‘So,’ she said, unscrewing the Coke bottle and swigging straight from it. ‘You tell me your story, I’ll tell you mine.’
‘What story?’ I asked.
‘Why you’re here.’
I hesitated.
‘Come on,’ she said, passing me the bottle. ‘I promise you, mine is much darker than yours.’
‘I bet it’s not,’ I said.
‘How much?’
‘A tenner.’
‘OK. Go.’
‘You start,’ I said.
‘I’m warning you, it’s not a happy little bedtime story. Wait, before I start, I just have to do something.’
She took herself to the corner of the room and turned away from me. It was dark, the only light came from the faint gleam of the candles. I could hear her fiddling with something, then there was a sharp intake of breath and a pause before she sat down again.
She tried to hide it, but I could see her arm was bleeding. She’d done it herself, opened up a deep red wound that she was clasping now in her opposite hand.
I suppose most people would have thought she was mad then, and turned away from her. But I didn’t. The thing about us was we weren’t afraid of darkness. It was part of who we were. It was normal.
Part Two
25
Hope
They called it second-chance syndrome, and my mother had it, badly. She lived for the next time – the time she was going to have a child and make everything work and not have it taken away from her. She managed for a while, but the problems were all still there, so she ended up losing me as well.
All her life, she told me, she’d dreamed of nothing but babies. She wanted one of those homes you see on American TV shows, with kitchens big enough for huge happy families. My mother had grown up poor, the sort of poor where everyone lived in one room and there was never any heat or food, and everyone was ill, and the adults were in despair and often thought the only solution would be to let everybody die.
So my mother didn’t want that life for herself and tried hard to move away from it. She got halfway there, but halfway wasn’t anywhere near far enough. Her past had left her weak, and really, she had no idea how to go about creating the life she wanted. She couldn’t even read or add numbers together, and when it came to caring about people, she didn’t have a clue. Everything was beyond her.
Those were her excuses, anyway. Or maybe they were reasons. Whatever they were, she was a disgrace.
I was her second chance, the one she was desperate for. It’s why she called me Hope. I was meant to be her dream come true, her bright light for the future, and she was high when she had me – high on happiness for the first, and only, time in her life. ‘I was so in love with you,’ she told me, ‘from the minute I set eyes on you.’ That was the trouble with my mother. She used to tell me all the time how much she adored me, even as she was punching my lights out.
Her story of my birth went like this:
First, she didn’t get what the fuss was about. All those women you saw screaming in agony on TV, as if birth were the worst thing in the world – worse even than war or a gunshot wound, or some bastard’s knife in your chest, on its way to your heart but missing by half an inch because he was drunk and had poor aim – something my mother had experienced not long before. This was nothing. Really nothing. A few contractions, a dull sort of ache, some energetic pushing, and then out I tumbled into the midwife’s waiting hands: a wet, red-faced baby, howling with rage – possibly because I knew what was waiting for me.
They’d passed me to her straight away and laid me on her chest. Oddly, my mother heard herself saying, over and over again, ‘My God, it’s a baby. It’s a baby,’ as though she’d somehow never quite believed those nine months of pregnancy, so my arrival was a mystery, as surprising as an unplanned delivery from a stork.
She couldn’t stop looking at me, she said, this wide-eyed creature of pure perfection; my skin warm and smooth against her own; my features still scrunched from the muscular embrace of the womb; my bright lips, pink and sweet as a rose. My mother had never known, until this moment, that rosebud lips existed anywhere outside of Snow White, but now she understood, and understood deeply. There was no other way to describe the image of my tiny, exquisite mouth.
Now, as she stared down at me, the words of some crazy midwife she’d seen when she was pregnant came back to her. ‘Don’t worry,’ she’d said, ‘if you don’t bond with the baby straight away. We’re led to expect this immediate, overwhelming rush of love the minute we clap eyes on them, but it doesn’t always happen like that. It’s a big adjustment, having a baby, and birth isn’t always easy. It can take time for the love to come.’
Thank God it wasn’t like that for her, my mother thought. Here she was, naked and bleeding in a hospital bed, her legs still in stirrups while she waited for someone to come and stitch her up, and she felt ablaze with a love so ferocious and tender it was like being the most powerful woman on earth.
She couldn’t believe the baby was here. Couldn’t believe I was hers.
She said, ‘I can’t get over how easy that was.’
The midwife smiled at her, ‘You’re lucky. You’re young. Young bodies manage easier.’
Everyone – literally everyone – was making comments about her age, but my mother wasn’t that young. She was twenty-two. It wasn’t as if she was a stupid fourteen-year-old, knocked up by some pissed lad in the park, but that’s what everyone seemed to think, just because she’d given birth on her own without the baby’s father, as if that meant she was bound to be bad at this, bound to mess it all up. No one saw it the way she saw it. No one bothered to say how strong she was to keep this baby and give it a chance. No. All they did was judge her. Well, so what if she was single and didn’t have loads of money? It didn’t mean she couldn’t be a good mother. She knew what she was doing. She’d always wanted this baby and she wanted me even more, now I was here.
