The numbness stopped me, as I told you. I went through the motions the next day, packing what few possessions I owned. Clothes, photos of Daniel and Gran, her jewellery. I placed Daniel’s birth certificate, proof he was still alive under the sapling, on top of everything. My entire life fitted into one canvas suitcase. Then I boarded the next train for Bristol.
I picked the first guesthouse I found in Yellow Pages after I arrived and took a taxi there. Then, after unpacking, I bought the local paper with the aim of finding myself a cheap bedsit. The next day was spent making phone calls; I took the first available place. The room smelled of the dirt in the shaggy carpet, which might once have been cream but was now grime-coloured, of stale cigarette smoke mixed with a whiff of drains. It was vile, shabby and ugly and exactly what I wanted. No beauty existed in my life right then and my scruffy bedsit spoke back to me of the desolation of my frozen psyche. We made a good match.
I spent most of the first few weeks in Bristol in my room, only going out to get food or to use the payphone to sort Gran’s estate and then going back as quickly as I could to my bolthole. I signed over power of attorney for my solicitor to sell the house on my behalf; besides him, I spoke to nobody unless I had to. I slept as much as possible, finding sleep a welcome oblivion. I'd lie on my bed if awake, looking at the stains on the ceiling, my mind a sanctuary of inertia. That’s what happens when you’re as numb as I was.
I never thought I should be doing something, getting a job, exploring Bristol. The city was alien to me apart from the busy road on which I lived. Every time I went out I passed people of all skin colours, women wearing strange and exotic clothes, heard languages I couldn’t identify. At night, looking out of the window, I’d see girls in tight short skirts, hanging around in doorways, smoking cigarettes. The city pulsed with life around me without touching me in any way. I had no thoughts, no feelings. I never let myself think about the event that had shattered my life.
God knows what a psychiatrist would have made of me back then. Shrinks have visited me so many times since I’ve been in this place, wherever I am, Daniel; they all think they can unlock my tongue and get inside my head. They haven’t a clue. Seems to me the human brain is more complex and far more multi-dimensional than any psychiatrist can ever gauge. Oh, they have their theories, which change according to the latest so-called expert, and they try to categorise people’s behaviour to match some arbitrary set of rules, but I don’t think our depths are so easy to reach, Daniel. Can one person ever fathom what goes on in another person’s head; really get to grips with what drives them? Probably not. I only know I was doing what I needed to in order to survive. I showered, dressed, ate my food, all the while frozen inside, the numbness a shield against my grief. Weeks went by like that; I had no notion of time or dates. Nothing mattered anymore.
One day I dragged myself off the bed and walked to the corner shop to get some eggs. A new assistant, one I’d never seen before, a middle-aged woman, stood behind the counter.
‘Morning, sweetheart!’ I glanced up, startled. ‘You need a bag, love?’
‘No,’ I mumbled.
‘Well, haven’t you got the prettiest blue eyes?’ My face flushed. I looked at her.
Our eyes met, and she knew some awful thing had broken me, because she was one of those people who connected easily and naturally with her fellow human beings. She could read me because she’d studied people all her life. A woman who understood others, this one. She’d reached right in and got straight to the core of me, with no more than a look.
The ice around my soul melted a little as her warmth touched me.
‘Thanks,’ I muttered. I grabbed the eggs and walked out.
The next day, I needed milk.
She was there again, the same warm smile, the same look of knowing.
‘Morning, my love!’ She rang up the milk. ‘You moved in round here, have you?’
‘I live in one of the bedsits above the launderette.’ It was more words in one go than I’d uttered at any time in the last few weeks.
She laughed. ‘I know your landlord! Barry Cummings. We went to school together. My, that takes me back. He asked me out once, but I had too big a crush on the head boy to notice Barry. We laugh about it now.’ She handed me my change, her fingers skimming my palm briefly, and the warmth of her touch melted my icy shell a bit more.
