The Year that Changed Everything

by Cathy Kelly

  Ted was concerned, she knew that.

  He kissed her every morning but she couldn’t respond.

  ‘Are you sure you’re feeling all right, Sam, love?’ he’d said so often, his face creased with worry. ‘You look so tired and worn out. Should you go to the doctor? Will I take more time off?’

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ she’d say.

  Once, this man had been her world and now, she couldn’t talk to him. The effort of explaining was simply too much.

  Besides, he wouldn’t understand. Who would?

  He’d think she was going mad.

  She couldn’t even tell Joanne. Joanne had never felt like this. Sam was sure of that – she’d have told her if she had.

  Sam had been in Joanne’s house when Joanne’s last baby, Posy, had been tiny and she’d watched, fascinated, as Joanne had wandered around the kitchen, Posy held against her expertly and she’d done things: she’d taken phone calls, kissed Patrick, had entire conversations, all the while knowing that she was safely taking care of the baby.

  ‘Make us a cup of tea, Patrick,’ she’d call happily.

  ‘Sugar?’

  ‘Oh gosh, yes,’ Joanne would say. ‘I need the energy. And a bun, if you haven’t snaffled them all.’

  Patrick would laugh and say there was one left.

  ‘For me!’ Joanne would say triumphantly.

  When the tea was made, Patrick would take the baby easily, and Joanne would sigh, grab her tea, rub her aching back at the same time, and sink into a chair, while Patrick, still holding Posy, would give her a plate with a bun on it.

  It was like a seamless ballet of comfortableness, of people who knew what they were doing.

  When Sam walked into her own kitchen, she was so full of fear something would happen: that she’d trip over one of the dogs, that they’d jump up and hurt India even though they were both knee-high to a midget and couldn’t hurt anyone. But she was frightened she’d fall and bang India’s tiny delicate little head on a chair, on the kitchen table, on the floor. Babies were so fragile.

  Looking at the tiny delicate skin covering her daughter’s beautiful little skull, Sam could see a filament of veins and she could feel the fontanel. Under other circumstances she might have loved that word. It was otherworldly, but now it merely meant a tiny fragment of her precious child’s skull where the bones were not fused and where injury could occur.

  She was sitting on the floor in the nursery with India one day, holding her and trying not to cry, when the doorbell rang.

  Let it ring, Sam thought. She could not move while India slept. But then she heard a key turn in the lock and knew it must be either her father or Joanne, both of whom had keys.

  Joanne appeared at the nursery door quickly.

  She slipped onto the floor beside her sister.

  ‘You OK?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ began Sam automatically.

  ‘Ted phoned me. He said you won’t talk to him and he’s worried sick. What’s up, lovie?’

  Finally, the automatic pilot that had kept her pretending for so long went off the grid.

  ‘Nooo,’ Sam said in a noise that was half-moan, half-sob. ‘I’m not OK. I don’t know what’s wrong.’

  It disturbed India, who wriggled.

  Expertly, Joanne took the baby and laid her in her crib.

  ‘She never goes back to sleep when I do that,’ said Sam.

  ‘I am a baby whisperer or a baby witch,’ said Joanne. ‘One or the other.’ She switched on India’s crib mobile, little coloured butterflies that whirled slowly to gentle music. ‘Come on.’

  The sisters sat halfway down the stairs, the way they used to as children.

  ‘Spill,’ said Joanne, ‘and don’t give me any rubbish about how you’re just tired. It’s more than that.’

  Sam spilled and as she did, she began to cry, relating the dreams and the fears and the terrible darkness that was waiting for her. Tears and snot mixed and eventually Joanne, who refused to move from her position holding her sister, handed over a scrunched-up tissue to dry the tears.

  ‘You poor darling. It’s going to be fine, I promise you. You’re not going crazy, Sam, really. I’d say it’s textbook post-natal depression,’ said Joanne. ‘Lots of women get it after pregnancy. You should have said something, lovie, but at least now that you have, it’s going to be easier. We’ll get you sorted. It’s a chemical imbalance and antidepressant tablets will sort you out.’

