Authors: Polly Samson
‘Your mum really doesn’t want to talk about Mira, does she? I was just telling her about that game she used to play with Billy and Arthur . . .’
‘Bad Rabbits,’ he says. ‘I think it was Beatrix Potter-inspired. I always had to be Mr McGregor.’
‘Yep, that one; it’s all they ever wanted to play, but every time I mention Mira’s name she changes the subject.’
‘Tell me about it.’ He shifts his weight so he has one arm and shoulder hanging Chatterton-style from the side of the hammock.
‘It must be hard for you,’ she says.
‘Yes.’ He screws his eyes over the final drag of his cigarette and flicks it into the bushes.
‘We had so much fun with her over the Easter hols. I can honestly say she and the boys couldn’t have had a lovelier time.’
‘Yeah, I feel bad now, fobbing her off on you.’
‘Oh come on,’ Katie says. ‘I offered. She was bright as a button, so much more articulate than my boys. And then the following week you were all gone and she was in Great Ormond Street, and I was searching my brain for any sort of sign I’d missed. I’m sure it’s awful to have to think about. But what I’ve never pieced together is . . . if you don’t mind talking about this . . . but how did she end up in hospital so suddenly like that? Did I miss something?’
‘I was an idiot is what happened,’ he says and laughs bitterly and for too long until she prods him with her foot to make him stop. ‘It was the day the builders had arrived to start knocking out the kitchen.’ He reaches for her foot and gives it a grateful squeeze and she curls her toes around his fingers as he continues. ‘It was a nightmare, the whole day. Mira had been awake every hour through the night complaining of tummy ache. I gave up putting her back to bed in her own room and let her sleep in mine. I couldn’t stop her crying. She wanted Mummy, she said.’
SO DO I! he’d found himself roaring into her face at four o’clock in the morning, but he’s too ashamed to tell Katie that bit.
‘She was pale and whiny and the men had started upstairs, demolishing the bathroom. I was trying to pack the kitchen into boxes, plaster falling from the shaking ceiling, banging, banging, Radio One blaring.
‘I’d been planning to drop her at nursery and spend the day writing in Woodford Library, but she was floppy and the Calpol hadn’t brought down her temperature, so we were both stuck here while it went on. The egg-shaped bath had to be sawn in two to get it out, you can imagine the noise that made. Dust flew everywhere, making her cough, so I moved a camping stove into the sitting room, though she wasn’t interested in any of the food I cooked for her. Karl called while I was boiling some rice. He sounded stressed, said he had to talk to me. He seemed so wretched I wondered if something had happened to Heino. But we were interrupted by Mira screaming outside and I dropped the phone and ran to her. She was burning with fever – she kept pointing at the ground, though no words would come. Eventually she managed: “A t-t-t-oad. It kept looking at me,” and burst into hot tears. I carried her indoors and when she was calmer called Karl back.
‘He said what he wanted to tell me wasn’t the sort of thing we could talk about on the phone. He insisted on seeing me, on coming down. But by then I just wanted to get away from the builders. I wasn’t getting any work done anyway.
‘I tucked her up with a beaker of warm banana Nesquik in front of the
Teletubbies
and tried to work. I screwed some of those yellow ear-plugs from an old airplane bag into my ears. Obviously that was no use, because she could barely hear the television over the banging and in the end I decided I might as well take her to London.’
‘So, that’s when you took off? You went to meet Karl?’ Katie has allowed him to talk uninterrupted all this time. It’s getting a little chilly, he’s almost glad to have the warmth of her beside him in the hammock.
‘Yes, I did. Screaming all the way in the back of the car. I know now that she was in agony, but shit for brains here just kept on driving. I even turned the music up.’
‘She’d only managed milky things that day. She complained that the seatbelt hurt her and I kept having to pull over to adjust it. In the end I made the straps so loose they’d have been useless in an accident. At some point she stopped screaming and fell asleep with her cheek lolling on her shoulder. She woke up moaning as we pulled off the motorway: pale, curdy sick was pouring from her mouth. I gave her extra Calpol in the lay-by and cleaned her up as best I could. She just looked at me and said: “Sorry, Dadoo . . .” ’
Katie manoeuvres herself around so that they face the same way. She holds his head to her chest as the hammock rocks, enfolds him. ‘Oh Mira,’ he moans her name aloud.
