The Predictions

  We moved into our own place, a small flat on the ground floor of a mansion block in Maida Vale, opposite a recreation ground, and I quit work to wait for the baby. Cheatah’s first album had sold only modestly in England, but in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands—­in fact across the whole of Northern Europe—­fans couldn’t get enough of Hungry for Hell. No one could explain the phenomenon, but as a result, real deutsche marks started rolling in. Every other weekend, Lukas jetted off to Düsseldorf, Helsinki, Vienna, Cologne, for gigs, TV appearances, rock festivals, and even to collect awards. A thirty-­seven-­date European tour was hastily planned for the spring.

  As the tour approached, Lukas and I disagreed about whether or not I should go with him. He wanted me to, insisting my presence would keep him on the straight and narrow. I couldn’t think of anything worse than being the beached whale on the tour bus, asking the driver to stop every five minutes so I could get out and find a restroom, so we had come up with the idea that I could jet in to meet him in various cities, only to be told by my doctor that I would be too far along to fly. We reached a compromise. My due date fell somewhere near the end of the tour but I would accompany them on the first leg, through Austria and Germany, the most civilized part, then, when I had reached the limit of my endurance, catch a train back to London to fluff up the nest and wait for baby’s arrival. At the last possible second, Lukas would fly home for the delivery.

  I made it as far as Zurich. To get there I had suffered an overnight bus ride from Frankfurt, through the Black Forest, where, in desperation, I had climbed out of the tour bus and, unable to see my own feet, peed behind a tree at the side of the road. As the city lights of Zurich came into view, I thought, No more. I would never again put myself in such a humiliating position. Straight after the concert, I would catch the first train home.

  It was held in a huge discotheque that doubled as a concert arena in the heart of Zurich. From the minute we pulled into the car park at the back of the venue, exhausted after the long bus trip and a day spent dozing in the hotel, I wished I was somewhere else, a quiet place with no groupies or roadies or managers swarming around. I was sick of everyone staring at my huge stomach, or else ignoring me because they were too embarrassed to have a conversation with a pregnant woman. In the last three weeks, I had ballooned to the size of a house bus. I tried to behave like a normal person, to crack the same jokes, but no one could see past the bump. It canceled out my personality. Fran, in particular, seemed repelled by the thing that was growing in my belly. She had long ago stopped lending me her clothes or trying to style me, and once, near the middle of the pregnancy, when I had asked her if she thought I should wear a blue T-­shirt of Lukas’s or a green one, she had screwed up her nose and said, “To be honest, love, you don’t look that flash in either. Have you thought about getting dungarees?” That same day I went to a department store in Knightsbridge—­Lukas told me to splash out—­and bought a selection of balloon-­shaped dungarees and floral-­patterned tents with Peter Pan collars. It was a relief to find something that fit and was comfortable, but on tour with the boys, I felt like a freak.

  At the concert in Zurich I wore the pinkest of the tent dresses, the “smart” one, and wished that it really was a tent so I could zip it up and hide in it. The greenroom was behind the stage and up a flight of stairs so steep I’d had to stop for a rest halfway up. At the top was a large lounge area with dressing rooms off to one side and a big window that looked out over the stage on the other. In case we couldn’t stand the noise, there was a selection of soundproof earmuffs. I still found it amusing that while everyone out front paid good money to hear the band at full throttle, everyone backstage wore earplugs.

  Lukas fetched me an orange juice from the rider, then apologized and said he had to go and run through the lyrics of a new song one more time before the show.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Serena’s here, and lots of other ­people, if I need anything.” At the sound of her name, Serena had glanced in my direction and held up her martini glass, which I answered with a nod of my slightly fizzy, off-­tasting orange juice. Since last autumn, she had been going out with Vince, Cheatah’s androgynous bass player, and though I was never sure if she loved him, or had simply hit on the best way to legitimately hang out with the band, it had made her slightly less insufferable.

  Lukas stood at the darkened window overlooking the stage. “You should be able to watch the whole thing from up here. Save you going down those stairs.”

  “I’ll have to go down at some point.”

  “Yes,” he said, planting a kiss on my forehead—­I was, in the late stages of pregnancy, treated more like an ailing pet than a lover. “But not without my help.”

  When he had gone, Serena plonked herself down next to me on the white leather couch. “Can’t be long now,” she said, gesturing toward my stomach with an olive speared by a cocktail stick. “You look ready to pop.”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure. The doctors tried to work out my due date but they weren’t a hundred percent sure if it was this month or—­”

  In the middle of my sentence, Serena got up from the couch and wandered over to the window. “I think they’re about to start playing,” she said, cutting me off. “I’m going down. Want to come?”

  “No thanks, I’ll watch from up here.”

  Serena left the greenroom, her heels clanging on the treacherous metal staircase. Even in her able-­bodied condition she was going slowly, taking her time. I was alone in the greenroom, everyone had gone downstairs, and I lumbered to the snack table to inspect the selection of meats and cheeses that had been backstage at all the German concerts, and that no one except me had ever touched. I nibbled on a few gherkins and a square of Emmentaler and poured myself another orange juice, this one fresher tasting. Then I sat back down to wait it out. Again.

