by Dawn French
Gradually, the water stopped sloshing about and, along with her slow and steady recovering breath, it became calm.
All of her senses were staggeringly alert.
Touch: the warm water slightly tickled her skin at the edges where it met her. The mix of the heat beneath the surface and the immediate nip of the colder air above was curious. She could feel her pores reacting. Those that had been lulled into opening below the water versus those that were closing quicksharp in the shivery crisp air above, causing goose bumps. She moved ever so slightly to tease the skin on the very edges.
Smell: the bubble bath was Matey, for children. The familiar gentle soapy aroma was heaven, and no other bathtime fragrance triggered all the happy memories like this. She’d not been without the jaunty sailor bottle on the side of the bath for her whole eighteen years. It promised that not only was it hypoallergenic, but that each bath was going to be an actual adventure. She loved it.
Hear: in the distance, she could hear Lee on his beloved PlayStation committing mass genocide in his efforts to rid the virtual world of mutant baddies. In the near, she could hear the tap dripping in the basin, and her own steady breath in the damp air.
Taste: ever since she’d realized she was pregnant, she’d craved toffees. Cadbury chocolate éclair toffees. Lee supplied her regularly with many crinkly new purple packets and it was rare that she didn’t have one in her mouth. She’d swallowed the latest one minutes before her breath-holding challenge, but she could still taste the remnants stuck in her teeth. Little sweetie jewels to mine with her tongue.
See: as she looked around the bathroom, her eyes were drawn to the bright green fluffy towelling dressing gown on the back of the door. Her mother’s. In her mind’s eye, she sees her mother wearing it. She loves the image. Then Minnie looks down along her clammy body, at her silky brown skin, flawless apart from a few stretch marks on her swollen breasts and her tight extended stomach. Past the hills of her bosoms is the mountain of her belly, and she can see nothing between or beyond. This is her baby landscape.
This is my body, Minnie thought. It belongs to me and to no one else. This is my baby, Bean. She lives in me, and I’m the container for her. Everything she is, all of her, is contained in me right here. We are part of each other. I’m her mother, and all of my future happiness will be in her happiness. Oh God, please let her be happy. Let me be a good mum. Like my mum.
She looked back at the green dressing gown. Her beautiful mum. How had she felt when SHE was six and a half months pregnant with Minnie? Had she lain in a bath like this, wondering these same things?
She wished she could ask her now.
But she couldn’t. Not right now.
She COULD feel close to her though. A bit …
Minnie broke the stillness of the water, and pulled herself up and out of the bath, tugging the plug out with her toes on the way. She carefully stepped out on to the bathmat and reached out for the green dressing gown. It hardly fitted around her big belly, but it was big enough to gather her in and comfort her. As her mother had always done.
Minnie stood still as she allowed herself to drip on to the mat and realize that this home she lived in was not really a home without her mother.
Home is people, not a place.
Home is somewhere distance isn’t. And she felt homesick. In her own home.
Back to the Start
Hope was not keen to hold the baby again, however much the midwives encouraged her to ‘take as much time as she wanted’.
Fatu took her little body from Quiet Isaac, who was now gently sobbing.
Hope watched him. She felt so very sorry for him; it was a terrible sight to see, the lovely man so utterly bereft. He had no resources to deal with this sudden trauma. He had never known shock like it.
She felt very separate from him. They were ordinarily so close, their thoughts and feelings in tandem, sharing absolutely everything. He was sitting right next to her, but that wasn’t where he was at all. He was worlds away in his own vortex of loss; he was unreachable.
Hope was hyper-aware of what was happening in the room. She knew someone was sewing her up. She knew the baby was over on a table, being put into a tiny yellow Babygro. She knew the senior midwife, Sarah, was writing out some kind of form. She knew the doctor was signing it. She knew all this because among the low buzz of activity in the room, kind people were telling her what they were doing. She watched it all. She heard it all, but Hope, like Isaac, was elsewhere.
Because detachment was familiar territory for Hope.
