Greenwich Park(55)

I nod. ‘Sure. Good idea.’

Daniel rotates his neck. He still looks pale. ‘You know what? I think I’m going to head out for a run. Will you be OK?’

I blink at him. ‘What?’

‘I won’t be long.’

‘But you just showered. And you don’t look all that well, Daniel.’

‘I’m fine.’

My vision wobbles again. ‘All right,’ I mutter. ‘I’m going to lie down here for a bit.’



I hear the front door close behind him, the soft pat of his trainers on the path. I take off my coat, curl back under the covers. I tap out a message to Rachel, hit send. To my relief, ten minutes later, she replies – an unusually long reply for her. She is fine, she says. She is sorry about the row, and she has decided to go and stay with her mum for a while. She hopes we are still friends. She wishes me luck with the baby.

I try to feel relief. She is fine, I tell myself. She is fine, and she is gone. She is really gone. But for some reason, deep down, I know that this is not the end of it.





HELEN





Mummy’s illness started when we were little, and kept coming back to her all her life, like the circling birds we watched together in the park. It never went away for good. And gradually she slipped under the water of it, like a bath filling up that she couldn’t control. She got cold in it, from the inside out. So that when she turned the wheel that day, into the central reservation at ninety miles per hour, the most surprising thing to all of us was that she hadn’t done it years before. That, and the fact she did it with Daddy in the car. That was the hardest part to understand.

The water that came for Mummy nearly came for me, too. A few times, when I was younger. I came pretty close. That’s why Mummy and Daddy wanted me to study where my brother was, so I would have someone watching over me. And why they were so happy when I met Daniel. I suppose I became less of a burden to them once he was in the picture.

I was all right for a while. But the water came again when, just a few months after we lost Mummy and Daddy, I lost the first baby, as well. I’ll never forget how they took him away, a ripped piece of blue NHS towel over a silver kidney dish. Like he was nothing. Like he was rubbish. They told me that I wouldn’t want to see. But I did, I did. I told them I didn’t care what he looked like. That he was mine. That to me, he would be perfect.

But they shook their heads and gave me a liquid that tasted sickly sweet, and I drifted away on a papery pillow and when I came back again it was all still the same, the square white lights, the beeping machines, the hard bed, the empty feeling in my body. Except there was a tube in my arm this time, and somehow, I didn’t have the strength to feel as bad about it all any more.

When we got back from the hospital, I lay in our bath for hours, the door locked behind me. Daniel stopped knocking and gradually I chipped away all the flakes of peeling white paint on the windowsill with my fingernail. They fell into my bathwater, floated on the top like snowflakes. Through the window I saw London, the dark cloak of night over the river. I looked away from my reflection. I let the water go cold and I willed it to go over my head.

Later, Daniel had to collect his ashes from the crematorium. He asked me what I wanted to do with them. I didn’t know. I didn’t want to do anything with them, then. I felt so dark, so broken. I wanted to be asleep, in the earth. To be with my baby. I didn’t want ashes. I wanted to take him to the park, push him on the swings. I wanted the warmth of his body against mine. I wanted to lie down with him, to close my eyes.

Daniel swore he’d never leave. But I didn’t believe him, especially not after it happened to us again, and again. Why would he stay, when all I gave him was this? Hospitals, nightmares, bleeding, misery, dead babies. He was chained to it, to my useless body: bloated, bleeding, bearing the ugly scars of pregnancy and birth, but with no life, no child to show for it. I started to feel I was dead already.

After it was bad for a while, we started seeing someone. Daniel thought it would help. I didn’t. I knew that Daniel would go eventually. I could see how it all was for him.



When I was on the drugs, things were easier, mostly because I didn’t feel very much at all. But sometimes that would frighten me, the feeling nothing. And I didn’t want to feel nothing about my babies. I wanted to grieve for them. It was all I had left of being a mother.

So then I would tell him that was it, that I didn’t want to take the pills any more. And then I’d be all right for a few days. And then it would happen again. We’d go to a cafe, order eggs and coffees. Do the sort of thing that Katie and Charlie do at the weekend, tell ourselves we were having a nice time. All the time Daniel would be glancing at me, to the door and back, would be fiddling with the keys in his pocket, waiting for it to happen. And then it would. A tiny, perfect baby, asleep in a pram, its little curled-up hands thrown over its head, a pastel-coloured blanket over its chest. And I would be hunched over, sobbing, like I’d been punched. People passing by, asking if I was all right, if there was anyone they could call.

I’d been barely aware of Charlie and Katie’s break-up, of him finding someone else, Maja. Then suddenly, they were having a baby. The sight of her growing belly made me feel sick. I felt like the whole world was taunting me. I started looking for excuses not to see them. When Ruby was born, I tried to go a few times. The therapist encouraged me to try. I knew I had to. I even bought presents. I got as far as the car. But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. I would call and Charlie would say they understood, that it didn’t matter. But I couldn’t bear the ugliness of my thoughts. This accidental baby. My useless brother. Undeserved. It still sits between Charlie and me now, those missed months. I missed so much of her.