Читать книгу Mother: A gripping emotional story of love and obsession - Hannah Begbie - Страница 12

Of all the things you could have smashed up, why her medicines?

That’s what Dave said in the kitchen when I finally met his gaze. His eyes brimmed with black disappointment, as if it was Mia I had broken.

And I had wanted to say, Taste the salt on my lips, taste the evidence of how much I kiss her. How much I love her. I would do anything to take her place.

But I didn’t say any of that because the anger in his face was like steel. His baby was crying and compromised, his wife’s wounds self-inflicted and his house needlessly broken by her.

Bad, bad, bad wife.

I had tried to explain but he had heard all those things before, about my mother and father, about our child. He was tired of hearing about these things that never changed but got talked about, round and round, without resolution.

And it occurred to me: a symptom doesn’t have to be a change. A symptom can be no change at all.

So I left to get help.

As soon as I was in the car, breathing the smell of its upholstery still warm from the day’s heat, I was calmer. I dialled the registrar and explained that I had dropped Mia’s antibiotic in the sink by mistake and needed a replacement. Yes, of course, she said, as if it happened all the time. That will be fine. Calmer still. We’ll leave replacement antibiotics at the hospital pharmacy but you’ll need to hurry because they will close soon.

I would return with a blue-and-white paper bag and Dave would see that I was not a bad mother and wife, after all.

I could emerge from these shadows.

By atoning, as Mum would say.

I turned the keys in the ignition. Underfoot a crisp packet crackled and slid. I moved it aside and felt biscuit crumbs and a balled tissue at my fingertips. A bottle that had been there too long, abandoned and half-drunk, the water unable to evaporate into thin air because the lid was closed; bacteria multiplying, toxicity intensifying until soon it would be too dangerous to water plants. I needed to throw it away, as soon as possible, before it leaked and caused damage.

As I drove, I thought of how Dave had looked at my bleeding wrist. He had been concerned but also suspicious, I think, as if it were not the glass from shattered bottles that had caused a slow trickle of blood. As if I was now capable of anything. A new problem in his life, something to monitor and perhaps to contain. Another item on his long exhausting list.

And in that moment I had imagined Richard. The thought had come unbidden. Would he have picked me out of the glass? Had his wife ever fallen apart, and had he held her then, instead of clearing up around her with a face full of cold contempt?

I drove through the neighbouring streets with their red-brick houses and plane trees, past playing fields and a football pitch where boys stood in a huddled mass, like petals on a stem. We’d chosen the area for the schools and the borough football club. We had come for the village feel. We had come for the small shops and the busy swings. We had come for the many speed bumps designed to keep children safe, which I now sped over.

I arrived at the local hospital. The last time I had been there my womb had been contracting and Dave had held me up as my legs gave way, my arms stretched wide against him – an eagle, grounded. Only an hour before we’d been sitting on the living room carpet watching Friends re-runs with him feeding me bits of bagel, and Fanta from a straw. Occasionally I’d gasp and he’d say: contraction or carbonation? And I’d laughed every time.

It was this hospital that had delivered all we’d ever wished for. Us. A family.

I walked through a crowd of Accident and Emergency patients – antiseptic and alcohol in the air, a child cradling an arm, a waxen wheezing man – until I reached the pharmacy.

A queue moved in fits and starts until finally it was my turn.

‘It’s Cath, Cath Freeland.’ My voice quivered at its edges. ‘Here to collect Augmentin for Mia Freeland. Dr Korres will have rung it through.’

The woman, whose hair swept across an acne-pocked forehead, lowered her gaze to a screen. She tapped and stopped. Tapped and stopped. ‘The pharmacist has gone home for the evening so can you come back tomorrow morning?’

‘No, I’m sorry but I need it now. They said it would be waiting here.’

‘Your request has come from the children’s hospital. That needs a pharmacist. We’re only open for non-prescription items now.’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘This is urgent. My daughter needs antibiotics. She has cystic—’

‘If it’s urgent you can bring your daughter to A & E and they might prescribe? Depending on the circumstances?’

