Authors: C. L. Taylor
“So we’ll go to Millets, then.”
“We won’t be long.”
“Just need to pick up a few things for Oli’s next trip.”
“I need a coat that’s actually waterproof. This is a proper Lake District downpour we’re talking about, not some kind of light drizzle.”
“Two-man tent.”
“Hiking socks.”
“Carry mat.”
My husband and stepson are talking to me. Their jaws are going up and down, their eyebrows are wriggling and twitching and their eyes are widening and narrowing, but nothing makes any sense. I can hear words, lots of words, rolling together like waves of sound, then crashing together above my head, but I can’t distinguish one from the other, and when I open my mouth to ask what they’re talking about, nothing comes out. After two attempts, I stop trying and allow the heavy feeling in my bones to roll me back in my seat, my head resting against the wall, my eyes drawn to the strip light on the ceiling. It flickers, pulses, and hums and I remember Charlotte, three months old, lying in her pram, looking up at the blue-and-gray Habitat lamp shade in our living room, her eyes wide with wonder.
“An hour.”
“Hour and a half tops.”
“Come and collect you afterward. Oli will go back to university and I’ll drive us both home in your car.”
“You look a bit more relaxed.”
“Is that a smile? I can’t remember the last time…”
My eyes swivel toward them and I’m vaguely aware of my mouth moving and words coming out. It sounds nonsensical in my head, but Brian and Oli smile and nod, and it appears I’ve said something that reassures them that it’s fine to leave me on my own, because the next thing I know there are lips on my cheek, a squeeze to my shoulder, a pat to my head, and then they are gone.
Without the roar and crash of their voices, the room hums with silence. It hurts my ears and then…
Bleep-bleep-bleep.
I make out the sound of the heart monitor in the corner of the room. The medical metronome—Charlotte’s constant companion and now mine too.
Tick-tick-tick. Bleep-bleep-bleep. Tick-tick-tick.
We are in the living room. I am lying on the sofa, and Charlotte is sitting on the floor. She picks up a plastic brick, throws it half a meter, crawls after it, picks it up, throws it again. Her face is a picture of happiness and pride. She has conquered throwing and crawling, and now she can take on the world. I want to freeze the scene. I want to relive it over and over again.
I glance at my daughter, asleep on her hospital bed, and reach out a hand to touch her hair. I am surprised when I don’t feel the fine silkiness of a baby’s curls, but I continue to stroke anyway, the follicles of her hair soft and smooth under my fingertips.
I was afraid. A memory stirs in my mind but it is ephemeral, transient, and slips away as my brain tries to anchor and examine it. I feel the pressure of Brian’s lips still warm on my cheek and Oli’s hand on my head. My life is perfect. I have been blessed.
There is a squeak, an interruption to my reverie, and I am aware of the door opening. Did Brian and Oli shut it behind them when they left? I didn’t notice. A figure—a man in a dark suit—drifts past me and crosses the room. He is standing by the window, his back to me, looking out.
Consultant.
The word pops into my head and I smile. He has arrived to give me good news, to tell me that Charlotte will wake up soon, that I can take her out of her incubator, give her a cuddle, and bring her home.
“Mr. Arnold?” I rise effortlessly, as though in a dream, and take a step toward him. “Will my baby be okay?”
There is something about the shape of the back of the doctor’s head that makes me pause midstep and halts my progress across the room. There is a spot of black in the glorious Technicolor haze of my happiness, and as I gaze at the width of his shoulders and the uneven balance of his stance, it spreads, like black ink on a wet watercolor. My fingers twitch at my sides as if they’ve developed pins and needles after hours of sitting on my hands. My thighs twitch too, then my shoulders, my calves, and my feet. My body is waking while my mind still snoozes, and I feel a sudden compulsion to run, but why would I? My child is here. She needs me.
“Mr. Arnold?” I say again. “Is it bad news? Is that why you won’t talk to me?”
Yes, I have sensed what he is about to tell me is bad news, and my body is preparing itself for the worst; it is trying to shake my mind out of its soporific slumber.
For a couple of seconds, the consultant does nothing and I wonder if he has heard me, then his shoulders rise as he takes a deep breath and turns to face me. I don’t immediately recognize the gray eyes flecked with blue, the large nose, and the wide, thin mouth, because I’m thrown by the thatch of gray hair, the deep lines around the mouth, and the heavy stubble that covers his top lip, jaw, and throat.