She had learnt very young that there is a way to be somewhere else if you don’t like what’s happening around you in that moment. She became a skilled traveller to that somewhere else inside her head, where she was always much happier. She knew how to split away very successfully. She hadn’t needed to do it for some time though, not really since her early teenage years and when life in her family home became too difficult to sit in the same room with. No one beat her. No one molested her. It was nothing like that – almost the opposite really. Instead of being the focus for any abuse, the abuse itself stole the focus from her, because in Hope’s childhood home, the priority was heroin.
Her father Zak was a gentle man, a drummer, the only white member of a ska band who had never quite made it, but who took drugs as though they had. Weed at first, irie and easy, no problem, but as the fortunes of the band dwindled and then plummeted, so Zak’s need to find his highs had increased. He was dangerously available for any diversion. Some were good. He wrote poetry, he helped people fix their cars, he kept an eye on Hope and her sister Glory when Doris went out to work, cleaning at the University of Bristol. He tried to quieten his frustrated inner voices with keeping busy, but inadequacy is a ferocious loud nag. The only time he had any peace from his demons was when he was sucking on a sweet sweet joint, when time stopped for a sweet sweet while. Then that wasn’t enough.
Zak had easily been persuaded to try heavier drugs. He liked the stories of how ‘golden’ his old band-mates felt, and how nothing bad inhabited them when they had these kinds of remarkable high. He was so desperate to forget his troubles that he only listened to their stories of ecstasy; he totally overlooked their sunken eyes, their loss of energy, and teeth, and reality … and loved ones. He craved the release from all responsibilities. At first. Then he craved it for itself. For its greedy jealous hold over him. He forgot to love his family more than the drug and, before long, the ravenous drug was almost his only love, to the painful exclusion of everyone else including his beloved girls. Heroin stole all his love.
Hope’s mum Doris had smoked a bit of weed occasionally back then, but she had been too afraid to get involved with smack. She watched Zak disappear into the fug of it, though, and rather than face up to the devastating impact it was having on them all, witnessing him gouched out so much of the time, she turned to her friends down the pub for support and comfort, those who had already turned to alcohol for support and comfort. She was too ashamed to confront her daughters with the awfulness of the situation, so she escaped to the pub and to vodka with orange. Her new best friend. Over a period of a year, Hope and Glory experienced the creeping neglect of both parents.
It might have been easier if Zak and Doris had been unkind parents you’d be glad to have less of, but that was palpably not the case. Zak was still the gentle funny dad they’d always loved; it was just that now he was the comatose version, either off his face or desperate to be, or very shaky and ill because he had been the night before. Their mum was still their mum, but either the embarrassing loud and drunk one or the grumpy hungover one.
When she was fourteen, Hope had had to go to Glory’s parents’ evening because neither parent showed up and Glory rang her in tears. ‘They bloody promised they’d be here, Hope, PROMISED, to my face! How could they do this to me?’
‘Hang on, don’t move. I’ll be right there.’ Hope had raced back to the school, hugged her furious, hurt sister, and then hurriedly explained to the
various waiting teachers, ‘Sorry Mum and Dad can’t come, they’ve both … got … a terrible bug, so if it’s OK, I’ll be Glory’s stand-in mum for now. I’ll tell them everything you say, yeah?’
No one on the staff had been fooled. They had taught both girls since primary school and knew the family well. Of course they’d noticed the girls weren’t quite so fresh any more, they’d both become tattier and definitely a bit thinner. There were rumours in the staffroom about the well-being of them both, and about their home life, but they remained rumours; no one came calling to check on the sisters back then. There were so many more critical cases than theirs for the social workers to consider. So they slipped under the radar, these two valiant sisters, and Hope grew up very quickly.
