The Baby Group

by Rowan Coleman

  Between the waves of physical pain Jess could hear the cries of other children somewhere on the ward. She would always remember the laughter and joy of a family ringing off the walls in the corridor outside, and wanting to scream for them to shut up. But all she could do was to stay as quiet as she could with Lee at her side, holding her hand, telling her she was so brave and how much he loved her, brushing away his tears between reassurances.

  What Jess found almost unbearable was that the baby had died without her even noticing her passing. That she hadn’t even been able to do that much for her child, to reach inside and try to say goodbye. She felt that she should have known her baby was terribly sick, but instead she might have been asleep or shopping or sitting on the Tube reading the paper when it happened. It seemed such a banal way to lose a child.

  It was no one’s fault, the doctors told them; sometimes tragedies just happen, but that didn’t comfort Jess at all. She always felt it should have been someone’s fault – and if it was anybody’s it had to be hers. It was a feeling that persisted steadily just under the surface of every breath she took and every thought she had had from that moment on.

  Almost two years had passed since that morning in the delivery suite, and every day Jess tried as she knew she should to separate her losses from the gain of having Jacob. But it seemed impossible to do, impossible to stop expecting the worst.

  Lee had wanted them to stop after they lost the second baby. He said that the doctors had told him there was plenty of time to wait and try again in a year or two. That there was no reason why Jess shouldn’t carry a baby full term and deliver a healthy child. But Jess had not been able to wait. She told Lee she wanted to try again straight away. That had been hard for him to understand.

  ‘It would be like putting my life on hold,’ she had tried to explain to him one morning. ‘Like the next year, or two years would be just treading water waiting for . . . what? There’s never going to be a magic time when we know for sure everything will be all right. And I’m still going to be scared, Lee. I’m still going to be terrified even then. I need to try again now.’

  Lee had sat on their sofa, his head bowed over his knees, and Jess knew he was struggling to find the right words to say and for a moment she wondered how they had ended up together.

  She hadn’t fallen for him because of his expertise at expressing his feelings and dealing with her in times of tragedy, she reminded herself. She loved him because he made her laugh like no other man ever had, even in bed, and because he loved dogs and hiking and real ale in an ironic way, and he wore his hair in little trendy spikes even though he was slowly going bald and had been since he was twenty-two. When they’d started out in an Islington pub four years ago it had never occurred to Jess to veto him for his ability to manage pain in times of deep despair. So she had to be as patient with him as he was being with her, she owed him that much. After all, when he bought her that first vodka and tonic he couldn’t have foreseen that just over fifteen hundred days later they would be having this conversation.

  ‘The thing is,’ Lee had said eventually, still staring hard at the laminate flooring, ‘I don’t think I’m ready, Jess. I’m still grieving, I’m still missing . . . her. I . . . I don’t think it’s right to just . . . replace her.’

  Those last two words had almost been the end of them. It would have been the end of them if either one had had enough strength to survive without the other. But neither one had. They’d clung on to each other despite everything, and less than a year later Jess discovered she was pregnant for the third time.

  When she told Lee he didn’t hug her or smile, he just looked at her for a long time saying nothing at all until eventually he rested the back of his cool hand against the heat of her cheek and said, ‘It will be all right.’

  They didn’t tell anyone about the baby until Jess was three months gone. She gave up work straight away, forfeiting any rights she had to maternity leave. Lee said it would be a struggle but they’d manage, and that her health and well-being was what counted. She knew what he really meant was that he’d do anything to stop her from freaking out.

  At the twenty-week scan Jess felt as if she was being taken to an execution. She lay on the hospital table completely drained of colour and her eyes brimming with unshed tears. When the technician told her the scan was fine she could hardly believe it. In fact, she didn’t believe it.

