‘Yeah, that’s what I said. When you come out, maybe you can teach me all about it.’
It was in that dark, silent cavern, with its total of thirty-three shelves and two computers with security so tight you’d be lucky to find more than pictures of fluffy bunnies, that I learnt everything I needed to know about the condition I’d been inflicted with. The more I talked with Cassie about what I’d learnt, the more it made sense: the effect of the IVF on my mental state, how C-sections could be traumatic enough to push a person into the depths of post-natal depression, the exhaustion and forgetfulness, my short temper I’d attributed to lack of sleep.
Images I’ve fought so hard to hide from myself seep through like water through rocks. Waking up in a hospital bed, not gradually but thrust awake, my eyes snapping open.
‘The baby, help! My baby!’ The room’s empty, I’m alone, and when I try to sit up my stomach screams its heated refusal. What’s happened to me? What’s happened to my baby?
‘Hey, hey, don’t move.’ Mark is at my side in seconds; his thumb hits the call button next to my bed. ‘It’s OK, love, don’t sit up.’
‘The baby, Mark, is the baby all right?’ My hands press against the hard swell of my stomach and a small fluttering from inside tells me it’s OK. It’s warm and comforting and I let out the breath I’ve been holding.
The room smells of antibacterial handwash, a smell that still reminds me of sickness and cancer, of watching my mother deteriorate. Mark is smiling, but before he can speak there’s another person in the room, a woman. She has dirty blonde hair in a scruffy bun but the rest of her face eludes me.
‘He’s fine, the baby is fine,’ Mark whispers. His smile spreads, as though there’s something I should know, something I should understand, but I don’t.
‘He’s doing well all things considered. You can see him when the doctor’s seen you.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I press my hand against my stomach once more. ‘Have I had another scan? Did they tell you it’s a boy?’ What was wrong?
Mark’s words are soft and comforting. ‘You went into labour, sweetheart, remember? There was a problem with the baby; they had to put you under. Don’t you remember? You said it was OK, you gave your consent.’
You gave your consent
. Why does my husband sound like a television lawyer? What is he saying? Why is that woman looking at me with such pity?
‘It was touch and go, love. The baby wasn’t responding well. We had to get him out as quickly as possible. He’s fine, though, he’s in recovery. Why don’t I fetch the doctor?’
‘He’s beautiful, Susan, I’m so proud of you. Do you want to see a picture?’ Mark pulls out his phone and hands me a picture of the tiniest baby I’ve ever seen. Why is he showing me this? Surely he isn’t trying to say . . .?
‘Mark.’ My voice is harder now. I need him to stop messing around, showing me stupid photos and grinning like an idiot. ‘What’s going on? Whose baby is that?’
I see his face drop, the creases at the corners of his eyes – his happy lines, I call them – disappear. ‘Susan, that’s
our
baby. You had a Caesarean and our son was born. This is him.’
He pushes the phone at me again and I feel the wave of anger and confusion crash to the surface. I fling out my arm, batting his hand. I catch him off guard, his grip loose, and the phone skitters across the room, crashing against the wall.
‘Stop showing me that! That’s not my baby! It’s in here, I can feel him in here!’
‘Jesus, Susan.’ Mark jumps up to retrieve his precious iPhone, turns on me, his face red and eyes narrow. ‘What did you do that for? Can you hear yourself? That’s our baby,
your
baby.’
He’s lying. I’d know, I’d know if I’d given birth! He’d have held my hand while I pushed and screamed, I’d have heard my baby cry, felt him against my chest.
I would know.
‘You’re wrong. That’s not my baby. That’s not my baby.’
It took three nurses, a doctor and a large dose of sedatives to calm me down, and it wasn’t until four hours after I’d first woken that I saw the baby they claimed was mine. When I stared into the small plastic box they wheeled into my room, I felt no connection between the little boy in front of me and the life I’d grown so carefully inside me for the past eight months. I felt like I’d been robbed, the precious first moments with my son stolen from me by these people. I was allowed to hold him, the nurses took pictures and made encouraging noises and I began to feel it, the love I’d known since finding out we were having a baby, yet still that sense of unfairness didn’t dissolve. I’d been cheated, first of a natural conception and now of a natural birth. I remember feeling then like maybe I wasn’t meant to be a mother at all.
