Living With It

by Lizzie Enfield

I wait and remove it, check the window to make sure the drug has been released, and begin massaging the spot where the needle went in, as instructed.

  It works quickly. Within minutes, Harvey’s breathing is steady again and the red swelling around his mouth has subsided.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ he says again, and Eric thrusts the washing-up bowl under his chin just as he throws up.

  ‘What did you eat, Harvey?’ I ask, looking at the contents for something to give me a clue.

  ‘It must have been those sweets of Vincent’s we had with the ice-cream,’ he says, looking shamefaced.

  ‘I thought they were Maltesers. You’re fine with Maltesers,’ I say.

  ‘No, they were just similar to Maltesers,’ Gabriella says, holding up the packaging. It’s red, but they are some sort of cheap supermarket own brand version called ‘Chocolate-Coated Crunchy Balls’. Neither of the boys had stopped to read the packaging, let alone the allergy guidelines.

  I screw up my eyes to look now and there it is, clear enough. ‘May contain nuts’.

  ‘Oh, Jesus, Harvey,’ I say angrily now, but my anger stems from relief. ‘Why didn’t you check what was in them?’

  ‘I didn’t think,’ he says. ‘I just thought they were Maltesers and they’re OK. I’m sorry, Mum.’

  ‘Leave him, Bel,’ Eric says.

  ‘But he could have…’

  I don’t finish the sentence. We all know what could have happened.

  Ben, Tuesday evening

  I was knackered after the theatre trip. By the time I got home all I wanted to do was slump in front of the TV, but Maggie was keen to get me straight out again.

  ‘You’ve just about got time for a cup of tea but I don’t want to be late. We don’t want to keep them waiting.’

  ‘They can wait a few minutes, surely?’ I said, grumpily. Really, this was the last thing I wanted to do now. I thought it would depress me further, meeting adults who cannot hear or speak.

  ‘They can speak,’ Maggie persisted in saying. ‘They just have a different way of doing it.’

  ‘Do you really need me there?’ I said, petulant. ‘Maybe you could chat to them first and I could join you a bit later?’

  ‘No.’ Maggie puts her foot down. ‘These people have lives themselves and they’ve arranged to meet us out of kindness, to give us an idea of what life might be like for Iris if she doesn’t have cochlear implants – and I know you don’t like that idea much any more.’

  I kept quiet and Maggie continued.

  ‘You might not be keen, but I wasn’t keen for you to start involving solicitors in our lives. But I let you talk me round, because it seemed important to you. So do this for me. Please.’

  I could not argue, and now that I am here sitting in a pub, with these two young adults talking in sign language, I realise I haven’t been listening to the translator. Instead I have become slightly mesmerised by the gestures and hand movements and am being drawn into the world which I have been resisting.

  Maggie would be pleased if she could read the thoughts that are going through my mind. They go something like this: This is amazing, actually. They can say all this, just by waving their hands about in the air. These people are brilliant. It’s like acting, almost. I could get into this…

  But she can’t read my mind, and she misreads the look on my face as indicating that my mind is wandering, rather than rapt.

  ‘Ben!’ she says, with a slight shrillness that makes me wince.

  ‘Yes?’ I look up, half expecting her to begin making hand gestures to accompany her question. But her hands are folded in her lap as she speaks.

  ‘Rachel was asking if you knew any sign language.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ I shake my head and look at Rachel, a twentysomething profoundly deaf woman seated on the opposite side of the pub table. She’s very beautiful: long dark wavy hair, pale skin and big blue eyes. She could be Irish, but of course sign language has no accent, so I can’t tell.

  ‘A little,’ I say, looking at Rachel as I hold my thumb and forefingers in L shapes, making the sign for ‘little’. I only know it because Maggie has been signing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little, Star’ to Iris before she goes to bed each night. She sings and signs, twitching her fingers in the air to represent twinkles as Iris lies in her cot, lulled to sleep by hand movements rather than sound.

  Rachel makes a movement, which looks as if she is blowing me a kiss.

