Patience

by Victoria Scott

  And was it crazy to hope for a miracle? Her father would have said not; but then, he’d been a Christian, and they believed in miracles. Louise had believed in very little for years, but this – she believed in science. And she believed in the little girl she’d held in her arms all those years ago, full of promise. She believed in hope.

  And coming towards them, right now, was that hope in action – a small vial of liquid, sitting in a sterile basin, alongside a long needle. A red-haired woman wearing scrubs, her hair tied back neatly in a ponytail, was carrying this precious load. She walked up to them and put it down on a portable trolley beside the window, before pulling the curtains around Patience’s bed.

  Shit, my boredom may be about to be replaced with something far worse.

  ‘Mrs Willow? I’m Dr Stevens. I do lumbar punctures every day, so Professor Larssen asked me to do this one. Has he explained what’s going to happen?’

  Louise held her gaze and responded, determined not to look as out of her depth as she felt.

  ‘Yes, I’ve done a bit of work with the team, so he went through it with me.’ The doctor looked relieved.

  That’s great, Mum, I’m glad someone has some idea what’s going on.

  ‘Great. Good. We’re going to move Patience into a side room for this. Let me just go to fetch the porter.’ She walked off, closing the curtain behind her. Louise glanced over at Patience and reached for her hand. Was it her imagination, or did she seem to be shaking?

  A side room? How large a puncture are they planning to make?!

  The doctor returned a few minutes later with a friendly-looking short, round nurse and a middle-aged, sagging porter who looked as if his breakfast hadn’t agreed with him.

  ‘Right, let’s go,’ said the doctor, signalling to the nurse and porter to take the brakes off Patience’s bed and begin to push her in the direction of the corridor.

  You know when you are so frightened about doing something that you wish someone else could take over your body and do it for you? That.

  Louise grabbed her handbag and followed behind them in silence, aware that all eyes in the ward were currently trained on her back.

  Their strange parade came to an end in a small windowless, strip-lit room just off the main corridor. The nurse and her reluctant assistant parked Patience’s bed exactly in the middle of the far wall and Dr Stevens closed the door behind them.

  This is a tiny room. It’s hot in here and the lights are hurting my eyes.

  ‘Carol here is going to come over and sit next to Patience and chat to her,’ the doctor said to Louise, identifying the nurse for the first time. ‘Wayne, you can go now, thank you.’ Louise watched as the porter sloped out of the room. Then the doctor turned towards her once more. ‘Mrs Willow, are you happy for me to turn Patience onto her side?’ she asked. Louise nodded, finding that she had temporarily lost the power to speak.

  Yeah, well, don’t bother asking me, lady. I’m just the patient, after all.

  Carol went to get a chair and sat on the far side of the bed so that Patience’s head would be directly opposite her during the procedure. Louise watched as the doctor carefully rolled Patience over on the bed, placing cushions under her knees and behind her back, so that she wouldn’t move. Then she squeezed some white cream out of a tube and placed it in a puddle on Patience’s back, securing it with a plaster. Local anaesthetic.

  ‘Hi, Patience, I’m Carol. I’m a nurse. I’m just going to sit here for a bit, while the doctor takes a look at your back.’ The nurse was smiling.

  The friendly-looking nurse has a megawatt smile, as if she’s just been told she’s won a lifetime’s supply of crisps. She also has a lovely lilting Welsh accent, and I’d be charmed by it if I didn’t have a fair idea about what’s coming. Sit here for a bit, my arse.

  ‘Carol, could you hold Patience by the shoulders and make sure she’s completely stable?’ asked the doctor, interrupting her.

  Brace, brace.

  ‘Yep,’ she replied, manoeuvring so that she could brace herself against Patience’s body. Louise took in her daughter’s back, marked forever by the major spinal surgery she’d had when she was nine. They’d inserted a huge metal rod to straighten her out, so that she didn’t have to spend her life doubled over, her lungs compressed by her own body.

  The doctor removed the plaster from Patience’s back, and wiped the cream away. Louise winced as she saw the vial placed in the syringe.

