Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.

by Viv Albertine

  I call the Biker and he races home and tells Lisa to leave. I don’t want to go downstairs. I’m scared to say anything out loud to her, it will make the situation real. I’m scared to get off the bed. I’m scared. After a scan, the doctor at the hospital tells me I have an ectopic pregnancy, the baby’s growing in my fallopian tube, trapped in my stringy, mangled, fucked-up tube, never made it to the womb. It could rupture any second. If that had happened and I wasn’t in hospital, I’d have bled to death.

  I’m knocked out and cut open and my baby and my fallopian tube are removed. I’ve lost this baby twice. The operation is more complicated and takes much longer than the surgeon anticipated so I’m heavily sedated; I come round to a man shouting angrily at me, ‘Viviane! Viviane!!’ I don’t want to come up from the bottom of the soft silt seabed I’m lying on, it’s nice and dark and quiet down here. The nurses shout angrily when you’ve been under a long time because it brings you back quicker than a soft soothing voice. You don’t respond to a seductive siren calling your name, you just float off towards the calm deep waters of oblivion. Anger rouses you, makes you passionate, fires you up. I’m wheeled back to my bed. I feel sorry for the Biker. He was young, handsome and carefree when we met and now he’s creased and haggard and in and out of hospitals all the time, living through these dramas because he’s lumbered with me. I think my body collapsed as soon as it knew it was loved.

  I wake up and look down at my stomach, it’s been cut open and stapled back together with huge steel staples. It looks disgusting, like a crumpled fleshy fish’s mouth puckering right across my body. I’m getting married in two weeks’ time but my face is yellow, my eyes are red, my stomach is stapled and my baby has gone. Not quite the fairytale ending I’d imagined.

  I cancel my hen night, and my oldest school friend, Paula, comes to visit me in hospital with a tub of soya ice cream instead. The Biker tries to have his stag party, playing baseball in Hyde Park, but his heart’s not in it; he leaves early, goes home and shares a spliff with his brother. I comfort myself by writing pages and pages of baby names. Arlo, Roseanna, Ariana, Frick, Freda, Ava, John … my friends are using up all the good baby names as year after year goes by and I don’t conceive … got to keep ahead of the game … ‘It’s all right, I’m OK,’ I say to Mum rather too brightly, pen and list in hand. But I can see she thinks I’ve lost the plot.

  I’m very thin now, so my wedding dress has to be altered. I buy long satin gloves from a fancy shop in Bond Street, to cover my knobbly elbows.

  And then it’s my wedding day.

  I stay in a beautiful boutique hotel the night before. My sister has flown over from America and sits on the end of my bed and chats to me all evening. In the morning, my friend Charlie Duffy, a fantastic makeup artist, performs a miracle on me. I will never forget what she does for me today. She mixes exactly the right shade of foundation (Hospital Yellow) and paints my features back onto the death mask that is my face. She is an artist, she makes me look human, pretty even. This is not an easy thing to do when your subject has lost every spark of life and colour that makes a person attractive. My hair is swept up and dressed with fresh blue ranunculus buds. My dress is ivory, floor-length, empire-line, with silk chiffon wisps trailing from the shoulders; Grecian with a touch of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady.

  My tall, handsome cousin Richard gives me away (I’ve gone all traditional now I’ve had a brush with death). We walk slowly into Chelsea Register Office – I’m physically frail, I have to cling onto his arm for support but I’m not nervous – to the calm, wistful strains of Eno’s ‘Another Green World’. After the reception, Hubby and I go back to the boutique hotel, no making love on our wedding night for us, I’m still stapled up. Can’t even stand up straight without difficulty. So we lie on the double bed, propped up by a pile of down-filled pillows stacked against the rattan headboard, surrounded by a fresco of cherubs and doves, and watch TV. It’s the happiest day of my life.

  Throwing the bouquet after my wedding, 1995

  9 HELL

  1995–1999

  Abandon all hope of fruition.

  Zen saying

  I turn down directing work that’s offered to me if it means being out of London for long periods of time because I want my marriage to work. Hubby works very long hours, so one of us has to compromise our career and I’m happy for it to be me. He earns more than me anyway.

  Now I’ve recovered from losing the baby, we’re all geared up and committed to trying again. We’ve been told that I won’t be able to conceive naturally because my remaining fallopian tube is also mangled, so we sign up for IVF at the Lister Hospital in Chelsea.