  ‘You never went through any of this with your babies,’ said Sam miserably. ‘I’ve failed India and Ted.’

  She began to cry again at the thought of how she’d shut him out.

  ‘For a start, all women are different,’ pointed out Joanne. ‘Plus, having a baby after a lot of infertility treatment can be difficult.’ She looked carefully at her sister. ‘I’ve read up on this and it’s quite normal for people who have had a lot of treatments to get post-natal depression once they actually have a baby.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Sam, thinking of the social worker in the hospital and how she’d asked if Sam had ever had either depression or any previous pregnancy problems.

  Joanne looked at her with wet eyes.

  ‘Oh lovie, I should have said something, I should have said it to Ted. I just never thought . . . Yes, it’s incredibly common. And you had to go through it all alone. I thought we were soul sisters forever and you were going to tell me everything, always.’

  Sam managed a sort of a laugh finally.

  ‘It came on me and I got lost in it. I—’ She searched for the right words. ‘It came out of nowhere and was so frightening. Like I would never be happy again and the fear and pain of that – thinking that when I had India to take care of, when I’d longed for her for so many years.’

  The sisters sat quietly.

  Sam realised she was holding the little cuddly donkey Vera had bought for India. It was as soft as velvet and, as yet, India had no real interest in it, but it seemed so precious now.

  She closed her eyes at the thought of her pregnancy and how she’d felt those moments of huge joy, and then those dark nights when she was too hot, her back hurt and her mind raced with all the fears she could never speak out loud. Not to Ted, not to Joanne, not to anyone.

  At the time, she’d feared that she would never actually give birth, that something would go wrong, because she was not meant to be a mother.

  Her genes were her mother’s genes. Those genes were not meant to be passed on. Plus, she didn’t know how to mother. She’d sit up those nights and remind herself tearfully that, yes, she could nurture and care. She had Ted, and her sister, her father, her darling nieces . . . so many people she loved and who loved her.

  But the needling little voice went on.

  ‘I thought I couldn’t do it—’ she began.

  ‘Yes, you can,’ said Joanne fiercely. ‘You were scared. Scared of this older mother thing that you’ve glued onto yourself like a piece of gum stuck to your shoe.’

  ‘Well I am an older mother,’ said Sam, ‘although that wasn’t the thing that knocked me down into this hole.’

  ‘It was part of it, and so was Mum.’

  Sam’s head had shot up. ‘What do you mean Mum?’

  ‘You’re worried that you’d be the same sort of mother as her.’

  Sam almost laughed. That fear was mixed in there for sure and yet it was only a part of the pain she felt right now.

  ‘I was worried,’ she admitted, ‘but how did you know?’

  ‘It wasn’t hard. You are the career chick and that sort of defined you. When you weren’t going to have a baby, it defined you even more so. I don’t think we needed a psychiatrist to figure that out,’ Joanne said. ‘You were scared you’d be her sort of mum.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sam, exhaling on the word, ‘it sounds stupid now, doesn’t it?’
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  ‘Not stupid at all, but you’re not our mum. You can be anything you want to be, you can be a different sort of mother. Am I like her? No. You can break the cycle. And – you’re going to hate me saying this – but it’s the way she’s made. Not everyone should have kids, end of story.’

  Sam nodded. ‘Yeah,’ she said fervently. ‘I just want to feel better and to be a mother who isn’t crying all the time.’

  ‘Right, let’s do something about this, then,’ said Joanne. ‘First, you need to go to the doctor about having post-natal depression. Let’s phone now, and make an appointment. I’m coming too. It’s medication time – pretty much the only answer here even if you feel you’re almost allergic to meds after all the fertility drugs. Then, when the tablets begin to work, don’t spend too much time looking at the books and trying to figure out what you should be doing exactly now,’ she said, ‘because that can be fatal. One book might say you should be feeding your baby this way or treating your baby that way, and when you are vulnerable that doesn’t help. Just see if you can do it your way for a while.’