Sometimes, on the days her mother was particularly frail and groggy, Hope would skip school to accompany her to work. No one seemed to mind that Doris’s daughter was with her. Furthermore, no one seemed to notice that it was mainly Hope doing the actual cleaning on those days while Doris slept it off in a chair. When she was sober, Doris was massively grateful to Hope, and she would apologize by buying her delicious pizza on the way home. They would laugh and walk arm in arm as they always had, and for a tiny while, it would all be like it used to be, and Hope would have a small ‘catching of happiness’ … until they walked in at home and Dad was out for the count …
The family kept doors firmly shut to outsiders. The secret of these darker notes in their life was to remain exactly that: secret. Even Doris’s family were kept at arms’ length, meaning that the sisters were starved of contact with their cousins and their uncles whom they loved so much. Occasionally there would be a ruckus when one of Doris’s brothers would turn up to confront them. They shouted from outside when their entrance was barred, imploring Zak or Doris to open up or at least let the girls out to spend time with the family. But no. Sometimes they would hide so as not to be thought at home. Hope longed for the doors to open, to let the light and fresh air in, have a barbeque, put music on and be with people she loved, laughing and dancing. That’s why Hope was determined, in adult life, that hers would be a doors-open house where all were welcome. There would be nothing to hide in there … would there?
Still, it was back in those old days of her childhood fears that Hope had learnt to detach from the ‘now’ life, to travel to the ‘could-be’ life in her head. Hope wanted her mum and dad back, and she had no idea what to do to make that happen. She chose, with her juvenile best thinking, to find the good in everything. She ignored the dark fug of their home, the lack of food in the cupboards and fridge, the detritus of her dad’s drug use on the table and floor all around him, the smell of unwashed underwear beneath unwashed clothes, the lack of telly due to electricity cut-offs, the stumbling about of her parents. Instead, she invented a world for Glory and her to play in, usually in the peace of their bedroom where they made up fantastical stories and built towns from cushions and boxes, where dolls could live the bright and happy life the sisters couldn’t. They had a theatre of delights at their fingertips.
It was the night-time when Hope had felt most sad and frightened. She knew her parents loved her in their misguided way, but she always had a nagging fear in her belly. This way of living wasn’t right: there was no light, no safety, no joy. She would stay awake feeling anxious, so to try and combat the fretting she learnt to float away in her mind to a deep place where only she needed to look after her, where she felt wrapped up and cherished. By herself. She learnt to detach and self-soothe.
So, in the painful now of this hospital room of the dead, with Isaac crying and no baby to take home, she splintered off into her own world of coping, where she was inwardly stroking stroking stroking her broken heart. She wouldn’t be able to carry on otherwise.
Fatu placed the baby back in Hope’s arms. She was now dressed in the yellow Babygro Hope had brought with her, and she was wearing the tiny woollen hat Hope had knitted. It was her first attempt to knit anything, and it was a bit wonky, but it was made with love, in stripes of pink and yellow. Hope stared at Minnie for a few seconds.
‘No,’ said Hope, ‘she won’t need this,’ and she gently removed the hat, and handed the baby back. She didn’t want to hold her or look at her any more. What was the point? Hope wasn’t in the now place, and she wanted to be done with now. Now was indescribably dire.
The midwives took the baby and started talking about funeral plans in hushed tones, about how someone would be in touch, and how there were organizations they could turn to for some support.
The doctor came over to close by her side. ‘I’m so very sorry about this,’ he said as he handed her an envelope, ‘but it’s best to get it over and done with, let you get home, so … in this envelope there’s a form, a certificate which I’ve signed. You will need it when you go to register the … incident. All the details of where to go and everything are in there. It’s best to register it within five days. Now, there may be a post-mortem, but only with your permission, and only for medical purposes. We’d all be grateful if you consented, but there’s no obligation. There’s no mystery surrounding this; the certificate simply says “intrapartum”, which means during labour. The reasons are unknown, as is so often the case, I’m afraid. It’s tragic, inexplicable, but as I always say, there are more things in heaven and earth. I do hope we will see you back here again with a happier outcome. You’re healthy and young and there’s no reason to think that won’t be possible one day. So. All the best. Such a lovely couple. Chin up and all the best.’ With that, he was gone.
Quiet Isaac was open-mouthed with astonishment at the sheer machine-gun-fire speed of the doctor’s well-meaning information. At least the surprise of it had brought him back into the room with a jolt. He reached out to Hope and took her hand.
Hope allowed the gentleness of it, although she filtered out any sympathy with which it was offered. If she allowed that she would be toppled.