I’d thought that all new mums experienced the same as I had; research and the powers of Google helped me to understand. I worked rubbish runs and cleaned toilets after that, desperate to earn enough credits to spend whatever time I could in the library – and pay Cassie back for that first day – until one afternoon one of the warders came to my room to offer me a lifeline: a job, just a few hours a week, in the library, in return for unlimited access.
What I’d never done, however, was type my son’s name into the search engine. I had no idea how difficult it would be to press enter, and wait the agonising few seconds it takes for the results to flash up.
My cursor hovers over the small cross in the corner of the screen, ready to close down the page if anyone comes too close. And then there it is. A whole page of references to Dylan’s death, each time his name in bold indicating the search subject. The first few are stories about the trial, newspaper articles I saw at the time, but even now it’s hard to face the fact that they’re about me. Snippets of headlines like
MOTHER WITH POST-NATAL DEPRESSION JAILED FOR SIX YEARS
and
MOTHER WHO KILLED BABY – ‘I DON’T REMEMBER’
stand out from the Facebook and LinkedIn profiles for other Dylan Websters. Every article bears the same photo, the photo that is in my hand. My heart pounds painfully against my chest as I scan the search results, each headline a reminder of a time I’ve tried so hard to push to a dark place in the recesses of my mind.
There are a few articles in there that don’t look at all related to Dylan but his name must have come up somewhere. I send them all to the printer and promise myself I’ll read them at home, where I can get upset in peace. All the time my mind is running over the clipping that Carole tells me fell from my handbag.
Who put it in there? Why? Was it me? Am I crazy?
I push the uncomfortable thought away.
On a whim, I type in my ex-husband’s name, Mark Webster. All that comes up is a design service – not my Mark – and a professional darts player –
definitely
not my Mark. Then I come across an article I have seen before. Mark’s photo stares proudly out at me from the screen as Durham University declares to the world how successful its alumni have been. I remember how pleased with himself he was the day this went out in the
Guardian.
A ‘Where Are They Now?’ piece that announced to the whole country that Mark Webster was a partner in a leading IT firm, the Mr Big of the IT scene. I’d smiled at how puffed up it made him; I always loved that he was ambitious and was fiercely proud of all he had achieved. The piece in the
Guardian
was like a stamp of approval, a sign that he’d made it.
Without even realising it, I’ve been in the library for two hours, and the warmth of the day has dropped away leaving a chill in the air. Back outside, I shiver, wrap my thick-knit cardigan around my chest and up my pace, eager to get back to where I’ve parked the car. I don’t realise how little attention I’ve been paying to where I’m going until I hurry head first into a woman who has stepped out from the side of the library.
‘Oh God, sorry.’ I glance up and find myself looking at the blonde woman who caught me staring at her earlier in the café.
‘My fault.’ She looks unnerved at our surprise meeting and smiles uncertainly. I want to say something funny to lighten the mood – she seems very tense – but I’m aware that it might make me sound like a crazy stalker so I hold my tongue.
‘No worries,’ I reply instead. She looks for a second as though she’s about to speak, but after a moment’s awkward silence she simply tucks a strand of her wayward hair behind her ear and walks past me.
I’m bloody glad to get home and settle down in front of the fire with a mug of hot chocolate and the newspaper articles fanned out on the floor in front of me. The ones about the trial are still too hard to face, so I shuffle through to the last ones, the ones that just featured the name Dylan Webster somewhere in the text, and hope they aren’t about some Olympic swimmer with the same name as my son.
They aren’t. The first headline is useless, a random news piece about a university reunion. The second makes me sit up and pay attention.
FAMILY OF MISSING MEDICAL EXAMINER SPEAK OF CONCERN FOR WONDERFUL FATHER
By Nick Whitely. Published 20/11/10
Three days after Dr Matthew Riley was reported missing, his family have spoken of their frantic concern for a ‘wonderfully reliable husband and father’.
