I was gambling on the unknown. I didn’t know if Maggie and I would start rubbing each other up the wrong way if we moved in together. I didn’t know if the novelty of expecting a child would begin to wear off. I didn’t know what the baby would be like. But I was willing to take the gamble anyway. I surprised myself, and I kept on surprising myself.
‘Shall we find out what sex it is?’ Maggie had asked early on.
‘No,’ I said, without even thinking about it. ‘Unless you want to?’
‘I don’t mind.’ Maggie smiled at me, laughing almost. ‘And you sound very certain. I guess you’ve already given it some thought.’
‘To be honest, it hadn’t even crossed my mind,’ I told her. ‘Until you said it, I’d forgotten you could. But I didn’t have to think about it. I don’t want to know. I don’t care. I don’t care what sex the baby is or what it’s like. I just care that it’s our baby.’
‘Oh, Ben.’ Maggie leaned over and kissed me. ‘Thank you.’
‘What for?’ I asked.
‘For being so pleased. I was terrified that I’d lose you. I was terrified that I’d lose you anyway, when I met you, because I wanted to be with you. But when I got pregnant I thought I would have to lose one of you – you or the baby. I never thought I’d get both.’
‘If you’d presented pregnancy as a hypothetical situation I’d have told you I didn’t want a child,’ I said. ‘But now that it’s happened I’m ridiculously happy – not just for you – for me too. I feel as if having a child is what I always wanted, even though I thought I didn’t.’
Maggie laughed.
‘And what about the tests?’ she asked, serious again. ‘We have to decide soon whether to have those or not, and what we will do if the results aren’t what we were hoping for.’
‘I don’t want to have them either,’ I said, certain in the moment of this too.
‘But I’m an older mother,’ Maggie said. ‘“Elderly primigravida”, they write on the forms, which is a bit better than “geriatric” but I know what they mean. There is a real risk of some chromosomal abnormality because of that. I’m at high risk of having a baby with Down’s Syndrome and other things.’
‘I don’t care.’ I remained resolute. ‘It’s a risk I’m willing to take. I didn’t think I wanted a child, but now I find I do. So if a test tells us there’s a chance the child might not be perfect, I might well think I don’t want it, but, if I have it, I am sure it will seem perfect to me.’
‘We don’t know how we would feel,’ Maggie persisted. ‘But it might be better to know if something was wrong, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, hypothetically I don’t want a baby with Down’s. But a few months ago I never wanted a baby at all. Things change. People adapt. We will adapt.’
I really believed it at the time. I genuinely thought that I wouldn’t mind if there was something wrong with our child.
I thought the same when Iris was in hospital, tubes feeding her fluids and paracetamol through her veins, an oxygen mask over her face helping her breathe. I thought to myself, I don’t care what happens, as long as she lives.
She got ill not long after we came back from France. The doctor there had told us to look out for symptoms. ‘It usually takes about nine days after coming into contact with someone who has the virus for them to develop.’
He was right. Exactly nine days later, Iris developed a fever and began to cough.
‘It could just be a summer cold,’ we said to each other, hopefully. She’d been given the triple vaccine in France, but again the doctor had warned us it might be too late. ‘She has already been in contact with the virus. There’s a chance she may not have picked it up, but it’s unlikely.’
It came on quickly, too, from the first flush of her raised temperature to her tiny body being covered with a violent bumpy rash and her breathing becoming laboured to the point that we could no longer bear listening to it. That all seemed to happen in twenty-four hours.
‘We should take her to the doctor,’ I said.
Maggie had been trying to keep her temperature down with Calpol but it wasn’t working. It registered at a hundred and three on our thermometer. That was too high, and her breathing was too uncomfortable to think it could possibly be normal.
They saw us immediately in the surgery, a few streets away. They’re good like that, I’ve realised since having a child. In the past, if I’d tried to see a doctor, it often took weeks to get an appointment. But if we were worried about the baby the receptionist would usually say, ‘Bring her in now.’
