‘What about the baby?’
‘She’s too young.’ He chuckled as he took Rizlas and a pouch of tobacco from his pocket. ‘Sorry, couldn’t resist that. It’ll be okay; we’ll just keep it down this end. I think they’re going overboard with all this scaremongering, anyway. My family has always smoked and it hasn’t done them any harm. My dad still smokes weed and even my grandad smokes twenty Weights a day, and he’s over eighty.’ He reached for the cover of The Dark Side of the Moon and rested his hands on it while he rolled one of the biggest joints Jo had ever seen. Normally, she’d probably have refused anything ‘trippy’, but she didn’t feel like her normal self, she felt elated, excited; a little bit reckless. Eve was always saying she should open herself up to a wider range of experiences. ‘What the hell,’ she said, taking a deep draw on the joint and immediately feeling the room spin. ‘Wow.’ She lay back against the cushions. ‘That’s really strong.’ Her legs started to buzz and she felt a bit sick. She needed to get to the loo, but when she tried to stand, her legs crumpled beneath her.
Scott helped her up and sat her back on the settee. ‘You okay?’ He smiled. ‘Powerful stuff, isn’t it? Nice, though. Makes your legs float. Probably best to stay sitting down. Just lie back and let it take you where it takes you.’ He took another toke, tipped his head back and closed his eyes. He was still smiling as he passed the joint to Jo again. She took a smaller toke this time, but automatically drew the smoke down and held it in her lungs. As she did so, she watched Scott’s smile grow wider and wider until it couldn’t possibly fit on his face any more, but stretched out across the whole room, curling around Eve’s bed and enfolding her and the baby as though his lips were actually big pink arms. Jo started to giggle; it was obviously the grass that was making her see things, but she’d never experienced anything like this before and, now she’d stopped feeling sick, she was fascinated, and drew on the joint a couple of times before passing it back. She looked across to where Eve was sleeping with the baby next to her, but she could see her face close up, as though she were right next to her, and as she peered at Eve’s face, she saw that her eyes had become two little diamonds, turning circles and sparkling away. Jo chuckled, although she didn’t know whether she’d chuckled out loud or just inside her head. Her body had shut down to allow her mind to break out, and she had the sensation that her mind was a mischievous entity that had finally been released from captivity and was determined to have some fun.
She may have slept for a while then, but whether it was a few minutes or a few hours, she couldn’t tell. Scott’s face had disappeared and all that was left where he had been sitting was a six-foot-wide smile, its lip glistening. It’s the dope, she told herself. Just blink and the smile will go away and Scott’ll come back. She blinked but it took an hour or so for her eyelids to close and open again, and when they did, Scott had changed back to being Scott again, but with his long hair spread out all around him like a silky black swimming pool. She wanted to reach across him for the cider, but she knew that, if she did, she’d be sucked down into the pool and was likely to drown in his hair. She tried to reach out, but sure enough she fell into the pool, only now it was red, not black, and it swirled and gushed and pushed and pulled her with its unexpected current and as she struggled to keep afloat, a baby rushed past her. Eve’s baby! She tried to grab it but it slipped through her fingers, and then Eve was there, too. At first Jo thought she was smiling; Eve always smiled. But then she realised that Eve’s eyes were closed and her face was blank, there was no expression at all, and she was sinking deeper and deeper into the red pool. Jo tried to reach out so that Eve could grab her hand, but she couldn’t move her limbs any more; in fact, she wasn’t sure she actually had limbs any more. Her head was spinning; she wanted this to stop now. It’s just the dope, she told herself again; it’ll pass. It was probably best to keep her eyes closed, because then her brain wouldn’t be able to mutate what she saw. But when she closed her eyes, she became convinced that the house was the wrong way round, and she had to force her eyes open again to prove that it wasn’t. If she could just get to the kitchen and splash some water on her face, she might straighten up a bit quicker. Yes, that’s what she must do. She hauled herself off the settee but she couldn’t stand, so she began to crawl on all fours. But the rug had become a deep red pool again, and it was getting bigger and bigger as she looked at it. If she went any nearer, she would surely drown. She turned back to the settee, pulled herself up onto it, then curled up and waited for the drugs to wear off .
