by Helen Walsh
Also by Helen Walsh
Brass
Once Upon A Time In England
GO TO
SLEEP
HELEN WALSH
This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2011
Copyright © Helen Walsh, 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in 2011 by Canongate Books,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
www.canongate.tv
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious.
Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 005 7
eISBN 978 0 85786 133 7
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Before
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
The Big Bang
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Go to Sleep
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Six months later
Acknowledgements
For Leo,
love of my life
Sleep, sleep, happy child.
All creation slept and smil’d.
Sleep, sleep, happy sleep,
While o’er thee thy mother weep.
William Blake
BEFORE
1
So here we are then, finally. Here I am, taking in the slow chug of the river one last time; one last trip as Rachel, as me. Me. Here I am, inhaling the salty, diesel stink, trying to drink it all in and hold it down, each and every nuance of the early morning – the wind turbines, the seagulls, the ferry boat pulling away and, further down the prom, the huddle of school boys hunched over the railings, gazing out cross-river like the menacing mastheads of an armada. I want to commit all of this to memory – every beat, every inflection of the sky and the low silver light on the water.
It will be different, next time I come.
The tide and all its spume and gullies will have moved on to a distant shore. The sky will have shifted, the clouds drifted away. Everything will have changed. And so, too, shall I.
* * *
A gentle rain. I shelter under the conker tree that bows the sandstone wall of our old house. Before the baby, before all this, I hadn’t much thought of the place in years. Yet I keep coming back, now – back to the river, back for another look at the old wreck; South Lodge. A wreck that, for all its buckled walls and tang of damp, felt loved, lived in; felt like home. But it’s a wreck no longer. The sash windows that gave a glimpse of the water and Snowdonia way beyond, sometimes shaky, sometimes stiff, and the glass my doughty mother would devoutly clean when the mellow light exposed the river’s streaks and sprays, those old casement windows have been replaced with durable PVC. And the gardens – Dad’s jungle, where we’d plant the seeds and snips he brought back from his travels; that riot of untamed, secret scent and vine, tangle and trunk – it’s all been hacked away now, cut back, managed and manicured by South Lodge’s new owners, whoever they may be. When I first started coming back down here, I half hoped to catch a glimpse of them. Now I’ve lost interest. Some things just are.
I’m glad that Mum isn’t around to see the old place. She was a snob, my mother. She kept it well hidden, but she was a tyrant at heart. Her disdain for anything modish – ‘fads’, as she used to denounce them – bordered on the manic at times. When the new housing developments began to spring up along the riverfront, her eyes would gleam with spite.
‘Would you look at those awful, ticky-tacky porches?’ she’d say. ‘Doric-effect columns, for goodness sake. What on earth!’
But she loved the Lodge. She really, truly loved our house, till the day she died. Thinking of her, I’m happy-sad, right now.
The rain peters out to a needle-fine sprinkle, cool on my face and hands. I loiter in the churchyard, waiting for the morning rush hour traffic to drop off before I head over to Lark Lane. I’ll have a lazy mope around the bookstore and antique shops, maybe a coffee at the Moon and Pea if I find something good to read. I’ve been looking forward to my maternity leave for weeks, yet now that it’s here I’m rudderless, guilt-ridden, unable to switch off from work: how will my kids get on in my absence? Keeley Callaghan, up in court again today; Milan, the Roma boy, only thirteen and already having to scrap for dear life, just to get by in cold, hard Kirkdale. And then there’s James. James McIver, my biggest challenge yet. How is he responding to Siobhan? How is she coping? Not too well, I find myself hoping. I was jealous, I admit, when I went in for the final handover and found her perched on the corner of my desk, chatting and laughing with Milan. He’s been a client since July, but I’d never even seen him smile. It’s hard enough getting him to open up at all – so much darkness already in his young life, so much hatred. But there was Shiv – Shiv by the way! – cracking a joke with little pint-sized Milan. And his beautiful dark eyes sparkled for a moment, and in that moment he was a child again. A kid. My heart lurched, it’s true – I was jealous that my young stand-in was getting responses I could never elicit. Fair enough, then – the kids love Shiv. She’s a natural rusty blonde, she’s tomboy pretty and, at twenty-one, she can engage them on a level I never will at my age. But can she get Milan a school place? They’ve already been back a week and getting him settled was a major priority for us. Did she remember the application for uniform vouchers? And has James Mac been turning up for that plasterer’s course? I finger my work mobile but sigh out loud and bury it deep in my bag. I touch my stomach and smile my apology to the Bean. I am going to enjoy this.
