by Jill Childs
Your blotchy scrunched-up face the day we carried you home from hospital, holding you as fearfully as if you were glass. Richard, sitting on the settee and cradling you, your tiny head resting in the crook of his arm, gazing at you with so much tenderness that it stopped my breath. Your first wobbly steps in the garden, pushing a toy buggy piled with furry bears and rabbits.
A wall of such sadness rises up and knocks the breath from my body that I start to shake, my legs juddering on the bed.
I whisper to you, trying not to cry: ‘Don’t leave me, Gracie. Please. Stay with me. You’re my whole world, my love. Please. Don’t you know how much I love you?’
Then I see it. Your eyelids flutter and the tip of your tongue pokes out between your lips and a flicker of life, real life, comes back into your face. I pull away from you, jumping off the bed, and lean on the red emergency button and, at the same moment, the machine on the far side of the bed starts to bleep.
Footsteps slap hurriedly down the corridor and voices come with them and a tall, dark-haired nurse runs in, one I haven’t seen before. She takes one look at you and calls back over her shoulder to someone else and rushes to the bed, snatching up the clipboard from its base and scribbling some readings from the screens. Even as she does so, another nurse appears with the American doctor and someone else takes me forcefully by the shoulders and moves me back, away from the bed, to give them all room.
Not long afterwards, Richard appears in the doorway, his face tense. A nurse, understanding nothing about us, propels me towards him and he opens his arms and holds me, looking over my shoulder at you as you lie motionless in bed, and at the frantically working, rushing medics suddenly filling the room with their movements, their short, sharp, urgent exchanges.
I’m crying now, weeping into your father’s collar, bathing in the old familiar smell of his skin. I press my face into his neck and the crying veers in and out of wild laughter and he pats my back awkwardly and murmurs: ‘Hush, Jen. Calm down.’
I don’t care. I know what’s happened. The doctors do their best but they only know so much. You were lost in a place where even they couldn’t reach you and somehow, even there, you felt me and heard me and came back to me, back to this troubled world just to be with me. I don’t know how that’s possible but it is. It really is.
Eight
You progressed rapidly after that, moving first out of intensive care and soon, in a matter of days, there was talk of your coming home. All the tests came back clear. The bleed dispersed, the swelling subsided and your brain function was normal. The doctors spoke, some more robustly than others, of a full recovery.
I agreed, at last, to leave you for a few hours each day and for much of the night to go home to shower and change my clothes and sleep. It was during one of those brief returns to the house that a pair of police officers turned up and began asking questions about the accident.
‘So the driver, Ella Hicks, I understand she’s your ex-husband’s partner? Did she often have sole charge of your daughter?’
The police officer speaking was middle-aged, her torso further thickened by body armour and an arsenal of equipment. Something in her manner made me anxious.
‘Not often.’ I shook my head, vehement. ‘If I’d known she’d take Gracie out on her own, I wouldn’t have agreed. I thought she’d be with her father all weekend.’
The police officer narrowed her eyes. ‘Why wouldn’t you have agreed?’
‘Well, she has no business. I mean, Gracie’s not hers.’
They both scrutinised me. A young Asian policeman sitting beside me, his hat on the carpet at our feet and his leather gloves inside it, made a note. He kept quiet, the more junior of the two.
‘I understand that.’ The policewoman leaned forward, probing. ‘But why would you have objected to her looking after your daughter? Was there anything about her driving specifically that gave rise to concern?’
I searched my mind, trying to think of something.
‘Not really.’ I thought of Ella, confident behind the wheel, risking your life. ‘But I don’t trust her.’
‘You don’t trust her?’
‘No. And I’m right not to. She nearly killed Gracie.’
The policewoman’s eyes bore into me, appraising.
‘You seem to blame Ms Hicks for the collision. I wonder why?’
I felt myself flush. Because I don’t like Ms Hicks. Because she broke up my marriage and stole my husband. Because she’d do anything she could to hurt me.
