by Dawn French
Home. Home. Home.
Hope looked in the mirror, and saw a strange, drawn face she barely recognized. She was only twenty years old. How could a twenty-year-old woman look like the haggard, haunted person staring back at her?
Working in the hospital, Hope saw every day how illness affected people. She regularly saw the brutal ravages of cancer and the toll that pain took on so many patients. It was a difficult truth to face so often, but she was aware that she had come to normalize it a bit. She had to. She had to learn to work alongside difficult circumstances and she had to avoid showing any scintilla of shock. She had to be able to walk into any room, and see any sight, without flinching. Illness and how it took shape: she could cope with that; it was the awful trauma on the faces of the visitors that stopped her heart more often than not, and their brave, unsuccessful efforts to hide it. The fear was visible in the eyes of wives and husbands, sons and daughters, all having to realize that their worlds might be about to change beyond all recognition, that yesterday was going to be vastly different to tomorrow. And that it was probably going to be worse.
Hope had often wondered how those people fared after they left the hospital, both through the front and back doors. They went home changed, but what happened then? Did they learn to live differently? Did they cope? She only knew the part of their stories that happened in this building, but she’d always wondered about that next crucial part.
And … here she was, glimpsing in the mirror a ghost of a person, shaken with shock, forced face down into a heap of horror and now looking back at her with unmistakeable injury. Her eyes had seen the worst sight she could ever imagine and she couldn’t understand how she would ever unsee it. The baby. The sleeping baby. The dead baby. The image was there forever. She could hardly keep herself together thinking about it for an instant, never mind having it seared into her heart forever. She wasn’t going to cope or be OK or be fine. She was going to be swallowed up by it. She was going to see it every waking moment and most sleeping moments. It was going to be torture, an unbearable torture.
Hope dressed quickly, trying to put aside any hurtful thoughts. As she leant down to pull up her skirt, she whimpered quietly. She heard the noise and knew she had made it, but was surprised to hear it. She stopped for a moment to calm herself, and it happened again.
‘Stop it. Stop it. Come on …’ she whispered to herself, and as she did, more of the little sobs surfaced, almost as though a hiccup and a cry had conspired together. Hope was emptying. She’d known it would happen soon, but she’d hoped she might have made it home first. She felt dizzy and helpless to contain it. All of the anguish inside her was bubbling up, wanting to explode, be acknowledged.
She sat down so as not to fall down, and she tried to piece herself together again. ‘Come on, Hope, get it together,’ she was repeating over and over, but she was full to the brim and her brain was not listening. Hope tried to think carefully, in an orderly way. It wasn’t working. Her mind wasn’t receiving the transmissions her heart was making. A trauma bomb had exploded inside Hope’s head. All normal thoughts or processes were utterly shattered. Her head was a skullful of splinters and her world was collapsing.
Hope clasped her chest. She knew that her heart was beating very fast. She had the distinct feeling it might actually burst. Was that what the breaking of a heart felt like?
The rending of a heart?
The ending of a heart?
Was it going to simply stop? And then, would she also … stop? For a tempting moment, she even embraced the idea. It would be better to be dead than to feel like this. This was terrifying. She wouldn’t be able to stand it much longer. Was she going mad? Was this what full-on crazy was like?
She wanted Isaac. She had to get to him as soon as possible.
If she could stand up. And walk. And talk. And seem ordinary.
‘Come on, come on, it’s gonna be OK … OK and fine, that’s what we are …’ She tried the mantra. ‘OK. Yes. And fine. OK and fine …’ And somehow she managed to finish dressing. She flung her last few items into the remaining bag. She held on to the walls, the bed and the cupboard to steady herself, and somehow, soothing herself all the while, she was ready to leave.
‘Shall I come with you down to the car?’ Fatu was standing in the doorway.
‘No, no. Seriously. I’m OK. Thank you, Fatu. Again.’ The two women hugged.
‘Don’t forget your coat, sista, it’s cold out there.’ Fatu took Hope’s red coat from the hook behind the door.
‘Yes. Good. Good. Goodbye …’ Hope said as she manoeuvred out of the door, awkwardly holding the overnight bag straps in one hand, her red coat in the other and her handbag over her shoulder. Off she went, out into the corridor, heading for the lifts and her escape from the graveyard of her beautiful daughter. She could feel the yelps rising inside her again, but she was determined to make it to the car.
No one who met her that morning would see that, in that moment, Hope was broken.
Hope was hopeless.
The Chance
Hope was hurrying down the corridor, anxious to make a swift exit, to leave here and somehow, eventually, convince herself that none of this had happened.
Her legs were carrying her along quite fast, although the quicker she moved, the more she felt the sharp pain between them; the sting was vicious.