Karl shouted up the stairs to his father as Julian stumbled from the car, Mira screaming in his arms.
‘Christ, she’s started up again. Where’s Julia?’
Karl led the way into the flat, Mira’s cries piercing the hallway, Julia running, taking her from him, kissing her hot, vomit-flecked face: ‘Sweetness, whatever’s the matter?’
Heino came in leaning on his stick, shaking his head when they told him it was tummy ache. ‘I think I’d better take a look at her,’ he said.
Mira quietened in Julia’s arms. She moaned when she laid her on the couch, her knees tucked into her belly. Heino motioned for Julia to pull up Mira’s sweatshirt. ‘May I?’ She flinched when he put his stethoscope to her chest. He pressed the dome of her tummy with his knobbly hands, snapped the stethoscope from his ears and turned to Karl. ‘You feel, tell me if I’m wrong.’ He looked at Julia while Karl put his hands on Mira’s belly. Heino grasped Julia’s elbow. ‘You need to get this child to A and E,’ he said. ‘It’s always better to be certain.’
They were seen almost immediately at the Paediatric Casualty Department at UCH. Mira was in a cubicle and the pressure sleeve already on her arm by the time Karl got back from parking the car. Her blood pressure was 150/100. Calls were being made. Karl knelt before Julia, held her shoulders to calm her, looked into her eyes: ‘They know what they’re doing,’ he said.
They were transferred by ambulance to Great Ormond Street. There were more blood tests – it was almost worse when Mira didn’t scream at the needle than when she did. X-rays. Scans. Mira awake for very little of it, he and Julia hearts pounding as they followed her hospital bed along corridors and through doors, to and from the lift, back and forth to the ward. Julia turned her face to his shoulder as a tiny hairy baby was wheeled past, a nurse leaning over the cot gently squeezing air into its mouth from a ridged plastic tube.
Mira was hooked up to a drip, nurses around her bed, tearfully resisting as they tried to insert the canula, then floppy again. Karl said he’d wait with her while they followed Esther Fry, their consultant, to the parents’ interview room along the corridor. Esther Fry sat with her clipboard of notes on her knee. They perched on stiff blue chairs while she passed Julia the box of tissues, corkscrew curls bobbing as she spoke with brisk confidence. ‘Once we’ve brought down her blood pressure, we can talk about the next stage.’
‘What next stage?’ Julian started pulling at his hair, and Julia had to grip his hands to make him stop; he could feel hers shaking.
‘We should have done something sooner . . .’ Julia said. There were so many things to beat themselves up about. ‘We used to laugh at her pot belly.’
Esther Fry flapped the sheaf of notes at them: ‘This sort of tumour can be very hard to diagnose in the early stages. She’s here now and that’s the main thing. You’re in the right place.’
Tumour. There, it was said.
‘Please just tell me that she won’t die,’ Julia said, asking for both of them.
‘The main thing is she’s comfortable now. She’s lightly sedated and we’ll be administering the Nifedipine to bring down her blood pressure. Everything else we can talk about tomorrow.’
‘Doctor, please . . .’
‘Call me Esther.’ She gave them her kindest smile. ‘This will be the worst day, from now on it’ll get better.’ And over the weeks to come they would repeat her words to each other,
from now on it’ll get better
.
‘First she will need to have a biopsy and a port fitted to her chest.’ Esther Fry pointed to a spot beneath her own collarbone and the thought of so tender a part of Mira being pierced made his palms sweat. ‘The port will remain under the skin and drugs will be administered through it.’ Again Esther Fry tapped the place on her chest where Mira would be cut, he could see lilac veins beneath her skin. ‘It’s a straightforward operation and it means we won’t have to keep pricking her.’
Esther Fry produced some leaflets and laid them on the table. They’d have to make choices, though choices were the last thing they felt capable of making. ‘If the scans show that the tumour is contained within the kidney, you can be part of a randomised clinical trial comparing the US approach, where immediate removal of her left kidney would straight away rectify her blood pressure, or the European approach of starting with four to six weeks of chemotherapy to shrink the tumour with reduced danger of it rupturing and spreading during the operation.’
