‘You didn’t manage it with me.’
‘I didn’t, no.’ Liz looks immeasurably sad. ‘My job was to look after Betsey, and we’re always conscious that children can be harmed. But I should have realised what was going on. I didn’t marry my knowledge of you with what I was being presented with. I should have realised you might be unwell . . .’
‘You were my friend and you failed to help me.’ Her voice is balled up tight. ‘You thought the very worst of me: that I would batter my baby.’ Anger spreads up her throat and through her head and she fears she will explode.
Liz shrugs, and it’s as if there is an immense burden on her shoulders she cannot lift. ‘I don’t know what more I can say. I should have understood more quickly; should have thought beyond the obvious.’ She pauses. ‘I’m so sorry, too, for being so absent after Betsey was born. I keep thinking that if I’d made more of an effort I’d have seen you were finding it so difficult this time round . . . But you didn’t help by not being honest about what happened when you came in.’
‘I couldn’t betray Frankie; and I couldn’t risk losing them by telling you I’d left them. I didn’t know you’d call social services, anyway.’
Liz is tender. ‘I imagine it felt impossible to admit how you were feeling, as well.’
Her kindness threatens to undo Jess. She swallows the pebble in her throat; only manages a curt nod.
They sit in silence for a while, Jess’s antipathy still simmering beneath the surface but complicated by a desire to rekindle their former closeness. She has missed Liz, despite her self-justification and earnestness, her tendency to sound a little pompous. She has missed her warmth and her desire to do the right thing.
She admires her conscientiousness, too. It’s nearly 9 p.m. ‘Why are you here this late, anyway? You didn’t come to find me?’
‘No.’ Liz shakes her head. ‘My mother’s on the gastro ward; I’ve just been to see her. I think she might die.’
The admission startles Jess but Liz doesn’t seem to notice. Eyes focused on Betsey, she murmurs: ‘I think she’s been drinking herself to death.
‘I didn’t pick up on it,’ she continues, in the same flat tone, ‘ just as I didn’t realise you might be struggling. Seems I’m not such a good doctor. And you know the worst thing? However much I try, I can’t feel the same compassion for her as I would for a patient.’
‘Oh, Liz.’
‘Yep.’ She scrubs at her eye. There’s a stye forming on her lower left lid and Jess wants to ease her hand away.
‘Why’s that?’
‘She told me about something horrific.’ There’s a long pause. ‘Do you remember me telling you she lost a baby to a cot death? A baby sister, though my mother would never talk about her, wouldn’t even tell me her name.’
‘You mentioned it when Rosa was tiny. You worried about the togs of her Grobags.’ A flash of a memory: Liz agonising over whether Rosa would overheat in a winter bag in spring weather; her obsession with the baby monitor and keeping the room a chilly eighteen degrees.
‘I did, didn’t I?’ Liz’s mouth twists, her bottom lip jutting out, as if she’s concentrating on not crying, but her voice is citrus bright. ‘Well, my mother told me she smothered that baby because she wouldn’t stop crying. Christ! I’m sorry.’ She rubs furiously at her eye.
Jess feels the revelation as a sharp wrench in the pit of her stomach. The shock is intense but so is the relief that she never acted like this. She imagined shaking Betsey, or throwing her down the stairs, or shoving her into the road in her buggy – but she never followed up on these fears. It was as if her mind flaunted the worst possible scenario, pushing her to be increasingly vigilant until there was a vast disparity between what she imagined and her reality.
But Liz’s mother did this most horrific thing. White stars cloud Jess’s vision and she feels as if she might retch. And then her condemnation is muddied by sorrow. ‘She must have been so lonely.’ She can see it so clearly: a mother with a screaming baby in one small room. People think you don’t have the time or headspace to feel alone with three energetic children, but there is little that’s more lonely than being at home with a distraught baby and an unravelling mind.
Liz looks at her, and her expression is raw with pain. ‘Yes. She was physically and emotionally isolated . . .’ She pauses, and there’s a clear caveat in her speech.
