Love Will Tear Us Apart

by Holly Seddon

  I woke up numb and saw Paul sitting upright on the visitor’s chair next to me. It was morning, but that early, private time of the morning, when most people across the city were still in bed. Under my sheets and gown, my belly sat like a hill. I looked five months pregnant and my ribs hurt like hell.

  ‘Why am I fat?’ I asked, struggling to sit up.

  ‘I’ll get the nurse,’ Paul said, practically running into the corridor. When he came back with a middle-aged woman in uniform, he avoided my eye.

  ‘How are you feeling, Kate?’ she asked in an accent I couldn’t quite place. Somewhere in the north-east.

  ‘What’s wrong with my stomach?’

  ‘Oh, that’s from the surgery. They fill your tummy with gas to separate everything so they can work easier. It won’t stay like that.’

  I’d always thought keyhole surgery was precise like a sniper, but this felt more like a bomb had been set off inside me. Paul left to go home and change for work, hovering uneasily next to the bed before kissing me on my cheek. Up close he was pale, and looked exhausted.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I think you might have saved my life getting me here.’

  He waved my thanks away and left the room, coming back a minute or so later and standing in the doorway.

  ‘Hey again,’ I said, my eyes filling with thick tears that overran my eyelashes and soaked hot into the pillow.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, and walked over to the bed, crouching down next to it and gingerly wrapping his arms around me. He was still wearing his pyjama T-shirt and jogging bottoms and smelled salty, a night of fevered sweating.

  ‘Paul,’ I cried, as he held me as tightly as he dared. ‘There was a baby.’

  We stayed like that until the tears ran out. When he pulled away from me, I saw his eyes were red-rimmed.

  ‘Do you. . .’ He paused, rubbed his eyes. ‘Do you think you’d like to have a baby sometime?’

  ‘Sometime,’ I whispered.

  ‘Then there’ll be other babies. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’ I said.

  The main thing, I was told later that morning as they showed me an image that looked like a ghost was in a sewer, was that the ‘obstruction’ – the apparition in the picture – had been successfully removed, along with the tattered and torn tube. The other tube was in fine fettle, apparently. I didn’t give a shit about the other tube right then. And I couldn’t bear to look at the little ghost either.

  I wanted my normal stomach back and for the pain to be gone. I wanted my memories wiped. I didn’t want to feel like I’d lost something I never really had, I didn’t want to be falling into a black pit of grief for something, someone, I never deserved. Another woman’s husband’s baby. Contraband biology. I deserved to feel shame, to feel punished, but I just felt loss. I didn’t want to feel anything at all.

  Paul came back on his lunch break. He sat on the chair next to my bed as I struggled to get comfortable, rubbing my bulbous empty stomach without meaning to. He’d called in sick for me, telling Janet that I’d been throwing up all night. Apparently, Janet hadn’t been surprised after the incident with the tuna sandwich.

  ‘Janet says to take it easy and cut back on the coffee,’ Paul shrugged. ‘She’ll let John know.’

  I hadn’t even thought about work but flinched at John’s name.

  ‘You look a bit better already,’ Paul said as he got up to return to the office. ‘You’re a tough old broad, Howarth. You’ll be okay.’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll make sure of it.’

  He kissed my cheek and this time left me with some magazines, a bag of my clothes and a tube of wine gums. It was this small gesture that made me cry. Again. I cried so much that when I was helped to the toilet, I saw a trail of misty salt marks under my eyes.

  Every time I was helped to the toilet after that, my mesh pad would fall out of my paper knickers and need replacing. The nurse helping me the final time had audibly tutted at this and I’d wanted to cry, ‘But this isn’t my fault.’ And yet it was. It all was. Everything that happened up until that point, and everything that happened afterwards. I hadn’t even realised then how much I made my bed, but I was already lying in it.

  The last lot of painkillers started to wear off and my belly felt raw, like I wanted to twist my body around and wring out the discomfort.

