He still made me smile, even with these phone calls. I was only too happy to take them, because it only seemed like yesterday when I was calling him, distraught, from some car park or shop or pub where I’d been suddenly struck down with grief.
Finding out I was pregnant, however, had changed everything because, suddenly, I was reminded of everything. It felt like my life was on repeat and so I’d cut him off and I felt terrible about it but I just didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t believe this was happening. Some things are not supposed to happen once, let alone twice. Perhaps, if I ignored it, it would all go away.
Fat chance with the number of pregnant women everywhere. London seemed suddenly teeming with them. Every other woman on the high street, the bus, in Tesco Metro, was Mr Greedy-shaped: fat and happy. I, more than anyone, knew that how people’s lives appeared on the outside was rarely what was really going on inside but, even so, I couldn’t help but feel cheated, that what was supposed to be a joyful event – finding out you’re pregnant – was for me the worst thing imaginable. Perhaps even worse because it wasn’t that I didn’t want a baby – I wanted nothing more than to be someone’s mum one day, but because I couldn’t have a baby like this. I couldn’t have a baby with Joe. Of all the people in the world, it couldn’t be Joe.
It had been precisely seventeen days since I’d found out I was pregnant and, in that time, the panic attacks had got steadily worse, to the point where they were happening almost daily. I’ve never been in any doubt that’s what they are, of course, these funny turns I’ve been having. I’ve seen enough people in my line of work hyperventilate and shake like a pile of crockery in an earthquake to work that out. What I didn’t know was that you don’t need to be in a panic-inducing situation to have one. I’ve had them at home, in the supermarket. I had one watching telly the other evening, so, like I say, not exactly threatening (although some people may say that watching Gordon Ramsay’s
Kitchen Nightmares
counts as very threatening). The other thing I didn’t know was that, like the pain of childbirth, until you’ve experienced a panic attack yourself, you’ll never be able to convey how real the belief is that you are certainly going to die.
On the upside, I felt I now had more insight into my clients’ conditions. One of the symptoms of schizophrenia, for example, being the ‘rigid upholding of false beliefs’, because when I had the first few ones, the belief I was going to die felt as real as the change from day to night. Now I knew what they were, I was less scared, but the frequency of them was becoming alarming. My biggest worry was that they were starting to happen when I was with clients. I was able to hide them now, but how long could I keep that up?
It was 21 May, only the start of summer, and yet we’d already had one heat wave in London and were now on the cusp of another. No doubt June and July would be a washout. Everything felt bleached in this bright, white light: workers lunched on homemade salad boxes in any patch of green they could find, straps down, trousers rolled up, going back to the office smelling of Ambre Solaire. I had a chocker morning that day: an eventful trip to Peckham to buy one of my patients, Yolanda, some shoes (Yolanda thinks she’s Beyoncé at the moment, so getting her to consider anything but Perspex hooker platforms was a challenge). Then I visited Levi. We went for a walk in Ruskin Park. It was so peaceful up there and we sat on a bench and talked for ages.
The sky was blue but smudged with clouds, which, for some reason, brought to mind my childhood bedroom – the one I’d shared with Leah, when we were little, before Leah left home for uni and Mum was diagnosed. There’d been a fashion around about that time for ‘sponge effect’ walls, and we’d had our room done like that – pale blue walls with pale pink splodges. Mum had spent two days doing it, black leggings and a chambray shirt on; Paul Weller turned up. ‘It’s like the sunset over the Bay, girls!’ she’d said when she’d finished her handiwork. (Possibly, if you really, really squinted!) ‘Or a dawn sky, with those pink clouds.’
Leah and I had fought like cat and dog in the daytime – two totally different personalities, two different sets of friends. And, yet, there’d been this sisterly bond that came out in the privacy of our own room, almost as if, away from the public gaze, we’d allowed ourselves to love one another.
Mum never knew it, but sometimes we’d set our alarms so we could watch that dawn sky, the real one, not the one on the walls; watch the sun rise, huge and red, over Kilterdale Bay from the Velux window in our bedroom. It would be then – the back garden in a shroud of sea mist, us still in our nighties – that we’d have our best times, Leah and I; our special times, when we’d talk about how we imagined our lives to turn out: I wanted to be a midwife like Mum. I loved babies and was still dining out on the story of my birth, in the back of a Land Rover. Leah wanted to be an ‘entrepreneur’ – ‘like Melanie Griffith in
Working Girl
’, she’d once told me, in all seriousness. (Leah said a lot of things that made us laugh that weren’t meant to.) ‘And I’m never having kids,’ she’d said. ‘Gross! They ruin your figure and your career.’
