Ghost Story

by Toby Litt

  Keep off the trampoline, my love.

  IT HAPPENED AND IT DIDN’T HAPPEN

  ‘Toby,’ Leigh’s voice came to me, in my study, from where she stood, in the bathroom. Her tone was quite plain, although not neutral; it was transparent with urgency – and context, or lack of context, made it even more compelling: Leigh said nothing else, just my name. And yet I heard it as if it had been spoken by quite another person, by my daughter – by the possibility of her that it announced and at the same time, I was already beginning to sense as I pushed back my chair, threatened with denial. First, I replied, ‘Yes?’ Second, I ran: in the interim, I had decoded the lack of context because I had understood it could only mean one thing – the thing. (I expect a text: come home.) ‘Toby,’ meant come home. Leigh was standing up from the toilet, her jeans pushed halfway down her legs and her black panties stretched across between her thighs. I don’t remember what she said: ‘There was some blood,’ or ‘I’m bleeding.’ My collapse was almost immediate, and hers followed as soon as she saw mine: we held one another, and I found nothing better to say than, ‘God,’ and ‘I don’t want this to happen.’ The two sentences were not intended to be connected: ‘God, I don’t want this to happen,’ or ‘I don’t want this to happen, God.’ At first, they were the only things I found sayable. Then I asked questions – about the blood, its appearance. I went into the living room, found the book on pregnancy that Leigh had been browsing when I saw her last – in an entirely different version of the universe – kissing her and going into my study; from where, a quarter of an hour later, ‘Toby.’ The book was something to hold on to, a hope. In the index I found bleeding; I was looking for the possibility of any cause other than miscarriage. There was only one page reference, and it was in the section just before Miscarriages, but it gave me what I needed: a quarter of all women may experience some bleeding during pregnancy. I showed this to Leigh, she now standing in the hall with her jeans and panties still where they had been at the moment she cried out to me: we were already, even if only in imagination, one step away from the worst. But as Leigh put a pad into her panties and I sat on the sofa weeping into my hands, we were both thinking that step: the same thing, again, for the third time. Leigh sat down. We held one another. When we had stopped crying, so that we could talk, we tried to decide what we should do, GP, hospital or NHS Direct? Here we diverged: I thought that spotting might not be taken all that seriously, and that if we went to the hospital they might simply send us home again. I didn’t want Leigh to have to make that journey unnecessarily. The GP was never that easy to get to see, so we decided I should call NHS Direct. It was Monday morning, and I spent several minutes on hold. I gave a telephonist some details. Plinky electronica played in my ear, making me think of all the people in even worse situations than our own who had had to listen to this; how some must have died, with this the last music they ever heard. Eventually I was told that all the nurses were busy, but that one would call us back, soon. She did; she asked if she could speak to Leigh. Leigh was too distressed, so the questions had to pass through me. Was there any abdominal pain? What was the appearance of the blood? As I asked Leigh, I put the receiver against my right shoulder – the place where one would hold a baby one was burping. The nurse suggested we go to a hospital in Tooting. I said we’d been there before, though I was wrong: it was to St Thomas’s, opposite the Houses of Parliament, that we had gone to on the previous occasion. Leigh reminded me of this once I was off the phone. The nurse, very sincerely, wished us well – and, to my surprise, her words made things slightly better; to have moved a professional dealer-with-pain, and over the telephone: we counted. We decided not to go to Tooting but to St Thomas’s. Leigh found their number, and I called; they said we could come in, but they couldn’t guarantee us a slot for a scan. Leigh said she wanted to go; we went. The taxi I’d ordered took about five minutes to come. The driver, luckily, didn’t want to chat, even though it was a beautifully sunny morning, and perfect as a conversational opener. Perhaps Leigh’s dark glasses informed him of our mood, or perhaps the mere fact we were going to the hospital. Dropped off, we found the ward, which had recently changed its name from ‘Early Pregnancy Unit’ to ‘Emergency Gynaecology’. It had moved, too, since Leigh was last there – A4 photocopied sheets taped to the walls directed us once out of the lift to keep going down this corridor and this corridor. We came to a waiting room, like any waiting room, sufficient variety provided for us by the extremity of what we were awaiting. Afterwards Leigh remarked, ‘No-one else there looked particularly upset.’ One Australian girl who had experienced vaginal bleeding after sex seemed, in fact, quite bouncy about it. Leigh filled in a form, spoke to the receptionist (whilst other women stood beside the desk, able to overhear everything – as we had overheard about the Australian girl’s vaginal bleeding). When she had told them all she needed, she came back to sit with me, read magazines and wait. In some ways, I think these cruel hospital rituals are wise and deliberate: having to speak about one’s most intimate health details in the hearing of others prepares one for the internal examination by a stranger in white; waiting for an extended period helps one control one’s emotions so that one can talk fairly rationally to the nurse. I read Dombey and Son, not realising the irony of the title until later. (An irony similar to having my broken-down hero reading Bleak House at the end of ‘It Could Have Been Me and It Was’, the first story in my first book.) A slot was found for Leigh, shortly before twelve. A doctor called out her name and, as she walked us to the examination room, tried to make us feel calm by saying, ‘I’m Serena, and I’ll be doing your scan today.’ This, too, seemed wise: the Americanism of it distanced us from what was about to take place; the echo of ‘I’m Chet, and I’ll be your Cabin Assistant for today,’ had us mentally fastening our seatbelts and putting our seatbacks in the upright position. In the small, dim room, Leigh was instructed to undress – bottom half only. There was a divan onto which Leigh climbed. The doctor explained she would be looking at the screen for a while herself, then she would explain what was going on to us. As she said this, she pulled a condom onto the plastic probe and lubricated it. Thank you, Serena, for in fact you turned the screen towards us almost as soon as the scan began – ‘There,’ you said, pointing to a white circle inside another white circle, ‘there’s the heart.’ And, looking like an eye, blinking, blinking, there it was – beating.