‘Liz, she couldn’t have been thinking clearly . . . She must have been so scared, so lost.’
‘I know . . . I know that, rationally. It’s just . . . Oh, she wasn’t kind. She could be physically abusive; neglected us; was sometimes cruel. We weren’t regularly battered but we feared her, and we knew never to push things.’
‘Like me with my father . . .’
‘You too? I’m sorry. I’ve often wondered . . . Anyway; it’s made me a suspicious person. A necessary suspicion’s a good thing in medicine but it means I’m prone to suspecting the worst of people, just as I did with you.’
‘She doesn’t have any power over you now,’ Jess says, and she takes Liz’s small, sturdy hand in her own slim fingers. ‘You said you thought she was dying?’
‘Yes.’ Liz swallows. ‘Yes. I think she is.’
‘So she can’t hurt you now. Would it help to see that she must have been in a very dark place to behave like that?’
‘I think she’s been in a dark place for most of her life.’
‘Then perhaps it’s time, not to condone her, but to try to forgive.’
LIZ
Monday 5 February
Forty-two
My mother is drifting in and out of consciousness. The consultant tells me she could have a matter of days, but in the end it’s just a matter of hours left to live.
I sit by her bedside, watching her thinly veined eyelids; willing them to open. I am nervous. Not of her death – I’ve witnessed deaths before – but of what I should ask her.
There is so much, and too little, I can say.
She’s been barely conscious in the forty-eight hours since she told me about my sister. It’s as if the effort of unburdening herself has depleted her resources, and my visits have been brief: at the start and end of each day. I run through my questions – about her intent; about why she harboured this secret for so long; about her state of mind – and I visualise them as bullet points, as if I am preparing for an interview or the sort of assessment I’ll have to take to become a consultant. But I know I’ll never ask them. I can’t quiz a woman who is dying. And, although it matters to me, the simple fact that Clare had her life snuffed out can’t be altered. As Jess said, now is the time to forgive.
I look at my mother and I see she is a collection of bones: a shadow of the woman who would power up the stairs as she screamed that she hated us and wished she’d never had us. The hospital gown grants her anonymity. Poor life choices, I’d guess if I was her doctor: a smoker, a drinker, someone who lives in relative poverty and will die young. The balance of power has shifted so completely that I see – and the thought blindsides me – I could mirror events: put a pillow to her face and, with her breathing this shallow, there’d be little struggle. She can’t hurt you now. Yes, that power has gone.
Instead, I take her hand and trace the fine white line where she was branded; try to imagine these fingers doing something mundane or even loving: buttoning my coat or cooking, her movements deft as she lifts a pan or cracks an egg. I see the same hands combing my hair, perhaps moving it softly to one side, but it’s a memory I’ve made up. She would tug a comb through my tangles, speaking sharply in the pre-school rush; slapping the side of my head with the paddle of the brush on more than one occasion. I imagine the same hands holding Clare in that dark, damp room, and clutching a little too tightly; imagine her knuckles clenching, these same fingers tightening their grip.
I drop her hand; note the rattle of her breathing, the faint rise of her chest. She’s close to death now. Perhaps it will be gentle, and I do wish that for her, though the irony of C
lare’s being anything but is not lost. I see that baby through the chink of the door and know for my own sanity I need to stop obsessing. Though she was cruel, I can’t believe, or let myself believe, she meant to kill Clare.
I close my eyes and, as so often when I’m with my mother, I think of Jess. And I find that I am weeping, in sympathy for what she has experienced since Betsey was admitted and since her birth. Then I look at the figure lying in the bed, her breath shallow and laboured, and finally, finally, and it’s such a relief to do so, I feel the same compassion for my mother as I do for my friend.
My tears flow quietly as I take her hand and stroke it gently, tracing her bones, and her too-thin skin. Her pulse is thready. DNAR - do not attempt resuscitation: that’s what she’s asked to be put on her records. There’ll be no crash call, no fight to get her back, as there usually would for a woman her age.