I was the maternal one in the family, everyone said, the one who would provide our parents with oodles of grandchildren.
The memory retreated and I was back with Levi, sitting on the bench in Ruskin Park. He had his long, fit legs stretched out in front of him, his hands clasped on his lap, looking up at the sky.
‘So, how you doing?’ I said. I’d thought it was best to get to the nitty-gritty whilst he looked so relaxed. ‘What’s going on in that head that I should know about, Levi? Are you having suicidal thoughts at the moment?’ Mine must be one of the few jobs where that is a perfectly normal, necessary question.
He swallowed. I watched the muscles in his throat move.
‘I think about dyin’, man,’ he said. ‘I think about it all the time.’
The sun was casting a beam across his flawless mocha skin. He looked so alive for someone who thought about death so much.
‘And have you got plans?’ I said, and he laughed; this long, deep, oddly joyful laugh.
‘I always got plans, innit?’ he said, turning to look at me. ‘I always got plans, Miss Robyn, you know dat.’
I looked at the sky, too. ‘Yeah, I know,’ I said.
Neither of us said anything for a while, then, as if he’d read my mind, Levi said, ‘I ain’t gonna do it, though. I know deep down, if I hold on, it will get better and I’ve decided, anyway, I c’dn’t do it to my mum.’
‘Yep, she’d be devastated, Levi,’ I said, trying to hide the excitement in my voice. This was progress; he’d never spoken like this before. ‘And we’re going to help you. I’m going to try my best to help you. You won’t feel so bad forever.’
He smiled. ‘Yeah, also, I’m her boy, innit?’ he said. ‘Her son. The only person she got.’
I walked back to the office, thinking that the way Levi felt about doing himself in was, in many ways, the way I felt about having a termination: ‘Suicidal ideation’, that’s the psychiatric term for it. He’d never do it, but he thought
about it a lot, fantasized about the escape route … ‘
I don’t wanna die, I just want out
,’
he’d say to me. And, right now, I could relate to that.
I went in to see Jezza on my return to the office, which proved to be a mistake. The egg-sandwich/TCP fusion proved too much for my delicate, hormonal stomach (the sickness had started with a vengeance, almost immediately), and I’d only just made it to the Ladies’ in time and was leaning on the basins outside, sipping somewhat pathetically on a bottle of water, when Kaye burst through the door, so desperate for the loo that she was already undoing her flies.
There was a torrent, as she told me from the toilet cubicle how Patrick the locum wasn’t pulling his weight. ‘I swear to God, he’s so lazy, he’d have a catheter fitted to spare him the trouble of going to loo, if he could,’ she said. It was only as she was washing her hands that she clocked my face in the mirror.
‘My God, you look like shit. Are you all right?’
I just came straight out with it: ‘Oh, God, Kaye, I’m pregnant.’ What was the point of doing anything else? It felt like a valve had been unscrewed in my chest. I immediately felt so much better just for telling someone. ‘It’s Joe’s,’ I added. Just in case there was any confusion on that front.
She didn’t move or say anything for what felt like forever. Then, she slapped both hands to her cheeks and made a squealing sound of delight that was just so girly and un-Kaye, it was even more touching. And it struck me: Oh, my God. This is how I’m supposed to react. This is how it’s meant to feel. It must have been written all over my face because, immediately, hers dropped. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, you’re not pleased, are you?’
She tried for a while, bless her. ‘Look, I know it’s a shock, a huge,
huge
head-fuck, Robyn, but you’re gonna be a mum!’ And it was the next bit that really made me cry because it reminded me exactly of my own mother’s words to me, the words she’d written to me in the letter a week before she died, a letter I’d read over and over again since I’d found out I was pregnant. It comforted me to read her words: ‘You were born to be a mum. You’re already one to all of us here. You’re gonna be just the best mummy.’
The tears started spilling then, which was annoying because I didn’t want Kaye to worry about me (which being Kaye, she would; I purposefully hadn’t mentioned the panic attacks and did not intend to).
