Lifesaver (2 page)

I felt the pain physically, starting in my sternum, then sneaking around my shoulder blades to close in on my chest. I nodded.

Aunt Lil had been a midwife, for six decades. That was an awful lot of babies: hundreds and hundreds of them over the years. The extraordinary thing about it was that she’d managed to keep in touch with so many of them; with the mothers at first, of course, and then later with the babies themselves. Lil’s babies, they were called. Some of them had even got to know one other, members of an exclusive club. Lil’s babies were lawyers now, mothers, jugglers, teachers, priests. A couple were even grandmothers themselves - which blew my mind.

Ever since I’d been a teenager, I’d told Lil I wanted her to deliver my babies too. I wanted to have them at home, with only her and my future, as yet unseen, husband present.

And this was what happened, although in the end there was another midwife there too, a young, plump Irish girl called Teresa, because Lil thought we should have the extra back-up. In case anything went wrong. At the time I imagined Teresa at the start of her career, thinking of all the baby souls she’d deliver safely into their earthly bodies to become ‘Teresa’s babies’, and wondering if she’d keep in touch with them as Lil had been doing for half a century.

Lil did deliver our baby. We called her Holly, and she was indescribably beautiful. But she stopped breathing ten minutes after she was born, and all Lil’s efforts to resuscitate her failed. She died before the ambulance arrived. We never found out why - the autopsy was inconclusive.

I later discovered that, shortly after Holly’s death, Teresa had given up midwifery and gone to work at Barclays in the High Street. I found it hard to imagine her out of the blue midwife’s uniform and in a pencil skirt and neat blouse. I tried hard not to imagine her at all.

‘I’d better go,’ I said, standing up abruptly. ‘I’ve, er, got loads to go. Got a neighbour coming round to lunch and I need to do some shopping first. Then there’s this kids’ party…

Later, when I remembered the comment about the neighbour arriving for lunch, it occurred to me that perhaps lying had always come more easily to me than I’d thought. I used to believe that those sorts of lies were simply words that made things more palatable for other people, as if I was doing them a favour by lying—the ‘no, of course your hips don’t look wide in that dress’ school of white lies. I genuinely hadn’t wanted Lil to know that I’d be going back to an empty house. But now I realized that lies were just lies. They started small, like two rubber bands twisted together, and got bigger and bigger until the bundle became a ball the size of a grapefruit, and each lie had to stretch further and further around its circumference.

Lil stood up too and clasped my hands in hers again. That had been the thing I’d dreaded most about seeing her - I’d thought I’d never be able to cope with the raw emotion of seeing those large hands again; the hands which, in the end, couldn’t help the one baby she’d most wanted to usher into the world.

But as we stood at the door saying goodbye, I felt instead an overwhelming wash of gratitude that Lil had made that false emergency call and physically got me round there.

It wasn’t her fault anyway, I thought as I left, really believing it for the first time ever. Holly just hadn’t been ready for us, that was all.

When I got home again, the house was still and empty. Of course that’s what I’d been expecting, but I wasn’t sure why it always gave me a split-second’s worth of bafflement, as if people ought to have crept in in my absence and decorated the place for a party, and should be hiding behind sofas and chairs, streamers and balloons at the ready, about to jump out and shout, ‘surprise!’ Wishful thinking, I decided miserably, trailing up the stairs and peeling off my clammy running gear at the same time.

It wasn’t only Ken’s absence which I felt so keenly in the silence—after all, I was used to that. My abiding impression of my husband, at least for the past four years of our lives, had been of a man on his way out of the door. He always seemed to be leaving the house: going to work, to tennis, to a gig; as if home were some kind of mandatory holding pen to be escaped from as soon as possible, so that his real life could begin. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that his family had been asylum seekers; in the 1970’s they’d emigrated to England from Uganda, to get away from Idi Amin’s regime.

‘I’ve got to run,’ he said, only that morning. I sometimes thought he never stopped running, and it had got much worse since Holly died. We didn’t talk about her, although I’d have liked to. ‘I’m going to squeeze in a quick set with Chris before I get my train. Take it easy today, OK?’

As I put the plug in the bath and turned the taps on full, I thought of Ken on the tennis court, his lovely legs dark brown and muscular in his white shorts and his top riding up to expose his hairy tummy when he served. We used to like making love in the mornings, but that hadn’t happened for a long time—more often than not, Ken left the house while I was still asleep.

