by Dawn French
Julius Albert Lindon-Clarke MP
Tory. Husband. FATHER.
Seed-giver. Success.
Very. Important. Indeed.
At last, he had achieved fatherhood, which was very important … for his job. It authenticated him. It helped him to be regarded as stable and faithful. The British public needed to trust him, and the new little wriggly bundle was a key part of that package.
He had been extremely worried when no baby came along earlier in the marriage and he was nervous when Anna suggested getting help in the form of IVF. He’d turned his feelings of failure and frustration into an offended childish stomp-off. It was some time before Anna tentatively suggested it again. Five years and a pressurized but sparse love life later, Julius had agreed to go and see an IVF specialist with her. By the time Anna had booked the appointment, she was pregnant. It was truly miraculous – they so rarely shared any intimacy – but he had come home one night in early April after a ‘late session’ in the House, smelling of cannabis and very interested in her. She knew deep in her honest heart that he’d been unfaithful many times, but she couldn’t accept it in her day-to-day trying-to-stick-to-the-marriage-vows-and-just-get-on-with-life state of mind. She didn’t want to confront him with it – he had a quick, ferocious temper and the poisonous tongue of a thousand snakes. He hadn’t displayed this side of his nature for some years when she first met him.
But.
Then again.
There were many hidden parts of Julius Albert Lindon-Clarke. Anna couldn’t have known when she first met him, but he wasn’t a whole real person. He was a construct, a convincing, attractive façade. Julius had scars. He had been the butt of many jokes when he was young. It wasn’t obviously to do with his race, there were plenty of other black kids at his school and they were respected and powerful. It was to do with his snobbish attitude.
Snobbery, whatever colour it’s wrapped up in, is pretty galling. As he saw it, he was truly entitled to any level of importance he desired. He saw no limit to any of his many aspirations and he genuinely believed that those who did were fools, and he pitied the paucity of their ambition.
Julius also had actual scars, from heart surgery he’d experienced as a very young child. The marks across his chest were testament to a very serious operation he’d undergone to correct a rare heart defect. The staff at the hospital in London where he was born noticed how blue he was and how little he fed. His breathing was shallow and he gained virtually no weight in the first few weeks. The doctor eventually told his mother the frightening news that he had something they named ‘coarctation of the aorta’, which they explained to her meant that part of his aorta was too narrow, thereby causing the left ventricle of his heart to have to work much harder. It could mean a problem with lack of blood flow to the lower half of his body if it remained unresolved, so she agreed to the proposed surgery. Julius was plumbed in wrong; basically there were serious errors in his piping. During the substantial surgery, the surgeon had to excise the section that was too narrow, and stretch the remaining tissue around the small Gore-Tex tube which replaced it. The operation was entirely successful and little Julius was soon able to go home with his mother and grew up without any further health issues other than the odd check-up. By the time his two younger sisters came along, Julius was fighting fit, and at age five he was pretty much assuming the role of the man of the house. The father figure he longed for, he became.
Except he wasn’t very fatherly. It was the position and status he desired, not the emotional responsibility, but being the only boy and the eldest, and the most prized by his mother (in no small part because she felt she almost lost him very early on), he had the figurehead role bestowed upon him, and he liked how important that made him feel.
Julius was going to MATTER, whatever it took, however many other people might have to be swept aside to achieve it. Ironically, Julius didn’t notice that those he was repeatedly sweeping aside, namely his mother, his two younger sisters and his wife, were in fact the very people he mattered the most to. They were ultimately the ones who endeavoured to love him best, despite how challenging that was, especially as he began to gain some purchase on his meticulously planned career path. The first whiff Julius had of any kind of status he might gain was when he took part in a school debate about the death penalty and why it was abolished in 1965. He was the only candidate to propose the return of such a penalty in cases of murder. He was extremely dramatic and persuasive when he recounted the grisly details of various murders he had researched, mostly brutal ones. The sixteen-year-old Julius re-enacted the events with great showmanship and plenty of vigour, eventually pleading with the audience of fellow fifth-formers at his grammar school, as if he were the prosecution attorney in an edgy crime series:
‘And so I urge you, upright citizens that you clearly are, to consider the moral justice of capital punishment. Look inside your own hearts, your own consciences, and surely what you will find is the incontrovertible truth that if, God forbid, someone killed your mother brutally, like this, it would be the only right thing to do, the biblical and justified RIGHT thing. That, my friends, however unpalatable, would be the neat and correct ending to any murderer’s life. I rest my case.’
