by Lucy Lawrie
‘I doubt there’ll be any case law authority. But I’m sure an exorcism won’t be necessary.’
The old lady huffed, drew her coat around herself and walked off.
‘Great. I’ll go and give him a flea in his ear. Now, can I get you on this number in case anything else transpires? He may well lodge a written complaint.’
‘Of course, that’s fine,’ I said in a sweet, capable voice. ‘I hope the meeting goes well. Thanks for calling.’
As I said goodbye and ended the call I had a sudden urge to throw my mobile phone into the pond. I might actually have done so, had I not entertained a vague fear that this might have electrocuted the ducks.
I hauled the pram and the rucksacks over to Jonathan. ‘What would happen if I threw my phone in there?’ I asked him. He just gave me a strange look and turned to carry Sophie in the direction of the monkey puzzle trees.
*
That night I dreamed I was in the dock, in front of twelve bewigged judges, accused of professional negligence so dire that criminal charges had been brought.
‘An exorcism of the premises was the only reasonable course of action,’ said one of the judges. ‘Send her down.’
I awoke to the sound of screaming. But it wasn’t mine.
‘Dad! No, please! No! I’m sorry. Please . . .’
Jonathan was thrashing around in the bed.
‘Wake up!’ I shook his shoulder gently. ‘You’re having a nightmare.’
His eyes shot open, and he stared at me for a second. Then he rolled over, dragging most of the sweat-soaked duvet with him, and started snoring.
I lay back on the pillow, exhausted. It was the first night since Sophie’s birth that I’d attempted to sleep in my own bed. She’d taken a sudden, intense dislike to her cot, so we’d decided to let her sleep in our room, in her Moses basket. Although she preferred this, she’d still woken me twice already, and now Jonathan was getting in on the act, not to mention nightmares about exorcisms. I inched some of the duvet out of his grasp, and settled down to try and go back to sleep.
But a little wail emanated from the Moses basket beside me. I swung my legs out of bed, and took her through to the nursery for a feed.
Half an hour later, Jonathan appeared. I was sitting with Sophie in the rocking chair, with the laptop balanced on the changing table to one side of me.
‘Did you have another nightmare?’ I whispered. ‘Are you okay? What was it about?’
‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘Oh, nothing. I had to check the Working Time Regulations about something, and I got a bit . . . distracted.’
‘So why are you Googling “male post-natal depression”?’ He leaned over and clicked on the history tab. ‘Or “repressed childhood memories”, or “psychological trauma and sudden death”? God, Cassie. This is just weird.’
‘I was just worried about your nightmares—’
He gave a gusty sigh. ‘I’m going back to bed.’
‘But—’
‘Er, Cassie, why have you heated up two bottles?’
‘I didn’t. That must be an old one.’
‘Well, this one’s warm.’
I looked down in horror at the bottle lodged in Sophie’s mouth, realising it was cool to the touch.
‘Oh shit! This is the bottle she had at bedtime and didn’t finish! It must be seven or eight hours old!’
The bottle feeding instructions the midwife had grudgingly given us had stipulated that unused feeds must be thrown away within the hour, formula milk being a rich breeding ground for harmful bacteria.
I pulled the bottle out of Sophie’s mouth, waking her and making her arms jerk out in a startle reflex. We both started crying.
Two hours and one frantic call to NHS 24 later, we finally got back to bed. We’d been told there was nothing we could do except stay vigilant, and call back if she started vomiting or had any diarrhoea.
‘I can’t believe it,’ I whispered as we settled under the duvet. ‘She’s only ten days old and I’ve already poisoned her. It’s my job to keep her safe. How do other people manage it?’
‘Most people don’t try and psychoanalyse their husbands using Wikipedia, in the dark, at three in the morning,’ mumbled Jonathan as he rolled away from me. ‘And if they do, they usually put their babies down first.’
I turned on to my side to face Sophie. Her breathing was soft and peaceful, but I knew I’d be staying awake to watch her; sleep went against all my instincts. The milk incident had merely underlined what I already knew: that it was a miracle that this little scrap of flesh had lungs that could breathe, and a heart that could beat on its own. And that it might all stop if I wasn’t paying attention; watching, praying, willing the miracle to keep going.
