by Ali Mercer
He certainly used to like escalators, though. No, like isn’t the right word; he had been thrilled by them and also slightly terrified. He lacks the gift of indifference. The nonchalant shrug is not and never has been in his repertoire.
The escalator will be an outing. An adventure. Something to look forward to.
Now that the stress of the drive is over, she notes that her back is protesting again. Hopeless! She can’t afford to be frail. Aidan still needs her. Aidan will always need her.
She couldn’t bear it when other people moaned about how busy their children were with their own lives, how they hardly ever called or bothered to visit. Honestly! Didn’t they understand that that was the point? Didn’t they realise how lucky they were?
People tended to think they owned their children, or that their children owed them something, and many of them never seemed to learn that this was not the case. They wanted to take the credit, as if they alone were responsible for the life that had taken root when they planted it. They didn’t understand that a gardener might dig the soil and feed the rose and water and prune it, but the blooms and thorns grew of their own accord, and the petals unfurled because that was what they were meant to do, not because anybody made them.
But Leona was not like that.
She had first met Leona at the Kettlebridge craft fair, running a stall selling her own wares – second-hand goods that had been mended and painted to make them better than new. A sideline, Leona had told her: ‘Not my day job – not yet, anyway.’ Viv had been impressed with the young woman’s energy and drive, but hadn’t guessed that a lost child lay behind it – the need to escape into being busy, and to try and make something of herself. But it had made perfect sense once she knew, because Viv herself was the same: why else had she spent so much of her life on committees, trying to be good?
She had only found out about Leona’s baby because she liked the bits and pieces Leona had been selling so much – refashioned jewellery and handbags, mainly, with a few knick-knacks, freshly painted and decorated bits of crockery and china. She had gone to Leona’s flat to look at the furniture Leona had been working on, and Leona had told her about Bluebell almost without prompting. It was a test: Viv had known that straight away, from the look on Leona’s face as she told her. Leona wanted to see if Viv deserved to know.
There had been so many occasions when Viv could have said something about Aidan, to so many different people: before George passed and even more so after. Why was it Leona who had opened the floodgates? Maybe it was because Viv barely knew her. Maybe it was because of the tattoo of bluebells on Leona’s wrist, which had turned out to be a tribute to her daughter. Anyway, Viv had blurted out the truth then and there, and she had wept, and Leona had comforted her.
The meeting, the support group for other women like them – mothers who for one reason or another, did not live with their children – had been Leona’s idea. She had been so sure it would work out that Viv had kept her doubts to herself, but she hadn’t been surprised when the other potential attendees had melted away. Misery did not seek company, after all.
But then Rachel had come – the woman with mask-like make-up who was temping in the office where Leona worked for her real day job. Whatever it was that had happened to her, it was obviously still raw and recent. After Viv had given her the barm brack and came back into the house, Leona had said, ‘If anybody needs this, it’s her.’
But maybe it was really Leona and Viv who needed it. To be able to help someone. To make some kind of difference, when there was so much that couldn’t be changed.
Viv approaches the entrance to the post-surgical ward and rings the buzzer for admission.
When you’re separated from your child – bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh – they are always frozen in your heart at the time and age at which you parted. Viv knows full well that the Aidan she’s about to see is a middle-aged man. Still, it feels as if the son who’s locked away from her on the other side of the security door is a toddler still: just as helpless, as needy, and reluctant to submit to unpleasant medical procedures, or remain in an unfamiliar place.
There is a reception desk at the head of the ward, but it is never staffed. After a few minutes, during which she manages to restrain herself from pressing the buzzer again, a nurse comes by to let her in.
Viv doesn’t recognise her, but she knows Viv straight away. It’s the Aidan factor. He makes an impression on people. Often not a positive one.
‘Aidan’s doing well, though still heavily sedated,’ the nurse says. ‘I’ll take you to him.’
Viv pauses to take her coat off and hang it up, and smears her hands with antibacterial gel from a dispenser – these seem rather token, hopeful gestures towards the prevention of infection, like lighting a candle in church as an offering for the dead, but Viv has always operated on the principle that something is better than nothing and anyway, it is what the signs say to do. Then she hurries to catch up with the nurse, who walks at a brisk pace that Viv struggles to match.
The nurse is an attractive sort of girl, and Viv reflects that under different circumstances Aidan might have fancied her, and then suppresses the thought. Poor lad, doomed to a life of perpetual virginity, though from the perspective of her three-score-plus years on the planet Viv thinks that maybe he’s saved himself a lot of bother.
After the drama when Aidan first came round from anaesthesia and got very upset, they’ve put him in a room on his own. And there he is, lying on his back in bed, asleep, his arms neatly arranged on top of the covers, one hand covered with bandages and plasters securing the drip in place. There is a large window next to his bed and raindrops are still clinging to the other side of the glass, but Aidan’s face and the outline of his body are touched with gold from the unexpected sunlight pitching through a break in the clouds.
He is so peaceful, so composed, it could be a deathbed scene.
She asks the nurse, ‘When can the drip come out?’