‘She needs her dose. I give it to her every eight hours. I dropped the bottle. It smashed. I didn’t mean to drop it. It’s Augmentin. 125 milligrams.’

‘As I said, if it’s urgent—’

‘But she’s got cystic fibrosis!’ I could feel my voice getting shriller, more panicked. ‘I can’t bring her to A & E. There’s a guy back there coughing up his lungs. I can’t put her near that.’

‘I’m sorry. All I can suggest is that you come back in the morning.’

‘Wasn’t it rung through?’

‘I can see it on the system, but it needs a pharmacist to handle it as it’s a prescription drug. If you’d been here an hour ago …’

‘This is ridiculous.’

‘It would be illegal for me to give it to you, OK? I can’t do any antibiotics because I’m not licensed, all right? All I can do for you is whatever’s not on prescription. For anything else you have to get a doctor.’

I turned away and leaned against the wall, the metal roll and close of the shutter unpeeling my nerves all over again.

I couldn’t go home, not until I had atoned.

I walked out on to the street and looked toward the entrance of the birthing centre. I looked up and counted quickly – one, two, three floors up to the ward where Mia had been born in a room bordered with mauve butterfly stickers.

Mauve: to calm the mother through her birthing ordeal.

Butterfly: average lifespan, one month.

I wanted to go back to the birthing centre reception. I wanted to sit on the single orange plastic chair that I had sat on eight weeks prior when it had been me, Dave and Mia for the first time. A family. I wanted to sit on that same chair. A chair that a thousand new mums before me had sat on, waiting for their partners to collect them and bring them home – sore with their ordeal, new life in a car seat at their feet.

I wanted to sit there until a security guard became so discomforted by me not having a baby at my feet nor any sign of someone coming for me that eventually he would ask: Can I help you with anything?

And I would say:

Yes, I am looking for something.

I didn’t know my newborn baby was the messenger for a new life.

And I need to find my old life because I didn’t have the chance to say goodbye.

I want it back, I need it, I miss it. Can you help me find it?

But the security guard would say: I’m sorry, I can’t help you and would you move along, please?

And the hospital would not come to my rescue if I sat motionless in an orange plastic chair, as it had not come to Mia’s rescue by prescribing her replacement antibiotics.

My life would continue as it was and Mia would continue to hold a death sentence in her cells.

Then I felt the essence in me that kept me upright and moving, drip lower and lower into my feet – filling them, pinning them to the lowest ground. A seabed, somewhere.

I tasted salt – my salt – on my top lip and thought of how much warmer it would feel on the surface of the sea.

And I thought of Richard and how he had offered help.

Help is what you call out when you’re drowning.

Back in the car I retrieved the piece of paper from my wallet, with Richard’s mobile number and email address written in looping blue ink.

I dialled his number and left a message explaining that I needed replacement medicine. Augmentin. Because I’d made a mistake. I explained that I needed it as soon as possible and perhaps he, being parent to a kid who’d need antibiotics on a regular basis, might have a spare bottle in the back of a cupboard.

Then I drove towards Hampstead.

I got his text message. Beep, beep, at a set of traffic lights, red. I checked it. It was his full address followed by a cross: a kiss, a hug perhaps?

Green, go, and up, up into leafy Hampstead where strong sun had followed the day’s earlier rain and people had probably bunked off, escaping the dry air of the office onto the heath because how amazing did this day turn out to be? Wandering around, sweating through a film of sun cream, holding hands or playing football. Resting against grassy banks or standing outside pubs, dewy pints in hand. Nuts in glasses, chips in bowls. Nothing else to do for the evening but talk and laugh.

The last time I’d been in this neck of the woods was visiting my almost-friend Julia, who lived nearby in Gospel Oak. We’d met while we were both pregnant. Her baby was born a day after mine, we had the same make of buggy and a shared taste for romantic comedies. It should have been the start of something beautiful.

The last time I’d seen her, we’d met on the heath with our babies, and, for about fifteen minutes, it was all I had hoped for; all smiles and sunglasses and normal talk about breastfeeding and TV binges and bad sleep and I thought well this is going to be fine, I don’t need to tell her about Mia. Mia had been diagnosed a week earlier.

