‘Guaranteed she’ll wake up in the ten minutes you’re not here and scream the place down. She’s not being sedated any more, don’t forget.’
‘She’ll be fine Camille. She won’t wake up and even if she does there are nurses here.’
‘I could have been and gone in the time it’s taken to have this conversation.’
‘Whatever. Buy me a sandwich. Are you going to come back when I need to take a leak? I suppose you don’t need the toilet when you’re here because you’re better than that.’
I turn around, go downstairs and buy him a ham and salad sandwich because I know he hates ham. When I return to the room I pass it to him and say, ‘It was all they had left. You can always pick the ham out.’
‘Just leave it on the table.’ He’s sitting in the chair reading the newspaper and I wonder if he waits till I’m gone to touch her or whether men just don’t feel that same need, to constantly love their daughters through the touch of their hands and the circle of their arms.
I have only just driven out of the car park when my phone rings. It’s Paul, calling, I assume, to be a sarcastic bastard and tell me he has to go to the toilet. I let it ring and then decide to answer just before it goes to message bank. The first sounds I hear are hospital sounds but they are close, too close, too much shouting and the liquid rush of retching.
‘She’s vomiting blood. She wants you.’
‘What did you do?’ I screech. ‘She was perfectly fine while I was there.’
I hang up, turn the car around, park in the emergency bay and run up the stairs. As each foot hits a step it knocks the same thought into my mind: why am I never there when this happens. If I was three and vomiting blood I’d want my mother.
The amount of blood in the bowl and on the bed and on Addie is filmic, it cannot be real. Blood has spattered on Paul’s shirt and face; it is even in his hair. They won’t let me near her because they are setting up another transfusion, they are sedating her again and I don’t even know if she has seen me come back before she disappears into the planet behind her eyelids, a place where I hope she can always find her mother when she needs her.
‘Why has she been taken off the list?’ I attack the consultant as soon as he steps into ICU the next morning.
‘She’s too sick. If we open her up for a transplant now she won’t make it off the table.’ He has learnt, over the past week, to be direct and clinical with me, not to convert everything into vague kin-speak.
‘She won’t make it out of this bed without a liver.’
‘If she gets through this, she’s likely to be one of the most in need.’
I don’t hear the if; I hear the rest of the sentence because that is the outcome I want.
But the consultant continues. ‘She’s spiked a fever. It’s staph. She needs vanc.’
Staph. Vanc. ICU words, but words I do not need in my job because my patients are never around long enough to contract hospital-borne infections. How did this happen? I’ve been here for the last twenty-four hours straight; it could not have happened while I was here because nothing bad can happen when I am around.
Mummy’s here. Mummy’s here. I have been saying this over and over in Addie’s ear, it has become like a lullaby as my vowels have become sleepy and less defined, as my voice has shrivelled to a whisper. But Mummy’s here has not been enough, the protective charm of the words has proved too weak and now all we have to rely on to stop the staph from poisoning her blood is vanc, the drug of Last Resort. Last Resort is a place where I work, it is not a place my child inhabits even though, to look at her, intubated and transfused, you would think she has been there a long time.
So I ask questions, because I can control questions. ‘What is her blood pressure? What is...’ until I realise I cannot control the answers and those are the important things, after all.
ELEVEN
The consultant comes back later when Paul has gone to work and I am alone. ‘If she recovers and goes back on the list, then you and your husband might want to think about having the work-up done to see if either of you are compatible.’
‘We’re at that point now are we?’ I ask.
‘Almost. Not quite. But if we do the work-up now, then when we do get to that point, which is likely to be soon, we’ll know if we have another option. It’s still a backup plan.’
‘Let’s do the tests today. I will happily take out part of my liver myself if it makes Addie better.’
The consultant smiles at me. ‘I know you would, Camille. But you need to think about the risks to you. Your husband does too.’
‘He’ll be fine with it,’ I reply, thinking, He’d better be.
