The Other Half of Augusta Hope

by Joanna Glen

And gave it to Diego.

  Who wrapped it in a tissue.

  And later gave it to me because he couldn’t bear to have it.

  ‘Did she drown inside me?’ said Julia.

  ‘We don’t know exactly,’ said the midwife. ‘It’s very unusual.’

  ‘Unusual?’ said Julia.

  She looked down at her little dead baby.

  She started singing.

  She sang ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ at her.

  Up above the world so high,

  Like a diamond in the sky.

  Twinkle twinkle little star.

  How I wonder what you are.

  She rocked her in her arms.

  Then she stopped.

  She said, ‘This is ridiculous.’

  She looked strange and far away, Diego said.

  ‘Where did you come from?’ she whispered to the baby.

  ‘Why did you leave me?’ she said.

  Then she said, ‘Where shall I put her?’

  ‘Shall we take her away?’ said the midwife.

  ‘No,’ said Julia. ‘Put her here in this plastic thing next to me.’

  ‘The cot?’

  ‘Is that a cot?’ said Julia.

  ‘I don’t like looking,’ said Diego. ‘Do you mind if I don’t look?’

  ‘It’s like the chick incubator,’ said Julia. ‘Do you remember?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Would you like to take a photo?’ said the midwife.

  ‘Yes,’ said Julia.

  ‘I don’t know if I can,’ said Diego.

  ‘You have to,’ said Julia. ‘From lots of different angles. Every single bit of her. Undo the sheet. Don’t miss anything. So we’ll never ever forget any part of her.’

  Her tiny snub nose, that’s what struck me.

  And the whorls of her perfect little ears.

  Like ammonites.

  ‘I want to dress her,’ said Julia.

  ‘Granny made you a cardigan, Rose,’ she said to the dead baby.

  The midwife helped her put it on, which was difficult, the left arm, the fiddly little fingers, in particular.

  The cardigan had a satin ribbon, which she tied in a bow.

  ‘I couldn’t get the bow right,’ she said to me.

  ‘Her arms were like dolls’ arms, but her skin was all flaky,’ she said.

  ‘It was seeing her in Mum’s cardigan,’ she said. ‘That’s when it hit me.’

  She let out the most heart-rending cry, that’s what Diego said.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said to the baby. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m just so so sorry.’

  Over and over again.

  ‘Everything about her was perfect,’ she said to me. ‘Except that she was dead.’

  I held her in my arms.

  ‘I could taste my tears,’ she said. ‘They came in big waves, and I couldn’t get rid of the taste of salt – whatever I ate. I scrubbed at my tongue with a toothbrush, and I made it bleed. But I could still taste the salt, mixed up with the blood.’

  We had been poised.

  On the cusp.

  Of something.

  But we got something else.

  The Moses basket lay empty, its blankets tidily folded.

  The day after Rose was born dead, my father had a stroke. His face split in two along the hairline crack which I saw coming the night that Mr Green watched his house fall down, and my father lost the left side of his body too.

  Julia had also split in two.

  They sewed the tear at the opening of her vagina with needle and thread.

  But there was no needle and thread for her soul.

  They buried Rose in a tiny green rectangular coffin.

  Because green is the colour of life.

  Julia planted a rose bush so that roses would grow from her dead baby, and butterflies would fly above and settle on the pinky sepia petals – above the thorns.

  ‘Talk to me, Julia,’ I said. ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘Words are no good,’ she said.

  My novel had stalled.

  Because the rose farmer didn’t have any words either.

  Julia sat with the patchwork quilt, feeling the textures of the different fabric hexagons with her fingers, rubbing them against her cheek, which was sweating.

  Diego said he was going to bed.

  I said goodnight to him.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said when I got up to leave. ‘There’s that folding bed in Rose’s room. I put it in there in case she was unsettled in the night. I didn’t want to disturb Diego if he had work in the morning. But really I think I wanted to sleep next to her. To check she was OK. To keep looking at her – do you know what I mean?’