My cheeks are wet, now. I ball up my tissue, and reach into my handbag for another. Blow my nose noisily. Should I slip away? People often wait until their family leave before they die, and it would be typical of her to want to do that; to remain that self-sufficient, that independent. And yet there’s too much left unsaid. I’m not ready to say goodbye.
I’m conscious of someone walking up behind me, though.
‘All right?’
I turn to see my brother, looking diffident, as if not sure he should be here.
‘Matt!’ I clutch his wiry frame.
His eyes flit to our mother and I see his shock at how she has diminished. ‘I thought about what you said and how I wasn’t being fair.’
He looks too fit and healthy to be on this ward. A literal breath of fresh air, he smells not of London grime but the chill of the mountains: peat, wood smoke, the fabric of his mountaineering jacket, a hint of neoprene.
And though it’s typical of him to leave it until the eleventh hour – great timing, part of me thinks – I feel inexplicably teary. ‘Thank you,’ I say.
We sit either side of her, and we wait. After a while, he gets up and drops a dry kiss on her forehead. Perhaps he also needs to forgive.
‘I wouldn’t have recognised her,’ he says, much later, after the junior doctor has confirmed she is dead, and as we gather up his backpack to return home. ‘She isn’t as I remember. This isn’t the Janet we knew.’
And I nod. Her power has gone.
‘She went a long time ago.’
JESS
Tuesday 13 February
Forty-three
‘What do you do, to keep Betsey safe?’ the therapist, Tessa Farthing, asks Jess from across the coffee table between them. It’s their first session, and Jess is surprised by Tessa’s speed at getting to the nub of things.
‘Well . . . I . . . I do lots of things.’
‘Can you give me an example?’
‘I . . . I don’t know where to start.’ How to disentangle the mass of measures threaded through her life? To work out which are ‘normal’ behaviours – the sort of things other mothers do – and which are specific rituals designed to make sure she does no harm?
She knew this would be hard. Cognitive behavioural therapy, that’s what she has signed up for. Extreme postnatal anxiety and maternal OCD, those are the conditions she’s experiencing, according to her psychiatric assessment last week. She doesn’t like being labelled and yet when Dr Arnold described the characteristics of maternal OCD something in her brain had clicked. This was a recognised condition? Other people felt like this, too? The psychiatrist had made it sound as if Jess could alter her state of mind by applying this CBT method. ‘You can feel better,’ he had told her. ‘You will feel better than this.’
Tessa, to whom she had been referred, had been equally clear that she could manage this if she committed to the sessions and worked hard in between them. And now, barely forty minutes into their meeting, she is asking Jess to describe the extent of her safety net.
‘Well, obviously I have to remove the knives from the kitchen; remove the pans. I have to make sure there are no soft toys in her cot, and there are no bolsters. I sterilise her bowls and bottles and cutlery three times – and if I think I’ve inadvertently put neat bleach in the steriliser I have to start again. I disinfect her high chair tray three times, too; and the legs of the chair . . .’ The details spill out, and it’s a relief to explain all this while Tessa sits there, calm and competent, in this vacated office at the GP’s surgery. ‘And if I’m out and about, and something really frightens me, and I can’t wash my hands for some reason, then I need to align my rings.’
‘You need to align your rings?’ No twitch of a smile. Tessa seems interested.
‘Yes. I do it three times. These rings here.’ She doesn’t demonstrate because then she would have to realign them, three times, just to make it right again.
‘And what would happen if you didn’t do that?’ the therapist asks, charcoal bob tilting to one side.
‘Well, I have to,’ she says. ‘It’s not an option.’
‘But what would happen if you didn’t?’ Tessa persists.
Jess stares back; puzzled as to why she wouldn’t do this, but with a growing consciousness that perhaps her explanation might sound a little ridiculous.
‘Then she wouldn’t be safe.’
The therapist peers at her over her glasses, her gaze not unfriendly but searching. ‘Why don’t you try it? It could be your homework.’
‘Homework?’ Dr Arnold had mentioned this.