  Whilst Lee’s tension seemed to lift then and finally give way to happiness, Jess’s fears bound themselves even more tightly around her. And the following months had been just as bad. She’d thought that when she began to feel the baby move that would make things better, because she’d be able to feel him thriving inside her. But instead, when an hour or more passed without her registering a kick, she panicked, convinced that the worst had happened again. Twice the doctor had to come and find the baby’s heartbeat for her. He told her that unborn babies sleep just like the rest of us, and that she shouldn’t worry. He had become one in a long line of people who told her she was worrying too much, almost as if it was an indulgence that they thought she revelled in. The doctors, their parents, even Lee commanded her to stop fretting so much. But she couldn’t imagine a time when she would be able to. She didn’t tell the doctor that she had hardly slept for what felt like months and that when she did she woke up with a start, panicking that somehow she’d abandoned her post. That something terrible might happen while she was gone. When Lee tried to reassure her she told him that once the baby was here in her arms where she could see him and hold him, she was sure she would stop worrying. Then at last all the fears and ghosts of the past would be put to rest.

  But she was wrong, just as she had known she would be.

  From the second the midwife put him in her arms there was a whole new world of worry. Jess was scared that he didn’t feed enough. She was worried that he slept for too long, or that he didn’t sleep enough. That he didn’t seem to poo as much as the book said he should or that he had too many wet nappies. Stupid things that when she asked the health visitor or doctor about them made them smile and look at her as if she was slightly mad.

  ‘It’s normal,’ the doctor would say.

  ‘He’s perfectly healthy,’ the health visitor would say.

  ‘It will be all right,’ Lee would tell her.

  And she’d know that they were right and they had to be right, but she still couldn’t shake off this terrible feeling that somehow, somewhere, something was going to go terribly wrong.

  ‘Wake up, darling,’ a voice said irritably in her ear. Jess looked up and saw a woman trying to pass her to get to a seat that had somehow become empty. She glanced out of the dirty window. The bus was at her stop.

  ‘Wait please!’ she called out, as she struggled towards the bus doors. ‘Hold on a minute, this is my stop!’

  The bus lurched again, throwing Jess off balance and forcing her to stagger with Jacob in her arms to steady her feet. She watched the front door of her block of apartments slip past. Now she’d have to get off at the next stop and walk back.

  ‘You could have held the bus,’ she said to the driver. ‘You must have heard me calling you.’

  He did not even look at her.

  The sky was dark with the threat of rain by the time that Jess finally got the apartment door open. She left the buggy sprawled in the communal hallway half up and half down, not caring whether or not some of the opportunist thieves in the area made off with the vile thing.

  She sat down in the gloom of the sitting room and before even shaking off her coat she put Jacob to her breast.

  Gradually both of them began to feel better.

  ‘You’re not mad,’ Jess said aloud to a room that was almost quiet except for the subdued roar of the traffic on Green Lanes that managed to breach even the double glazing. ‘You had a difficult time, it will take a while to adjust, that’s all. All these people who look at you as if you were a bit weak-minded or silly don’t know what you’ve been through – they don’
t know how well you’re doing.’

  She looked down at Jacob suckling and felt two or three still and calm moments pass by with each heartbeat. And then she remembered their visit to the clinic that morning, just before Natalie found her in the shop.

  The health visitor had asked her if she had post-natal depression. Jess had laughed. Quite a feat because she had been crying at the time.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to tell me that?’ she’d asked before adding, ‘I’m just a bit down and tired, that’s all.’

  ‘Do you ever feel like harming yourself or the baby?’ the health visitor had asked her without looking up from her notes.

  ‘No!’ Jess had exclaimed. ‘I would never, ever do that. He is the most precious thing in the world.’ She had hesitated, but Lee was always telling her that talking about her problems would make them better. ‘If anything,’ she had said slowly, ‘I worry sort of obsessively about keeping him well. All the time.’

  ‘Oh well,’ the health visitor had said. ‘That’s OK then.’

