The Predictions (18 page)

The step went out from under me. As I thudded down the long staircase, my enormous, heavy body gathered a momentum I was unable to stop. When I landed, a burning sensation spread from the base of my groin, through my pelvis, and up into my spine. Hot liquid gushed out from between my legs, broken water, greenish black and slimy, the dregs of a duck pond.

I called out for help but my plea was swallowed up by my other least favorite song—a high-pitched power ballad about a childhood sweetheart with a taste for hard liquor and a tattoo of a rose on her arse. Between the stage and myself was a thick black curtain hemmed with lead. The floorboards under
neath me vibrated. Even if I screamed, no one would hear me.

The woman who had startled me made her way down the stairs. She didn’t want to fall, like I had, and held tight to the railing, her spiked heels wedging in the metal grating on every step. She took forever to get to me, and then forever went on and on, while she fetched Fran, who called an ambulance. Fran didn’t want to stop the gig and I told her that was fine, that I didn’t want to stop it either—to cause a fuss. “I’ll send Lukas over the minute they come offstage,” she said, adding, almost as an afterthought, “Do you need me to come with you?”

“Yes, please—would you? I don’t want to go on my own.” Then someone threw a blanket over me, I supposed to cover the mess.

The paramedics laid me on my side on the stretcher, and I put my hand on my stomach and tried to feel if the baby was still kicking. She wasn’t moving, but sometimes she didn’t for long periods of time and then she would wake up and nudge me in the ribs. Lately she had run out of room to do much except squirm.

Please, god, let her be okay.
I turned to the paramedic. “Is she still alive? Will she make it?”

“We’ll do everything we can,” he said. “You had a bad fall.”

“She was so close to being ready,” I said, through sobs.

“That is not so good. Earlier in the pregnancy, there is more fluid to protect the baby. We will need to get her out as quickly as possible.”

If he had passed me a sharp, cleanish knife, I would have
cut myself open. “What’s wrong with this fucking ambulance? Why is it going so slowly?”

I lost consciousness for a few minutes and woke up in the hospital, feet in stirrups and hooked up to machines by a series of nodes on my stomach. “Is she okay?” I said to the nearest nurse, who didn’t comprehend. “Is the baby alive?” My belly felt full, but deflated, not as tight.

The nurse went to get her supervisor, a woman who spoke English. “We’re inducing labor,” she said. “The fetus shows signs of distress.”

“What kind of distress?”

“Rapid heartbeat. But you must not think of that. Labor is going to be very fast. We don’t have time to do an epidural. It will hurt. Very much.”

I thought I wouldn’t mind the pain—that it couldn’t be as bad as everyone said—but it was catastrophic, like being run over by a car and a lorry and a train, obliterating agony, then a few minutes of respite, long enough to catch my breath before bracing for the next juggernaut. When I thought I couldn’t take it any longer, the gaps between contractions closed up, stranding me in a tunnel of pain. I began to imagine hellfire, and roaring, growling beasts, and the nurse gripped my arm and said, “You might want to put more effort into pushing—and less into making that noise.”

“What noise?” I said, and she growled a little to demonstrate, as the roaring beast had done. Trapped in the tunnel, my thoughts turned bleak. I wondered if I was dying. A man stood by the bed, offering his hand, but I smacked him away
and returned to the underworld, the trial by pain, to cross the river Styx and bring back my baby.

“Push!” said the nurse. “Push now!”

The bones of my pelvis creaked apart like the hinges on an old, rusty gate, and something vast, and wild, a rhinoceros, rammed against the wall of my backside. The pressure was immense, unstoppable, the pain ringed with tusks. And then, not a miracle at all but an indignity of the first order, I shat out the rhino, and was gored.

I opened my eyes. Lukas, in spandex tights, stood next to me, an elated look on his face.

“Jesus,” he said. “I think you scalped me.”

“Where is she?” I collapsed on the bed, spent but euphoric, the brutual goring already a lost memory, watching a surreal pantomime of doctors in white masks dancing around the bed, pulling machines off the wall and plugging others in. There was a single cry, the bleat of a lamb getting its throat cut.

“Was that her? Is she dying?” I looked at Lukas, alarmed.

“It’s a boy,” he said. “And he’s alive all right.”

