Go to Sleep

by Helen Walsh

  I slam down on to all fours, maddened with grief and hate; hacking at the surface, slamming the opaque slab with my fists, trying to tear out a hole with my blistered fingers. I would rot for ever in jail if I could just hold my baby one last time.

  I collapse exhausted. I lay my face down on the ice. Why have you taken Joe? Why not me?

  Because that’s what you wanted, Rachel. You wanted to go to sleep.

  No. I wanted Joe to sleep.

  Exactly.

  *

  My legs are so weak now, each and every step starts from the hip bone and I can’t walk properly; I throw my legs, heavy and slow. The fatigue that is locked around my bones is thick and suffocating – a shutting-down of the organs, absolute surrender. The urge to curl up by the wall, to succumb to a full and final collapse, is overpowering. But I have to make it home.

  A shiver. A tremor of light, and then – of course: Dad. My daddy. I will phone my daddy and he will come, now, and find me and take me away from all this. I dig out my phone, stab in his name. It rings and rings.

  ‘Hello, this is Richard. Sorry I’m not here to take your call . . .’

  ‘What if they can’t break the ice, Daddy?’ I hear myself wailing. ‘What if I never see him again?’ A voice in the distance. ‘Daddy?’

  The voice gets louder.

  ‘Rachel! Rache!’

  It’s not Dad. It’ll be the police. Social workers. Psychiatrists. They’ve come for me. They’ve come to take me away. I laugh bitterly. Prepare, Rachel. Go in peace. I try to focus. One hazy figure, running towards me. I try to step towards him and my head spins. I fall flat down and the sky is white.

  I’m soaring up, up now and I see it all below. There’s silence except for the rhythmic thumping of my heart, fast and steady. I’m flying, gliding over the park, over my past, our story, flickering in stark and pristine shades of grey and white. I see a door opening and a woman, full of doubt. She’s shaking her head at me, but I can’t see her face. I squint, for a better view. She’s talking, animatedly now, but she’s not speaking to me. It’s James, at her doorstep. James McIver is on the doorstep at South Lodge and my mother is pointing . . . where? She’s pointing at the sun, sky high and dazzling white. It’s blinding. I close my eyes tight as I speed closer and closer towards it.

  40

  James is standing over me in my living room. I don’t even question it. None of this is real. I hear his dim and dislocated voice.

  ‘Rache. Can you hear me? You’re sound now.’ I think I try to smile. I don’t know. ‘Fuck, but you’re heavy, girl.’

  I close my eyes. This is not happening.

  Footsteps, receding. I’m lost. What is this? A dull ache from my hand. I hold it up. That, out on the lake, that happened; my bruised and bloodied knuckles give me a marker, a level of truth. And I flew. I soared up and out of my life and I saw it all and I flew back here. But no – I didn’t. Footsteps again. A voice.

  ‘Now then, little one . . . let’s just get you . . .’

  James. James carried me. Yes. He picked me up and carried me all the way and he thought I was going under, passing over, and he talked and talked, his breath all staccato, and he told me . . . no.

  Gone. Just as I get a picture it dims and fades.

  ‘James? Are you there?’

  Nothing. I’m dreaming the whole thing. I’m dizzy, my thoughts are disjointed and sluggish. What did he tell me? I’m having hallucinations, now: a strong, lurid narrative plays out behind my throbbing, sightless eyes, piece by piece. James breaking into the flat. Joe sobbing his little heart out. Starving. James tries to wake me. I’m comatose, dead to the world. Yes! Fuck. Of course. I’m dead . . . Dead.

  I hear a sound that, if it exists at all, will never come to pass again. It’s here in my dead-head now.

  Ak-ak-ak-ak-ak . . . ‘Yer all right. Got the hang of this now, kidda.’

  I sit bolt upright. There’s no one there. James, if he was here, has gone. But he wasn’t here. It’s too cruel. I hold my battered hand close to my eyes to tell myself I’m here, I live. I stare at my swollen knuckles, then let myself drop back down on to the couch. Sleep. You can sleep as much as you want now, Rachel.

  *

  I’m flying again. I know why they say ‘heavenly’. I am limp with the ecstasy of my flight. James and Lacey McIver glide next to me, their crisp white wings clicking as they climb higher and higher. James cranes his neck round.

