The Child(4)

She’d tried to train herself to put the memories away. There wasn’t much help at the beginning. Just the family doctor—poor old Dr. Earnley—who’d patted her shoulder or knee and said: “You will get through this, my dear.”

Then, later, support groups, but she’d got tired of hearing her own and other people’s misery. She felt they were just circling the pain, prodding at it, inflaming it, and then crying together. She upset the group when she announced that she’d discovered it didn’t help to know other people hurt, too. It didn’t take away her own grief, just added layers to it, somehow. She’d felt guilty, because when she’d been a nurse and someone had died, she used to give the grieving family a leaflet on bereavement.

I hope it helped them more than it did me, she said to herself as she got off the sofa. Mustn’t be bitter. Everyone did what they could.

In the kitchen, she filled the sink with water and started preparing vegetables for a casserole. The water was too cold and numbed her hands so she found it hard to hold the knife, but she continued to scrape mechanically at the carrots.

She tried to summon up an image of what Alice would be like now but it was too hard. She had only one photograph of the baby. Of her and Alice. Nick had taken it with his little Instamatic but it was blurry. He’d taken it too quickly. Angela braced herself against the kitchen counter, as if physical effort could help her see her lost baby’s little face. But it wouldn’t come.

She knew from the photo that Alice had a fuzz of dark hair, like her brother, Patrick, but Angela had lost a lot of blood during the delivery and she was still high as a kite from the drugs when they put her baby in her arms. She’d asked Nick afterwards—after Alice was gone—but he couldn’t tell her much more. He hadn’t studied her as Angela would’ve done, memorizing every feature of that face. He’d said she looked lovely but had no details.

Angela didn’t think Alice looked like Patrick. He’d been a big baby and Alice had been so fragile. Barely five pounds in weight. But she’d still studied Paddy’s baby photos and the pictures they took when their second daughter, Louise, came along, ten years later. “Our surprise bonus baby, I call her,” Angela told people—willing herself to see Alice in them. But she wasn’t there. Louise was blond—she took after Nick’s side.

Angela felt the familiar dull ache of grief round her ribs and in her chest and she tried to think happy thoughts like the self-help books had told her. She thought about Louise and Patrick.

“At least I have them,” she said to the carrot tops, bobbing in the dirty water. She wondered if Lou would ring her that night, when she got in from work. Her youngest knew the story—of course she did—but she didn’t talk about it.

And she hates it when I cry, Angela said to herself, wiping her eyes with a piece of paper towel. They all do, she thought. They like to pretend that everything is fine. I understand that. I should stop now. Put Alice away.

“Happy birthday, my darling girl,” she murmured under her breath.





FOUR


    Emma


WEDNESDAY, MARCH 21, 2012

The baby has kept me awake most of the night. I tore the story out of the paper and went to put it in the bin but ended up stuffing it in the pocket of my cardigan. I don’t know why. I’d decided I wasn’t going to do anything about it. I hoped it would go away.

A small voice inside me whispered Not like last time, then.

And today, the baby is still here. Insistent. Demanding to be acknowledged.

Paul is dozing, almost awake and beginning to move his legs, as if he’s testing whether they’re still there. I wait for his eyes to open.

I dread it. I dread the disappointment and exhaustion I’ll see when he realizes my Bad Days are back.

It’s what we used to call it so it sounded like it wasn’t my fault. It has been so long since the last proper one and I know he thought that it was all over. He’ll try hard not to show it when he sees me but I’ll have to carry his anxiety, too. Sometimes I feel as though I’ll shatter under the weight.

People say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. They say that when you’ve been through something terrible. My mum, Jude, used to say it. But it doesn’t. It breaks your bones, leaving everything splintered and held together with grubby bandages and yellowing sticky tape. Creaking along the fault lines. Fragile and exhausting to hold together. Sometimes you wish it had killed you.

Paul wakes and fetches my pills and a glass of water from the bathroom without a word. Then he strokes my hair and sits on the bed while I take them. He hums under his breath as if everything is normal.

I try to think All things will pass, but This will never end slips past my defenses.

The problem is that a secret takes on a life of its own over time. I used to believe if I didn’t think about what happened, it would shrivel and die. But it didn’t. It sits in the middle of a growing tangle of lies and fabrications, like a fat fly trapped in a spider’s web. If I say anything now it will mean ripping everything apart. So I must say nothing. I have to protect it. The secret, that is. It’s what I’ve done for as long as I can remember. Kept it safe.

? ? ?

Paul is talking to me at the breakfast table and I’ve missed what he was saying.

“Sorry, darling, what was that?” I say, trying to focus on him across the table.