A few seconds later something pink and fat and covered in blood and cream cheese landed on my chest. His face was puckered, as if he had just eaten a lemon, and the top of his head stretched out in a cone. He was beautiful, a warm, squirming wonder, and my heart grew in seconds to fill the whole room.

Zurich

1989

A
NURSE SHOWED ME
what to do, shoving the baby at my breast and stuffing the nipple in his mouth. She made it look easy, but it wasn’t. The baby wriggled, or wouldn’t open his mouth, or clamped it shut on the wrong part of the breast. I tried so hard, but I couldn’t get it right, and the baby screeched and thrashed, going from hungry to hysterical in a matter of seconds.

“If he won’t settle, I will give him a bottle,” said the nurse, and I remembered the women on the commune, how zealous they had been about breast-feeding. Once, Susie had snuck into a maternity ward pretending to be a midwife and stood over the hospital beds of petrified new mothers, railing against the evils of infant formula, until she was caught and thrown out. Her voice rang in my ear, and I felt like a failure. “I’d like to keep trying,” I said, holding back tears. Everything to do with having a baby was so much harder than I had imagined.

Lukas wanted to call him Zurich, spelled “Zoorich,” after the city he was born in, but I thought that was ludicrous, the sort of thing only a rock star off his tits would do.

“Imagine calling out his name in the playground. Or sending him off to school. He’d have to spell it out for the rest of his life.”

We settled on Zachary, a regular name with the same initial.

The first night alone in the hospital with Zachary, I watched him breathing.
All night
. Too excited to sleep. When he woke up, bleating, I put him to my breast, then peered under the hospital gown at his little frog legs, curled up tight to his chest. When I tried to stretch one out, it pinged back into place, and his feet folded up against his shins. The skin on his tummy was so thin, and I could see his little organs, pumping underneath. I didn’t know how to change his nappy, or even to tell if it was wet, so I pulled the nightgown back over his legs and wrapped him again in the blanket. He had woken up and suckled and turned away again and fallen asleep, all without opening his eyes. Was that normal? Was he just like all the other little babies in the hospital, or had I blinded him and given him brain damage when we fell down the stairs?

Your womb shall bear only sorrow.

In the morning, when the nurse asked if I had slept, and I said that I hadn’t, she wanted to take Zachary away, so I could rest, but I wouldn’t let her. What if something happened to him while I wasn’t watching? What if he stopped breathing and I wasn’t there?

“If you don’t try to sleep we will take him to the nursery whether you like it or not,” said the second nurse who came in and found me awake. “It is very important that you rest.”

The next day, when I still hadn’t obeyed orders, true to her promise, the nurse took Zachary away. Seeing his bassinet getting wheeled out into the hallway, I felt a dread so strong it was like a seizure and a second nurse had to restrain me. “Please rest, Mrs. Harvest. We will take good care of your baby.”

She did not understand why I needed to be able to see Zachary at all times. It was to save his life. I was the only one who could keep him safe. When she had left the room, I put on a dressing gown and went out into the hall to look for him. For what felt like hours I wandered the corridors, lost and disoriented, continuing to search even when black dots swarmed in front of my eyes and I hallucinated that the walls of the maternity ward were melting.

Lukas found me staring through a window into a room filled with bassinets, each one cradling a baby wrapped in waffle blankets. They all looked the same and I was crying with despair because the labels were in German and I couldn’t tell which one was Zachary.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he said. “The nurse told me you went walkabout.”

“Where is he? Where’s Zachary?”

“In the crib, next to your bed.”

“You’re lying. He’s not there. They took him.”

“He’s right there, I promise. We gave him a bottle.”

“You did
what
?”

Lukas flinched and I realized I had screamed at him. “He was hungry.”

“You’ve poisoned him,” I said, bursting into tears. “You may as well have fed him arsenic.”

Lukas took my arm and gently guided me down the corridor. “I really think you need to get some sleep, my love.”

When we reached the ward, I made him sit and watch Zachary while I lay on the bed. “Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep,” I warned him. “You have to watch him like a hawk.
Like. A. Hawk.
”

I heard my voice, horrible and shrill, and for a fleeting moment understood that I was truly bonkers from not sleeping, before the blind came down and I lost all perspective on my own behavior and everything else for that matter. “I’m serious,” I said. “He could stop breathing at any moment. Remember the prediction, what it said?”

