Multitudes
VISITATIONS
THE CONSULTANT COMES INTO THE ROOM with eight or nine others. We are so new to this, barely twenty-four hours new, we don’t yet know what this augurs. With the consultant is the registrar and two SHOs, the senior nurse and the other nurses and even the student nurse who knelt beside me at 3 a.m. last night and told me how her newborn son was premature and had to spend the first six weeks of his life in hospital. Our son is a full-term baby of nine days old, and we’re still hoping this is nothing serious, a little bug, a false alarm. After the momentary comfort, I felt ashamed. I catch her eye now and smile, and she smiles back but is the first to look away although it’s only later, much later, that I remember this because right now and without any preamble the consultant has started talking, and the first words she’s said are, It’s not good news.
PLATITUDES
Words don’t fail us. The problem is the opposite: there are too many words. Too many words with too many syllables. There are also words we wish there weren’t, these words in particular. Fifty per cent.
NUMBERS GAMES
Fifty per cent. Fifty-fifty. Heads or tails. Yes or no. We look at each other and say it with horror: fifty-fifty. But as the hours accumulate (two, three, twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six) and his temperature still won’t come under control, we start to say it with a desperate sort of hope. Fifty-fifty. We’ll take that. There’s also ‘half of all survivors’. We’ll take that too. We’ll take anything. We read and re-read the leaflet the consultant left us with, which isn’t even really a leaflet, just five smudged and increasingly dog-eared photocopied pages stapled together in the left-hand corner. We read it hoping there’s a paragraph or sentence or statistic we missed. There never is.
HE IS SO YOUNG WE DON’T EVEN KNOW YET WHAT COLOUR HIS EYES ARE GOING TO BE.
THE KINGDOM OF THE WELL AND THE KINGDOM OF THE SICK
In the darkest hours of the night, which aren’t actually dark at all but punctured by the red and green glow of machines and the flashing yellow numbers and the strip lighting from the corridor and the bright lights of the nurses’ station outside, my panicking mind, plundering its reservoirs, throws up all sorts of flotsam and jetsam, disconnected images and half-phrases half-remembered, a desperate attempt to make sense of things. The kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick is a phrase from – it comes to me – a Susan Sontag essay that I read as a student; somehow I’ve retained that much, although I haven’t read the essay in question for years. The words go round and round in my mind, like the refrain from a catchy pop song lodged. The kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. It’s true: we have crossed a border. When people phone us from the distant lands of their own lives, their voices are tinny, distorted; there is a time lapse on the line that’s not just the hospital’s patchy reception. Over the past couple of days those closest to us have learned our new vocabularies and try them out with clumsy tongues. How are his temps, his obs, his bloods. Ceftriaxone, Nystatin. Recannulate. IV push. We are acquiring new vocabularies at a rapid pace, strings of acronyms and shorthands – GBS, PCR, LP. Some of these are almost familiar from teenage years spent watching ER. Get me an EKG and a Chem-7. Ninety over sixty and falling. Clear. When the doctors use a word we don’t understand, we nod, and then, when they’re gone, we google it. New immigrants to this land, we don’t want to admit our weaknesses, our failings. We will master this language and in doing so we will wrest back control. Systolic, diastolic, pulse/ox, stat. Or maybe it’s not that at all. Maybe the hope is that if we learn this new language, if we abide by the rules of this foreign land, keep our heads down and be thankful and eager and subservient, then one day we will be allowed to go home, or else we will blend in until we can slip back unnoticed over the border.
