by Fiona Harper
The midwife at the end of the bed gives me a weird look. This must be a new one on her.
I don’t even want to moan about exactly when I ‘jumped’, about why couldn’t it have happened afterwards, when I was nodding off, exhausted, the baby nestled in my arms, instead of right at the most intense moment.
I talked to Jude about having babies a couple of months ago and he smiled that smile at me, his ‘whatever you want, Meg’ smile, and then he explained quite carefully how he thought it would be better to wait. We’re both so busy, you see. He’s been ‘flipping’ houses as fast as he can, each one bigger and more luxurious than the last, and I landed a layout job with a magazine. I’ve still been helping with the staging of Jude’s houses, getting steadily more confident and ambitious, but the extra work fills up my evenings and weekends.
It wouldn’t be fair to the child, Jude hinted, as if it was just a dog I wanted for Christmas. Maybe we should wait until we were better established? And then he’d kissed me on the nose. Whatever I wanted, of course, though …
I’d nodded, put those yearnings away. Because he was right. Of course he was. Maybe I was just being selfish. We’re both so young. Not even twenty-five. We have years of possible childbearing ahead of us.
But now it’s actually happening! It almost makes up for being catapulted back into this life with Dan against my will. I give one last massive push and the midwife tells me to pant. I know it’s only moments away. I want to laugh. I want to cry. If I could I’d get up and dance a jig around the room. That would certainly be another first for the midwife! But they don’t understand …
Sophie is going to be here in a minute! And I’ve missed her so much.
I’ve bemoaned the things I’ve had to repeat in this redo of a life – shaving my legs, commuting, toilet-cleaning and washing up – but this is one experience I will relish every moment of the second time around.
The next few minutes are spent entirely in the present. Dan, Jude and my strange two-pronged life melt away and I pant, push, listen to the midwife, following her clear instructions to the letter, and I’m rewarded with the sound of a reedy, warbling wail.
After a few moments she hands me a tightly wrapped bundle – this is too soon for the fashion of skin-to-skin contact for mum and baby straight after birth. ‘Here you are, Mrs Lewis. You have a beautiful baby boy!’
I almost drop the bundle. ‘Are you sure?’ I ask.
I look at Dan for confirmation and he nods. ‘I know the scan said it was going to be a girl, but they did say it was only seventy-five per cent accurate and, taking a look at him, it’s kind of obvious he’s a boy, if you know what I mean!’ he says, grinning even wider now. He’d adored Sophie, but I knew he’d always wanted a son too.
Sophie is a boy?
That seems impossible. I try to transplant my memories of her almost-translucent white-blonde hair, the little curls that used to collect at the sweet curve where the back of her head met her neck, her love for all things pink and frilly until her ninth birthday, onto a boy and find the picture doesn’t fit.
Will it change her, I wonder? The fact she has one different chromosome? The different levels of hormones in her blood? Or will she still be my Sophie, just a little more rough and tumble?
I look down at the baby in my arms and that’s when the biggest surprise comes. There’s no blonde peach fuzz, just a shock of dark, straight hair. Sophie’s pointed little chin that used to stick down below her chubby cheeks is missing too and her nose is the wrong shape.
I try to lift the baby to hand him back, but find I’m too exhausted to do it, so I stare at the changeling in my arms, waiting to see if this is just some post-birth hallucination and if I’m patient everything will shift back into what it should be.
Dan and the midwife were smiling at me to start off with but over the next few minutes their expressions change. I know I must be behaving oddly to them, but I can’t help myself. ‘Can you take him?’ I ask Dan, without fully making eye contact. When he lifts the baby out of my arms, clumsily trying to get the head right into the crook of his elbow, all I feel is relief.
And then we get on with the business of the third stage of labour, and stitches. Joy, oh, joy. When it’s all over, I close my eyes, blocking out as much of this reality as I can, and the midwife talks to Dan in a low voice: ‘The hormones can do strange things to new mums after delivery. Give her a moment. It was a long labour, even for a first one.’ And then I hear her walking away, off to check something, probably, and the door opens and closes. I keep my eyes closed, even though I know Dan is tearing his eyes from his son periodically to look at me.
