that Amanda feels guilty about not wanting to continue the pregnancy, and making the decision at least nominally a family vote lets her feel better about it than if she’d just said ‘I can’t face going through post-natal depression again, so I’m going to have an abortion’. I doubt Atkins had that in mind, but it works for me as a headcanon, given the pressure women often feel to shoulder all burdens For The Sake Of The Chiiiiildren. Meanwhile, I feel Atkins has unintentionally written a meta-commentary illustrating how pro-lifers stereotype abortion decisions as being about superficial things when they aren’t.

One other (in-story) point worth noting here is that all of this is supposedly adult Caz’s description of the scene years later… which means she remembers her mother saying this. This isn’t just about Caz not properly understanding her mother’s viewpoint as a five-year-old. She can look back as an adult, remember her mother telling her this, write about it, and yet never see it as a reason to rethink the anger and resentment she’s always felt towards her parents about the abortion. Caz makes it clear she thinks her mother should have continued the pregnancy, but never addresses the risk this would have entailed of severe postnatal depression.

The fetal viewpoint

This chapter is then rounded out with a page or so in which Atkins tries for an ‘omniscient narrator’ effect in order to include what she thinks the fetal POV is. She writes about the ‘smallest member of the family’ feeling safe and comfortable in the womb and learning to suck her thumb, while meanwhile Amanda and Simon are discussing abortion and a song from Rigoletto mourning the murder of a daughter is playing in the background. That last bit is rather nicely done in terms of providing a sense of understated menace, so credit to Atkins for the writing there. However, remember that we’re talking about a fetus that’s at most around nine weeks gestation, which means that brain development would still be at a very rudimentary stage. A fetus of this gestation just doesn’t have the kind of conscious awareness that Atkins is trying to portray. (For that matter, she’s pushing it a bit with the thumb sucking, as well; while that’s reflexive and does start pre-sentience, the earliest I could find as an estimate for when this starts was ten weeks.)

I think Atkins genuinely believed what she was writing, by the way. I don’t think she was lying here; I think she was misinformed, partly because this was all at a time when less was known about fetal brain development and partly because, alas, pro-life groups have a strong history of manipulating and misrepresenting facts. But, however well-meant a misrepresentation this is, it’s still a misrepresentation, so it’s worth correcting the facts here.

It’s also worth commenting on the worldview which Atkins (or Caz, in-book) is trying to use the fetus to portray:

This world around her, she knew without knowing it, was dedicated to her safety. Her mother’s body would starve itself sooner than let her go hungry.

Note that Caz/Atkins is presenting this as a positive in a book that’s against abortion. The implication is, apparently, that this sort of self-sacrifice is a noble goal to which pregnant women should aspire. It genuinely does not seem to have occurred to Caz/Atkins to stop and wonder how right it is to demand that someone continue with a process that can potentially take that kind of toll on the body.

Her mother’s womb would shield her from the cold, and cushion her from violence, and continually keep her protected and nourished.

This image of the uterus as a fetal protector is, of course, the standard popular one. However, it is worth reading this really interesting take on this viewpoint, which turns it on its head. (Hat tip to blogger Samantha Field, from whom I found that link.) The (anonymous) writer at that link points out that, in fact, zygotes often implant in places outside the uterus and grow very nicely there, burrowing in and grabbing their nutrients from the host’s blood supply just fine… up until the point where they rupture something crucial and cause the person whose body it is to suffer life-threatening haemorrhage. That’s why uteruses are necessary. The purpose of the uterus isn’t to protect the fetus. It’s to protect the person who’s pregnant. It’s to mitigate the dangers of pregnancy to the point where the pregnant person is (probably) going to survive them for long enough to give birth.