  ‘OK, Patience, you’re going to feel a sharp scratch in your back,’ the doctor said. ‘But it’ll be over quickly.’

  Oh my God, that hurts!

  ‘Just look at me, Patience,’ said Carol. ‘Look at me. Where’s this top from, by the way? I love the colour.’

  Her efforts to distract a woman who can’t talk are faintly ridiculous, I mean, how am I supposed to reply? And, oh God, another twinge!

  ‘Argggghhhhh!’ Patience had made her first noise of the day, and it sounded like a cry. Louise stood up quickly and walked around the bed, so that Patience could see her.

  Fuuuuccccccckkkkkk

  ‘I’m here, darling, I’m here,’ she said, and she knelt down next to the bed, as if in prayer. ‘Just look at Mummy.’

  I can hardly look anywhere else!

  ‘Arrrggggggghhhhhhh!’

  The doctor had inserted the needle. Louise was whispering in her ears now, almost chanting.

  ‘Mummy’s here, and it’s going to be worth it, I promise. Mummy’s here, and it’s going to be worth it, I promise.’

  What on earth could be worth this?

  ‘It’ll be over in just a minute, Patience,’ said Carol brightly. ‘Just a few seconds more.’

  ‘Done!’ said the doctor, swiftly removing the needle and replacing it in the dish behind her. She then ripped her latex gloves off and asked Carol to help her place Patience back onto her back. Louise noticed that there was a tear in the corner of her daughter’s right eye.

  ‘She’s going to need to stay on her back for at least twenty-four hours, as you know,’ she said, looking at Louise. ‘The nurses are going to come to fit a catheter, and they’ll also attach a drip. She can eat normally, but we’ll be monitoring her pretty constantly for the next few days. Do you have any questions?’

  I have plenty.

  Louise could think of none. She was focussed instead on the tear, which was now trailing down Patience’s cheek. She reached for the pack of tissues on the bedside table and used one to wipe her daughter’s face dry.

  ‘OK, well then. Great. I know Professor Larssen said he’d be checking in on you. Good luck with it. I really hope it makes a difference.’

  And with that, she picked up the dish, opened the door and strode away, already thinking about her next patient. Louise watched the door close and gathered her daughter into an apologetic embrace.

  Mum is giving me a hug. I think she’s crying. That makes two of us.

  26

  Eliza

  March

  The waiting-room-that-was-trying-not-to-be was still as unconvincing as ever. The radio was still tuned to Classic FM, and the Gladiator soundtrack was currently serenading the assembled gathering of women desperate for distraction.

  Katy was gripping Eliza’s hand. She’d taken hold of it as they’d walked up to the building and hadn’t let go, even when they’d checked in at reception. Eliza thought that some of the other patients probably had them down as a couple, which would have been funny, if she was in the mood for laughter.

  She was feeling decidedly unwell. The morning sickness had pretty much abated now, but had been replaced with a gnawing in her bowels, which she recognised as fear. She hadn’t dared to eat anything today.

  At least she didn’t have to work. She had laid the groundwork for this carefully, and taken the whole week off, citing wedding preparations. This was obviously a hilarious irony on so many counts, but Eliza was, again, not in the mood for hilarity.

  ‘This is awful, isn’t it,’ said Katy. ‘The déjà
vu.’

  It was surprising that she hadn’t raised it until now; Eliza had never told her not to, but it had just been an unspoken understanding between them, that what happened in the past stayed in the past. Her mum had told her never to tell anyone about what had happened in that clinic on the south coast and, for the most part, she’d kept that promise. But it was Katy who’d come to visit the next day and, seeing the look on her face, had known something appalling had just happened. It had been such a relief to tell her. She had provided the emotional support afterwards that her mum had failed to. In many ways, it had cemented their friendship.

  It had turned out, in the end, that the thing by the tree – for that was the only way she was prepared to refer to it – had been a dare. She had been the unwitting star of a cruel show, designed by Michael and his friends. She had been an easy conquest, so easy. A pushover. He must have loved that. Unable to move schools to avoid him and his friends and the inextricable shame, she had instead shrunk into her uniform, stopped speaking in lessons, taken to hiding in the library during break. She had longed to be invisible.

