The Thin Place

by C D Major

  ‘That’s great, Ava,’ said Dr Patel. ‘Well done. You’re doing brilliantly.’ She called to another person dressed in blue and the double doors were opened. Fraser appeared dressed in scrubs, eyes red rimmed and scared above a blue mask.

  ‘There you go, Ava. He’s been straining to get in here.’

  He looked so out of place. Fraser, who was normally dressed in jeans and scruffy T-shirts, was suddenly a cast member in a hospital soap. For a crazy moment, Ava felt a bubble of laughter rise unbidden. It morphed into a sob as he gripped her hand, squeezed it so that she gasped from the pain, her eyes filling with tears.

  ‘I’m sorry . . . Neil told me. Oh my God . . .’

  ‘The baby, Fraser . . . What if the baby isn’t OK?’

  A screen had been erected over her so that now she was unable to see her legs or stomach. Dr Patel’s head appeared. ‘Can you feel that? I’m tapping there?’

  Ava answered, aware that every second mattered.

  Fraser kneeled by her head, stroking her hair back from her face. His hand was warm; he smelled of pine needles and aftershave. A small part of her relaxed, relieved she wasn’t alone. ‘It’s going to be OK,’ he whispered as she told Dr Patel she hadn’t felt the last tap.

  Everyone looked grave and spoke quietly. She took more glances at the monitor that made sounds she didn’t understand. There was a heartbeat, though, that she could cling to. But would the baby survive? Thirty-four weeks . . . surely it would be too small?

  The pain had been excruciating as Neil had raced her away from the house, tyres skidding on the pebbles. They had both been gabbling, the adrenaline rushing through her as they’d sped away.

  ‘Thank God I walked down there. I couldn’t understand it. Garry’s car was still there.’

  Garry. She’d remembered then that Garry was locked inside the house. ‘He’s still there!’ she breathed, and tried to explain.

  ‘It’s OK, don’t talk,’ Neil had said. ‘It’s OK. Let’s get you to a hospital.’

  ‘My mum, she . . . her mum . . . suicide at the bridge . . . where the dogs jump . . .’

  ‘What?’ He almost swerved, the car juddering before he gripped the wheel and straightened up, his voice strong. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Oh God, it’s so early. It’s too early. I’m not due for six weeks.’

  ‘Don’t worry . . . the doctors are great. My mum had cancer treatment there.’

  It was a different Neil who swung onto the A82 back towards Glasgow with a screech and a smell of burned rubber, gabbling about a disastrous band rehearsal the previous day – a drummer who’d got so drunk he fell off his stool in the middle of it. She’d tried to focus on the story, knew he was trying to distract her from the situation, punctuating his tales with encouraging words.

  ‘Almost there,’ he said. He swerved past other vehicles and ignored any speed limits.

  He had taken her phone, asked for the code and told her he was ringing Fraser as they wheeled her away through double doors and people calling out instructions. She could see him mouthing into her phone, pale faced and with mud all over his clothes, which she realised was from her.

  The surgeon arrived and Dr Patel melted away. An older man with narrow shoulders and crinkled eyes loomed over her. Strands of white-grey hair peeked from under his blue hat. ‘Hello, Ava. I hear you’ve had quite a morning. I’m Mr Bain and I’m going to be delivering your baby. You try to relax.’

  There were so many people in the room now, bustling about with their own set tasks.

  ‘In a normal procedure, we’d introduce everyone, Ava, but we haven’t got time for that.’ She could tell from the somewhat strained expression above his mask, the way he checked the timing of the spinal block, that seconds mattered. A machine beeped and whirred and people were telling him numbers she didn’t understand.

  The spinal block meant she couldn’t move her legs or wiggle her toes and her arms were numb right up to her shoulders. Nausea swirled and it wasn’t long before she felt the strangest sensation, a huge pressure on her ribs as if someone was pressing down on her, tugging inside her. The screen hid everything from view. She tried to keep calm, to listen to Fraser, to not think too much about the tiny baby coming too soon or the fact they seemed to be heaving out her organs to reach it.

  ‘Look. Can you look?’