  ‘My way?’ said Sam doubtfully.

  ‘Yes.’ Joanne hugged her sister. ‘Your wonderful way.’

  Ginger

  Ginger held tightly onto her takeaway coffee cup and went for nonchalant. It seemed to be the best attitude to strike as she and most of the paper’s magazine team stood outside the glass conference room in the Sunday News office and watched the features editor, Carla Mattheson, flick back her chestnut hair, lick her already heavily glossed lips and swivel in her chair. She wore a short flirty skirt the wrong side of decent and with every move of those long, bare legs, it was sliding further and further up. This carry-on did not seem to bother either the editor or Zac, who both sat on the couch near Carla and appeared transfixed.

  Up until her recent, thrilling and entirely out-of-the-blue appointment to the Sunday News a mere week ago, Ginger had never had much to do with Carla, but she was beginning to see why Paula hated her.

  Paula called her a ho, and Ginger loathed name-calling and especially women slut-shaming other women. But after a week in the Sunday News on the magazine team, it was obvious that Carla used her sex appeal as just another bargaining tool in her climb to the top – plus, and this was the worst bit, she appeared to view fellow women reporters as competition to be trampled on.

  If the teenage readers of Girlfriend wrote in and said: my boss treats all women like crap and sucks up to the men, Girlfriend would have some sage advice about how sisters needed to help each other, but that message would not cut it in this job.

  Ginger now had to work with Carla and Carla had, in one short week, made it plain that nobody on her staff was her friend. They were all her competitors.

  She never flirted with the guys on the features team because she didn’t see them as a threat to her plan for world domination.

  But for the women reporters, she made life hell. A subtle hell that would be damned difficult to explain out loud, but still hell.

  ‘I don’t understand her,’ Ginger said to Paula after a couple of days, when they’d both managed to sneak off for a ten-minute sandwich. ‘It’s not as if any of us are any threat to her.’

  ‘And still here we are, talking about how horrible she is,’ said Paula, who’d been assigned to the paper’s news department in part of Zac Tyson’s reorganisation of the company. ‘It’s simple: you’re women, so you could be. It’s like that old Highlander series – there can be only one. If there’s only one woman at the top in the News, it’s going to be Mattheson, and the rest of you will have spiked heel marks all over your bodies from being trampled on.’

  ‘What about feminism?’ Ginger demanded.

  ‘To her, that was a course in women’s studies and politics in college,’ Paula said. ‘This is the real world, Ginger, where women like Carla don’t burn bras but buy really good plunge ones when they want to go in and ask for a raise. This is sexual politics at the very dirty coalface. Instead of changing the game, Carla plays the old game.’

  ‘Someone should complain,’ Ginger said and earned herself a pitying look from Paula.

  ‘Are you kidding? You see what happens when women in big London City jobs complain about bullying or sexism? Do they get a medal? No, they might get some payoff money but only after years of hell, two weeks of pain in court where they’re pilloried and they will never work in the industry again. Complain at your peril.’

  ‘How did I ever think being part of the Sunday News team would be a good career move?’ said Ginger miserably.

  ‘You’re a dreamer,’ Paula said. ‘I’m a dreamer. I keep giving Mr Zac Hotness the eye but he ignores me. Guess if Carla’s heating his bed, his brain cells are too frazzled to notice anything. She probably uses handcuffs.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘Do you think she’s the type to lock him up, leave him, then head off to the shops for an hour, just to show him who’s boss?’ Ginger asked.

  ‘Totally.’

  The conversation had made Ginger feel even more disillusioned with her own sex.

  Between Liza, Charlene and now, Carla Mattheson, it appeared as if sisterhood and feminism were just slogans for T-shirts and not for real life.

  Finally, fifteen minutes after she’d summoned the team to the conference room, Carla stopped the flirt show and stood up: tall, sinuous, looking superbly good in her cobalt blue skirt, and a pale blue jersey blouse that had, yup, Paula was right, the definite outline of something that was undoubtedly called ‘Ultra-Plunge – Defibrillator for stunned males costs extra’.