‘Camille, we need to talk about it more before we both just rush in and do the tests.’ That is Paul’s reply when I ring him with the news.
I fire back, ‘Or we could do the tests and talk about it later. It’s a backup plan; they might not even need to use part of our livers. So let’s just do the tests.’
‘With you, doing the tests is the same as deciding. If I do the tests today and I’m compatible you’ll expect me to give Addie part of my liver without even discussing it.’
‘What on earth do we need to discuss? If you’re compatible then you’ll give Addie part of your liver so that she doesn’t die.’
Paul sighs. ‘Of course I would Camille. But we need to talk about it. What if you’re compatible? They’ll take out part of your liver in one hospital. Meanwhile Addie will be in the children’s hospital having a transplant. You won’t be able to see each other because you’ll both be too sick to move. Don’t you think she’ll want you with her when she’s recovering?’
‘That’s a minor detail. She’ll be alive.’
But Paul presses on. ‘I’ll need to be with Addie because you won’t let her be by herself. You’ll be in hospital recovering from major, and very risky, surgery. So who’s looking after Rosie? We just farm her out to Julie or Louisa for a month or so?’
‘You weren’t too concerned about how to manage everyone before, not when you knew you could leave it all to me. I’ve got to go. The doctor’s here.’ It’s a lie and I think Paul knows it but I have better things to do with my time than discuss whether or not it is appropriate for me to want to save my daughter’s life.
That night, after I finish having my work-up done, I call Sarah. I need a way to shut out the alarms that sound constantly through ICU, to release the pressure trapped within the walls of this other world, an alien space where nothing exists except me and my child and a bank of machines and a team of doctors and nurses who do all they can even when they have run out of things to do. It is a world without night or day, where you forget what silence sounds like, where you see tiny people swathed in tubes larger than they are.
‘How’s Addie?’ is how she answers the phone, is how everyone answers the phone.
‘She needs a liver,’ I say because, to me, that says it all, says exactly how precarious her situation is. ‘But let’s talk about the exhibition instead. I’ve talked about livers all day.’
‘I won’t be mad with you if you can’t do it any more, Camille.’
And I actually laugh because her words make me realise how despondent I must sound; if Sarah, who never lets anyone get out of anything, is giving me a leave pass, then it must seem as if the world is ending. ‘No, I’m still going to do it. It gives me something else to think about when I’m here at the hospital.’
There is a huge sigh of relief from the phone. ‘Thank God. Because the notes you’ve written are perfect. I love the pieces you’ve chosen. I think we should mount five or six plaques on the wall behind each piece with a quote of a paragraph or so taken from the notes. Then I’m going to publish the notes in full in the exhibition catalogue. If we make the exhibition really spaced out, with plenty of room in between each piece, then people will be able to stop and read the quotes, and maybe refer to the catalogue to read more, while they’re there, in front of the piece.’
‘Sounds good.
I’ll send you through some more as I write it.’ I haven’t sent her anything for a few days because I have reached the point in my mother’s diaries where I have been born and I am reluctant to read on now, to see baby-Camille and mother-Alix together, bonding perhaps – or not – in the first weeks of my life. The notes that I’ve written have been easy to edit so far before passing them to Sarah – take out anything too private – but it hasn’t been really personal yet because I have been absent. Now everything will be personal.
Sarah’s voice pushes the thought away. ‘You haven’t got to Jack’s paintings yet, have you?’
‘No.’
‘Do you want me to organise another meeting so he can talk to you about them?’
‘Not yet. Let me write it my way first. I know stuff about him from Louisa and from Alix’s diaries. I want to see if the story works out without him.’ I shake my head even though she can’t see me. ‘I don’t mean without him, literally. I mean without his version of events.’
‘You’ll have to show him the notes, Camille.’
