Heartstream

by Tom Pollock

  My baby. I look over to you for reassurance. Swallow, and nod.

  “Normally, under these circumstances,” she goes on, “the father would look after the baby while you got well. But that’s not really an option here, is it?”

  Another swallow, and a headshake.

  “Thankfully we have another option. I can look after her, just for now, just until you get well. I’m my own boss, so I can take time off work; I’ll bring her to visit every day and as soon as you get out, she’ll be back in your arms. That’s the best solution, but because we’re not related, I need your consent, your signature.”

  Her tone is gentle, her eyes full of concern and, yes, even love. And I’m exhausted. But all of that butts up inside me against the iron-hard fact that she’s planning to take you away from me.

  “And if I don’t give it?”

  Ben Smith clears his throat. “Then I and two colleagues would need to assess your case and make a recommendation to a judge about whether you are able to care for your daughter. I understand your mother was an only child, like you yourself. Her parents have both passed away, and with her recent…” He tails off under my gaze, swallows hard and then continues. “There’d be no guarantee that it would be anyone you knew, or indeed that it would be reversible if your stay here became prolonged.”

  I stare at the forms in my hand.

  * In the last twenty-four hours I have attempted to take my own life.

  My heart is screaming denial, snapping and hissing like a cornered animal, but I grit my teeth and swallow, and look at you and tell myself this is for you; this is for the best.

  Because, damn them, they’re right.

  They bring me forms, and I sign them, and my hand is shaking so hard the signature’s barely recognizable as mine, but they don’t seem to mind.

  Evie squeezes my shoulder. “Brave girl, Cat,” she whispers. “This is what being a mother is.”

  They bustle off to arrange a car seat and leave me alone with you. You look up at me, and you must sense the part of me that’s breaking because you start to cry again, and this time no amount of rocking or cooing or cradling will soothe you. You cry and you cry and I feel your voice like a piano wire over my nerves and I think, This is proof you’re better off with them.

  I try to distract you. I give you your hat and your blanket to hold, but you just throw them down, and my glasses case catches my eye, the little red cleaning cloth poking out of the corner. In desperation I grab that and give it to you, and for no reason I can think of, your cries ease.

  The cloth is still clutched in your tiny fist when Evie comes back for you. I watch you as she carries you out, and the shadow of the door crosses your face. That little square of red is the last thing I see.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Amy

  I stare at the woman before me: cross-legged on the cold bathroom tiles, her hair hacked off with no deference to style, the only goal to have it shorter. I study the face so twisted and battered by suffering that she’s almost unrecognizable from the girl I saw on the Tumblr account, the girl she was only seventeen years before.

  Her voice was dead the whole time she was speaking. I know that tone; I know that if I streamed off her right now, I’d suffocate on the numbness she’s wrapped like fibreglass around her heart. I wonder if she even knows she’s crying.

  But I don’t stop to watch the tears spot our precious upholstery. My feet are already in motion under me, my body moving faster than my sluggish brain can follow. I’m pounding up the stairs, clawing the banister past me for extra speed, swinging right, into Mum and Dad’s room. The dust sheet from Mum’s wedding bolero is still on the floor where Polly discarded it. My feet get tangled in it and I fall. My jaw smacks against the floor, and I bite my tongue and taste metal in my mouth. I spit, and the carpet’s sprayed red.

  Panting, I drag myself to my feet by the edge of Mum’s dressing table. My reflection appears in triplicate in the three mirrors arrayed on the back. My eyes are wild, my skin flushed, the shadows under my eyes like the silhouettes of standing stones at sunset. I look deranged, and at last I see a glimmer of resemblance.

  It can’t be, a part of me is screaming. It can’t be it can’t be it can’t be no no no no NO! It can’t be.

  Like she said, it all comes down to who you trust: Catherine Canczuk, who came in here with a bomb strapped to her chest? Who half the known Internet proclaimed to be a liar, a fraud, criminally insane? Is that who you’d choose?

