by Ellery Lloyd
I wish I could say she’s a better grandmother than she was a mother, but the photos of hugs and smiles and blowing out birthday cake candles with Coco are all for Instagram’s sake. My mother has always applied what Dr. Fairs calls the if-a-tree-falls-in-the-woods approach to relationships. Even before she became an Instagran, it often felt like it was more important for her to get a photo of her and Coco to show her friends at bridge club than it was to actually spend time with Coco. She never calls to just ask how we are, never drops round unannounced to see her grandkids. If anything, she has provided me with a shining example of how not to let the optics interfere with real family life—not that I always get it right myself, by any stretch. But at least I try.
By the time we get to the studio she’s been waiting around for us outside for over an hour so we can all make an entrance together. She doesn’t ask me why we’re late. I have to prod her to say hello to Coco, and when she does Coco’s little face lights up at Granny’s attention. For a split second, I see my four-year-old self in my daughter’s shoes and my heart cracks a bit for both of us.
The first thing that confronts us as we walk inside is a three-foot-tall roll of toilet paper. Virginia spots it, pretends to do a double take. “Oh God, darling, did you really sign us all up for this shit?” She guffaws at her own joke. The PR looks unamused.
Today’s set has been dressed to look like an enormous bathroom, with the aforementioned vastly oversized rolls, a selection of potties, and some giant toilets styled up as thrones that we’ll sit on to do our interviews. We’ve just got to trot out the usual clichés: hardest job in the world; nothing more precious than a mama; she’s always been my best friend; she told me I could do anything . . . while the assembled under-tens roll around in the four-ply like golden retriever puppies. At least that’s what the director thinks will happen. I suspect he doesn’t have any children himself.
With the exception of Bear, who is being fussed over by the makeup artist, all twelve kids on set are currently running around wrapped, mummy-style, in toilet paper, jacked up on pains au chocolat pilfered from the breakfast buffet. It is utter, earsplitting chaos. We parents are doing our best to ignore them as we mill around said breakfast buffet, recording theatrical hellos for Instastories over the avocado toast.
“Sara, you glittering marvel, I am so psyched I get to hang out with my sister from another mister all day!” Bella exclaims, filming herself going in for an enthusiastic air kiss.
I make my way over to the coffee machine to fill a #yaydays-branded mug—Irene never misses an opportunity to plug the merch. Sara heads that way too, leaving her mother stranded in conversation with Suzy Wao, whose giant earrings keep swinging perilously close to her bifocals. She gets her phone out, and I raise my mug in a cheers, throwing my head back in laughter. Sara posts it immediately with the caption: It’s a miracle: Mama drinks a cup of coffee while it’s still hot!
There is an art to this. I’m not saying it’s one of the high arts, but it is an art.
When it’s our turn to take our places on the thrones, I scoop up Bear and call Coco to come sit on Mama’s lap.
She doesn’t want to.
One of the assistants goes over and tries to jolly her along, points over at me and Bear, the thrones.
Coco turns her back on us, folds her arms, crouches down.
Aware I’m being watched, I keep a patient smile on my face, hand Bear to my mother, and walk across.
“Pickle,” I say.
Coco doesn’t respond. Understanding how many pairs of eyes are now on us, how many people are listening in, I crouch down so my face is level with my daughter’s. Her bottom lip is trembling.
“What’s the matter, pickle?”
She whispers something so quietly I can’t hear it.
“I can’t hear you, Coco. What are you saying?”
“Mummy, I don’t want to. I feel shy.”
“What’s she saying, darling?” shouts my mother, who’s managed to hand Bear off again to one of the makeup artists. “Tell her everybody is waiting.”
“Just give us a minute, Mum,” I shout back, as brightly as I can muster.
“Do you not remember?” I ask Coco. “We talked about how fun this was going to be. Sitting on the throne. Telling funny stories about me and Granny. You remember, we even practiced the stories.”
Ages ago, when Mamabare was born, one of the first things Dan and I agreed upon was that when our daughter got old enough to say no, when she didn’t want to do this anymore, that was when we’d stop. I remember we discussed it one date night, shook on it, swore. No ifs, no buts, I promised him.
The thing is, though, when you have a child, you quickly realize you’re continually having to make them do things they don’t want to do. Wear a nappy. Wear a coat. Get into the bath. Get out of the bath. Take their medicine. Drink their milk. Brush their teeth. Go to bed. If you never did anything your child did not want to do, you’d never leave the house. You’d just sit in front of the TV eating chocolate in a princess dress all day.
And there would not be a great deal of shareable content in that.
I can certainly remember having to do a load of things I didn’t want to do when I was little: Sit through long dinners without fidgeting. Answer promptly and clearly when anyone asked me a question. Go and say hello to all the guests at my parents’ parties—a room full of men with thick voices and women with horrible laughs, a layer of cigarette smoke hanging at head height, someone with acrid breath always insisting on kissing me stickily on the forehead. I can remember begging not to have to go away on holiday to the same place every year, to spend two weeks in a house in Provence where I’d lie in bed listening to my parents bicker in the next room, waiting for the door to slam and the plates to smash. I can remember having to go away to boarding school at seven. I can remember coming back from my first term and finding Mum had given my guinea pig away because it was too much trouble to look after.