  I inject a solution into my stomach for a month to suppress my natural hormones, making me menopausal. Next I inject pregnant cow’s urine into my stomach for a month to stimulate my ovaries so they produce lots of eggs, then I’m ready for the eggs to be harvested. I make about twenty. I’ve swollen up, I look six months gone, it’s called ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, looks like elephantiasis (a teacher at my school had it). My legs, feet and waist are huge as barrels. It’s a complication, quite dangerous; I overreacted to the drugs, now I can barely walk and am constantly nauseous. My eggs are mixed with Hubby’s sperm in vitro, and the most viable three are placed back inside my womb. We wait four weeks then do a pregnancy test. I’m pregnant again.

  I waddle back and forth over Chelsea Bridge to the Lister, the doctors and nurses are thrilled that it worked first time for me, but at the next appointment I start bleeding, gushing blood – hello darkness my old friend – and baby’s gone again.

  I am wildly insanely bug-eyed crazy with grief. I don’t want to live. I think of ways to kill myself. Throw myself under this passing car? Jump off Chelsea Bridge and drown in the Thames? Or just lie face down in this puddle and stop breathing? Poor, poor Hubby, he is hitched to a raving lunatic. But he is my rock, solid, grounded, steady. I love him so much that life is just about still worth living. If it’s just going to be me and him, so be it.

  We keep on going to the Lister, I keep on trying to get pregnant, months turn into years, fail after fail after fail. I am not a person, I’m a shadow, creeping along walls, quivering along pavements, my body itching, my mind wild, my patience stretched tight, ready to snap at the slightest provocation. I can’t stand to look at pregnant women. I hate them. I can’t even bear pregnant friends – I stop seeing them. If anyone walks too close to me in the street or at a bus stop, I want to kill them. I will kill them, just let that fucker take one step closer, it’s nothing to me, I’m dead anyway. My body feels like one of those diagrams you see on posters in doctors’ surgeries: skin stripped away, palms turned out, vessels, organs, arteries on show, blood raw.

  Lying on the doctor’s table, week after week, my feet hoisted up in stirrups, I transport my mind outside of my body; I’m not here, it’s the woman who is longing for a baby who’s lying down there, legs wide apart with a man she’s never met before sticking his arm right up inside her. Do it for the baby. It’s not you, Viv, you’re up on the ceiling looking down. My, she’s pale. Sweating desperation. Saddest thing I ever saw. Been crying a couple of years I’d guess. Glad it’s not me. I’m lucky. Mum always said I was a lucky baby. The nurse told her that when I was born. It’s part of my history. At another hospital, where I’m sent for more tests, the doctor doesn’t use gloves, sticks two fingers inside me and circles them round and round inside my vagina whilst he looks into my eyes. I think it’s called abuse. When I get dressed and sit opposite him at his desk, I burst into tears. He looks petrified but I don’t report him, I haven’t got time. I’m on a mission. Next time I go to this hospital I say I don’t want him; the nurse says, ‘Don’t worry, he doesn’t work here any more.’

  I have to stop working, I’m mentally unfit to work. I become reclusive, hiding away at home, occasionally venturing out to get food. Every ounce of my energy goes into my husband. I love him, I want to keep him, I make his dinner, we sit on the sofa tog
ether holding hands and watching TV. We are very close. It’s us against the world.

  I am accepted at St Mary’s Hospital miscarriage clinic – run by the world-famous Professor Lesley Regan – and put on a blood-thinning regime, injecting aspirin into my stomach every day; then I go back to the Lister to start trying again. Still nothing. No baby. Just purple, black and yellow bruises all over my stomach. I couldn’t look less like a mother. I have a sharps bin under the sink. Every day, every day I inject. I go to see Trainspotting at the Screen on the Hill, but have to leave halfway through. I think it’s glorifying needles; needles aren’t rock ’n’ roll to me, nothing glamorous about them – to me they signify heartbreak and failure. Back home that night, the tiny pale grey mosaic tiles in our bathroom pulse like millions of mini TV sets as I sit on the bog, head in hands, staring at the floor and worry, worry, worry if I’m doing the right thing. Is this is a safe or ethical way to conceive? IVF is in its infancy, not many people have done it. A little girl’s voice cuts into my thoughts, loud and clear, I don’t care how I get here, Mummy. Just get on with it. The voice is reassuring and confident. Or am I just barking mad? I shouldn’t watch surreal films whilst I’m in this state.