  IT HAPPENED

  At some point during the following events, the baby’s heart may have stopped beating. After leaving the room in which the scan had taken place we went back into the waiting room, where we’d been sitting since a quarter to nine. The view from the window was of midday rain falling on the Thames, falling on the Houses of Parliament – though Big Ben was only visible from the office into which we were called a few minutes after the scan. The senior nurse, who I won’t name, though I have no criticism of her treatment of us, was immensely reassuring: once a heartbeat was visible the chances of miscarriage decreased to around 4 per cent. Reassurance was just what we needed, even after seeing the scan – the bleeding might possibly continue for another seven months; we needed something to keep our morale up during that long time. The baby was ‘fine’: there was no necessary link between bleeding and miscarriage; the senior nurse had had bleeding throughout her own third (successful) pregnancy. In a couple of weeks Leigh could go along to what they actually called a ‘Reassurance Clinic’. As we left she told us that this was all good practice for being a parent; when we were parents we wouldn’t be without worry for eighteen years, or longer – for the rest of our lives. We walked out of the hospital, embracing in the corridor, in the lift, in the rain outside. I tried to allow myself to feel joy. Leigh said, when I asked, that she wanted coffee and a croissant. The nearest place was Starbucks, halfway between St Thomas’s and the South Bank Centre. A voice from one of the darkest, unhappiest corners within me speaks up, saying: ‘It’s your fault. You made this happen. This was your punishment for lapsing into the corp
orate – which you normally manage to avoid: in terms of coffee, anyway. The baby died here, Starbucks.’ Leigh ordered a decaf latte and an almond croissant; I had latte – heightening my high with unnecessary caffeine. We took our breakfast to a table, and talked in half-hushed voices, voices that couldn’t believe their luck. We repeated to one another the nurse’s reassurances, each saying what they said as much for themself as for the other. A minor television personality came in for a meeting; we heard her talking on her mobile. We discussed what to do with the unexpected rest of the day: both of us, earlier on, had thought mostly of a return home and to crying and the beginning of grief. Instead, we went to the Hayward Gallery, at which Sam Taylor-Wood’s first major retrospective was in its opening week. Leigh said she would like to go there because she might not have the chance to visit galleries for too much longer. On the walk past the London Eye, we both of us called our parents to let them know the good news: I spoke to my father, Leigh to her mother. Outside the Hayward was a large poster for the show, ‘Self-Portrait in Single-Breasted Suit with Hare’. As a review pinned to a corkboard in the foyer explained, the suit was a reference to Sam Taylor-Wood’s cancer-caused mastectomy, the hare to the regrowth of her hare-coloured hair following chemotherapy. Hospitals. When we’d gone through the whole retrospective, Leigh said that this (the hare) was her favourite of all the works we’d seen that day – and I got the feeling she liked just as much the poster version we’d seen outside as the cibachrome in the first room we entered. Walking away from the Hayward, heading for the tube, we discussed video art – of which much of the retrospective was comprised. This, I don’t have to remind myself, but I do have to remind you, could have been the point; halfway across