Lukas didn’t acknowledge my remark. While I tried to sleep, he watched Zachary, but not as closely as I would have, not like the hawk I had asked him to be.

Five days later, without Lukas, Zachary and I flew back to London, holed up in our flat, and remained inside, venturing no further than the front doorstep, for the next six weeks. Lukas stayed on in Europe to finish the tour (there were too many livelihoods at stake to cancel) and without him around I fell into a wormhole. Zachary did not sleep for more than two hours at a time, three at the most, which meant that by the time I had put him down and drifted off to sleep, I never managed more than an hour or two in one go. I lost whole weeks to this relentless cycle of feeding
and changing and putting the baby down and working out whether or not it was worth trying to sleep in between Zachary’s naps or to hold out, white knuckled, until the slightly longer sleep he may or may not have at the end of the day. When we’d been up all night, the new day starting without the last one ending, I would sometimes just curl up on the floor in my dressing gown and howl along with Zachary.

Often I would think about leaving the house, and mentally start making a list of all the items I would need to take with us, and how long I might be able to stay out for, but the effort of actually doing any of it was too great, and I would sit down, exhausted, and stare at the front door in defeat. Lukas had arranged for one of the PAs at his record company to deliver groceries twice a week, and each time she came to the door, laden with bags, and asked to see the baby, I carried him out to her so she wouldn’t be able to see how disgusting it was inside the flat.

When Lukas came home he was shocked, but I couldn’t explain to him what was going on because I was so deranged with tiredness that I could no longer speak in whole sentences. He tried to hire a nanny to give me a break but on her first day with us I refused to let her anywhere near Zachary. “What if he cries?” I had protested. “How will you soothe him? What are your qualifications? Do you have a criminal record?” At the end of the day, she had thrown up her hands in frustration. “I give up.”

One day Fran came around in an attempt to stage what I supposed was a kind of intervention—as though motherhood was only a temporary condition that I could just be
snapped out of. She brought champagne,
Vogue
magazine, a gram of cocaine. “Since when did you start doing that stuff?” I said when she cut it up in front of me and casually did a line. It was eleven in the morning. I had gone from having no idea what time it was to obsessively watching the clock, waiting for nap time or waiting for Zachary to wake up, my days measured in portions of sleep. Fran reached for the Moët and expertly defoiled it. “Go on,” she said. “Zachary’s asleep. By the time he wakes up, you’ll be sober.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” I said, gesturing to my breasts. “The booze hangs around in the milk.”

“Nonsense,” said Fran, picking up my glass and clinking it with hers. “One sip of this and you’ll forget you even have a baby.”

Fran had lost weight, not just puppy fat but half of her breasts and hips and the filling that puffed out her cheeks. Next to her I felt like a living doughnut, soft and lardy and filled with cream. Since the baby was born, I had put on weight, not lost it. To please Fran, I took a sip of the champagne but it tasted like turpentine and I spat it back into the glass.

In the next room, Zachary whimpered, and I got up to check on him. He was so pure, so innocent, and I wished that Fran, and her drugs, would leave.

Lukas and I had been told by the doctor not to have sex for six weeks after Zachary’s birth but that date came and went without either of us even considering it. He started sleeping in the spare room so as not to disturb us when he got home late at night after recording—Cheatah had gone
straight into the studio to cut a second album—and when that had finished, in June, he didn’t come back to our bedroom. After a while I couldn’t remember what had instigated the separate rooms or who it was meant to benefit, but the arrangement had become a habit. Our lives collided for only a few short hours in the middle of the day. Lukas would crawl out of bed to lie on the floor with Zachary, staring in wonderment at his smiling, cooing son, until Zachary cried or shat his pants, at which point Lukas would hand him back to me. I had tried to show him how to change a nappy or settle Zachary with a gentle swaying and rocking motion, but too much time passed between practice runs, and he forgot, or lost confidence, and Zachary sensed his fear, his uncertainty, and mirrored it back to him with his bellowing.

Lukas thought the answer was to get me on my own, to take me away from Zachary for a few days so we could be a couple again, but I couldn’t understand why he wanted to go back to the old configuration when we had become something new and wonderful, a family.