‘What are we going to call him?’ he eventually says. ‘We can’t call him “Sophie” – ’
An icy coldness slices through me at his words.
‘ – and we never could agree on a boy’s name …’
I turn my head away, not even bothering to feign exhaustion. ‘I don’t care,’ I say. ‘You choose.’
And I really don’t.
Sophie is gone. I’ve lost her.
And now I don’t feel anything. I don’t want to.
I roll over, turning my back on my husband and brand-new son, and will sleep to claim me so I can be free of it all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Dan peers over the clear, plastic, hospital crib and frowns. ‘I think he’s hungry.’ He looks at me, waiting for a response. ‘I’ve changed him and burped him, so that’s the only thing left to try.’
‘Check his nappy again,’ I say. I’m looking at the wall, painted apple-green, like the rest of the maternity ward, apart from the delivery suite, which is gardenia. I’ve been staring at a lot of walls lately, so I’ve started to notice these things. ‘Babies love a clean nappy to poo into.’
I can feel Dan’s eyes on me as he coos to the baby, who is doing that grunting and snuffling that usually precedes a full-on wail. I hear the snap of poppers and the rip of plastic tabs. A few moments later the sounds repeat themselves, but in reverse. ‘Nope. Clean and dry.’
I nod. The high-pitched, scratchy moaning starts and I have to stop myself from closing my eyes to shut it out. Dan walks across the room and presents the pink and crumpled bundle to me. I look at it, but I don’t reach out and take it. ‘I think we should re-consider formula,’ I say, and go back to studying the wall.
I don’t have to look at Dan to know the expression on his face. It’s a mixture of confusion, frustration and sympathy, with an ever-diminishing smidgen of hope mixed in.
‘The midwife says breastfeeding will help with the bonding process,’ he says, ‘and we always said we’d breastfeed.’
I let out a snort of a laugh. ‘We did, did we? Well, you get your knockers out and get on with it then, because mine are red raw and in need of a good rest.’
‘You know what I mean.’ There’s more irritation in his tone now. For some reason I’m pleased. ‘You were adamant about breastfeeding beforehand, almost evangelical.’
That was before I knew my nipples were going to drop off, I think caustically. I hold out my arms. ‘OK, then. Give it here …’
‘His name is Billy,’ he reminds me quietly.
I know that. William, after my grandad, because Dan thought I might like it.
I open the front of my nightdress and my son latches on straight away. Pain shoots from my nipple and right under my armpit, causing me to grip the armrests of the hospital chair. Sophie never was this enthusiastic, this … greedy. Quite the opposite. We had to call up the NCT breastfeeding counsellor to come and give me some tips, because she couldn’t quite get the hang of it, and, when she did, feeding her was lovely – soft, relaxed, gentle – not like this, so forceful and hungry that I’m sometimes scared he’s sucking more than milk out of me, that the bit of me that makes me feel alive is slowly being pulled out and separated from me too.
‘Still sore?’ Dan asks and I realise he’s hovering again. He’s not sounding irritated any more, just sickeningly sympat
hetic. ‘I can get you more of that cream, if you like …?’
Oh, God, I think. Stop being such a wimp and man up, will you? I close my eyes and wish Jude was here. Why are the things I want split between two realities? The love of my life in one and the child I long for in the other. Only, this isn’t quite the child I expected. Someone delivered the wrong package. Dan probably, seeing it was his sperm that made the final race to the finish line. Bloody typical. He had one job to do in this ‘getting pregnant and giving birth’ malarky and he couldn’t even get that right!
Jude wouldn’t be over there, messing around with the nappy bag, trying to find the Kamillosan. He’d have made me look him in the eye, and he’d have told me, not nastily but firmly, that I needed to snap out of it. The baby comes first now. He’ll do everything he can to support me, but I have to at least try.