  Sure, she seemed vacant and numb downstairs, like she barely knew what she was saying. But maybe she did know. Maybe the whole story was constructed on purpose? Maybe it was all a scheme to get me to believe?

  Believe what? At least say it; say it to yourself.

  But I can’t.

  Memories rise, like tiny bubbles in the saucepan of my mind, getting bigger and faster and more numerous with every passing second. The way Mum couldn’t find my birth certificate when I lost my passport and needed to get it renewed. The way everyone says Charlie looks just like Dad did at his age, but no one has ever said that about me.

  I can hear creaking on the steps behind me.

  This makes sense of everything. The phone. The emails. Mad Hatter. Everything.

  But that could be deliberate. Polly knows as much about all this as I do. She could have cut her tale to fit the evidence like a key to a pre-existing lock.

  Behind me, I hear the latch click as the doorknob starts to turn.

  Why would she do that? Why would she lie?

  She found me online. She became obsessed. There are plenty of crazy people in the world and the Internet brings them all to your doorstep.

  OK, fine, then why did Mum blackmail the doctor to keep her locked up then?

  I don’t know she did. I’m bargaining now, desperate. I’ve only got Polly’s word for that.

  Then why the Mad Hatter emails? Why the hidden phone?

  Because … because she planted them! Polly, Cat, whatever her name is. She had all the time in the world while we were at the funeral. She locked me in that room. She must have meant me to find it. Yes, that’s it!

  That other voice inside me falls silent.

  See? I think in relief. It always comes down to who you trust.

  Except, very occasionally, it doesn’t.

  My gaze roves over the top of the dressing table. Hands trembling, I pluck aside the tangled clots of jewellery, the dusty face-down photographs.

  And then I see it. My heart’s going like a trip hammer, pumping blood through my wounded tongue and into my mouth. I reach for it, clutching it as tight as I ever did. The little scrap of red cloth that served as a comfort blanket as a baby, the one Mum was so desperate to wean me off, but that I wouldn’t let go.

  The one I never told anyone about, not ever, not on Heartstream, not anywhere. The one that’s just the right size and softness to clean a pair of glasses with.

  In the mirror I can see her hovering in the doorway, flustered and uncertain.

  “Did you know what you were saying?” I croak. “That whole time downstairs when you were talking, did you know you were saying you? You looked up at me; this is for you. Oh God, I love you so much?”

  She just stares at me. I reach into my mouth and dab my tongue. The blood I smear between my finger and thumb is almost exactly the same colour as the cloth. I look into the mirror and meet the eyes of the woman who gave it to me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Cat

  My body gave up on you before I did.

  Two days after she took you, my milk came in properly. My breasts ached with the weight of the milk and my back ached with the weight of my breasts and my heart ached with … well, my heart ached with everything.

  Joy came with a pump a couple of times a day and let me squeeze out just a trickle. “Just enough to make you comfortable, hon,” she said, like that was anywhere close to possible. “When your body realizes there’s no call for it, the milk will go away.”


  “But there is a call for it,” I said. I looked up anxiously at her kind, round, competent face. “Evie’ll bring her back. She said she’d bring her back for visits. I’m her mother. I need to be able to feed her when she’s here!”

  Joy’s expression was full of sympathy. “OK, lovely,” she said gently, but she still only let me express a tiny bit into the little plastic bottle, and then took the pump away no matter how I begged.

  In the days that followed, I swore blind to her that I needed more, that my breasts still hurt, that – I thought I was being crafty; she’d have to take this seriously, surely! – I might be getting an infection in them. And Joy patiently examined them for redness and swelling and gave me a pair of cold gel packs to put into my bra. “OK, lovely,” she’d say mildly. But she still took the pump away.