“Hello, Suzy-Sue.”
The shudder that goes through me speeds from my head to my toes then explodes back again and I shake violently, as if the temperature has dropped by forty degrees.
I thought I was ready for this moment. I thought I was old, strong, and resilient enough not to be affected by the sonorous timber of his voice, but it’s as though I’ve stepped into a time machine and I am twenty-three again, hiding in the wardrobe, quaking as he walks from room to room calling out my name. I take a step backward, instinctively pressing a hand to my stomach, to hide my secret, to cover what is no longer in my womb. James notices, and the blank expression he was wearing morphs into something else. His lip turns up in a sneer, his eyes narrow, and his nostrils flare, and then the revulsion is gone, replaced in a heartbeat by a wide, natural smile. I blink several times.
“Hello, Sue.” He takes a step forward. “How’s Charlotte?”
The mention of my daughter’s name is all I need to snap out of my shivering stupor, and I spring to her side, my hand on her shoulder, my eyes on James as he moves to the foot of her bed, unclips her notes, and flicks through them, making small uh-huh noises as he scans the pages. On the last page, he purses his lips and shakes his head.
“I’m no doctor, but even to me, the prognosis doesn’t look good. Unless I’m very much mistaken, your daughter is minutes away from death.”
“Get out.” I say it as calmly and steadily as I can and point at the door. “Get out or I’ll—”
“Press this?” James steps nimbly to the other side of the bed and thumps the taped emergency button with his fist. “Oh dear, it appears it’s broken. The National Health Service does try hard but honestly, their equipment just isn’t—”
“I’ll scream then.”
“You could do that”—he places a hand on Charlotte’s pale neck and drums his fingers slowly and deliberately on her pale skin—“but she’ll be dead by the time you pause for breath.”
Lying on the bedside table beside him is Oliver’s pile of
National
Geographic
magazines with my best hairdressing scissors on the top. If I threw myself across Charlotte, I could reach them, but James would still get to them first.
“There you go,” he says, misreading my silence. “There’s no need for histrionics. No silly screaming, no heroics. Not that you could move quickly enough for heroics.” He removes his hand from my daughter’s throat and sculpts a beach ball in the air. “You always were on the chubby side, but you’re veritably matronly these days. Childbirth, was it?” He glances at my daughter and I suppress the urge to leap across the bed and tear out his eyes. “Did carrying your ugly spawn around for nine months turn you into a fat bitch, or did you mainline cream cakes and butter?”
James laughs and I’m glad he’s gone straight for a verbal assault. My fear was that he’d wrong-foot me by being charming and apologetic. Still I say nothing. I’m waiting for the sound of footsteps or chattering voices in the corridor so I can scream for help, but the wing is unusually quiet; there’s not so much as a squeaky gurney or a slamming door.
“She’s not as gargantuan as you, but it’s only a matter of time.” His eyes are still on Charlotte. “I still shudder when I remember those rolls of flab on your back, your stomach, your thighs…how you found someone else who could bear to make love to you, I don’t know.”
“Is that what you call rape these days?”
“Rape?” His dead eyes flick toward me. “Rape implies taking something of virtue from someone innocent, but you were never innocent, were you, Suzy-Sue? You were a dirty slut who’d been putting it about for years.”
“No, I wasn’t. I was a normal twentysomething who’d had a handful of boyfriends and a few one-night stands. I wasn’t a party girl or wild or unusual or dirty or used goods or any of the filthy things you used to say to me.”
“The truth hurts, Suzy-Sue.”
“But it’s not true.” The words spill out of me, and there’s nothing I can do to stop them. For twenty years, these thoughts have blistered and festered inside me, dying to be spoken. I tried to block them out, but the more I ignored them, the stronger they grew. No wonder they spilled into my dreams. “
None
of
it
was true. You tried to make me feel ashamed, James. You tried to make me regret the life I’d lived because you couldn’t accept that I’d had a life before you. But most twenty-one-year-olds don’t come with a blank slate, James, no matter how much you might wish it. They are who they are
because
of their past.”
He shakes his head. “Still proud to be a slut, I see. Twenty years and you still haven’t learned.”
“Did you love me, James?”