  Out in the arena, a huge cheer erupted, followed by galloping drums and howling guitar feedback. They were starting with “Autobahn Child,” a song they had penned hastily to appeal to their German fans. The viewing window rattled, and I put on a pair of earmuffs. I thought about at least watching the band, but I had seen them play so many times before that I could already visualize the prancing and gyrating and posturing that went with each song. Besides, I did not think I had the strength to raise myself and the bowling ball once more off the couch.

  At this end of the pregnancy, I often had heartburn, and the orange juice and gherkin were telling me they did not want to be together in my stomach. I had also drunk too much juice, too quickly, and needed to pee, but the only promising door was locked. I was going to have to go downstairs, and soon, before I was too desperate even to waddle.

  I stood at the top of the staircase and looked down. The descent did not seem as steep as I remembered, but the stairs went on forever, descending from high up in the roof of the arena to stage level far below. It was the kind of staircase that would normally have had a bend in the middle, but because of where it was, behind the stage, there was no room for a zigzag or a landing.

  I took my time, feeling, in the metal handrail, the reverberating bass line from “Autobahn Child.” It was one of my least favorite songs, all about a pretty, orphaned waif who lives underneath a motorway and grows up to be a hooker. The singer of the song is in love with her but before he can rescue her, she dies of an overdose. Total downer.

  I had made it down a dozen steps, about a quarter of the way, when a clacking noise made me turn around and glance back up the stairs. I did not expect anyone to be there, and when I saw the figure of a woman silhouetted in the doorway, I got such a fright that I lost my footing.

  The step went out from under me. As I thudded down the long staircase, my enormous, heavy body gathered a momentum I was unable to stop. When I landed, a burning sensation spread from the base of my groin, through my pelvis and up into my spine. Hot liquid gushed out from between my legs, broken water, g
reenish black and slimy, the dregs of a duck pond.

  I called out for help but my plea was swallowed up by my other least favorite song—­a high-­pitched power ballad about a childhood sweetheart with a taste for hard liquor and a tattoo of a rose on her arse. Between the stage and myself was a thick black curtain hemmed with lead. The floorboards underneath me vibrated. Even if I screamed, no one would hear me.

  The woman who had startled me made her way down the stairs. She didn’t want to fall, like I had, and held tight to the railing, her spiked heels wedging in the metal grating on every step. She took forever to get to me, and then forever went on and on, while she fetched Fran, who called an ambulance. Fran didn’t want to stop the gig and I told her that was fine, that I didn’t want to stop it either—­to cause a fuss. “I’ll send Lukas over the minute they come offstage,” she said, adding, almost as an afterthought, “Do you need me to come with you?”

  “Yes, please—­would you? I don’t want to go on my own.” Then someone threw a blanket over me, I supposed to cover the mess.

  The paramedics laid me on my side on the stretcher, and I put my hand on my stomach and tried to feel if the baby was still kicking. She wasn’t moving, but sometimes she didn’t for long periods of time and then she would wake up and nudge me in the ribs. Lately she had run out of room to do much except squirm.

  Please, God, let her be okay. I turned to the paramedic. “Is she still alive? Will she make it?”

  “We’ll do everything we can,” he said. “You had a bad fall.”

  “She was so close to being ready,” I said, through sobs.

  “That is not so good. Earlier in the pregnancy, there is more fluid to protect the baby. We will need to get her out as quickly as possible.”

  If he had passed me a sharp, cleanish knife, I would have cut myself open. “What’s wrong with this fucking ambulance? Why is it going so slowly?”

  I lost consciousness for a few minutes and woke up in hospital, feet in stirrups and hooked up to machines by a series of nodes on my stomach. “Is she okay?” I said to the nearest nurse, who didn’t comprehend. “Is the baby alive?” My belly felt full, but deflated, not as tight.

  The nurse went to get her supervisor, a woman who spoke English. “We’re inducing labor,” she said. “The fetus shows signs of distress.”

  “What kind of distress?”

  “Rapid heartbeat. But you must not think of that. Labor is going to be very fast. We don’t have time to do an epidural. It will hurt. Very much.”

  I thought I wouldn’t mind the pain—­that it couldn’t be as bad as everyone said—­but it was catastrophic, like being run over by a car and a lorry and a train, obliterating agony, then a few minutes of respite, long enough to catch my breath before bracing for the next juggernaut. When I thought I couldn’t take it any longer, the gaps between contractions closed up, stranding me in a tunnel of pain. I began to imagine hellfire, and roaring, growling beasts, and the nurse gripped my arm and said, “You might want to put more effort into pushing—­and less into making that noise.”

  “What noise?” I said, and she growled a little to demonstrate, as the roaring beast had done. Trapped in the tunnel, my thoughts turned bleak. I wondered if I was dying. A man stood by the bed, offering his hand, but I smacked him away and returned to the underworld, the trial of pain, to cross the river Styx and bring back my baby.

  “Push!” said the nurse. “Push now!”