  I hear of an IVF clinic in Belgium that has a better success rate than English clinics and because they have different fertility laws over there, they can put more than three embryos back into the womb. So Hubby and I start trekking over to Belgium. Altogether, I’ve had eleven attempts at IVF and thirteen operations under general anaesthetic, including two lost babies and the removal of my gall bladder as it was overstimulated by the IVF drugs. No wonder I’m bonkers. I lie on the bed and stare out at a Belgian industrial estate; hundreds of magpies gather on the grass outside. Dear god, just send me a sign if this is the wrong thing to be doing … Hundreds of magpies, thousands of pounds, heartbreaks, train trips, international phone calls, blood tests … and still I fail.

  Failure has become my middle name. Do I sound sorry for myself? Fucking right. Why don’t I give up? Because I want a baby more than anything in the world. I didn’t want a baby for thirty-six years but now I’ve met a man I love and I want a baby. Simple as that. I’m gripped and driven by a desire way out of my control. Mum is being destroyed along with me. She tries to tell me that having a baby isn’t the be-all and end-all: ‘Why do you want one so badly?’ ‘I JUST WANT TO HOLD MY BABY.’ No logic, no sense, a compulsive biological urge. I see a baby in a pram outside the gym. How lovely it would be just to pick her up and hold her. I look down at the sweet little bundle, I just want to hold … Oh god, I am that close to stealing a baby. That vile, unbelievable crime, I understand it now, I get it, that’s what the crazy bad lady always says, ‘I just wanted to hold her.’ You pick her up for a quick cuddle, and baby feels so warm and soft, and that lovely newborn smell makes you close your eyes in ecstasy, and you can’t put her back down again. Ever.

  As a project, to take my mind off everything, Hubby and I start looking for a house to buy. We want something modern, can’t stand those cornices and uneven floors and dust coming out of the walls made of lime and horsehair. We find a great house in a mews full of one-off architect-built houses in Camden Town. Lots of people are after it but we get it. It’s the first thing that’s gone right for years; I hope it means my luck has turned. I wasn’t expecting it. I will never just presume I’ll succeed again. I am not that person any more. I am a person that bad things happen to. We move in, it’s huge. ‘Please don’t leave me alone in this big house,’ I say to my husband. I love the house though, it’s the first time in my life I have walked up to a front door and been proud to put my key into it. This means a lot to me; it sounds shallow but my home is important to me, I’m ashamed to say it defines me in a way. I’ve lived in horrible homes all my life, now at last I am in a great one.

  My career has gone down the toilet with my failed pregnancy tests. The BBC have offered me a short contract. I don’t want to do it but I’ve accepted it. I need to start contributing to our finances again; I’ve sold all my guitars, amps, Sex clothes and Sid’s bits and pieces at auction to pay for a couple of the IVF attempts (if one of those attempts had worked, I was going to call the baby Sid if a boy, Sidonie if a girl). We’ve decided to have one more try and then stop. When I’ve healed emotionally I’ll think about adoption.

  Hubby and I plod off to the hospital in Chelsea for one more go and I start working at the BBC in White City again. On my last day of the BBC job, I meet a very kind woman who is a reiki healer. She does a ‘hands on’ healing session on me, as I’m stretched out on a desk in an empty office. She won’t take any money for it, she’s a true healer. I go home feeling good for the first time in years. I keep telling myself, Whatever happens, I can take it.

  It’s Saturday, time to do our last-ever pregnancy test. Negative. Of course it’s negative. I’m resigned to it now. We’ve arranged to meet some friends at Kenwood House for a picnic and to listen to the open-air concert tonight. I’m not going to let my quest for a baby dominate our life any more, so we go anyway. Hubby and I lie on the grass and Handel’s Water Music floats over the lake. I can’t smile. I can’t talk. Hubby says, ‘Why don’t you get drunk? At least you can do that now.’ But I daren’t, in case baby is still there. I have a feeling baby might still be there.

  I secretly do a pregnancy test every day. It’s always negative. I just want to be sure, seeing as this is the last try. I’m going to do a pregnancy test every single day until my period comes. If I’m still doing tests, I’ve still got something to live for. Still got hope. But it’s the hope that kills you. Every day I torture myself looking at the little window on the white tester stick, waiting and waiting. No blue line.