He jolts, as though mentally disarmed by the question, then steadies himself with one slow blink. “Of course I did. You were the love of my life.”
“No, James.” I slide the top drawer of the bedside table open and spider my fingers, searching for a pen, a letter opener, a syringe, anything sharp I can use as a weapon, but all I find is an unopened box of tissues and something smooth, square, and leathery. “I wasn’t. If you’d really loved me, you’d have accepted my past. Instead you made me suffer because I couldn’t live up to the idealized woman you wanted me to be.”
His mouth narrows in disgust. “You tricked me, Suzy. You let me think you were different—that you were special, a beautiful angel—but you were the same. You were like every other dirty slut in London. You weren’t special enough for me.”
He inches closer to Charlotte, runs the back of his index finger over her cheekbone, then touches the crown of her head and strokes her hair from root to tip, then does it again. His eyes are intense and staring, and he’s breathing deeply in and out through his nose.
“Is that what your mother told you?” I say when he rests the tip of his index finger on one of her closed eyes. “That her special little boy deserved a good girl? That God would send Jamie an angel who’d saved herself especially for him?”
“I saved myself for
you
.” His hand leaves Charlotte’s face and he lunges at me across the bed. I dart backward as his fingers graze my neck, but then step forward again. If I can’t get help, I need to get him away from my daughter. I need to use myself as bait.
“No, you didn’t, James. You lost your virginity to a prostitute.”
“And how proud do you think I am of that? Something that should have been a beautiful meeting of souls was instead a dirty fumble with a whore.”
“That wasn’t my fault.”
“No.” His eyes fill with tears and he reaches for Charlotte’s hand and presses it to his lips, his head bowed. “No, it wasn’t.” A single tear rolls down his cheek. “I’m sorry, Suzy. I’m so sorry for what I put you through. You’re not a slut or a slag. You’re a beautiful, kind, tenderhearted woman. I never felt I deserved you. That’s why I was cruel to you. I was trying to push you away.”
I stare at him in astonishment as another tear follows the first, then another and another. We stare at each other, neither of us saying a word, until the silence is broken by the excited chatter of two female voices in the corridor. I look toward the door. Do I shout? Run? But running would leave Charlotte with James. It would be too dangerous. Shouting it is then. I open my mouth and—
SNAP! There is a sickening crunch like a chicken bone being bitten in half by a dog, and I spin around. James is holding Charlotte’s right hand around the wrist. The little finger of her right hand is bent backward at ninety degrees, the nail brushing the back of her hand.
“Hello, Mummy,” he says in a little girl’s voice as he waggles my daughter’s hand at me, mimicking a wave, the broken finger flopping limply from side to side. “Look at my wibbly, wobbly finger.”
“Leave her alone!” I launch myself toward them, clambering onto the bed with one knee as I throw myself at James in an attempt to knock him away from my daughter, but he’s too quick and knocks me sideways so I topple on top of my daughter instead. I struggle to right myself, but James grabs my right forearm, and as he twists it so it’s lying across Charlotte’s throat, the oxygen mask over her mouth is knocked free. There is a deep rumbling gurgle from within her chest as she gasps for breath.
“Leave her alone?” James says as he digs his fingers into my arm, his face millimeters from mine, my cheek pressed against Charlotte’s rib cage. “Like you left my Mammy alone? She died, Sue. No, you didn’t know that, did you? You didn’t know because you ran away and left her to rot in a hospital ward. You didn’t just abandon me, Sue. You abandoned her too.”
“I didn’t know,” I whisper. “I had no ide—”
“Shut up. I’m sick of the sound of your whining voice. Make one more noise and I will break the rest of Charlotte’s fingers, one by one, while you watch, and then I will wring her neck. Do you understand?”
I nod silently.
“Now get up.”
I try to stand, but James grabs me by the hair. He drags me, bent double, toward Charlotte’s feet, then yanks me around the end of the bed so I’m bowing in front of him. A jolt of fear courses through me as he tightens his grip on my hair and presses down on my head so I fall to my knees.
Nothing happens for several seconds. The only sound in the room is the bleep-bleep-bleep of the heart monitor in the corner of the room and the deep rasp of Charlotte’s unassisted breathing. I close my eyes and steel myself for a blow, a kick, or worse, but nothing happens. Finally there is the squeak of chair legs on linoleum and James speaks.