  At first, I squeezed more out myself, bent over the sink in my little bathroom, uttering little wheezes of pain as my fingers gripped the skin. But then day after day went by, and she didn’t bring you. They returned the clothes I’d been wearing before the birth. They were freshly laundered and pressed, but my mobile wasn’t with them, and the old black phone beside my bed stayed silent. When I tried to call Evie from it to ask where my family was, all I got was a girl from reception who informed me in a bright, clear voice that outward calls from residents in the first month of their stay were against the clinic’s treatment guidelines.

  And I sat, and I stared out of the window at the garden, and I ate when Joy brought food and expressed when Joy brought the pump, and fought to remember your face as you looked up at me, and flicked through the magazines they brought me without seeing them, and every now and then broke down into choking, gasping fits of tears, my chest crushed by the absence in my arms.

  After a week or so, Ben started to visit. He insisted I call him Ben rather than Dr Smith. He wore the same diamond-patterned V-neck sweater he’d had on the night he’d signed me in – like he’d just wandered in off a golf course – but there were deep dark crescents under his eyes.

  “Not been sleeping, Ben?” I asked. He blinked and took off his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief he pulled out of his pocket, and that gesture reminded me of the little red cloth I’d given you and suddenly I wanted to cry or kill him or maybe both.

  “Why do you ask?” he said eventually. “Have you not been sleeping?”

  “My baby’s been stolen, so no, I’ve not been getting all forty of my winks in. What’s your excuse?”

  When he replied, the coldness in his voice was like a shield. “It sounds like you’re fixated on this idea of ‘your baby’.”

  I just stared at him. “Astonishing,” I said, at last well and truly flabbergasted.

  “How so?”

  “That is the single stupidest statement I have heard in my entire life. Of course I’m fixated on my baby: she’s my baby.”

  Again the glasses came off, again the cleaning. I wondered if it was a nervous tic for him.

  “It’s very important for your healing that you start to let go of the idea of ‘your baby’. I understand it’s difficult, but we’re here to help you.”

  “It’s very important for your healing that you start to let go of the idea of ‘your breathing’.” I mimic the antiseptic mildness of his tone scornfully. “I understand it’s difficult, but we’re here to help you.”

  “Catherine—”

  “Seriously, doc. What are you talking about? She’s my baby. Evie said she’d bring her back to visit. You were there. Why hasn’t she come? She hasn’t even called – why hasn’t she called?”

  Another sigh. “No, she hasn’t called. Catherine, you’ve had a terrible trauma. The loss of your home, your mother, that would devastate anyone. And with your father also missing… In cases like yours it’s not uncommon for a patient to create the idea of another relative, so they can feel that the family unit that has supported them is not wholly destroyed—”

  “You’re trying to tell me my baby is a hallucination?”

  “I’m trying to—”

  “Fuck you.”

  I delved into my bra for the cotton wool pad pressed against my nipple and threw it at him. It had been in there for a couple of hours and was well sodden so it made a satisfying squelchy sound as it hit his cheek.

  “So I guess my boobs are hallucinating milk?”

  He peeled the pad from his skin. He looked deathly pale. Almost like he was more appalled by the words coming out of his mouth than I was.

  “Catherine, I know it’s difficult now. It won’t come right away, but eventually we will get you to the point where you can accept the truth. That it was an extremely difficult, premature birth, that the best obstetrician in London did his utmost, but in the end, nothing could be done.”

  As he spoke, I felt my throat closing. I shook my head, trying to speak, but there were no words in my mouth.

  “The baby was lost in childbirth. It’s not fair and it’s not just, but it’s what happened. We’ll get you to the point where you can accept that, that’s my promise to you.”

  And – I’m ashamed to admit – just for a tiny fraction of a second, a tiny sliver of time, I wondered if he was telling the truth. Then the image of you looking up at me flashed through my mind, your eyes roving over my face like you were fixing every pore and eyelash in your mind for all time. I’m your mother; that same commitment is the very least I owed you.

  “No. You won’t,” I said. “That’s my promise to you.”