  Fraser peeked over the screen, his face tinged green either by it or the sickness he felt seeing her insides. ‘They’ve cut you,’ he said. But nothing more.

  ‘Is the baby OK?’

  Fraser looked back and she stared hungrily at his expression, unable to understand what was happening below her ribs. She was desperate for information, her tears running, her head shaking, goosebumps – that she could feel – prickling the skin on her arms. ‘Fraser?’

  ‘It’s a girl,’ he whispered. His eyes had filled with tears.

  She would be placed on her chest, she’d read about it online – in the books.

  She had imagined this moment, the feel of the baby on her bare skin, their hearts beating next to each other but she knew something was wrong, knew from the way the baby was whisked away, from the frantic energy in the room, from the dreadful silence.

  Fraser had frozen too, his hand reaching for hers, his eyes following the tiny bundle that they were transferring to a table on one side.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Ava could lift her neck but little else. There should be noise, there should be something. ‘Oh my God, Fraser, is she OK?’

  Someone was on the phone calling for blood, for her or the baby, she wasn’t sure. The bustle and energy increased; no one had time to answer any questions. Fraser was shunted to one side too, both of his hands on his cheeks.

  ‘Oh my God.’ Ava started crying, her head pounding with more tears, dripping down by her ears and onto the paper beneath her. ‘Fraser . . . oh my God . . . our daughter!’

  A shady spot, tiny holes. It couldn’t happen to her. She had felt the menace of the bridge pervading her body. Had it got inside her? Was it doing its damage?

  His voice was choked too as he kneeled at her side, tried to whisper. ‘She’s with the doctors . . . she’s with the doctors.’

  ‘What did she look like? Fraser, is she going to be OK?’

  He couldn’t speak. She knew she was asking the impossible but she felt so inert, incapable of getting up, swinging her legs over the side, racing around that screen to find out more. Her arms were useless at her sides. She felt nausea explode within her, vomiting while on her back, feeling pieces almost choking her as Fraser tried to help.

  A nurse helped wash it off, soothing words that Fraser couldn’t say over the stench of vomit. Then she thought she heard the sound of a baby crying. Her head snapped up as far as it could. Fraser leaped to his feet.

  ‘Oh my God.’

  It was definitely a cry. Not in her head this time, but in the room with her. A cry.

  Ava didn’t want to interrupt the doctors but the wait felt like the longest minutes of her life. Please, God, could they not tell her what they were doing?

  Fraser was back at her head. Their eyes met and it was all they could do to drink each other in. He lowered his forehead to hers and they stayed that way for a few seconds.

  ‘I love you, Ava, whatever happens . . .’

  She sobbed. Had she caused this? Had Overtoun done this?

  ‘We have to stitch you up . . .’

  She lay there, feeling the small tugs as they worked on her, picturing the tiny figure on the other side of the room. Her daughter. It was a girl. Her whole body felt hollowed out, a large piece of her missing. She had to be OK. She had to be . . .

  Oh God.

  Chapter 56

  MARION

  She is such a sickly baby. Those early days lured us into a false sense of security.

  She continues to bring up the milk I feed her, losing weight and having to return to the hospital. My own supply has dried up, the baby too weak to take it from me. The nurses suggest we try
a bottle and she is fed milk from a wet nurse. They adore seeing her, brave little Constance, whose father, it has been confirmed, died fighting the Nazis. They praise my strength and bravery. It must be terribly difficult. All alone and she is so sick, too. God will be kind.

  She is bonny for a while, lying on a rug in late summer, delighting in her own hands, fingers waving in the air as she tries to roll from her back to her front, straining, head tilted. I worry she is not moving correctly. The doctor comes.

  Months pass. She has had lots of the symptoms. I know of other cases in other children – polio, I am sure.

  ‘I’m not sure, Lady West,’ the doctor says. ‘I have seen other children with polio.’

  ‘Can you see? Where the muscles are weak? And she struggles to swallow sometimes, Doctor.’

  ‘I can’t see anything that concerns me. She’s a bonny wee lass, doing nicely.’