MOTHER’S MILK
He is too weak to feed and so I feed him a drop at a time, hour after hour, drop after drop after drop on the tip of my little finger. Then I express milk into a syringe and squeeze half a millilitre at a time into the corner of his flaccid mouth. Some of it he manages to swallow; most just dribbles away. I miss, even through the new mother’s pain of cracked and bleeding nipples, his hot, sugary little mouth, the urgency of his latch, the pinching tug of his feeding. My breasts are swollen and hot with useless milk, the skin taut and shiny with angry red patches. I hook myself up to a hospital-grade pump and press the button to drain the milk out of me, my nipples swelling to raspberries. The little yellow-lidded bottles line up; all the milk he should be – isn’t – getting. I’ve always thought ‘nursing’ a coy term for feeding a baby, a euphemism to avoid saying ‘breasts’. But now I understand it. I am looking after my son in the only way I can, nursing him better one drop of milk at a time, hoping that everything the baby books say about the miraculous properties of breast milk is true. When they say I will have to stop feeding him while they analyse my breast milk to make sure I’m not infecting him through it I want, momentarily, and before I am ashamed of the thought and its despicable self-indulgence, to die.
WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?
It seems to have become the song I sing to him, rocking him in my arms to sleep. Sometimes I have to sing it several times before he succumbs and so we go round and around and around, the young men becoming soldiers becoming graveyards becoming flowers over and over, generation after generation of them. Just a few miles from our window people are pushing ceramic poppies on wire stalks into the ground around the Tower of London, commemorating the hundred-year dead. That world feels as far from us here and now as those old dead young men do. Sometimes I go on singing long after he’s finally slipped into sleep, limp and heavy in my arms, the monitor wires and IV drips arranged carefully across the tight white sheets of his cot and fed into the glut of incessant beeping machines. I sing over the noise of the machines, and I sing myself into a sort of daze. Sometimes I try to sing alternative endings for the soldiers (Where have all the soldiers gone? They’ve all stopped fighting, every one), but nothing I invent will break for long the cycle of graveyards and flowers, flowers and graveyards. Sometimes I try to sing other songs. But I find I can’t remember the words to ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ or ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’, or even my own childhood favourite, ‘Down by the Lock Hospital’. ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ works for a while but then is too lurchingly sad: dragons live for ever, it goes, but not so little boys. My mouth is suddenly dry and my throat is cracked, and I go back to the flowers, no less sad, really, but blessedly meaningless, now, the hundredth time round.
DAYS
The days pass. We lose count of them. Someone asks if we would like to speak to the hospital chaplain. We say no, and so he (she?) never comes, but something about the offer – the combination of doctors and priests, perhaps – makes me think of the Larkin poem. I google it, and it is shorter than I remember. We no longer live in days. We live in an endless present tense that’s both day and night and somehow neither, demarcated by obs every four hours, different drug cycles every four, six, eight and twenty-four, the combinations meeting and receding in an elegant quadrille. We save his nappies to be collected by the nurses and weighed. We roll them up into fat little bundles and line them up on paper towels, the time neatly written on the top right-hand corner, and we note their frequency and contents in a log chart. We keep feeding charts too: which side, how long, with what degree of vigour. These days are a particular time outside of time, like the air in the negative-pressure room, suspended, cut-off, an endless turning in on itself. Darkly, as much as we long for time to begin again, we hope that it won’t, because its beginning again could mean the other of two things.
PERSONALITY
Here are the things we know about him. He hates his cot. He wriggles and writhes and thrashes and cries and stiffens his little back flat as a board until we pick him up and I lay him on my stomach, mewling and hiccuping, until he falls asleep. His cot, its bars painted blue and bright green, is called ‘Inspiration’, and it is where people do painful
things to him, though they all tell us he is too young to make the association. I don’t believe them. He knows. I know he knows. Other things we know about him. His smell and the particular warm heft of him, the feeling of his rapid hot little breaths against our chests or into our necks and his shuddering exhales, and the way his arms fling up above his shoulders in abandon when he sleeps and his drawn-up, froggy little legs. These are things every parent knows, but they are also specific to him, to us, as if we are the first in the world ever to know them. Other things. He has, somehow, at just a week and a half and against all the odds, begun to smile. We know the doctors will say this is impossible, say it is wind, or involuntary movement of the muscles, and so we document it furiously, tapping series of pictures into our phones, taking videos, before we look at each other and put down our phones and just smile back at him, eyes thick with tears. Yes, we say, that’s right. Yes. Other things. We loved him as soon as he was born, bashed up and purple and battle-scarred, and we loved him fiercely and surprisingly, and what we said to him and to each other was, It’s you, because it was him, and it had been all along, and it made such sense, that heady overwhelming flush of recognition. Other things. We knew he was unwell. We knew. Even without a rash or a temperature or any of the leaflet’s other signs, we knew he wasn’t himself, and we pushed for a second opinion, and this, and the brief hours it won us, might be what spares him.
