Blue Sky July

by Nia Wyn

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  YEAR ONE

  YEAR TWO

  YEAR THREE

  YEAR FOUR

  YEAR FIVE

  YEAR SIX

  YEAR SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  About the Author

  DUTTON

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Previously published in 2007 by Seren, an imprint of Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

  Published in the United States by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, August 2008

  Copyright © 2007 by Nia Wyn

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Wyn, Nia.

  Blue sky july / by Nia Wyn.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-4406-3018-7

  1. Wyn, Nia. 2. Parents of children with disabilities—England—Biography. I. Title.

  HQ759.913.W96 2006

  306.874—dc22

  [B]

  2008007686

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  For Joeski, with love

  Acknowledgments

  With thanks to my family, friends and everyone who has helped me on this journey. I am also grateful to Seren, for believing in this book; to Brian Tart for helping me share my story; and to Penguin for publishing it around the world.

  Preface

  It’s hard to imagine some journeys.

  The kind that happen rarely,

  to someone else,

  and the kind the heart doesn’t want to.

  People often tell me that they can’t imagine how it is for me.

  Mothers especially.

  They say they can’t begin to understand the things I think and

  feel and do; and that they don’t know what, if anything,

  would pull them through.

  Perhaps it’s impossible to imagine, unless it happens to you.

  Because life can be changed in the split of a second, and everything

  you think and feel and do changed with it,

  changed completely,

  changed within,

  beyond all imagining.

  This journey has a scale of its own,

  a space between the lost and found,

  that ends where it begins—inside me.

  It’s almost seven years ago now, the summer of ’98.

  And still, at times, it’s like yesterday. . . .

  Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, SONNET 116

  YEAR ONE

  (Summer ’98)

  WE’RE HAVING a baby, Alex and I. At the end of the summer. The doctor says that all is well, and my mother says life, as we know it, will never be the same again.

  Time is in limbo in Market Road,

  hanging around,

  waiting.

  When I left work and walked home through the city, I came in, put on the kettle and felt like I’d left my world behind. I sat for a while at the kitchen table; thoughts of the city, the paper and all its stories, dropping like litter about me.

  Alex says I’ll be back within the year, that newsprint’s in my blood, but today, in my stripy top and dungarees, the whirl of headlines has unspun itself, leaving the simple equation of boy or girl, shining in its place.

  The city collapses inward,

  and is stilled by a tiny heartbeat.

  I am between worlds now, I guess.

  On the window seat in the front bedroom, I look out on the stained glass arches of an old Welsh chapel, and up to a small patch of sky. I come here a lot now to talk to my big round belly, and to watch the mothers pass by.

  When the sun raids the chapel in the late afternoon, it’s like sitting in a rainbow.

  Alex says it’s exactly a year since we moved into this Victorian red-brick house in Market Road and next month, when the baby’s born, the rose vine that clings around this window will be full to bursting in a hundred nameless shades of white.

  We’re growing together, the rose vine and me.

  Almost ready, almost in bloom.

  I think of Alex often when I’m here. At the picture desk in the Western Mail, shirtsleeves rolled up, black hair flopping in his eyes; at the coffee machine, perhaps, making cheerful small talk with the typists; in the darkroom, watching light emerging out of shadow.

  He calls from there, to say he misses seeing me across the newsroom. He says it suddenly feels real, having a baby, now we’re apart.

  In his lunch break today, Alex went to the Morgan Arcade and bought a smiling man in circus clothes who swings in a basket under a striped balloon.

  The weather’s humid, close, like a calm before a storm. When I’m buying the paper and an orange ice pop, Sam in the corner shop says: “It’s gonna break. It’s gonna rain, any day now!”

  I’ve not been feeling well of late, just tired and thirsty, which the doctor calls “quite normal,” and Alex puts down to the heat wave. We’re in most evenings, him and I, pottering around half-naked together, playing U2 and watching the telly. Sometimes I sit at the piano and he plays guitar and we make up songs that make us laugh.

  We often talk about this child-to-be, imagining some blue-eyed boy with rosy cheeks and golden hair, or some brown-eyed girl with jet-black curls in the tatty, patchwork dresses I’ve seen in the shops.

  We imagine it will be just like the babies in the catalogs and the adverts on TV.