I shrugged. ‘She was the one driving.’
Her eyes stayed on my face. Beside her, the Asian police officer was alert, his pen poised.
I reached for the mug of tea on the coffee table in front of me and drank a little. My hands shook and the china juddered against my teeth. I used both hands to put it down again.
‘There’ll be a coroner’s inquest, of course. But it should be straightforward.’
‘An inquest?’ I shook my head. ‘Does that mean she’ll face charges?’
‘It’s standard procedure, ma’am. When there’s a fatality. We need to establish the cause of the accident.’
The young Asian flipped his notebook closed and reached for his gloves, his hat.
‘I’m sorry. I know it’s a difficult time.’ The senior officer put a business card on the table beside my mug as she heaved herself to her feet.
‘Who was she?’ I asked. ‘The other driver.’
‘Vanessa Parkes. Twenty years old.’
‘Twenty?’ It shocked me. She was so young. ‘A student?’
‘An estate agent.’
I couldn’t answer. I thought of her mother. Of the call from the police, breaking the news.
‘We’ll see ourselves out.’
I sat very still, following the creak of the floorboards in the hall, the heavy sound of their footsteps, the squeeze of the latch as they closed the door behind them and went down the path to merge with the early evening darkness gathering there.
At once, the house was too silent. I sat on the settee, my legs trembling, unable to move. Neither of them had touched their tea and I wondered why they’d asked for it, if there were some hidden trickery in keeping me busy in the kitchen while they lingered, unobserved, in here.
Finally, I forced my legs to take me upstairs to wash and change before I headed back to the hospital. Your room was hollow with emptiness. I sat for a while in the battered old armchair in the corner and simply looked. Then I made up your bed with clean sheets and arranged the mess of soft toys at the bottom of your bed – kitty cat, puppy, rabbit, bear – all waiting for you to bring them back to life.
Nine
You came home but life stayed far from normal.
For some time, although I was exhausted, I struggled to sleep. My world became a dull blur of night and day. Footsteps in the street woke me, night after night, and I stood at the window, drawing the edge of the curtain round my body, looking out at the dark road and the soft stripes of lamplight along the pavement. Sometimes I thought I saw a figure there in the shadows, looking across the street to our house, and I imagined it was Richard, coming home again too, coming back to us.
When I went back to bed, my body shook as if the mattress were vibrating beneath me. The hard outlines of the wardrobe, the chest of drawers, the bedside table, melted and swayed as I watched.
During the day, I tried to stay calm, for your sake. I delivered you to nursery each morning, collected you each lunchtime, took you to soft play and to the library and to parties. But wherever I went, a shadow hung behind me, just out of sight. I never saw it. I felt it. A feeling or a phantom? I didn’t know. All I knew was that when I turned to catch it, to look it in the eye, there was nothing but empty air.
Inside, I felt as if the physical laws of the universe, which all my life had formed the solid edges of my world, warped and gave way around me. When I think back to that time, my memories are a swirling snowstorm of static with occasional moments of horrible clarity.
Richard sensed something. He was the one who urged me to see a doctor. That in itself gave me hope that he still cared about me, at least a little. In the early days, when we first met, he made me feel so cherished. A beautiful word. He still cherishes you, Gracie. You must believe that. He carried on loving you long after his love for me died.
Do you remember the days before he left us for that awful woman? You slept so badly as a baby and he sat with you in his arms for hours on end, stroking the soft line of your back with tenderness. I’d wake with a start and reach for him across the bed only to find a rumpled absence and then pad through, bleary-eyed, to your room to find him in the armchair, a dark shape in the half-light, patiently caressing you back into sleep.
The doctor said I was experiencing post-traumatic shock. She prescribed tablets to help my nerves, as she put it. I don’t know what was in them but I did take them each night for a while, mostly to please Richard, and gradually the wardrobe and chest of drawers settled back into place and let me sleep a little.