  ‘I couldn’t make his formula right, Rache. I couldn’t get him to take it. But I remembered from when our Lacey was newborn that you could get it ready-mixed and that so I just . . . well, I didn’t have no choice, did I? I just put him in his pushchair thingio and went and got it. You was gone by the time we got back. Good job I seen you out there. You would’ve froze to death.’

  I’m feeling some elusive tug in my heart, something calling me. I stop flying, drag myself back to consciousness again. Still bound tight in my hallucinations, my head is still ringing with James; my mind bouncing and spinning with snapshots and jagged little images. ‘Some fella keeps ringing your phone. Ruby. And yer aul’ fella’s on his way.’

  I’m trying to break out through this cocoon, force myself up. There’s no one here. No James. Nobody. I know it. I have already gone, but I’m not yet on the other side. I understand, now. This is my last chance to confess. And though I know now that I will never see my baby ever again, that I will rot in hell or spin in limbo, I now understand my elation. I am glad to have this chance to explain myself; explain everything.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry. I couldn’t get him. I couldn’t break the ice.’

  ‘Shhh. You’re sound now, girl.’

  ‘I was so desperate, James. I had to sleep.’

  ‘I only got yer text this morning, Rache. I’m sorry.’

  And I can feel it reining me in – death, hell, whatever I’m destined for. I start to fall, my eyes battling to stay prised open long enough for me to purge my guts of this confession.

  ‘You need to know what I did. You need to know where Joe is.’

  ‘I know where he is, you divvy. Just get your head down for now, eh? You’re still twatted from the sleeping drops.’

  ‘You forgive me?’

  ‘Rachel. If it weren’t for you I wouldn’t fucking be here. End of.’

  My eyes are closed now, but I can feel the splash of his tears on my face. I try to force myself up. I feel out for his hand but it’s not there. He’s not there.

  ‘I loved him, James. I did. I was so desperate for sleep. Can you . . . will you ever understand that?’

  ‘I’m not fuckin’ soft, Rache. It was written all over you. I come back the other day. But some fella thought I was breaking in.’

  ‘Will you go to the lake for me? Will you do that? Will you get him back for me? Make sure he has a proper goodbye?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The baby.’

  ‘What you on about, you divvy? Joseph’s here, with me. He’s fine!’

  The words jolt me upright. It’s all going to be just fine. Please. Don’t play with me. Let me go. Let me go.

  James is there. I prise my eyes open and the image is hazy, it comes and goes; but he’s here. So scared, so shot through with the fear of what I know will happen now, I reach out. James takes my hand, squeezes it hard.

  ‘You loon. Do you want me to bring him?’

  Ah-ah-ah-ah. Ak-ak-ak-ak.

  And now my breasts are welling up, spilling over. Please. Please. Let this be real. I can take no more dreams; no more hallucinations. Please.

  Everything dissolves into sepia.

  Ak-ak-ak-ak!

  ‘Greedy little get, isn’t he?’

  I screw my eyes up closed then bang them open, desperate to see, to feel.

  ‘James. Tell me. Please! Is it him? Is it Joe?’

  ‘Hang on a mo. I’ll ask if he’s taking visitors.’

  And now I find the motor within me. Now I can sit up, desperate, smiling despera
tely.

  ‘James! Tell me what’s happening! If this is real?’

  He fades out. His image drifts away and vanishes to nothing, and my heart sinks, my hopes plunge. James is gone. He was never here at all. This is agony, and it’s all I deserve. As soon as I can haul myself out of this stupor, this half-life, I will finish what I started. But then I hear his footsteps padding back to me.

  Ah-ah-ah-ah . . .

  Closer now, the sound, and it could only be . . . it has to be. It’s so close I can taste his tears, his beautiful tears.

  Ak-ak-ak-ak . . .

  And now here he is. Joe. My love. My baby. James places him on to my chest, and his tiny little mouth seeks and finds, and now I feel it, and I don’t care if this is real or not because I feel it so hugely, so purely – that awesome star blaze of emotion as he nuzzles and sucks on me. If my life was nothing but this one single moment, I would take it. I have lived. I have loved.

  James pulls the blankets up and over us.

  ‘Go to sleep, now.’ My body is already crashing down and under. ‘You too, little fella.’

  ‘Don’t let him fall off me.’

  ‘Shhhh. I’m not moving till your aul’ man gets here. Go to sleep.’

