I folded the black-and-white photo in two, and folded it once again. I placed it snugly between the blue outfit and her pink raw skin. I didn’t want her to be alone. The people in the picture would keep her company while her flesh and blood was on this planet.
“There now, you have your parents, all your grandparents and the aunties and uncles and friends with you so you won’t be lonely. Go now, sweetheart, to your place where you can sleep for ever, a place where they will love you, where they love flawed people like you.”
I pushed the red buzzer.
Lucy came in and slowly approached the Perspex box. She peered in as if check that all the contents were in order.
“Okay to go?” she enquired tenderly.
“Yes, thank you, Lucy – we have said our final goodbye.” I smiled gently at her kind eyes.
I stood up, as though I was giving Ruby a standing ovation for performance. I wanted to escort my daughter to the door and out of the room. From there the lady with the kind eyes would look after her, and Henry and Penny would take care of her. She had come on loan to me for only a day; her final destination was elsewhere. She did really only have one day on earth because tomorrow, Wednesday, very early, they would take her to the crematorium. The lady with the kind face said: “They like to get the ashes back to Ireland as soon as possible.” Thursday my little girl would be busy travelling. And on Friday we would be reunited – all three of us.
I walked to the door, and waved. I waved as she was pushed down through the cream-coloured walls of the corridor. Then they turned left at the end of the corridor. And she was gone, gone from me forever. There was no happy ending, like in the movies.
Alone, I sat on the bed and sobbed. The sobbing became howls, and the floods of tears ran down my cheeks onto my now defunct bump. I coughed and choked on my own tears. I cried myself to sleep. Then, the nightmares began: those torturous hours of restless sleep that were to become my new bed companion. Never did they disappoint. Nightly for months they visited my sleeping hours.
Chapter 14
A Wednesday in June, 2013
A different lady with a sweet smile greeted me with a cup of coffee. “Good morning, Afric. Hope you slept well?”
I wondered if they had a factory attached to the hospital where they made all these kind people. It was as though they were all made with the same tender personalities and thoughtful ways. They all had full waists, slightly rounded faces and kind eyes – a very sincere type of kindness – you could tell that they really meant it. It was not just a job to them, it was a gift that they had and they were sharing it with those in need.
These people had a real job, I thought. This was not marketing fluff or consultancy drivel – it was a job at the coalface of reality. On a daily basis they battled with the certainly of death. I wanted to stay here forever, inside those creams walls. I wanted to be minded and cared for by this tribe of wonderful women. Life would be so easy with them around.
I looked up at the lady. Her gold name badge with brown lettering read ‘Hazel’.
“Thank you, Hazel. I did sleep well – for a while – but then the nightmares began.”
I looked beyond her to centre of the room. I was hoping for a glass box, that it might have miraculously reappeared with a living angel dressed in a blue outfit peering over the side. The floor was empty. There was no box. My heart sank to meet my sick stomach.
“Nightmares are normal for the first while, Afric, and with time they will stop. Eventually they will fade . . . so too will the pain . . . it will ease . . . it may never go away but you will learn to accept it . . . you will be able to live with it. Afric, then you will be left with only the fondest of memories that you will cherish forever. It will get easier, Afric, just give it time.”
She had moved to the edge of the bed, and the rough skin of her right palm rubbed on the back of my hand. She smiled gently at me.
“Don’t be hard on yourself, Afric – give yourself time to heal from the inside out. The inside, you know, is the bit that takes time, plenty time. You will discover all the clichés are true, every one of them: time heals all wounds. But you will have to take that time.” She stroked my hand again. “So you’re leaving us today. You’ll need to get up soon to make your flight – your file says it is at eleven – is that correct?”
“Eleven fifteen, I think – yes, it’s eleven fifteen because it lands in Dublin at midday. What time is now?”
“It’s just after eight thirty – so you still have plenty of time. We’ll get you a taxi, Afric. Call me when you’re ready to go, okay?”
