The Story of You (31 page)

Dear Lily,

I’ve been going through some of my old letters to you recently and it’s occurred to me, that while my intention was always to write only about lovely stuff, this has not always been possible – Maybe because I’ve needed to let off steam.

You see, I realize that you’re the only person I can tell the truth to (bit tragic, when you come to think of it, since you don’t actually exist), and the truth is not always that nice, I’m afraid. However, I’ve decided that this letter will be only lovely. It will be full of all the great things about my mum that I’m scared I’ll forget over time. That I’m already forgetting. It will be a record between all three of us: me, you, Mum. I promised, before we lost you, that I’d tell you about Mum, so here we are.

Surprising things about Lillian King (your grandma, my mum):

• She couldn’t cook for toffee, so she’d do party food for tea all the time: cheese and pineapple on sticks, mini-sausages, sausage rolls …
  
• She used to make up brilliant games for us to play, her favourite being a ‘make the most realistic poo competition’. On a rainy afternoon when we were bored, she would challenge all three of us to make the most realistic poo: 20 mins on the clock, free rein of all ingredients in the cupboard (cocoa powder, bread etc.). At the end, she’d give us marks out of ten. That was, at one time, our all-time favourite family game. Not Scrabble, or Monopoly, no. ‘Make the most realistic poo’ competition.
  
• She was always fair. She never let any of us go to bed without giving each other a hug (even if, when Leah and I got to the bedroom, we almost killed one another).
  
• She played the ukulele (badly) and we all had to go and watch her.
  
• She was a Man Utd supporter through and through.
  
• She put up with my dad’s potty mouth and his general cantankerousness. But he had to put up with her extreme untidiness (there is a reason he is now with a woman who boils her dishcloths).
  
• She had a phobia of baked beans. Not spiders, or bats, baked beans.
  

*

Joe put down his paintbrush and blew air through his lips. ‘Do you think we could just give Carol Smillie a call? I’m done in,’ he said.

On this particular weekend – the week after Joe had poured his heart out in the Renaissance Hotel bar – we’d decided to decorate the baby’s room. I say ‘we’, because it was us who decided, and us who put it on the AA list. We’d talked about whether it was tempting fate, but decided that
not to do it was also tempting fate, just in a far darker and more morbid way, and so decided just to get on and do it now, before I was too hefty and offended by the paint smell. The smell was all over the flat, anyway, which is why Joe suggested I leave the flat and I wasn’t complaining. That afternoon, I’d spent the day mooching round Portobello with Kaye and Parv, buying sunglasses and ethnic jewellery and feeling young and cool again.

Now I was home and felt bad for being out all day having a lovely time while Joe slaved away, because he really did look done in. I dropped my bags and strode over to him. ‘Thank you for doing this,’ I said, kissing him on his cheek. It was damp with sweat. He had white paint all over his eyelashes and in his hair. I stepped back, crunching my eyes up. ‘I can imagine what you might look like when you’re seventy, if I do this,’ I said.

‘Really?’ said Joe, amused. ‘What do you care, anyway? I’ll be married off and emigrated to Australia by then.’

I opened my mouth at him in mock shock.

‘Or maybe just Spain. A nice villa in Andalucia …’

I rolled my eyes. ‘In your dreams,’ I said.

Joe started with the paint roller again, continuing with his second coat of white. I stood back in the centre of the room, so I could get the big picture, as it were. It was late afternoon – 4.30-ish by now – and the room was warm as toast and drenched in sun. It was so bright, you could see each roller stroke on the wall, each tiny drip, each movement Joe had made, and I felt this sudden little surge of excitement for the future, and what it might hold. I wanted to hold onto that feeling forever. Looking forward to things. For so many years, I’d forgotten what it was like. Now I was fighting for it.

‘It’s looking so nice in here, Joe,’ I said. After things getting a little heated in Ikea (Joe had wanted to go out all bling and pink, I said we weren’t doing anything so gender-specific, not until I was holding that baby girl, alive, in my arms), we’d eventually agreed on a unisex rabbits theme (sounds weird, looked cute). Joe had made a nappy-changing table to put on top of a set of drawers. He’d now got as far as painting the walls white, the skirting boards yellow and had grand plans to make a cot. Carpentry being one of the many things he did with his NEETs students, he was great with his hands. Cliché it may be, but in the past few weeks I’d discovered that there was nothing sexier in this world than watching Joe, pencil over his ear, decorating scruffs on, moving with the rhythm of the wood-sander. I’d told him so too, to which he’d (after he’d picked himself up off the floor, laughing) given me an Elvis lip and said, ‘Hey, honey, if you want to take black-and-white pictures of me in my pants, over the Black and Decker, knock yourself out.’