On the surface, we began to return to our old life, you and I, but it was a lie. We had both changed.
All I wanted now was to be with you. The bank agreed to let me take a leave of absence. Unpaid, of course, but I calculated that, if I was careful, we could manage on savings and the money from Richard. It would only be short-term, just until September when you’d start school and pull away from me, into your own world.
So in the afternoons, when you came out of nursery, we spent time together, living simply, just enjoying ourselves. You so nearly left me, my love, and suddenly nothing seemed more precious than being with you. I thought of the last few years and the hours I’d spent in offices, chairing meetings, running training programmes and suddenly I didn’t want to miss another minute of your life.
We read stories and crayoned and, if it was dry enough, we wrapped up warmly and went to the park, with its bouncy animals and seesaws and roundabouts and a brightly coloured train with an engine and carriages to sit inside where we shouted ‘Tickets, please!’ and ‘All aboard for Toyland!’, and imagined chuffing off on adventures.
Life seemed simpler. I realised, for the first time, that most things didn’t matter. If you wouldn’t put your coat on and wanted another story instead, why not? If you threw your spaghetti Bolognese on the floor or smeared finger paint on your clothes, who cared about the mess? You were alive and well and I was so grateful I sometimes felt I couldn’t breathe.
You were different too. It took me a while to realise. I assumed at first that you were quieter because you were still convalescing but it was more than that.
Your drawings changed. You always loved to crayon – well, scribble in multi-colours the way small children do – announcing, if I asked what you were drawing: ‘I’m not drawing, Mummy, I’m writing.’
When you first started, at the age of about two and a half, you only used black. Whole pages of princesses and rabbits and fairies were devastated by thick dark lines, etched with deep concentration by a small scrunched fist. That wasn’t long after Richard had finally packed his bags and, after more than a year of rows and threats and time apart and struggles to reconcile, he’d left for good. I remember worrying that you were prematurely traumatised, that you were becoming the world’s first toddler Goth.
Now, though, you went to the other extreme. You wore the yellow crayon to a blunt stump. You drew with the tip of your tongue sticking out between your lips, lost in your work as deeply as any Michelangelo. I sat at the table with you, colouring neatly and evenly inside the lines by way of example, and watched your passion as you made strong strokes of brightness across the paper, then sat back to consider them, then dipped again back into work.
‘That’s lovely, Gracie.’ I pointed at the streaks across the paper. ‘Look at all that yellow. It’s like sunshine…’
You barely acknowledged me. You were too intent, too serious. You were nearly four years old and you knew your own mind. When a picture was done, ended as abruptly as it began, you pushed it away from you, dropped your crayon and slipped from the chair, running through to the sitting room with the same intense focus with which you did everything, to find something else to do.
And then you started to make extraordinary claims, saying you’d seen things so bizarre I didn’t know what to make of them.
Ten
The first time, it was a cool, bright day and we’d spent the afternoon in the park on the far side of the river. I had more time to spend with you but little money – at least, until I went back to work again – and we often hung about in the park, one of our many sources of free entertainment.
You played on the swings for a while, then rode your scooter up and down the paths, looking like an astronaut in your bulky pink helmet. Finally, we stood together on the embankment and threw bread down to the ducks that waddled far below on the stony shore revealed by low tide.
We had just hurled the last crust and shaken a final rain of crumbs out from the corners of our plastic bag. The mallards and large Canadian geese turned and waddled back towards the water and, one by one, launched themselves into the current, starting to disperse. I reached for you with one hand and, with the other, stuffed the empty bag in my coat pocket.
You tilted your face to the low, white cloud over the river, thoughtful.
‘Mummy, do angels live in the sky?’
I blinked, then stooped to hear you better. ‘Angels?’
Your face was solemn. ‘Can they see us right now? If we wave?’