But then she said her baby had a cold and that the doctor had prescribed saline drops to put in his nose and wasn’t that wrong because you weren’t supposed to give a baby salt like, ever?

When I swallowed it was like there was a big round pebble stuck in my gullet. Looking back, I should have turned the pram around and gone home but I kept walking with Julia at my side, clinging to the day.

Soon enough Mia needed feeding and I had to stop the pram and get her medicine. Julia saw me prepare it all and although she didn’t comment, because we didn’t know each other well enough for that, I did think: perhaps I should tell her about Mia’s CF anyway? Maybe if I share it all with her she’ll reciprocate by telling me she’s in an abusive relationship, or that she’s dying: something terrible like that. We might have a motherhood of shared loves, shared heartaches, that kind of thing.

But when I told her all she said was: Gosh, I’m sorry and: Is there a cure?

And I said: No. There is no cure.

Then she fell silent and she had to look down at her shoes trimmed with scarlet, which only made me feel bad for her so I said something like, It’s not as bad as it sounds because medical science is very hopeful in the current climate. Which seemed to make her feel better.

We pushed our prams around the lake and I wondered about the fountains spraying bacteria into the air. What does a single bacterium weigh anyway? Do they float like pollen or sink like fish eggs?

Julia confided that her best friend’s middle child had recently been diagnosed with asthma.

Did that count?

No, Julia, it did not.

On the far side of the heath the roads were broad with gaps between each sprawling, wide-fronted residence: some gated, others hedged. I found his road easily. No house numbers, just names. His was The Cedars.

I parked on the road, wound down the window, breathed an early evening air that was still thick with summer warmth.

The driveway to his black-and-white house was big enough to have a garden with a shed in the front. The shed was painted pale grey and guarded a side path that, I imagined, led to something landscaped and lush – space enough for a dozen picnic blankets in the sun. A place for watering cans and wine bottles, teapots and teepees. I pictured a woman lying there, her face towards that sun, hair fanned like a halo. His hand stroking her forehead, or maybe holding her there.

Even as I stood at his doorstep, even as I rang the bell that trilled like an electric bird caught in a brass cage, I didn’t know what I would say. Richard had a wife, and a daughter I couldn’t be near; whose air I didn’t want to breathe. I tried to remember the rules for cross infection. Was it twelve feet between patients? And no shaking hands. A distance to leave between us.

What if she answered the door? What if she spoke and the air carrying her words wafted an infection that stuck to my clothes, perched in the strands of my hair? What if I carried it home to Mia’s skin as I bowed my head to feed her, to kiss her?

I stepped back abruptly and turned to walk away when I heard, ‘Cath.’

It wasn’t a question and there was no surprise in his voice. It was a statement, said like I’d been standing in front of him, all day.

When I turned around I saw that there was no surprise in his eyes, in the creases around them or the circles under them. His mouth was a gentle smile which suggested I was not a hindrance, not a hindrance at all in fact.

‘I’m so sorry to interrupt you,’ I said. ‘I left Mia’s medicines out in the heat. I forgot to put them back in the fridge and they won’t work for her now …’

‘I know, I listened to your message. I can help. It’s nice to see you.’ He smiled. ‘You look …’ I didn’t know how I looked. I hadn’t checked for a long time, not since before I’d got ready to go to the supermarket with Mum that afternoon. Suddenly I was conscious of what I might look like; the tangled hair, the mascara that had probably run, the eyes all puffed and glazed with tears.

But he smiled like he didn’t mind any of it. ‘You look like you’ve just woken up.’

For a moment we stood there – him inside his house, me on the doorstep – listening to the sounds of fun in the background. A music track with a sing-song voice, bass and drums, a party popper, laughter, the high pitch of a woman’s voice. And then he was stepping over the threshold, quickly, to me, and pulling the front door to, slowly and silently – as if he were trying not to wake a sleeping baby.

