Little Disasters

by Sarah Vaughan

  She and Pete are falling apart. The hairline cracks that ran through their relationship from the start have widened until they can barely speak civilly. Communication is kept to a minimum. They don’t live, let alone love. They exist.

  He doesn’t want to know. So full of enthusiasm about this alternative lifestyle, so naive, so selfish, he doesn’t listen when she tries to explain how mind-numbing she finds it and how she’s achingly lonely with only the children to talk to each day. One of six, he will never understand her ambivalence towards her kids. She can’t tell him of the frustration that’s so intense she fears she might hurt them before he gets home, or explain that she fantasises about leaving them: just tramping up the lane, the fierce wind drowning out their screams. She tried doing it yesterday. Left around five o’clock and was out for twenty minutes, before the guilt – or rather the fear of what Pete would say if he came home early – drove her back to them.

  This room is filthy. A fly struggles in a spider’s web strung from the light bulb to the ceiling and she fixates on this as she grips her baby. She is like that caught insect: bound tight in a trap from which there is no escape. She doesn’t want this life. She doesn’t want this baby. But, despite knowing this quite clearly, she doesn’t mean to kill her. She just wants to shock her into silence.

  ‘Shh, shh, shh,’ she says, as she squeezes her tight.

  LIZ

  Saturday 3 February, 2018

  Forty

  I am swimming. It’s something I rarely do; that I only manage at moments of high stress or intense anger. Up and down the hospital pool I go: thirty lengths, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three.

  I’m not a particularly fast swimmer and I’m unfit: my body soft and unwieldy, my hips rolling from side to side. I’m two stone heavier than the skinny teenager who swam obsessively in the university pool, trying to work through her insecurities under the chlorinated water. But if I’m out of shape, I’m dogged and today I’m more driven than ever: goggles on, head down, arms windmilling in slow, considered motions. The water sloshes over the side of the pool as I tumble, turn and plough back on again.

  My mother killed her baby. My mother killed her baby. The mantra thrums through my head with every stroke. My mother killed her baby. I surge through the water – windmill, turn, slosh – as the realisation persists. By this stage of my swim, the endorphins have usually kicked in. But thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven lengths in and there’s no hit of wellbeing and none of the usual intoxication that comes as my brain empties. She killed my sister. She killed my baby sister, Clare.

  Compassion, I tell myself, as I try to kick away my disbelief and anger. View your mother with the same understanding as you’ve viewed Jess. Treat her as if you were her GP. Undiagnosed postnatal depression. Isolation, lack of support, marital breakdown: the risk factors were all there. This wasn’t as widely recognised in the Eighties. If she’d experienced it now, it might have been prevented. Though – and here I kick particularly forcefully, using my anger – even then it’s missed, isn’t it? I missed it. I missed it with Jess.

  Windmill, turn, slosh. Another length, but it’s no good, this cool, clinical analysis, when what I feel is a toxic cocktail of sorrow, anger, shock and shame. My mother smothered her eleven-week-old baby because she wouldn’t stop crying. I up my speed, putting on a brief sprint, as I try to force this fact away. And then – and here’s the thing that seems to chime with her cruelty towards us – she left it thirty-five years before confessing: not seeking help or not using this experience to temper her behaviour towards Mattie and me.

  Stop being so bloody harsh, I tell myself. She’d have been terrified of being found out; confounded by what she’d done; perhaps fearful for us? Better to bring us up than to have us placed in care. She’d have felt that more intensely once our father left: that big bear of a man who didn’t want to listen and walked away. Did he know what she’d done – and if so, how could he abandon his children? Or was the thought so monstrous it was something he couldn’t conceive?

  I think of our slapped thighs and dulled heads. Of her detachment when Mattie was in hospital. The fierce, hard heat of her gaze. I remember how we learned to read this from a very early age; how I instinctively knew to protect my brother – lying on his behalf; physically standing between them when she raged; taking the brunt of the blows on one occasion – and I’ve suppressed that memory of hands raining down on me, karate-chopping. And I think of how I’ve carried the guilt for his accident ever since it happened, and how my mother did nothing to dissuade me.