Below, the remaining geese squawked and pecked round each other’s feet. You swung my hand in yours, pulling me forward.
‘No, my love,’ I said. ‘Angels aren’t real like that. Not like us.’
‘Yes, they are.’ You looked cross. ‘I met one.’
I steadied my breath. You had been known to tell tall stories. You didn’t mean to lie. You were still working out the difference between what was real and what was imagined. I remember finding a page torn out of a book and saying sternly: ‘Did you do this, Gracie?’ and you looked me right in the eye and said: ‘No, Mummy, Bear did.’
But this seemed different. I steered you to one of the wrought-iron benches on the other side of the path and sat you down beside me.
‘What do you mean, Gracie?’
‘You made him laugh.’ You looked thoughtful, remembering. ‘In the hospital. Sticking mouse’s ear back on the wall.’
My breath stopped in my throat. ‘In the hospital?’
You smiled, gave an emphatic, exaggerated nod. ‘Typical Mummy. That’s what he said. Always trying to put things right.’
The lorries and double-decker buses made dark silhouettes against the sky as they followed the rounded arc of the bridge. I thought of the peeling picture of Minnie Mouse and the way I’d stood on the table to press it back. How did you know? Did someone else see and tell you? That was the only way I could explain it.
I slowed myself down, choosing my words with care.
‘Gracie, do you remember when you were in the play at nursery? Angels are a lovely part of Christmas. But we don’t actually meet them. Not nowadays.’
You frowned, squirmed, looked at your tangled fingers.
‘But I did.’
I sighed. ‘Maybe you had a very special dream, Gracie. When you were in the car.’
You shook your head and pushed out your lower lip. ‘It wasn’t a dream. It was real.’
You looked away from me, out over the water where seagulls were swooping.
I steadied myself, trying not to get cross. ‘Sometimes I have dreams that feel very real.’
‘No!’ You screwed up your mouth.
I reached out and put my hand on your back and stroked you between your hunched shoulders. You shrugged me off, annoyed.
‘OK. Tell me about it then.’
You glanced at me, judging whether it was worth saying more. A young woman in a tracksuit jogged past, listening to music. A moment later, a dog nosed round ou
r feet, sniffing, and you drew up your legs, frightened of being licked.
When the dog’s owner passed, calling the dog after him, I tried again.
‘So where did you see him?’
You hesitated. ‘Remember when we had the accident?’
‘Of course.’
You hesitated, searching for the words. ‘Well, in the car, I had a funny feeling in my head.’
‘A funny feeling?’
‘In here.’ You pointed to your forehead, then hesitated. ‘I was all floaty and I could see myself in the car seat and the car was all crumpled like paper and there were big men shouting and using knives to cut off the doors and get in.’
‘You remember that?’
You nodded, your eyes clear. ‘They put something round my neck like a dog and put me on a bed and we went in the ambulance. One of the men called me petal but that’s silly, I’m not a flower. And suddenly I left them all behind and started to fly.’
‘To fly?’
‘One minute, I was looking down on them, rushing, rushing, and the next I went whoosh through a dark tunnel and there was a bright, bright light at the other end and he was standing there with his arms open, stretched really wide like this, waiting for me.’
You looked sideways to see how I was taking this. I tried to keep my face impassive.
‘What makes you think he was an angel?’
‘He was tall and he had light shining.’
I hesitated, thinking about the pictures of angels we’d coloured at Christmas, complete with wings and halos.
‘He gave me a big cuddle and he was so happy to see me and I was happy too and he took my hand and started to lead me away.’ You smiled. ‘It was amazing.’
I bit my lip. You seemed lost in the memory.
‘Then what happened?’
‘We talked for a bit and then he asked me if I wanted to go with him or if I wanted to go back. When I looked round, I saw Daddy outside the hospital and when they lifted me out of the ambulance, he came running, shouting, and he was crying.’ She paused. ‘I’ve never seen Daddy cry before.’