But nothing compared to the earthquake happening inside her. Hope was split away from her real, true self. This wasn’t Hope rushing down the corridor; it was a mess in Hope’s flesh, parading as a normal human. She felt dizzy and disorientated, so she let her hand brush against the cool wall to steady her as she raced along. Her head was thumping; she could feel her pulse, beating too fast and irregularly, and her own confused blood swirling in her veins, hammering around in the chambers of her hurt heart. She was in many pieces. None of her was joined together properly; she didn’t feel real. She was a numb, walking-dead zombie. Except zombies shuffled. Hope wasn’t shuffling; she was zooming along. Too fast, too fast. She almost tripped and had to stop for a second to steady herself. She leant heavily against the wall and hung her head down momentarily while she caught her breath. She kept looking up to check both directions of the corridor, like a nervous cat. She didn’t want anyone to see her like this. She wanted to GET OUT.
She was relieved to see that no one whatsoever was in the corridor. She could see as far as the nurses’ station at the end by the door, and it seemed that nobody was there, even. She could hear some faint sounds coming from behind various doors along the hall, the sounds of birth, in different stages. These were noises she herself had been making only a few hours before. Hope really didn’t wish to listen to another second of anyone else’s miraculous moment, but she was shattered, mentally and physically finished, and could hardly move.
Hope looked at the door next to where she had stopped. There was a long window in it, and through that, she could see a large slumped man sleeping in a chair in the corner. His mouth was wide open and she could hear his loud snoring through the thick door. She could see the end of a hospital bed and, just beyond that, she glimpsed the edge of a see-through baby cot, just like the one she’d had in her own room. The empty one.
But this cot wasn’t empty; she could see two tiny little feet paddling against the Perspex. The baby was awake.
The door Hope was leaning on wasn’t a sliding door …
Yet it was.
A giant, inexplicable universal magnet drew Hope into the room. She was utterly helpless to resist. A cosmic grappling iron had been thrown out, latched itself to her heart, and was now reeling her in.
She leant against the door and it opened silently, causing her to almost fall into the room. As she stepped forward, slowly and quietly, she put her bags down, and Hope took in every detail of the room as it revealed itself to her, inch by inch.
The big dark man was definitely sound asleep.
The baby was sleepy-eyed, but gurgly happy, wriggly and blinking at her first daylight.
The mother was turned towards the wall and breathing very deeply in her exhausted slumber, with her blonde hair splayed across her sweaty face.
The whole room was bathed in winter morning light.
There were bags and phones and jackets and bottles of water and a banana skin and a brush and a car seat.
All the same sort of normal stuff Hope and Quiet Isaac had had in THEIR room. In readiness for THEIR baby.
The car seat. Yes.
Isaac was sitting downstairs in the underground car park waiting for her. She needed to go, but something kept her in this room, watching the family just being, being together, as if she were entirely invisible. She could hear them all breathing in their very different ways. She saw the same dancing dust in the light. She noticed that was the only movement besides the rise and fall of the man’s chest and the woman’s ribs, and of course the happy writhing of the infant, which she was so drawn to.
Hope risked a step closer. She had to see the baby up close. She wanted to look. A step wasn’t enough, so she took another. And another, until she was standing right next to the bassinet. The newborn saw her and immediately stopped gurgling as their eyes locked on to each other. Lovely open eyes. ALIVE.
The baby was exquisite. Unmistakeably female, she had flawless bronze skin, a mass of curiously straight black hair, large deep brown eyes and the most deliciously dribbly kissy lips. She was perfect. She was life. And she was looking right at broken Hope, who could physically feel her heart mending as they gazed at each other. The longing was mammoth. Here, staring at Hope, was her missing piece, everything she surely needed right at that moment to be happy. It was precisely then, in this crazy stopped slice of time, that Hope suddenly became aware that she was lactating. She felt the wetness from her nipples making stains on her blouse. She looked down, and confirmed that it really was happening: her body wanted to feed that baby.
And it was precisely then that little Florence reached her hand up. Her perfect hand with her beautiful tiny pinkish nails, trying to connect with Hope. The wrist was so small, and circled with the hospital wristband identifying her name. Florence was looking for her mother. Hope wanted to be that more than anything, ever. In an instant worthy of a fresco by Michelangelo, Hope tentatively reached out her hand, into the bassinet, and into the tiny perfect fingers of Florence Lindon-Clarke, who immediately grasped her. This was Hope’s could-be life. Hope knew instinctively that the baby wanted to be picked up and held close, and that in a matter of seconds she was probably going to yell for that to happen. She mustn’t cry. The man and the woman would wake and find her there.
Boom. It happened. Without so much as a second thought, Hope snapped. She crossed the line. In the fuzzy haze of Hope’s dreadful sadness, she couldn’t possibly discern the boundaries of right or wrong. How can a person know their own mind when their own mind is absent? Hope’s whole body was doing what it NEEDED. For her, right then, it was indisputably right.
In less than ten seconds the baby was lifted out of the cot and into Hope’s big overnight bag, nestled on top of Hope’s nightie, zipped up and heading out of the door.
Out.
Quick.
Out.
Hope made sure the door closed gently behind her with a soft flump, nothing to disturb either parent. As she raced up the corridor, her feet hardly touched the ground; she was fleeing over dangerous hot coals.