Did it do me any harm? Well, probably. No doubt, if you really got into it (as Dr. Fairs is always trying to), you could connect my fear of being alone in a house in the dark with that time my mum locked me in my room because I kept coming downstairs while she was entertaining, and you could almost definitely link my desire to make a public success of myself to both my parents’ stinginess with praise and my utter, chest-swelling delight on the rare occasions I got so much as an approving nod from either. People love to find a neat psychological explanation for everything, don’t they?
Nor would it take a rocket scientist to connect my choice of Dan as a husband to my confidence that he will never cheat on me or leave me. Growing up, I was fully aware that—when it came to my father—my mother and I could never be certain of either of those things. And one of the reasons I was aware of this was because she used to come into my room at night and tell me, carefully putting her wineglass down on the bedside table and raising her voice so he could hear everything she was saying, when all I really wanted was just to go to sleep. And yes, my mum was probably fucked up by her mother too, whose favorite daughter she never was, and who always found some way of telling her she wasn’t the prettiest or the cleverest, and who for some reason I’ve never quite determined (no matter how many times I’ve heard the story retold) refused even to get out of the car at my parents’ wedding, but just sat there in her fur coat at the end of the path up to the church while everybody waited and my grandfather tapped on the window and begged her to be reasonable.
Perhaps the truth is that I come from a very long line of very bad mothers. And that, of course, is what all this You do you, Clap yourself on the back—you deserve it crap serves to obscure. That ultimately, all mamas are not superheroes. That becoming a mum doesn’t automatically confer sainthood if you were a dick before you pushed a baby out of your bits. That ultimately, all mothers are still just people. Some of us are kind and gentle and endlessly giving—others resentful and frustrated and increasingly convinced they’ve made a terrible mistake. Some
will be getting through each day and doing their best, while others just go through the motions waiting for the seven thirty p.m. gin and tonic. There will be some mums out there who thought they were going to hate it and have surprised themselves, and others who thought they’d love it and simply don’t. Some of us are wonderful. Some of us are wankers. Most of us are a mixture of all these things on any given day.
All of which, I guess, is a way of saying that while it’s quite clear my daughter isn’t keen on doing this commercial, I’m not about to do the heroic thing and tell everyone the deal is off, pick her up in my arms, and take her for a long walk hand in hand through a softly lit meadow. Not least because by the time we got to the car she’d have changed her mind and decided she did want to do it actually, and would then spend the whole journey home screaming and kicking my seat and demanding to go back. But also because I can only speculate how much it cost to hire this place and all the equipment, get all these people together and cater for everyone, build the set and the lighting rig and the rest. I’m not letting my family’s financial future dangle and twist on the whim of a four-year-old who most of the time can’t decide whether or not she wants to wear a scarf when we leave the house. And, finally, because if I know one thing for sure, it’s that if we walk off this set now, we won’t be walking onto one of these sets again.
Which is precisely why everyone on set is holding their breath. They know this. I know this. The only person who doesn’t know this is Coco.
And so I do what any harassed working mum would do in circumstances like these.
I tell Coco if she plays ball now, we can stop at a McDonald’s on the way home—somewhere we have always point-blank refused to take her—and she can have absolutely anything she wants, and then as much iPad time as she likes before bed.
She considers this for a moment.
“Happy Meal with a toy?” she says.
“It’s a deal!” I tell her, wondering how she even knows what that is.
We all take our seats on the throne, my mother and me side by side, with Bear on my lap and Coco on hers. The director starts filming. My patter is polished, my gestures assured. As soon as he asks me the first question about Virginia, I reach out and grasp her upper arm. “This woman,” I say, looking into the camera, welling up a little, “is my everything. My rock. My lighthouse.” I pause. I already know this is going to be the take. “My mum,” I conclude.
Somewhere out there beyond the klieg lights, there is a scattering of applause.
Then it is my mother’s turn. Even though I know she had Irene write it for her and then learned it by rote, I’m mildly irritated to find that I feel a warm rush of happiness as she heaps praise onto her incredible, beautiful, smart daughter.
I see someone whisper in the director’s ear, and he shouts, “Cut!”
“Can we try a take where the little girl looks a bit less miserable?” he says with an exasperated sigh.
There were basically three things I needed for what I was going to do. Two of them were very easy to get my hands on. The third required a little more subterfuge.
You don’t spend as long as I have in an ICU without amassing a pretty thorough understanding of the practicalities of sedation. Twenty-three years I have spent monitoring pulses, checking oxygen levels, measuring levels of expired carbon dioxide, ensuring that airways are clear and drips are set up correctly and capnographs and feeds are correctly functioning, and that nothing is jammed or twisted or trapped or obstructed. Twenty-three years I have spent learning the early warning signs that something is amiss.
It is a tricky business, keeping someone alive but unconscious. No matter what you might see on your Sunday-night TV crime dramas, in your Hollywood movies, you can’t just knock someone out with a massive dose of something and leave them tied up for a few days then expect them to wake up groggy but unharmed. It just doesn’t work like that. First, because if you get the dose wrong and overdo things, they have a tendency to stop breathing—and if you overdo things badly, there is a good chance their heart is going to stop beating too. Second, because if you give someone a massive dose of some random sedative you have managed to get your hands on—a load of sleeping pills, say, washed down with a bottle of cough syrup, or ground up and slipped into somebody’s glass of wine at dinner—then the most likely way the body is going to react is by trying to reject it, i.e., the person is going to throw up. And throwing up when you are unconscious is a great way of choking to death. It really used to exasperate Grace and her dad, when we were all watching TV together, the way I would always point out exactly where the villain was going wrong, pharmacologically, or make a point of explaining why what they were trying to do would not work.
I guess at some level I feel I owe it to all of us not to mess this up.
Even in my position, though, getting my hands on all the things I needed was far from straightforward. It was not just a matter of borrowing the keys to the relevant storeroom from the nurses’ station and wandering off at leaving time with a box of benzodiazepines under your coat.
The propofol was no problem. Stockpiling that was almost worryingly easy; we use so much of it in surgery and afterward, it’s just not practical to keep under lock and key. I grabbed as much of it as I could possibly need out of the drawer and wandered out of the building with it jammed into my handbag. Easy? I doubt if you had been monitoring me, I would even have displayed a quickened heartbeat. It was like walking out of the place with a bunch of pens from the stationery cupboard.
The oxygen cylinder and the mask to go with it I just took out of storage, put into a sports bag, and stowed in my locker. Then I waited until I was coming off shift late one night and carried it out to the car when there was hardly anybody around. No one raised an eyebrow. A couple of people wished me a good morning.
The infusion pump I bought online, although I probably could have sneaked one out if I had wanted to.
The midazolam was a different matter. Partly, I guess, because as a muscle relaxant and an antianxiety agent and a sedative, there are people out there who get their kicks by taking it recreationally and who are prepared to pay for the privilege. On our ward, they keep it very much under lock and key, make you sign for it. Make sure only certain people have the access code to the locked fridge.
Of course, not all of it gets used. If, say, you are an anesthetist and you need to sedate a patient and require ten milliliters of midazolam to do it, you still go (or send someone like me to go) and fetch the standard fifty-milliliter bottle.
Now, a conscientious surgeon, a diligent team, will always make sure they get rid of that other forty milliliters of midozalam before they chuck the bottle, the vial, away.
Someone who is slightly less diligent, a little less conscientious, might assume that one of the nurses will do it.
By the night they sprang that retirement party on me, I had everything I needed.
Chapter Eleven
Emmy
Hi lovely,
I’ve tried calling and texting a few times, but I know how busy you are. I just wanted a chat, really. I thought I might be able to steal you away at Coco’s birthday, but you were so busy. I’m sorry if I seemed a bit subdued. Perhaps you guessed? You have always been so good at reading people, knowing the right thing to say—so maybe you knew, but didn’t think it was the right time to ask. I don’t suppose it was, really.
I have been thinking for a long time about how to tell you what I am about to—whether to share it at all. This will sound crazy, but I think I’ve been a bit embarrassed maybe, a bit ashamed. I have to open up now, though, as I feel like there’s a huge part of my life, a huge part of me, that you just don’t know about. I feel that by denying it, I am denying that those little lives we lost ever had the right to exist at all, when actually they’re as important as if they were here right now.
We’ve had three miscarriages, Em. And that pain, and the guilt and the desperation—they just don’t disappear. I can be happy one minute, or p
erhaps not quite happy but not achingly sad, and then it will just hit me. Three people who would have been part of our lives, just gone. The first pregnancy didn’t make it past twelve weeks. A missed miscarriage, they call it. We had no bleeding, nothing. There we were at the first appointment, holding each other’s hands, waiting to see the heartbeat. There was none. It’s amazing how impassive the faces of the people who do the scans are, isn’t it? I guess they must see it all the time. I had to have an operation for that one.
Then it happened again. We were away for the weekend in Norfolk, and I started bleeding as we were walking along the beach. The next we lost at twenty weeks. Nobody can tell us why it happened. The hope is the worst, I think. The hope that you try not to nurture from the moment that little blue line appears, but that finds its way out at night when you start to dream what it’ll be like to be lying there with your baby in your arms. I haven’t said anything before now because it’s just so hard to find the words. Maybe there are no words. Who knows if these are even the right ones? All I know is that I have tried everything else—so maybe telling my oldest friend is the only way to heal.
The NHS doesn’t fund IVF where we live, and we don’t have the money to pay for it ourselves, and anyway, I don’t think I can go through the heartache of losing another life. But can that really just be it? Forever?
I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m emailing you this. Perhaps it would feel less like mad rambling if we could talk it through face-to-face? I really miss you. Could we meet soon for a coffee or a drink?