  ‘Good!’ the sign language interpreter translates the sign for me, and I laugh.

  It was the National Deaf Children’s Society that suggested this meeting we are having in a pub in Clapham. They didn’t suggest we have it in a pub. I think that idea actually came from Rachel, which was a brilliant one, given we were all bound to feel a bit less tense with a beer close to hand.

  I wonder if Rachel and Darren, the young man sitting next to her, felt as uncomfortable about the whole meeting as I did. It felt forced and unnatural. ‘Let’s meet up with these two people we have never met before and have nothing in common with, other than that they are deaf and so is our daughter, shall we?’ That’s not exactly a comfortable proposition for any of us, but I suppose Rachel and Darren must have been up for it or they wouldn’t have agreed.

  Maybe they do it a lot. Maybe they are on a list of deaf people willing to talk to parents of newly diagnosed deaf children and tell them how great it is.

  I’m becoming cynical again, but I do also want to know.

  ‘Will you ask Rachel if she does this a lot?’ I say to Sylvie.

  Sylvie had put out a hand, when we arrived in the pub and introduced herself as ‘your translator for the day’.

  They were easy enough to spot, when we walked into the bar. Three people sitting round a table, all signing to each other. It had to be them. And we probably had to be us too, the quite-old-to-have-a-baby couple with said baby fast asleep in a buggy, a state she remains in for the duration of the meeting. It’s almost as if she’s decided to leave any decisions about her future up to us.

  ‘Does what?’ Sylvie asks me before translating my spoken words.

  ‘Meets up with anxious parents,’ I say, smiling to Rachel as I say it.

  She smiles back, unaware yet what I am asking her.

  Sylvie makes the signs and Rachel mimes back.

  ‘We are happy to meet with people and talk if they think it will help,’ Sylvie says.

  Rachel and Darren look together-ish, squashed up on a bench seat close to each other, mirroring body language and being tactile towards each other. But then I guess, if body language is your language, you mirror it. And, if neither of you can hear, then touch is a good way of getting the other’s attention.

  ‘How did you two meet?’

  Sylvie signs my question and Darren and Rachel both begin making the same signs together at the same time. Then they both shrug, also in unison. Rachel makes a familiar enough hand gesture, which I know means ‘you speak’, and sits quietly while Darren explains in a way that ends with him clapping his hands together.

  ‘They met at a school for the deaf,’ Sylvie tells me, and I feel my heart sinking slightly. I like these two young people, from what I’ve seen, I really do. They seem open and friendly, and they are here because they think it might help us, but the ‘I did not want this’ part of my brain is fast-forwarding and thinking negative thoughts.

  I wonder if they are a couple. They don’t look like a couple because she is more attractive than he is. Much more. That’s not unusual – you see that a lot, I know – but I can’t help thinking that if the place you are most likely to meet a boyfriend is at deaf school then your options are limited. I don’t want my daughter to end up with a bloke who is nice enough, if a few features short of ugly, just because he speaks the same language. I don’t want that for her.

  ‘We’re also thinking about cochlear implants. Aren’t we, Ben?’ Maggie is saying to Sylvie. ‘We’d like her to be able to hear a little, if it was possible.’

&nb
sp; I nod, but Maggie knows that since we had our trip to the audiology unit cochlear implants no longer seem like the miracles I once hoped they would be.

  There’s intensity to the signing now going on between Rachel, Darren and Sylvie, which hints at ‘discussion’.

  I look to Sylvie for explanation, when they come to the end of the frenzied flurry of hands.

  ‘Rachel thinks it is unfair of parents to try to force their children to hear,’ she says. ‘She says deafness is not a disability. It is a difference.’

  ‘I know…’ Maggie begins, but she is clearly flustered.

  ‘Maggie is a musician,’ I try to interpret for her. ‘Hearing is very integral to her world. Of course we want our daughter to be a part of that, if it was at all possible.’

  Sylvie signs and Rachel, obviously sensing that Maggie is a bit upset by her outburst, begins rubbing her fist around her chest in a circular motion – another sign I realise I am familiar with. I must be picking it up by proxy because Maggie has been making such an effort, even though I’ve made very little.