‘Not until after he’s shown he can eat and drink for himself, I’m afraid.’
‘He’s not going to eat and drink with that thing in. He might try and rip it out. It’ll drive him crazy.’
The nurse sighs. ‘They won’t want to take it out only to have to put it in again. The consultant will review him on his ward round − shouldn’t be too much longer now.’
Viv puts her Tupperware box of cupcakes on the bedside table. She says, ‘If I’m not here when he wakes up, could you please try and make sure he’s offered one of these? He may not like any of the food you have. He’s a very picky eater.’
‘OK, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll leave you to it. Ring the bell if you need anything.’
The nurse goes out, keeping the door open, and Viv sits down to watch over her son.
He has a window with a lovely view – not of the city but of green hills stretching to the horizon. He’ll like that, when he’s better. You can just see the road that leads to the hospital car park and there’s a bus stop and, sometimes, ambulances, so that’ll provide him with diversion.
Aidan tends to notice things that nobody else is interested in. The number of lights above the bed. The make of the car passing the bus stop. The three birds wheeling in a distant corner of the sky. And he has always seemed to see right through her… past the carefully groomed, ageing outer shell to her heart.
It is warm in the sunlight, almost like summer. She closes her eyes and the darkness is tinged with orange. For a moment she allows herself to bask. She imagines herself relaxing, having not a care in the world.
Letting go.
But that is what she must not and cannot do.
As if an alarm has gone off, jolting her back into wakefulness, she’s alert again and the sensation of drifting off somewhere else – somewhere bright and hazy, perhaps near the sea – is gone.
Aidan is still sleeping peacefully, but that won’t last forever, and God only knows what state he’ll be in when he comes to. Most likely this is the calm
before the storm, and soon enough all hell will break loose.
But that is a good thing, she reminds herself. Chaos is a sign of life. An Aidan who is capable of wreaking havoc on a hospital ward is an Aidan who is still in the world of the living, even if acting in a way that is not particularly convenient for anybody else.
However nice medical people are, it’s always made plain that when you’re on their territory, you operate by their rules. But Aidan won’t submit to that. Aidan isn’t very good at rules, unless, that is, they’re reinforced with cupcakes.
She has tried to explain this to the staff here, but she’s not sure the message has quite got through.
Oh well, if they don’t watch out, they’ll find out soon enough what a six-foot-tall middle-aged man is capable of in the throes of a toddler’s rage.
But to look at him now, you could almost imagine that he was just like anybody else.
He had been such a sweet, docile baby. And then, suddenly, almost overnight it seemed, he had become a changeling child: screaming, biting, hitting, spitting, lashing out, and at peace only when blank, absorbed in rubbing a favourite stick between his hands as if trying to light a spark that was never going to catch because there was nothing for it to catch on.
And then it was down to what the men in white coats said, and she and George had listened to them and agreed to do as they said, and have Aidan taken away.
You have other children, the men in white coats had told her. Concentrate on them. You need to move on, for their sakes.
Did she love the others a little less because of Aidan? It makes her feel awful to think this, but it’s possible. After Aidan, she couldn’t help but maintain a small protective space around her heart, to insulate it from future shocks.
At least she’d had Aidan with her for a time. Some women gave birth knowing that their children would be taken from them, or would die or were already dead. And some women sank into such depression that they wished their lives were over, and believed that their babies would be better off without them.
But when she’d first held Aidan in her arms it had seemed as if he and she were the still axis at the centre of everything, and the people and places around them – even George – were distant and peripheral. It would never have occurred to her that four years later she would be saying goodbye to him.
When she left him at the first institution he had lived in, he had turned his back to her, absorbed in the spinning top she had brought because she knew it would divert him. To this day, she doesn’t know whether he was indifferent to her departure or oblivious, or stoic and resigned beyond his years – beyond anybody’s years.
A normal child would, surely, have bawled, wailed, clutched at her, obliging her to peel his hands off her ankles finger by finger before she could leave him there.
It had been agony. Somehow she had got through that day, and the next, and the next. Housework. Cooking. Looking after George and the girls. She knew George knew how she felt – she could see it in his eyes. ‘It’s for the best,’ he had said to her. ‘They’ll be able to help him there better than we can. We couldn’t go on the way we were, Viv. We couldn’t have coped with him, not now he’s getting so big.’ And she had willed herself to believe him. It was, after all, what all the experts had said.
And then, a week later, she had gone back, and there Aidan had been in the visitors’ room sitting in a bright patch of sunlight, playing with the spinning top as if she had never left him, as if no time at all had passed.
She had lived for years with the fear that the others would turn out to be like Aidan – which, in a way, had also been a strange kind of longing. Because if they had, she wouldn’t have given them up. She knew that much. She could never have done that again. They’d have had to put her away as well.
But no, the others had been chatty, competitive, possessive, demanding – all the things Aidan never was – and, ultimately, they had gone off and left her, which was how it was meant to be.
Everybody goes in the end, if you don’t go first.