  I didn’t.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jules,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to say to help you.’

  ‘Nothing helps,’ she said. ‘Because I’d planned my whole life being with her.’

  She sat staring at the television.

  ‘My whole life,’ she said again.

  I’m not sure I understood then how a tiny baby inside you, who you’d never met, could take up the whole of the rest of your life.

  We sat watching the news, on repeat.

  ‘Shall we go to bed, Jules?’ I said. ‘It’s late. And Diego will be waiting for you.’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said.

  Her lips trembled, and she flicked through the channels.

  We watched the headlines again.

  President Poroshenko declares a unilateral ceasefire in Ukraine.

  Again.

  Then he declared it again.

  ‘I can’t remember what unilateral means …’ said Julia.

  ‘Affecting one group or one person,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘Come on, Jules,’ I said.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Please. Not yet. Don’t make me.’

  We sat saying nothing.

  ‘Can you turn the telly off, Aug?’ she said. ‘I can’t stand that advert.’

  It was a family in a kitchen.

  I turned it off.

  ‘I can’t stand the silence,’ she said.

  ‘Shall I turn the telly back on?’ I said.

  ‘Not that kitchen,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe we should go into the garden,’ I said. ‘It’s so hot.’

  We sat on the new swing seat in the dark, and we rocked back and forward, sitting together side by side, with our thighs touching.

  Flesh on flesh, slightly sweaty.

  ‘I imagined that I’d be out here all summer, sitting here with her, rocking. So happy.’

  I nodded.

  ‘So happy,’ she said.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  A car drove into next door’s drive.

  ‘He’s very late,’ I said.

  The door slammed.

  ‘He works shifts,’ said Julia. ‘That’s his normal life. Everyone else’s lives go on the same.’

  We heard his key in the side door.

  ‘That’s why I bought it,’ said Julia. ‘So it would rock. And also so the shade would keep the sun off her head.’

  We sat in the dark, rocking back and forward. The night sky was pale with clouds, and between them, the moon peeped out, like a fat face.

  ‘They say babies like rocking because it reminds them of being in the womb,’ said Julia.

  I nodded.

  ‘She was so beautiful,’ she said. ‘I wish you’d seen her.’

  ‘I wish I’d seen her,’ I said.

  And Julia started to cry again.

  ‘I’m too frightened to go to bed,’ she said. ‘I’m too frightened to close my eyes.’

  Diego came stumbling into the back garden.

  ‘You could have told me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know where the hell you were.’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ said Julia. ‘Go back to bed.’

  ‘Come to bed with me,’ said Diego.

  She shook her head.

  ‘She’s too frightened,’ I said.
<
br />   ‘What of?’ said Diego.

  ‘Closing my eyes,’ said Julia.

  ‘I’ll be with you,’ said Diego.

  ‘Not when I close my eyes,’ she said. ‘That’s when all of us are on our own.’

  Neither Diego or I spoke.

  ‘Rose is all alone now,’ she said. ‘Without me.’

  Diego took her hands and he pulled her up from the swing seat, and he tried to hold her hand, but she wouldn’t hold his.

  ‘I’m frightened of my life, Aug,’ she said. ‘What it’s going to be now.’

  They disappeared through the back door into the kitchen.

  I went to Rose’s room.

  As I walked, something grazed the top of my head.

  I jumped.

  The basket of the hot-air balloon.

  I turned on the light.

  The empty balloon basket was swinging back and forward in the breeze from the fanlight window.

  I stood by the window.

  The rose curtains were open and I stared into Higgots Close, where every light but one was off. There was a guy upstairs, sitting at a computer in a yellow glowing window. I wondered what he was doing.

  The tiny black cat breathed in and out, in and out, on the window sill, as if it were alive.

  Julia, her breasts swelling with unwanted milk, which made dry streams inside her bra, had taken to playing my father’s old records on a vintage turntable that Diego had bought her on eBay.