‘Dinner. I’d ask you in, but …’

‘No, God, no, thank you—’

‘Believe it or not it’s only the three of us in there. We try and make sure we eat together once a week, on a Sunday usually, because things get so busy. There’s school, treatments, work and the charity. Rachel, that’s my daughter’ – he said it like I’d forgotten, but I’d remembered – ‘she likes to get out the party poppers and streamers. And she loves her music. Sometimes we save time and she uses party blowers as part of her physio. Like now, can you hear? You have to blow through them really hard to get your lungs moving.’

‘Sounds like a lot of fun,’ I said, imagining the scarlet and emerald shine of coned party hats, a pot roast, wine, talk and laughter. And the muted and colourless dinners I’d had with Dave since we tried to make a family.

‘It is fun,’ he smiled. ‘But it’s also loud. I could do with a break. Come with me.’

‘Are you sure? I don’t want to take you away from your family. I need, I only need …’

But he took me by the arm and led me towards the entrance of the grey shed. I hesitated at the threshold, looked up at the trees – all willowed and gentle, their leaves like black paper cut-outs against the darkening blue of the sky – and felt him stand behind me, for a moment, as if he too felt the shape of another person between us.

‘Cath?’ He said my name again, this time like he’d read it from the engraving on a precious antique. Curious about its provenance. Amazed that its shape had survived time.

I stepped out of the twilight and into the darkness of the shed where I breathed damp wood and engine oil. He grabbed me abruptly, painfully, by the elbow before I even knew I was falling, over a coiled snake of hose on the floor.

‘I’m sorry, I … There was …’ My hand went to my hair.

He let go.

A standard lamp with a pale silken shade sprang to glowing life as he hit a switch behind me. ‘Sit down,’ he said, as if my clumsiness had never happened. He pushed a wooden tea box towards me, borders thick with rusted metal, brushed it down and motioned for me to sit. There was a rich Persian rung laid across the concrete floor, and candles that had guttered leaving stunted stalagmites of wax. Underneath the shelves of engine oil, spanners and metal tins of this and that, stood a wooden trestle table with TV, a closed laptop and at least two cups of greying tea.

‘Who lives here?’ I said.

‘No one! This is my shed and my island. It’s where I come to get some peace and quiet when Rachel has her friends round. Another rule for dealing with cystic fibrosis and children: always have somewhere you can escape to for a moment. You are that rarest of things: a guest here.’

His eyes were shy but his smile sparked – so bright and wide and inviting, it drew my gaze to his lips. I looked into his eyes then and away again, towards the glow of the lamp. Confused and delighted by how he made me feel as if he were reading something in me that I didn’t know how to.

‘The pharmacies are all closed,’ I said, too abruptly, wanting to move on from that moment with him and yet wanting to stay. ‘The hospital pharmacy is closed. I didn’t know where else to go. I need to give her antibiotics before tomorrow morning. She shouldn’t miss a dose. She’s got a cold, she’ll have got it from Dave or me. It’s not a cough, yet, but—’

‘It’s OK. Really it is. I’m always talking to the pharmacy for Rachel’s meds and I’ve built a stockpile big enough to get us through the most violent of atomic wars.’ He smiled and I smiled. ‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘I can give you anything you want. How much do you need?’ His voice was gentle and his gaze steady and I didn’t look away.

‘One bottle. I, you see …’

He was the one to look away then, leaving without further remark and returning only a few minutes later with a blue plastic bag.

I took it tentatively, hooking it with one finger. His brow rumpled in confusion at my hesitation.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s only that I’ve read so much about cross infection, perhaps too much, but anyway, you know, like the woman at the parents’ meeting said. I don’t want our children to pass anything between them.’ I looked at the silver-grey concrete beneath me – striated with veins of deep purple, like a steak on the turn – and the dark vermillion, Persian rug with its soft, deep pile. I should go, I thought. ‘We wouldn’t want to be unknowing vehicles. Isn’t that what she said?’

‘That’s unlikely. It’s not like we’re touching each other right now.’

I looked down before I said, ‘No.’