the empty concrete behind the Royal Festival Hall – that may have been it. We will never know – a sentence I was to hear a great deal too much of in the following week. The work I liked best was ‘Still Life’, a time-lapse film of a bowl of ravishing fruit fulfilling their mouldy vocations. I had already seen this, and about half of the other pieces, in Sam Taylor-Wood’s show at White Cube2 (February). I told Leigh to wait with her eyes closed until the loop was right at the start, with the apricots and peaches at their most fragile/impeccable. Now? The best of the works I hadn’t seen before was ‘Noli me tangere’, the meaning of which tag I’d forgotten but which, looking it up now in my Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases, is ‘Do not touch me’. This, in the context of the other works in the room, one of which, a pietà with Sam Taylor-Wood cradling the act-dying body of reformed Hollywood reprobate/coke fuck-up Robert Downey Jr, this was a reference to paintings representing, so the Dictionary tells me, ‘the reappearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalen at the sepulchre (John 20:17)’. I look up the biblical verse, and find it to be: ‘Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father: and to my God, and your God.’ In ignorance of this, I saw a double-sided video projection – very tall, perhaps sixteen or seventeen feet tall – of a muscular man doing a handstand; however, he was projected upside down, so that it appeared he was not resting on the floor but, Atlas-like, holding the ceiling up. For just over three and a half minutes, slightly slowed down from real life, I think, the man tried to hold off his inevitable collapse, to hold himself at full ceiling-and-floor-touching extension. Looking at him, I thought there was a possibility I might start weeping – having made the direct analogy between his struggles of maintaining supportive form and my own; I didn’t: the image moved me but also distanced me from myself. After exiting the show, we went and bought postcards – and I bought Leigh a copy of High Art Lite by Julian Stallabrass, which she said she wanted to read. I bought a couple of postcards of the ‘Self-Portrait…’ to go in my ‘After the Hare’ file. Then, quite possibly whilst our baby was dying inside her, Leigh talked to a market researcher with a clipboard and twenty questions. Yes, she was a member of the Tate and the Royal Academy; No, we didn’t have a regular Sunday paper. Walking to the underground station we passed a busker playing a penny whistle, badly. Superstitious about such things, I forecast disaster to myself if I didn’t give him some money: whenever I cross the Thames on foot, I give money to the first beggar or busker I see; this is my payment to Charon, who ferries souls across the river Styx. This time I was several steps past before I realised the doom, and by then – because Leigh was with me – I felt embarrassed about going all that way, that increasing way, back, to give money to a busker who wasn’t even any good. We took the escalator down to the Jubilee Line, and I promised myself that I would give twice the amount of money to the very next busker I saw: I hoped for one in the station, but one wasn’t there. Outside Borough Market, where we went next, there was a beggar beside the cashpoint – but I realise now that I didn’t fulfil my superstitious promise to myself, and didn’t give him any money. We went into the market, perhaps doomed, our doom perhaps already having come, and went and bought bread. Then we went home.

  AFTERWARDS

  I am going at points to allow myself to be angry, starting now.