‘You get any trouble with Barry, you tell him Emma Carter will come and sort him out. That’ll put the fear of God into him.’ She laughed again, showing a gap where a molar should have been.
‘If you need anything – anything at all – you get yourself over here. You take care of yourself, sweetheart.’ She patted my arm as she spoke, and the ice melted a little more.
Well, I found myself going into that shop every day. The prices were a little higher than elsewhere, but I didn’t care. Emma’s innate empathy reached out to my frozen soul; I craved those few moments of warmth each day. I guess we all need human contact and I was no exception, Daniel, even when I still felt so dead inside.
The numbness seemed to lessen a little each time Emma greeted me, though. After a few weeks of her soft smile warming me through each day, I took out the box containing Gran’s photos, and I was able to look at them without crying. I still missed her and thought of her every day but the pain of her death was no longer as raw, as fresh, as before. I traced my fingers over her beloved face and I realised how lucky I’d been to have her in my life. I may not have received the maternal love I would have liked, but I'd experienced Gran's warmth and understanding instead and I reckon with her I got quality rather than quantity. I’d been blessed, all right, and I realised I’d had the first thought in weeks that held a nugget of positivity.
I found I was no longer spending all day, every day, lying on my bed. The grime and whiff of my bedsit had started to get to me. My inner housewife took over; I went to the shop and bought lots of cleaning products. Well, I did say I was the homebody type. Before, the state of my bedsit hadn’t mattered. Now I figured I might as well spend the rest of my self-imposed sentence somewhere clean that didn’t smell bad. My real motivation was Emma Carter. I wanted her to think well of me, to believe I had some pride; I dreaded what would go through her head should she ever see the ugliness in which I lived.
It took a long time. That bedsit probably hadn’t been cleaned in years. The smell of bleach and lemons and – according to the label on the all-purpose cleaner – summer meadow freshness filled the small space. I buffed the windows and stuffed the grey net curtains into my laundry bag for washing later on. I coaxed solidified grease from the ancient cooker. I squirted polish on the wardrobe and rubbed the battered wood to a semblance of a shine. I wiped bleach inside the old fridge and chipped away at the thick ice around the tiny freezer compartment.
At the end of what seemed like forever, I had somewhere to live that didn’t smell bad, with clean windows, where the once stained furniture now shone. My arms ached, but my inner housewife was satisfied. The place looked unrecognisable from the squalid hovel I’d moved into a couple of months ago. It was still cramped and there wasn’t much I could do about that, but it was clean now, and I intended to keep it that way.
One weekend I bought one of the Sunday newspapers; I'm not sure why. Perhaps I wanted more to do in my day than clean, eat and sleep. I lay on my bed and started reading.
The paper came with one of those thick supplements aimed at women. I scanned through the recipes, skipped the fashion advice, before turning the page to an article that made me draw in a sharp breath. It was entitled ‘Taken Young: How I Dealt With The Loss of My Child,’ by a woman called Mariette Sinclair.
I didn’t read the article at first. I couldn't. Something compelled me to start reading eventually, though, and I didn't stop until the last word.
Mariette Sinclair might have been telling my own story. The raw pain shining through her writing was my pain too. We’d never met, we never would, yet the shared agony of holding a dead child in our arms bound us together. Like me, Mariette had thought cot death always happened to other people; like me, one morning she woke up with the same deep sensation of dread that something terrible had happened. She rushed in to her baby’s nursery and found her daughter limp and lifeless. This woman understood the agony of finding a baby cold and dead, when before there had been a warm body and flailing limbs. Probably she had screamed out her despair in the same way I did. Perhaps she had pounded the floor in anguish as well. She admitted she’d contemplated suicide, like me.
She told how, even with a husband who shared her grief, her sorrow isolated her. She shut him out, walling herself off, describing how she imprisoned herself in the cell of her own mind. I guess her internal jail was her mental equivalent of my frozen heart and soul. Same thing; semantics the only difference.
