by Dani Atkins
I watched Noah race down the length of the hall towards the lounge, seeking the TV’s remote control with the accuracy of an Exocet missile. I waited for a moment, until I heard the familiar theme tune playing – as usual – a little too loudly, knowing the volume would provide an effective mask for our conversation. I turned to the man who inhabited a curious no man’s land: no longer my current husband, and not quite yet my ex.
‘These came,’ I said, reaching for the small bundle of mail I’d been collecting. I no longer wondered if the reason so much of his post was still delivered here was that subconsciously Pete intended to come back. In reality it was probably because he was slow to realise that things like re-routing your mail don’t magically happen, courtesy of internet elves. Paperwork and organisation had always been my thing, not his. ‘Classic control freak’, he used to tease, softening the criticism with a kiss or a hug. Pete’s domain had always been the practical, hands-on tasks. These days I stopped my own dripping taps and eliminated my own spiders. Pete was just taking a little longer learning to pick up the reins.
He took the letters from my outstretched hand. No touching this time, he made sure of that. One by one he flicked through the pile. ‘Bill. Bill. Bill. Rubbish. Rubbish. Rub—’ His fingers stilled on the envelope I had deliberately placed at the bottom of the stack. He plucked it from the others, his eyes fixed on the white oblong, which bore the name of not one addressee, but two: Mr Peter Vaughan and Ms Eliza Bland. Every year I wondered why we never bothered telling them we were now married – and had been for the last eight years. It was ironic, we’d left it so long to ask them to update their records that their mistake was now about to become the truth again. Would I take back my maiden name? It was one of a thousand questions about my future I couldn’t face answering.
There was only one place that still addressed us in this way. Pete didn’t need to slip his finger beneath the seal to know who the letter was from or what it was about.
‘Oh,’ he said, his voice – the one I’d always been able to read so accurately – suddenly a mystery to me. ‘Is it that time already?’
I nodded, not quite sure if my voice was steady enough for use.
‘What do you want to do?’ he asked, his voice low, and before I had the chance to say shouldn’t we be making that decision together, he felled me with his next words. ‘How much is it?’ It was the first time in ten years he’d ever asked that question, and it cut like a knife that he did so now.
I gave a sad shrug. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t want to open it without you.’
His eyes asked Why?, but thankfully his voice remained silent. He tore at the seal and extracted the folded letter, tilting it slightly so we could both read it.
The wording from the clinic was the same every year. For them, it was just one more piece of business; a formality. But this year our automatic ‘Yes, of course’ and ‘We’ll find the money from somewhere’ was no longer a foregone conclusion.
‘Three hundred pounds,’ Pete said quietly, his focus on the bottom line of the letter, while my own lingered on the question they asked us at this time every year: do we wish to continue with another year’s storage for our frozen embryos?
My eyes lifted to Pete’s. I had no idea what he was thinking, but for me the feelings were still the same. There were two potential people stored in a tank of liquid nitrogen, just waiting for us to release them. They were Noah’s brothers or sisters, or could be. And yes, I knew we’d run out of money to continue with further rounds of IVF, having only just clawed our way out of the debt our previous efforts had got us in. But somehow, from somewhere, each year we’d found a way – however tough things were– to keep ticking the box that said ‘Retain the embryos’.
‘Who knows, we might just win the lottery,’ Pete used to say. And even though he’d never been a gambling man, I had loved the way he believed there was still a chance we might one day have the house full of children we’d both always dreamt of.
Pete scratched absently at the space just below his left ear; it was something he always did when faced with a problem. I hated the fact that what had once been a source of hope for both of us was now an issue that had to be resolved. A problem. The contract we’d signed with the clinic ten years earlier had made it clear that we both had to be in agreement about the outcome of any frozen embryos. Who would arbitrate now if I said yes, and he said no?
Pete carefully refolded the letter and slipped it back into its envelope. ‘I’ll find it from somewhere. Send them a cheque.’
Words were beyond me, and there were now two Petes standing on my doorstep instead of one. I addressed them both in a voice that was little more than a whisper. ‘Thank you.’