No pity. No, thanks.
A tiny dollop of comfort? OK.
Hope took the pain-relief tablets she was offered and laid her head back on the pillow. It felt damp to her neck; it was the sweat from all the effort earlier when her baby had still been alive. She chose to ignore it, close her eyes and rest. She could hear them all faffing around in the room. She prayed that when she opened her eyes again, there would be no baby anywhere to be seen.
She prayed that when she opened her eyes again, Quiet Isaac would be composed and strong once more …
She prayed that she would sleep a little and maybe when she opened her eyes, all of this might have been a nightmare and she would start giving birth all over again, this time to a live baby …
As she prayed for all this, she wondered whether her prayers were ever heard?. She had doubted like this before, when she was younger, but she had rejected those thoughts because she so needed God to be on her team back then; she couldn’t face the thought that he might not exist. She took massive comfort from the idea that God, the big real God, was in loco parentis, that He was looking out for her at a distance, the way her real dad wasn’t.
There, there, she was stroking her heart.
Now here she was years later, doing the same again, but this time, however much she yearned for the comfort, the doubt chipped away at her. What kind of father-God let this woeful cruelty happen to her? To anyone? Surely only a vicious and vengeful God? Did He hate her or something? Did she do something so wrong? Had she offended Him? It was unfair on her, on Isaac, and especially on little Minnie. Little dead Minnie. Who deserved a life, who was innocent and perfect and who had tried so hard to live. Why didn’t He help her have that? Why did He forsake her at that very last moment?
Hope felt the anger boiling up inside her; she heard the distant roar of it. She didn’t want it any closer, so she shut it down quickly. She just wanted her baby.
She wanted it so much.
She kept her eyes tightly shut and forced her mind to sink deeper, below the agony, to some rest. The heavy painkillers
helped her, they were sedative and eventually sleep claimed her as she fell deeper and deeper, pulled further into the arms of Morpheus by a thousand chubby babies’ arms, tugging tugging her drowsy drowsy down.
In Anna and Julius’s room, further up the corridor, there was a low-grade hushed argument kicking off, threatening to gear up into a full-blown row. Julius was beginning to raise his voice: ‘All I am saying is that if I call Kirsty now, she can action the release of the press statement about the birth. I did bother to prepare it, so why wouldn’t we push the button?’
‘Because, Jules, and please keep your voice down, it is three o’clock in the ruddy morning – what is the point of waking Kirsty up now? She’s exhausted enough as it is. Surely it can wait? Come on now. And shush, please.’
‘The whole point is to catch the early editions. We need to get amongst it. Pronto. Or sooner.’
‘Jules, surely it is more of a priority to tell the family? My parents will be waiting by the phone. Call them first? You did promise. And leave the papers ’til tomorrow. Please?’
Julius harrumphed like a spoilt six-year-old. This meant he would be forced to talk to Anna’s parents, who would no doubt want all the minute details about the birth. He genuinely had zero interest in talking about all that guff; besides which, he hadn’t really witnessed it, since he was spark out for most of the time.
‘Jules, seriously, it’s not just my ma and pa – oh and my bro please, and Jo: I promised her – it’s your bloody mum too, and your sisters, for God’s sake. Surely they’re your first bloody call?’ Anna whispered loudly.
‘OK, OK. Yes, OK,’ he replied, annoyed, and immediately called his best friend Piers instead. ‘Piers, wake up, mate. Yeah. A girl. Filly and foal doing fine, yeah …’
Julius was no stranger to arguments. In fact, he enjoyed them. As Julius wandered out into the corridor to continue his conversation, it annoyed Anna that he was so loud despite the fact it was very early and the hospital was cocooned in the unmistakeable early-morning shush that happens just before a building properly wakes up. Other people must surely be giving birth, this was the maternity ward after all, she thought, but nevertheless it was quiet. And Julius wasn’t. He was laughing as he strutted up and down, boasting loudly for all the world, sleeping or awake, to hear. These phone calls weren’t just to inform or celebrate as far as Julius was concerned. No, they were his calling card to anyone he told, a calling card which, were it to be printed out, would read:
