by Clare Empson
He turns to face me; instantly he’s crying, tears that will not stop.
‘Oh Jake,’ I say, crying too, ‘I love you so much. I wish I could help.’
He doesn’t speak, not for a long time; the sadness in him is just too big. By the time the doctor arrives mid-morning, he has said only one word to me – sorry – and I saw the effort it cost him to speak. So much pain and sorrow and he has no way of expressing it. He is caged within his body, his mind in torment.
The doctor is with him for almost an hour, and I spend the time pacing back and forwards from the kitchen to the sitting room, making a cup of tea that turns cold as I stare out of the window.
‘Shall we sit down?’ the doctor says, finally coming into the sitting room and gesturing at our brown sofa. ‘I’m sure you must be very anxious with your baby almost due, and so I’m sorry for what I have to tell you. Jacob is very severely depressed. The important thing is that we’ve caught it. We need to get him into hospital right away and on to medication. I’ll be able to organise a bed for him within a couple of hours, probably at the Maudsley.’
‘Not the hospital. Please, Jake hates hospitals.’
‘I’m afraid so. And as a matter of urgency. You do understand, I hope, the severity of this depression?’
‘Will I be able to visit him?’
‘Of course. Perhaps not a good idea for the first few days, until we can stabilise him.’
‘What if he doesn’t want to go? Have you talked to Jake about this?’
‘He knows he needs to go into the hospital for a while. He’s fairly resistant to it. But, Alice, it’s the only way. If he refuses to come voluntarily, then we would have to section him to keep him safe.’
He pats my arm before he leaves.
‘Once the medication starts to take effect, you’ll see a huge change, believe me.’
Jake is staring up at the ceiling when I return to the bedroom, but even from the doorway I can see the constant slide of tears running down his cheeks. He watches me come into the room, he taps the space beside him. I put out a hand behind me and lower myself in stages, a lumbering manoeuvre that would have made him laugh not long ago. He turns to face me and we lie there holding hands, not speaking. Sometimes the baby kicks or shifts position and I’ll capture his hand and hold it to my belly so he can feel it too. He doesn’t smile, but he leaves his hand there long after the baby has stopped moving.
The clock beside the bed is measuring out our time; three hours turns to two and then one and a half. And still we haven’t had the conversation about the hospital. I don’t have the strength for it.
Eventually I get off the bed and start pulling clothes out of his cupboard. Underwear, socks, T-shirts. Are these the right things? I come across his long, skinny scarf, the one emblazoned with a feather design; he was wearing it the day he came to find me at the Slade. I hold it out to him.
‘Remember this? You were wearing this the day I fell in love with you.’
He nods but doesn’t smile, and I put the scarf on top of the chest of drawers, knowing I’ll need to look at it later.
‘What are you doing?’
I hear how hard he has to dig for each word.
‘They want you to go into hospital today.’
I feel treacherous saying it, this word ‘hospital’ which he loathes and dreads and fears.
‘No.’
I return to the bed and sit on the edge. I reach out for his hand, but he shifts away from me, a sullen child.
‘NO.’
‘Jake. Please. You have to do what the doctor says. You’re so unwell. They only want to make you better.’
‘What about …’ He breaks off, the effort of speech exhausting him. ‘What about our baby. Can’t miss it.’
‘It will probably be late. First babies often are. You’ll be back by then, I know you will.’
He turns his face away from me.
‘So you’re on their side?’
‘Of course I’m not. How can you say that? All I want is for you to get better so you can come home again.’
‘What if I say no?’ He speaks the words to the window. And he knows the answer just as I did.
‘They are going to make you.’
We’re both crying now, and I lie down beside him. This time he does let me hold his hand.
‘It will be all right,’ I say. ‘It won’t be like last time because now you’ve got me.’
Jake manages to nod before he turns away.
I finish packing his bag. A pair of jeans. Toothbrush and toothpaste from the bathroom, a brand-new bar of soap. I reach for his razor and snatch my hand away, thinking better of it but hating myself a little more.
It’s almost 2.30 by the time I’ve finished. Robin and the doctor are arriving in half an hour: Robin to drive him, the doctor to enforce his admittance if required. My heart is bleak.
‘I’ll go with you,’ I say, but Jake shakes his head.
‘No. Come here.’
I lie back down next to him, and this time he wraps his arms around me just as he used to.
‘I don’t want you to see it. I told you what those places are like. It will frighten you.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘But I do.’
‘You’ll let me visit you, though?’
He squeezes my hand. ‘I’m counting on it.’
‘You know how much I love you?’
‘Same, same.’
‘Could you eat something? There’s enough time.’
He nods. ‘Something small.’
‘Soup?’
He smiles for the first time in twenty-four hours.
‘Soup would be perfect,’ he says.
Did anyone ever prepare a tin of soup with such care? As if I can deliver all my love and hope and reassurance into this small bowl of vivid orange, the toast crisp and hot and buttered from corner to corner. While I wait for the soup to heat, I make myself a cup of tea and remember that I haven’t eaten anything since a slice of toast at eight o’clock this morning. I chide myself for not taking better care of the baby. I think that with Jake away I will go to the greengrocer and pack in all the healthy ingredients I can get my hands on, a last-minute nutrient boost for our almost-born babe.