  A firmer voice. ‘Are there some tests you can do, Doctor? She really isn’t right. A mother’s instinct. I’m so grateful to you. My little girl needs the best care.’

  He leaves moments later, past the brown bear. For a second I imagine the beast stepping off his plinth and chasing him out of the door, his claws tearing at his clothes as he slips on stripy tiles to get outside. As the front door closes behind him, I wait, fists curled, my breathing so loud I think the noise is filling up the corridor.

  Constance gets thinner as the weeks pass and I am desperate with worry, pacing the nursery, holding her to my chest. Annie has summoned the doctor again, who appears with a wary look in his eye. ‘But she is definitely ill, Doctor.’ I show him where she has regurgitated her dinner. He weighs her and agrees that she needs hospitalisation.

  ‘Annie tells me you prepare all her weaning meals.’

  ‘I do.’ My voice sounds a little shrill, but I am frightened. My baby is unwell.

  Another ambulance is called. There are grave faces as we wait for her to have blood taken from her. Her bony arm is thrust out, her cry piercing as the tube fills red. ‘There, there. You are a good mother, so caring.’

  The next year it seems her walking is delayed a little, perhaps. I worry about the slight limp in her left leg. The doctor doesn’t believe she limps. He doesn’t come back when she still suffers with sleeping problems or when she struggles to breathe. She might need an iron lung, I insist. He could check the squint in her right eye – it comes and it goes. She can’t see things in the distance, I am sure of it.

  We visit another doctor in Glasgow, a specialist who takes my concerns seriously. A battery of tests is undergone when he hears of her various ailments. I tell him she had polio as a child. He is very concerned.

  ‘You poor woman! What a great deal you have been through – and a war widow, too! We will take care of her as best we can, you can be sure of that. Would you like a sweet tea while you wait? The nurses here think she is just adorable. What a poppet!’

  Now I think, going forward, we should perhaps try a stick to help her walk.

  Chapter 57

  AVA

  Today was the day.

  Fraser had returned to work reluctantly and it was one of their first days on their own together. She had arranged to meet her in town, in a cafe neither of them had been to before. Anonymous. Neutral. Ava hadn’t allowed herself to think too much about it and her hand shook as she applied lip salve and a dash of mascara.

  She lifted her daughter, Leonora, into the pram. Her eyes already closing, fists curled, arms thrown over her head. She had weighed 3lb 15oz when she was born, the smallest scrap of a baby, her legs so thin they seemed all bone, her body covered in fair hair. She was whisked away on that first day for checks, Fraser and Ava clasping each other’s hands as they waited for news. But, apart from her size, she was perfectly healthy. The days after were a strange blur of aching, blood, terrible daydreams, red eyes, pills, slow walks to the communal toilet, injections in her stomach, resting her head in her hands, crying.

  Leonora stayed in an incubator. She and Fraser were allowed to touch her through holes in the side. She spent hours under a UV light and being fed with a tube through her nose, making Ava’s heart break every time she looked at her.

  Her mum was desperate to talk, to explain, but Ava wasn’t ready yet to talk about that day. She was too full up with her own daughter, their future.

  Ava was moved to a ward, intermittent coughs and the never-quite dark of the place, a constant reminder that she wasn’t at home. The early days she had envisaged of the winged armchair, the mobile turning, the night feeds were a distant dream, the pristine nursery still waiting for them.

  The nurses were kind and efficient, giving her pills, cups of sweet tea, later showing her how to give Leonora bottles, encouraging her to pump her breast milk and save it to give to her daughter later. Ava healed slowly, the scar livid and raised, the area devoid of feeling. Her stomach sagged unpleasantly around the mark, the skin dimpled.

  Cards arrived, along with soft toys and messages from friends and colleagues. Claudia sent her a letter full of work gossip: Neil’s band had played at the office Christmas party and he had sung; Daniel, the cameraman she’d been sleeping with, had got a new job in London; the man who wrote letters to her in purple ink had finally been arrested. She’d kept another card from Garry, a short, sad note apologising again for getting it so wrong, hoping he could come by in the new year and meet her baby. Her bed was decorated with cards. She stared at one for an age.