  ‘Things aren’t all bad,’ Jess told Jacob, whose lips had disengaged from her nipple, leaving his small mouth gaping open as he slept. ‘At least I bumped into Natalie and met the others. They seemed nice, didn’t they? It’s good that we’ve arranged to meet them again next week. It gives me something else to think about. Take our minds off things, hey, Jacob? You’ll like Baby Music I reckon, won’t you?’ She bent her head to him and sniffed deeply. He needed changing. Jess knew she should have done it before feeding him, but his cries and the pain in her breasts had been too persistent to ignore. She knew that changing his nappy now would wake him, and that waking him would mean he’d be crying for hours. But she couldn’t bear him to have nappy rash either. What if the health visitor saw that he had nappy rash?

  ‘Sorry, Jacob,’ she whispered, carrying him into the nursery and laying him on the changing table. ‘I’ll be quick.’

  Jess had just about undone the poppers on Jacob’s Babygro when she heard the front door click open. There was no call of hello. Lee had learnt from experience not to make any noise, on the off chance that his son and girlfriend might be sleeping. Carefully he pushed the front door to and eventually found his small family in the second bedroom.

  ‘What’s this?’ Jess said, staring down at the baby, a frown drawing her eyebrows together.

  ‘Hello,’ Lee whispered pleasantly. ‘It’s dead at work so I got off early. Good day?’

  ‘Lee, look at this – it’s a rash,’ Jess said, that familiar edge of panic beginning to sound in her voice.

  Lee took a deep breath and looked at his son’s tummy.

  ‘Looks like a touch of heat rash,’ he said. ‘Has he been in his sling or wrapped up too warm?’

  ‘No,’ Jess said defensively. ‘He hasn’t and besides it’s cold outside. What is it?’ She picked up Jacob, who wriggled and began to whimper as his last chances of remaining asleep gradually faded away. Jess rested her palm on his forehead.

  ‘And he’s hot,’ she said. ‘Feel him – don’t you think he’s hot?’

  Lee touched his lips to the baby’s forehead. His mum had told him that lips were far more sensitive to body heat than hands and fingers, which were always a bit colder than the rest of the body. Jacob’s forehead felt normal to him.

  ‘He’s fine,’ Lee tried to reassure Jess.

  ‘Is it meningitis?’ Jess asked him, panic colouring her voice. ‘It might be meningitis. We went on the bus, there was this woman coughing and sneezing . . . Get a glass from the kitchen. Is it supposed to disappear or stay visible? I can’t remember – Lee!’

  ‘It’s not meningitis,’ Lee said firmly, putting his arms around both Jacob and Jess. ‘He’d got a bit of a rash, from being so bundled up. He’s fine, look at him!’ He laughed with sheer joy as he held his amazingly beautiful boy in his arms. ‘Just look at him, Jess!’ he pleaded. ‘He’s pissed off, but he’s fine. He’s got a touch of heat rash. It’s nothing to worry about.’

  And suddenly Jess’s fear subsided and she knew that Lee was right, of course he was right. Jacob had had heat rash before. She knew exactly what it looked like. It looked like that.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her shoulders collapsing as she let go of her anxiety. ‘I just –’

  ‘Worry.’ Lee finished her sentence for her. ‘I know you do, but you don’t have to. Nothing is going to happen to Jacob.’

  Jess let his words sink in for a moment, but still they seemed to have no meaning.

  ‘What do you want for tea?’ she said wearily.

  ‘Why don’t you have a bath,’ Lee suggested. ‘Relax for a while and unwind. I’ll settle him and order a takeaway later.’

  ‘Thanks, babe.’ Jess felt a brief sense of lightening as she walked away from her partner and son for a few precious responsibility-free moments.

  ‘No worries,’ Lee said, gazing down at Jacob’s angry face.

  And he means it, Jess thought to herself as she turned the hot tap on full blast. He’s not worried at all.