It’s a quarter to three by the time I make it back to the bedroom, enough time for him to eat the soup, which I have taken care not to over-boil. I push at the door with my foot, but it doesn’t budge; there’s something jamming it from the other side. I put the tray down on the floor, a difficult move at nine months pregnant.
‘Jake?’ I call, pushing harder at the door so that it inches forward, but there is still something pushed against it, something heavy and hard to shift. Everything in my body – bones, blood, skin, heart, lungs, stomach – turns to ice. I shove against the door with my full weight, all nine and a half stone of me, and then I see on the other side of it his feet, still in the holey socks, three toes exposed, and I know, oh I know, what I am going to find. He is leaning away from the door, face tilted up grotesquely, neck looped to the doorknob by a slip knot in his cream feathered scarf.
I’m sobbing as I try to release the noose with hands that shake.
‘You’re alive,’ I say, talking to myself, talking to him, talking to anyone who might be able to make this true.
And his skin is still warm, that’s the thing, but his body slumps forwards across my lap the minute he is released from the scarf, and his eyes are staring into nothing. I sit down on the floor, cradling him in my lap, my lover, my love, my darling.
Now
Luke
Luke,
I used to tell you stories about your father while you slept, whispering them into the darkness so your dreams would be filled with colour and light and love.
Of course you couldn’t understand, but I wanted
to somehow pass on to you the strength and passion of this most amazing human being as if by osmosis.
I loved him, and not just because I’d fallen in love with him so passionately and intensely as a girl of nineteen. My first love. My only love.
He was the person who inspired me and understood me, my mentor and my saviour.
You look just like him. So much so that when I first saw you in that restaurant, it was like him being brought back to life. It still is sometimes. The re-emergence of you, such a happy event, one I have longed for, has also brought me to the brink of despair. I’m not always sure I’ll be able to bear it, this constant reminder of what I lost.
And so I must tell you the truth about your father, write the words that I can never speak. The horrible, ugly truth and my part in it. I will spare nothing.
Your father was Jacob Earl, the lead singer of a rock band called Disciples, set for great things. Their second album had just come out and after he died it went to number one in the charts.
Jake had severe depression, which stemmed from a troubled childhood and pursued him as a young adult. He had good patches when he was happy and creative, and it was during one of those times that we met. He really believed he’d kicked the depression once and for all and so he threw away the medication that was meant to keep him stable, and I allowed him to do it. I didn’t understand.
I want you to know how excited your father was about my pregnancy; an accident, it’s true, but we both wanted to keep you. He said it was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And it would have been, I know that.
Jake fell into a deep depression while he was on a European tour; by the time he came back he could hardly speak. The day he was due to go into a psychiatric hospital he hanged himself from the bedroom door while I was in the kitchen.
That he died on my watch is something I shall never forgive myself for. Please just know this. He loved unborn you with all his heart. He was the best man imaginable and you are just like him.
Alice
The letter from Alice heralds my breakdown. Letter, photographs and an old newspaper cutting of the two of them at a gallery opening, caption: Jacob Earl, singer of Disciples, and artist girlfriend Alice Garland at Robin Armstrong Gallery in Mayfair.
In the photograph you can clearly see the swell of Alice’s pregnant stomach, but the thing that derails me is the way these lovers are looking at each other, inflamed by love, at the height of their beauty, on the precipice of success, a snapshot of greatness. I hold Alice’s letter in my hands and I weep for the man I never met and the life that was taken away from her, and for things I cannot name. The crying lasts all day and I can’t explain it to Hannah, who fusses over me, trying to understand the mix of hopelessness and sorrow that has swept over me; how could she when I cannot comprehend it myself?
It’s dark when my mother arrives, summoned by Hannah at some point during the day. She sits beside me on the bed, holding my hand between hers; she calls me ‘my poor boy’. Her hands are warm, dry and cracked from gardening; she smells of lavender soap.
‘Don’t try to talk,’ she says when I begin to apologise. ‘There’s plenty of time for that. And don’t feel you need to explain either, because you don’t. I understand.’
‘Alice …’ I say, and she shushes me.
‘It’s all right. Hannah told me who she is, and I understand, completely, you wanting to find her. Don’t feel bad about not telling me the truth; I understand that too.’
Her kindness is hard to bear, of course, and somewhere beneath the encircling madness I realise that it is guilt that pins me to the bed. Guilt about Christina, guilt about Alice. The man who hurt two mothers, that would be a better title.
Who knew that a mental breakdown would affect the body just as much as the brain? For the all-encompassing dread I feel has given me limbs made of lead, a tight, bronchial chest, palpitations, sweats, dizziness and a surfeit of panic attacks, one after the other, which convince me I am about to die.
