The Most Difficult Thing

by Charlotte Philby

  ‘I tripped, I …’

  My voice was crushed under the weight of my own body.

  ‘Sssshhh, don’t try to talk.’ He placed a hand on my head before running to pick up the receiver from the phone on the landing.

  ‘It’s OK …’

  Holding the doorframe for stability, he punched the numbers into the phone. 999. For a second I could swear I saw him pause, his eyes flashing towards the computer, the corner of it poking out from under the duvet, and then back to me.

  ‘What’s the emergency?’ The operator’s voice filtered across the room.

  David’s voice was strained, ‘It’s … my girlfriend.’

  ‘Anna, my name is Dr Singh. I’m one of the consultants here.’

  His face hovered above mine; a throng of nurses moved briskly around me, the sickly white of the hospital room forcing me to squint.

  ‘You’re at UCLH, you’re in very good hands …’

  ‘What, why am I not at …?’

  ‘When there are complications sometimes we need to bring you to somewhere better equipped than your private hospital to deal with the situation, but not to worry, Anna, you are in the best possible hands and we are going to take you into theatre now. I’ve spoken to your partner, and …’

  David. Where was he? Struggling to sit up, I was struck by a wave of sickness. The doctor placed a firm hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Anna, you had a panic attack and we gave you something to help you calm down. We’ve also given you an anaesthetic which means you are numb from the chest down.’

  I felt the room move around me, struggling to focus as a doorway flashed above my head. Dr Singh was talking faster now.

  ‘We are taking you into theatre, and you’re going to meet your babies very soon …’

  ‘But it’s too soon.’

  My voice faded away and the doctor smiled.

  ‘Thirty-six weeks is absolutely fine – often with twins, women have a section around this time.’

  That wasn’t what I meant. But you don’t understand, I wanted to shout out. I’m not ready.

  ‘My colleague is going to ask you to sign some forms, just a formality.’ The doctor’s attention moved to the job in hand as the trolley swung through a set of double doors into theatre, my body instantly turning cold. Any detachment I had felt suddenly transformed into horrifying lucidity. Every flicker of light was illuminated; the metal sheen of the surgeon’s trolley dazzled my eyes; a fuzzing sound like a radio hissing in and out of signal was coming from somewhere near my head.

  Rolling my eyes upwards, I saw a woman in a hairnet talking to me, her face bright with optimism.

  ‘I’m going to be sick.’

  The woman stroked my head reassuringly.

  ‘That’s just the drugs, I’ll give you some anti-sickness.’

  ‘Where is David?’

  I could not turn my head to look.

  ‘David is next door, he will be here in a moment. Would you like some music?’

  I tried to process the woman’s words. Music? I needed my boyfriend. The realisation struck me like a weight across the back of my head – I needed David.

  ‘I’m here. It’s OK, I’m here …’

  His face appeared above mine, perfectly formed against a fuzzy backdrop as he leaned over me, the skin around his eyes blotched and red.

  I felt the tears come as I looked back at him, my hands feeling for his face but never quite making contact.

  ‘Please try not to move.’

  The woman at my head indicated the needle that had somehow been inserted between the bones on my hand; the tube running up my arm towards a plastic bag hooked onto a metal cage beside me.

  ‘It’s antibiotics, just a precaution against infection.’

  I looked at my hand, wondering how it was possible to feel so disconnected from my own body.

  ‘David, what’s happening? I can’t …’

  ‘It’s OK, there was something wrong with one of the babies.’

  His voice was choked.

  ‘They’re going to get them out …’

  Wrong? What did he mean, wrong?

  ‘Right, Anna.’

  It was one of the nurses, a face I had not seen before.

  ‘I’m going to spray you with this cold spray, and I want you to tell me if you can feel it. OK?’

  ‘I don’t feel anything.’

  ‘That’s good – how about now?’

  I shook my head, tears streaming down my cheeks, the only part of my body that still felt like my own.

  ‘They’re starting now, Anna.’

  The woman with the spray-can was suddenly beside me.

  ‘Just a minute, maybe less and … Oh, I can see your baby, Anna, she’s … Here she is!’

  The air seemed to crack with the sound of its cry. The child resisting, thrashing its limbs, held above my head for a fraction of a second before being whisked away towards a plastic table on the other side of the room.

  I watched, through a mute haze of tears as three of the medical team rushed towards the furious child, moving between pieces of equipment, calling out words I did not understand.

  ‘OK, and here is number two!’

  Trancelike, I turned to see another baby, smeared in white and red mucus. This time, the body was curled in on itself. For a second, I waited for the familiar shrieking, the immediate protest against the world into which it had been pulled. Instead, I felt the atmosphere shift as the baby was suddenly lowered, a tacit agreement passing between the strangers around me who, without another word, flew mechanically towards the child as, finally, a cry erupted from her lungs.

  ‘Good!’

  The midwife called out, moving towards the plastic cot on the far side of the room. ‘Good! That’s right, you have a good old scream.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  David leaned forward, his body crumpling in relief.