  She had also discovered after that that she was, for the most part, perfectly happy with her own company. Aside from Katy, she had made almost no other close friends, and that had been a deliberate choice. Other people could not be trusted, as Ed had so elegantly demonstrated.

  ‘Elizabeth?’

  It wasn’t the same nurse as before. This one did not have a Scottish accent, and she did not exude the same warmth. Eliza and Katy stood up in unison and walked, still holding hands, down the corridor and into one of the rooms, this time, on the right. Sitting inside there was an older woman of Indian descent, dressed smartly in black trousers and a floral shirt, dark brown hair up in a bun, her stethoscope slung around her neck.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ she began. ‘Can I call you Elizabeth?’

  ‘It’s Eliza.’

  ‘Eliza. Good. I’m Dr Krisha. I see you’ve decided to go ahead with a termination. Can I confirm with you the date of your last menstrual period?’

  ‘I can’t remember exactly, but it was last November,’ she replied.

  ‘Right, so that makes you about twenty weeks pregnant,’ the doctor said. She typed a few words into a form on her computer, and swivelled her chair towards Eliza. She looked her up and down, taking in her thin frame, her complete absence of bump. Eliza had been relieved that she wasn’t showing, but now she saw that it was worrying the doctor.

  ‘I’d like to do an ultrasound to confirm those dates, as you aren’t exactly sure,’ she said. ‘Can you hop onto the bed over there for me?’ Eliza had not moved.

  ‘Why, don’t you believe me, about the dates?’ she asked.

  ‘I do,’ the doctor replied, softly. ‘But I wouldn’t know that, from the look of you. It’s standard procedure; we need to know what we’re dealing with, confirm dates. Did you do a pregnancy test?’

  ‘Yes. Several.’

  ‘Good.’

  Katy let go of her hand at last and Eliza stood up, walked over to the couch and sat down on it, unbuttoning her trousers.

  ‘Do you mean, you think I might not be pregnant at all?’

  ‘This will be cold,’ Dr Krisha said. She was squeezing gel over Eliza’s lower abdomen and the nurse was fiddling with a screen, which was turned away from her. ‘And sometimes, pregnancies end without us knowing they have, and that can be dangerous. So I’m just taking a look.’

  Eliza lay back on the tissue covering of the bed and placed a hand over her stomach. She had never once doubted that there was a baby inside there.

  ‘Could this be because I had an abortion when I was a teenager?’ she asked.

  ‘That shouldn’t have any effect, but let’s see what’s going on.’

  The doctor placed the transducer on her stomach and Eliza lay still, considering for the first time that her first abortion might have ruined her chances of ever having children. Throughout her twenties she had battled not to get pregnant again; now, she realised, it might all have been a waste of time.

  There was a significant pause. The doctor was staring intently at the screen and the nurse, meanwhile, was tidying up a table of instruments on the other side of the room, in what looked to Eliza like a deliberate attempt to avoid her little bit of human drama. She wondered when the doctor was going to break it to her that the baby had died inside her, long ago. She must be working out the best way to go about it, particularly as she was planning to abort it anyway. It was an odd predicament to put her in, no question.

  Ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom

  The doctor exclaimed loudly and reached for a knob on the machine to turn the speakers down. But it was already too late. It took Eliza just a split second to realise that she was listening to a baby’s heartbeat.

  It was the most extraordinary sound she’d ever heard.

  ‘Please can I see?’

  The doctor looked over at her.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘We don’t normally show—’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Eliza, almost begging.

  The doctor turned the screen towards her and showed her the outline of a small human amongst the grey and black.

  ‘It seems fine,’ she said, as if that’s what she’d been expecting all the time. ‘You must just be the sort of person who shows late. But it’s odd… Have you been eating OK?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She had barely eaten for months.

  ‘You look on the thin side. The baby will have taken what it needed and it hasn’t left you much. You need to look after yourself, too.’

  She wiped the gel off with some tissue, told Eliza that she could get dressed, and pulled the curtain around the bed to give her privacy. Eliza’s whole body was shaking, and when she sat back down on the chair nearest the doctor’s desk, she could see that Katy had been crying.