And then I would have done. I’d have tried for him. Because he wouldn’t have been faffing around with tubes of cream and worrying if he’d bought the wrong size paper knickers from Mothercare. He’d have taken charge.
I realise the intense sucking has lessened to an intermittent tug. I look down to see his eyes have closed. One tiny hand rests on the top of my breast, fingers splayed, and I feel a rush of something from deep inside. ‘He’s finished,’ I say and hand him back to Dan, before the feeling grows.
I hear a noise in the corridor outside. It’s visiting time. I sigh and prepare myself for another round from my parents, or Dan’s parents, whichever set has won the fight to be the ‘two per bed’ for this session. They will try to lift me out of my ‘baby blues’ by the force of their will, the sheer brightness of their smiles. It’s completely exhausting.
And completely pointless. Because this isn’t just the baby blues, is it?
Dan goes to the door of my room – they gave me one on my own. All the rooms here are either doubles or singles – and I hear him talking to someone in a low voice. I stop looking at the wall and turn my head so I can hear better.
Becca. It’s Becca. Even though I can’t make out her hushed words, I recognise the tone, the earthy softness of her voice.
‘Maybe you can do something, say something?’ Dan says. I note that he’s careful not to sound quite that desperate when he’s in the room with me.
A moment later, Becca and Dan enter. They’re both wearing the masks everyone puts on outside the door to my hospital room. Not the surgical kind, but the happy kind. False and plastic and scarily smiling, reminding me of ventriloquists’ dummies. It’s as if the whole world has turned into performers and I am the lone member of the audience. Unfortunately, the show’s been running for days now and the bill never changes: cheer Maggie up.
I mentally beg Becca to be her usual blunt and inappropriate self. I want her to tell me my hair looks a mess and I’ve got bags under my eyes, that finally I’ve got the boobs I’ve always yearned for, but she’s too busy navigating the eggshells everyone has been crushing into the linoleum floor.
She sits down on the edge of the bed, looks at me installed in the high-backed armchair beside it and leans forward a little, taking her weight on her palms. ‘How are you?’
‘OK,’ I say. We both know I’m lying. An awkward silence follows. Where has our easy chatter gone? I search for something normal to say but realise I don’t know what that is anymore.
Eventually, Becca walks over to where Dan has placed Billy in the plastic cot and leans over. ‘Just as good-looking as yesterday,’ she says, smiling up at me. ‘He definitely got your genes instead of Dan’s!’
Dan is hovering again, outside, it seems, because he says, ‘Oi!’, and pops his head round the doorway. ‘I heard that!’ He’s smiling at Becca and she’s smiling back at him. For a split-second I feel jealous, that they’re sharing something I’m excluded from, that they still remember how to pull the right facial muscles to form that signal of joy.
‘You’re so lucky,’ Becca says as she sits back down. There is meaning behind her stare.
‘I know,’ I say. Logically, I do know that. There are women who would kill to have a lovely healthy baby like mine. I can see the truth of it when I run it through my brain, but when I try to send the message to my heart, it just doesn’t want to plug in. Wrong lead. Wrong connector or something. Computer says no. And I don’t know how to reboot it. I’m not even sure I want to. I don’t want to wipe the memory of Sophie away.
Becca comes back to the bed and sits down. ‘It’s OK to feel like this,’ she tells me softly. ‘Lots of women do.’
It’s only the fact that I know, ten years from now, that Becca’s sister will have a severe form of post-natal depression, that Becca will have to take the baby in for a month, that she knows what she’s talking about – or she will one day – that stops me from yelling at her.
‘The hospital might have someone you can talk to …’
I suspect Dan told her that during their hushed conversation in the corridor, about how I refused to see the woman. I shrug.
‘It might help?’
I turn to the wall again. I’m beginning to think about painting my bedroom apple-green. It’s not that bad as colours go.
‘Maggie?’
‘Maybe,’ I say. And maybe I will, just to stop everyone bothering me. It won’t help, though. I haven’t got the ‘baby blues’, not in the sense anyone else means. It’s not hormones. I’m grieving. Grieving for a daughter I’ll never have, and if I try to tell a counsellor that, she’ll probably have me sectioned. Fat lot of good that would do.