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
When Jo woke, it was daylight. There was a crick in her neck where she’d slept curled up, and she was cold, apart from her feet which were resting against Scott’s leg. He was still in a sitting position although he’d keeled over to the side with his head on the arm of the settee. His mouth was open and he snored as he breathed in. She’d never seen him look so unappealing. Slowly, she sat up. There was a weird smell in the room, metallic, like cold copper pipes. Then she remembered that it had finally happened; Eve had given birth, here in this very room.
Right on cue, Lily made a little mewling noise, and Jo felt a sudden rush of love. Maybe it was because she’d helped deliver her, but she felt an incredibly strong connection with her already. Perhaps she could pick her up and give her a quick cuddle before Eve or Scott woke. She tried to uncurl her legs and stand up without disturbing Scott, but as she moved her feet away from the warmth of his leg, he made a snorting noise, then opened his eyes and stretched. His eyes were so bloodshot they looked almost completely red. Hers probably did, too, come to think of it. That grass was ridiculously strong. She stood up a little shakily and started to make her way across the room, but then she stopped, her brain unable to quite grasp what her eyes were seeing.
Blood. Everywhere. So much blood. It was on the rug, and on the floorboards as well as the bed. Jo couldn’t move; she felt like the bottom of her stomach had fallen out. Eve was lying in the bed, still covered with the new bedding they’d bought specially, sheets and a continental quilt, all now sodden with dark blood. Jo tried to speak but the sound that came out was more like a cry of pain. She heard Scott leap to his feet behind her. ‘Fuck!’ he yelled, and rushed over to Eve. ‘Don’t just stand there, you stupid cow!’ His voice was high with panic. ‘Go to the phone box and call an ambulance.’ He almost fell on Eve and started trying to give her the kiss of life. Jo didn’t move. She’d only needed that one look at Eve’s rigid, greyish-white face to know that she was dead. It was the same thing she’d experienced when her mum died. The body was there, the person’s face completely recognisable as the person you knew them to be, but with something missing; with the soul gone.
Scott was sobbing now; he’d lifted Eve’s head and shoulders and was rocking her back and forth saying, ‘Eve, oh Evie, Evie.’ He didn’t ask Jo to go for an ambulance again. ‘She’s dead, Jo. She’s fucking dead.’ He looked around at all the blood and gestured helplessly at it, then buried his face in Eve’s hair again.
Jo was still standing uselessly in the middle of the room. She willed herself to move but her knees started to feel shaky and she was afraid she was going to be sick, then she heard a buzzing sound in her ears, and then everything went black. She came to a moment later, lying on her back on the floor, and it was a blissful millisecond before the horror of what had happened came flooding back. Scott was crouching next to her and offered his hand to help her up. ‘You fainted,’ he said. He didn’t look at her as she sat up, but she could see his utterly stricken expression. ‘Oh Jo,’ he moaned. ‘How can she be dead? How can she be? It was all okay, she said so; she said she felt all right.’
She had. In fact, she’d said she felt wonderful, more alive than she’d ever felt in her life. ‘This is what I was meant for, Jo,’ she’d said as she’d held Lily to her breast.
‘She must have started bleeding after,’ Jo said, then cursed herself for the ridiculously obvious statement. ‘I mean, maybe some of the placenta didn
’t come away, or—’
‘But why? I mean, why the fuck?’ And he banged his fist down on the coffee table so hard that Lily started to cry.
Scott didn’t move, so Jo got to her feet and walked softly across the room, as though afraid of waking Eve. When she glanced down, the sight of the blood, the smell of it, the stark fact that this was something that was clearly meant to be inside someone’s body, not outside, sent ripples of horror lapping through her. She paused for a moment and put her hand on the back of a chair to steady herself. She’d never been particularly affected by blood before, not like her mum who’d gone pale every time Jo grazed her knee, and was incapable of watching a blood test. But now she felt sick and faint at the raw, exposed deadness of it.
Lily stopped crying the instant Jo picked her up, but she began squirming and turning her head forcefully towards Jo’s chest. Rooting, that was what the books said; she was rooting for the nipple. Jo began to cry at last, a sudden and unexpected rush of sobbing that she could do nothing to control, so she handed the baby to Scott who seemed surprised to find her in his arms and looked at her as though he wasn’t quite sure who or what she was.