  Ginger knew she would never have that aura of potent sexuality around her, but if she did, she hoped she’d use it for good instead of evil.

  The editor came past the team and said hello to a few of them. Not to Ginger. She’d met him four times but he probably couldn’t recognise her in a police line-up.

  Good move, Ginger, she told herself sourly. The ‘all-black to hide your extra weight’ look is really working out for you.

  Then came Zac, who said hello, by name, to everyone.

  ‘Ginger, how are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘Great, Mr Tyson,’ she said, channelling cool professionalism.

  ‘It’s Zac,’ he said, smiling, and if her heart wasn’t so bruised, it would have skipped a beat. Paula was right: he was sizzling hot.

  But this was his patented charm offensive. Ginger had watched him use it on Carla moments before. And now Carla was watching her, with an arched eyebrow.

  Ginger gave him a nod and turned to the front of the room as the meeting started.

  It quickly turned into a bloodbath.

  Nothing anyone had written was any good and all the ideas they’d come up with were hopeless – according to Carla.

  A sick four-year-old with a temperature of 100 degrees had stopped one reporter from making a ten-minute interview slot with a singer who was in town promoting a forthcoming gig.

  ‘Nobody else could go?’ asked Carla in her silky-smooth voice, the voice of the class bully waiting to pounce.

  Paula was right: it would be impossible to nail her for any sort of bullying as it was all so subtly done.

  ‘It happened so quickly . . .’ said the reporter, a harried mother-of-two.

  ‘Your husband . . .?’

  ‘Works too.’

  ‘But he didn’t give up a vital interview to get to the school and get your kid?’

  Carla’s tone made it clear that having children was for morons and that women with progeny either needed house husbands or to stay home and not interfere with her work.

  Nobody in news had tracked down Callie Reynolds, who was hiding while her husband was on the run from the police for his part in the fraud of the century. Millions were gone, millions.

  ‘Let’s do a piece on women betrayed by men,’ Carla said, eyes glittering. �
�You.’ She pointed at Fiona, recently transferred over from news, ‘You do it. Do you think she was in on it?’ Carla went on, daring them to answer back. ‘She looked like a rich bitch.’

  ‘She didn’t when the photographers cornered her outside her friend’s house,’ said Ginger. She’d felt sorry for the woman – she’d looked haunted, betrayed. Ginger knew that look all too well.

  Carla’s eyes narrowed. Trouble ahead for me, Ginger thought.

  The health and fitness writer was sick for the third week running.

  ‘So much for the benefits of a vegan diet,’ said Carla bitchily.

  Worse, the health and fitness reporter’s job included editing and correcting the many spelling mistakes in the weekly column of a well-known fitness guru.

  It had gone into the paper unedited because the subeditors had been rushing and assumed it had been checked. Basic grammar, not to mention correct use of the possessive case, were not among the strong points of the fitness guru and the online teasing for the paper’s errors had been severe.

  Everyone looked down at the conference table. Co-ordinating this stuff was Carla’s job or the deputy feature editor’s job, but she didn’t want a deputy features editor, in case anyone pulled an Et tu, Brute on her.

  ‘You.’ Carla pointed at Ginger. Trouble had arrived. ‘You take over until our dear health and fitness reporter is back with the living. We’ve run out of articles. Cobble together some diet for next week – phone the publishers and find out what diet books they’re trying to flog right now. I’ll need it by tomorrow morning.’

  Ginger’s heart soared. An actual, proper feature! Never mind that this was hardly her expert area.

  ‘And fitness. Get me something new.’ Carla stared at her, beautifully made-up eyes almost evil. ‘A new series, that’s it! You try the regime out. Get photos. How to get fit – my journey, that type of thing. We’re fine for next week, but starting the week after, I’m thinking of a four-week special. Anyone else want to join in? Shots of the entire team in bikinis – the bikini diet and regime: our team try them all out.’