Then I imagined him on the train, showered and glowing with slick black wet hair, his Blackberry bleeping quietly in his jacket pocket like a small electronic animal, or a Clanger perhaps. I thought of him getting newsprint on his fingers from somebody else’s abandoned copy of Metro. What I didn’t like to think of was all the female office workers who might be staring at him with admiration, surreptitiously checking to see if he was wearing a wedding ring, and then feeling disappointed when they saw that he was.

I climbed in the bath and lay there for a long, long, time. The only sound in the house was the slow steady plink of the cold tap dripping into the water, and a bluebottle whizzing around the bathroom, so fast it was a blur. I tried to focus on it for a while, watching it zigzag, and then fly in concentric circles, as if being spun from a string on the ceiling. No wonder it kept bumping into things—at that speed, how could it possibly see where it was going? And when it crashed into the window, how come it didn’t knock itself unconscious?

In many of the ‘inspirational’, life-after-death books I’d read in the past six months, people who had lost loved ones were graced with the presence of, say, a rare bluebird, or a butterfly in winter, hovering or fluttering around them and making them feel the spirit of the deceased was with them still. I put the word ‘inspirational’ in inverted commas because those books depressed the hell out me. Why hadn’t
I
ever got visitations from a beautiful but unfamiliar cat, who would appear just when I was feeling at my lowest? All I got was this big fat irritating bluebottle, and I doubted that it had any messages of wisdom and eternal wisdom with which to succour me.

I contemplated getting out, but closed my eyes instead and sank back under the water, letting it close over my head and face, feeling the tickle of my hair on my cheek as it floated around me. I had nothing else to do, not until the party that afternoon. I supposed I could have run through the script for my audition the following day, but I couldn’t be bothered. It was only a part in a West Country cable soap, nothing huge.

The character I was up for was the glamorous but tired mother of twin babies - which was a little close to the knuckle. My agent, Fenella, sounded like she was walking on broken glass when she told me about it, full of apologies and qualifications; she knew I might not feel up to it, but it was decent money for a cable—over fifty grand a year. Which indeed wasn’t bad, and it would probably do me good to have some regular work. But then, having to hold babies…I wasn’t sure.

I wondered how Ken felt about me going up for an audition. In the old days he’d have helped me go over my rehearsal piece, prompting and encouraging me, bringing me cups of tea and sending me little break-a-leg cards to wish me luck. I couldn’t even remember if I’d mentioned this one to him or not. He certainly hadn’t referred to it lately, if I had. He just told me to ‘take it easy,’ and buggered off to play tennis.

Ken assumed that because I spent so much time lolling around the house, ‘taking it easy’ was a treat for me. He didn’t realize that it was actually my idea of Purgatory: empty house, time on my hands, frustration, boredom, depression. And the guilt… knew I ought to have gone to the gym, or the supermarket, or for a walk; but I’d rather be bored and cloistered at home than be out during the day, because the daytime was when the mothers roamed. They were everywhere, and with such an array of equipment: prams, buggies, papooses, car seats, scooters, push-along trikes. ‘It’s like being roadie to the world’s smallest rock star’, Ken used to joke, when he thought he was going to be a dad. But I didn’t think that joke was funny anymore. Anything could set me off: the squeak of a pushchair’s wheel, a tiny dropped sock, trickles of melted ice-cream running over a chubby dimpled chin.

If I went out during the day, my hands felt limp and loose at my sides without anything, or anyone, to push or carry, and it just made me want to crawl indoors again.

I lay in the bath and watched the bluebottle until my eyeballs ached with the exertion of darting around the room after it, and the water was almost stone cold. Suddenly I really wanted the part in the cable soap. I wanted to have my hands full of baby again. With a watery swoosh I climbed out of the bath and dried myself with a towel which probably ought to have been washed about three weeks ago.

The phone rang just as I’d got back into our bedroom and was knotting the belt of Ken’s towelling bathrobe around my waist. I picked up the extension by the bed.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Anna, just ringing to check you’re still on for the party today. Crystal can’t wait to see you! And thanks again for Saturday, by the way. It was fun.’