  Chapter Six

  Natalie could not stop laughing. There was something about fifteen or so women and two men sitting in a big circle on a dusty floor singing ‘Row, row, row your boat’ whilst doing the actions with babies who were either asleep or looked utterly bored that was very, very funny and which made her laugh so much she had to stop and catch her breath between fits of giggles. But it was the marching around to ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ with babies that couldn’t even roll over, let alone march, that made her practically hysterical.

  ‘This isn’t a joke, you know,’ Steve said, despite chuckling along with her as they marched to the top of the hill and down again. ‘It’s really good for them, music and singing. It stimulates all of their senses.’

  Baby Music had been Steve’s idea. Just as everybody had been on the point of leaving Meg’s and saying how nice it was and that they must do it again sometime, he had suggested they set a date.

  ‘I’m taking Lucy to a baby music class in that place down by the park, it starts next week,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we all meet there next if you like?’ And before Natalie knew it she had been half press-ganged and half volunteered herself for yet another new and strange life experience, and found that she was even a little depressed that she had to wait a week before they were due to meet at the class.

  The still so new and yet seemingly timeless life that Freddie and she had enjoyed for the eleven or so weeks before falling into the baby group was, Natalie began to realise, rather small and constricting. Her mostly solitary experience of early motherhood hadn’t made her unhappy or especially depressed, but she had underestimated the importance of a peer group in making one feel normal. It was a relief and a pleasure to hear the stories and thoughts and worries of the others at Meg’s house, and to know that her experiences were not unique.

  So as she had walked home that morning she had found herself wishing that the baby music class wasn’t quite so far away, and that there wouldn’t be a whole week of sleep-deprived wandering around Stoke Newington trying to avoid Gary Fisher and his apprentice and wondering if it was possible in the twenty-first century for a modern human being to lose the ability to communicate through language.

  She needn’t have worried, because the week had passed quickly. While she had assumed that contact with the others could not be made until a specific time, rather like keeping an appointment or waiting the allotted number of days after a date to suggest another one,others in the group did not.

  Tiffany was the one she saw almost every day of that week. She had tagged along with Anthony the morning after coffee at Meg’s house and while Gary had been mid-apology about the girl’s presence, Natalie had whisked her off to the kitchen for a chat and a coffee. Gary had stopped apologising for her after that. In fact, he told Natalie in passing as she handed him a mug of tea one morning, he was glad to see that Tiffany had a new friend. Without exception all her schoolfriends had abandoned her as soon as the novelt
y of a new baby wore off and the reality set in.

  Natalie was glad for herself that she had a new friend because, perhaps surprisingly, she liked Tiffany. She liked listening to her stories of the complicated and frankly terrifying school social scene that she was temporarily excluded from. And Tiffany was a mine of information about baby related things, like getting Freddie on to solids and how to help him with teething. She was funny and clever and always seemed relaxed around Natalie, not the shy and acutely self-conscious girl that she had been at Meg’s.

  It might have been because Tiffany was so mature that they got on as well as they did. Or possibly because Natalie was perhaps a little immature, but either way they had a lot in common.

  That Friday Meg had called Natalie out of the blue and asked her if she wanted to meet her for a latte at the French patisserie on Newington Green. It had been a guilty conversation conducted in a low voice and Meg went to great pains to stress that it was not a baby group meeting, just friends having a coffee together. When Natalie jokingly asked her if she needed a password to meet her at that particular coffee shop, Meg confessed that she was feeling guilty for not asking Frances to come. She told Natalie with commendable reluctance that fond as she was of Frances, the advent of their two babies in such close proximity had forced them together on a far more regular basis than she had been used to. Frances seemed to visit her every day. And as sweet and nice as Meg insisted Frances could be, she was sometimes a little wearing.

  ‘Well, you can’t like everyone all the time, heh, Tiff?’ Natalie had asked the sixteen-year-old as the three of them sat in the café a little while later.

  Tiffany had shaken her head and sunk her chin into the zipped-up neck of her parka. She didn’t say more than three words the whole time that Meg was there. The girl whose company Natalie had enjoyed so much seemed to have vanished.