I take my time sifting through the books in the Amorous Cat, Miles Davis parsing his sorrow in the background. I find myself vacillating between the books I want to have read and those I want to read. I fudge it, plumping for a collection of Paul Bowles essays and Jackie Collins’ Lady Boss. I know which august tome will be seeing me through the next few weeks and beyond. I picture the scene: me, sat up in bed reading, a late September sun slanting across the baby’s head as he suckles at my breast. I’m sure the Bean is a boy; he just feels like a boy, and if he is I know exactly what I will call him. My tummy does a little flip at the thought of him – that he’ll be here, in my arms, any time now; but the reverie is broken by the bray of school kids over the road. Instinctively, I grope for my work phone in my bag. I dig it out and fire it up again, recalling Faye’s knowing face admonishing me with a look, hearing again the snap of her North Liverpool accent.
‘You do not take that mobile out of this office! Hear me? You are going to take time out and you are going to enjoy this marvellous thing.’
Now there’s a Lady Boss for you.
I pay, decline the shop’s cute carrier bag and make my way down to the park.
I pass by Keith’s, already filling up with its regular cast of students, retired yet ever-more-opinionated academics, professional malingerers and aspiring musicians. Perhaps I should go in and join them, enjoy a glass of wine. A small Rioja would surely take the edge off my funk, help me to forget about work. But a sudden lunge from within, a tiny heel or fist, jolts me back to the here and now. I carry on past the wine bar, nostalgic but happy again, too.
I did love that part of my life – long Saturday afternoons at Keith’s, squabbles about books or music, arcane conversations with strangers at the next table, just one more glass, one more bottle. That’d be me, holed up next to the Indian Professor bickering about nothing in particular. Professor of what, nobody could be certain – he just turned up one evening and, in that cultured, strident and authoritative voice of his, calmly destroyed Mitch Levin’s argument about liberal Islamic states. I loved him for it, mainly because I despised that beardy wanker Levin so much; he’d routinely thrash single female drinkers with his intellect then try, hatefully, to bed them. But the Indian Professor put paid to that, and in no time at all he was one of us; one of the regulars at the wine bar. It was my world not so long ago, but I’m happy to be leaving it behind. I’m ready for motherhood now, ready to be a mum. I want it so badly, it’s hard to imagine ever caring about anything else. Nothing, but nothing else is important any more.
I smile for my own benefit, because the truth is that a year ago I’d given up thinking about children. I was thirty, enjoying life, enjoying work; I wanted to fall in love, of course I did – and as much as I loved my rogues and ragamuffins at work, I dearly wanted kids of my own. Yet, as time ticked by, on some instinctive level I’d come to understand that love wasn’t going to happen again for me; and I was fine with that. I met plenty enough interesting men – well, I met some; one or two. Being relatively tall and, I suppose, passably interesting-looking with my mane of red hair, I’ve never wanted for male attention; it’s just that I’ve never wanted it either, really. I may be a harsh judge, but I know within moments whether a man is going to set me on fire, and so, so many of them just don’t. And it’s fire I’m looking for. If it’s not there, it’s not there.
But that was where I was, then: with the exception of my waning relationship with my father – and I knew we could fix that easily enough with a bit of give from him, a bit of take from me – there was not one single aspect of my world that felt lacking. I was chugging along in a state of grace where everything was in its right place and my world made sense to me; and then I got pregnant.
I shouldn’t have been surprised; spontaneous, unprotected sex opens up the possibility of pregnancy. But I was shocked, when it was confirmed; then deeply frightened. My pure response was one of being unready, caught out, found out. I’d wanted a baby for so long, yet now it was real I felt exposed and wholly ill-equipped for the road ahead. A huge part of that stemmed from the circumstances of the conception – not even a fling, let’s be honest, but a knee-trembler with an old flame. But that was the thing. Ruben was a flame; and I just didn’t want to tell him he was daddy. I postponed any decision, bided my time.
And then came the scare at nine weeks, the bleed and the frenzied dash to hospital. That was the real shock – that, as the taxi tried to weave a path between the speed bumps and I dug my nails into the ball of my thumb, silently cursing the cabbie to go faster – my plan for this, for life, just settled upon me like an apparition. I actually laughed out loud. Of course, of course I would do this alone! It would be me and the baby; just the two of us. It had been that way for me since Mum died. It was always meant to be like that. And I swore to myself that if my embryo survived this trauma I would love it like no other. I would be the best mother a child could ever have.
The nurse who examined me seemed functional, disengaged; but then I caught her gulping and I knew. The baby was dead. The miniature life form had failed and she didn’t know how to tell me. I tried to envisage just how tiny, how frail its little heart must have been. She gave me a pitying look, swallowed hard and left the room; left me wired up to the monitor, left me to work it out for myself. Her footsteps echoed like gunshots in the corridor beyond. I didn’t move. I didn’t want to know. For as long as this moment prevailed, as long as nobody came back into the room and took my hand in theirs, looked me directly in the eye and prefaced their tidings with a sigh, then there was still a chance.
The nurse came back in with a doctor or a surgeon, a man in a white gown with a full day’s stubble. Neither of them even glanced at me. The nurse pointed at the screen and the doctor nodded. He muttered something to the nurse, gave her another curt nod and turned sharply, left as quickly as he could. Left it to her.
