All this happened shortly after the millennium. Not long ago at all, really. But it was before social media. And, consequently, before the name Karen became a shorthand for, what? A particular kind of privileged but distinctively female entitlement? An unhappy customer who demands to see the manager. A smug, judgemental harridan with a self-righteous hairdo. Or a decent person unfairly maligned because she sticks up for herself while being female? No doubt every Karen has her story.
Back then, at least, our Karen would have been amused at the thought that her name should one day align her with a type. She was perhaps a little young for the role at the time, but she did like rules, and holding people to account. She also had a kind of bob. More importantly, she did not have to call the police on anyone, because she was the police, or ‘polis’ in the Glasgow vernacular. A Detective Sergeant, in fact. And she was used to the contempt of those who resented her presumption.
This story is not really about Karen’s work, though, or not mainly. It’s about what happened during her maternity leave, which was ‘off the clock’ on compassionate grounds for reasons that will become apparent. But to do justice to Karen’s own perspective, the beginning of that story can only be told in gasps and gulps.
An unplanned pregnancy. Surprising and inconvenient in the context of an unsettled and unsatisfactory relationship. With her boss.
She did love Alexander, and it wasn’t like he was married or anything. Divorced with a kid, but hey: he was a polis. And he loved Karen, but since he had no idea what he was doing with his life apart from working, he could hardly find a secure place for anyone else in it. They did not talk about their relationship.
Much solitary agonising. Possibilities considered. No unequivocal inclination for the option that would make the question go away. Time ticking. Finally, unavoidably, a conversation. ‘I’ll support whatever decision you make’. Maddening. Time still ticking.
A decision. She would not have the baby. Done. And then, no, she would have it. She would be a mother. Make Alexander a father again, and a good one, even if he would just as soon not be a father again. She at least trusted him not to be a bad one. And he took her decision cheerfully enough. For the first time, they began discussing their future together. As Karen’s body swelled, they looked for a flat to share. She planned to use her maternity leave to decorate. Blue for a boy. Alexander would even take some time off to help when the baby came.
Karen did not remember the moment she got the news. Apparently she had let out some kind of unearthly noise before collapsing to her knees and all but through the floor. She remembered waking up in hospital. Her mother and sister coming and going. One or two colleagues too. Her baby was to have no father. Alexander was dead.
She had decided to have the baby on the understanding that Alexander would be there to support her, that they would be a family. And then a bus driver passes out at the wheel… Seriously? She had never signed up to be a single mother. The whole thing felt like a bit of a swizz. And frankly, yes, Karen did want to speak to the manager.
Not that Karen believed in God. But she did make an appeal, as the idiom has it, to ‘the universe’. She felt it owed her an explanation. She was a good person, or at least not a bad person. And she did not think that lightly. Her work had brought her into contact with genuinely bad people. And their victims. No doubt the bad people all had their own stories too. Awful stories of childhood trauma and neglect. Drugs that made everything worse. But some of the things they did… There came a point when to look for ‘reasons’ was obscene.
Anyway, Karen did not believe that to understand is to forgive; quite the opposite. People are not robots or even animals responding to stimuli. There is always a moment of decision, or a series of decisions, however rotten the circumstances. To understand a crime was to understand both. To see that the one did not cancel out the other. Karen had seen it time after time when she’d got to the bottom of a case. ‘And you chose that? Made a habit of it? You bastard.’
A belief in the justice of punishment was Karen’s most Karenlike trait. Talk of forgiveness seemed cheap to her, as if the awful things people did could be waved away. As if it didn’t matter. Surely the universe demanded a reckoning.
This was the kind of thing she and Alexander had once bonded over in post-coital colloquies. Curled up together, safe and close, talking about things civilians would never understand, but in a way other polis would never entertain. It was not the stuff of Karen’s criminology degree, let alone of canteen chatter. It was deep stuff, real stuff. Who else could she talk to like that? Nobody. Nobody.