  The bones of my pelvis creaked apart like the hinges on an old, rusty gate, and something vast, an elephant, pushed against the wall of my backside and tried to escape. The pressure was immense, unstoppable, the pain ringed with fire. And then I shat out the elephant, or that’s what it felt like, as though a mass vastly bigger than a baby had burst out my rear end.

  I opened my eyes. Lukas, in spandex tights, stood next to me, an elated look on his face.

  “Jesus,” he said. “I think you scalped me.”

  “Where is she?” I collapsed on the bed, spent but euphoric, watching a surreal pantomime of doctors in white masks dancing around the bed, pulling machines off the wall and plugging others in. There was a single cry, the bleat of a lamb getting its throat cut.

  Was that her? Is she dying? I looked at Lukas, alarmed.

  “It’s a boy,” he said. “And he’s alive all right.”

  A few seconds later something pink and fat and covered in blood and cream cheese landed on my chest. His face was puckered, as if he had just eaten a lemon, and the top of his head stretched out in a cone. He was beautiful, a warm, squirming wonder. Lukas put his face next to mine and together, we marveled.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER 13

  Cologne/London

  1989

  A NURSE SHOWED ME what to do, shoving the baby at my breast and stuffing the nipple in his mouth. She made it look easy, but it wasn’t. The baby wriggled, or wouldn’t open his mouth, or clamped it shut on the wrong part of the breast. I tried so hard, but I couldn’t get it right, and the baby screeched and thrashed, going from hungry to hysterical in a matter of seconds.

  “If he won’t settle, I give him a bottle,” said the nurse, and I remembered the women on the commune, how zealous they had been about breast-­feeding. Once, Susie had snuck into a maternity ward pretending to be a midwife and stood over the hospital beds of petrified new mothers, railing against the evils of infant formula, until she was caught and thrown out. Her voice rang in my ear, and I felt like a failure. “I’d like to keep trying,” I said, holding back tears. Everything to do with having a baby was so much harder than I had imagined.

  Lukas wanted to call him Zurich, spelled “Zoorich,” after the city he was born in, but I thought that was ludicrous, the sort of thing only a rock star off his tits would do.

  “Imagine calling out his name in the playground. Or sending him off to school. He’d have to spell it out for the rest of his life.”

  We settled on Zachary, a regular name with the same initial.

  The first night alone in the hospital with Zachary, I watched him breathing. All night. Too excited to sleep. When he woke up, bleating, I put him to my breast, then peered under the hospital gown at his little frog legs, curled up tight to his chest. When I tried to stretch one out, it pinged back into place, and his feet folded up against his shins. The skin on his tummy was so thin, and I could see his little organs, pumping underneath. I didn’t know how to change his nappy, or even to tell if it was wet, so I pulled the nightgown back over his legs and wrapped him again in the blanket. He had woken up and suckled and turned away again and fallen asleep, all without opening his eyes. Was that normal? Was he just like all the other little babies in the hospital, or had I blinded him and given him brain damage when we fell down the stairs?

  Your womb shall bear only sorrow.

  In the morning, when the nurse asked if I had slept, and I said that I hadn’t, she wanted to take Zachary away, so I could rest, but I wouldn’t let her. What if something happened to him while I wasn’t watching? What if he stopped breathing and I wasn’t there?

  “If you don’t try to sleep we will take him to the nursery whether you like it or not,” said the second nurse who came in and found me awake. “It is very important that you rest.”

  The next day, when I still hadn’t obeyed orders, true to her promise, the nurse took Zachary away. Seeing his bassinet getting wheeled out into the hallway, I felt a dread so strong it was like a seizure and a second nurse had to restrain me. “Please rest, Mrs. Harvest. We will take good care of your baby.”

  She did not understand why I needed to be able to see Zachary at all times. It was to save his life. I was the only one who could keep him safe. When she had left the room, I put on a dressing gown and went out
into the hall to look for him. For what felt like hours I wandered the corridors, lost and disoriented, continuing to search even when little black dots swarmed in front of my eyes and I hallucinated that the walls of the maternity ward were melting.

  Lukas found me staring through a window into a room filled with cots, each one cradling a baby wrapped in waffle blankets. They all looked the same and I was crying with despair because the labels were in German and I couldn’t tell which one was Zachary.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he said. “The nurse told me you went walkabout.”

  “Where is he? Where’s Zachary?”

  “In the crib, next to your bed.”

  “You’re lying. He’s not there. They took him.”

  “He’s right there, I promise. We gave him a bottle.”

  “You did what?”

  Lukas flinched and I realized I had screamed at him. “He was hungry.”

  “You’ve poisoned him,” I said, bursting into tears. “You may as well have fed him arsenic.”

  Lukas took my arm and gently guided me down the corridor. “I really think you need to get some sleep, my love.”

  When we reached the ward, I made him sit and watch Zachary while I lay on the bed. “Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep,” I warned him. “You have to watch him like a hawk. Like. A. Hawk.”

  I heard my voice, horrible and shrill, and for a fleeting moment understood that I was truly bonkers from not sleeping, before the blind came down and I lost all perspective on my own behavior and everything else for that matter. “I’m serious,” I said. “He could stop breathing at any moment. Remember the prediction, what it said?”