‘You’d need to take your stacking rings off. Put them in a box at home so that there’s nothing on that finger. Take all your rings off, ideally. Then there’s nothing to spin.’
The thought terrifies her. What will she do if she thinks the baby monitor isn’t working – her current fear now that Bets is finally home – and she is trying not to check it? Spinning her rings is an inadequate alternative but it gives her a brief reprieve.
Her fingers stray instinctively to her right hand now: a quick one, two, three, and the rings are spinned. Tessa notices and Jess flushes as if she’s been caught doing something furtive.
‘Why don’t you try taking them off, now?’
‘I – well, OK.’
Cack-handedly, she removes the rings and slips them into the side of her handbag. Her fingers feel naked and she exposed. She reaches for a tissue from the box on the coffee table between them and starts fiddling with it, while blinking back the tears that film her eyes.
‘OK?’ Tessa says eventually.
Jess nods. She can do this. She has to do this. Learning to think differently – to curb the way in which she has behaved, on and off, since childhood – seems impossible, and yet what choice does she have? Betsey’s skull fracture – the result of her acting on sabotaging thoughts – has shown she cannot continue like this. Besides, seeking help is crucial to persuading social services she can be trusted as a mother; is part of her family’s action plan.
‘It would be good if you could continue to try this,’ says Tessa, in her non-judgemental way that is nevertheless quietly assertive. ‘And if you could fill out this chart, as we discussed – rating your thoughts, what triggers them, and the likelihood of your thinking they are true?’
Jess takes the piece of paper. She will need more than one of these.
‘It would be a good idea to get a notebook so that you can make several charts.’ Tessa seems to read her mind.
She has been allocated six CBT sessions on the NHS, and Jess knows she is lucky to have these. She suspects – and she has never felt more grateful for Ed’s fat salary – that she will need to have more. Still, she is sceptical about changing something so entrenched. Her intrusive thoughts began when she was ten, ebbed and flowed throughout adolescence, then lay dormant for many years before returning with a vengeance with the puppy and after her traumatic labour with Betsey. She can’t imagine existing without them, and yet, and here she feels the tiniest glimmer of excitement, what if she could contain or even silence them?
‘You all right?’ I
n the health centre waiting room, she bumps into another mother from Kit’s year: Carla’s mum – she can’t remember her name, she’s not one of the mothers she chats to in the playground – a toddler in a buggy, a baby straddling her hip. The woman eyes her curiously: clocking her smudged mascara, the signs of her emotional unravelling. She looks down, averting her eyes.
All good, thank you. That would be her usual response. The reply of a woman hiding her anxieties beneath a spun caramel exterior, her layers of glossiness binding her dark thoughts tight.
But other mothers think like her: that’s something she’s taken from her conversation with Dr Arnold, and so she is honest. ‘Not brilliant,’ she admits.
And then she thinks of Ed, who is at home looking after Bets; of Martha, who will drop in every other day; of Liz, who texted this morning to say she was thinking of her. ‘But I hope I’m going to get there.’
LIZ
Saturday 9 June
Forty-four
The PTA Summer Fair has been going for an hour and a half and Sam has reached peak levels of excitement, cramming wisps of pale pink candyfloss into his mouth.
‘Look what else we won,’ he manages through bubblegum pink fluff.
Frankie, with whom he’s pooled his resources, opens a canvas tote to reveal their spoils: lurid chewy sweets, strawberry laces, small packets of Haribos and four Sherbet Fountains. The sorts of prizes his mother would immediately ban.
‘That’s just the sweetie tombola,’ Sam adds. ‘We also won a huge bottle of Coke and some bubble bath. The lady on the stall wouldn’t let us get you the wine.’
‘That’s very kind of you – but where’s the Coke now?’ I ask, amused but slightly chastened that Sam knew I’d choose alcohol over toiletries. My boy belches softly.
‘Oh, Sam. You didn’t?’
‘We shared it with Connor.’
‘You drank most of it,’ Frankie, ever literal, retorts.
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