In the five weeks between her bereavement and birth of the baby, she did grow closer to her older sister, Shona, who moved in with her for a time ‘to keep you from doing anything silly’. Ever the diplomat. They had long conversations, not about justice but about life. About their careers and relationships. There was an age gap between them, and Shona was old enough now to regret not having had children, though maybe it was not technically too late. She was looking forward to being an auntie, she said. But still, when she turned in early for the night, she felt the need to apologise: ‘Not very rock‘n’roll, I know’. Shona, you're a forty-year-old geography teacher. Nobody expects you to be rock'n'roll.
Honestly, Karen preferred evenings alone with Carole King’s Tapestry on repeat. Was that rock'n'roll? It was as rock'n'roll as Karen got. Of course, she did not drink while she was pregnant; she had her standards. But she could still remember how a third of a bottle of vodka had made every one of those songs all about her. The alcohol-free tears still flowed. It was nice to cry about something else, or sort of something else, for a change.
Those five weeks were unlike any other period of Karen’s life, before or after. If anyone were to have asked, she would not, based on her on experience, have recommended combining bereavement with pregnancy. The one process necessarily open-ended and uncertain, the other an ineluctable countdown. And without work to structure her days and weeks, Karen found herself counting down in a shiftless limbo.
She refused to watch daytime television; again, she had her standards, and by the grace of God, Netflix did not yet exist. But she could not focus on a book for more than twenty minutes at a time. She dug out her sketchbook and drew fantastical castles as she had done as a teenager, but after a few days she lost all interest in that. She cleaned the house, or rather picked on random things to scrub and polish obsessively: a skirting board here, a door handle there, a latticework tray gunged up with candle wax.
None of these things silenced Karen’s thoughts. Sometimes, she gave up the pretence and simply stared out the window, surrendering to those thoughts. When she was not trying to read, or talking to her sister or weeping to Carole King – and often while she was doing those things – she was thinking. And she was thinking about the past or about the future. There was no present. No present except the pain. And for Karen, the physical discomforts of pregnancy were inextricable from the devastation of loss. Didn’t every bereaved person’s breasts ache with sadness?
The past, then. Young Karen had set her mind on the police at the age of 14 or 15, and fantastical castles aside, thought of little else. She had chosen her degree accordingly, though mindful that she would have to serve time in uniform and earn the respect of colleagues for whom a degree was a dubious ornament. She had watched all the cop shows. Yes, she had been naïve, but Karen did not like to patronise her younger self. She had lived and learned; that had always been the plan.
Focused as she had been on her career, Young Karen had not spent much time dreaming of wedding dresses and happy families. But then neither had anyone else with whom she had been to school or university. The very thought of a traditional romantic script was just embarrassing. Only now, looking back, did it occur to Karen that she had grown up with a ‘romantic’ script no less prescriptive, if considerably less romantic.
According to that script, it was important to have boyfriends while at school. Boyfriends plural, mind you; one at a time, but keeping it casual. Not too casual, of course, and not too many boyfriends plural. But just one boyfriend for too long would be unhealthy. Because it was also important to make mistakes and have your heart broken, perhaps more than once. That was a bittersweet rite of passage, something you had to learn to laugh at in retrospect, and to condescend to in others. Bless!
You had to be broken in emotionally as well as physically. Then you might be ready for a more serious relationship, but it was generally considered best to experiment a bit first, to have fun. And often it was fun. But for many it would involve at least one experience that could almost-maybe be described as rape, which was most unfortunate, but character building in that bittersweet way you’d come to recognise as the hallmark of maturity.
It seemed to Karen that the overall point was to have any silly notions knocked out of you so you’d be fit for a proper, grown-up relationship or two. Only after those could you even consider marriage. Only when you had learned to compromise with the universe, that is, could you possibly be expected to compromise with another person for the long haul. Which meant you would go into marriage with your eyes open to the possibility of failure. Better have kids while the going is good. After that, who knew? Maybe you’d get lucky and live, laugh, love with your soul mate who was also your best friend. Maybe you’d split up and get back out there in search of a second chance or two. Repeat till death.
