The Love of My Life(63)

I was more than happy to oblige: I felt murderous and oddly afraid. We’d been sitting in stasis for what felt like hours and this woman hadn’t even acknowledged how busy I was; how much of my time she was taking up. Had she actually met a new mother before?

In the kitchen I checked the sky. Granny and the midwife talked in low voices, punctuated by squawks from my daughter. I started making toast but abandoned it because the smell was disgusting.

A cat jumped into Granny’s garden and started wandering around a flower bed, looking for somewhere to shit. I ran outside to chase it away – cat shit was bad for babies – but by the time I got out there, it had vanished.

Everything felt sharpened, but nothing felt right. The sky was normal again; no nuclear mushroom cloud. The euphoria melted down, and now the fear was biological.

Granny came and got me from the garden.

I went over to my daughter, who was lying on a special play mat with dangly arches that Granny had bought. I removed her blanket to tickle her, only to discover she was naked apart from her nappy.

‘She’ll freeze like this,’ I snapped, and left the room to get a sleepsuit. Imbeciles! If I wasn’t so busy, I’d report this midwife.

Granny followed me out to the hallway. ‘Emily,’ she said, in the voice she probably used to use in the House of Commons. ‘Darling, I need to ask why you keep calling Charlie “she”.’

‘What?’

‘Charlie. Your baby. Why do you keep calling him “she”?’

I took myself off up the stairs. ‘I haven’t the time for this,’ I said. Granny had hung a new picture on the landing, but it needed dusting already.

When I got back down to the sitting room, Granny was holding my daughter. ‘Emily,’ she said, in that MP voice again. ‘Do you think you had a daughter?’

‘What is this?’ I exploded, but the fear had reached deep inside me now, and it was hard to think straight. ‘What are you doing, Granny?’

Granny looked at me for a long while and then undid my baby’s nappy. ‘You had a son,’ she said. ‘You called him Charlie. He’s a boy.’

And there, tucked inside the nappy, were a tiny boy’s genitalia.

My breath stopped in my throat. I bent down and, wincing with pain, I did up her nappy, and started to put her sleep suit on. But before I could do up the poppers, I had another look inside her nappy, and the room darkened.

‘See?’ I muttered, but my voice was inaudible. ‘The sky.’

I snapped the poppers closed.

His head was a different shape to my daughter’s, and his hair thicker and darker. He was now wearing one of her sleepsuits, but he wasn’t the child they pulled from my womb yesterday, or last week, or whenever it was she arrived in the world.

The dread opened up before me, smooth-sided and sparkling blue.

‘What have you done?’ I asked. The two women in the room watched me.

‘What. The fuck. Have you done?’ I repeated, in a whisper, but it was no use; the boy had started to cry – as any baby would, if they’d been taken from their mother.

‘Who did this?’ I asked. ‘Who took my girl and gave me a boy? Where is she? Where is she?’

‘I totally understand that you think you had a girl,’ the midwife said, crossing her legs at the ankle. ‘But you had a boy, and you called him Charlie. It’s all here in your maternity notes. Please don’t worry, though, women undergo all sorts of hormonal changes after birth; it’s not unusual for this sort of confusion to occur. I can see you’ve been quite . . .’ She made a show of looking at my maternity folder. ‘Quite busy, and distracted, since you had him, and your grandmother agrees. How have you been sleeping?’

I replied, or at least my mouth did, but my thoughts were racing. Who was involved in this? How had it happened? My money was on the hospital midwife, who’d used the strange words. Was she even a midwife? Had she been wearing a lanyard? I stared at this boy, Charlie, who was beginning to look hungry.

I had to find my daughter.

I forced my aching body up and went over to my grandmother. ‘Granny,’ I said. ‘Someone has taken my daughter, and you need to help me. We have to call the hospital. And the police. Straight away.’

Until that moment I’d thought Granny was my ally, but she looked me in the eye and said, ‘Emily, there hasn’t been a mix-up, and nobody has taken your daughter. This is your son, Charlie, and you had him on Friday. I was there when they got him out and he hasn’t been out of my sight since. I think we need to see a doctor, just to make sure you’re OK.’

The midwife was out in the hallway, on the phone to someone. Everything was imploding. The crab with the signal-red spots and bristled claws was in our garden, and Dad was on the phone to the midwife, telling her this baby was not biologically mine.

‘Granny . . .’

‘Yes. I’m here. Talk to me, my love.’

Her betrayal was worse than anything I could have imagined. I couldn’t meet her eye.

‘You’re a liar,’ I whispered, although she seemed not to hear me. ‘A born liar.’

The baby was wailing, Granny was saying my name, and there was a man nearby, I think the postman who used to deliver letters to me and Dad when I was tiny, back at the beginning of the eighties when they still wore peaked hats like Postman Pat.