  ‘OK, so I took some measurements, and it would seem you were pretty much accurate regarding dates, so we can authorise the abortion – if you want to go ahead,’ the doctor said, slowly, carefully.

  ‘I think we both know that I’m not going to go ahead,’ Eliza replied, enunciating each sound in each word, as if making sure that she was properly understood. ‘Thank you,’ she said, as an afterthought. ‘For checking.’

  ‘Not at all, I was just doing my job. You will need to register with your GP as soon as possible,’ Dr Krisha said. ‘By the way – do you want to know what you’re having? A boy or a girl?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said, instantly. ‘I don’t care. But is it healthy? That’s all that matters to me.’

  ‘As far as I can tell, it’s perfectly healthy,’ the doctor replied. ‘But you’ll need a full scan to make sure. Make sure you visit your doctor soon, as I said.’

  ‘Thank you, I will,’ she replied, rushing to get out of the door, to get away from that room as quickly as she possibly could. She took Katy’s hand again as they left.

  ‘I would have gone through it with you, if you’d really wanted,’ Katy said, turning to face her friend, ‘but I’m totally delighted I don’t have to.’

  *

  It was six o’clock in the evening, and the rush-hour traffic had begun to thin out. Eliza glided over Albert Bridge and slipped past Earl’s Court without effort, easing her way onto the M4 in good time. She’d had to dig deep for the particular soundtrack she had chosen for this journey, had been forced to take a box out from the top cupboard in her bedroom and sift through it all to find it, but it had been worth it. Her own copy of Take That: Greatest Hits, deliberately hidden from view for years, was booming out of the speakers, making her smile. This was not the time for guitar-led angst.

  The nights were getting shorter now and there was still a remnant of sun lighting her way. Spring was making its presence felt everywhere, dormant trees emerging from their long sleep, stretching their fingers to greet the sun. It might just be an age thing, but Eliza drew so much comfort from this time of year now. Witnessing this annual resurrection, inevitab
le and yet for so many months almost unimaginable, gave her courage and hope.

  And there was something else giving her courage. Hearing that heartbeat, the sound of that new life intertwined with hers, had triggered a sense of self-determination in her. It was time for a seismic change.

  She arrived in Oxford in under an hour and a half and found a place to park just a short walk from the flat. It was dark now, the streets lit by lamps and light cast out of hundreds of living room windows, TV screens beaming their flickering light shows onto front gardens, wheelie bins and parked cars. She walked up to the door and knocked firmly, twice. She could hear a TV playing through the living room window, which was open a crack.

  It was Ed who answered the door.

  ‘Oh… hi,’ he said, in a tone as enthusiastic as if she had been a Jehovah’s Witness bent on saving his soul.

  ‘Hello, Ed,’ she said. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘I’ve got…’ he looked shiftily down the corridor ‘… company.’

  ‘Yes, I thought you might have,’ she replied.

  Ed lowered his voice to a harsh whisper. ‘Look, it’s over, OK? I thought you’d have got the message. That was what the dinner was for. I’m sorry you’re hurt. But I’m with someone else now. It’s over.’

  ‘But it’s not quite over,’ she said.

  ‘How so?’ His voice was getting louder again, his hushed tones forgotten in his rage.

  ‘Ed?’ A woman with sleek, well-cut black hair appeared in the corridor, wearing a pink fleece dressing gown and bright pink, fluffy slippers. Wow, she’s really got her feet under the table, thought Eliza. She’s not even making an effort.

  ‘It’s OK, sweetheart, I’m dealing with this,’ he replied. ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘It’s not fine, sweetheart,’ replied Eliza. ‘And I will not be dismissed by you, Ed, like a door-to-door sales rep.’

  ‘I really have nothing left to say to you, Eliza,’ he said. ‘We are done. And by the way, I cancelled the wedding reception booking last week. Amazingly, your parents hadn’t done it yet. They’ll be getting a partial refund in the post soon – but do I need to send them a signed affidavit stating that I do not want to marry their daughter?’