But then she turned the monitor round. Jesus! She was turning the monitor round so I could see it and the cruelty of it almost knocked me out.
Her voice brightened. ‘Now, what we’re looking at here . . .’ She pointed to a greyish, wispy mass, like the cloud cover on a weather report’s satellite photograph. ‘This is Baby, here.’
I almost choked. She hadn’t said the foetus was alive, but surely she wouldn’t be showing me if . . .
‘Is it?’
She smiled. ‘Baby’s fine. It’s a little small but it’s just . . .’
And the moment I saw it, that tiny pulse on the monitor, the struggling mass no bigger than a kidney bean, that was it. That was me, gone – smashed with a love more ferocious than anything I’d ever known. I knew then, where I was heading, where I’d been heading my whole life. I was more certain of it than I had been of anything before. When I was finally able to stand, to function, I thanked the nurse. She looked stunned when I tried to hug her.
My head spinning with ideas, plans, contradictions, I walked automatically, instinctively, towards the Anglican Cathedral. There, my mind might slow down. There, I could be close to Mum. I sat out on the café’s terrace, the only customer on a bleak and beautiful February afternoon, gazing out over that spectacular vista. Trees, endless sky, silent graveyards below. Gambier Terrace directly opposite, where this began. Where it ended. I should tell him. It was right that he should know. I could call him. Or I could just walk over there now, knock on the door and break the news to him. But that’s how it would be, wouldn’t it? I’d be telling him something he really didn’t want to hear. Dad was right about that part – that’ll be why he did what he did. Held him off. Held him back. And besides – what if they’d offered Ruben the job? He’s on the verge of a new life. He needs it. Not that they’d give him the job – a black lad from Liverpool 8 working in a place like that. But for my part, I can do my bit.
I felt my eyes well up, and I knotted my fingers tightly round my cup. Yet the overpowering sense of destiny that rinsed me through and through came without fear, without sentiment. Calmly, with a cold, still certitude, I made my big decision; and it was easy. It was clear. I was going to do this thing by myself – all the way. I shivered and sipped my coffee, smiling to myself.
*
By the time I reach the park I’m perspiring wildly. The baby’s feet are pushing up into my chest, its head bearing down on my bladder. I need to pee, and fast. I steal a quick glance either side and duck into the bushes. Squatting uncomfortably, it seems to go on for ever – one solid jet of foul-smelling yellow, a stench so sharp you could nick yourself on it. These last few weeks I’ve felt as though a separate pregnancy has inhabited my bladder, so tight and cumbersome has it become. I shake myself, sigh out loud with relief. The baby relaxes, reclines into the extra legroom and the pressure eases on my lungs.
When I emerge from the bushes there’s a group of Bangladeshi lads setting up a five-a-side goal on the grass; down the other end, their Somali opposition. Their goal-keeper barks instructions, his head almost too large for his slender body. I park myself on the grass and watch the match for a while. The Somali boys are fast and skilful, but
the Bangladeshis chase every ball like shadows, harrying the Somalis for possession. They take the lead from a speculative shot that squirms under the Somali keeper’s dive. His defenders smirk to one another. Their captain is not a popular fellow.
It’s easy to take this area for granted: the park, the brio, the buzz of Liverpool 8. Toxteth may have shed some of its shabby glamour over the years as new housing gradually replaces the peeling old Georgian terraces, but the charm of Princes Park, its vibrant mix of race and religion, still prevails. It’s easy to imagine why Dad fell so hard for the place, why he decided to stay on long after university, and after the riots and recessions had sucked the vim and verve out of the barrio. He would have known Toxteth as it was – the blues and shebeens and exotic-sounding drinking dens. He would have loved all that, Dad – newly arrived from Huddersfield, the bright-eyed student of Tropical Medicine discovering a whole new world of exotica, right there in the side streets and back alleys of Liverpool 8. And our move to the other side of the park, to the safe and sanitised enclave of St Michaels, would have snuffed out a little piece of his soul – I see that, now. Mum, a Scouser, shared Dad’s Egerton Street pad, but she never shared his romantic view of her city. The dapper old Trinidadian dudes sat playing chess in the middle of the Boulevard; the myriad shades of skin and robe, and different twangs of accent; the whiff of ganja on the night breeze; none of that made its mark on her. To Mum, Toxteth was lawless, a law unto itself. It was no place to raise a family. We were moving, and that was that.
So move we did, to the rambling and decadent pile that, bit by bit, became our South Lodge home. For the first few months we lived in just three rooms as Dad gamely but hopelessly grappled with a programme of repairs that would have taxed a seasoned craftsman. Mum fled the bombsite for swimming or knitting or Irish Dancing in town. And when the big Tesco superstore opened, that was her, in her element; shopping on her doorstep, on demand.