And I think that’s worth thinking about here. Atkins is giving us the romanticised view of the uterus’s role in pregnancy, with the implication that this is some kind of ironic contrast to the whole idea of abortion, where the pregnant person refuses to have their body devoted to fetal nurturing in that way. But, in fact, it’s biologically more accurate to view the uterus as protecting the pregnant person against the dangers of the fetus… because pregnancy is actually inherently dangerous. And, while it’s easy to forget this in a world where modern medicine has managed to bring the death rate of pregnancy close to zero, it remains the case that having a fetus growing inside your body for nine months and then vigorously exiting carries all sorts of potential short and long-term complications. Without abortion, those of us with uteruses are denied the final say in whether we’re willing to risk those complications. That’s probably not the part of the abortion debate Atkins wants us to think about, but it’s not something of which we should ever lose sight.

The aftermath of the vote scene

The rest of this strand of the book consists of Sandy’s reactions to the decision, both before and after the abortion itself. This part, I think, is well written; overall, it’s a very good portrait of a child trying to process something distressing that she doesn’t properly understand and struggles to articulate even to herself. Sandy has nightmares, becomes upset with her parents, and hides the expensive tennis racket her brother gets for his birthday (leading to it being accidentally broken) because her father managed to leave her with the impression that her mother had the abortion in order to enable them to buy expensive stuff and the thought of this trade-off upsets her in a way that she can only express by hiding the racket. Eventually, she sobs out the story to her grandfather, who is also against abortion and who’s able to offer her the sympathy and comfort she needs.

In this part of the story there are a couple of arguments meant in an out-of-the mouths-of-babes way; the ‘why be pro-choice but against capital punishment’ argument and the ‘why not have the baby adopted’ argument. I’ll therefore write about those.

Abortion vs. capital punishment

This starts off with a very odd bit of Hitler apologia in which Sandy asks her father about Hitler after hearing a garbled version of his story from one of her classmates:

‘He was a man with a great dream […] He wanted work for all his countrymen, and he wanted health and happiness for them all, and he wanted the best nation in the world’

Because that’s totally the way a middle-class liberal is going to describe Hitler to their child. Atkins seems to be using this as the setup for these lines to which she clearly wants us to have an ‘Oh, the irony’ reaction:

‘[…] He was wrong about how to go about it. […] No dream’s worth killing for. You never get freedom that way. You can’t build your own liberty on other people’s lives.’

So either the Hitler apologia bit is Atkins’ very poorly thought out setup or she actually wants to equate pro-choicers with Hitler supporters. Hmmm…. I’m going to vote for it mostly being the former with a bit of subconscious influence from the latter.

Anyway, we learn that Sandy’s grandfather is a pacifist who almost went to prison during WW2 due to being a conscientious objector, and get onto the topic of capital punishment, which Sandy’s father tells her is wrong because we never have a right to take other people’s lives, and we inevitably get this:

‘So Daddy can you only kill people if they’re really, really bad people?’

‘Yes. […]’

[…] It was during bathtime that Sandy asked, ‘Daddy. Can babies be bad?’

Daddy laughed. ‘Babies are very selfish. But they’re not really bad. […]’

‘So a baby that hasn’t been born yet can’t be bad?’

And her father gets a bit evasive and tells her that no, they can’t, but we normally call them fetuses. Walked into that one, Simon.

I’m coming from different premises here as I object to capital punishment on practical grounds rather than ethical grounds. I actually don’t have an ethical issue with the idea that someone who deliberately takes another person’s life should forfeit their right to their own, but I think there certainly are enough problems with the accuracy of the legal system that I’m not OK with that level of irrevocability in punishment. So my position on this is not ‘We never have a right to take someone else’s life’, but ‘There’s always a chance new evidence might come to light proving them innocent, so I’d rather have someone who’s still alive and can be let out of prison if need be’. And I’m also not a pacifist, because I think that fighting back against oppressors is much better (or a lot less worse, if you prefer) than leaving them to go blithely on with the oppressing. I certainly think there are cases to be made for objecting to particular wars, but I really don’t share Atkins’ implied belief that refusing to fight against Hitler is somehow a morally stronger position.