I read how she started to get to grips with her pain at last. It seemed impossible at first and every tiny step forward she took was beyond difficult for her. She began with tearing down the wall shutting her off from her husband. She started to talk to him and realised their shared grief was a column of support to cling to in her misery. He encouraged her to call a friend who had lost a baby to cot death and she wrote about how valuable she found it to talk to someone who had experienced a similar tragedy. The same friend introduced her to the idea of getting grief counselling, which she did, eventually retraining as a psychotherapist.
I'm not sure why her article spoke to me so strongly. Perhaps it was the catalyst for my brain to unfreeze and start to think about my baby's death. I’d been bottling everything up, Daniel, as I told you. Well, not bottling things up, as that suggested I’d had emotions about the death of my baby to bottle up, but thanks to the pervading numbness freezing through me since that awful day, I hadn’t actually felt anything at all. My baby's death was still a no-go area for me, the ice still solid around the place in my heart where he lived.
I finished reading, curled up on my bed, my knees hugged to my chest, and it was then the ice around my heart started to crack. Big shards of frozen numbness splintered off and fell away, exposing the raw devastation beneath. My baby had died. The awful reality of his death rolled over me in one huge agonising wave, sobs choking me as I broke down. Instead of the floor this time, I pounded the bed with my fists, the words No, No, No tearing themselves from my throat. The pain, the terrible crushing pain I had experienced whilst cradling my dead child in my arms, returned full force, smashing its way into my heart and mind. My beloved baby, my soul and very existence, had died. How could I ever begin to heal the devastation of his death?
The idea of taking a sharp knife to my wrists flashed across my mind again in that moment, Daniel, the thought bright and shimmering and showing me the end of the tunnel. Only for a moment, though. Through my tears, I caught sight of Mariette Sinclair's article on the bed beside me. This woman had experienced the same agony as I had, and she had survived. Somehow, she found a way to deal with her grief.
Perhaps a way existed for me too. I had no idea what it might be. Mariette Sinclair had been married, with a husband and friends to help her in her grief. I had neither. She’d also attended counselling. No way would I be doing that. Impossible, I thought, to talk to somebody who hadn't herself known the searing grief of finding a beloved child dead. There must be counsellors, like Mariette, who had. Other than sharing a common experience, though, how would that help me? Would a counselling session breathe air into my dead baby’s lungs? Would I have to listen to futile questions, such as how was I coping with my child's death? I’d need to lie about his burial and about the makeshift grave under the sapling. I could never have explained about how I’d thought if I didn’t tell anyone, my baby’s death wouldn’t become a reality.
Mariette Sinclair had contemplated suicide. I remembered how I'd thought about killing myself. I wasn't frozen and numb anymore, but the overwhelming searing pain had returned. I'd promised myself pills or a sharp knife would be my release if that ever happened.
Somehow, though, the agony wasn’t quite as crushing as before. Perhaps time, such a tired cliché, had helped a little. Despite the pain, I knew I wasn’t going to commit suicide. That article, written by my sister sufferer in grief, had spoken to me, snuffing out my desire to kill myself. Mariette Sinclair had survived; so would I.
She’d been lucky in having people around her to support her, though, Daniel. I didn’t.
It sank into me then how very alone I was.
16
HAMMER BLOW
Daniel dragged himself awake late the following morning, head pounding, mouth parched and tasting like shit. The whole weird situation, already thoroughly screwed-up, now came with the mother of all hangovers. Not that he regretted his session on the sauce, although he’d never intended to sink so many beers.
He sent Katie a text, suggesting he should come over early afternoon, adding he was going to take a shower and asking her to text back yes or no. Within two minutes, he got a yes response and switched off his mobile. He popped a paracetamol and forced himself to take the hottest shower he could withstand, willing the water to wash away his hangover. He caught sight of his face in the mirror. Shit. He looked rough, but what the hell.