  It means ‘sorry’.

  Darren speaks now. His movements are slower and more expressive than the two women’s. Perhaps this says something about him. Perhaps I am wrong in my assumption that Rachel is too good for him. Perhaps he is the one who is thoughtful and highly intelligent and Rachel was drawn to him for those qualities.

  I’ve no idea what he is saying, but I find myself mesmerised again in a way I had not expected to be.

  Maybe I should have expected it.

  I remember going to see the comedian Eddie Izzard once and that particular show had a sign language interpreter, who stood on one side of the stage throughout. Even though Izzard’s own performance was full of mime and theatricality, and mesmerising because of it, I found my attention kept being diverted from him to the guy doing the signing. The way he morphed the comic’s words into actions, which seemed to speak louder than the words themselves, was amazing. I remember being impressed, at the time.

  I’d just forgotten.

  ‘Darren says Rachel was born deaf so, for her, life has always been this way, but he lost his hearing after getting meningitis as a child,’ Sylvie interprets Darren’s hand signals. ‘He’s asking if your daughter was born deaf?’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘She had measles and became deaf as a result.’

  ‘That’s bad,’ Sylvie says, as Darren makes a sign which is like blowing a kiss but, rather than blowing it, he appears to slap it down on an imaginary surface.

  ‘She caught it from the daughter of a friend who had not been vaccinated,’ I add, wanting them to understand the full picture.

  I hope that perhaps this will make Rachel more sympathetic towards Maggie, for wanting her to be able to hear a bit. If she understands how unnecessary Iris’s deafness is, I hope that perhaps she will understand us better.

  Rachel puts both her palms flat in the air then bends her fingers, turning them into claws and scraping them back towards her.

  ‘Selfish,’ Sylvie translates.

  ‘Yes,’ I say and nod and repeat what she has just said. ‘Selfish.’

  As I say it, I put my palms flat, then bend my fingers and draw the claws back towards myself. It feels strangely liberating.

  Isobel, Friday

  ‘The police?’ I can’t quite believe what I am hearing, although half of me is hardly surprised. Our friends’ baby is deaf, solicitors are involved – why shouldn’t the police be mixed up in our lives too?

  Gabriella has never been in any sort of trouble with anyone before.

  ‘But why wasn’t she at school?’

  I am in the foam shop when I get the call. It’s one of those shops that never seems to have any customers to keep it going. All the other shops in the street are busy, doing a good trade in ‘vintage’ clothes, or homewares, or what Eric calls ‘ifty wifty’ shops, i.e. shops that sell stuff no one really needs. There’s a huge market for all of that. People always have the money to buy things they don’t really need. Even in the midst of a recession, unnecessary stuff still seems to sell well – here, anyway. But foam is the possible exception.

  Nevertheless there is a shop, stuck between an ‘ifty wifty’ shop and a retro café, which is stacked with foam strips of varying size and thickness. Most of it is that off-yellow spongy colour, but there are a few shelves of green and grey too. I need some to cover the ends of broom handles, to make them safer to use as lances for Vinnie’s Space Hopper jousting party.

  ‘Why bother?’ Gabriella said, when I was discussing it with Vincent, keen to use any opportunity to highlight my casual neglect of other people’s children’s welfare.

  I caught myself reflected in the glass of the foam shop door, as I went in. Even though I didn’t have any of the children with me, I recognise that there is something about me which makes me look like a mother. I look like someone who would be buying foam for some ridiculous project which only she has time for because she does not work.

  I’m not quite sure what it is about my appearance that gives me away. I’m dressed casually, but so is everyone these days.

  I remember when Gabs was little she saw a group of men standing outside a bank. ‘Are they prime ministers?’ she asked.

  ‘No, love. They work in the bank, I think.’

