Читать книгу Mother: A gripping emotional story of love and obsession - Hannah Begbie - Страница 11

I pushed our trolley through the supermarket car park and, as I searched for my keys, a Range Rover ploughed through a puddle so big that it showered Mia and me with muddy rainwater. My jeans were covered in it. Mia’s legs were stippled with it. I looked down and her head and face were baptized by it.

Back at home I took Mia out of the sling, laid her down in the hall and patted gently at her cheeks with an antibacterial wipe – the tenth or eleventh time since leaving the car park. But what if the bacteria had made its way into her mouth? I pulled gently, as gently as I could, at the corners of her tiny mouth so it stretched like a clown’s, and wiped the insides with the bitter and abrasive wipe.

I took shallow breaths that didn’t fill my lungs as Mia wailed. I did the only things I could remember to reassure her – kissed her, sang to her, I will love you love you love from the bottom of my heart – all the while crouched on the floor by the front door, trying to think and remember and please think, think, what should I do to stop that puddle from seeding a new and corrosive sickness in her?

Still she cried and with every piercing call issued from her tiny mouth I wondered how this puzzle would ever resolve itself. How there would ever be a time when we wouldn’t be lashed together like that, trapped – her helpless without me, me powerless to truly help her.

I looked up. ‘Dave, where are you? I need your help. We’re covered in muddy puddle water.’ But there was nobody home. A pile of unopened post in a shoebox by the door. The burnt remnants of lunch in the air. The rug that had rumpled and turned as I hurried out of the door earlier, anxious not to be late for Mum. All of it, exactly as I had left it.

I lifted Mia to the ceiling and held her there, hoping that my face would cheer her up. But she wailed more, now turning crimson in her anger.

‘I love you. It’s going to be all right. You’re going to be all right. Dave, please, are you upstairs?’

I stood up, pressing her close to me as I kicked off my shoes. Balancing her with one arm as I hooked a finger under each sock, peeling each one off in case splashes of dirty puddle water had touched their fibres.

I walked to the bottom of the steps and buried my face in Mia’s neck, trying to calm her with my closeness, trying to slow my own breathing and thinking of how Mum had said: Yes, yes, I understand, even though she hadn’t understood. About how Dad would have listened and how I would have listened to him.

I kissed Mia’s cheeks over and over, tasting the salt of her tears. Kissed her brow, tasted the salt of her skin and my heart broke once more with the facts of it:

Salt.

Once so cheap and inconsequential in our lives. Pinched into soups, scattered on icy doorsteps. Swum in and washed off. Salt had once scattered and flowed round us so silently and unmemorably that we had barely noticed it.

Now salt was of consequence. Salt was the missing ingredient in Mia’s life: her body’s inability to hold on to it made the mucus in her lungs a thick and sticky spider’s web for infection.

I thought of the waiting room we’d sat in, moments before diagnosis, as the sun tried to cut through the pollution-dusted window. How I had licked Mia’s brow and tasted the sea.

Woe is the child whose brow tastes salty when kissed, for they are cursed and soon must die.

The first time a salt-doomed child was recorded in writing, back in the Middle Ages. The words rang around my head as I held on to the stair banister for balance, sad wisdom from another age, written of the babies who coughed and coughed then died before they even learned to talk.

We knew more now, but not enough.

‘Dave,’ I shouted. ‘Please be here. You have to come here.’

Another way of looking at things, Richard had said, eyes shining.

But as the sweat gathered on my skin and my mouth dried of the right words and songs for my daughter, all I could see was life spiralling angrily and painfully towards a series of horrific endings.

Hurry, hurry.

Time is running out.

‘Dave!’

I sat on the stairs and thought of the bacteria now finding a new home inside her chest. I imagined it, sly and malignant, bedding down into her lungs, twining round her like poison weed, doubling and doubling in numbers, every tick of the second hand rooting them deeper, letting them burrow where no antibiotics would ever find them.

I was late to administer her last dose of antibiotics for the day. I’m sorry, so sorry.