All the Petes shrugged, because by now he’d quadrupled. ‘You never know what’s going to happen,’ he said, turning away and stepping back down onto the front path. ‘We might just win the lottery.’
I closed the door behind him and leant weakly back against it, feeling in some strange way that we already had.
*
By the age of thirty-four, I thought my life was figured out. Pete and I had weathered all kinds of storms over the last fourteen years. We’d survived the years of bad jobs and no money, and could look back on them with nostalgia – even the early days in that shoebox of a flat above the takeaway shop. Pete had been on an apprentice’s wage at the garage back then, and my monthly take-home pay as a receptionist hadn’t been much better. But when I look back on those days I remember only the love and the laughter… so much laughter.
We faced every challenge life threw at us together, including infertility. I’ve heard that it can sometimes break couples; that relationships can crumble under the strain. Not ours. ‘We’re titanium strong,’ I used to say, tempting the Fates, which I now realise were just biding their time to bring us down. After a struggle that brought us even closer together, Noah had finally arrived eight years ago, and turned us from a couple into a family.
And that joyous time, when everything should have been wonderful, was when – if I’d been listening closely enough – the first distant rumblings of thunder might have been heard. Those early days of parenthood hadn’t been smooth sailing. And a lot of that was probably my fault. I’d been an anxious mum and Noah had been a fractious baby, suffering badly with eczema and allergies throughout his toddler years. We’d practically had our own parking spot in the doctor’s surgery in those early years, but then every mum worries about their newborn, don’t they?
It’s unusual for a building to be toppled by a single blow. The same can be said for a marriage. There were two wrecking balls that brought ours down: money issues and my out-of-control protectiveness of Noah. Two years ago, the first cracks had started to appear, growing a little deeper with every red-inked bank statement. The debts were what started to drag us under. They were a mobster, encasing our feet in concrete shoes. The descent from having everything we wanted to realising we might be broken beyond repair had been shockingly fast.
‘Did you have a good time this weekend?’ I asked Noah, tucking the duvet securely around him; a small boy-shaped Egyptian mummy, encased in a Spiderman quilt. I bent to kiss the soft peach of his cheek, secretly sneaking in a quick hit of cleanly washed little boy.
‘Yeah. We went to the cinema, and then to the park to play football, and we ate lots of pizza and ice cream and doughnuts.’
I did my best to keep my face neutral and not register my disappointment that Pete persisted in following the Homer Simpson eating plan on his weekends with Noah. All that did was make my healthy-eating food regime seem dull in comparison. That was the way of it though. Noah’s weekends with Pete were full of fun things, father-and-son bonding things. It wasn’t the first time that the realisation panicked me. What if one day Noah asked if he could live with his dad instead of me? It seemed unthinkable, but after witnessing the disintegration of a marriage I’d thought was indestructible, nothing was impossible.
We’d waited so long to have h
im in our lives that losing Noah became my greatest nightmare. And there it was; the missile that had helped shoot down a marriage we’d thought was rock solid. My overprotectiveness, which at times had bordered on an obsession, and my failure to realise I was pushing away the one person who was trying to help me. I became the problem.
*
It was inevitable that the dream would return that night. It had a tendency to find the cracks in the walls I’d constructed around me and drive straight through them whenever it got the chance. It always started in exactly the same way…
The sun was hot on the back of my neck as I walked across the gravelled car park. I leant forward and adjusted the canopy on the pushchair, making sure that Noah was completely shaded. Not that he was in any danger of burning, for I’d practically dunked him in a vat of factor fifty sunscreen before we’d left the house. Still, it pays to be careful.
‘Shall we pick Daddy some lovely fruit?’ I asked my two-year-old, who was singing happily away to himself as we crossed to the entrance of the farm shop. Noah smiled broadly up at me and nodded, with absolutely no idea what I was talking about. To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure of the set-up here myself as this was the first time I’d visited the ‘Pick Your Own’ nursery. It was also to be the last.
‘Basket or punnet?’ asked the pretty young assistant in her vivid green apron, holding both options aloft for me to choose from.