An emergency doctor is called out and I weep for the duration of his visit while Hannah and my mother whisper to each other in low-pitched, anxious voices. I am crying for Jacob and Alice, of course, for the destruction of their dream, for the life the three of us were not allowed to have. I am crying for a man who was once so desperate he hanged himself days before his child was born. But I cannot find the words to explain any of this, and the doctor diagnoses burnout and prescribes antidepressants and a fortnight off work.
After he’s gone, Hannah lies down on the bed next to me and holds my hand while I cry.
‘You’ll feel better as soon as the pills start to work,’ she says, and I manage to nod.
‘Do you think you might sleep?’ she asks, and I close my eyes, feigning tiredness, relieved when she gets up and goes downstairs.
All I want is to get back to Jacob. I cannot explain it, this bizarre communing with my dead father, but it is the only thing that matters, the only thing there is right now.
Alice sent me a photograph of Jacob in school uniform, aged around nine or ten. There is something about this picture that draws me in more than the others; I cannot stop looking at it. He is a handsome boy with his dark eyes and his sharp cheekbones and his full mouth; indisputably like me in this image. When I showed the photograph to my mother, she burst out crying, this woman I cannot once remember crying in my childhood.
‘It’s you,’ she said, when she was able to speak. ‘He is you.’
Now when I look at the photo, I absorb his solemnity, an adultness that belies his age. This boy who looks out at me knows more than he should; his life is not bikes and football and chips and chocolate. He looks at me and I look at him and in some bizarre, unexplainable way we are connected by pain; we know each other, we are each other; it is enough.
Then
Alice
He is dead. Not dead when I found him, not exactly, not clinically, not thoroughly. That happened in the ambulance minutes later, I am told. But my mind cannot contain this information and so instead I lie in our bed, curtains drawn against the light, a covering of his shirts, the arms of them wrapped around me. Rick is here with me as the hours turn into days, and he doesn’t say anything apart from my name occasionally, a whispered Alice, because he understands there is nothing to say.
People come and go. Eddie. Tom. Robin. I talk to no one, Rick deals with it all.
They speak of the funeral, a horrid, pulsing word, but I will stay here in my frozen state and Rick will know, without me telling him, that this is all I can do.
He makes me drink water and eat food, tiny doll’s size mouthfuls of bread – ‘for the baby,’ he says – and though the child in my belly moves and kicks and seems ready to fight its way out, I am no longer connected to it.
Rick says, ‘Alice, are you going to stay here in this flat? Robin will cover the rent until you know what you’re doing to do,’ and I don’t like this conversation because he is forcing change right in behind my eyelids.
‘Stay here,’ I say, because although I am thinking of nothing, nothing is my chosen state, somewhere in the hinterland of my consciousness I believe Jake is still away on tour. And I am waiting for him to come back.
Rick runs a bath for me, water just above lukewarm – ‘We don’t want to boil the baby,’ he says, holding me steady while I step into the tub. He picks up the shampoo and massages it into my hair, and when I get out, he holds a towel for me and wraps it around me as if I’m a child. When I am dry, he passes me an old blue dressing gown of Jake’s to wear, and it smells so strongly of him, the scent of cedar and ferns and lime, that I am jolted into real, painful tears, as if I am crying for the first time.
We sit together on the brown sofa, Rick’s arms around me, and we cry and cry as the light changes in the window.
‘What will I do?’ I ask him, and he shakes his head.
‘Somehow we’ll ge
t you through this. We’ll take it minute by minute if we need to.’
The baby comes that night. I wake to find the sheets soaked beneath me and I hobble through to the sitting room, where Rick is asleep on the sofa.
‘My waters have broken,’ I say, and he is fully alert before I’ve finished the sentence.
Unbeknownst to me, Rick has been studying the baby books and he knows exactly what to do.
‘We’ll call the hospital and let them know we’ll be coming in. But we don’t want to go too soon or they’ll just send us away again. We need to wait until your contractions are five minutes apart.’
It’s almost comical sitting here with Rick, drinking tea in the middle of the night, him timing my contractions on his watch.
‘That was a huge one, it lasted thirty seconds. Won’t be long now.’
And though the pain is exquisite, I react not at all as each wave breaks over me. This is all I’ve wanted, for my body to be ripped apart by pain.
The first hurdle at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital is that they try to send Rick away.
‘Only family members or spouses,’ they tell him, and when I begin to cry, he shouts, ‘But I’m the baby’s father, for God’s sake. Doesn’t that count for anything?’ and I don’t know if they believe him or if they are just trying to put a stop to my unending tears, but he is allowed to stay.
The midwives think I am odd, strange, disturbed. The pain crescendos as my cervix dilates and my womb contracts and the muscles around my belly turn into a coating of iron. And I am addicted to it.
‘No!’ I shout through another contraction, waving away the gas and air, the offers of other medication: pethidine, an epidural. But otherwise I am entirely silent – ‘stoical’, the midwives tell Rick – just the slide of a solitary tear when I think how Jake will never see this baby.
The final moments of delivery, the overbearing desire to push – not that I want to, just that I have to – and Rick crying out, ‘Here’s the head. Oh my love, the baby is coming.’