When, inexplicably, he received a round of applause for his impassioned argument, Julius’s world changed. The possibility of power was no longer a whiff, it was a graveolence. Julius reframed himself in that instant as a potentially significant person and he relished all the attention it brought him. Little did he realize then that this kind of limelight is the worst poison for a psychopath such as he.
It would feed
feed
feed
feed his monstrous
ego, and it would lead him to seek out his approval and his love in all the wrong places.
And it would also allow him to repeatedly and selfishly forget all the sacrifices his family had made to help their golden boy on his way.
Julius finished his loud phone calls and came back into the room where his wife and baby were. The midwives had gone for now; the baby was wrapped up tight and dozing in the see-through plastic crib next to Anna’s bed. He flumped down into the chair at the end of the bed and, without a single glance at his daughter, yawned a huge, cavernously loud yawn, uttered, ‘God, I’m knackered …’ and promptly fell fast asleep, mission accomplished.
Anna, barely resisting the urge to sleep, was trying to remain upright so that she could share this precious time with Florence.
She didn’t even want to blink really, so as not to forgo a moment where she could be looking at Florence’s beautiful little face. She couldn’t stop staring. ‘Look at you, tiny one,’ she whispered. ‘Who are you actually? I know you, you lived inside me, but now you’re here, I don’t think I do know you after all. You are yourself, aren’t you? A whole new person of your own, bless you. Welcome, darling Florence. There were two of us. Now there’s three. And you’re the best one of us all …’
‘Bah.’
A strange involuntary grumble coming from her conked-out husband made Anna look over to him. She watched Julius as his head slowly lolled forward on to his chest, and he started his familiar caveman rumble of a snore, leaving her to watch over Florence. Anna imagined that this would be the first of many nights just like this, where she would be alone with the responsibility.
She didn’t know that there would never be another.
1 January 2000
The tinkling of a hospital teacup woke Hope up. It was still early, around 6.30 a.m., but Quiet Isaac was clearly in the new day in such an affirmative way. He smiled at her as he slurped his milkless tea.
‘Hey. Sun is shining,’ he said, risking a tentative smile. Hope looked at the window and indeed it was – shining brightly. She could see dust particles dancing in a beam hitting the far wall. To anyone else, this would be entrancing. Beautiful even. But for Hope, no. She didn’t like to see dust anywhere, and definitely not here in the hospital where she was in charge of
ridding it of exactly that.
She and Isaac were the only people there. The baby cot was empty. So empty. Except the atoms of dust. The dust that might have also once been on her baby.
She sat up and took the fresh cup of tea Isaac poured for her from a sludgy green teapot. There was no sugar in it. She liked sugar, did Hope. She liked it far too much. But there was none on the tray, so she settled for tea with just the milk. It was hot and vaguely tea-ish, and that was enough to rehydrate her, which was all she wanted, because her head was pounding.
All Hope knew was that she needed to get out of that room, that ward, that hospital. She felt a strange mixture of sadness, shame and embarrassment. What had happened to them was supremely personal, and she wanted to hide away so that she could nurse herself.
As she moved her legs out from underneath the warm sheets, she felt the sharp sting of pain where her stitches were. Ow.
Quiet Isaac saw her wince and moved to help her.
‘It’s OK. I’m fine. My clothes …?’