‘I-I don’t know …’ I started. ‘I don’t know yet if …’
I could see what she was thinking: ‘You’re thirty-two, you’re clearly into Joe. It’s not like he’s some stranger. Worse things happen to people.’
‘I rang Marie Stopes,’ I said eventually.
Kaye was searching my eyes, frowning at me.
‘Really? That bad?’ she said, and I nodded.
‘Oh, Kingy,’ she said, bringing me into a Kaye-style embrace, almost crushing me with her kick-boxing-toned arms. ‘Surely not. I’m sure once you’ve spoken to Joe, it will seem so much better. So much easier?’
I looked up at her. ‘It’s not that simple, Kaye. I wish it was, but it’s not.’
And when I said that to Kaye, I felt like I was saying that to my mum, too, kind of letting her down, too. All this life she’d not been part of, it was becoming bigger than the part she’d been in.
It is summer; I know that, because in front of us is a huge shimmering sun, like a gong, and riding into the centre of it is my mother, in her terry-towelling playsuit. The playsuit is dusky pink and strapless – the next best thing to naked – and Lil’s been sporting it since the first rays of April, lost in the gardening, nattering over the fence, so all her freckles have joined up and she’s as brown as a berry.
We are cycling down a sea front, I know that much. There are blue railings that curve, like Morecambe prom, and a steep grass verge to our right, like the prom at Grange. But this is not Morecambe or Grange prom, it is a promenade only we know about; one we’ve just discovered, untouched but for our bicycle tyres. We sneaked between two tall buildings, down a cool, dark alleyway, and there it was, in all its blue, quivering glory.
We stood back and marvelled, Mum and I, at the pulsating sun, the shimmering sea, and the smooth, red tarmac of our promenade, which curves and hugs the bay and leads … we don’t know where, ‘But that’s the fun of it, Robyn!’ says my mother.
And I can see her now in front of me, those fierce little legs pedalling like nobody’s business, her big straw sunhat like a smaller sun, against the real one. I am wearing a green-and-white sundress, nipped in at the waist and tied at the shoulders. I’m sure Mum made it for me when I was little – seven, maybe eight – but the legs that pedal beneath it are fully grown and athletic, tanned; and I am very pleased about this. I can’t take my eyes off my amazing legs!
We’ve got quite a speed up now. I tip my head back and fill my lungs with the warm, salty air. I’m admiring my mum’s posture from behind: such a straight, toned back, she has – I can make out individual muscles. Then the square shoulders, and her thick auburn hair, which flows from her hat like flames. Every now and again, she turns and looks to check I’m still with her. She’s wearing huge, white-framed sunglasses and lipstick. She looks like a film star.
We ride on; the grass to our right is getting hillier and craggier now. If I follow the line of the land, up the hill, I see there’s a column-shaped monument at the top, glinting in the sun, and I know, instinctively, that this is where we’re heading. We’re going to climb that hill, to our monument, and admire our newly discovered land from up high, where it will be laid out like a patchwork quilt. Mum veers off the promenade onto the craggy foot of the hill, and we have to stand up from our seats to heave our bikes up. When we get to the top, our thigh muscles burning, we see how the road dips and rises; a valley, a hill, a valley, and then on top of the final hill, our monument, winking at us. Mum turns and smiles at me. ‘I’ll race you,’ she says. And then we’re off, feet off the pedals, over the crags and the grassy knolls, squealing, our hearts in our mouths.
‘Hi, it’s me, Joe.’
I woke up, violently and gasping, as if from the dead, just as the shrill beeps stopped and the answerphone kicked in.
‘I’m just checking you’re not dead in a ditch, because I’ve left a few messages on your mobile and I haven’t heard anything …’
I sat up. It took me a bit for the dream to subside and reality to kick in, to realize who it was, and everything else. Every day for the past three weeks or so, it’s been like this when I’ve woken up. Like finding out all over again.
‘… Anyway, I’m just checking on arrangements for today …’
Today? What day was it? I had to glance at my radio alarm to check: Sunday, 26. Shit! I’d never said anything concrete but he assumed it was on.
‘Are we still meeting? Are you taking me somewhere posh? Are we doing booze or cultural, because this will inform my outfit choice. Also, actually, I have a request – somewhere I’d really like to go.’
I smiled. I’d forgotten how much Joe could
talk
.