by Elisa Lodato
‘Yes – well remembered. Just that I’ve been keeping myself busy. I’ve agreed to write a big piece on the Olympics, and that’s been good for me, I think.’
‘Well done! That’s fantastic. Your mum would have been so proud.’ She looked down at the ground then, still too out of breath to cry.
‘I’ve been thinking about her a lot too. And about the past.’
She didn’t say anything. Just looked up at me and waited as we walked. So I continued.
‘About her and my dad. Trying to work out when things went wrong between them.’
‘Have you spoken to your father about any of this?’
‘No. Not yet. I mean, I can. And I will, but I want to try and get a few things clear in my head first. You know, things like …’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, why was she so keen to have Jenny around? She must have begun to suspect something was going on. I know my granny warned her.’ I looked over at Helen. She was still staring down at the grass and Sandy’s quick legs, listening intently and nodding her head. ‘I mean, you knew her best of all. What do you think? Did she know?’
‘About your dad and Jenny?’ She looked up and to the right. As though the answer might be over by the duck pond. ‘It’s difficult to say. I believe so.’
‘So why put up with it? And not just put up with it, sanction it. I remember her saying to him once, the night after Sue attacked her, “Never in the house”. I mean … that’s pretty odd, don’t you think?’
‘Odd isn’t the word.’
‘But why? Why did she let it happen?’
Helen stopped walking and allowed her right arm to be pulled up by Sandy’s impatience at the end of the lead. She looked like a one-armed scarecrow trying to decide how frightening she could be.
‘Because things had come to a head with them. I don’t know how much of this I should be telling you.’
‘What had come to a head?’
‘It was complicated. I’m not sure of everything myself. But I know that by the time Christopher was born, your mum had decided to stop sharing a bed with your father. Physically it was over between them.’
‘When you came to stay?’
‘You remember that? Yes, when I came to stay.’
‘But my dad stuck around for another five years!’
‘They agreed to keep things together. As normal as possible for you and Christopher. And your mum was happy for your dad to have a life outside the house. As long as it didn’t interfere with your lives inside it.’
‘But it obviously did interfere. I mean, eventually. He moved in with Jenny.’
‘I tried explaining the same thing to your mum once. Laura, you have to understand that Kath,’ she took a deep breath, ‘your mum was complicated and stubborn. God, she was stubborn.’ She smiled to herself and shook her head. ‘And she couldn’t be made to do anything.’
‘What did you want her to do?’
‘I wanted her to separate from your father.’ She looked up at me and then back to the grass. ‘I thought, in the long run, it would be better for all of you if they regained their independence. From one another.’
‘Why did you come to stay after Christopher was born?’
‘She needed me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she almost died giving birth. And Christopher very nearly went the same way. It was a terrible experience, and she blamed your father for it.’
My mother went into labour on a Saturday afternoon. I was sent to go and knock on Sue’s door and summon Jenny. When I returned, with Jenny holding my hand, my mother was sitting on the bottom step in the hallway. My father was on his knees in front of her, tying her shoelaces. She looked up and beckoned to me, silently. I walked over slowly, aware of being watched by three adults. She cupped my face and inhaled my features with a primal intensity. Our mouths met for a last kiss and I felt suddenly embarrassed by the depth of her emotion. She was crying at her own act of betrayal.
My mother had decided she was going to have another girl – she simply couldn’t conceive of a birthing experience different to my own. But Christopher’s passage into the bright light of the hospital was not to be straightforward. My mother was fully dilated upon arrival, but after fifty-five minutes of purple pushing she knew her baby was stuck.
A young and inexperienced midwife tried to encourage her. She mouthed platitudes, told her to keep pushing, that she was ‘doing brilliant’ and held her knee in maternal camaraderie, but my mother just shook her head. In desperation she put her own hand down between her legs, hoping to feel the slippery globe of her baby’s head, but there was nothing there. She turned to my father who was sitting beside her and spoke quietly, almost intimately: ‘Where is she?’