In the kitchen, Jo sank into the armchair in which Eve had been sitting only hours before. Eve’s long green cardigan, the one Jo sometimes borrowed when she was chilly, was squashed down in the back of the chair where Eve had taken it off without getting up. Jo picked it up and held it to her face as she cried. It smelled of Eve, a mixture of patchouli and that slight scent of apples that came from her skin. On the table beside the chair was Eve’s knitting, a tangled mess that she’d decided to unravel so she could start again. Next to the knitting, her favourite red mug with the dregs of her tea and the copy of Baby Beloved that she’d been reading bits out of yesterday morning. What does it matter if the nappies are grey, as long as the bottom they’re pinned onto is pink and healthy and cherished. Eve had smiled and passed the book to Jo. ‘Sounds painful,’ she’d said and they’d giggled together at the clumsy wording.
Lily was crying. Lily. The reality of what had happened was still difficult to grasp. Before the birth, Jo had lain awake night after night going over the things that could go wrong. She’d read that a post-partum haemorrhage could happen any time up to forty-eight hours after the birth, but this was much less common than haemorrhages occurring during or immediately after delivery, so once Lily had been safely born, she’d forgotten about those possibilities. In their stupid, self-righteous, naïve elation, they’d assumed there was no more danger. And now Eve was dead. The whole thing felt unreal, but not unreal enough for Jo to convince herself she was still tripping. She groaned aloud. If they hadn’t smoked that vile stuff, Eve would still be alive. She picked up the red mug and hurled it at the wall.
‘Hey.’ Scott was standing in the doorway, holding Lily who had started to cry more insistently.
‘Sorry,’ Jo said. Then she looked up at him, her face wet with tears. ‘It’s our fault, you know. If we hadn’t smoked that weed . . .’ And then she was crying again. ‘Oh God, Scott, what are we going to do?’
Scott stood there, a look of utter bewilderment on his face. There was blood on his jeans where he’d knelt on the bed. ‘Our fault,’ he muttered. ‘Yes, yes, I suppose it is, isn’t it?’ Tears were streaming down his face now, too, although they were silent tears that just kept falling, running off his chin and dropping down onto the baby.
For a few moments, it was as though they were frozen in their positions, Scott standing in the doorway holding Lily, Jo a sodden, crumpled heap in Eve’s chair. Then Lily’s cries seemed to rouse them both. Scott walked towards Jo. ‘You take her; I need a smoke.’
‘You what? You can’t seriously be thinking of—’
‘Shut up, Jo.’ He held Lily out to her without meeting her eye. ‘I need a fucking smoke.’
Jo pushed herself out of the chair and stood up, jiggling the baby to try and soothe her. ‘You can’t!’ she yelled. ‘You can’t just duck out of this!’ But he was already walking away from her. ‘Scott! What are we going to do?’
He came back seconds later. ‘I can’t go in there.’ He was shaking his head. His face had paled and there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He put his hand to his mouth. ‘Oh, God, I think I’m going to . . .’ He turned, then ran along the hallway and up the stairs, reaching the bathroom just in time by the sound of it.
Jo looked down at baby Lily in her arms. Lily’s face was screwed up and red from the effort of crying. She was still frantically rooting, her little head turning repeatedly towards Jo’s chest. Eve had wanted to breastfeed for as long as possible. ‘It’s the perfect food,’ she’d said, ‘and the perfect way for a mother to comfort her child.’ She’d held out the book so Jo could look at the picture of a golden-skinned mother, naked from the waist up, smiling serenely as she fed a contented-looking downy-haired newborn.