‘You’re safe,’ he said. ‘These antibiotics come from my store cupboard and Rachel is far more interested in boys than her medication stores. These will be a different concentration to the one you’re using for Mia. Do you know how to check dosage equivalents?’

‘I think so.’

‘Good. This stuff’s still in date. Small miracle really. Almost everything else she takes is a tablet now.’

‘Thank you, I do appreciate your help.’ There was a beat. ‘And how is Rachel at the moment?’

‘She’s great!’ His smile was so wide and his eyes shone. There was so much … I couldn’t put my finger on it … life in him. ‘Great, actually. We’re in a calm waters phase. She’s got the usual, but—’

‘What’s the usual?’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to ask, and I’m just checking, is all, because I’ve read that some bugs are more persistent on surfaces than others.’ I felt for the packet of antiseptic wipes in my jeans pocket because despite what he said I would use them to clean the boxes when I was back in the car. ‘I’m sorry, I hope what I’m saying isn’t offending you. It’s the bugs, not the people I worry about.’

‘I understand.’ His words were slow, like he was thinking too much between them. I hadn’t offended him but I’d done something else, I wasn’t sure what. ‘You’ll be all right, Cath. I promise it will get easier. At the start it’s impossible to see the wood for the trees. Everything is a threat to your child’s life. Every wood, every tree, as it were.’

‘Yes,’ I smiled.

‘Anyway, that lot should see Mia through,’ he said. ‘And this is for you.’

He put a foil-wrapped chocolate star in my palm, and smiled.

I laid the bag of medicines on the floor, where I could not see it and it could not see me. ‘Thank you,’ I said, unwrapping the chocolate and putting it in my mouth.

‘What happened to your hand?’ he said, and I held it up so we could both examine the trail of dry blood that disappeared under my sleeve. I looked on the floor, expecting to see the kitchen towel Dave had given me to soak up the blood where broken glass had cut the skin. But it was gone – discarded somewhere between here and home.

Richard didn’t wait for a reply and took my hand in his, holding tight where there were other cuts I hadn’t yet noticed. I flinched, because it stung and because …

It had been so easy to hold hands when Dave and I only had each other. We held hands all the time when we’d first met because we wanted to touch each other all the time, intoxicated by the newness of it all. Then, when the miscarriages happened and the IVF started and the miscarriages continued, we held hands all the time because we’d been scared we might lose each other if we ever let go. But I couldn’t remember a time, not since diagnosis, when we’d really wanted to hold each other’s hands again. Perhaps because we’d had to let go when our burden got harder and heavier, our grips taken up with what we held on our shoulders – wrist tendons stretching with its awkward shape, back aching with its terrific weight.

Perhaps it hadn’t been practical to hold hands as we once did.

Richard let go and leaned against the wall, like he was resting.

‘Sorry, I’m keeping you from your family dinner,’ I said. ‘You should get back.’

‘Please, it’s fine. Honestly? Rachel’s in a bit of a sulk. I’d booked tickets for us to see Tiger Love at the O2. Most teenagers wouldn’t be seen dead with their dads at a rock concert …’

He looked out into the distance somewhere far beyond my eyeline, like what he’d said had triggered a vision or a memory in him.

‘Then what happened?’ I said, bringing him back into the room.

He smiled brightly. ‘I was asked to drinks with some MPs and it’s a rare opportunity to collar them on the subject of those new medications I was telling you about. The Americans have found ways of fixing CF at the source instead of treating symptoms but the catch is that the treatments cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient, per year. This drinks is about communicating the human story to MPs so when it comes to lobbying our government they really understand the difference these drugs could make to people’s lives. If Rachel gets this new medication it will change her life … But try telling that to a teenager whose greatest love is rock music. You know?’

I nodded. ‘It sounds like you do so much to help. Rachel must be very proud.’

He smiled. ‘She’s proud most of the time. Between the moods and the worrying about boys and parties.’ He adjusted the carpet at the door with his foot. ‘I know her. I know why she’s upset. It’s for the same reason I’m upset. Those concerts are when we get to spend our best time together. To gossip without her mum being there. She had a crap winter and the spring was, well … Fun times together are important.’