I scooped her to my chest and ran, thundering down steps, my bare feet slipping, almost losing us on the bottom step, until I reached the kitchen.

Mia screamed and screamed. I couldn’t think. Maybe she was in pain, maybe she was hungry. Maybe she was dying.

Alone with the choices, alone with the syringes and the screaming, the baby screaming, I tried to remember what she needed first, what the danger signs were, where the new dangers lay, what might need to come first.

I took the antibiotics out of the fridge with hands that shook. The cap locked as I tried to unscrew it. I pressed it down hard, tried to release the safety catch and turned again, and again, and again but still it stuck, still it resisted. It fought me, kept me from helping her. I screamed to something above me in anger, defiance and frustration. I pushed and turned through gritted teeth, pushed so hard that the bottle slipped through my grasp as the lid opened. Heavy brown glass bounced on the wooden floor leaving a trail of medicine, and for a moment I gazed at it, spreading into a glistening white fern pattern.

The pharmacy was closed now and that was the last bottle. I had nothing in stock in the cupboard.

Bad mother, bad mother. Screaming child still screaming.

‘Dave!’ A sound so splintered and spitting I did not recognize it as coming from me. ‘Please help. I need you. I don’t know what to do. Please help.’

A damp towel sat in a mocking heap by the dishwasher, reminding me that I should have put it in a boil wash that morning to kill the bacteria that would harm my baby if left to multiply. I hadn’t done it, I had forgotten, and now my baby was screaming with hunger and the pseudomonas bacteria were increasing at such a rate that I wouldn’t be able to touch that towel without rubber gloves in case my skin became a vehicle for their transmission.

How long, how impossible the battle when the enemy was everywhere you looked, on every surface forever.

In frustration, I raked at my arms with my fingernails. Then I remembered reading that many people, most people, unknowingly carry staph bacteria on their skin and it doesn’t harm them. But it would harm Mia if it got into her lungs. And now it was surely under my fingernails because I had put it there with my panicked, silly scraping, and I would need to clean and scrub at them with antibacterial soap and while I was there, clean the floor that the dirty towel was on, with the bleach I had bought, then clean my skin, and her skin and maybe her mouth again.

Who would be the first to surrender? The bacteria or me? Of course defeat was coming, a horrible, inevitable defeat. It had been on its way from her first moments and there was no one to back us up when we fell.

I remembered Mum in that supermarket and how my thing wasn’t big or painful enough for her to finally look me in the eyes and say, That must be terrible for you. Not me. You, dear. You. The kind of thing that someone who loved you might say.

The kind of thing a mother might say as part of her battle cry as she stood by her daughter’s side, spear at the ready – to fight for life. To the death.

I don’t remember why I emptied the cutlery drawer on to the floor. Perhaps I needed a new sound to cut against Mia’s screams, or to wake me up from the screams in my head, or to tip me over.

I went to the drawer stocked with syringes and took out one box. I laid one aside because I would need it for Mia but the rest I tipped out and the plastic clattered lightly on to the floorboards. Then I stamped on them all, their plastic cases shattering under my bare feet, and I cried and screamed and shouted with the pain of it.

I opened the fridge and called out for Dave again. Was he in the house? He was in the house, of course he was, he could hear me and he’d decided not to come to me until I was calm. He was thinking about all those times I’d sat, perched on the bath, digging that lying plastic stick into my palm, and thinking: she needs to calm down first.

‘Dave, if you’re here, I need you. Please come.’

But he didn’t come and I needed to make him hear so I reached into the fridge and took other bottles. Milk. Orange juice. Dressing. And I threw them, one by one, at the floor. And when the sight of broken glass and liquid hadn’t made me feel better, I took the other medicine and I threw everything she needed on to the floor. Against the wall. On to the floor. Bang. Bang. Against the wall and on to the floor.

The ones that didn’t break I emptied down the sink, one by one, like a child pouring away her angry drunk of a father’s whisky bottles as his eyes glaze and he turns into someone she doesn’t know.