Julian was overcome with weakness. ‘Let’s ask Karl,’ he suggested. ‘Or, better, his dad. I’m sure Heino must know what’s best.’
They found themselves hovering at the door of the chapel. Inside a choir of golden angels soundlessly played their instruments around the star-spangled dome. His eyes blurred; there was nothing but glitter, PAX at their feet and, within, a great eagle spreading his gilded wings at the lectern. He knelt and prayed to his father to send him a sign that Mira would recover. He looked around the walls at the huddles of soft toys parents had placed there: teddy bears, Tiggers, rabbits, love-torn monkeys, a little felt mouse with a bright-red nose and flowers embroidered across its ears. Julia pointed, whispered: ‘I can’t stand it. These must have belonged to children who have died here.’
‘Stop,’ said Julian. They clung together until they heard somebody cough behind them. It was Karl holding Mira’s rabbit. He’d been back to Lamb’s Conduit Street to fetch it; Mira never slept without it. The rabbit was wearing Mira’s own baby dress, the one with her name in red appliqué.
‘Mira will be all right,’ he was saying. Julia pointed to the toys and started to sob. Karl had his arm around her. ‘I expect the parents put them here as an offering to God to keep their little ones safe,’ he said, pulling her close. ‘In fact, I’m sure of it.’
Katie strokes Julian’s hair as they lie together in the hammock. ‘Poor Jude, you’re exhausted.’
‘I think you’re right,’ he says. ‘Let’s call it a night.’
The mist drifts from the river. They cross the grass, she’s shivering, so he puts his arm around her shoulder and gives her a squeeze. Michael and Jenna have cleared up the supper things and slipped away to bed unnoticed while he’s been talking at her in the hammock.
She curls in the chair beside the Rayburn and he pulls the dog blanket around her. He thinks a brandy will warm them both up, whether or not she’ll be sober enough to drive herself home doesn’t cross his mind. He hands her the glass and she looks up at him, the yellow speckles of her eyes like grains of pollen. Her green eye stuff is still in place but her mascara has smudged into black rings. Her dress has twisted around and as she adjusts it he sees, with a stab of pity, that her bra is green to match the rest of her outfit. She raises an eyebrow.
‘Oooh, look at you, Cassandra,’ he says, embarrassed to have been caught looking.
‘What?’
‘Don’t pretend. Like in
I Capture the Castle
when the Mortmains dye all their clothes green? Remember?’
The pollen dances in her eyes. Oh yes, she remembers.
They came across the burial mound racing on their bikes through the bluebell woods after school.
I Capture the Castle
was Katie’s favourite book, even that it was their set text for GCSE didn’t spoil it for her.
The grassy mound was fringed by white wood anemones and bluebells and home to clumps of primroses, chocolate-raisin rabbit droppings, maybe even a shy scattering of violets. Their bikes lay in the bluebells. ‘It’s perfect,’ she said. ‘We have to do it here.’ The scent of bluebells was intoxicating, her dimples flashed. Through the trees you could see across the river to the west. ‘Look, we’ll be able to watch the sun setting,’ she said.
There was a crumbling bit of wall at the foot of the mound where once had been a boundary, so they loosened some large stones and set them in a circle for their fire. She crouched down, grinning at him through her fringe. ‘What is it we need? Salt, herbs, a bottle of the vicar’s wine . . .’
The sun was set, their offerings made, the vicar’s wine drunk. Her hastily gathered garlands were askew, her naked skin was strewn with petals. A sweet peaty smell mingled with squashed bluebells, their crushed stems sticky beneath his knees.
‘The rite of midsummer exactly as they did it in the book . . . oh, I still love that book.’ Katie gives a little shiver at the memory and smiles up at him.
He snorts: ‘I don’t remember the rite of midsummer in the book ending with a bonk, also, it wasn’t midsummer, it was bloody chilly.’
‘Oh, bonk off, Jude. That’s a horrible word for it. Why do you have to spoil things?’ He’s horrified to see that her eyes are welling.
‘Well, you looked very pretty covered in my floral tributes,’ he says. ‘Oh, stop it, Katie. You’re doing it again.’