Speaking from Dr Riley’s home in Bradford, his cousin Jeff Atwater, 34, said, ‘This is an incredibly difficult time for Matthew’s family. Matty is a wonderfully reliable man, an amazing husband and loving father. He would never willingly abandon his wife or two lovely girls, so we are obviously very concerned. Everyone here is frantic.’
Kristy Riley, Matthew’s wife, is expected to speak at a press conference later today.
Dr Riley, 36, has been in the spotlight recently for his part in the conviction of Susan Webster, the mother found guilty three weeks ago of smothering her son Dylan to death. He was last seen on 17 November coming out of Waitrose in Bradford with a carrier bag thought to contain wine and chocolates to celebrate his eighth wedding anniversary. Anyone who has any information on his whereabouts should contact West Yorkshire Police via the hotline number on their website.
Matthew Riley, do I remember him? My mind searches hazy images from a trial I attended in body only, and then I see him. A doctor who looked too young to be an expert on anything but according to the newspaper article was older than me. I remember struggling to focus as he took the stand, knowing this would be important. I didn’t know if it was the stress, the lack of food and sleep, or the antidepressants the doctors at the hospital had prescribed me, but focusing on anything was a struggle after Dylan was gone. Grief, my father said; he’d been the same when Mum had died. I’d grieved the loss of my mother too, of course, but this was different, this was an all-consuming black hole, hovering just out of my line of vision but still I knew it was there, waiting for me to step too close and slip in. It took all of my energy not to just step in voluntarily.
The doctor was sworn in and the prosecutor stepped up to the box, a horrid little man who reminded me so much of the great and powerful Wizard of Oz that I had to try not to giggle and prove what they probably all thought anyway – that I was crazy. I tried to concentrate on what the doctor – Matthew Riley, I know now – was saying.
‘. . . was unresponsive. I checked for a pulse, heartbeat, signs of breathing. I declared him dead at 16.06 but the post-mortem found the time of death to be approximately two hours previous.’
‘And Susan Webster was . . .?’
He’d been looking at the jury throughout his initial testimony but at this question I saw him look at me and he cleared his throat uncomfortably.
‘The emergency team had taken Mrs Webster through to the theatre room. From our encounter in the car park I had believed her to be deceased, however it was discovered fairly quickly that she was unconscious.’
The prosecution paused for a second, allowing time for this information to sink in, although, I thought, it was hardly news to the jury.
‘What were your first impressions of how Dylan Webster had died?’
Dr Riley looked back at the jury once more and resumed his professional stance.
‘It appeared that Dylan had been a victim of SIDS.’ He glanced at the prosecutor, who nodded at him to continue. ‘That’s Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, otherwise known as cot death.’
My vision blurred. I had no clear memory of that day. Dylan was alive and then they told me he was dead. All I knew was that he was gone and I hated this man. I hated that he was talking about me and my son and saying the word ‘death’.
‘Could you tell us why you presumed this to be the case?’
‘Well, unfortunately SIDS remains one of the biggest causes of death in children under one year of age and so it’s natural to consider it a possibility when a baby has died in his crib with no outward signs of abuse or cause of death.’
‘And what did the post-mortem evidence suggest?’
‘During the post-mortem I found fibres from Mr and Mrs Webster’s sofa cushion inside Dylan’s mouth. There was acute emphysema and oedema of the lungs.’
You didn’t have to be a medical expert to know what Dr Riley’s testimony was building up to.
‘And when you added up all this evidence, what did you determine to be the cause of death?’ the prosecution asked with what I was certain was a perverse glee. Dr Riley didn’t even look at me as he gave his damning evidence.
‘It was my professional opinion that Dylan Webster died from homicidal smothering.’
‘And in plain and simple English?’
‘Dylan Webster was smothered to death with a cushion.’
Did they ever find Dr Riley? Does his disappearance relate to the picture at all? Sighing, I rub my hands across my face and sit back on my heels. That’s when I hear the noise.
There’s no denying that I heard it. It is a loud crashing sound from the back garden, like someone knocking into the outside bins. Jumping to my feet, I quickly scan the front room for something I can use to defend myself. The poker. Clichéd, I know, but probably for good reason, and it’s got to be better than a rolled-up newspaper article.