  I up my pace, arms whirling, buttocks clenching as I exploit this anger. Parcel up those memories; pack them away. I must think logically. Just because she could be aggressive towards us, it doesn’t mean she meant to kill Clare. The postnatal depression would have clouded her reason for that brief moment in time.

  Images kaleidoscope of this baby bucking against our mother. Remembering my nightmare, I feel Clare’s panic as she grappled for breath. I forget my rhythm and suddenly my lungs ache. I swallow water, the chlorine burning my throat and nose, my chest sharp with pain. Fear grips me as I start spluttering; momentarily imagine I will choke to death.

  Bursting out of the water, I clutch the side of the pool as if I’ve swum the Channel. Breathe, I tell myself, as I might to Sam or Rosa. Stop being so melodramatic. You’re fine. Wrenching off my goggles I sink below the surface, scrubbing away at my nose and eyes. Down here my tears can flow. My vision’s clouded, the water murky and opaque, but I can think more clearly. When my mother smothered Clare did she know what would happen? She wanted to silence her, but did she want her to die?

  I surge back up to the surface; put on my goggles. An anaesthetist in the next lane raises his hand, poised to strike up a conversation. I give him a tight smile and push off from the side. I need to distract myself, and I need to address the questions I know will otherwise dog me in the still of the night; questions that circle around the notion that Mattie and I are lucky to be here; that we might have been at risk yet somehow we survived . . .

  *

  After sixty lengths, I pull myself out of the pool, shower, and contemplate going back to the gastro ward to see my mother. I’d left abruptly. She’d been exhausted and I’d needed time to process what she’d said.

  I towel myself dry, wondering whether to present Mattie with this news, but knowing it would hardly persuade him to come down. He will always think the worst of her, and this will only confirm his suspicions, whereas I want to believe she was ill rather than malicious. That she never intended this child to die.

  I pull on my tight jeans, noting my soft stomach, silvered with stretch marks, and the broken veins at my ankles: the legacy of carrying two children. In the past, I’ve been critical of my body, wishing I had the time and self-discipline to have a figure like Jess. While other women have staved off middle age, I’ve seen myself hurtling towards it. But now I can’t believe I cared. My body may not be honed, but my mind? My mind is sharp and I take my mental health for granted. What a luxury! I’ve never experienced the despair that must have dogged my mother, or tormented Jess.

  It’s nearly nine. My mother should be asleep, or trying to sleep. We’ll achieve nothing now by talking: far better to visit in the morning when I’ve worked out what to say.

  I walk briskly to the hospital multi-storey, retrieve my car and head for the only place I want to be at the moment: home, and more specifically Nick.

  *

  He listens. Eleven o’clock at night and he’s still listening as I pace around our kitchen, turning the same thoughts over and over again. I rail, I question, and finally I cry, not just for my sister but for Mattie and me.

  He folds me in his arms and it’s the steady beat of his heart that calms me. That lets me voice the suspicion that throbs like an intractable splinter: tiny but so invidious, it can’t help but dominate.

  ‘The thing is,’ I say, not meeting his eyes, because it’s something I’m finding hard to think
, let alone voice, ‘I want to believe she was ill when this happened. That it was a clear case of postnatal depression. But I can imagine her being so angry, so frustrated, that in the heat of the moment she knew what she was doing. I know she’s capable of lashing out: that she feels emotions intensely and doesn’t seem able to moderate her temper. I’m scared that she just snapped – and it wasn’t just because she was ill; it was that she had the capacity to do this.’ I pause, and then whisper, ‘She killed her eleven-week-old baby – and if it was conscious, or deliberate, how can I excuse or forgive her for it?’

  ‘Could you forgive her if you were convinced she was mentally ill?’ Nick looks at me intently and for a moment I wonder that my husband could doubt this.