4
‘Cassie! Oh, it’s good to see you!’ cried Jonathan’s mother, holding out her arms when I opened the front door.
‘Hello, Dita!’ I felt small in her embrace. Even with her height-disguising stoop, she stood a good head taller than me. She’d flown in from Holland to meet Sophie, who had now survived to the grand age of five weeks, none the worse, it seemed, for the consumption of the bacteria-laden milk that dreadful night.
‘The flight was late, sorry,’ said Jonathan, sweeping past us with Dita’s bags. ‘Then we had to wait ages in a taxi queue.’
I ushered her inside, closing the front door against the dark and rain. She unwound her scarf with a satisfied sigh, and I took it, along with her damp coat, and hung them up. I offered her a cup of tea, but she was looking longingly up the stairs, smoothing down her boyishly-cut grey hair with both hands.
‘Would you like to have a peek?’ Sophie had only just gone down after an hour of crying, but I knew I wouldn’t need to ask Dita to be quiet. She winced as she tried to avoid creaking on the stairs, her paddle-like feet treading slowly in their flat shoes.
When we reached the bedroom Dita peered into the Moses basket, sucking in an ‘ahh . . .’ on the in-breath. She gripped my forearm and her voice emerged as a whisper. ‘Cassie . . . she is gorgeous! What a beautiful baby!’
She kissed a finger, leaned over and gently touched Sophie’s sleepsuited chest, the place over her heart. Together, we watched the almost imperceptible rise and fall that came with each breath.
Exhausted by all her crying, Sophie didn’t wake up, so I took Dita downstairs and we sat around the kitchen table while Jonathan made cheese-on-toast and heated up a tin of tomato soup. I was doubtful whether cheese-on-toast before bed was a good idea, in light of his bad dreams, which were now a regular occurrence – night-time in the Carlisle household was pretty lively now, when you added Sophie’s antics and my insomnia into the mix. But his repertoire of meals was narrow to say the least, and it seemed a shame to dampen his enthusiasm.
‘So, what is our plan for tomorrow?’ asked Dita.
‘Hmm, I don’t know. I was meant to be meeting the girls from our Babycraft class in John Lewis, but I’m not sure if I’ll go. It’s so difficult to time it around Sophie’s feeds.’
In truth, I hadn’t been out of the house since Jonathan had gone back to work the previous week. I’d watched him shave and comb his hair that morning, and put on his grey pinstripe suit, and leave the house to re-enter the world of fund managing – of markets and stock values, of colleagues and targets and breakfast meetings – as though he was setting off for an alien planet.
‘What is this Babycraft?’ asked Dita.
‘Nutters,’ breathed Jonathan. Absorbed in his culinary endeavours, he didn’t look up. He had pulled the cheese-on-toast from under the grill and was in the process of adding five drops of Worcestershire sauce to each piece in its semi-melted state.
‘Well,’ I continued, ‘when we were expecting Sophie, we went to these antenatal classes run by this organisation called Babycraft. They were in somebody’s house in Colinton.’
‘Ah . . . interesting,’ said Dita, leaning forwards and putting her elbows on the table. ‘Stephen and Moira att
ended classes like these before they had the twins, I think. What did you have to do?’
‘Mostly, it was the teacher telling us what to expect about the birth. She split us into groups and made us write lists.’
‘On bloody flip charts!’ said Jonathan, red-faced from heat and concentration, slamming the oven door shut as if for emphasis.
‘And was she right?’ Dita was lovely, the way she was so interested in everything.
‘What do you mean, was she right?’ I asked.
‘Well, I mean, did you know what to expect, when it came to the birth?’
‘Kind of. But there wasn’t much about what to expect afterwards.’
‘The next eighteen years . . .’ Dita nodded, understanding completely.
‘Anyway, we were sort of encouraged to stay in touch with the other couples.’
‘A pretty weird bunch,’ Jonathan cut in with a wiggle of his eyebrows and a big sigh.