‘I knew I was going to do right by you. I wasn’t going to let anyone take you away.’
Five years before me, she’d given birth to a baby boy, but she couldn’t remember anything about that. She’d been so out of it, her memory was wiped. The baby was out of it, too – lost in a heroin-induced stupor because my mother hadn’t been able to kick the habit. No one had picked up on it at the time. She’d never gone for antenatal care. It was only after the birth, when the midwives heard the shrill cry of a newborn in cold turkey, that they realised.
‘Don’t take him away,’ my mother begged. ‘I’ll stop. I’ll stop. Let me keep my baby.’
For a while, she kept him, and they gave her all the usual support: methadone for the baby, treatment for herself, but the pull of addiction was too strong. They found him one day, abandoned in his cot after nearly a week, unfed, unwashed, not cared for at all, while my mother was somewhere else, lost in cloudy euphoria.
‘I love my son,’ she was quoted as saying in court. ‘I’d die for my baby boy.’
It was true. The social workers and judges all seemed to agree. My mother would have done anything in her power to look after her child, but in the end, the drug was stronger than she was. It swept her off her feet, straight into the gutter.
So they took him away and had him fostered, and after a year, when my mother still wasn’t upright, he was adopted and went to live with a nice, middle-class family in Jesmond and went to a private prep school, where his navy-blue blazer and high level of numeracy belied his terrible beginnings.
But my mother never recovered from losing him. It was her wake-up call, she told me. She was going to get treatment and get well. She knew she could never have her first child back, but there had to be a second chance. She’d find work and a decent place to live and then she could have another baby and give this one all the love and care it needed.
That one was me. And now look at me.
I was only a few hours old when it started going wrong. She’d had me in a midwife-led unit, attached to a small hospital. Mos
t women didn’t give birth there. The babies were delivered in the city, then the mothers went there to recover on a ward with only four beds, and midwives to help with feeding and bathing and changing, and all those other things the huge city hospital was too busy for.
They said they weren’t going to push her out before she was ready. They knew she was a single mother with history, and had her flagged as someone who’d need extra support. Also, the unit was always under threat of closure, so they liked women to stay for a while so they could prove that this was a vital service, not just an expensive luxury the NHS could ill afford.
We were the only ones there the first night. At nine o’clock, when my mother was just about to lie down and sleep for the first time in more than twenty-four hours, I woke up and started crying. In moments, the midwife on duty walked on to the ward, looking like she meant business. ‘Right,’ she said, taking me from my mother’s arms. ‘Let’s get this breastfeeding going. These first hours are crucial for giving her the colostrum. It’s like liquid gold for the baby. Think of it as her first vaccination. It’ll protect her against all sorts of nasties.’
My mother nodded obediently and undid the fastenings on her maternity nightdress. Once she was sitting up, her back straight against the pillows, naked to the waist, the midwife lurched me towards her left breast, as ferociously as if I were a truck coming to knock my mother down.
Apparently, feeding wasn’t as easy as other women made it look.
‘She needs to be attached like this,’ the midwife said, grabbing hold of my mother’s breast in her hand and pushing it into my mouth. It hurt her, and I had other ideas anyway. I refused to suck and kept arching my back away from what was being offered, spluttering on my own hungry frustration. My mother tried, again and again, but each time I rejected her.
She was tired. So tired. She just wanted to lie me down beside her and let herself fall into a long, luxurious sleep.
The midwife spoke firmly. ‘The baby needs feeding. She’s hungry.’
So my mother muscled on, murmuring to me, coaxing me, trying to make me see that I didn’t have to fight, that what I needed was right here, being offered to me. All I had to do was to take it.
But I wouldn’t take it.
My mother had been so hopeful. She thought she was going to be good at this, thought she could do it, even though she’d never had a decent mother herself and everyone had told her you only learned mothering from the way your own mother did it. But it was all so much harder if you’d never been mothered yourself, or mothered the wrong way … But she’d been sure she could manage. Already, having a baby had reignited the sad grey lump of her heart, and surely that was the most important thing. If the love was there, she could navigate her way through the rest.
But here she was, failing, barely ten hours in.
‘She doesn’t like me,’ she said, and looked at the midwife as if she were lost.
The midwife was brisk. ‘Of course she likes you. You’re her mother.’
‘I can’t afford that formula stuff. She needs to eat.’
I went on screaming. There was a terrible, desperate pitch to the crying now, as if some deep, evolutionary instinct had kicked in and I was panicking, knowing I would die if I couldn’t get milk.
The midwife said, ‘Let me take her for a while.’
My mother handed me over gratefully and the midwife took me and headed off the ward. All she could think now was how peaceful it was, and how badly she wanted a drink.
They should have taken me, right there and then, and given me to somebody stronger. Things could have been so different if they had.
Another day passed, another night, the midwives changed shifts, I went on crying and the feeding still failed. They told my mother to squeeze out the colostrum herself and she gave it to me in a syringe. Her breasts were cow-heavy and aching. She waddled from bed to bathroom and longed for her mother, or someone’s else’s mother. Any mother.