  ‘Of course I could, yes.’ My tone’s no-nonsense. I’d have a rationale, a neat medical diagnosis. ‘If she was suffering from severe postnatal depression there would be a reason for her doing what she did.’

  ‘I guess all you can do is wait and see if she’s capable of talking about it any more? Not much help, I know, but I can’t see that there’s another option.’ Nick gives an apologetic shrug. I’m asking his opinion on a question to which even my mother might not admit the answer.

  How can we know what she was thinking when she killed her child?

  JESS

  Sunday 4 February

  Forty-one

  When DC Rustin confronted her with the news that Frankie had confessed to what happened, Jess initially felt a hot flush of intense embarrassment swiftly followed by an acute longing to hold her youngest son and reassure him everything would be OK.

  Then came relief. It had taken her by surprise and engulfed her like a fake fur coat, making her feel momentarily safe and almost giddy. Because though the fear remained that they viewed her as a negligent mother at least she no longer needed to lie about everything.

  For too long she had been living this double life, and the strain of pretending everything was fine, while ignoring the riff that made a mockery of this – the voice that constantly sought to trip her up – was unsustainable, and proving more than she could bear. The officers knew almost everything: that she had left her children alone; that Frankie was involved. But perhaps, and it was the faintest glimmer of an idea, perhaps now she could finally admit that she was in the grip of something perturbing. Something that had taken over her mind and was so compelling it felt like her reality. Perhaps now something might change.

  And so she told them what happened, braving DC Rustin’s evident irritation at her having wasted police time.

  ‘I thought I would be five minutes. I can’t believe I could think that: I clearly wasn’t thinking straight.’

  From the other side of the table there was silence, the officer appraising her like a stalking cat. And, prey-like, Jess froze. She couldn’t admit that she had left the children because she feared she would hurt Betsey: that she had seen herself taking her baby by the legs and slamming her against the mantelpiece. That such scenarios machine-gunned her mind.

  It was DC Farron who opened the way for her to indicate that perhaps not everything was well.

  ‘Do you often feel like that? As if you’re not thinking straight?’ he asked, with a hint of the empathy she’d detected when they’d met in A&E.

  Her throat closed over and to her horror she started crying great ugly sobs, her hands fluttering to her eyes as she tried to shield her wet, red face.

  A tsk from DC Rustin. Jess could imagine her contempt. But from DC Farron, she sensed more sympathy. He watched her quizzically, trying to fathom her out. There was a mention of Lucy Stone, of social services offering support, but she couldn’t take it all in and focused, instead, on the thing that seemed tangible.

  She was going home.

  *

  That was ten days ago. She was released after Frankie was interviewed and now they are all trying to pick up their lives – impossible, really, while Betsey is in hospital in a still vulnerable state. She’s in paediatric intensive care, hooked up to wires and drips and machines, and all the medical paraphernalia Jess thought she distrusted and despised. She’s with her, now, braving the paediatric nurses’ wary gaze.

  Of course, she still can’t hold her. While Jess was being questioned Betsey experienced another seizure that topped twelve minutes and led to the anaesthetist inducing a coma so that it could be managed. Now she has been eased out of it and is waiting to be transferred back to the ward. And though Jess longs for this, she is terrified. At least here Betsey is safe. She baskets her fingers together, imagining the bones in her daughter’s skull knitting tight.

  Let her get better soon. It’s all she wants – well, that and her family life to return to some sort of normality; for the thoughts that sabotage her to end.

  She can’t imagine how that will occur. Lucy has talked about an ‘early help plan’, and suggested she see a GP for a psychiatric referral. Ed rang the surgery on Friday for an emergency appointment: she is seeing someone tomorrow first thing. But though she is grateful, she is passive, Ed and the social worker bandying terminology, arranging appointments, conspiring to make things better when to her this feels impossible. How can she change her thinking and move on from this?

  She needs to focus on her children and on Ed, who is trying so hard to understand but is clearly struggling. Their relationship has been strained to near breaking point this week.