‘Hard for everyone, trying to meet all those needs.’

‘It’s OK, her band will be back in town soon. Meantime I’ll try and get her excited about learning to ski with me this winter.’

‘Sounds fun.’ I brushed hair away from my eyes. ‘I thought the newborn years were hard.’

‘They are. It’s all hard! You must be having a tough time: all that sleep deprivation alongside dealing with CF.’

We smiled at each other as if we had silently agreed on something. A language, perhaps.

‘All that hard work and anxiety are what make vices all the more important.’ He stood up and slid a cigarette box out from behind a well-thumbed book on the shelf. ‘Smoking. My one and only vice and, therefore, extremely important to me. No one knows. Or at least, if they do, they’re kind enough not to say anything.’

He held out the packet.

I hadn’t smoked for over ten years. Dave and I used to smoke incessantly, with coffee and pints and wine, in parks and pubs and restaurants. It seemed to go hand in hand with talking about films and our friends and our weekend plans.

And now, with Mia’s lungs so compromised, the idea of destroying my own repulsed me. ‘No. Thanks. That’s fine. I’m fine.’

‘Suit yourself.’

Then there was nothing but the spark of a lighter, a party popper in the background and his deep inhalation. I felt far from the sound of plastic cracking under my heels and from Dave’s blaming, appalled cries. Far from the floorboards and the noise of traffic and the pressure in my head.

‘I didn’t leave Mia’s medicines out in the sun,’ I said. ‘I poured them down the sink.’

He looked up, and moved his cigarette to the side like it had been blocking his view.

‘I’d seen my mum,’ I said. ‘And I missed my dad. And so I don’t know why, I broke the syringes and I threw the medicines down the sink. I didn’t want CF in my house any more.’

Richard nodded slowly, looking at me with lidded eyes, squinting against the smoke and my confession.

‘After Rachel was diagnosed,’ he said, ‘a whole seven years and twelve lung infections later, I didn’t break medicine bottles but I did do some damage to the lives of people I’d just met. I made huge redundancies in the name of re-shaping my company and increasing profit. My career and business took off but I could only do what I did because the thought of losing Rachel early knocked me sideways. That pain, that imagining, it blunted my feelings towards everything but my family. But we got through it and here we are now,’ he smiled. ‘Having weekly parties. We manage it. We get by. We more than get by.’

His fingers tremored where they bent round the cigarette. He made me want to join him.

I reached out my hand instinctively towards his words. ‘I should go,’ I said suddenly, letting it fall by my side.

‘How are you getting on with that speech?’ he said brightly, stubbing out the cigarette and cradling his hand, twisting the ring on his finger, round and round.

I looked away quickly. ‘I’m not. It’s not my thing,’ I said to the door.

‘I think you should do it. And going to the conference might dilute some of the despair. There’s no greater high than hearing a medical professional announce he’s months away from a cure.’ I smiled. ‘And it’s all quite fun, despite the subject matter.’

I motioned to the cigarette packet. ‘Can I? I won’t smoke it. I just want to be close to the smell.’

He opened the packet. ‘Here, take two. Then they won’t be lonely.’ He caught my eye and I caught my breath.

I smiled. ‘Thank you. For everything. For your help.’

‘Any time.’

When I got back in the car, I wound down the window and used the car’s lighter to singe the edge of one of the cigarettes he had given me. The smell of it was everything I knew it would be and yet not enough, so I put the cigarette to my lips and inhaled deeply. Smoke hit the back of my throat, making me cough and splutter. It was all I needed, to be reminded of how nauseating the rush was after such a long time, how it was never as good as I imagined. I threw the cigarette out on to the road. It rolled into the gutter and my face flushed red at the thought of him seeing this. As if I might be someone who was surprising to him. A woman who lay on his lawn and looked up to the sun – burning her face today for a tan tomorrow.

I stowed the remaining cigarette in an empty crisp packet, pushed it to the back of the glove compartment and drove home.