The Girl Before(8)

But afterward—after I had given birth, or given death, or whatever it should be called—everything was strangely peaceful. That was the hormones, apparently—the same cocktail of love and bliss and relief every new mother feels. My daughter was perfect and quiet and I held her in my arms and cooed over her just as any mother would. She smelled of snot and body fluids and sweet new skin. Her warm little fist curled loosely around my finger, like any baby’s. I felt—I felt joy.

The midwife took her away to make casts of her hands and feet for my memory box. It was the first time I’d heard that phrase and she had to explain. I would be given a shoe box containing a snippet of Isabel’s hair, the cloth she was swaddled in, some photographs, and the plaster casts. Like a little coffin; the mementos of a person who had never been. When the midwife brought the casts back, they were like a kindergarten project. Pink plaster for the hands, blue for the feet. That’s when it finally started to sink in that there would be no art projects, no drawings on the walls, no choosing of schools, no growing out of uniforms. I hadn’t only lost a baby. I had lost a child, a teenager, a woman.



Her feet and all the rest of her were cold now. As I washed the last bits of plaster off her toes at the tap in my room, I asked if I could take her home with me, just for a while. The midwife looked askance and said that would be a bit strange, wouldn’t it? But I could hold her for as long as I wanted, here at the hospital. I said I was ready for them to take her away.

After that, looking at the gray London sky through my tears, it felt as if something had been amputated. Back at home, raging grief gave way to more numbness. When friends spoke to me in shocked, sympathetic tones about my loss, I knew of course what they meant, and yet the word also felt deadly accurate. Other women had won—victorious in their gamble with nature, with procreation, with genetics. I had not. I—who had always been so efficient, so high-achieving, so successful—had lost. Grief, I discovered, feels not so very different from defeat.

And yet, bizarrely, on the surface everything was almost back to the way it had been before. Before the brief, civilized liaison with my opposite number in the Geneva office, an affair played out in hotel rooms and bland, efficient restaurants; before the mornings of vomiting and the—initially awful—realization that we might not have been quite as careful as I’d thought. Before the difficult phone calls and emails and the polite hints from him about decisions and arrangements and unfortunate timing, and finally the slow dawning of a different feeling, a feeling that the timing might be right after all, that even if the affair was not going to lead to a long-term relationship it had given me, unmarried at thirty-four, an opportunity. I had more than enough income for two, and the financial PR firm I worked for prided itself on the generosity of its maternity benefits. Not only would I be able to take off almost a whole year to be with the baby, but I was guaranteed flexible working arrangements when I came back.

My employers were just as helpful after I told them about the stillbirth, offering me unlimited sick leave; they’d already arranged maternity cover, after all. I found myself sitting alone in a flat that had been carefully prepared for a child: the Kuster crib, the top-of-the-range Bugaboo, the hand-painted circus frieze around the spare bedroom wall. I spent the first month expressing breast milk that I poured down the sink.



Bureaucracy tried to be kind but, inevitably, wasn’t. I discovered that the law makes no special provision for a stillbirth: A woman in my position is required to go and register the death, and the birth, simultaneously, a legal cruelty that still makes me angry whenever I think about it. There was a funeral—again, a legal requirement, though I would have wanted one anyway. It’s hard to give a eulogy for a life that didn’t happen, but we tried.

Counseling was offered, and accepted, but in my heart I knew it wouldn’t make any difference. There was a mountain of grief to be climbed, and no amount of talk would help me up it. I needed to work. When it became clear I actually couldn’t go back to my old job for another year—you can’t just get rid of someone who’s doing maternity cover, apparently; they have rights just like any other employee—I resigned and started working part-time for a charity that campaigns to improve research about stillbirths. It meant I couldn’t afford to go on living where I was, but I would have moved anyway. I could get rid of the crib and the nursery wallpaper, but it would still always be the home where Isabel isn’t.





THEN: EMMA

Something’s woken me up.

I know right away it isn’t drunks outside the kebab shop or a fight in the street or a police helicopter overhead because I’m so used to those, they barely register. I lift my head and listen. A thud, then another.

Someone’s moving around in our flat.

There’ve been a few breakins recently around here, and for a moment I feel my stomach knot with adrenaline. Then I remember. Simon’s been out, some work pub crawl or other, and I went to bed without waiting up. The sounds suggest he’s had too much to drink. I hope he’ll have a shower before he comes to bed.

I can tell roughly how late it is by the street noise, or rather the lack of it. No growl of engines accelerating away from the traffic lights. No car doors slamming around the kebab shop. I find my phone and peer at the clock. I don’t have my lenses in, but I can see it says 2:41.

Si comes along the corridor, drunk enough not to remember that the floor by the bathroom always creaks.