‘Your baby’s coming, Mrs Rowan. You just have to keep pushing,’ interrupted the midwife. My mother lay back against the bed, reprimanded by her insistence. She wanted to tell my father that she felt their baby’s lack of strength deep down in her pelvis, but every time she opened her mouth to explain, he held her hand and spoke over her in an attempt to reassure: ‘It’s going to be OK, Kath. You’re doing fine.’
She swallowed into her dry mouth, whispering to keep the contractions and the midwife at bay, and said, ‘I know something’s wrong. Please get me a doctor.’
My father, aware of the midwife watching them and embarrassed by this overt attempt to undermine her authority, tried to mollify her again. ‘Give it time, Kath. These things take time.’ He looked to the midwife, seeking approval.
My mother felt his disloyalty like a sharp wound in her womb. Its immediacy quickly spread across her back and into the lumber region of her spine.
‘Get me a doctor.’ And then, because she saw the pained inaction in his eyes, she shouted louder: ‘Now! Get me a doctor,’ her voice rising to a scream as another contraction rolled in. The midwife approached my mother, leaning over my father’s back as she tried to get closer to the bed.
‘Mrs Rowan, please. Your baby is coming,’ she said as my mother tried to move onto her side, away from the terrible pain of lying flat on the bed, but instead of helping her move, she leant over so that my father was forced from his chair. With her face hovering above my mother’s, she pushed her rising shoulder back and said: ‘You need to concentrate on pushing. Lie back and we’ll get this baby out.’
‘Get your fucking hands off me!’ The midwife jumped back, her fingers burning from my mother’s sweaty invective.
‘Jesus Christ, Kath!’ My father stood between the two women, powerless.
‘Help me over,’ my mother said to my father.
‘Kath, I think we should do as we’re told. You need to start pushing.’
But the new pain, like a barbed and twisted ball within her womb, was impervious to the contractions that came and went. It wanted nothing to do with pushing. She couldn’t have known that her placenta had begun separating from the wall of her uterus, or that she’d soon start haemorrhaging, but she knew something was very wrong. So she held herself as still as she could and, looking above my father’s head at the sky through the large window, said, in a suddenly calm and measured voice, ‘This baby is going to die if you don’t get me a doctor,’ and, lowering her eyes to his face, said, even more quietly, ‘and I will never forgive you if she does.’
The sudden transformation was enough to startle my father. My mother, in her terrible pain, had withdrawn enough to return with authority. He stood up and walked past the midwife and into the hallway, where he began shouting, his voice rising on the first note of panic, for a doctor.
The consultant who entered the room a few minutes later was a woman in her late forties, white and petite. Her name was Dr Lynn, and she fixed my mother with her small, fast eyes. ‘Mrs Rowan. I understand you’ve requested a doctor. I’m the consultant obstetrician. Would you like me to examine you?’
My mother swallowed to lubricate her throat and nodded with an emphatic yearning that might have embarrassed them in any other con
text. But as Dr Lynn lifted my mother’s thigh to peer between her legs, she saw the blood that had pooled beneath her. What had started as a trickle quickly revealed itself as the determined flood of placental abruption. Dr Lynn raised the alarm and worked quickly to stem the flow. The room was suddenly full of doctors, but Dr Lynn kept her eyes on my mother and spoke directly to her. ‘Your baby is in distress. We need to perform an emergency C-section. Please don’t worry. I’m going to take good care of you and your baby.’
The pathologist, in examining my mother’s corpse, rightly deduced that the scarring on her abdomen was caused by a caesarean section. He couldn’t have known that it was the result of an emergency procedure to safely deliver my baby brother and save her life. Or that Christopher’s birth was the beginning of the end of my parents’ marriage.