‘The hypno-birthers were pretty weird,’ I conceded. ‘In the first class we all had to say if we had done anything to prepare for the birth, and they said they were hoping to bring “prisoner of war wisdom” into the process.’
‘What?’ Dita looked bewildered.
‘They had read this memoir of a man who was in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and he used to pinch his ear whenever the guards made him do something he didn’t want to do.’
‘Really? Would that help, I wonder?’ She frowned and poured another cup of tea.
‘The idea was that it would block out the pain,’ I said. ‘You know, the pain of the birth. They wanted to have a home birth without any artificial pain relief. Except for the ear-pinching thing, and their special songs.’
‘Ah. And did it work?’
‘She said it did work. But then they were forced to go into hospital for an emergency C-section.’
‘Oh, so, not really then.’
‘No, not really.’
We watched as Jonathan deftly transferred the cheese-on-toast to our waiting plates. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dita. ‘I’ll come with you to John Lewis, if you like, and help you carry Sophie’s bags. It will be really nice for you to see all your friends.’
In theory, I thought darkly.
*
The café at John Lewis was like a Dante-esque vision of hell. Dark, raincoated shapes circled around like vultures, poised to swoop down on any shortly-to-be vacated table. Sharp-elbowed old ladies, meeting for their weekly coffee and scone, were the quickest, and the most ruthless. Then there were the legion of the sleep-deprived – the pale, empty-eyed mothers with wailing offspring arching backwards off their hips, trying to manoeuvre enormous ‘travel systems’ through the crowd with one hand.
We found the Babycraft group comfortably ensconced in a corner – they’d pulled several sofas together so they could all sit round facing one another. When they saw us, there was a flurry of demonstrative hugs and air kisses. They huddled round Sophie and shrieked their congratulations until she started bawling. I jiggled her around while Dita slipped off to get some drinks. After a while the general discussion turned to the merits of different types of pram, but one of the girls, Jody, turned to talk to me.
‘Is Sophie only five weeks old? Gosh, she looks a lot bigger than that. She’s bigger than Vichard and he’s seven weeks now!’
Jody must have been thirty-ish, but looked about twelve with her shiny light brown hair and apple red cheeks. To add to the childlike effect, she seemed unable to pronounce her ‘r’s’ properly – which was unfortunate considering she’d named her son Richard.
‘Are you feeding her naturally?’ She pronounced it ‘natuvally’.
I took a deep breath. Not this again. I felt tempted to say I’d installed a machine with a robotic arm in Sophie’s bedroom to administer her nightly bottles so I didn’t have to bother shifting my arse out of bed.
‘Actually, she’s on formula.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Jody, her voice dropping to barely above a whisper.
Dita returned to the table with a tray bearing shortbread, and two tall glasses of hot chocolate topped with cream and chocolate flake. Helen. We used to disappear off to Negociants each day after nine o’clock lectures, to alleviate our boredom with brioche toast and the creamiest hot chocolate in town.
‘Are you okay?’ whispered Dita. A tear escaped my right eye, trickled down and hung quivering on my jawline. I laid my cheek against the top of Sophie’s head, but more tears escaped and slid into her downy hair.
‘What about you?’ I said to Jody when my voice was steady again. ‘Are you still breastfeeding?’
She snorted. ‘I’m producing it quicker than he can drink it! We’re having to throw bags of it away, aren’t we shnoozums? Our freezer is overflowing with the stuff!’ She lifted the spindly, fearful-looking Vichard up to eye level and squashed her nose against his. Suspended in mid-air, he gave a querulous cry. ‘Oh, he’s hungry,’ she said, thrusting him back down onto her lap and pulling up her top.
Shona, one of the other mums, looked across in approval. She was a lawyer too, but a properly grown-up one. She was a litigator who specialised in medical defence cases, and could sometimes be seen on Scotland Today giving a statement on behalf of some exonerated medic outside the courthouse.
‘You know,’ she said leaning forward and raising her eyebrows, ‘I didn’t realise that any advertising of formula milk for babies under six months has been completely banned. That’s a pretty huge statement, isn’t it? They must have found some pretty compelling evidence to back that up.’