Smiling, she left, closing the door gently behind her.
Hazel – well, presumably Hazel – had left a brown A4 envelope on the locker next to the bed. She had not drawn my attention to it – maybe she meant me to open it later at home.
I spilled the contents of the white envelope onto the brown cover of the bed.
There was a booklet and four tiny cut-out pieces: two hand and two foot prints. They looked like something from a kids’ make-and-do class. I picked up the hand prints. They were so petite that they both fitted perfectly into the palm of my hand. Her hand was now inside mine, I closed my hand over her tiny little paper prints, careful not to crush them. I rubbed both foot prints. I was so proud of them, so proud of us, Luke and me, for getting something right: her tiny toes.
The booklet came from the same art class. It was like something from This Is Your Life. It had her personal details and her photos. They’d only needed two pages to record her short life. The foot and hand prints should have been part of her living body and not in a remembrance book that read: Forever in Our Thoughts. At the back of the book was a sleeve that held a clear plastic band. It read: 11.6.12 Baby Lynch. 10: 31.
I gently touched the band; it was the wristband that Ruby had worn for her only day on earth.
Now my little angel, Ruby, was gone. Physically she had departed this world because of her troubled body. All I hoped now was that her soul would keep me sane. Of course that was the ironic beauty of it all: she was now tasked with looking after her mother. Luke and I were now parents of angel, a very exclusive club that no one wants to be a member of.
Carefully, I repacked the envelope, sealed it, and then got out of bed.
“Ruby, we are going home, to the room with the sea view. You and I are going home, our time here is done.” I kissed the envelope and popped it into my pink-and-cream handbag. How cruel, I thought. Only a single brown envelope to remember my little angel by. The only evidence I had that she ever existed – other than my memories.
Until her ashes came home to us.
Chapter 15
“Just one bag to check in?”
“Yes, Dublin please, travelling alone, thank you,” I replied. “Is there any chance of an emergency-exit seat?”
He looked from my face down to my bloated stomach and then back at my eyes. I wondered if I should say anything, but what could I say? ‘Sorry, in fact you are wrong. I can sit in the emergency-exit seat because I am no longer pregnant.’ Should I say that my inflated belly was only a farce and that it was only skin deep, that behind the skin was a vacant womb?
“Sorry, we don’t have emergency-exit seats available – they are all booked up,” he replied politely.
Thankfully, we had both been saved a difficult conversation.
I made my way to the boarding area.
My phone blipped, I stared at the screen.
Miss you, Afric, hope you survived the conference, very excited about the new job and coming home soon. Chat later, going to a meeting just now, hope all is well, Love you, Luke.
I sent a simple ‘X’ that would buy me more time before I had to speak to him. It would be easier to talk to him sitting at the desk overlooking Howth Head. It would be more restful there. It is easier to tell lies when you’re in your comfort zone – mind you, I had done a pretty good job in Liverpool. I would be home and at my window in over two hours – one thirty at the latest. Th
at would make it eight thirty in the evening in Beijing, a perfect time to call Luke. He would have done his pool swim and would be more relaxed. I would get home, shower, relax, pour myself a stiff drink and then call him.
The plane skidded to a halt.
I looked out the square window with the slightly rounded edges. The raindrops bounced off the tarmac at Dublin airport – they looked as though they were jumping up to greet the aircraft.
I began to relax. Very soon I would be home, sitting at the window. Knowing that I was not far from my comfort zone, my mind began to wander.
They say ‘Trust your instinct’, another cliché like ‘Time heals all wounds’. Clichés had a reason to have been hanging around for so many generations. People use them time and time again, mainly I suppose because they are largely true.
But I had ignored my instinct. I deliberately had denied its existence – maybe because I was too scared to trust it. During those long six months of pregnancy, I didn’t know that there was something wrong but I knew that there was something not quite right. I could never put my finger on it. I was unable to identify what exactly was the problem. Unable to recognise the issue, instead I chose to block it out.