Our first official family outing after Lukas returned from touring—and the first time I had left the house in six weeks—was a disastrous trip to the park that I’d had to force him into. He couldn’t see the point of walking around a pond in the middle of the day. “Since when do we hang out in Regent’s Park?”

“We might see a squirrel. Zachary can feed the ducks.”

He was too young to do anything but lie on his back and stare at the trees in astonishment, but I had packed a picnic and spent hours gathering up items we might need for the
outing—spare nappies, burping cloths, wet-wipes, a change of clothes, baby powder, an extra blanket. The stroller was so weighed down it needed a Sherpa.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” said Lukas, eyeing the load.

“But I never leave the house,” I said, hearing the petulance in my voice. “You don’t know what it’s like to stay home all day.”

“That’s why I hired a nanny, to give you a break.”

“But I don’t want a break from Zachary. I want us to spend time together as a family.”

Lukas shoved the stroller roughly out the front door, letting me know that he would go along with what I wanted but only under sufferance. I stood on the top step, squinting in the sunshine, blinded by it, overcome with fatigue after packing all our gear, and wishing I hadn’t bothered.

In the park, people stared at Lukas, but I didn’t think it was for the reason he thought, which was that he was famous. There was plenty to stare at in an ordinary gobsmacked way: the crocodile-print spandex pants, the waist-length corkscrew perm, the fact that a guy dressed like that was pushing a baby in a stroller. But just in case, he put on his sunglasses and scowled from behind them at passersby to let them know he was off duty and did not wish to be disturbed.

We fed the ducks by holding a piece of bread in Zachary’s hand, then launching it out for him to the waiting birds, a pretense that fooled no one and made the ducks charge aggressively at our ankles, trying to hurry us up. We spread out the picnic a safe distance from them, ate a couple of fish-paste
sandwiches, then were pelted with rain at the same moment Zachary chose to shit his already urine-soaked pants.

In the old days, or even six months before, we might have laughed at the awfulness of the outing, what a farce it had been, but that day we couldn’t. I was too sleep-deprived to find anything funny, and Lukas had his mind on a whole other life.

At night, when I could have slept for a few hours, I lay awake fretting over Zachary, consumed with anxiety. His existence defied the prediction but at the back of my mind was the thought:
What if it’s only temporary? What if sorrow is yet to come?
With each passing day, I loved him a bit more, and had more to lose. Wide-awake, crazed with insomnia, brooding, I would remember what we had been taught on the commune about the dangers of manifesting thoughts. We’d had it drummed into us to be careful not to dwell on our fears or we would make them a reality. But the harder I tried to expel my dark thoughts, the more persistent they became.

I shared none of this with Lukas, partly because I knew what his reaction would be, and largely because he was never there.

In early summer, when the leaves on the plane trees outside our window were as green and crisp as Granny Smiths, he came home early one morning and climbed into bed with me, something he hadn’t done for months. It was just starting to get light outside. I smelled whiskey on his breath. “Darling,” he said, low and urgent. “Wake up.”

The first thing I thought of was Zachary. “What’s wrong? Is he okay?”

“He’s fine. Guess what? It’s finished!”

“What is?”

“The album!”

“Oh.” I collapsed back onto the pillow. “What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Six maybe?”

I had only just fallen asleep again after a three
A.M
. feed. “That’s great, darling,” I said, but with little enthusiasm.

He left the room, and a little while later, the front door slammed. The noise woke up Zachary. It wasn’t even six—it was five forty-five.

Five hours later, midmorning to a normal person, Lukas came back, took a shower, made a pot of coffee. “You know, we’re having a playback this afternoon of the new record,” he said, a box of birds. “You should come.”

“To the studio?”

“Yeah, bring Zachary, it’ll be fun. Everyone will be there.”

In my head I quickly tried to work out if I had anything decent to wear that still fit me that I could also breast-feed in if I had to, then I started on calculating how we would travel to the studio, how long it would take, whether it would interfere with Zachary’s feed times or nap, and if it did, whether he would be able to hold it together, before getting on to whether the slight pleasure of listening to Cheatah’s new album would outweigh the inconveniences. “I don’t know, babe. Maybe you should go without us?”