  I had daily sessions with him at first. I couldn’t get out of them. If I dragged my feet then Joy would literally carry me, uncomplaining and uncritical, wearing the same placid smile she always did. They couldn’t make me talk, though, so I didn’t. I might have tried if he had at least admitted what he was doing, holding me captive, away from you, but he kept insisting you were dead, that I was imagining you, that, in short, I was crazy. That – more than the locks on the doors or the strength in Joy’s back muscles – was what he felt gave him power over me. If he strayed from it, he was weakened.

  So, at ten every morning, every morning, I went to his office, and sat in silence on the same chintzy armchair listening to the mantelpiece clock chip fragments off our life together.

  Time became strange. I started out keeping track of the days with tally marks, first on paper, which they took away, then on the bathroom soap, and then finally on the skin on the inside of my upper arm with a thumbnail. But as weeks stretched to months, it became too painful. Not physically, but I knew I was missing milestones: around about now your vision would be perfecting itself, your world becoming sharp and defined; this was the time you might be sitting up; you might be trying food for the first time today. I measured my own life by yours, the one I was missing, and I couldn’t handle it. So I stopped.

  As a result, I don’t know how long I’d been inside when I met the unlikely individual who led me, eventually and indirectly, back to you. It was a bright spring day, and I was taking a walk around the garden. It was a pretty garden, with wide lawns and tall trees clustered in the middle (though none by the walls, of course). Word in the cafeteria was that when the summer leaves came in, the bushes all but hid the fifteen-foot-high walls, and then it was like being in a park.

  There was a boy standing looking at the peonies. He was skinny and pale and pimply, but he was about my age; and anyway, I liked peonies, always had done, so I wandered over.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Cat.”

  He flinched immediately, and then said, “Will Jenkins, of the Beaconsfield Jenkinses.”

  “Huh. Well, I guess I’m Catherine Canczuk of the Tooting Canczuks, although I’ve never run into enough other Canczuks to make me feel like I needed to clarify.”

  He flushed. “Dad said I should introduce myself that way in here so people know who they’re messing with. Or who they didn’t ought to mess with, rather. Or…” He squinted at me. “Have you heard of the Beaconsfield Jenkinses?”

  “I can’t say I have.”

>   He flushed deeper – this kid could give me a run in the blushing stakes – and then pulled his shoulders up protectively around his neck, bracing himself like he was expecting a punch.

  “If it’s OK with you, though, I’ll refrain from messing with you anyway.”

  He looked reassured. The shoulders descended. “Thanks,” he said.

  “No problem. I’m sure your family’s very famous and scary.”

  He made a face. “Not really. Dad’s a lord and owns a big building supplies company so everyone does what he tells them, but he’s not a gangster or anything. What brought you over here?”

  “I just wanted to look at the flowers. I like peonies.”

  He grinned suddenly, and I saw he had braces. “Me too. They’re like, spooosh.” He mimed an explosion with his hands. “Like a frozen fireball.”

  I looked at the flowers. The petals were red and yellow, and layered into their big spherical heads. I could see what he meant.

  “What are you in for?” he asked.

  “I had a pop star’s baby and they took her away, and now they’re keeping me here so they can pretend she died.” I’d had the same conversation a half-dozen times since I’d been in here. There was no harm in telling the truth, since no one believed you anyway. “You?”

  “I tried to blow up Parliament,” he said.

  For a moment, the only sound was the ticking of the leaves in the wind.

  “Wait … seriously?”

  “Well, I didn’t get very far,” he admitted. “I mean, I’d done a load of research: architectural drawings, modelling different explosive yields, chemical make-up analysis, you know, the basics; but before I could buy any of the actual materials, our cleaner found all the plans on my bedroom floor while I was having a pee. She called the police and they called Dad, and because he’s Lord Beaconsfield – he’s descended from Disraeli, or at least he says he is – they called a psychiatrist rather than the anti-terror squad, and here I am.” He sighed, like he was talking about the love of his life who got away.