  ‘We’ll just get them cleaned up and weighed and then you can have a quick cuddle before we take them to ICU for checks, OK? So far everything seems perfectly normal but we just need to have them checked out. All right, Anna?’

  The surgeon remained where he was, studiously repairing the severed muscle as my eyes rolled back, deliberately pushing out the sounds around me.

  People talk of that all-consuming love that rushes in the moment you have a child, blotting out everything else. I felt like I had been steamrollered and my body was slowly setting in the concrete.

  The weeks following the birth passed by as if the world and all its colours and sounds had been dampened somehow. David spent the majority of his time hovering over the twins as if they might disappear if he so much as looked away.

  Maria descended within hours of us returning home from the hospital. Arriving at night, she used her own key, as instructed, slipping into the role of surrogate mother with unnerving ease.

  ‘An extra pair of hands, that’s all,’ David placated me as I lay on the side of the bed one morning, my face motionless, tilted towards the window, the girls writhing and cooing in the other room.

  ‘She has taken a break from studying and she needs the money.’

  Should I have felt the jarring of a nerve at the prospect of an old friend of my husband’s coming to stay within hours of my giving birth – a woman who understood his family in a way that I never could, whose history and connection superseded my own? A woman whose body was untainted by the pushes and pulls of pregnancy, and birth? It seems obvious now, but in that moment, jostling for position was the furthest thing from my mind.

  ‘I am glad she is here,’ I replied, my voice barely audible, simply relieved that someone else would be there to satiate the swarm of needs that had suddenly taken hold of the house so that sometimes it felt the whole place was shaking with the weight of the things I could not do. Perhaps I should have noted the significance of an extra pair of eyes to watch over me, but I was too tightly woven inside my own darkness to notice, or care.

  Like the answer to an unspok
en prayer, Maria took the reins without ceremony, looking after the girls, bringing my lunch, removing the untouched tray hours later without remark.

  ‘You want to try to feed her?’ She knocked quietly before stepping into the bedroom holding Stella who was making up for her initial silence after her birth with feverish screams that rang through the house like an alarm.

  I closed my eyes gently, whispering under my breath.

  ‘She wants the bottle.’ My voice was flat.

  Maria looked like she was going to say something, but instead she nodded, hushing the baby to her chest, moving out of the room without another word.

  It was weeks since I had heard from Harry. I had been so caught up in the last-minute organisation before the girls’ arrival – design tweaks for the builders, wrapping things up at work – that I had hardly given him much thought. What was it that made me think of him then? Was it really him that I needed, or rather the knowledge that he was thinking of me?

  The landing outside the bedroom felt unnaturally bright, the glow radiating from the ceiling lamps causing me to squint.

  Letting my body rest against the wall for a moment, I felt the searing pain cut across my abdomen, a visceral reminder of the blades neatly laid out on the surgeon’s stand, before making my way to the bathroom, the solid brass door handle trapping into position behind me.

  With the door shut, the ceiling seemed to loom over me, concealing memories, secrets etched into the yellowing cornicing. The walls were dark emerald green to match the carpets, thick layers of curtain hanging from the window. In one corner there stood a circular cabinet in heavy, detailed wood.

  Along the surface, a row of cut-crystal perfume bottles secreted waves of musty vanilla from the dark amber-coloured liquid that stained the glass, bottles I increasingly found myself inhaling – the scent of David’s mother, this strange proximity to her haunting and reassuring in equal measure.

  It took both hands to turn the tap on, an angry gush of steaming-hot water roaring from the wide brass spout.

  Turning towards the sink, I avoided the reflection in the mirror. Bending down, I opened the cupboard, reaching expertly through the rows of bottles and clothes, my hand feeling its way towards the back of the shelf.

  Twisting so that I could reach it, wincing at the sharp pain that jabbed at my ribs as I did so, I prised the phone from where it was wedged between the panel at the back of the cupboard and the shelf. My hand lightly trembling, I held down the button until the light flashed green.

  From the hallway, David’s voice reached in through the crack under the door. I had not realised he was home, and his return meant it must already be late afternoon. My skin bristling, I paused, listening to him singing to the girls in that giddying voice he had affected since their birth.

  Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my Bonnie to me, to me …

  It was another few seconds before I risked looking down at the screen. For a moment, I could picture a message from Harry, the connection between us having already alerted him to trouble. But then I blinked, and the screen was blank.

  I’ve been in hospital … The girls are here, we nearly died … I started to type before deleting the message and starting over.

  Did you get the thing I left for you? I need to see you.

  Hearing David’s voice getting louder, I pressed ‘send’ and pushed the phone back into the cupboard.

  ‘Everything OK?’ His shadow passed under the gap of the door; I heard his mouth pushed up against the wood.

  Carefully easing the door of the cupboard closed, I answered.

  ‘Everything’s fine. I’m coming.’

  CHAPTER 33

  Maria

  The sky was low as I stepped into the concrete basin that stood between Euston Road and the British Library, taking a moment to savour the building, red bricks containing the answer to the questions I would not have dreamt to ask.

  Fleetingly, I thought of my childhood, my father’s body bent over at the end of my little bed as he regaled me with the same stories his parents had told him, the sound of his voice vibrating reassuringly through the sheets as I watched the skin on his face stretch and crease. After he left, the stories went too.