Karen had followed the script half-heartedly, had her heart half-broken once or twice, before swearing off. As the time drew nearer, one of the things that had appealed to her about joining the police was the prospect of a secure and predictable career ladder. None of this feeling around in the dark for a future. She put her career first; the rest of her life could take care of itself. Or not. Whatever. She did well, became a detective right on schedule. She was in control.
When a promotion duly brought Karen under the command of DCI Alexander, she could hardly believe he was real. A younger, better-read Taggart, (a few) people joked. He seemed to embody everything that had attracted Karen to the job, and yet was unlike any polis she had ever actually met. Serious, intense, witty. They clicked, of course. Idly, she allowed herself to entertain silly notions about what might have been had he not been married. His subsequent divorce seemed almost providential.
Still, what followed lacked clarity, structure or certainty. It was only the unplanned pregnancy that put things on a different footing. Almost as if Karen had planned it. (If only she had been that clever, perhaps she could have kept the father alive too.) The pregnancy now provided clarity, structure and certainty of sorts, even with Alexander out of the picture. Motherhood beckoned. It was a promotion involving far more responsibility, even if the remuneration package left something to be desired.
For a few blurry – sometimes even joyful – months, the future had been happy families after all, or at least something like that. Now it would just be Karen and the baby. When she was not dwelling on the past, she was speculating about that future, but – with nothing to go on in terms of actual experience of motherhood – she was constantly drawn back to the past. For a while, it crossed her mind that she was in fact carrying Alexander. Not that she literally believed in reincarnation, of course. It was just a thought. A kind of consolation even. A feeling that Alexander was still around somehow. That she was not alone.
It was only when the baby was born that this idea was completely dispelled. And that was because of the surge of emotion she felt. She knew her baby was not Alexander. How did she know? It was like Jodie Foster’s famous line, ‘I know because I never loved him the way that I love you!’
Hormones, she supposed. And yet, this new, overpowering love was not so all-consuming that it took away the pain of bereavement. In fact, she felt the loss of that spurious consolation that had sustained her through the latter part of her pregnancy. Alexander was absolutely gone. It hit her again. And now Karen was battered by two competing torrents of emotion. She cried more than she had ever thought possible.
And yet, the baby made demands that could not be ignored. Karen had neither time nor energy to dwell on the past, or to speculate about the future. The future was here. Life did not so much go on as go mad. Now, Karen’s mother came into her own. She was there to help Karen make sense of it, but there was no end to the madness to be made sense of. It was hard for Karen to admit to herself how much she depended on her mother in those early weeks, but she would not have trusted herself to look after her baby alone. Not all the time.
She lost count of the number of times she walked into the room and was shocked to find the baby lying there - on his mat on the floor, on the table, wherever she had left him – as if he had appeared from nowhere. And this despite the fact she had only left the room for five seconds to get baby wipes from next door. ‘How did that get there?’ part of her seemed to ask, even as the rest of her set about wiping the baby’s bum and putting on a fresh nappy. Apparently it was easier to play the part of a mother than to remember, all the time, that you were one.
Karen was soon convinced she was not a good mother. Despite her own mother’s assurances that she was doing just fine. Despite her knowing objectively – sort of – that this was hard for everyone, that motherhood did not come as naturally as mother’s milk, and let’s not even get into that. Karen was not supposed to doing this. She was supposed to be catching criminals. She was really quite good at that.
There were moments when she even fantasised about ‘taking the baby back’, so he could be given to someone with the emotional strength, the patience, the kindness that Karen so clearly lacked. Of course, she didn’t mean it, and she felt awful for even having the thought, but it was a stubborn one. And then, one night, the third or fourth in a row when the baby simply refused to sleep at all, refused even to stop crying, an exhausted and emotionally brittle Karen looked at her little bundle of discontent, considered her own life, and found herself muttering, ‘This is Hell’.