But Aidan…
Her halting, imperfect, interrupted love for her firstborn has been the most terrifying and compelling experience of her life, and it is impossible to believe that anything so vivid and powerful could ever be cut off.
But there is no point brooding… Much better to keep herself occupied. She rummages in her backpack – so much more practical than a handbag – for her knitting.
Passing the time while waiting to see Aidan: this has been the story of most of her life. By now she should be well used to it.
She’s knitting a baby cardigan, premature size, smaller than the things you can buy for newborns in the shops; she does a lot of these for the hospital. As she works on them she often thinks about the mothers whose children will wear them: all that hope and fear, those hours in the special care baby unit next to the incubators. Watching. Waiting. Praying, whether you call it that or not.
She puts the knitting down in her lap and reaches out to touch Aidan’s bandaged hand, very lightly, so as not to wake him.
‘We’ll get you out of here soon enough, my darling,’ she whispers.
Fourteen
Rachel
Always, just when you don’t need it, when you can’t afford for anything to go wrong, something comes along to cause chaos. Today it’s snow, which has snarled everything up even though it’s not even that heavy, and somebody else’s accident, which has brought the traffic to a near-standstill.
Not her fault. It could happen to anybody. But because of her track record, it matters. It will be harder for Becca to forgive.
The crucial moment – curtain up for Oliver! – inches closer, and then passes.
Finally, she turns off at Kettlebridge, and everything begins to move. She has never been more relieved to reach Becca’s school.
The car park is full and has been for some time, judging by the light dusting of snow that has settled on every surface. Somewhere round here will be the people carrier she had bought when she was pregnant with Becca, which now belongs to Mitch.
They’d both assumed back then that there would be more children.
‘It just didn’t happen,’ was what she had learned to say if anybody was rude enough to ask.
She leaves her car in an unmarked spot next to a flower bed. The compacted snow of the car park is particularly lethal, and she nearly ends up flat on her backside several times as she picks her way towards the entrance.
Just outside the auditorium she hears music. Girls’ voices, raised in unison. Rachel hasn’t heard the song for years, but recognises it straight away: it’s ‘Be Back Soon’, the most cheerful of all possible goodbyes.
She takes a deep breath, pushes open the swing doors to the lobby and goes through. It’s a cavernous, brightly lit space, decorated with commemorative plaques and students’ artworks − big, splashy oil paintings in gilt frames like Old Masters. There is no one there apart from a curly-haired, cardigan-clad young woman who is setting out wineglasses on a table covered with a pristine white cloth, ready for the interval.
Becca’s class teacher. Oh, God, but what’s her name? A blank. How can Rachel have forgotten? It’s just further evidence that she’s unfit to be here: is barely functioning, even now.
Somewhere in that auditorium the Chadstones are sitting together and watching like proud, proper parents. Probably next to Mitch.
Rachel approaches the teacher, leaving a trail of wet footprints on the pristine floor. She smiles her best smile, apologises, asks if she could just slip in and stand at the back.
‘I’m so sorry,’ the woman says, her eyes big with sympathy of the this-is-hurting-me-too variety. ‘But I just can’t. It would be so distracting for the girls. It’s not long till the interval, if you wouldn’t just mind waiting?’
Her name is still a blank, something to do with birds maybe, suggestive of pecking and scratching and then flitting away. Ah yes – Miss Finch.
Miss Finch looks down at the gla
sses of wine she has set out so far as if it occurs to her to offer Rachel one, and then thinks better of it and faces Rachel again with a bright, slightly nervous smile.
‘Maybe you might like to have a look round the art works?’ she says, bravely but a little falteringly.
Don’t worry, I’m not actually dangerous, Rachel feels like saying. Not to you, at any rate. Instead she withdraws without saying anything.
She leans against the auditorium doors, as close as she can get, and does her best to listen. Then applause breaks out and the doors are pushed open. She stands aside and watches the other parents emerge blinking into the light to circulate in the lobby, greeting and congratulating each other.
After a while Mary Chadstone descends on her, glass of wine in hand and husband and son in tow, calling out: ‘Rachel! Wasn’t Becca brilliant – you must be so proud!’ and somehow that is even worse than being invisible.
Rachel summons up a smile. Maybe she will be able to get away without acknowledging that she has only just arrived.
‘Hello, Mary – how are you?’
‘Very well, very well,’ Mary says.
‘Excellent show,’ Hugh Chadstone says.
He is the type of handsome that runs to seed early given too many hours spent behind a desk or in restaurants and not enough exercise: big, beefy, a former rugby player. Henry, the son, who is thinner and geekier, hovers next to him. Defensive. Protective. They’re going to let Mary handle this, but are both poised to step in if needed.
And then Rachel spots Mitch coming out of the auditorium.
The rest of the room fades into the background. Mitch sees her and freezes. The tension between them is almost palpable, like magnetism, though the force at work is repulsion rather than attraction. Then he heads straight towards her and comes to a standstill just inches away. He is so angry with her he completely ignores the Chadstones.
‘What happened to you?’ he says.