I wondered who ‘they’ were . . . a large-bosomed army of Babycraft ‘breastfeeding counsellors’, perhaps.
‘Oh yes, I saw that too,’ chipped in Molly, who was one half of the hypno-birthing couple. ‘And it was also saying that they wanted to make it so that formula would be kept behind the counter in pharmacies, and you would have to ask for it if you wanted to buy it.’
‘Yes, I go to a housing estate in Muirhouse to get mine,’ I said. ‘I have to knock on the door of this derelict flat and ask for Jimmy, and it gets handed out to me through a hole in the wall, wrapped in a brown paper bag.’
Not a flicker.
‘Do you . . . live near Muirhouse?’ asked Jody, clutching Vichard to her chest, thinking no doubt of Trainspotting-style drug dens and playparks littered with used needles.
‘It’s okay,’ I soothed. ‘Our house is a clear two miles away.’
Jody nodded distractedly, as though she was picturing the Muirhouse residents chasing us across town, pressing their bottles of formula on us.
‘Well there are advantages to formula,’ said Molly, trying to be helpful. ‘It obviously helps them to get to a good size quickly.’ She nodded at Sophie, and I pictured my poor love obese at fourteen, on one of those Channel 4 documentaries about people who are so fat they can’t get out of bed.
‘I made fifty ice cubes of puréed carrot, and seventy of puréed spinach yesterday!’ announced Shona, attempting to rescue the conversation.
She beamed at me, but the only response I could think of was: ‘Why?’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Elgin is seven weeks old now. I want to have plenty of stocks in the freezer, because we may decide to start weaning when he’s four or five months. And I’m going back to work soon, so I want to get on top of things.’
How was this possible? I was lucky if I managed to find time to brush my teeth within the course of a day at home with Sophie.
‘When do you find the time?’ I asked, feeling exhausted just thinking about puréeing vegetables.
‘It’s simply about having a proper routine in place. We’ve been following the Bootcamp method. It sounds brutal, but the name’s just tongue-in-cheek. It really works – you should try it. Oh, but actually, if you haven’t already started it, it might be too late . . . the book says there’s only a short window during which babies are receptive to starting the routine. Any attempt to impose a routine outside the window period can actually be d
amaging to the child. Have you read the book?’
‘No,’ I whispered. Failure, compounded upon failure.
‘But you haven’t told us how your birth went!’ piped up Molly, to change the subject. Again, she was trying to be kind. Nosy, but kind.
‘Oh, it was fine.’ Weary beyond belief I went on, knowing they expected details. ‘I had an epidural.’ Which had worked for the final hour in a twenty-two-hour labour – but I didn’t want to go into all that.
‘Did you?’ said Jody. ‘I had an epidural too, but I asked them to let it wear off for the pushing stage. I read that the so-called pain – the intensity – of the birth is important for bonding between the mother and baby. It was wonderful. When he was coming out I could feel his little nose, and his little chin, and everything.’
Wincing at this image, I considered how I had selfishly precluded all possibility of bonding with Sophie, by having an epidural.
‘Well, that’s what happened anyway,’ I said. ‘We all lived to tell the tale, and that’s the main thing. And I got to feel her nose and chin after she had come out, so it was fine.’
Jody looked doubtfully at Sophie. ‘And did you really need to have 48 stitches? I got your email . . .’
‘No.’
‘Oh, so how many stitches did you have?’
I sighed. ‘Two.’
I could have sworn that Jody looked disappointed.
‘And I didn’t feel a thing, obviously, still being under the epidural.’ I didn’t mention the haemorrhage, didn’t want it pounced upon with ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’.
‘I think these epidurals are really a wonderful thing,’ said Dita kindly. ‘I don’t think a natural birth necessarily helps bonding. I think that the opposite can happen sometimes, you know, that the mother is so upset by the trauma of the birth that it also can interrupt the bonding. And anyway, bonding is something that takes place over many months and years. I do not think there is any problem, whatever pain relief a person decides to have.’
There were no dissenting voices and Dita went on, encouraged.
‘And also, it means there is no delay with having to give you an anaesthetic, for example, if the doctor is having to put forceps into your vagina.’