Maybe if I had listened to my inner voice from the beginning this tragedy would have been avoided. If I had gone for an amniocentesis at an earlier stage of my pregnancy would they have discovered my baby’s incompatibility with life? It still would have been very sad, but it would never have got to become this tragic.
Perhaps that was why I didn’t tell anyone until I was over twenty-two weeks pregnant – maybe to protect myself from the imminent hurt. I had gone through the motions of congratulations. These now would be followed by a follow-up round of commiserations. That was what awaited me now, hundreds of well-intended empathetic condolences.
Inadvertently, I had been shielding myself from the pain, from the reality of the situation. Of this I was sure. It had not been the hormones that were making me feel sad for the past six months. It was my own body rejecting its own flesh, the very flesh that it had created. My body and mind were not elated because perhaps it was nature’s way of protecting me from the deformity in my womb. It was preventing me from bonding with a child that would never survive outside the womb. I was saving myself from myself.
During those six months, I thought that I was going crazy, that I was losing my grasp on reality. I was relieved now that I knew it was my mind rejecting something that was trying to hurt me: it considered my daughter as a foreign body.
The raindrops continued to dance on the ground – there was something very therapeutic about it – it had a rhythm – there was almost a sensation to it.
“Miss, Miss, Miss – whenever you are ready – we need to get the plane clean – very quickly.”
I wondered how long he had been trying to get my attention.
“Sorry, sorry, I was in my own world,” I replied.
He smiled. Perhaps he could tell I was sad – you can see when someone is very sad – you can see it in their eyes. I smiled gently back.
I opened the large yellow door and climbed the threadbare stairs to the front door of the apartment. I was glad to be home. I poured a large glass of chilled white wine and sat down at the window.
The rain storm was slowly clearing, the dark grey mist had blocked out the entire headland of Sutton and Howth. There was no white-and-grey lighthouse visible, though I searched the sea for it. It must have finally toppled over and tumbled into the Irish Sea.
I took out my phone and typed: At home, exhausted, going to sleep for a bit, will text later.
Chapter 16
A Thursday in June, 2013
It gushed from between my fattened thighs; it drenched the bed sheets and soaked right through the mattress, leaving dark red circles in large patches. Its dark stained colour was all over my body, as though my body had been painted with large brushstrokes of red. I had been bathed in my own blood; it had turned my hair from dull blonde to brown. There could not be much left in my veins. My black nightgown was stuck to my skin.
My engorged breasts throbbed from the milk that was being produced; somebody had forgotten to inform them that they were no longer needed, that they were now obsolete. Like me as a mother. I was no longer required, I served no purpose.
But instead they produced and grew and grew, swollen and roasting. I wanted to pierce them with a knitting needle. Piercing them was the solution. I got up and walked from the bedroom into the kitchen. I reached into the top drawer of the sideboard. I fumbled around in the dim light until I found a kebab skewer. It sparkled – it was clean and unused. Perfect, I thought.
I retraced my steps back into the bedroom and then went through to the bathroom. I stopped at the bathroom cabinet mirror. I turned on the light over the mirror.
I aimed directly at my left nipple with the skewer. I punctured the faint-brown skin, tearing right through the nipple, right in the very centre. The yellowy grey gunge spurted everywhere. It was mixed with blood. This blood was a light red in colour. It was all mixed together. The milk and blood flowed from my breast. It had splattered everywhere. It was on me, on the walls, it stained the toilet bowl, the bathtub. I gazed back at the mirror. My face was stained with my own bodily fluids, and splashes of colours interrupted my freckled face.