‘Let’s wait for the nurse. She said she’d be back soon.’
‘I just want to … get home …’
‘I know. I know, but be careful, Bubs,’ and he reached out to her.
She looked him in the eye and they both understood just how much it all hurt, and Hope let him hold her. As her face nestled into his chest where he stood at the side of the bed, she could hear his heartbeat, strong and steady, like the Isaac she knew before all this, the Isaac she came into the hospital with. He was back, strong and supportive, and she was gratefully glad of it. Perhaps they might just get through everything as long as they were together …?
Fatu came back in and explained that Hope was free to go whenever she felt ready to. She gave Hope a packet of pain-relief tablets and an antibacterial wash to keep her stitches clean. She sat next to Hope on the bed and, very very sensitively, she said, ‘I have a pack here for you, Hope. It has some information about a support group for people who have been through this similar situation. They’re good at their job, so lean on them if you want to, yes? I know you want to leave, but if you would like to see the hospital chaplain, I can call him …?’
‘No, no, it’s far too early.’
‘He would never mind, honestly.’
‘No. Thank you. It’s OK. Thank you.’ Hope knew she wouldn’t be able to stomach another sympathy-tilted head. At least Fatu had been there in the room with them through it all. Others couldn’t possibly understand.
‘And lastly, Hope, this envelope is for you to pass on to the funeral director, when you are ready. It has all the details of where little Minnie will be kept for now …’
‘What do you mean, “kept”?’
‘Where she will wait to be collected …’
‘Where is she then?’ Hope asked.
Fatu paused. The word was hard to say, but she knew she must. ‘In the hospital mortuary. Safe.’
Fatu had kept it together valiantly until this moment of raw reality. She was a young midwife, and stillbirth was relatively rare, so witnessing Hope and Isaac’s shock and pain was dreadful for her. She wished it had turned out differently for them, but there was nothing she could do other than offer her sisterly giant heart in a professional manner.
Fatu put her hand on Hope’s hand, which was in turn on Isaac’s hand, and for a small frozen moment, the three of them shared the heaviness of the grief. When Hope lifted her head to look Fatu in the eye and thank her, she saw that Fatu wasn’t coping with the sadness.
‘I’m so sorry, sista.’ A fat tear rolled down Fatu’s cheek and sploshed on to her hand.
Hope reached up to Fatu’s face and wiped away any wet that was threatening to congregate and make more tears. ‘’S OK. It’s … yeah … OK. It is this, it’s what it is and nothing can change it now, so save your tears. But thank you. From me and him and … her. Thank you. You did nothing wrong. We know that.’
‘Oh, thank you for sayin’ so … I wish—’
‘I know,’ Hope interrupted her. ‘My grandmother would say this is God’s wish. I dunno what I think right now, but we need to go away and work out how to live without her …’
‘I don’t know how you’re goin’ to do that, but I get the strong feelin’ it’s goin’ to be all right, I really do.’ Fatu tried to reassure her with what she undoubtedly felt was the truth. ‘You want some breakfast?’
‘No, no, we will go if we’re allowed to …?’
‘Yes, you are free to leave, but, Hope, please take it steady. Can I help you to shower …?’
‘No, no, thanks, I can manage …’ And with that Hope released their hands and stood up. She wasn’t an invalid; she could get herself ready. She was a bit sore but she could manage. Hope was a tower of strength, and even if, like now, there were times she wasn’t, boy could she fake it. She had reached that moment when if she didn’t move forward somehow, she knew she would tip back into the awfulness of what had happened a few hours ago. Nope. That was NOT going to happen. She needed to motor on. She needed to get out.
Quiet Isaac went to pick up the two large bags they had packed to bring in. One was full of baby clothes, blankets, newborn nappies and everything they could possibly need to bring their new little one home. Isaac wanted to get this bag especially out of Hope’s eyeline and out of the building into the boot of his tatty old Honda Civic parked in the hospital’s basement garage. The zip was tightly closed on that one; it hadn’t even been opened once. It would return home packed. The saddest bag in history.