  When I think of that time, I see the black album cover lying on the carpet – Art Garfunkel’s shock of blond hair, and Paul Simon’s face, half-light and half-shadow. I had the feeling that we were deep in the shadows – ‘the valley of the shadow of death,’ said my grandmother.

  Julia took the needle, and it crackled with dust, and there went the song again, track 4, Homeward Bound, she was sitting in the railway station …

  ‘Why do you play this one so much?’ I said. ‘Do you want me to take you somewhere on the train? We could go up beyond Durham and walk across the causeway to Holy Island. Or we could get the Eurostar to France and go back to Quimper – what do you think? Do you want to get away? Is that it, Julia?’

  Round and round went the vinyl album. Julia would take the metal arm, replace the scratchy little needle at the outer circumference, and Homeward Bound would start again.

  I wondered whether home was no longer here, no longer me, no longer any of us.

  My mother would watch the doves fly through the garden at number 1.

  ‘Do you want to fly kites, Jules?’ I said.

  ‘Or go for a picnic on Tattershall Common?’

  ‘Get drunk on cider?’

  ‘Make a fire behind the shed?’

  ‘Augusta,’ she said. ‘Can you shut the fuck up?’

  I didn’t tell anyone she’d said that.

  But it kept coming at me. Like the needle was stuck in a groove.

  I couldn’t sleep for hearing it.

  It made me tremble.

  I’d lost my confidence that I could make her better.

  I’d lost my confidence that I knew her at all.

  I couldn’t find our warm secret places.

  They’d evaporated.

  All we had was the cold, quiet, separate present.

  I crept in and out of the maisonette in Higgots Close, treading my way through the thick air in the hall, making her cheese-and-ham pancakes, which used to be her best thing, but I feared that everything I did was wrong.

  My mother was also split in two.

  When she was with my father at the hospital, she felt she should be with Julia. And when she was with Julia, my father kept phoning her and speaking in his new slurry voice so that she couldn’t understand what he was saying. But he was always saying, Where are you?

  ‘It’s like a tug of war,’ she said.

  ‘Stay with him, for God’s sake,’ said Julia. ‘No one can help me.’

  ‘You’re very brusque, darling,’ said my mother.

  ‘Is she brusque with you, Augusta?’ she asked me.

  I said no.

  Because it hurt me too much to say yes.

  I felt now that I would never, could never, leave her.

  Yet I couldn’t bear to be with her, that’s the truth.

  My mother made batches and batches of cupcakes, icing them in pastel colours and covering them in small sugared flowers and white rabbits left over from Easter. She rushed to the corner shop and bought several varieties of polish. She polished the furniture, and Diego’s shoes.

  ‘Please don’t put roses on the cakes,’ said Julia.

  ‘You don’t need to polish my shoes, Jilly,’ said Diego. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  So she polished my father’s shoes instead, and left them in a tidy row by the back door, though he only ever wore his brown corduroy slippers, which sat on the little plastic foot-rest of the wheelchair, with his feet inside them.

  My mother and I ate cakes in my father’s grey ward, where old men cried and burped and asked to go home. Then we ate cakes in Julia’s conservatory as the doves crapped above us, and their guano dripped like paint down the slanted glass.

  I went on working at the library.

  I hovered about the self-help section looking up Stillborn Babies and Loss of Speech after Strokes.

  I longed to get away.

  I felt full of guilt.

  I wished I hadn’t gone on about dying.

  I wished I hadn’t read out bits of Blood Wedding.

  I wished I hadn’t done my dissertation on Symbols of Death in Spanish Literature of the Early Twentieth Century.

  I wished I’d never chosen Burundi as my favourite country.

  I wished I’d married Olly Macintosh and moved to Cirencester.

  Far far away.

  And worn green tweed jackets and tended horses.

  And had a baby, myself.

  And from where, on the phone, I would have said, in a calm and measured voice, ‘I can’t leave the horses/my husband/the farm/my baby. Do send Julia lots of love.’

  My father came home in his wheelchair, and I slid him up the new metal ramp and into the porch.

  My mother was given compassionate leave from the pet shop.

  Diego was given compassionate leave from the council.

  We went on eating my mother’s cakes.

  We all put on half a stone.

  I dreamt of La Higuera.

  Julia had counselling and drugs.

  More counselling.

  More drugs.

  We went to Old John Brown’s to watch the sun rise because we couldn’t sleep, and when we walked home, the level crossing gates came down. We stood waiting in silence.

  I tried to think of something to say, which made me nervous, aiming for words which were not too sad, not too happy. Better to mention the baby? Or better not to? Call her the baby? Call her Rose? Tell her how sad I was that she didn’t invite me to the funeral. They didn’t invite anyone.

  I wanted to put my arm through hers.

  But I didn’t.

  Her hands were in her pockets.

  The tension bubbled into possible sentences I might say.

  I saw us, through the ages, waiting by the gates, growing taller, changing school uniforms. I imagined us on fast forward, like those sped-up films you see on nature documentaries, about the growth of trees.

  Blossoming, flourishing, that’s what we expect.

  We didn’t expect this.

  Nobody does round here.

  The train sped past, passengers a blur, zooming towards London, as Julia and I stood.

  ‘Do trains remind you of time?’ I said to Julia.

  She laughed.

  The sound of it shocked me.

  I hadn’t heard her laughter for a while.

  ‘Do you remember when we got drunk before I left for Durham?’ I said.

  Julia creased her eyes like someone looking for something they can’t see.

  ‘You must remember. I read y
ou the Lotos-Eaters poem by Tennyson. Time driveth onward fast …’

  ‘Oh, Aug,’ she said. ‘Will you never change?’

  The steady beat of the disappearing train faded into silence.

  ‘If trains do remind you of time,’ I said, anxious and tripping on my words, ‘it’s good news, Julia. We move on. It doesn’t seem as if we will, but we do. These days I hardly think of Olly Macintosh. You will have more babies. You will be the best mother in the world.’

  The train noise was eaten by the air as the gates came up, and we walked through, on our way back to Willow Crescent.

  I shouldn’t have mentioned Olly Macintosh.

  How could I think of comparing poncy Olly Macintosh with his ridiculous floppy hair to her dead baby?

  We walked on in silence, and Julia came to a stop on the pavement, outside the party shop and the jeweller’s.

  She took a big breath, hesitated, then took another breath.

  She put her hand on my upper arm.

  ‘I don’t want to move on, Aug,’ she said. ‘That’s the point. Don’t you get that? I don’t want to hardly think of Rose. Having more babies isn’t the point at all. The point is that I killed her.’

  I stopped.

  I breathed.

  I gathered myself together.

  And I said, ‘What do you mean you killed her?’

  ‘She was alive and swimming about inside me. But there you are. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Like Grandma says.’

  ‘What was the first eye then? The first tooth?’

  ‘There was a boy. And I didn’t save him. I didn’t save him.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘When we went to Spain. The morning we had breakfast on the beach. Saw the sun rise. And you didn’t come. That’s the thing I never told you. The thing that happened. Here’s the newspaper cutting. The photo. I cut it out. You have it.’

  She took it out of her pocket.

  ‘This is the newspaper Dad didn’t let us buy. I stole it from the shop,’ said Julia, handing it to me.

  ‘I knew something was wrong and I kept asking you. But you wouldn’t tell me. Why wouldn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I promised Dad I wouldn’t.’

  There was our special spot, the holey rocks, the pine trees, the white sand, the buried patera boat, there were the sunrise fish clouds – and there was a black man, face down on the beach.

  ‘He was probably one of the guys from the building site,’ I said. ‘Sleeping on the beach. You didn’t need to save him.’

  ‘Not him,’ she said, and she was white with the fluorescent light of the street lamp. ‘No, there was someone out at sea, I’m sure there was. There was just his hand. Like your poem.’