  And I do. I slip away, smiling at the sound of his greedy little gulps.

  Six months later

  So here I am then, finally. Here I am, taking in the slow chug of the river, inhaling the salty diesel stink, trying to drink it all in and commit it to memory. If I shut my eyes I can think myself back to that day. I can hold the river air right down in my lungs and touch my stomach and feel that overpowering sense of destiny.

  I open my eyes. The tide and all its spume have moved on. The sky has shifted, the clouds have changed. And so too have I.

  I’m crying, happy-sad, as I make my way back to the flat.

  *

  A gentle bleeping. I dig my phone out of my bag. There are a couple of missed calls from Dad. He and Jan will be heading back from the Lakes now and Dad will be anxious for an update, eager to know what he can do to help. On Friday night he hiked two miles in the darkness across boggy, cow-dunged fields in search of a phone box.

  ‘You trekked all that way just to tell me there’s no phone reception at your cottage?’

  And knowing I was onto him, knowing he’d been found out, he had no choice but to come clean.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure, darling? We’re ready to come home at the drop of a hat if you need . . .’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing. Now go and enjoy this time with Jan. I’m hanging up right now.’

  It’s a month now since my psychiatrist deemed me well enough to extend the period between our appointments, yet Dad still calls me once, often twice a day, and pops round at all hours, on any pretext. There’re roadworks . . . I saw the light was on . . . Jan’s got a mountain of paperwork, thought you might keep me company . . . Sometimes, it’s all I can do not to snap at him or laugh and throw my arms around him: Dad, come on now. Even my fourteen-year-olds can do better than that!

  And he’s managed to crank an extra level of panic into his: ‘Are you okay?’ every time he picks up the phone to me. If it weren’t for Jan quietly reining him in, forever reassuring him that I’m coping, I’m more than coping, no doubt he’d be camped outside my front door on a round-the-clock vigil. He’d never admit it, but Dad hasn’t yet forgiven himself that he didn’t twig. Or worse, that he did twig – and did nothing about it. Jan surprised me though, on every level. The moment she found out, she was on the first flight back from Malawi, and she didn’t duck it – any of it.

  ‘Rachel. My God. Can you ever forgive me?’

  She held me for ages, told me she’d known, she’d guessed, but felt she had no licence to interfere. She couldn’t – I wouldn’t let her – help me.

  They moved in for a while, but it was Jan who really took care of house and home. She was the one who cooked, did the laundry and the shopping, paid the bills, and in the dead of the night when my shrieks woke me up it was Jan who held me, rocked me, let my sobs roll through her, over and over. But, in time, and as I started to mend, the inflections of our relationship shifted. Jan became less my protector, more my therapist, my sounding board, as the confessions and submerged horrors and misconceptions spewed out of me. I spilled it all: Ruben, Dad, Mum, my Joe. I didn’t spare Jan herself, told her how much I’d resented her all those years, resented my father. I purged myself of everything. Our relationship shifted again.

  Jan is my ally now, my mate – my sometime dinner date. I love the way she thinks, her razor tongue, her skewed sense of humour. And Christ but I’ve needed it these past few months, the pure and simple release of laughter. But even these snatched moments are shadowed by a nagging betrayal, a twinge of guilt, and sometimes I still find myself beached – cowering and squirming under the unbearable weight of what I’ve done, what I did. None of it was my fault – I know that now. And yet it did happen. It did. I doubt the enormity of that will ever leave me.

  *

  I round the corner into my road and the scene stills me for a moment. The weather has brought life to the streets, everyone smiling and laughing, beatific with the sunshine. It feels like a proper little neighbourhood again, and I want to freeze-frame the image and store it or put it on my wall. I’ve felt many things about this place, but I’ve seldom felt the sense of pride and stability that’s sweeping through me now. This feels . . . for ever, somehow. I smile, pumping purpose into my stride as I cross the road and head up my path. This is me, now; this is where home is.

  *

  The sun streams into my front room and I’m suddenly aware of the space, the lack of chaos and clutter, the absence of Joe’s smell. I turn on the radio and fill the void with music, some summery, jangly indie refrain that my kids were all singing last year. I crank it up a notch and then another. The panic leaks away, and in its wake I feel a swell of liberation as I sway and spin across the expanse of wooden floor, using every available inch, flailing my arms, letting the feel-good riff of the guitar bounce me round and round till I’m breathless. The song ends and I catch sight of my face in the mirror, flushed, excited, nervous. I giggle. It’s almost time.