‘Go away. Get out of my house,’ I screamed – defeated and yet fighting – as I smashed anything I could find against the wall. ‘Go, get out!’

Then Dave was in the kitchen and his face was twisted with alarm. ‘Are you OK? Is someone here?’ But all I could do was cry. ‘Cath. Speak to me. Who’s been here? Are you OK? Who’s hurt you? Where’s Mia?’ He looked to Mia lying on her mat and satisfied she was OK, turned his attention back to me. ‘Please, speak to me.’

‘No,’ I managed through tears and gasps. ‘No one’s here.’ And I wept harder then, so much I thought I’d never stop. Part of me didn’t want to stop because stopping would mean talking and there were no words. ‘There is no one here.’

Dave held me tight at the wrist and a line of blood dripped over where his thumb grasped me. ‘Calm down and look at me. Look at me. Are you sure no one is here? Who did this to you?’

I felt my mouth and eyes stretch wide, spaces opening to allow an overflowing dark smoke to escape.

‘I did,’ I said.

Pity and anxiety filled his eyes and I thought he would cry when he turned abruptly away and towards Mia. He collected her up, made comforting sounds and Mia’s cries stopped right away. He glanced at me again then changed Mia’s nappy, her babygro. Whispered in her ear and held her tight. Put her down on the play mat. Gave her a bottle.

By the time he was with me I was sitting silently on the kitchen floor, the anger emptied from me, drained and dripping through the floorboards along with the antibiotics.

He tore off some kitchen towel and wrapped it around my foot, around my wrist – both, bleeding. I buried my face in his sleeve. There was silence and for a fleeting moment I was soothed. Oh, to be carried and loved and rocked until you sleep.

His eyes were full of sadness as he looked around the broken mess in the kitchen. ‘Why? What happened?’

I wanted to say:

I was sad.

I saw my mum but I wanted my dad.

Then we were drowned by a puddle.

I’m drowning in it all, Dave. Drowning every day.

‘Where were you?’ I said.

But when he saw an empty medicine bottle on the floor and the cracked syringes in a pile on the boards, he looked up at me with an expression I didn’t recognize – or didn’t want to recognize. ‘Are they … they’re Mia’s antibiotics. What have you done?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, straitjacketing my arms around me.

‘Have you given her the evening dose of Augmentin?’

‘No, no I haven’t. I dropped it on the floor. That was how it started …’

‘How it started?’ He looked at the open, gloating fridge and its empty shelves. ‘All Mia’s medicines are gone from the fridge. Cath? We don’t have any drugs for tonight or for the middle of the night. You know that all the pharmacies are closed? There’s nothing until the morning?’

Maybe it was the internet or possibly the doctors or even the leaflets that said:

The babies that do better, the ones that live a little longer, are the ones who have parents who stick to the regime. The ones who are compliant with treatment.

‘Cath? Are you even listening? This is a huge problem for us. She needs her dose. She can’t skip one.’

The babies that do best are the ones that avoid early chronic infection: their parents watch for any signs. They watch, they test, they assess, every day.

I curled over and laid my palms on the floorboards.

‘Cath? Snap out of it now. We need to sort this out. She needs her meds and physio and a bath and bed. We need to get her sorted out first.’

The babies that die slower are the ones that keep weight on. It helps them fight off infections when they’re too ill to eat. The consultants like their children to carry a little bit extra. Every meal helps. Every breastfeed.

‘You can do the crazy mental stuff after we’ve sorted this out, but I need you back in the room now helping me clear this mess up.’

The babies that are strong are cared for, and lucky. They don’t have mothers whose wrists shake, whose feet stamp on their syringes.

‘You’re frightening Mia, Cath. You’re frightening her.’

The babies that live.

‘If you don’t snap out of it I’m calling your mum.’

The babies that live a little longer.

‘Cath, for God’s sake, what are you looking at? Where have you gone? Look at me. Look at me, now.’

The babies that don’t live, they run to God, leaving their mothers to howl their names into all the empty years that lie waiting for them.