There was no shouting or panic as the birth loomed. Only my father’s ashen face and sweaty hands as he realised things were about to go wrong. That his wife might bleed to death and take his second child with her because he hadn’t wanted to contradict a midwife he’d never meet again, crushed him. He looked over at my mother who, in spite of the blood loss and considerable pain, had drawn her knees up and was breathing deeply. She was trying to give her baby space, the only thing remaining in her power, as the doctors desperately tried to staunch the bleeding.
My father did not know then, as he looked at his wife, that he would never reach her again. That she had failed to push their baby out but succeeded in pushing him away for good was a fact that would become apparent in the coming weeks. This was no time for painful recriminations or lacerating statements sharp with finality. She was too busy wrapping her maternal flesh around the distressed baby and preparing for the operation that would save their lives and scar her abdomen, ready for the pathologist’s report some twenty-six years later.
On 13 September 1986, Dr Lynn made an incision in my mother’s abdomen, parting the tissue and muscle so she could better reach her uterus. At 3.14 in the afternoon, she pulled my baby brother, Christopher Michael Rowan, from her punctured womb, grimacing and blue. His throat constricted by an umbilical cord reluctant to let go, he’d been just moments from death.
And that’s exactly what she told my mother when she visited her on the recovery ward several hours later. My mother, who’d been given a general anaesthetic, was groggy and sore from the operation. She was confused by Dr Lynn’s use of the word death in relation to the baby in the cot beside her. The baby that was not me. Or not even a girl like me. For days she felt as though her baby had died, had given up while inside her. Her nightmares were a variation on the theme of screaming – from the anguished shouts to my father, to the raw sobbing on being handed a lifeless baby.
Helen visited her on the Sunday afternoon following Christopher’s birth. My father had already been and gone. My mother was staring into the middle distance as a nurse tried to position Christopher, forcing contact between his hungry mouth and her sore nipple.
‘Kath?’
My mother’s eyes didn’t move. They simply filled with tears at Helen’s voice.
Helen grabbed at the curtain and pulled it around my mother and her screaming baby. As she approached the bending nurse, she paused and looked down at her. ‘And what exactly are we doing here?’
The nurse looked up at my mother and then, realising the question was for her, turned to Helen and said, ‘Breastfeeding. We’re trying to get mum to feed baby.’
‘Mum looks like she could do with a feed herself. And an arm around her. Can we try again later?’
‘This baby is very hungry.’
‘So go get a bottle. I’ll feed the little feller.’
‘It’s not a good idea. We need to keep mum’s breasts stimulated.’
‘Forget her breasts and do your job. Get me a bottle.’
My mother sucked in her breath and closed her eyes as she heard Helen sit down and take Christopher in her arms. His anguished cry changed the moment he was against her. It became a raspy staccato full of expectation, and when she finally gave him the bottle of formula brought to her by the nurse, he was quiet.
‘It’s a boy,’ my mother said, her eyes still closed.
‘So I gather. And he has a fine pair of lungs on him.’
My mother’s smile was too sharp and sudden to be anything other than a harbinger of pain. It forced the soft flesh of her cheeks upward until her eyes understood to cry.
‘What happened?’
‘I thought I was going to die.’
‘But you didn’t. And here he is. And you’re both—’
‘You don’t understand. Even with him inside me and people around me, I felt so alone.’
Helen, made immobile by my brother’s body and urgent sucks, tried to lean towards my mother. ‘You’ll get through this, Kathy. It’s bound to be difficult for a little while, but I’ll come and help.’
‘Will you stay?’ My mother turned and looked in her direction for the first time. And seeing her baby quiet and content in the arms of her best friend was like a balm to her aching wounds. Both the literal wound that throbbed in her abdomen and the sharper, more tormenting one in her head that kept closing and reopening.
‘Of course I’ll stay. I’ll do whatever you want,’ she said, smiling down at Christopher.
Helen. She was always there for my mother, holding her close when she felt as though she would surely fall.
My father came home on the afternoon of my mother’s operation just as Jenny was preparing my dinner. His face was pale and fragile, as though he might cry at any moment. I jumped down from my chair and ran to him. He put his arms out in an automatic gesture of embrace, but I stopped short by a few inches to ask an urgent question. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’
‘A boy,’ he smiled sadly.