Next to me, there is the clatter and bustle of a new patient being brought in. I can see a child who is really no more than a baby, about Rosie’s age. He is on a ventilator. There is no family with him and I hear the words brain injury, stepfather and Community Services and I know it is not going to end well for that tiny baby and I wonder, how could anyone take the gift of a precious, healthy baby and destroy it, transform it into the damaged and neglected child who lies just a few metres away.
I say goodbye to Sarah and then make another call, even though I know I am not supposed to, but I cannot sit here any longer, detached from the real world, where all there is to worry about is what to get a child for their birthday, not whether they will see another birthday again.
‘Camille.’ Louisa knows it’s me before I even have a chance to speak. ‘How are you?’
And I love Louisa for being the one person who asks about me before she asks about Addie. I turn away from the baby next to Addie. I remember Rosie’s words from the day before, calling her sister slow. I shut my eyes. Why are there so many dead people? How did I survive? Why is it Addie instead of me? Questions that Paul would find too pessimistic, questions that Louisa would answer with a big squeezy cuddle, an answer that isn’t really an answer.
So I don’t ask them. I say, ‘I just had a work-up done to see if I can give Addie part of my liver. In case we get to the point where we can’t wait for a paediatric donor any more.’
‘When do you find out the result?’
‘In a couple of days.’
‘Is Paul doing the tests too?’
‘I don’t know.’ I pause and then ask, ‘What was it like, raising Felicity and me by yourself?’
‘Having the two of you was the thing that helped me get through the divorce. And remember that Felicity was five by the time you came to live with us so she could do a lot for herself. It wasn’t like having two babies.’
‘But I was only two.’
‘Which made it easier. Felicity thought you were her baby too. She didn’t worry so much about why her Dad had left because she had so much fun looking after you.’
‘Did you still love Graham when he left?’
‘I did,’ Louisa says, then adds, ‘Well, I thought I did. Until I realised that he’d stopped trying.’
‘Why is love so bloody trying? Shouldn’t it be easier?’
I can tell Louisa is smiling and I know I sound like a whingy teenager who thinks everything in the world, even getting out of bed, requires too much effort. But, wise as ever, she says, ‘The easy thing is to stop loving someone. The hardest thing is to do is to stay in love. No one ever talks about what a struggle it is, how much effort it takes, not just to stay with somebody and suffer through it, but to stay with someone and still feel curious about them.’
‘Curious?’ I laugh. ‘I would have thought desire and passion were more important than curiosity.’
‘If you’re curious about someone, even after many years together, then it means you still yearn for them. Yearning comes after passion, if you’re lucky.’
Yearning. I remember The Waltz, Camille Claudel’s sculpture, and realise that I have always imagined the figures in the sculpture as Alix and Dan. But perhaps they are not. Alix and Dan had time enough for passion, but they were dead before they could yearn.
At 2.30a.m. the little boy next to Addie dies. No one has been to see him except the nurse. At 2.00a.m., I see his eyes open once, and there is nothing in them; he is already gone and I am glad that he does not know how unloved he is, does not know that, when he most needs his mother, she is not there. Even though I am expecting what happens half an hour later I am shocked when my throat stiffens and I cannot swallow or breathe.
I pick up my phone again, dial Paul, but hang up before I finish. I can’t call Louisa again. So I dial another number.
‘Fliss.’ My sister-cousin, who is now living in Hong Kong with her husband, answers the phone on the first ring, as though she had been waiting for my call. ‘She’s so sick, Fliss. Addie’s so sick.’
‘I know,’ Felicity says.
Two such simple words. No platitudes. Honesty. At last. It makes me cry. ‘They’ve had staph at the hospital and now Addie’s got that on top of everything else.’
‘Staph,’ repeats Felicity. ‘Bugger. You’ve always been worried about that.’
‘She’s too sick to have staph. What if the antibiotics don’t work?’
‘What happens if they don’t?’