‘Basket,’ I said decisively, smiling down at Noah. ‘That way we can pick even more.’
‘We close in an hour,’ the young girl reminded me. ‘So make sure you’re back here by then so we can weigh the fruit you’ve picked and work out the bill.’
I felt deliciously rustic with the basket swinging from my hand as we left the shop and headed towards the rows of fruit trees and bushes in the adjacent field. The lateness of the hour meant that the only other pickers we saw were all heading back towards the shop and car park. I glanced at my watch, realising we were going to be late getting back home, so delved into my pocket to send Pete a message. My searching fingers found only a neatly folded tissue and some wisps of fluff, but no phone.
‘Damn,’ I muttered, hesitating for a minute and looking back towards the car park. I’d left my phone on the passenger seat while I was strapping Noah into his buggy, and had forgotten to pick it up. I debated going back for it, but it was a long hot walk over uneven ground, and the rows of strawberry bushes were right there in front of us. I chose not to return to the car.
Ignoring the nearest bushes, I decided to walk to the furthest row of shrubs before starting to pick the fruit, imagining they’d be the least depleted by other pickers. The light was dappled beneath an overhead lattice of grape vines, although the late afternoon sun was still surprisingly hot. Despite my constant stream of chatter, I wasn’t surprised when I peered beneath the pushchair’s canopy to see that Noah had drifted off to sleep.
I lost track of time as I began plucking fruit from the bushes, picking far more than we could probably use, unless I decided to go into serious jam production. Eventually the basket became too heavy for the crook of my arm, so I moved Noah’s legs to one side and wedged it on the footrest of the pushchair. Noah didn’t even stir, and I remember staring down at him, marvelling as I always did at the incredible length of his long dark lashes, fluttering against the soft skin of his cheeks as he slept.
The basket was almost full when I noticed a large cluster of ripe strawberries at ground level. I put the brake on the pushchair, even though the ground was perfectly flat, and moved a few steps away to pick the last pieces of fruit to complete the basket.
I thought at first he was giggling. What kind of mother does that make me? How could I possibly have mistaken my child gasping for breath for laughter? I was kneeling on the grass and turned to look over my shoulder when I heard him. The smile poised and ready on my lips froze into an expression of terror. Something was wrong; terribly, terribly wrong.
Noah’s face was blotchy. Only a minute ago it had been a soft pink colour, now it was red with fiery raised splotches, most of which had erupted around his mouth. Even as I looked at them, his eyes were starting to swell shut. In each pudgy hand, Noah held the lush red strawberries he’d taken from the basket, their fateful juice still dribbling down his chin and onto the white of his T-shirt. It looked horribly like blood. But far worse than his appearance were the long wheezing gasps he was making as he struggled to breathe.
The handful of strawberries I’d gathered flew in every direction, exploding like bright red shrapnel all around us as I ran back to Noah. I threw the basket of fruit off the footrest, but the damage its contents had caused was already done. Neither Pete nor I had a history of allergies and I’d never seen anyone in anaphylactic shock before, but I had absolutely no doubt that was what I was witnessing right now. Noah, who’d never eaten a strawberry in his life before today, was paying the price – the very worst price imaginable – for my negligence.
My fingers struggled on the harness of the pushchair as I tried to release him. Every second counted, and I was losing precious ones as I fumbled ineptly on a clasp I did up more than twenty times a day without even thinking about it.
‘It’s okay, sweetie, it’s okay. Mummy’s got you,’ I said through terrified sobs as I finally succeeded in freeing Noah from the buggy. I pulled a bottle of water from beneath the pram and poured it quickly over Noah’s lips, which were already swollen to twice their usual size. But it was only when I opened his mouth, to swill out the remains of the juice that was like poison to him, that I realised how much trouble we were in. His tongue was so enlarged it filled his tiny mouth, practically obscuring his airway.
‘Help!’ I screamed into the deserted rows of plants and shrubs. ‘Somebody please help me. My baby’s choking!’