PERIPHERAL VENOUS CANNULATION
When we were admitted it took three doctors six attempts to cannulate him, and eventually they had to bring up special equipment from Neonatal, a lightbox to shine through his veins, which were too thin to be seen by the naked eye. The cannula lasted a day before the vein gave up and the whole procedure needed to be done again. It’s been redone three times now: his veins collapsing one after another under the intensity and duration of the IV drugs. He’s had the right hand, the left, the right again, the left foot. This time there is talk of them putting the cannula into his scalp, and we recoil and say, Please, no, please. We look at his scalp, and we see the juicy veins just under the surface, and we say, Please, only as a last resort. The nurse says, If they have to do it that way they’ll give him a little cap to wear, it will be okay, you won’t see anything. We kiss his hands and feet and forehead and cry, both of us, and then we leave the room before the doctors begin, but we hear his cries the length of the corridor and until we’ve put two double doors between us. My own left hand is still aubergine from a failed attempt to cannulate me during his birth. I run the fingertips of my right hand over the bruise and then press down as hard as I can.
THE REASONS (WE TELL HIM) TO STAY IN THIS WORLD
During my – our – protracted labour, I tell him, I used (too much and incorrectly) gas and air and went temporarily crazy, although I thought I was perfectly lucid at the time. I started stamping and swaying from side to side and chanting in a deep, loud, atonal voice and in between contractions explained to my husband, politely, patiently, and in my normal voice that I was in the middle of a shamanic rite, calling the spirit of our unborn child from where it was roaming on the plains, telling him – we didn’t know the gender, but I already knew it was a him – that the time had come to be born. I tell our son this now, how I called his spirit into this world, and I tell him that I will fight for it against the forces that want to suck it back. My husband lists all of the containers – our word for them, an obscure joke whose origins we can’t now remember – that we have bought to put him in and keep him safe. His car seat. His Bednest cot. His Sleepyhead pillow. His Moby wrap. His BabyBjörn bouncer. His baby bath with its moulded sponge insert. His highchair with a newborn attachment. There are half a dozen of them, a dozen. My husband reaches the end of the list and begins again, a litany. We tell him it’s a beautiful world. The cheap pocket radio is talking of Gaza and Ebola and Operation Yewtree and global warming, and we look at each other and tell him, as parents must have murmured to newborns for decades, centuries, that it’s his job now to make the world better. At some point we stop giving reasons and just tell him, Stay.
FICTION
For the first time in my life, fiction has failed me. I can’t imagine myself out of myself, or even imagine doing so. One evening, when I am so exhausted I can’t imagine how I’ll last through another night, my husband offers to read to me. He picks up a magazine and opens it at random and reads a review of a new restaurant in Brooklyn. It is the first time in our lives that he has ever read to me. Between sentences, perhaps even between words, I dip in and out of sleep. Our son is lying in the crook of my husband’s left arm, naked but for a nappy, limbs limp, mouth open. My husband reads, self-conscious. I have never loved him as much as I love him then. He turns a page and reads his way through a poem, stumbling slightly. The poem is a son’s memories of his father, a lifeguard, and the one time he saved people from drowning. It moves from concrete memories to abstract musings, from the people saved and lost that day to the sky above and the ceaselessly moving waves. Read it again, I say when he finishes, and after that, And again?
MULTITUDES
Before we are born, we decide in advance the lives we are going to live, the events in them, the people, the choices. We decide according to the lessons we want to learn, and all of us have lived here many times over, learning new and different lessons, meeting over and over the same people in endlessly new configurations. I dream this in the light hot daze of one snatched nap, in the sweat of the faux-leather chair-bed and the stiff, faded cellular blankets, and for a few minutes when I wake it all makes sense and the ancient wisdom in my baby’s grave and luminous eyes is obvious, and I think, You’re here to teach me too, and for a moment I even have a fleeting grasp of the lesson.