  Last night he admitted trawling through her laptop. He had found her search, made on Friday afternoon as Frankie and Bets competed to see who could cry loudest and the walls of the house – and her life – had constricted. Why do I want to harm my baby? Her chest tightened as he repeated the phrase.

  ‘And you’ve known about this since Sunday, and you didn’t think to mention it before now?’ she asked, swallowing her anger.

  ‘How could I admit I’d spied on you? You’d have been incandescent: even less likely to talk to me.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell the police?’

  DC Rustin hadn’t mentioned it. The police had only taken her laptop after she was arrested on that terrible Wednesday night.

  ‘No. I was worried for the children, of course, but they were never left with you unsupervised. And I guess I couldn’t imagine you actually doing it.’

  Her relief is immense. So he didn’t betray her. He didn’t even confide in Liz or Lucy.

  ‘Did you tell anyone? Charlotte perhaps?’ Her old anxiety flares.

  ‘Of course I didn’t! How could I risk incriminating you? I didn’t even tell your sister. It’s been horrific, to be honest, wondering why you’d written that. Now it seems so bloody obvious you were unwell.’

  He is typically relieved there is an explanation for her behaviour. ‘We’ll get you some help now. We can sort this,’ he said, and he’d stroked her cheek as if she was a small child to be humoured. ‘I’ll try to be around more, and do more to help.’

  She doubts this will happen. The culture in which he works doesn’t allow for flexible working. And yet it is something: this recognition that he needs to be more involved with the children; that he understands she is less resilient, more fragile than she has always pretended to be.

  She thinks of her boys. They’ve been unconditional in their love, though Frankie has been emotional, even by his standards. ‘It’s my fault. I’m so naughty. All the teachers say I’m naughty . . .’ He was inconsolable when she tucked him up last night.

  Something about his behaviour still doesn’t make sense and so she approaches the memory in ever decreasing circles. Imagines him lifting Betsey, hauling her up the stairs, excitement building with each step. He wouldn’t predict that he might drop her, that she might wriggle, that he would need to put a hand on her body as he fumbled for a nappy: few eight-year-olds would, and none with his lack of impulse control. She had told him not to leave the room, to go upstairs or lift her and she is surprised that he completely ignored her words; that he chose to blindly block them out . . .

  She closes her eyes. Tiredne
ss overwhelms her and yet she can’t relax: her habitual jitteriness courses through her. Her eyes snap at the sound of footsteps. Someone’s walking towards her. A gentle tread.

  ‘Can I join you?’ Liz stands beside her, apprehensive. Underneath the unflattering strip light, she is haggard. A patch of eczema flares below her left eyebrow and the eye area looks inflamed.

  Wordlessly, Jess nods. Liz pulls up a chair and perches on the edge of it. It irritates her, this carefulness. She should be bloody hesitant. She wishes she had the strength to tell her to go away.

  ‘She’s doing well.’ Liz nods towards Bets.

  Jess doesn’t want her talking about her; feels instantly protective. Betsey has contracted an infection in her groin, requiring antibiotics, and has experienced intermittent seizures. She’d hardly say she is ‘doing well’. When she gets back on the ward she’ll have to be weaned off the morphine and sedative administered for the past eight days: she can’t go ‘cold turkey’. And she still faces a week in hospital.

  ‘And how are you doing?’

  Jess shrugs. She cannot articulate how she is feeling; can barely admit the extent of her distress.

  ‘How’s Frankie?’ Liz ploughs on. ‘Is he any better?’

  She has to say something. To concede that Liz was the one who winkled out the truth that led to her being released by the police, even though she helped alert them.

  ‘He’s still pretty distressed. But thank you for getting him to open up . . .’

  ‘I was just so relieved I could help. If I couldn’t get him to do that, well, I might as well give up . . .’ Her voice tails off. ‘It’s what I’m meant to do, isn’t it? To work out what’s going on . . .’