The nurses’ station seemed deserted, but as she crept by she heard the low mumblings of someone on the phone. The desk around the station was at chest height, and all Hope could see was the top of someone’s head, who was clearly deep in conversation. Never had Hope been so pleased with the purchase of a pair of trainers. The particular ones she was wearing had been on sale in a Nike shop in Carnaby Street a month prior. She was passing by with no intention and pretty much no budget to go shopping, but they were in the window, these Air Max 270 Flyknits, brazenly daring her to buy them, and tempting her with a third-of-the-original-price tag combined with their irresistible air-soles and ultra-breathable orange uppers. She was a goner. Instantly in love with them. She adored them for so many reasons, but she didn’t know the true depth of the love until now, when they were the perfect get-away vehicle because they were … s … i … l … e … n … t. Only her breath and the airstream she was creating in her wake would give her away. With that in her mind, alchemy in her soul and prayers in her heart, Hope wondrously became
as small as a mouse
as thin as paper
as fast as light
as invisible as vapour
as breathless as a dead baby
and somehow … somehow … all the gods and wizards of kindness and fortune conspired to help her reach the ward door unnoticed. She burst through, and as it flapped shut behind her, the phone-busy nurse looked up, too late to see her, and too distracted to try.
At that precise moment, an early-shift midwife emerged from a room near the station, and started to make her way back down the corridor towards Anna and Julius’s room. She yawned and peered through the same window in the door that Hope had looked through just moments before. She saw a sleeping exhausted father, a sleeping exhausted mother, and she saw the very end of the bassinet where the blanket was bunched up in such a way that it looked just like a perfectly safe sleeping baby’s covered feet. Reassured, she made the most giant career-threatening error of her life. She moved away, to get on with her day.
Hope decided to avoid the lift just in case the baby made a noise, so she headed for the stairs and cursed the fact that the maternity ward was on the eighth floor. She knew she had to get into the basement garage and she wasn’t sure this stairwell would go all the way down. Would she have to divert back into the main body of the hospital to find the exit to the underground parking?
As she descended, it was clear that the hospital was kicking into the top gear of a fresh day, as one, then four, then eleven and more members of hospital staff arrived on to the stairs at various floors, rushing up and down to their jobs. Some greeted her with a quick ‘Morning!’, most took the stairs three at a time, and absolutely none genuinely looked at her. Although she worked in this hospital, the sheer size of it meant that the staff count was in the thousands. Nobody really knew her, and she realized that she didn’t even know the building very well, because she typically stuck to the floors where she had always been assigned, and to the service lifts accessing those couple of floors. She was a stranger on these stairs.
Hope had to be careful not to slip because she was going so fast. She could hear the faintest sound of the baby responding to the jiggling of the bag, but no one else would hear it against the thunder of footfall on concrete steps.
When she reached ground level, Hope noticed a side door off the main stairwell, indicating ‘Parking’. She slipped through the door. It wasn’t easy to manoeuvre with the awkwardness of all she was carrying, but she managed it.
The stairs down to the garage were different to the ones above. They were narrower, darker and had that unmistakeable putrid uriney stench. This deeply offended her. Nothing in her hospital should smell like this. The stairs weren’t the most common route to the parking area, the big lifts in the main concourse were; but, nevertheless, some folk would be using them. Hope muttered to herself as she moved along, ‘For God’s sake. This isn’t a nightclub. It’s a hospital. Who gets out of a car to visit someone and thinks, Oh I know, I’ll just have a quick wee on these stairs …? There are tons of loos a minute away inside the building! I mean, honestly, who does that?’
Hope was glad her baby was cocooned away inside the bag, protected from the rancid pee particles she might inhale. Hope didn’t want this awful stink to be in her baby’s memory as a sensory souvenir of her first day on this earth. If she could, Hope would ensure that the little one breathed only good clean air. Maybe one day, at the seaside even …?
For now, the only mission was to safely get her home. Hope was a parent now; she was focused in a way hitherto unknown
to her. This was what she was on earth for, to love and protect, she absolutely knew she was going to be supremely good at it, but … first things first. She had to get her baby back to the flat, safe and sound. She had to remain calm and clever and quick-witted.
Down, down two flights of revolting stairs, through a big blue door, and into the gloom of the car park. More fumes. Exhaust fumes. Even more perilous than pee. There was no doubt that the absolute best way to transport a baby was in a bag; it was brilliant for so many reasons.
Hope looked left and right, but there was no sign of the familiar rusty silver Honda Civic with Quiet Isaac in.
Damn, where was he? Hope could feel a panic rising but she needed to remain cool and in control if this was going to work, so she took a deep breath, including the awful fumes, and she started to walk among the cars looking for him. Suddenly, she stopped, when the thought occurred to her that, of course, he would probably be waiting near the entrance to the lifts. That would’ve been the more likely place for her to emerge. She could see the big red doors on the other side of the car park.
She started to walk directly towards them.
She changed her mind; she needed to be cleverer.
She wended her way between cars and pillars.
She made sure no one saw her.
She kept low.
She moved stealthily.
She checked the bag didn’t bump anything.
She avoided a chatty family.
She watched them from behind a pillar and only proceeded when it was safe to do so.