  We can dream our lives away these evenings. The twilight hangs about for hours and the windows are awash with pinks and blues.

>   Last night Alex rigged up his old Decca player and we danced to the single he bought when he was eight: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, by Lynn Anderson. He told me he bought it with his three bob allowance money at Woolworth’s in Reading after football practice one Saturday morning, and when he got home, his brothers called it poncy and said he should have bought Ziggy Stardust instead.

  I love dancing with Alex.

  He holds me as if I’m godsent.

  In the study, the quietest room on the landing, we have filled four brown boxes to make room for the nursery. Odd bits and pieces, old camera parts, articles and magazines—stuff we don’t need and can live without. Alex has filed all his photographs in one and I’ve thrown letters and diaries in another.

  They sit side-by-side now,

  In two little piles of word and light,

  waiting to go up to the attic.

  There’s been a sense of recueillie in Market Road, a gathering in of who we are, as we’ve idled away these hours, sorting through photographs and flicking through diaries.

  Alex says I’ve had a silver life between these pages—rites of passage to be treasured, he says, like charms on a chain.

  The sun rose behind a mountain, and fell in pieces through horse-chestnut trees when I was young, and I followed its orbit, in the middle of a brother, a sister and a big white house called The Moorings in a small, sleepy town by the sea.

  Between these pages teachers tell me I have an unusual way of seeing things, Keith Simpson says I look like Marianne Faithfull and my school friend, Angela, says we’ll be best friends forever. Between these pages life is charmed, as Alex says. Silver.

  Alex says life didn’t really begin for him till he was twenty. When he scraped together enough money driving a forklift truck in a warehouse, to buy a secondhand OM10 and do a photography course. His very first pictures are of a log in the steelworks, a bird on the wire—things he calls “alien to their environment,” out of place.

  He says his life changed the first time he understood light. He was on a double-decker bus, traveling to college from Reading to Henley, when he suddenly saw the way it interrupted the trees, and curved into shadow, and that life became another journey altogether after that.

  Alex says people rarely see the shadow; they forget that it’s part of the light.

  We have finished the nursery.

  There are psychedelic rainbows on the wall, and a smiling man who swings in a small straw basket under a striped balloon.

  Alex puts the boxes in the attic, and before we go to bed, we sit together for a while at the freshly painted old sash window.

  Like two small children, watching the city lights die out.

  IF WE could only ever keep one feeling, from the whole of our lives, I’d choose this one. When heaven lands inside me.

  Joe Alexander is born in hospital at 1:07 P.M. on Saturday, August 29, two weeks early. He weighs six pounds and ten ounces, gets ten out of ten in his Apgar scores and has skin the color of a pearl.

  He is perfect.

  Alex can’t take his deep brown eyes off us.

  Our son has jet-black hair, blue eyes and a cry that I’ve known longer than I’ve known myself. He is far more beautiful than we’d imagined.

  We make our phone calls to family and friends. “It’s a boy,” we say, “and all is well,” as smiling nurses breeze in and out, and the sun drops in through the window, spellbound.

  It brings a new sense of time, this feeling,

  a new sense of love,

  a sense of the miracle.

  Alex says it’s as if we’ve been enlightened.

  If I could keep one feeling, from the whole of my life, I’d

  choose this one.

  This time,

  when just to be human feels divine,

  and nothing is wrong.

  It’s the strangest time—a birth—for life to start falling apart.

  Just like that!

  The very next moment.

  It’s rare—

  but it can happen.

  And it happens to us.

  It’s so easy to slip between worlds, silver to black. There’s nothing in-between. Sometimes it’s just a trip down the corridor between heaven and hell.

  It was 3:16 P.M. when his skin turned a duskier shade of pearl and

  a nurse stopped smiling. When she wheeled him off on a silver

  trolley to intensive care,

  and we chased her down the corridor,

  as if she’d taken our insides away.

  His skin is ashen,

  his body shakes,

  and his cry is changed so that even I don’t know it now.

  We sit at the edge of an incubator like children astonished, Alex

  and I, and as doctors’ summations merge with the irregular bleeps

  like a shipping forecast we can’t understand, we tell him over and

  over how much

  we love him.

  So suddenly, it is all there is to say.