Of course, there are some people who are against capital punishment but for abortion rights; so is that a contradiction? I don’t think so. I think it’s perfectly consistent for your dividing line to be ‘protect life, but not at the expense of using other people’s bodies for life support’, or ‘protect the right to life for conscious beings with actual brain activity’, either of which works as support for a pro-choice and anti-capital punishment stance. (On the flip side, I do also think it’s not automatically inconsistent to have the opposite set of views. While I obviously disagree with people who are against abortion, I don’t think ‘But you believe that people who’ve committed severe crimes should lose their right to life, so how can you say that a fetus should still keep it?’ stands up as a good reason for that disagreement.)

Since we’re on the topic of contradictory views and since the US political landscape is what it currently is, I will add one other thought here which is not related to anything Atkins has said but which I think does need saying: If you’re against abortion but also against setting up a properly tax-funded healthcare system which would save lives – and which would also pay for contraceptives to avoid unwanted pregnancies in the first place – then that is contradictory. Unless, of course, protecting life isn’t really your reason for banning abortion at all.

Abortion vs. adoption

This one comes up when Sandy and her family are visiting her mother in hospital prior to the abortion (which was, by the way, a blast from the past for me, bringing back the days before pre-op clinics when anyone having surgery under general anaesthetic had to come in the day before and stay overnight; I remember the ward clerkings back in my junior doctor days). Sandy gets chatting to another woman on the ward, Sara, who is, apparently, recovering from surgery from ectopic pregnancy (which Atkins does apparently consider acceptable, so she at least hasn’t reached the stage of extremism of the current US anti-abortion movement).

We learn, via Sandy’s questions about whether Sara has children and why not, that following surgery for two ectopics Sara can no longer get pregnant, and, as she’s too old to be approved for infant adoption (she doesn’t mention the possibility of adopting/fostering an older child), she won’t be able to have children even though she really wants them. Ding! Sandy, of course, comes up with the idea that her mother can continue her own pregnancy and give the baby to Sara, thus solving both problems. When her parents tell her that it ‘just doesn’t work like that’ and can’t explain more clearly why not, she understandably becomes upset and desperate to convince them, or at least to get an answer that makes sense to her. It all deteriorates into a huge argument with Sandy getting smacked by her stressed father.

Looking at this altercation more clear-headedly, it sounds as though the question of why they couldn’t give the baby to Sara (answer: because legally in the UK you can’t just give a child to a random stranger, so Sandy’s parents didn’t have the option and that’s that) was getting confused with the more important question of why they didn’t give the baby up for adoption by someone, which is what Atkins actually wants to demand of women having abortions.

There are, of course, many reasons why adoption isn’t just a substitute for abortion. What’s strange is that the very obvious answer regarding this pregnancy doesn’t get mentioned at all. We’ve already been told that Amanda is at high risk of post-natal depression. That risk is still going to be there (in fact, probably higher) if she continues the pregnancy only to have the baby adopted. Having brought up Amanda’s risk of depression, Atkins ignores that plot point completely for the rest of the book, including here where it would be an obvious point to mention.

So, poor Sandy doesn’t get her question properly acknowledged or dealt with, and is left once again wondering desperately about the irrationality of the adults in charge.

The vow

This strand of the book ends with a chapter about the death of Sandy’s new rabbit (also called Poppy, which made this book really confusing when I was skimming through trying to figure out the plot). Amanda offers to help Sandy bury it, and after this is done Sandy stands by the grave wondering why her sister didn’t get a grave and thinking deeply about the whole thing. She thinks about how she’ll always remember her sister and think about what she’d be doing at each age and stage of life (thus giving context to the ongoing third strand of the story in which she’s been writing about her supposed relationship with her in-fact-imaginary sister). She vows to Poppy (the sister, not the rabbit) that she’ll never forget her and that she’ll ‘never kill my children, I mean a baby in my tummy’. Thus ends this strand of the book.