  Shaking away the thought, I pushed my body against the heavy metal doors that led into the library. Inside, a security guard scanned the contents of my rucksack while my mind drifted across the space, taking in the vertiginous ceiling and endless balconies. From where I stood, I imagined myself looking up at a giant human organ, sliced in two, every cell and valve exposed.

  It was my day off from the twins and I was sitting on one of the single tables lining the wall in the coffee shop of the library, my notes spread in front of me, the first time she approached.

  ‘Do you mind?’ Her expression was so English, a look designed to convey how loath she was to impose.

  ‘Oh God, don’t worry, I won’t be long,’ she added, smiling, holding up her hand in an act of surrender as I scraped together the books that were sprawled out across the table.

  ‘Gosh, that looks intense.’

  She pointed to a book on the political economy of good government, brimming with Post-it notes. It had been bought with money from my first pay cheque from David, something to take the sting out of my abandonment of my course. Just because I had taken this time out of university, I told myself, there was no excuse to lag behind.

  What had it taken for my mother to finally convince me? How many calls had it required to wear me down to her way of thinking? The truth was, there had been no choice. I had run out of money, and working twelve-hour shifts scraping fat off an industrial fryer was occupying more time and energy than my studies. However I looked at it, it was a false economy.

  ‘So why not take this nannying job, darling,’ she had pressed on. ‘Surely it is wiser to defer than to be forced to pull out altogether. Just for a few months, and then when you have savings, you can go back to university. It’s David you would be working for, not Clive. It’s not David you’re angry at, is it?’

  Tears had run down my cheeks but I had not made a sound.

  The woman opposite me was casting her eyes enthusiastically over my books.

  ‘Intense is one word for it.’

  I rolled my eyes, pleased to have someone to talk to. After the mood at the dinner to which David had invited me, I’d worried how Anna might react to my arrival. But the reality, when it came, was far more unsettling.

  In the weeks since the birth, Anna had hardly left her room. Occasionally, I would hear her, feet dragging along the corridor. Peering through the gap in the door of the nursery I would watch her from behind, her ribcage protruding beneath her nightgown, above the swollen mound of her belly, as she moved towards the bathroom, the sense of unease following her like a ghost.

  ‘What are you studying?’

  ‘Political Science and International Relations – well, I was before, back home.’

  ‘Sounds impressive.’ The woman raised her eyebrows. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘I live in Athens, or I did, but I’m from the Sporades originally. It’s a series of islands on the east coast of Greece.’

  ‘Oh my gosh, you lucky thing. I used to have a friend who had a little place on one of the smaller islands; it’s so beautiful there. Which island do you come from?

  I pushed the lid of my laptop closed and told her the name. She gasped when I said it.

  ‘No way! Gosh, what a small world. I’m Felicity, by the way …’

  It seems ridiculous now that I fell for it, but then what was I supposed to think?

  CHAPTER 34

  Anna

  After a couple of weeks the health visitor arrived to sign me off, my stitches removed with a single tug by the accompanying midwife, who pulled and prodded at the girls while her colleague bombarded me with a stream of meaningless questions. How was I feeling? Was I struggling? Did I ever feel at risk?

  For reasons I couldn’t explain, my mind flashed to the pot of
pills that sat by my bedside. I blinked, suddenly aware of my clenched fists, fingernails digging into my palms.

  ‘David would never hurt me.’

  I was perched uncomfortably on the sofa in the living room, a pile of leaflets by my side. Was there a hint of uncertainty in my voice?

  ‘Good. Well, keep the phone numbers just in case. You’d be surprised what goes on in even the happiest seeming relationships, and children can create a strain.’

  Smiling weakly, I closed the door, dropping the papers into the wastepaper basket as I made my way towards the stairs, stopping in the doorway of the kitchen where Maria was washing up our cups.

  ‘Could you watch the girls? I need to sleep.’

  Padding slowly along the hallway, I made for the bathroom to check once again for the message reassuring me that Harry was thinking of me when I needed him most; that perhaps, without me needing to tell him, he had sensed the girls had arrived. But the screen was blank.

  I made my way back to the bedroom and pulled the sheet up higher around myself, never wanting to get up again.

  ‘Don’t you think you should get out of bed?’

  David was standing at the doorway of our bedroom, his hair pulled to the side in the style he had gradually started to adopt since joining the firm. His wardrobes were filling with expensive suit jackets and crisply ironed shirts, which seemed to appear from nowhere; the smell of soap at some point had been replaced by a heavy aftershave.

  ‘It’s been more than two weeks, Anna. The doctors said it’s important for you to move around, to help the healing … The girls, they need you.’

  He said the last part of the sentence louder than necessary and when I turned I saw Maria in the hallway, delivering clean sheets to one of the bedrooms.

  In the distance, the fractious waves of Stella’s cry rang through the house, and Maria’s footsteps disappeared. My eyes rested gratefully against their sockets.

  ‘I’m so tired, my stomach is so sore I’m not sure I can walk. Could you bring the girls to me?’