  Please come in. Did you find it alright? Let me give you the tour. This in here, to the left off the hall, is the bathroom, which is where Leigh had the miscarriage – on the toilet, into the toilet. After the first burst of our grief, which I’ll describe in a little while, she picked the baby and its accoutrements out of the water and put it into a plastic freezer bag that I’d fetched at her request from the kitchen. I did not see this retrieval, she closed the bathroom door whilst I stood crying in the living room – through there. I also sat, I think, on the arm of the sofa – which is blue, cheap and which we have been meaning to get rid of for about a year. Leigh didn’t want me to see what had come out of her. ‘It won’t help,’ she said. I told her I wanted to see it. I said that I felt left out – I meant that otherwise I would feel left out. I didn’t want that door closed upon me, too; I felt a need to see everything. She showed me, or rather let me look: the freezer bag was lying there, on the window sill. I picked it up, held it in my hands close to my face; I was wailing, not speaking, and my words were, ‘I loved that.’ I won’t describe what I held, yet. Instead, I’ll describe as promised our grief – but let’s go through into the living room with the unlovely blue sofa. We came in here when it came time to decide what to do. Before then, we stood in the hall. I was behaving, with my voice and my body, as I’d only ever seen – and disbelieved – actors in Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. Extreme grief, perhaps, has brought me to a greater respect of bad acting, of truly full-hearted overacting. The tears went straight down my face, I could feel them; they only spread across my cheeks because I sometimes moved my head, shook it, violently, or crushed it onto Leigh’s shoulder as she crushed hers onto mine. I tried to say things that would be of some comfort to her: that I loved her, and that I didn’t regret a moment of the past eight weeks – that it had been a special time. In the bathroom, whilst kneeling in front of her, the first thing after she’d told me she was certain what had happened, I had said that I loved her, and that however terrible this was it was still part of my love for her. I’m not quite sure what I meant by this, perhaps something similar to what I said later, in the kitchen – that however painful this was, she had brought me so much joy that the pain didn’t even compare. I thought of Dustin Hoffman’s bouffant-haired Hollywood producer in the film Wag the Dog (which I’d watched on the TV in the corner over there a couple of days before). ‘This?’ says Hoffman, whenever disaster strikes. ‘This?’, whenever all seems absolutely lost. ‘This is nothing… This is a walk in the park.’ This – for us – wasn’t nothing, nor a walk in the park; but I wanted to say that, comparatively, it was nothing. I’m no longer sure if this was the right thing to say; at the time I felt it was and so I said it. (All through, I was less uncensored about what I said but, in trying to speak out of tenderness, I was aware of taking great care with my words.) Those flowers there, on the console table, are from my parents and were
delivered this morning – making us cry. I was again sitting on the sofa, a while after the cry from the bathroom, perhaps an hour, when I phoned St Thomas’s. I was, as usual, put on hold – more hospital wisdom, perhaps; calm them with delay. The tune that played, to placate me and others, was a tinny version of Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’. I was waiting to ask whether they wanted us to bring the embryo in, for them to do tests on it. Even in my distress, I was amused to be subjected to this supposedly bland piece of electronica. It reminded me inevitably of our American summer holiday the previous year. After checking with the company that our hire car would have a CD-player, I had selected about fifteen soundtracks for driving. California demanded the Beach Boys’ Greatest Hits. Driving down to Venice Beach we had allowed ourselves the delightful obviousness of ‘California Girls’; driving out of Yosemite National Park, I had been half-annoyed, half-amused by the nagging ‘Lady Linda’ – ripping the melody, as you probably know, off Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’. What different people we were then, I thought, as I waited for someone in Emergency Gynaecology to pick up. How changed by this we will be – have already been. When St Thomas’s answered the phone, I explained our situation. They said to come in, but didn’t require us to bring the embryo. Let me show you the kitchen. It’s quite small, with yellow walls I now regret painting that colour. You may have noticed the bright violet-mauve of the bathroom – that was chosen by the girl I originally moved into this flat with. The yellow was, too; the living room used to be even worse – lime green and tangerine, the colour of lime- and tangerine-flavour Tic-Tacs. It’s now, as you saw, a tasteful antique white. Here is the fridge, where I put the freezer bag and everything it contained, after we’d got back home from the hospital. Leigh cleaned out the bottom shelf in the door. We were already thinking of