She heard Scott come out of the bathroom and walk along the upstairs hallway, then she heard the door of his and Eve’s room open and close. She waited, but he didn’t reappear. Part of her wanted to shout and throw things at him – how dare he just disappear and leave her here like this, with the baby – with his daughter - crying for a feed, and Eve, lying in there . . . She felt another sob rising in her chest but she fought it down. Perhaps Eve knew Scott would be useless and this was why she wanted Jo to stay and help. She walked back to the armchair and sat down, still jiggling Lily in her arms. ‘You need some milk, sweetheart, don’t you?’ For a moment, the crying subsided, as though in response to Jo’s voice. With Lily still in her arms, Jo began opening cupboards. Somewhere, there were a few bottles and two unopened tins of baby milk that had come in a box of second-hand baby equipment. She found the bottles fairly quickly, but the powdered milk must have been thrown away. Maybe cow’s milk would be okay just this once? And she was sure she could boil the bottles to sterilise them.
She looked at Lily properly; the perfect little face, the tawny-coloured skin with its fine covering of down, almost as though it had been dusted with powder, the hair dark, like Scott’s, and the tiny, shell-like fingernails so thin that you could see her pink fingertips beneath the transparent nails. The baby was looking at Jo with wide blue eyes that were serious and wise. Granny Pawley had always said Jo was ‘an old soul’, and now she looked at Lily, she finally understood what that meant. As they looked at each other, Lily’s lower lip trembled and she began crying again. It wasn’t like this was a newborn baby, a creature just a few hours old; it was as though she had a personality and wisdom, and as though she was somehow disappointed in Jo for failing to provide for her needs. ‘Sorry, sweetheart,’ Jo whispered, and then, almost instinctively, she lifted up her sweater and her bra, and held Lily close to her breast. The sensation when Lily’s hard little mouth clamped around her nipple was unexpected and shocking, like an electric current running from her breast through her stomach to her loins; it engulfed her heart and her head at the same time and was both sexual and yet intensely chaste. She’d never experienced anything so unbelievably powerful in her entire life. She touched the baby’s cheek. She hadn’t even consciously intended this to happen, rather, she’d thought that the nearness of her warm skin might offer Lily some comfort. But Lily’s instincts were thousands of years in the making and involved the implicit trust in Jo to provide both comfort and nourishment. She watched Lily’s tiny fingers clenching and unclenching as her hand rested against Jo’s pitifully small and empty breast. For a few seconds the poor little thing sucked for all she was worth, until Jo was so overcome by horrified guilt that she was about to try and prise Lily’s mouth away from her when Lily broke off of her own accord and began crying again in earnest, and this time there were real, actual tears coming from her eyes. Jo’s nipple was reddened and elongated, and she quickly pulled her bra and sweater down again so that neither she nor Lily had to see the evidence of her betrayal. She hoisted Lily up onto her shoulder and murmured, ‘I’m sorry, baby, I’m so, so sorry,’ into her neck, whic
h smelled uncannily of talcum powder, even though there was no such thing in the house.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
As Jo was heating up some cow’s milk, Scott remembered where he’d put the powdered baby milk, which turned out to be just within date. Carefully following the instructions on the tin, Jo made up three bottles, one of which she fed to a ravenous Lily who fell asleep before she’d quite finished. She was now sleeping peacefully in her cradle, which they’d moved into the kitchen and wiped clean of the blood that stained its rockers. Jo and Scott sat opposite one another at the kitchen table, too stunned to eat, drink or even smoke, despite what Scott had said earlier. ‘We should tell someone,’ he said. He was looking down at the table and his voice was so quiet she could barely hear him.
She sighed, then nodded. ‘Yes. We should.’ After an initial period of not being able to think at all, her thoughts had now started to speed up and were darting back and forth across her mind. Of course they must tell someone. Doctors? The police? But what would happen when they did? One thought kept coming to the front of her mind, shouting at her louder than the others: As soon as they told whoever they needed to tell, it was unlikely that she would ever see Lily again and the one thing she was absolutely certain about was that she loved Lily as surely as if she were her own baby.
‘Scott,’ she said, but he didn’t appear to have heard her. Scott was Lily’s father, but even he might not be allowed to keep her, not after what had happened. She reached across and put her hand on the back of his, shaking it slightly as if gently rousing him from sleep. ‘Scott, listen. We need to think. Eve’s dead, and we were there when it happened – in the same room, for Christ’s sake. We were supposed to be looking after her, although I’m not even sure if it was legal to arrange a home birth with no doctor or midwife around.’
The Secrets We Left Behind Page 25