I turn to look at Becca. I’m fed up thinking about myself. She’s got that look, that glow, I remember from the cafe in Bluewater, even though the shopping centre is probably still a dank old chalk pit at this point in time.
‘You’re seeing someone,’ I say.
She replies with a grin and the blanket of concern is shooed away like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. She leans forward and begins to talk, her normal self again. I breathe a sigh of relief. ‘How did you know?’ she almost squeaks. ‘You’re always so intuitive.’
Not really, I think. Because if I was that clever I’d have known this whole weird experience was going to happen. I wouldn’t have had a life that would have bored a corpse in the first place. But I don’t want to go into that. I’m happy to be distracted by Becca’s news. Delighted, in fact.
I smile back at her and see a rush of hope and delight in her features at my response. She glances over her shoulder, as if she wants to call Dan in so he can see it, but then the urge to spill her secret takes over and she turns back to me. ‘Oh, God, Maggie … he’s amazing. Not like any of those other losers I’ve been seeing. He’s kind and thoughtful and romantic, and he’s already said he thinks he might be falling in love with me.’
I take a breath, let it wash through my lungs. It’s the first one I’ve taken recently that hasn’t had to fight against the tightness of my ribs, the muscles pulled taut, as if I’m literally trying to hold myself together. ‘I’m so pleased,’ I say. ‘Tell me more.’
And I sit there in a half-daze as Becca chatters on. He’s training to be a barrister, she says, but they’re the perfect pairing. He loves that she’s creative and expressive, even though he’s more cerebral, and he doesn’t mind at all that she works front of house in a theatre. He just loves her for who she is. I smile again. Maybe this is it, the guy she’s been waiting for. Thank goodness. A part of me feared she was going to say Grant’s name, but it can’t be him – he’s a banker. Although, after the divorce, Becca would often swap that first letter for another one.
So I listen, letting Becca’s story of their first date, which started off badly. The restaurant in Covent Garden they’d been planning to go to was closed when they got there, with an exterminator van parked outside, but they broke the ice by having a good laugh about it and it ended up with them walking through the city hand in hand, talking into the wee hours.
‘It sounds wonderful,’ I say.
Dan sidles into the room again.
He picks up the baby, who’s now in the kind of deep sleep that only a stomach full of milk can bring. At least I’ll have a few hours’ reprieve now. I’m supposed to be going home tomorrow and I can’t wait. At least Dan will be there at night. I don’t like being on my own with it.
‘Five minutes before kicking-out time,’ he says, smiling at Becca. Not-so-secret communication flashes between them again, and this time it does make me feel sad. I’m tired of being in this thick, grey bubble that dulls everything and keeps me separate from everyone else. I think I need to pop the skin and climb out, but I know I’m scared of that too. What if all the feelings I’m holding back rush in and drown me?
Becca stands up. ‘I’d better go.’
I push my way out of the chair, the first time I’ve done so in hours, I realise, as my hip joints complain, and give her a hug. She squeezes back gently. ‘I’m glad you’re happy,’ I say. ‘When we’re back home and settled, you’ll have to bring him over so we can make sure he’s good enough for you.’
She pulls back and slips her handbag straps over her shoulder. ‘It’s a date!’ she says brightly. ‘And I’m sure you’ll love Grant. Everybody does.’
The warmth that’s slowly been building inside me since Becca walked in the room drops through a trap door deep inside me, leaving nothing but cold air behind. ‘Who?’ I ask as my heart begins to beat painfully inside my chest.
‘Grant,’ she says, frowning slightly. ‘My new boyfriend. Didn’t I mention his name before?’
I shake my head. ‘Grant what?’ I ask, hoping against hope this is just a horrible coincidence. My tone is shrill, angry.
Becca frowns. I know she’s confused by my reaction, but she doesn’t understand. I have to know. When she tells me his name that trap door inside opens again, but this time I fall through it. I collapse into the chair and start to cry.