People LIke Her(47)

Nor would it take a rocket scientist to connect my choice of Dan as a husband to my confidence that he will never cheat on me or leave me. Growing up, I was fully aware that—when it came to my father—my mother and I could never be certain of either of those things. And one of the reasons I was aware of this was because she used to come into my room at night and tell me, carefully putting her wineglass down on the bedside table and raising her voice so he could hear everything she was saying, when all I really wanted was just to go to sleep. And yes, my mum was probably fucked up by her mother too, whose favorite daughter she never was, and who always found some way of telling her she wasn’t the prettiest or the cleverest, and who for some reason I’ve never quite determined (no matter how many times I’ve heard the story retold) refused even to get out of the car at my parents’ wedding, but just sat there in her fur coat at the end of the path up to the church while everybody waited and my grandfather tapped on the window and begged her to be reasonable.

Perhaps the truth is that I come from a very long line of very bad mothers. And that, of course, is what all this You do you, Clap yourself on the back—you deserve it crap serves to obscure. That ultimately, all mamas are not superheroes. That becoming a mum doesn’t automatically confer sainthood if you were a dick before you pushed a baby out of your bits. That ultimately, all mothers are still just people. Some of us are kind and gentle and endlessly giving—others resentful and frustrated and increasingly convinced they’ve made a terrible mistake. Some will be getting through each day and doing their best, while others just go through the motions waiting for the seven thirty p.m. gin and tonic. There will be some mums out there who thought they were going to hate it and have surprised themselves, and others who thought they’d love it and simply don’t. Some of us are wonderful. Some of us are wankers. Most of us are a mixture of all these things on any given day.

All of which, I guess, is a way of saying that while it’s quite clear my daughter isn’t keen on doing this commercial, I’m not about to do the heroic thing and tell everyone the deal is off, pick her up in my arms, and take her for a long walk hand in hand through a softly lit meadow. Not least because by the time we got to the car she’d have changed her mind and decided she did want to do it actually, and would then spend the whole journey home screaming and kicking my seat and demanding to go back. But also because I can only speculate how much it cost to hire this place and all the equipment, get all these people together and cater for everyone, build the set and the lighting rig and the rest. I’m not letting my family’s financial future dangle and twist on the whim of a four-year-old who most of the time can’t decide whether or not she wants to wear a scarf when we leave the house. And, finally, because if I know one thing for sure, it’s that if we walk off this set now, we won’t be walking onto one of these sets again.

Which is precisely why everyone on set is holding their breath. They know this. I know this. The only person who doesn’t know this is Coco.

And so I do what any harassed working mum would do in circumstances like these.

I tell Coco if she plays ball now, we can stop at a McDonald’s on the way home—somewhere we have always point-blank refused to take her—and she can have absolutely anything she wants, and then as much iPad time as she likes before bed.

She considers this for a moment.

“Happy Meal with a toy?” she says.

“It’s a deal!” I tell her, wondering how she even knows what that is.

We all take our seats on the throne, my mother and me side by side, with Bear on my lap and Coco on hers. The director starts filming. My patter is polished, my gestures assured. As soon as he asks me the first question about Virginia, I reach out and grasp her upper arm. “This woman,” I say, looking into the camera, welling up a little, “is my everything. My rock. My lighthouse.” I pause. I already know this is going to be the take. “My mum,” I conclude.

Somewhere out there beyond the klieg lights, there is a scattering of applause.

Then it is my mother’s turn. Even though I know she had Irene write it for her and then learned it by rote, I’m mildly irritated to find that I feel a warm rush of happiness as she heaps praise onto her incredible, beautiful, smart daughter.

I see someone whisper in the director’s ear, and he shouts, “Cut!”

“Can we try a take where the little girl looks a bit less miserable?” he says with an exasperated sigh.

There were basically three things I needed for what I was going to do. Two of them were very easy to get my hands on. The third required a little more subterfuge.

You don’t spend as long as I have in an ICU without amassing a pretty thorough understanding of the practicalities of sedation. Twenty-three years I have spent monitoring pulses, checking oxygen levels, measuring levels of expired carbon dioxide, ensuring that airways are clear and drips are set up correctly and capnographs and feeds are correctly functioning, and that nothing is jammed or twisted or trapped or obstructed. Twenty-three years I have spent learning the early warning signs that something is amiss.

It is a tricky business, keeping someone alive but unconscious. No matter what you might see on your Sunday-night TV crime dramas, in your Hollywood movies, you can’t just knock someone out with a massive dose of something and leave them tied up for a few days then expect them to wake up groggy but unharmed. It just doesn’t work like that. First, because if you get the dose wrong and overdo things, they have a tendency to stop breathing—and if you overdo things badly, there is a good chance their heart is going to stop beating too. Second, because if you give someone a massive dose of some random sedative you have managed to get your hands on—a load of sleeping pills, say, washed down with a bottle of cough syrup, or ground up and slipped into somebody’s glass of wine at dinner—then the most likely way the body is going to react is by trying to reject it, i.e., the person is going to throw up. And throwing up when you are unconscious is a great way of choking to death. It really used to exasperate Grace and her dad, when we were all watching TV together, the way I would always point out exactly where the villain was going wrong, pharmacologically, or make a point of explaining why what they were trying to do would not work.