‘You need to take her straight to hospital,’ the doctor said. ‘I’ll phone them so you’ll be admitted right away. Do you have a car?’
‘Yes. At home.’ I nodded, focusing on the journey rather than the reality of the situation. It seemed easier somehow to concentrate on getting Iris to hospital, rather than the fact that she needed to be admitted.
‘Is that far?’ the doctor asked. ‘I could call an ambulance if it is.’
‘No, it’s just up the road,’ Maggie said, and we looked at each other anxiously.
‘It’s not an emergency,’ the doctor tried to reassure us. ‘But I’d like to get her into hospital as soon as possible. Her temperature is too high and she needs intravenous analgesic and may need oxygen.’
Maggie and I looked at each other again.
‘There’s no need to panic,’ the doctor repeated. ‘But I think you should drive her straight there.’
I nodded and we raced up the hill, pushing the buggy, to where our car was parked.
‘Should I go in and get some things?’ Maggie asked, as we took Iris out of the pushchair and began strapping her into the car seat, trying not to upset her as she cried out in pain.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Let’s just get her there. I can come back later and pick stuff up.’
Maggie nodded. I think she was thinking the same thing. She just needed me to confirm it.
We lived in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone but I stuck my foot on the accelerator whenever I could, on the streets where the traffic was quiet. A speed camera flashed as we passed the parade of local shops but I ignored it and so did Maggie. She didn’t say, ‘Slow down, Ben,’ as she often did when I was driving.
It was just before midday and the roads were relatively empty, the rush-hour congestion past. But as we neared the local primary school there was a weight of traffic on the roads again, slowing as parents looked for parking spaces before picking up their children who didn’t yet do whole days.
‘Come on, come on, for fuck’s sake,’ I cursed a young mother who gave me a friendly apologetic wave as she tried to manoeuvre into a parking space unsuccessfully and was forced to pull out again and repeat the process, while I waited impatiently behind her, desperate to get on.
Again Maggie said nothing. No, ‘Calm down, darling. Don’t be so impatient.’ She didn’t even look at the woman or acknowledge her second smile and wave as we passed her, once she was halfway back into the space.
Iris was crying and coughing now, in the back of the car, and the combination of the two made it almost impossible for her to breathe. Maggie, sitting beside her, was trying to soothe her. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart. It’s OK, darling. We’re going to get you to hospital just as soon as we can.’
The roads were clearer now, away from the school, and I pressed down on the accelerator again, driving too fast to spot the woman waiting with a child in a pushchair and a toddler holding on to it by the side of the level crossing. I didn’t see that the toddler had released its grasp on the buggy and was venturing across the crossing without its mother giving the signal to go.
It was too late for me to do anything other than slam on the brakes, jerking Maggie and Iris forward in the back of the car and missing the kid by an inch, or a split second, however you care to measure the narrowness of space or time by which I missed hitting him head-on. I could see the fear on the mother’s face, as she left the buggy on the side of the crossing and sprang into the r
oad to scoop up her child. I could feel the sweat beginning to prickle the back of my neck, as I allowed myself briefly to think what might have happened. And I could see the mother mouthing words, presumably obscenities, in the rear-view mirror.
But I didn’t let myself think about what might have happened. Not then. I had to get Iris to hospital. She was my priority, not the kid on the crossing. If his mother knew how ill she was, she would understand, surely? She would know I could not stop.
I didn’t pause to think about it then and I didn’t let myself think about it later, when Iris had been admitted and ‘stabilised’ but was still desperately ill. My thoughts about getting her to hospital had been replaced by thoughts about getting her home again.
‘Don’t let her die. Please don’t let her die,’ I kept repeating, over and over, as Maggie and I sat by her bed, watching the tubes which were feeding and medicating her and the monitors which checked her progress. I wasn’t sure who I was saying it to. I don’t believe in God and wasn’t calling him up in our hour of need, the way I know some people do. If anything, I was talking to myself. ‘Please don’t let her die,’ I remember saying to myself. ‘I don’t care what happens, as long as she doesn’t die.’
I made a pact with myself, and I hoped that, if I kept it, Iris would survive.
When your baby is lying on a hospital bed and her temperature is sky-high, she can’t breathe without assistance and the doctors look worried, you have to believe in something. So I put faith in myself, in my ability not to mind what happened to Iris as long as she lived.
But I couldn’t keep that promise, not when the doctor told us she was deaf. I did mind. I minded enormously. I didn’t want a deaf child. I wanted the child we’d had before all this happened.
I know I’ve let Iris down by not not caring, and Maggie and Ruth and all the people who thought I was bigger than this. But I do care. I really do. This is not how I wanted things to be.
Isobel, Wednesday morning
I have an appointment to meet ‘our solicitor’. If I think of him in quotes, it helps me distance myself from the mess we’re in. I called him yesterday, after Eric unearthed his details the night before. The appointment is at ten, in town, after I’ve dropped Vincent off at school.
He has a school trip today and is overexcited and overprepared. They are going to an open-air museum thirty miles away – a collection of houses from different periods and places, which have all been dismantled brick by brick and reassembled on the site of the museum. It’s a history trip.
‘There are beds you can lie in and you get bed bugs,’ Harvey told him over breakfast.
He went on this particular trip when he was in Year Six. The beds are in a Tudor house. The bedding can’t be authentic but Harvey says with excitement, ‘It was filthy.’
Vincent has packed an enormous backpack. He has not only a change of clothes (‘It might be wet!’) but a torch, compass, penknife (‘You’re not allowed knives at school, Vincent!’), clipboard, pens, paper and his packed lunch.
His class teacher balks at the size of his bag, as we stand on the pavement outside the school waiting for the coach. ‘Are you planning on climbing Everest, Vince?’ he asks.
‘Yes.’ Vincent is a strange mix of whimsy and literalness sometimes. ‘But not till after I leave school.’
‘Today?’ the teacher asks.
‘No, when I’m eighteen.’
The teacher shrugs and begins head-counting.
I catch sight of a blonde girl I have not seen before.
‘The new girl,’ Vincent says.
He has told me about her before. She is from Germany. Her father has just landed a job in Brighton. She joined their class two weeks after the start of term. Her name is Michaela. She was in a German soap opera when she was a baby, playing the baby. Her mother makes her own ice-cream. This is what I know about Michaela, and I am about to learn another thing which is of interest to me.
‘Listen up, everyone,’ the teacher shouts, clapping his hands to command silence from both children and parents. ‘We should have sent a letter home to remind you and I’m afraid it’s my fault that we didn’t. But we have a child in the class with a severe nut allergy. So, if anyone has anything in their packed lunches which contains nuts, will you please take it out of your lunch bag now and give it to your parents? Or to me.’
‘Does Michaela have a nut allergy?’ I ask Vincent. The school has a ‘no nuts’ policy as standard, but they have to reiterate it on school trips.
‘Yup. She’s a nutter,’ he replies. ‘Same as Harvey.’
He uses the term affectionately for his brother. Harvey likes it, preferring to be described as ‘a nutter’ than as having a condition which makes him feel awkward and singled out.
The first time, I didn’t even realise. It was only hindsight that made me aware that that was what it must have been. I had a sling when he was a baby. It had what Eric would have called ‘a strange hippy name’ like a ‘huggababy’ or something like that. The packaging claimed that, if you carried the baby in it, it would sleep for hours. It seemed to work and was comfortable enough to wear, and I could sit down to watch television or even to eat without disturbing my sleeping Harvey.
I laughed at the time when I looked down at him one evening. He was in the sling on my lap and Eric had brought home a Wagamama takeaway. It was some sort of noodle dish and I’d been forking my share across the sleeping Harvey, unaware that some of the noodles had dropped on to his head. When I paused to look at him, I found that my bald baby had a tiny crop of noodley curls. It looked rather sweet. I motioned Eric round to see, before I removed them and dabbed his head with my napkin.
A few hours later Harvey’s head was swollen and puffy and his face red and blotchy. I didn’t put the two things together at the time. I thought maybe he was getting a cold or had been crying too much, because earlier that evening he’d been very distressed and screamed for almost an hour and half, refusing to eat, before he eventually wore himself out and settled in the sling.
I only put two and two together the second time it happened and we had to call an ambulance.
He’d just started crawling and was on the floor in the kitchen watched by Gabby, who was eating a peanut butter sandwich. It all changed so quickly from happy domestic scene to disaster. One minute Gabs was eating and Harvey crawling; the next I heard this horrible rasping noise and turned round to see Harvey wheezing and struggling for breath. I thought he was choking.
I picked him up and turned him upside down. ‘Did you see what happened?’ I asked Gabby. ‘Did he put something in his mouth?’ I imagined he’d picked up one of the coloured plastic letters from the fridge that were always falling on the floor, or a stray coin.
‘I gave him a bit of my sandwich.’ Gabriella was in tears, as if it was all her fault.
I shook Harvey, slapped his back, tried to do a mini-Heimlich manoeuvre, but nothing seemed to help.
After I had called the ambulance, the woman on the other end of the line told me calmly that she’d dispatched the crew but continued to talk to me, asking me questions about exactly what had happened.
‘Has he had any sort of reaction to nuts before?’
That was when I put the two things together. From then on my life acquired a new anxiety. I was constantly vigilant, checking the packaging of everything, telling everyone he came into contact with he must avoid nuts, sending him to nursery with a name-tag that read NUT ALLERGY – so bold and unmissable that some of the older children thought it was his name.
I smile at the blonde woman who I presume is Michaela’s mother as the coach gets ready to leave, but don’t introduce myself. I don’t have time to stop and talk, I have to make my way to the solicitor’s, but I hope to convey a feeling of solidarity with her. ‘I know what it’s like – always on the lookout for nuts’ – that sort of look.
‘Bye-bye, Mummy, Mummy, goodbye,’ Vincent sings to the tune of the Bay City Rollers, as the queue he’s in makes its way on t
o the coach.
Lucky boy, I think, not a care in the world.
Ben, Wednesday morning
‘Hello, Iris!’ Ruth is sitting up in the sofabed in the living room and I bring her a cup of tea. Iris crawls in after me but she takes no notice of her grandmother. She probably hasn’t seen her yet, and certainly hasn’t heard her name.
Reacting to hearing your own name spoken is something so natural, so instinctive, something we’ve all been doing from such an early age, that it seems totally bizarre that my daughter does not do this.
‘Hello, Iris.’ Ruth moves her hand into Iris’s field of vision and waves it, another sign we all know.
Iris beams when she sees her grandmother and emits a horrid screech.
‘Hello, beautiful.’ Ruth opens her hand and moves it around her face, a sign I do not know. Perhaps it means beautiful.
I think the name ‘Iris’ is beautiful.
Maggie came up with it. She wanted a name that was ‘normal’ but unusual. ‘There don’t seem to be many Irises around these days,’ she said.
‘Nor Maggies!’ The old joke.
‘I had a great-aunt called Iris. I think it’s a lovely name, and simple. People won’t be able to mess with it and call her anything else.’
I agreed with her. It seemed the most apposite name for our beautiful daughter. I liked saying it, when she was born. I liked the sound of it rolling off my tongue. If I’d had specific fears for her in relation to her name they were only that she might not be able to say it, that my speech impediment gene might have been passed on to her, that perhaps she would have a lisp and struggle with the R. I never for one moment imagined that she would not be able to hear it at all.
I keep thinking about this. It’s a simple, everyday thing, hearing our name spoken and reacting to it. Knowing that Iris can’t do this makes me wonder all the more.
Living With It Page 20