‘Oh, hi Vic; yes, it was,’ I lied. ‘Thanks for coming.’

We’d had Vicky and her husband Peter over for dinner. Maybe it was just that we were somewhat out of practice in hosting dinner parties, or maybe it was the presence of my goddaughter Crystal and her baby brother Pat, but the whole thing had been hideously unrelaxing. Vicky and Peter’s babysitter had pulled out at the last minute, and Vicky had entertained the fanciful notion that her children would go to sleep at our house instead. Fat chance. Both Crystal and Pat had decided that fighting and crying for Vicky’s attention was a far better way to pass a few hours away from home, way past their bedtime.

The fact that neither Ken nor I really like Peter very much wasn’t very helpful, either. Peter had this great thick mass of reddish hair, and freckles, and in my opinion didn’t pull his weight with the kids nearly enough. Every time I saw him it reminded me of the words of my favourite childhood book:
Anything to me is sweeter/Than to see Shock-headed Peter.
Crystal was the image of him but, being four, she still managed to be incredibly cute.

Much as I adored Crystal, I had only recently been able to face her again; to actually want to spend any time with her. It still hurt, seeing each new thing she did and said and learned. I couldn’t help thinking about my little Holly, and how left behind she’d got. She would have looked up to Crystal so much. Crystal could have taught her all her bad habits. Given her lessons in Advanced Hypochondria, Primal Screaming, and of course, Tantrum Throwing II—The Full Monty.

This was a bit unfair, although Crystal was going through a bit of a difficult phase. She was fine around me, but she didn’t half give poor Vicky a hard time - the expression ‘drama queen’ could have been minted just for her.

‘What did you do yesterday?’

I tried to remember. ‘Um. Not much. Ken played golf with some people from the office. I went over my audition script.’

‘What audition? You didn’t tell me you had an audition! When? For what?’

Vicky sounded slighted, and I felt too lethargic to protest that I had definitely brought up the subject of the part. ‘It’s tomorrow. Only a regional cable soap, plus I’d have to be away filming for days at a time, most weeks, down in Bristol. I’m not sure I want it.’

‘Oh, Anna, go for it. I’d kill for a part like that—regular work, and fame, but only regional so you don’t get papped every time you’re seen rolling out of a bar with your skirt stuck in your knickers and your lipstick sliding off.’

The wistfulness in Vicky’s voice gave it another edge; a hologram of longing. She was dying to get back to work, but hadn’t been offered any parts since she got pregnant with Pat. It was hard enough for her to get away for the auditions, let alone to commit to any sort of theatre runs or filming schedules.

‘Yeah. I suppose I could handle being famous in the West Country.’

‘That’s the spirit. Anyway, see you at four for the party, yeah? Come round to me and we’ll go in my car.’

Ten minutes after we hung up from each other, I was still sitting in Ken’s bathrobe on the unmade bed. Eventually I roused myself enough to trudge downstairs, fill the kettle, and half-listen to a heated radio phone-in, something about congestion charging. I let the different voices wash over me and remove me from myself, like sleep. The kettle boiled, but I didn’t notice. I forgot about the audition. I made myself switch off, click, like the kettle, and just sat. It was something I’d done a lot in the past six months, like a mobile epidural. Instant numbness. I craved it, and I’d become quite adept in achieving it. I looked at it as a technique to be perfected, like a Stanislavsky exercise, or yogic breathing.

I really thought I’d only been there for ten minutes or so, until I looked at the clock and realized with a lurch that almost an hour had gone by, and I hadn’t moved. No wonder I felt stiff. Time treated me strangely these days. It was either stretched out into endless skeins of sticky minutes that I didn’t know what to do with, or it compacted itself into hard little atoms which moved so fast I couldn’t keep up with them.

I wished that I didn’t have to battle with time like this. I oughtn’t even have been aware of it, that’s what was so unfair. It made me feel cheated. Right then, I ought to have been making pipecleaner butterflies with felt-tip decorated wings, or sticking cork flooring down in a wendyhouse. Having other children round to play; sewing name tapes into coats; washing sticky hands and polishing small fingerprints off the French windows, or any of the dozens of things that Vicky moaned about having to do. If things had been different, I would not have had the time to sit motionless on a stool in the kitchen for over an hour and a half, still in a dressing gown.