And there it is. A chance to talk it through. To put everything in my mind into words. To have someone listen. I wipe my eyes and concentrate on my reply. ‘She can get sepsis, blood poisoning. Then everything shuts down. Blood pressure drops. Fever skyrockets. No urine output. Her heart and lungs go into overdrive. Then septic shock. The end of everything.’
Please come, Felicity, is the sentence I don’t add to what I have just said.
I don’t need to. ‘I’ll book a flight. Richard and I will come as soon as we can.’
‘But the baby.’ My protest is without vigour.
‘I’m only thirty weeks. I can still fly. I’m coming, Camille.’
‘Thank you,’ I say.
NOTES ON AN EXHIBITION
THE BROKEN BITS
(Plaster, various sizes. Never previously exhibited.)
How does a child make time pass by so quickly? Alix wondered about this every day as her brain assumed a vegetative state and her body became an armature, a framework to support the physiological necessities of feeding and nappy changing and settling to sleep and pacifying sudden and relentless crying. A framework that shut out any emotion about her situation because how else could she surrender Camille to Louisa’s care each day to return to work? But she knew that if she did not do this, then the armature would fail to support anything at all and she would be reduced to residual nervous system activity that made her body appear alive when it was not.
Returning to work was the outward sign that she was not wallowing in it, this muddy grief that wanted to suck her down into a kind of quicksand where she could no longer walk or breathe. So every day she dropped Camille off at Louisa’s, went to the hospital, worked, then collected Camille, fed her, bathed her, changed her and put her to bed.
Only after those jobs were done, did she allow herself to wade out once again into what others, she knew, would call self-pity. She would sit in his studio wearing his dusty jeans, holding pieces of plaster. The broken bits, he called them, the pieces he had begun but not finished because something was not right about them. The scale of the piece was wrong perhaps, like the one Alix held – a woman whose chest was stunted in comparison to the size of her head. Or it had snapped in two because he’d applied too much pressure with the chisel. Or removing the bodily context had caused the sculpture to look like a piece of nothing, rather than the elbow it was supposed to be.
What would it be like, Alix thought, to be nothing? To be like tha
t elbow. To be like Dan, her mind mocked her and that was when she would pick up the bottle of pills from the desk, pills she had prescribed for herself because she wanted sleep, dreamless sleep, endless sleep, not to wake each morning to the absence that was Dan. She would count them out into her hand. Twenty. That would be enough. Her fist would close around them. She would pick up a glass of water, place a pill on her tongue. Tempting herself. How far would she go?
But then the baby would inevitably cry and Alix would put the pills back in the bottle, close the lid, put it on a shelf up high even though Camille couldn’t roll over, much less walk, and go to the baby’s room. She would pick up Camille, feed her a bottle, change her nappy, wrap her in muslin and put her back in her cot. Camille would cry. For hours. It was as if she had claimed all of Alix’s grief, taken it for herself and was flinging it out into the night-dark room. For the first week or so Alix would do what Louisa had told her; she would pick up Camille and shush her, pat her bottom, rock her, put her in the pram, go for a walk, feed her again, change her again, get a little angry – even though Louisa had told her not to do that – and then she would sit on the floor and cry too, not knowing what to do about anything, not knowing how to make Camille stop when she could not even stop herself.
At about 5.00a.m., they would both fall asleep, Camille first and then Alix. Usually Alix woke herself up at six o’clock, to get ready for work at seven. But one morning she didn’t. She slept right through and was only woken by the sound of Louisa and Felicity opening the door to Camille’s room, looking for Alix who should have dropped Camille off at Louisa’s house an hour ago.
After that, Louisa would appear at Alix’s house at midnight, leaving Felicity at home with Graham, and she would do the rocking and the patting and the walking. At first Alix would try to help too, to take turns, but she would end up in the studio and forget to go back inside.
Because to dwell alone at night with Dan, floundering in memory, was all she wanted.
Alix was back on call by the time Camille was four months old. Because you couldn’t be a heart transplant surgeon and not be on call. Nor could you work only during the day.
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