  I shower, wash my hair and enjoy the abrasive wheat germ in the soap as I polish myself all over. I feel a bit silly, and I vacillate about shaving my legs, but I succumb and grope for the razor. Now – what to wear. What to wear? I lay out two knee-length dresses on the bed, one lilac and floaty and floral, the other an off-white, simple A-line. Today I feel like being pretty. I want to look strong and womanly and girly all at the same time.

  I keep a careful eye on the bedside clock as I put on moisturiser and mascara and pop back to brush my teeth. I dunk my finger in the pot of Vaseline and slide it back and forth across my lips, picking out their shape, pleased with what I see. Not bad, Rachel, not bad at all. You scrub up quite well. I blush back at myself as I run a brush through my hair and gargle with mouthwash. I want to look my very best for this.

  *

  Once outside on the wide open street I can no longer contain my excitement. The knowledge that half a mile down the road he’s there, waiting for me, is almost too much to bear and my feet give way to an involuntary skip. Every so often I have to slow myself down, grip my handbag tight to steady myself against the lurch of my heart. I see myself in the eyes of strangers and I know I must look like a lovestruck teenager. I am, and I don’t even care. I don’t care who knows. I deserve this. I’ve waited so long for this moment. And, God, I have never felt need like this – for flesh, his flesh, and his smell and the feel of his skin upon mine. I swing left and into the shadow of the towering cathedral, rippling in the heat haze, and a flicker of doubt nags at me, sucks at my pace. How will he be when he sees me? Nervous? Shy? Tearful? What if he just shuns me?

  I’m turning into his street now and everything is fast and blurred and pumping in my chest. I feel faint and unsteady as I climb the three steps, droplets of sweat breaking out from
my skin. I pause, breathe in, breathe out. Steady, Rachel. Don’t let it show.

  His door. I feel my breath against my clammy hand as I knock, twice.

  My heartbeat is audible above the footsteps coming towards me.

  The door opens up.

  ‘Hello, Rachel.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Come on in. He’s down here, waiting for you . . .’

  She half beckons for me to follow her, but I know where he is. I push past her, smiling a brief apology. I barge right into the room, I don’t care if my cool has gone – and there he is. There’s nothing I can do to stop the sharp howl of pleasure that spurts from my mouth.

  I’m on him in a flash, holding him, kissing him, wanting to strip him there and then so I can feel him properly, slurp him up. We spin across the room and it’s there in his eyes. Oh yes, he’s missed me too.

  The lady is standing in front of us, smiling. We stop spinning.

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t had time to fill in his form yet, Rachel. But Joe has had a lovely morning. He cried for a few minutes after you left, but he settled down just fine and he’s done very well indeed, for his first day. He drank all his milk, ate all his puréed vegetables. He’s even got a little friend.’ She gestures to a little blonde girl attempting to roll on a fat, padded mat, then dips her head back down towards us.

  ‘We’ll see you tomorrow then, Joe.’

  He seems to know her. He grins his little dimpled smile and his eyes sparkle. From the end of the corridor the buzzer sounds again and I use this as my exit music. I can’t wait to get my little man out of here, so I can smell him and kiss him again and again and again.

  Acknowledgements

  I am deeply indebted to my editor, Anya Serota, for pushing me to places I might not have ventured otherwise. I am also grateful to Ailah Ahmed, Jonny Geller, Melissa Pimentel and Angela Robertson for feedback, and to Debbie Hatfield for the benefit of her eagle-eyes. I would also like to thank Aimee Simprie and Gaynor Forster for propping me up during the first few weeks of motherhood, and Rachel Tolhurst, Patricia Ashun, Carole Campbell, Zoe Massey, Carole de Asha, Audrey Hughes, Stephanie Ebanks, Sarah Jane, Anne Harding and Lauren Storrar for friendship and a tale or two from the front line. Various sources were called upon to research the trauma of vaginal labour but I would like to acknowledge two texts in particular, Kate Mosse’s Becoming a Mother and Silvia Feldman’s Choices in Childbirth. And especial thanks to the exceptional woman that is my mother, and to Kevin, who stayed up all through the night and was ‘always pleased to see him.’