While Joe had started work on the cot, I’d been tentatively knitting items, including a teddy and a little dove-grey cardigan, which sat around the flat, like little stepping-stones in my head: just get to twenty-seven weeks and a day. Then, twenty-eight weeks, twenty-nine. Thirty. If I could get to thirty, I’d feel much better. It wouldn’t be perfect, but I’d relax. A little.

I went into the kitchen to make tea. That decorating smell hit me right between my eyes and I felt kind of headachey, like you sometimes do before a storm.

‘Jeez, this place stinks. What paint are you using?’ I shouted to Joe in the spare room.

‘Sorry, that’s the turps.’ I was filling up the kettle and I stopped. Turps. Course it was. ‘Are you sure you should be in a house that stinks of chemicals?’

I took him a mug of tea, setting it on the bottom rung of the stepladder he’d used for the ceiling. I’d get used to the smell.

‘Are you operating a secret brothel?’ I said. ‘You keep on wanting to kick me out.’

‘Sorry, darlin’. I just want to do everything right. You read this stuff on the Internet …’

‘Oh, Joe, you’ve not been doing that, have you?’ I said, knowing full well that things had taken a downturn on that front. One night last week, I’d got stuck on Google and I couldn’t get off. Of course, I’d found torturous stories immediately:

The Ultimate Grief Twice. It’s devastating enough to lose one baby, but to Emma Connor, it happened twice …

Google Search: How could anxiety attacks affect my baby?

Google Search: Risk of stillbirth happening twice.

I read blogs, studies and message forums, until my neck ached from sitting at my laptop and statistics seemed to glow from the screen, like cancerous tissue showing up on a PET scan. I still remembered the horror of those, from when Mum was ill. My brain was screaming at me to stop and yet, feverishly, my finger kept on clicking:

… women who have had a stillbirth are five times more likely to have a subsequent stillbirth.

But then another study concluded:
In mothers who have already given birth to a stillborn … there is NO increased risk of subsequent stillbirths.

But that study was
s
mall and Australian, so did that even count?
No
increased risk was the overall consensus, but I couldn’t stop myself thinking the unthinkable. It was perfectly feasible, after all: the universe had already dealt me quite a lot in one go, several years ago. The universe was clearly not interested in fairness. I became hyper-attuned to other people’s stories of unmitigated misery and runs of bad luck; which is no mean feat in my job, given most of our clients have pulled the short straw in life (as if abuse and loss and trauma weren’t enough, the universe then throws schizophrenia into the mix). Lightning-strikes-twice stories in the press leaped out at me: ‘Woman loses son and husband to cancer in one day’; ‘Man killed on way home from wife’s funeral’. Like an addict, I’d promise myself I was never doing it again, until the next night. I knew Joe would kill me if he knew. But it was like a little voice inside me was dragging me to that laptop, urging me to gather more evidence to support the story my evil twin was telling me: that I didn’t deserve this happiness, that when Joe knew the truth, he wouldn’t want me any more, that this couldn’t last.

I sat in a puddle of sunlight on the floor with my cup of tea and admired the muscles in Joe’s arms as he painted, waited for the tantalizing glimpses of his smooth, golden back every time his T-shirt rode up. He stopped for a second and stepped back, surveying his work.

‘Do you think they’d have looked like each other?’ he said. It was completely out of the blue and my stomach flipped. ‘Who?’ I said, even though I knew who.

‘Lily,’ he said, turning to me. ‘And the new baby. After all, they’re full sisters, aren’t they
…
?’ I swallowed. Did he suspect something?

We’d talked once about this: how while this baby, or any baby,
would never, ever replace Lily, she’d give us more to go on than just the imaginings we had. She’d be a window into what Lily might have been that we never had before. Despite this, we’d never talked about what she might look like before, more about personality traits, talents, that sort of thing. And we’d only talked about it once and then it was enough, we didn’t need to keep bringing it up. I wondered why Joe had.