burying the baby, and Leigh had found something to act as a coffin – a baby-blue box with the words TIFFANY & CO. on the cover: it was oblong-shaped and very shallow. The allusion to diamonds, and what was sparkling, rare and precious seemed a good one. I folded the freezer bag carefully, ceremonially, and placed it inside the box – which I then placed in the cleared space in the fridge. Right there. If you turn round and come with me to the other end of the hall, we’ll enter my study where I’m writing this now. To our right, halfway along, is Leigh’s room. We won’t go in there – but you see this postcard she has on the door, it’s Freud’s couch, bought at the Freud Museum. Here I am, at my desk. This is exactly where I was sitting when Leigh first called out my name. After that, I was involved with deciding whether or not we should go to the hospital. For some reason I took my mobile phone into our bedroom, which is just next door and we’ll see in a minute. On the desk in front of me, resting on top of one of my black notebooks, is the stone Leigh picked from the beach in Southwold after we’d had our little burial service. Let’s go into the bedroom – where, on the rich red bedspread, Leigh had her contractions. It was a particularly cruel parody of childbirth we had to experience: very short, very confusing. All through, I kept asking Leigh what kind of pains they were? Could it possibly be constipation? When was the last time she went to the toilet? (That morning.) This seems particularly absurd and grotesque, now – considering what was really going on. Absurd and grotesque were the words, was the phrase I later used to describe how I felt anything we did to dispose of the baby might be, if we were not careful. ‘I don’t want to flush it down the loo,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to put it in the bin.’ Initially (this was after we’d returned from the hospital), we decided to bury it in the park next to our house. I had some worries about this; us never being able to go in there without being confronted by our grief. Then Leigh said, when I asked her what she really wanted to do, ‘I want to go to The Shed.’ It was a fantastic idea, and first thing the following morning we hired a car, and after an excruciating wait for it to be delivered, we drove up to Southwold. I put the Tiffany’s box in a black carryall, about which I became very self-conscious, for I had offered the young man who brought our car a lift to the underground station. He might ask what was in it. I was equally self-conscious about the bag as we walked out onto the sand dunes at Southwold about three hours later. We had made good time, our speed increasing in direct proportion to our distance from London. In the car we played the Beach Boys’ Greatest Hits, singing along to the bastardized Bach of ‘Lady Linda’. Arriving in Southwold, we parked and walked back to a hardware store where we debated whether to buy a spade, a trowel or two trowels. I dreaded us being asked what we wanted them for – the young man delivering the car had already asked us where we were going, why we were going there. With disguised emotion we told him Southwold, and said we were just going to get out of town. ‘It’s good sometimes to just get out of London, isn’t it?’ he said. It was good; it was the best thing we could ever have done. We walked out with our black carry-all containing a baby-blue Tiffany’s box containing a freezer bag containing what it contained. This was the second time in a week that I had felt like a funeral director. The first was whilst scattering my Uncle James’s ashes – this we had done on the Wednesday, my mother (his sister), my father, me and Val (his last girlfriend). I said very little, not wanting to pretend to be a more important part of the occasion than I was. But a moment came when they had finished with the ashes (my mother and Val spread them widely, over the bluebells) and cried, and stood in a circle, and said a few private things; the two urns, one pottery and one plastic, were still in my mother and Val’s hands. I was able to relieve them of the interference of carrying them, and put them carefully back in the cardboard box. I don’t know why, but I felt it very important that I did this carefully – as if the urns were somehow sentient, and would know whether or not I was treating them with respect. This was odd, as I had been the one to carry the box – then containing two ash-ful urns – from the car up the hill to the chosen spot; and, at that time, I’d had no particular sense of James being in my hands. In fact, I tucked him under one arm; a position which seemed less solemn, less ceremonial and therefore more in keeping. I think that’s what we all felt: we were doing this as if James were indeed present – ready to mock anything that was false or forced. When we stood together, in that circle, I think we were all aware that we were the most there would ever again be of James. I remembered this three days later, on the dunes at Southwold, when Leigh told me I can’t, and I was left gently to tip the contents of the freezer bag into the small hole we’d dug into the grass-covered sand. As it was all we could do, we did it as well as we could.