Then ignoring the wounded breast, I refocused my attention. I took aim at the right breast. Again I carefully aimed the skewer so as not to miss, but I was not able to get the exact angle of the protruding nipple on the small bathroom-cabinet mirror. I opened the cabinet door, so that the mirror was nearer so as to perfect my aim. It was more difficult with the second breast as the bodily fluid that escaped after the first piercing had stained the mirror, obscuring my vision of my intended target. I tilted my head so that I had the perfect uninterrupted view. I pierced myself a second time. This time I struck harder because the second breast was the more engorged and the more painful of the two. The stabbing needed to be fierce to stop my own body torturing me. If my body didn’t know that it was inflicting pain on its own very being then I needed to act to stop the torture. I had to rescue me from myself. My own flesh was devouring my mind. It had to stop.
I was drenched in my own mess; it had managed to even grace my swollen vacant stomach with its presence. How sordid, I thought. It was as though the fluid was sneering at my bloated belly. I banged hard against my stomach, trying to instantly deflate it, hoping that the bloated bulge would disappear, that the hangover of a dead child would lift, that I would be relieved of a tragic death, that the nightmare would be over soon.
The puncture wounds in my breasts instantly relieved the pressure on my chest. The horror of self-harming had not yet been realised by my mind, only by my body. My body didn’t care because it was so fucked-up and confused that it no longer could distinguish the different kinds of pain.
It was my mind I had chosen not to focus on – it was a much more complicated matter to heal. You can fix tits, I told myself. I remembered what the kind midwife had told me: heal from the inside out. That was what I was not doing.
I turned my head and saw him approaching. He wore a long coat. It was pristine white. He had a gold name-badge with dark brown lettering. I thought I could read the word ‘Doctor’ on it, but he was too far away from me to make out his second name. It looked like it began with ‘De’.
He had dark-brown hair parted to the right; the fringe swerved over his forehead. He had green eyes, very green, the colour of olives. He had a button nose and, on closer inspection from where I lay, it was too small for his face. He needed something a size bigger to fit in with the contours of his head. His lips too were not full enough for his face. Everything seemed to be a size or two too small for his body and that included his neck. It looked as though they had just propped the head on his shoulders, like they had forgotten his neck – that they then suddenly remembered it and stuck it in at the last moment.
“Lynch, Afric Lynch, if you would like to come this wa
y?”
He invited me to follow him into a room with a huge monitor with hand-scanners attached to it. He closed the door behind me and we were alone. I squinted to read this name badge. Its deep brown lettering read ‘Doctor Death’. I looked up at his olive-green eyes but his eyeballs had disappeared and were now replaced with sheets of shiny steel. His steel eyes gawked at me, as he smiled to reveal solid gold fangs behind his thin lips.
I sprang upright in the bed. I extended my arm to the far side, checking to see if I was alone. The sheets and my nightgown were soaking. I turned on the bedside lamp to my right. I forced open my eyes. I examined the dampness. It was not blood but a lather of sweat that had drenched my entire body.
The small grey digital clock read: 04:11 am.
I reached for some water. I was completely disorientated. Panicked, I looked around me, desperate for a signal to tell where I was. I was relieved to discover I was in our bed and not in another room with cream walls, clear plastic tubes and large monitors.
The nightmares had started. The lady with the kind face had said they often happen. She’d said that often women relive the traumatic reality of losing a baby; she’d promised me that with time they would pass, that they would fade and some day they would disappear altogether. She said that I would dream again, happy dreams. However, she had failed to promise when this might be. For now, these nightmares would be my nocturnal bed companions.
I got up and had a cool shower. I stood there in the darkness as the water spilled over me, and thumped onto the bath’s surface. The rhythm of the spilling water relaxed me. I stayed there for what seemed like hours.
Luke would be back in less than twenty-four hours. I still needed to work out how best to explain it to him – to clarify the reason for the deceit – why I had kept it all from him – why I had lied about Liverpool, about going to an IT conference for work. I needed to make it – the explanation – as painless as possible for him. Luke would want facts not emotions – well, at the start of the conversation anyway.
Ruby's Tuesday Page 15