‘A boy? That means I have a baby brother.’
‘You sure do.’ Then he stood up to face Jenny, who was standing behind me. ‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ she mumbled in return. They were quiet with each other. Comfortable.
‘How’s she been?’
‘Oh, fine. We’ve been out to the playground, watched a bit of TV and I’m just making an omelette now. Would you like one?’
‘No,’ he said, grimacing at the thought. ‘I could do with a lie-down, though. Are you sure you’re OK down here?’
‘Yes, definitely. Did it all go OK?’
He looked down at me and attempted to smile. Then looked back at her, mouthed I’ll tell you later and went to walk out of the kitchen, his back suddenly strong and out of my reach. I followed him into the hall and pulled on his jumper.
‘Is Mummy OK?’
He turned back, but his first look was to Jenny and then down to me. ‘She’s fine, sweetheart,’ and then the more alarming, ‘there’s nothing to worry about.’
I stood still and listened to the heavy thump of his step on the stairs. Jenny and I remained in the kitchen. Suddenly strangers. She slid my overcooked omelette from the frying pan onto a plate as I sidled up to the chair I’d just vacated. ‘Do you want some ketchup?’
‘Yes, please.’
She cut my food up and slid the plate towards me.
‘Will you be all right down here?’
I looked up at her, unsure what she was asking. ‘Can I have a drink please?’
‘Oh yeah. Sorry.’ She quickly pulled a cup from the cupboard above the sink and filled it with water. I took a sip and winced at how warm it was – she hadn’t let the tap run for long enough. But before I could say anything she had walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs. I ate a small, dry mouthful of omelette, got down from my chair and followed her, very quietly.
At the top of the stairs was standing room for one person – two, at a push – and a long and wide landing to the left. Our bathroom was the first door on the right, then my bedroom and, at the front of the house, a small box room – complete with cot, waiting empty for the baby – and my parents’ large bedroom. On the second floor was another large bed
room, usually reserved for guests, and a small bathroom. I walked slowly past my bedroom, drawn by their whispering voices and the need to get closer. The first words I heard clearly were my father’s. He was calling something a ‘fucking disaster’. Jenny’s voice was soft and soothing in return. ‘It’s all right, Rich. They’re OK now.’
‘But it nearly wasn’t. I should have spoken up sooner.’
‘What happened?’
‘She asked me to fetch a doctor. And I didn’t, and then … the blood. There was so much blood.’ His voice drowned in the phlegm at the back of his throat. As he coughed to clear it, Jenny put her hand between his shoulder blades.
‘It’s not your fault.’
‘Tell that to Kath,’ he whispered to the carpet.
‘You didn’t know it was going to happen.’
‘She can’t even bring herself to look at me,’ he said, turning to face Jenny. Their faces uncomfortably close.
‘She’s lucky to have you.’
He stood quickly, as though he’d suddenly understood something, and then saw me standing there. ‘Laura.’
Jenny turned at the sound and got to her feet. I could see she was irritated by the interruption and, walking over quickly, tried to turn me out of the room and into the hallway. I became obstreperous and unmanageable – so much so that my father was forced to compose himself and join us by the door. ‘Laura. What’s the matter?’
‘Why are you crying?’
‘Because I’m being silly,’ he said, trying to smile.
‘What’s wrong with Mummy?’
‘Nothing. I’m just crying because I’m so,’ he was casting about for a word, ‘happy.’
I felt suddenly hot and angry as Jenny tried to steer me from the room. I was enraged that she was trying to keep me from my father and my father was trying to keep me from the truth. I shouted at her to get off! and pushed her hard in the hip. It caught her off guard and she stumbled sideways into my mother’s bedside table, knocking the lampshade crooked. She was clearly shocked, as was my father, but the hot feeling made me charge on in the silence: ‘I want to see Mummy.’