She was afraid to go home and face sleepless nights alone; for her flat to be filled with a baby’s howls; for the neighbours to overhear and know she was failing at this before she’d even started; for the money to run out because the baby was going to need formula and she couldn’t work, not yet, not until her body recovered; for it all to just get too hard; for her to mess it all up and for me to die.
On the fourth day, they were busy. The midwife pulled back the curtain around my mother’s bed and said, ‘Are you ready to go home today, Bex?’
‘OK,’ my mother said.
We got lost in the wide-open mouth of the night. 2.57 am. I was wailing. I’d been wailing for ages, for hours, forever. My mother had given me formula – she’d abandoned breastfeeding at night; someone told her babies slept better with a belly full of formula, so that’s what she was doing now, although it wasn’t working – and then settled me in the Moses basket beside the bed. But I’d woken up again five minutes later, and now we were still there, the two of us, pacing the floors while my mother rubbed my back, her eyes failing as I cried and cried, pulling my mother further into a dark space that wasn’t sleep but ought to have been sleep – somewhere vague and heavy and forgetful, where her mind sagged and there was no energy to keep going.
She hated me by then, I’m sure, and I could probably feel it. She couldn’t do this. She needed a cigarette to stay awake. She needed to get away from this noise, from this baby, just for a minute…
But then, suddenly, I was asleep. 4:08 am. Just like that. From somewhere unknown, my mother found the strength to head back to the bedroom, fasten me into my sleeping bag and lie me down in the Moses basket. Soon, she knew, I would be awake again. I hadn’t slept longer than forty-five minutes at a time since we’d come out of hospital three weeks before. But for now, for this moment, I was asleep. My mother slipped back beneath the covers and let it happen. Oh, God. She would do anything for more of this.
Anything…
I woke, crying. My mother’s eyes jerked open. She was too tired now. She couldn’t be bothered to get up and mix formula. She reached for me, then sat back and attached me to her breast, which was as empty as a deflated balloon. 5:03. She wanted to lie down with me and sleep while I fed, but she couldn’t because I was too frail and it was too big a risk. So she sat up and watched as time passed and the night slipped away from her.
5.23. I fell asleep again and my mother knew this was my last nap of the night. Next time, I’d be bright, alert, and we’d have to get up and begin the task of muscling through another day.
She laid me down and then laid herself down. She had to get these minutes, these forty-five minutes. They were probably only forty-four by now, but she had to get them…
She felt awful. Awful. If she ever had to paint a picture of hell, for the rest of her life now, this was going to be it: a mother chasing sleep, while everywhere around her, small vampires demanded that she produce more energy. But there was no energy. She had to drag it out of her bones.
The days were alright, sometimes, but there was no way of pushing back the night. It was out there, always, waiting to rush in. There was too much of it, like the sea. Its currents pulled her under. I wailed and my mother floundered on, directionless, until at last the light came and there she was, washed ashore: the motherwreck.
It would be easier soon, she told herself. Easier because the health visitor was coming over today and my mother was going to hand me to her on a plate. ‘Here,’ she’d say. ‘Have her. I can’t cope with her.’
26
Annie
‘I didn’t have a chance from the start,’ Hope told me. ‘I was born to the wrong woman.’
It was something I grew to despair of in her – this habit she had of thinking she was powerless, that everyone else had already destroyed her and there was no fighting back, no chance of recovery from her brutal past.
She passed me the bottle of Coke and some of the Wotsits she’d nicked from the kitchen. I pushed them away, but kept seeing them from the corner of my eye,
glinting at me like knives.
‘What was your mum like?’ she asked.
‘Mental,’ I said. ‘Completely bonkers.’ My mother wasn’t a subject I wanted to talk about, or even think about. When the memories surfaced, I had to push them back down before they drowned me.
She wasn’t going to leave it there, though. She saw this sharing of biography as a direct exchange. Now she’d started telling me about her life, she expected me to do the same.
‘Do you need vodka?’ she asked me. ‘Is that why you haven’t told me anything yet?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t need vodka.’
She laughed. ‘Give it to me, then,’ she said. ‘Give me your shit and we can compare the shittiness of it. I bet yours isn’t as bad as mine.’
‘I bet it is,’ I said. Before I met her, I thought mine was the worst life in the world. I felt too young to be stuck here, looked after by strangers who only pretended to care. I didn’t realise Hope’s story was just going to get worse and worse until I could hardly bear to hear it.
‘How was she mental?’ she pressed.
‘She just was. She thought crazy stuff. Stuff that wasn’t real.’ I could picture her as I spoke, her face ancient and careworn, eyes glazed, speaking into the air as though someone was listening…
I said, ‘Was your mum mental, do you think?’
‘She was fucked up. Is that the same?’
I hesitated, thinking about it. Then I said, ‘I don’t know. Mine was properly mad. Naturally crazy. She didn’t need drugs to send her crazy. It’s just how she was.’
Hope shrugged. ‘No. Mine wasn’t like that. But it’s the same thing in the end, isn’t it? For us, I mean. Our mums were out of it and were … well, they were just a bit shit.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Mine was such a flipping embarrassment.’
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