  She became used to the routine of the day on the ward, the nurses’ rota, the checklist for meals, the gossip around the desk outside. She watched them put up tinsel and decorations and then take them down again. In the snatches of downtime, they told her about their own families, their own dramas. In visiting hours, Fraser would appear armed with fruit and news and reassuring smiles that soothed her strained face.

  She thought this strange new reality would never end, but gradually Leonora was allowed to rest in her arms, the feeding tube was removed, she would drink from a bottle, the matchstick legs slowly uncurled from their permanently tucked-up state. Ava put her in impossibly small nappies, watching carefully for the yellow line to turn blue, indicating a need for a change. She whispered to her, took photos on her mobile that she stared at when Leonora slept beside her.

  She thought then of the diaries, the pain Marion had gone through. And yet she had gone on to have a healthy child, to have Mum. What had happened? How had it all gone so wrong? Now that she was emerging from the shock of the birth, these questions had engulfed her once more.

  Then suddenly the car seat was brought in, a folder was signed, appointments with a visiting midwife were made, a dozen leaflets and adverts for baby things and she was walking outside the hospital to the car, her senses reeling after so long inside. The January wind nipped at her face before she slid into the passenger seat of the car, almost to the day when she had been due to have her daughter in the first place.

  The cafe had steamed-up windows and plenty of empty tables. The air smelled of cinnamon and caffeine as Ava pushed inside, the pram sticking on the thin rubber threshold so that her stomach pressed into the handlebar. She was still numb where they had cut her all those weeks ago.

  Her mum sat at a table right at the back near sliding double doors that overlooked a concrete square of courtyard outside; tables and chairs meant for the summer were pushed back into the corners. The space outside was a bleak eyesore: cracks in the stone, withered weeds poking out of them. In a small pile on the table sat the diaries and Ava was jolted to see them there. Her mum stood up, knocked over the small cactus in the centre of the table and spilled tea into her saucer.

  ‘You look well,’ she said as Ava removed her outer layers. ‘And look!’ Her mum gazed down into the carrycot, her fingers twitching with the desire to pick her up.

  Leonora stirred and Ava bent over her, unzipping the pram suit and lifting the tiny figure out.

  ‘Do you want to hold her?’ she asked in a soft voice.

&nbs
p; Her mum’s eyes filled with tears as Ava gently passed Leonora over. Ava left them both while she ordered a coffee. From the counter, she watched her mum gaze at her granddaughter in adoration. She was glad she’d come.

  Taking her coffee back, she couldn’t help her eyes straying towards the diaries, remembering the words within them. Her grandmother had lost so many babies. She had sounded so loving, so desperate for a child. And she had gone on to have a healthy baby. So, what had gone so wrong?

  She watched her mum smoothing the feathery hair on Leonora’s head, too soon to really tell what colour it would go, the fine strands golden.

  ‘I read the diaries,’ her mum said softly. ‘It was . . . difficult. To try to reconcile the woman in them with the woman I knew.’

  ‘What was she like?’ Ava clutched her mug in both hands.

  ‘She was . . . evil.’

  Ava stilled, shocked by the simple term. ‘What did she do to you?’

  Her mum’s face was drawn, lines etched deep into the sides of her mouth. ‘She . . .’

  Ava had to lean forward to hear her.

  ‘She made me ill.’ Her mother held Leonora to her, drawing comfort.

  ‘Ill?’ Ava didn’t understand.

  Her mum nodded. ‘She told me I couldn’t walk. That my legs were weak. That I needed to use sticks, a wheelchair or they would break. Later, she told me I would . . .’ Her mum gazed out over the courtyard, not meeting Ava’s eyes as she swallowed. ‘That I would lose them.’

  Ava set her coffee down and the noise of the cafe melted away as she stared at her mother. ‘That’s . . .’

  That feeling at Tommy’s party. The words on the endpapers.

  ‘She made me sick. Most days. She told me I had digestive problems. I had an operation on my stomach. I had so many tests, I felt like a porcupine. I had days when I could barely get out of bed.’

  The strange disconnected lists. Apple seeds. Pesticides. Numbers. Quantities. Some words and figures circled.