HOMEWARD
And then, almost as quickly as it started, it is over: we are being told his clinical signs are good, they’ve been stable for forty-eight hours now and so we can go home – they need the room, and we live near and can bring him in three times a day to receive the rest of the course of his IV drugs. So we are suddenly packing a week’s worth of accumulated things: a cheap supermarket duvet and my breastfeeding pillow, energy bars and packets of dried fruit, crumpled clothes and toothbrushes and the pocket-sized radio, unread magazines and tubes of nipple cream, piling everything haphazard into the plastic laundry sacks the nurses have given us because we don’t have any other bags. Then we’re leaving the room and walking the length of the ward and through the double doors and along the corridors and into the lift and down and through more corridors, through the main reception and into the concrete and litter of a Whitechapel afternoon, the knots of smokers and the traffic fumes, the flapping tarpaulins of the fish and vegetable stalls across the road and the racks of flimsy fluttering chiffon outside the sari shops. My husband has gone home every night to sleep and has been to and from the supermarket on errands, and he strides on ahead carrying the baby in his car seat, but my legs are wobbly. I’ve been out of the hospital – out of our son’s room, in fact – only twice in seven days, when it all got too much and I walked through the corridors and took the lift down to the entrance hall to stand in the sunlight with the smokers and cry. It feels too soon to be going home. It seems as if they’ve only just told us how seriously ill he is. Fifty-fifty. We are the first fifty, or the second, the right fifty. It’s chance, luck, Alexander Fleming in 1928, nothing we’ve done, and this makes us fearful. The ferocity I felt through the nights in hospital, the conviction that I could and would fight for his soul, has melted away in the daylight, and now it’s just the three of us, left to watch and wait and muddle through. Wait for me, I say, suddenly terrified, and I heave the laundry sack over my shoulder. We have to stay together. We have to. That’s all there is.
STORYTELLING
He’s too young to remember any of it, they say. He won’t remember a thing. We think of his eyes in pain, black with incomprehension and fear and bewilderment, and we are not so sure, and we agree more out of politeness even than hope. He is talking to hims
elf as I write this. Gurgles, coos, the occasional indignant squawk. Heh-gooo, haw. Uh-heh, glaaaaa. Eoow. Batting with his right hand, now finally out of its cumbersome bandage, a green bird with rattling beads in its tummy suspended from a loop on the playmat he lies on. He is utterly absorbed. Ah-gooo, haw. Heh-eoow. Are you telling a story? I ask him, as I kneel down beside him. He looks up at me, beams his gummy little grin, and even as I smile back at him and rub his fat little stomach my own stomach lurches. It will always be like this, I think. But perhaps it always is. Sometimes he smiles as he is sleeping, and sometimes he sucks down imaginary milk. Sometimes his tiny face creases and his chin quivers and he cries out his distress cry. Then we rush to pick him up, but even by the time our hands are around the soft heavy warmth of his swaddled body he is gone again, the memory, if that is what it was, already, at least momentarily, forgotten.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the various editors who have helped with individual stories in this collection: Liz Allard, Ellah Allfrey, Brendan Barrington, Sinéad Gleeson, Heather Larmour, Adrian McKinty, Deirdre Madden and Stuart Neville. Thanks are also due to Mike Brett, Carlo Gébler, Sarah Hall, Leo Mellor, Rowan Routh, Damian Smyth, Di Speirs and last, but perhaps most of all, Joe Thomas.
I am very grateful to Van Morrison for allowing me to use his lines from ‘Astral Weeks’ as the collection’s epigraph, and my debt to him exceeds these lines: as a Belfast writer, and a writer of and from the east, not just my city but my imagination too have been formed and shaped by his lyrics. Thanks also to Colin Dundas of Exile Productions.
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