Around the time Karen had realised she was pregnant, while she was still weighing her options, Alexander had been reading Dante’s Inferno. He became a bit obsessed with it, actually, and had all kinds of nightmares, or even… episodes. If Karen had not been so busy with work, let alone the other matter, she might have been more worried. (Another case of her lacking human compassion?) Nevertheless, he had seemed perfectly lucid when describing the different circles of Hell and where he imagined various historical figures and professional acquaintances would end up. This was before people started talking about cerebral men being ‘on the spectrum’, but Alexander was just a bit like that, so it was easy enough for Karen to downplay it.
Karen’s Hell was not quite like anything Alexander had described, except insofar as it seemed to involve her own self at her worst. But the worst of it for her was that she hadn’t chosen this. Had she? Not the part that hurt. She was not living with the consequences of her own bad choices, but of a freak accident. As if the manager of the universe were less like a just god than a capricious goblin. In which case, what was the point of appealing for justice? Unless the manager had a supervisor with some kind of standards, it would be caprice all the way up. Karen didn’t deserve this.
It occurred to her that perhaps the point of religion was not so much to tell people how to live as to make it possible to live at all. To bear the awfulness that will come in this life no matter how wise or virtuous our life choices. And now she could acknowledge that the only thing worse than being left alone with the baby would be being left alone without him. She held the wailing baby close, shuddering at the thought of giving him up. He was a blessing, after all, even without a father, and she loved him as she had never loved before. Karen’s thought continued: what if her mysteriously overwhelming love for her baby came not from hormones but from a mysteriously loving God? It was just a thought, but a comforting one.
Not that it made things much easier. The love that sustained Karen felt like a finite resource. As potent as it was, it kept threatening to run out. And as one might expect of a purely biological resource, food and especially sleep seemed to help replenish it for a time, as did the support of her mother, especially inasmuch as it allowed Karen to sleep. But she felt like she was driving with a leaking petrol tank, complete with the constant fear of going up in flames. No wonder her thoughts had turned in desperation to God.
And yet, she could not help feeling providence was at work when she noticed a poster for an Easter concert in the church hall where her new mothers’ group met. The other mothers were lovely, and an indispensable source of tips and ideas, but they had always been awkward around Karen, struck dumb – or moved to excessive niceness – by her devastating story. And none seemed remotely interested in the concert. JS Bach’s St John Passion, to be performed in the church itself as part of a Good Friday service. It was not something you would take a baby to.
She did not feel guilty about asking her mother to babysit. The concert was an ideal pretext for a respectable person like Karen to sit in a church and breathe in the air of another world. To hear about Jesus, even. And if Jesus were in fact the source of the love she craved, she would be doing everyone a favour by sitting at his feet for a couple of hours.
Karen was little better acquainted with classical music than with any other aspect of the service, but like the basics of the Christian story, the music was familiar enough. It was the kind of thing that had always been in the background. And attending to it felt like coming home somehow. Not to the particular things that made Karen Karen, but to an inheritance that was refreshingly indifferent to her. And even in the hands and throats of an amateur ensemble, the music moved Karen much more than she had expected.
She did not try to follow the story on the handout with an English translation of the German words; she knew the gist. But when her gaze alighted on a stained glass window depicting the crucified Christ, the gravity of the story hit her with force. Whether it was true or not, it was something to think about. Most significantly for Karen, as she looked at that image, she realised that – whatever else it was – Christian forgiveness was not cheap. Yes, the universe demanded a reckoning, and apparently it had got one. The implications were vast.
And here’s the thing: she wanted it to be true. A year before, this would have struck Karen’s sceptical, forensic mind as a reason not to believe. Not any more. Not with a baby to love.
Karen appears as a minor character in my first novel, That Existential Leap: a crime story, and then more prominently in Gehenna: a novel of Hell and Earth. It’s possible that some of her very distant ancestors feature in The Pictish Princess ..and other stories from before there was a Scotland.