  There are two squares of glass in my room on the maternity wing, one looking out on an ever-changing car park, the other onto an ever-changing ward. When I look through this one, I see all the perfect mothers and all the perfect babies and all the perfection of unconfined joy.

  I watch it as if it’s my parallel world, and I feel like my arms have been amputated.

  He’s still in intensive care and when I leave his bedside, I come here and sit on my bed writing lists. “Things to do,” I call them. This is what I do when there’s nothing to do, nothing that can be done.

  The doctor says that Joe keeps running out of sugar. He says he doesn’t need oxygen, blood or life support—just glucose. He says he’s big and strong and should be fine once he’s stabilized. The doctor says that I’ve been diabetic and that I should have had treatment—it’s just that “unfortunately, it wasn’t picked up” for me.

  Across the city Alex drives about in his silver car and thinks in fives. It’s the number-one thing to do on the lists I make. To think in fives. It’s where we need Joe’s blood sugars to be. Five is normal.

  When Alex comes to visit me here he holds me in his arms and says that all will be well. He tells me Joe will be fine and that we will be closer than ever. He doesn’t know that, when he goes, I watch him walking back across the car park, and see him crying in the car.

  When the nurse comes to see me, she shoos the happy fat circles of mothers away from the other side of the glass.

  It’s a stunning separation,

  and the blurry moon spills over inside my belly,

  setting hard as cake.

  I should be happy. We’re going home today.

  Everything’s fine now. The doctor says so.

  He’s sure of it.

  No damage.

  Alex says it’s all been just a bad, bad dream and that it’s time to wake up. Time to be happy.

  It’s just that I don’t feel it, sat in hospital, waiting.

  Cases packed,

  lipstick on,

  and a baby in my arms that has a different cry.

  Alex makes a film of it. September 14, the label says: Leaving hospital, Coming home. It’s a beautiful day and I am walking out of the hospital doors into bright light with Joe in a baggy blue suit in my arms. The sun is at its height; the shadows are long. My white top and jeans are overexposed and there is a silvery haze around us. Alex says we look like angels.

  Market Road is expecting us when we get home. The neighbors are on the doorstep and my mother has tied blue ribbons to the rose vine, which flutter like little sails in a sea of white. They all say they “knew it would be fine at the end of the day.”

  They give Joe teddy bears, love spoons and rattles, and take it in turns to hold him. They say he looks like Alex—that there’s no trace of me anywhere.

  This film ends as he’s passed back to my arms. Everyone laughing and chatting and drinking champagne. I’m rocking him gently and smiling at the camera, and in the backgro
und, a few broken notes from a saxophone drift in through an open window.

  I see Joe’s arm is shaking slightly and I see mine move to calm it without even a glance.

  I watch this film a lot these days. It seems to speak to me, though I’m not sure what it says.

  It’s not like I imagined, coming home. The postman brings cards that say lovely things, and the phone never stops ringing with cheery hellos. Friends call round with gifts and compliments, but I’m not myself, and nor is Joe.

  He doesn’t sleep, he’s fractious; and he arches back in my arms. It gets more and more difficult to feed him day by day.

  Sometimes we have to dribble milk into his mouth with a syringe, like people do with newborn lambs.

  The doctors still say there’s nothing to worry about. They say he’s passed his eight-week tests, has tracked an object and has smiled on time.

  The health visitor comes and goes, nodding at me vacantly, and talking about colic.

  She says I just have a touch of what she calls “the baby blues.”

  The next-door neighbors say the saxophone player lives in Library Street, in a room in the student house that backs onto our square walled garden. They say he must study something else, because he can’t even play a note in tune. I’ve grown accustomed to him, though, these past few weeks, and when he starts his practice I open the French doors in the kitchen and feel comforted by his solitary battles.

  When I first took Joe back to the hospital, I sat in a waiting room for hours until someone agreed to see us.

  The doctors were still not concerned. They said it was natural for first-time mothers to be “overly anxious” and that Joe looked fit enough and healthy. They just gave me some thickener for his milk.

  Today, though, they seemed less sure. They said perhaps Joe wasn’t “thriving” quite as well as he should be, after all. They plan to run some tests.

  I haven’t told Alex. He struts about like he’s ten feet tall and carries Joe’s picture around in his wallet.

  He must have shown the whole city by now.

  He wants a party to celebrate.

  I’m not sure what to say.