‘Robyn?’ Joe said, when I didn’t say anything. ‘You alright?’

My mouth was frozen. I couldn’t speak. Did he know?

‘I don’t know,’ I said eventually, pathetically. ‘But it would be nice to think so, wouldn’t it?’

Joe stuck his paintbrush in the can of turps and came over, putting his arms around me. That smell. It seemed to seep into every orifice, every pore of me, hardening something inside, making it hard for me to breathe, to think. ‘Will we tell her about her?’ he said.

‘Course,’ I said. ‘Of course. As soon as she’s old enough to understand, we’ll tell her she had a sister called Lily Grace Sawyer.’

‘Good name,’ Joe said, resting his chin on my shoulder, wrapping his arms around my waist. I closed my eyes. Maybe I was just imagining it. Maybe he didn’t suspect at all. Why would he? I’d never mentioned anything about Saul Butler, nothing at all.

‘Yeah, top name.’

‘It sounds like a writer or a musician, or a fashion designer …’

We both stood in that warm orb of sun, gently rocking, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing. That she never got to be any of those things.

I leaned my head on Joe’s chest; and, as if she could hear us talking, the baby stirred inside me. I took Joe’s paint-speckled hands and placed them on my belly. ‘Feel that?’ I said, and there was the fluttering – more than a fluttering now, more of a wriggling inside, like tiny people were moving tiny furniture. I smiled, excited. ‘She’s up and about.’

Joe looked skywards, concentrating; then, when she did it again, he smiled this slow, wide, smile. ‘And to think people go out and get off their heads,’ he said (like he’d never got off his head in his life), ‘when there are natural highs to be had in life like that.’

Our noses were millimetres apart. ‘Joseph,’ I said, ‘you’re like a
poet
or something.’

He slapped my bum once, sharply, making me yelp. ‘Sarcastic! Horrible girl,’ he said. Then he put his hands in my hair, arranged his head and shifted his feet – Joe takes kissing very seriously – and put his mouth to mine.

The sun slowly made its way around the room as we kissed, the light it emanated kind of extraterrestrial.
Joe’s face and hair were damp from the exertion of painting. I drank in the scent of him, the pheromonal deliciousness. My hands made their way up his T-shirt, to the sun-warmed dune between his shoulder blades. Joe was caressing, marvelling at my bump, with both his hands in a circular, rhythmic motion, like he was fashioning a pot on a potter’s wheel; at the same time as kissing me in that slow, very artful way in which only Joe can kiss.

He rested his forehead on mine. ‘You’re so sexy,’ he said. ‘I might have to take you to bed. Would that be okay with you?’

The dull nag of dread began in my stomach. I pushed it away.

‘I think I could go with that,’ I said. I let him take me by the hand.

My bedroom is at the back of the house, away from the afternoon sun, and was lovely and cool. We undressed and lay facing one another, Joe slipping one arm, gently under my head, me snaking a thigh around his smooth, warm body. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the taste of him; the sounds our mouths made, on our hands, feeling their way around our bodies, which were now familiar enough again for that feeling of togetherness, but still strange enough after all this time for it to be a total thrill. I’d rediscovered the simple pleasure, these last few weeks, of just Joe Sawyer’s bare skin next to mine.

‘You okay?’ he whispered, as he lowered his pelvis onto mine, as our hip bones met and I nodded because, more than anything else in the world, I wanted to be. And for some time I was okay; more than okay, it was bliss. I was managing to think of absolutely nothing other than what was happening in that moment – meditating, basically; something I was doing in and out of bed, to try to help me with the panic attacks. But then, suddenly, I was far from okay. As much as I tried to fight it, my mind and body were betraying me and – just as had happened so many other times we’d tried to have sex these past few weeks since I’d caved, that afternoon after the zoo – Joe’s face and his touch were being eclipsed by Butler’s.

I knew what it was now. When it had happened in the back of my neighbour Tim’s car the first time, when he was giving me a lift home, I hadn’t realized. But now I knew I’d believed that it was really happening again, that I was sitting in a car with Saul Butler and he was driving me down Friars Lanes. It was in the way the sun had hit the windscreen, caught the light on the amber hairs on Tim’s arms; it was in the way it had flashed behind buildings, like it had behind the high hedges that summer’s evening, sixteen years ago, like a malevolent star, leading us somewhere dark and terrible.