  Except one day there is a blue line. Very faint but I think I saw it. Or imagined it. Hubby squints at the stick and says he thinks he can see a blue line too. Is it possible that you can get negative after negative reading and then a positive? The next day I do it again. The blue line is stronger. Not imagining it. We go to St Mary’s, where my consultant does another test and confirms I’m definitely pregnant. I’ve become quite friendly with this woman, but today we can’t look at each other. Her best friend, the TV presenter Jill Dando, has just been murdered. I’m so unstable that it all feels like part of my curse.

  A baby is growing inside me. I know it. And I know Baby is healthy. I don’t trust myself, don’t trust my own health but I have no doubt that Baby is strong, mentally and physically. It’s just up to me now not to let her down, to be a safe and stable home until she’s ready to be born. (I found out the sex, I can’t bear any surprises, it’s gone on too long. I have to be ready.) Surely I can manage that? Of course I can’t. Dear old Blood starts showing up again, pouring out of me. I’m carted off to hospital and stay overnight. The woman in the bed next to me is handcuffed to the bedstead. She’s a prisoner, a warden sits on a chair next to her bed. The prisoner is so excited to be out and about that she gabbles away excitedly all night. The bleeding stops, Baby seems to be OK, I’m sent home. But I keep bleeding on and off throughout the pregnancy; every time it happens I go back into hospital but Baby hangs on in there. Doesn’t let go. Thank you, darling girl.

  10 HEAVEN AND HELL

  1999

  It’s days before I’m due to give birth, and I am suddenly convinced that I shouldn’t have the ‘natural’ birth I’ve planned and was so looking forward to; I should have a Caesarean in controlled circumstances. I follow my instincts and book the operation for 12 April 1999. Baby is lifted out of my womb: Bloody hell, I don’t know much about babies but she looks the size of a toddler! For the first time in my life, I know what it is to cry with joy. If I die now, I will be happy. She is swaddled and handed to me, hollering her head off. As the nurse advances towards me with this wailing hole wrapped in a white cotton blanket, I panic. I won’t be able to stop her crying. She’ll know I’m a fake. Everyone is going to see I am a useless mother. I hold her and whisper, ‘It’s all right, Baby, Mummy is here, M
ummy will look after you.’ And she stops crying. I don’t put her down again, unless I really have to, for three years.

  The three days in hospital with my baby are three days in heaven. She’s a beautiful, soft, dimpled little dumpling. I gaze at her all the time. She clings to me like a baby koala bear. I’m standing on the steps of the hospital with her in a car seat, she’s dressed in her Baby Gap pink hat and jacket, we stop a passer-by and ask him to take a photo of me, Hubby and Baby. Now we’re in the car, Hubby is driving. I’m horrified. What the hell is he doing driving like this? He is going to kill my child. Everything is heightened and distorted. Being a new mother is more psychedelic than taking acid. The whole world is different. Dangers are exaggerated, smells are intensified, speed and distance are stretched. Back home with another fish-mouth scar across my stomach, I sit in the rocking chair feeding Baby, listening to Hubby moving about downstairs, and think to myself, Please go. Just leave now and put a cheque through the letter-box every month. What a filthy thought. I am filled with hate and fury and mistrust towards my husband, who has stood by me through years of IVF and never once threatened to give up on me, not even in a temper. I loved him with all my heart until the second we set foot on the pavement outside the hospital. I confess my feelings to the visiting midwife. She tells me to give it a year and then reassess the situation, she explains that it’s biological and not uncommon. She’s right: after a while, the familiar warm feelings I had for Hubby creep back into my cold heart.

  I’m nervous. After so many years of trying for a baby, deep down I don’t think I deserve a child. Someone is going to take her away from me; my mum will lose her in Camden Town, a paedophile will snatch her, Hubby is going to trip up whilst he’s carrying her: every night I imagine going to her funeral.

  Hubby is going out tonight for the first time since Baby was born, she’s six weeks old. I feed her and put her to bed. I think, Shall I just lie here and go to sleep? I’m exhausted but decide to get up and make beans on toast. Got to look after myself. I’m sitting on the sofa eating when I hear a thump. I ignore it. Another couple of thumps. I put my beans on toast down, wander into the hall and drift towards the sound, not in the least bit worried. The noise is coming from the garage. I open the garage door, look up at the skylight and see a figure spread-eagled across the glass.