  ‘They look like prime ministers,’ she said. ‘They’re wearing prime minister’s outfits.’ By this she meant suits. In her three-year-old life, she’d so rarely encountered anyone wearing a suit that she thought these men having a cigarette on the pavement outside their place of work must all be having a break from running the country.

  So I don’t know what it is that makes me appear so definitely someone who is a mother who does not work.

  Eric came home last night telling me he’d bumped into an old colleague of mine.

  ‘You’ll never guess who I came across today.’

  I hate having to guess. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Emma Dunlop!’

  I struggled at first to place the name. Then I remembered: she had joined my team a few months before I left work. As far as I knew, Eric had never met her.

  ‘Oh, yes? Where was that, then?’

  ‘She came into the office to give a briefing to someone on the politics desk. We got in the same lift.’

  ‘And got chatting?’

  Emma Dunlop was, if I remembered rightly, very beautiful.

  I wondered how, in the short space of time it took a lift to go to the fifth floor of the building where Eric worked, he had elicited enough information not only to discover who Emma Dunlop was but also to make the connection with me.

  ‘She asked if there was a coffee bar anywhere in the building,’ Eric told me. ‘She said she had a meeting with Roger Palin but she was twenty minutes early and needed a coffee. So I went with her, as I was going there anyway. I can’t quite remember how it came up that she used to work in your old office but she remembered you and said to send you her best.’

  ‘What does she do now, then?’ I asked, and began to feel a huge and unreasonable resentment towards this woman I barely knew but who definitely did something impressive these days, if she was stalking the corridors of the Daily News ready to brief its chief political correspondent.

  ‘She’s the mayor’s campaign director now.’

  She would be.

  ‘She did your old job for several years after you left, had a couple of children and worked as a consultant for a few years while they were young, and now she’s back working full-time for the mayor.’

  His words were delivered casually but I was super-sensitive to them. Emma Dunlop had done all that and managed to fit two children in too. Well, bully for her. And no doubt when she caught sight of herself reflected in shop doorways she looked like a high-powered career woman.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the woman who ran the foam shop asked, and I was about to tell her what I needed when I heard my phone ringing inside my bag.

  I go straight up to the sc
hool after I’ve hung up. I take a taxi from the rank by the Royal Pavilion. I want to get there quickly, even though the school said it was unnecessary.

  ‘We’d just like to speak to you and Gabriella after school,’ Mr Collins, the head of Gabriella’s year, said to me on the telephone. ‘If you could be here by three-thirty, that will be fine.’

  But I want to get there sooner. I need to speak to Gabriella and find out what is going on. The police are involved, for goodness’ sake. Surely that makes speaking to one of her parents a matter of urgency.

  ‘I’ll come straight up,’ I said to Mr Collins on the phone. ‘Should I go straight to reception and ask for you?’

  ‘Yes, if you like.’ He sounded almost weary, annoyed by my insistence that I come straight to see him. He seems to think this can wait until after school. I don’t.

  I phone Eric from the taxi.

  ‘I’m in a meeting.’ He is brusque and to the point when he answers the phone. It’s the second time I’ve called; my first went to voicemail.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ I tell him. ‘Can you leave it for a minute?’

  ‘Sure.’ His voice becomes softer, picking up on the anxiety in mine. ‘I’ll call you back in a minute. Are you at home?’

  ‘No. I’m on my way to Gabs’s school. Call me back as soon as you can.’

  He must have made his excuses quickly, because I am still holding my phone after ending the call when it rings again and Eric’s number appears on the screen.

  ‘What’s up?’ he says as I press the Answer button. ‘What’s happened? Have you heard something more from the solicitor?’

  ‘No, it’s not that.’

  In the time between getting the call and taking Eric’s now, I had, for the first time in ages, forgotten completely about the solicitors. I am supposed to be calling ours later. I need to tell him about the letter we received yesterday. I need to ask how Ben and Maggie can possibly expect us to raise the sort of money they’re asking for.

  I should have done it first thing really. The foam shop trip was part delaying tactic and part coping mechanism. If I carry on as normal, at least with some aspects of my life, then I can, at least some of the time, pretend that it still is.