Quiet Isaac picked up the other overnight bag, but Hope stopped him.
‘Best leave that one. I’ll put my nightie in it, and there’s my washbag stuff …’ she said, touching his arm.
‘OK, I’ll take this,’ he said as he went to the corner of the room and picked up the baby car seat they’d bought to make sure the tiddly infant was safe homeward bound. He was a pitiful sight. A man so loaded down with the defunct detritus of his tragedy.
The seat was a pastel purple colour with a pattern of ducklings on the padding. The bag was pale yellow with cheerful pink hearts all over it. The man was brown, with a black and blue interior. He attempted a valiant last smile; then he was gone.
Hope was grateful the delivery suite had its own bathroom. She closed the door behind her. This was the first minute she’d had entirely alone since … well, since.
Everything inside Hope was trembling. She felt that only her skin was keeping the shaky jelly in, and her skin was extra thin right now. She wondered if people might actually be able to SEE the wobbling mass she was just beneath the surface, if they were up close? She turned the shower on, and she stepped in.
Something very strange happened to Hope as the water hit her upturned face. It gave licence to Hope’s tears, the first she had cried. Hope had cried before in her life, many times; she’d had some pretty lonely moments trying to be both parents to her sister, and worrying herself sick about her mum and dad, but she’d not experienced anything like this. These tears came from a bottomless well she didn’t know was there. How could something so recent, so new, feel like such ancient sorrow? It was as if she’d lost her oldest, dearest darling, the closest soul to hers. Some of her, of herself, had died. Unexpectedly.
She opened her mouth and as the shower water gushed in, she let out a choking yelp. She held on to the wet, cold tiled walls for balance as she looked down at the water disappearing into the plughole, taking with it all the hopeful skin she had yesterday, when life was so differently better and so full of happy anticipation. Hope’s tears joined in and swirled around the drain along with all of her joy and she watched it vanish. She was emptying out. She felt weak. And raw. And strangely heavy. Surely all these tears escaping should leave her lighter, in every way? And yet she could barely stand, owing to the weight of the concrete sadness in the pit of her stomach. She placed her back to the wall, felt the cool of it with a wince and slid down until she was crumpled up in the shower tray, curled in on herself with the h
ot water pounding down on her. She started to slap the wall with the flat of her hand, and soon she was on her knees thwacking the wall repeatedly and howling out her pain.
When, finally, Hope’s breathing was back to calm and regular, she stepped out of the shower and vigorously rubbed herself dry with the merciless over-bleached hospital towel. She rubbed very hard. She wanted that top layer of baby-hopeful skin gone. She wanted her hair clean of the baby-pushing sweat. She wanted no single remnant of any of it. Her skin felt raw but it helped somehow. Even the way it stung felt right. The inner anguish boiling away, filling her up and pushing out through every pore.
Fatu popped back into the room and heard the noises coming from the bathroom. ‘You OK in there, Hope?’ she enquired as she knocked on the door.
‘Yep. Yep. Fine. No problem,’ Hope shouted from within her own private wet hell. ‘I’m nearly done …’
‘Take your time, no rush,’ Fatu answered. She hesitated briefly in order to listen closely at the door, just to be sure Hope was all right. She heard nothing alarming, so she carried on with her work.
Home was definitely where Hope wanted to be now. She wanted everything familiar around her; it might help to anchor her to the earth again because, sure as hell, nothing in the hospital seemed normal. Even though it was her place of work, it felt like a completely strange and hostile other planet. She was glad it was early and she might avoid seeing any of her cleaning team as she left. She’d promised that she would present her new little one to them on the way home, but she couldn’t face telling them. She couldn’t face the pity; it would tip her over the edge. She wanted to dodge them all and get straight down to the car and waiting Quiet Isaac.