  One of the doctors came to see me that afternoon. She checked my stitches and explained again what they’d taken out, told me again about how dangerous it had been, that silent assassin growing inside me. ‘It may not feel like it now,’ she said, ‘but you were very lucky. Ectopic pregnancies can be fatal if they’re not treated in time.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ll count my blessings.’

  After work, Paul came back just as I’d finished pulling on the loose clothes he’d brought me, ready to be discharged. We got a cab home in silence. I managed to tip the contents of my handbag out while trying to find my purse to pay the fare. Paul scooped it up and gave it back to me, passed his own bank note to the driver.

  I was woozy and exhausted, everything was in slow motion and my body felt twice its normal weight. He steered me into the flat, carrying my holdall and I remember being so grateful. So gulpingly, tearfully grateful.

  The painkillers I’d been given were incredibly strong but didn’t quite knock me out. Instead, they stole my ability to speak and made me punch drunk so I sat back in my own head and just watched what was happening outside of my eyes with no ability to engage with it.

  I lay in a ball on the sofa under a fake-fur throw, trying not to think about the little ghost. Trying not to think about what I would have done if it had been growing in the right place. At what point I would have found out. Was I even sure when my last period was?

  I knew, as much as I tried not to let myself know, that I wouldn’t have been able to end the pregnancy. Despite the clandestine genes. Despite my own shoddy parental experiences. Or maybe because of them. Would I have really dared let myself be a mother? Risk the cycle continuing? Yes. I knew the answer was yes and I couldn’t bear to even consider the question.

  Paul made me dinner that first night home. A nursery tea of soft-boiled eggs and buttery soldiers. I watched him dumbly from my nest and ate without tasting. I stared at the television while Paul tried to talk about films and books and all sorts of nonsense that I think was designed to distract me. I just hung there, my face slack and my thoughts suspended.

  Eventually I zombie-shuffled into bed and fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

  ———

  I woke up at 10.30 in the morning and panicked for a few seconds. I hadn’t woken up that late in years, even at the weekend. Outside, the weekday bubbled up and I drifted painfully around my flat feeling like something was missing. I tried very hard to deny what it was. And how could it have really been that? The blockage? The little ghost? Until it was tearing through me, I hadn’t even known it was there. And yet thoughts of tiny toes, of the purest skin and an untainted heart whispered their way into every thread my mind took.

  Had my mother seen me as a fresh start? Had my father clasped her hand and told her not to worry, everything would be better for me, better than it had been for either of them? Had she stroked her belly and sung to me? Had she planned me? Had she had dreams for me? Or had she drunk gin and taken hot baths and wished she still had her life ahead of her? I’ll never know. I hope that she and my father hadn’t had the best intentions. They’d certainly not seen them through if they did and that was somehow worse.

  But I didn’t need any best intentions. I wasn’t allowed any intentions at all, and with one tube left, maybe the point was moot. I tried to focus on missing work instead.

  And I definitely did miss my work. I wasn’t used to being idle and I’d long forgotten how to stay still.

  I made myself a cup of tea, taking so long to get the bag out and stir in the milk that it was sludgy and barely warm. I tipped it away and started again because I didn’t ha
ve anything else to do.

  The flat was so clean it shone, light bouncing off every surface. I had a cleaner, or maybe it was a team of cleaners, I didn’t know because I was never there while the magic happened. I paid an agency to send around someone who they called a ‘maid’, although that was really over-egging it. Every Monday and Thursday the flat was vacuumed, bleached, wiped, polished and buffed. My favourite bit had always been that he/she/they – the ‘maid’ – folded the ends of the toilet roll into a little point.

  I had returned to a glossy flat the night after the operation but I didn’t really notice until I was alone in it the next day. I almost wished the place had been filthy so that I had something to do, a challenge to meet. Not that I had the energy, the pills I was taking made me feel seasick and heavy, and my stitches were on fire, but I needed something.

  After drifting around the flat for another half an hour, I felt a sudden pain in my lower abdomen, like a sharp kick. But, I grimaced, there would be no kicks for me. I wondered if I’d lost my chance to ever feel kicks.

  I took my pills and lay on the sofa in front of This Morning. It wasn’t Richard and Judy presenting, which rocked me. When did that change? There was a phone-in discussion about incontinence after childbirth and I closed my eyes and sank my head into one of the turquoise John Rocha cushions that the ‘maid’ had plumped up the day before. When I woke up again, it was the lunchtime news.

  I’d never been idle. I’d filled every day of my life, even as a lonely child. Now that I wanted a distraction from the little ghost that followed me, with little eyes that might have looked like my eyes, my world was emptier than ever. It was oppressively quiet. If I’d had the energy to go out, to run away from it, I would have.

  My stomach throbbed and I felt agitated. In the end, I decided it would be better to scratch the work itch so that I could reassure myself all was well. I switched my phone on to check nothing urgent had happened and saw three missed calls and two messages from John. I slowly pulled myself up from lying to sitting, my feet on the floor and back hunched over, about to listen to my voicemail when John called again. I answered, robot that I am. He barely waited for a hello.

  ‘Kate, I’m sorry to call when you’re feeling rough but I need you to come in. George & Lili have called a crisis meeting, they don’t like the campaign plans and they’re threatening to pull out altogether and Pete, fucking Pete, didn’t get the PO signed so they have us over a barrel. And I have to go. Jill’s gone into labour.’ He paused, for congratulation or well wishes, I think, but I didn’t give any. ‘Can you come in? Please?’

  ‘You’re having a baby today,’ I managed to say.

  ‘Can you come in?’ He sounded irritated. ‘Take some Imodium or something, yeah?’

  I fell asleep in the cab to the office.

  It’s easy to look back now and say that I should have called John back and told him no, I can’t, I’m too sick and they need to sort this out themselves. But I didn’t. George & Lili had been a hard-won campaign. Finally fashion, of sorts. Children’s fashion, high street meets designer, angora baby cardigans and slogan T-shirts for toddlers. It was as close to fashion as I ever got.

  I won that account through sheer bloody-mindedness. Back then, George & Lili – G&L as we called them in house – had grown a huge presence in America but hadn’t made a dent in the UK. The prices weren’t designer but they were a far cry from Mothercare, and they saw themselves as couture for kids, which they weren’t. G&L had wanted to go with a fashion agency for their campaign but I convinced them that we would get them in front of the people who actually bought children’s clothes, whereas a fashion agency would push them into high-fashion mags with beautiful adverts that wouldn’t shift 10 per cent of the numbers they wanted. More than anything, I sold them me.

  And now I’d been away for one and a half days and the whole thing was falling to shit.

  By the time I slowly shuffled into the office, the meeting had already started in the boardroom. I could see the bobbing heads of the assembled team (almost everyone that worked for TMC seemed to be there) and the marketing director and sales manager from G&L sitting together with their arms folded across their chests. Straight from the off, this had been badly handled. Don’t assemble the whole team and act like it’s a crisis, go one on one in a neutral place and talk openly and freely, be collaborative. Remind the client that it’s a partnership, that you’re deeply invested rather than acting like a bunch of gormless sycophants.

  Furious and fatigued, I pushed through the glass doors, wincing with pain, and interrupted the senior account manager drafted in to perform a holding pattern until I got there.

  ‘Maria, David, it’s so good to see you, I’m glad I could make the meeting,’ I tried to breeze.

  Maria, the G&L marketing manager, and David, their sales manager, stood up to greet me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the account manager mouth ‘thank you’. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she said, as she practically ran out of the room.

  Maria was almost my height, a little older than me, with beautiful glossy brown hair. David was a lot smaller, with slick back hair and beady eyes. He wasn’t a bad guy, he just looked an awful lot like Joseph Goebbels.

  On the white board was layer upon layer of photographs of dimpled children in adorable knitwear and tufty-haired babies rolling in rompers and sucking their thumbs. I stood for a moment in front of it, my eye drawn to the rows of little toes.

  The room was quiet, I felt a bubble of something in my throat and swallowed it down. I reached awkwardly across the boardroom table and pulled out the cord from the monitor so the images faded to black.

  ‘Let’s start from scratch,’ I said, and turned to Maria. ‘What are your concerns? Because obviously we’re at the start of the process and we’re still at the brainstorming stage.’

  David opened his mouth to answer but I said, ‘Maria?’

  I’m not sure why I cut him off, I think I was trying to make a show of being in control, to try to counteract the woozy feeling from the pills and day-sleeping.

  ‘I, um,’ Maria started, ‘I’ll let David explain.’

  I never really recovered ground after that. I smarted and floundered through the rest of the meeting. We kept the account by a thread, and with the kind of damaged relationship that would see us limping through the campaign rather than striding, unable to take bold ideas to them for risk of frightening them – and not delivering the best campaign as a result. I saw them out to reception, watched through the glass doors as they hailed a cab and then fell back into a waiting chair, exhausted. After a few minutes I heaved myself up. My stomach was hurting again and I swallowed my next lot of pills early, without water, so they stuck in my throat and made me gag. I made my way back into the boardroom slowly, to find one of the admin girls plugging the cord back into the monitor and collecting up the left-over paper. She was small and pretty with tiny wrists. I could smell her coconut shampoo and it turned my stomach a little. Apparently, the pregnancy hormones would take longer to drain away than the pregnancy.

  ‘I’m going to get off now,’ I said, reaching for the coat and bag I’d tossed on a chair. As I bent to pick them up, I was hit by a wave of nausea and dizziness. I reached behind me for a chair but didn’t connect properly so the chair wobbled and I stumbled backwards.

  ‘Shit, you okay?’ she said. Her voice was like a child’s. I hated it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, trying to stand up straight but buckling at the knees.

  I felt warm, too warm and then hot. In the seconds it took the admin girl to reach over and grab my hand to pull me up, my palm had become slick with sweat.

  ‘Sorry, I’m a bit dizzy. I haven’t been able to eat so I’m a bit, I don’t know, spaced out, I guess.’

  ‘John said you hadn’t been your usual self,’ she said.

  ‘John did?’ Since when did John chat easily with admin girls? Oh. How many of us were there?

  ‘Maybe you should take a proper break?
’ she said, turning to leave. She called over her shoulder in her baby voice, ‘I’ll hail you a cab.’

  The flat felt like a held breath when I re-entered it that afternoon. It stank of my body, my sleepiness. I curled up on the sofa with a throw and cradled a cup of tea. When that didn’t help, I opened a bottle of wine from the rack in the kitchen. I grabbed it indiscriminately, a heavy red, and fell asleep after half a glass. Fell was the right word, it was so fast I didn’t have a chance to put my glass down and a trickle had made its way onto the carpet by the time I woke up hours later, still holding the stem.

  I struggled to open my eyes and shake the heavy throw off my legs. After having a wee and taking the next clutch of tablets, I poured another glass of wine and turned the TV on. It was The Weakest Link, some kind of teatime game show where Anne Robinson from Watchdog berated eager members of the public. I struggled to answer early round questions that were clearly supposed to be easy, and shifted myself around on the sofa to stop my legs going dead. I knew Paul wouldn’t be home for a few hours and I didn’t have the wherewithal to cook myself dinner so I opened a box of chocolates I’d been sent in a Christmas hamper months earlier and ate three.

  The afternoon sleep clung to me and I felt headachy after the chocolate, falling in and out of sleep before Paul got back. He ordered us a Chinese take-away and I picked at it, eventually waking up again to find Paul had cleared up and gone to bed.

  Because I’d dozed on and off earlier in the day, I struggled to catch the first thread of sleep that night and lay hot and sweating on the bed. The streetlights outside taunted me and thoughts of the George & Lili account whirled until I felt frantic. I made notes that seemed like gibberish in the light of the next day, when I found them scrunched into the bed.

  I went back to work a few days later, despite being told I should take up to four weeks. I couldn’t have explained such a long absence, and with John on a week’s paternity leave, I was more needed than ever.

  In truth, I couldn’t face another day at home, trying not to think about ghosts and tattered tubes and lost futures I’d never worried about having. Trying not to imagine John holding his new baby and telling his wife how well she’d done.