People LIke Her(48)

I guess at some level I feel I owe it to all of us not to mess this up.

Even in my position, though, getting my hands on all the things I needed was far from straightforward. It was not just a matter of borrowing the keys to the relevant storeroom from the nurses’ station and wandering off at leaving time with a box of benzodiazepines under your coat.

The propofol was no problem. Stockpiling that was almost worryingly easy; we use so much of it in surgery and afterward, it’s just not practical to keep under lock and key. I grabbed as much of it as I could possibly need out of the drawer and wandered out of the building with it jammed into my handbag. Easy? I doubt if you had been monitoring me, I would even have displayed a quickened heartbeat. It was like walking out of the place with a bunch of pens from the stationery cupboard.

The oxygen cylinder and the mask to go with it I just took out of storage, put into a sports bag, and stowed in my locker. Then I waited until I was coming off shift late one night and carried it out to the car when there was hardly anybody around. No one raised an eyebrow. A couple of people wished me a good morning.

The infusion pump I bought online, although I probably could have sneaked one out if I had wanted to.

The midazolam was a different matter. Partly, I guess, because as a muscle relaxant and an antianxiety agent and a sedative, there are people out there who get their kicks by taking it recreationally and who are prepared to pay for the privilege. On our ward, they keep it very much under lock and key, make you sign for it. Make sure only certain people have the access code to the locked fridge.

Of course, not all of it gets used. If, say, you are an anesthetist and you need to sedate a patient and require ten milliliters of midazolam to do it, you still go (or send someone like me to go) and fetch the standard fifty-milliliter bottle.

Now, a conscientious surgeon, a diligent team, will always make sure they get rid of that other forty milliliters of midozalam before they chuck the bottle, the vial, away.

Someone who is slightly less diligent, a little less conscientious, might assume that one of the nurses will do it.

By the night they sprang that retirement party on me, I had everything I needed.





Chapter Eleven


Emmy

Hi lovely,

I’ve tried calling and texting a few times, but I know how busy you are. I just wanted a chat, really. I thought I might be able to steal you away at Coco’s birthday, but you were so busy. I’m sorry if I seemed a bit subdued. Perhaps you guessed? You have always been so good at reading people, knowing the right thing to say—so maybe you knew, but didn’t think it was the right time to ask. I don’t suppose it was, really.

I have been thinking for a long time about how to tell you what I am about to—whether to share it at all. This will sound crazy, but I think I’ve been a bit embarrassed maybe, a bit ashamed. I have to open up now, though, as I feel like there’s a huge part of my life, a huge part of me, that you just don’t know about. I feel that by denying it, I am denying that those little lives we lost ever had the right to exist at all, when actually they’re as important as if they were here right now.

We’ve had three miscarriages, Em. And that pain, and the guilt and the desperation—they just don’t disappear. I can be happy one minute, or perhaps not quite happy but not achingly sad, and then it will just hit me. Three people who would have been part of our lives, just gone. The first pregnancy didn’t make it past twelve weeks. A missed miscarriage, they call it. We had no bleeding, nothing. There we were at the first appointment, holding each other’s hands, waiting to see the heartbeat. There was none. It’s amazing how impassive the faces of the people who do the scans are, isn’t it? I guess they must see it all the time. I had to have an operation for that one.

Then it happened again. We were away for the weekend in Norfolk, and I started bleeding as we were walking along the beach. The next we lost at twenty weeks. Nobody can tell us why it happened. The hope is the worst, I think. The hope that you try not to nurture from the moment that little blue line appears, but that finds its way out at night when you start to dream what it’ll be like to be lying there with your baby in your arms. I haven’t said anything before now because it’s just so hard to find the words. Maybe there are no words. Who knows if these are even the right ones? All I know is that I have tried everything else—so maybe telling my oldest friend is the only way to heal.

The NHS doesn’t fund IVF where we live, and we don’t have the money to pay for it ourselves, and anyway, I don’t think I can go through the heartache of losing another life. But can that really just be it? Forever?

I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m emailing you this. Perhaps it would feel less like mad rambling if we could talk it through face-to-face? I really miss you. Could we meet soon for a coffee or a drink?

I could really do with my best friend right now.

Polly xx

I take a deep breath, start to type a response, delete it, then read the email again as I head toward the park, a milk-drunk Bear dozing in the carrier as I walk. I had forgotten, before he was born, just how little time newborns spend awake. Feed, burp, doze, repeat. I look at his little head, topped with a cashmere beanie, beneath my chin. Feel his heartbeat against my chest. Try to imagine what it would feel like without him, without Coco. What it would be like to be in Polly’s shoes. I press my lips against his head and think about all that heartache, about everything Polly must have gone through without ever breathing a word of it to me.