I prayed for the sound of another voice, or the pounding of feet running our way, but all I could hear was the gentle song of bird call and the lazy buzz of honey bees.
Abandoning the pram and my handbag, I held Noah tightly against my chest and began to run.
*
Sometimes the dream ended there, with me sprinting along the endless rows of fruit bushes, the farm shop always tantalisingly just out of reach in the distance.
Sometimes I made it to the shop, only to find the ‘Closed’ sign swinging on the door and the lights turned off. In that version of the nightmare I would race towards the only vehicle left in the car park – mine – with Noah gasping for breath in my arms, only to discover the doors were locked, and my car keys out of reach in the depths of my abandoned handbag. Through the windscreen I could see my phone light up with an incoming call from Pete as Noah began to grow floppy in my arms.
*
In the way dreams have a habit of doing, the ringing phone morphed seamlessly into the trilling of my alarm clock. It was probably my imagination, but it sounded almost irritated that I hit the ‘snooze’ button three times before finally hauling myself out of bed. I hadn’t always been like this, but sleep and I appeared to have fallen out of love with each other lately. I no longer leapt from my bed with a spring to my step or a glowing brightness in my green eyes. The reflection I glimpsed in my bedroom mirror looked more like a bloodhound who’d indulged in yet another night on the tiles. It would improve after a reviving shower, but that particular remedy would have to wait a little longer.
‘Muuuuuuum!’ wailed Noah, as I stumbled blearily into the bathroom. I backed out, with a quick apology, surprised to find him even awake at this hour, much less already in the shower. Confused, I pulled the bathroom door shut with a click. Eight was an awkward age for boys, and these days my presence in the bathroom was no longer welcome. It was a brief glimpse through a door of a place no sensible parent wants to visit. Puberty. My mouth twisted into a small wry smile. All too soon we would need to be having the kind of talk that was probably going to embarrass the hell out of both of us. Maybe that was something Pete should tackle on his own, I mused, as I walked to the top of the st
airs and saw the laundry basket, with its lid bulging open. Having spent most of the previous day catching up on the washing, I had no idea how it could be full to overflowing so soon. Spiderman’s face stared up at me from the wicker depths.
A small alarm bell sounded in the back of my head – one I had no intention of pushing the snooze button on. As kids go, Noah was pretty fantastic. He kept his bedroom tidy, and could navigate a route for dirty plates to the dishwasher with only one request from me. He even remembered to put the toilet seat back down again (better than his father ever did). But still, changing his bed sheets was a new and unexpected development. I pushed open the door to his bedroom and sure enough saw that Robert Downey Jr was now on Noah’s bed – not literally, of course, just his Iron Man persona. I think I already knew the answer as I returned to the laundry basket and gathered up the bedding in my arms. He’d buried the damp sheet in the very middle of the bundle, and my heart broke to think of him carefully trying to conceal it from me. I glanced back over my shoulder at the closed bathroom door, because the last thing Noah would want or need was to come out now and find the evidence he was trying so hard to hide right there in my arms.
By the time he joined me in the kitchen I was sitting at the scrubbed pine table, a cup of coffee and a slice of toast I had no appetite for on the table before me. A tiny piece of my heart splintered off when I saw his quick nervous glance at the washing machine. Flashes of red and blue patterned duvet cover were just visible beneath an ocean of white suds. He didn’t say anything and I would sooner have lived through a dozen root canals than utter a single word to make him feel uncomfortable.
I pinned my jolliest smile on my face, and reached for the cereal box. He watched me carefully as the golden clusters hit the bowl. He looked like a nervous gerbil biting his lower lip anxiously, the way he does if anyone should happen to ask him ‘what’s nine times seven?’. That one I could help him with, but with this… I was suddenly helpless. Noah hadn’t wet the bed in over five years. While Pete and I had been busy congratulating ourselves on our civilised and polite separation, assuring ourselves that we were still committed members of Team Vaughan, how had we failed to see that one member of the team was struggling? I needed time to think about what I should do now, and suddenly the leisurely morning I had planned was about to be replaced with one spent on my laptop googling for a solution.
