So, having Joe at my side, trying to make conversation with every nurse, every midwife – in fact, everyone that we passed as we walked down seemingly endless peach-painted corridors – was a godsend.
I could tell he was trying to distract me in the waiting room, too, trying to keep things light. We tried to think of other people we’d heard of, also with names perfect (or just ridiculous) for their profession. As well as Dr Love, Joe told me that, when he used to live in Preston with the girlfriend (I tried always to keep a neutral expression when he talked about the two years he’d lived with Kate), there had been a policeman called PC Robin Banks. I then remembered a dermatologist Niamh had once seen called Dr Creamer, and Joe told me how he once temped for a company that exported handbags from the Far East, and had to deal with a Mr Baggoyshyt, which made me snort out loud in the waiting room.
‘It’s called nominative determinism,’ said Joe.
‘What is?’
‘When your name determines your job.’
‘Sawyer, you are an endless stream of useless trivia.’
‘Robyn King?’
Then, Dr Love opened the door, and I felt guilty for laughing and being happy. Of course, we were plunged immediately into discussions I didn’t want to have. I wanted to be back in the waiting room, talking about silly names.
‘Well, the good news …’ Dr Love began. He had a preposterously jolly face and I wondered what he looked like when it was bad news – did he still smile like that? ‘… is that baby is doing very nicely indeed. The scans look great, the measurements are fine, and how is Mum?’
For a second, I wondered who he meant, then clocked.
‘Oh, fine,’ I said. I was turning that word around in my head – ‘
Mum
’ – trying it out for size. ‘Great. Just … what’s the bad news?’
Joe was looking at me, shaking his head.
‘There is no bad news,’ said Dr Love, smiling, looking at me, then Joe, for some sort of clue of what I was talking about. ‘Why should there be bad news?’
‘Um, you said there was good news?’
He laughed. ‘I did, so I did.’
‘She likes to look on the bright side,’ said Joe, sarcastically.
‘Well,’ said Dr Love, with a little chuckle, ‘there really is nothing you should be worrying about. Everything is utterly as it should be so far.’
I swallowed.
So far.
‘Now, Robyn, I have your notes here,’ Dr Love continued, turning back the front page, and I caught a glimpse of the Sands teardrop sticker. It shows a womb, in the shape of an eye, with a baby inside, and a teardrop coming out of it. I’d found out about it when I’d been having one of my sessions torturing myself with research on the Internet – not that I would
ever
tell Joe about those – and knew that it was often added to notes of women who had previously lost a baby, to prevent any hiccups such as the one we’d had with the sonographer. Clearly, it had since been added to mine. ‘So,’ said Dr Love, ‘perhaps you could tell me what happened with your first pregnancy, in your own words, and we can go from there?’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You should know that Joe here was also the father of that baby, our daughter, Lily.’
Dr Love raised his eyebrows, just a fraction. It was the first time I’d seen him look anything but cool and composed.
I relayed the whole story. It was the first time I had done so in front of Joe, and it wasn’t as awful as I’d worried it would be. In fact, it was cathartic, comforting in some odd way, to reduce it all to medical facts. I told Dr Love how everything had been as normal – for as much as it’s normal to be sixteen and pregnant – until I’d got to twenty-seven weeks, when I’d had terrible stomach pains and started bleeding heavily. It had been in the middle of General Studies, and there’d been a huge drama involving an ambulance and pupils crying. I’d been too traumatized to shed even a tear; too convinced this was somehow my fault, that I’d caused this to happen, that I was tainted – clearly. I didn’t tell Dr Love that bit, though, I just told him how we’d been told it was unlucky, one of those things, and that the placenta had basically come away.
I managed not to cry, the whole way through. Joe was staring at me when I’d finished, his eyes glistening, like
he
might cry.
‘Often with stillbirths …’ said Dr Love, gently, when I’d finished.
Often? Did they happen often?
‘… there is no known cause, and that is one of the hardest things for the parents but, yes, what you had is what’s known as a placenta abruption, which as I’m sure you’re aware means there was a bleed behind the placenta, which meant the placenta came away. More common than you’d think, but still rare, relatively and, yes, hugely unlucky.’
‘How rare?’ I said.
I wanted statistics, even though I already had statistics, because I’d looked them up on Google, but I wanted them from the horse’s mouth, from Dr Love.
‘It’s
very
unlikely.’
Joe took my hand. ‘I think, if possible, Robyn needs to know facts, statistics,’ he said. ‘Even though I don’t particularly think that is helpful myself.’
Dr Love nodded. ‘Mmm, probably best not to scare yourselves unnecessarily.’ (I wondered what scaring yourself necessarily consisted of.) ‘But, stats-wise, about one in a thousand women will have a stillbirth.’
I was picturing a thousand women in my head – what would a thousand people look like? It still seemed quite common. It was quite common. ‘But a lot fewer than that will have it happen twice,’ he added. ‘In fact, in my twenty-seven years of practice, I’ve never met a woman who it has happened to twice.’
‘Hear that?’ said Joe, squeezing my hand. I was picking at my bottom lip.
‘That’s not to say it wouldn’t,’ said Dr Love.
‘He has to say that to cover his back, don’t you, Doctor?’ said Joe.
Dr Love crossed his legs, folded his arms and smiled in a noncommittal fashion.
‘The most important thing
I
think,’ he said, ‘is not speculating on what might happen, but looking at the situation now, which is that you are in very good health, the baby is in very good health and we’ve no need to worry.’
With all due respect, and as nice as he was, I could tell that Dr Love had never held his dead baby in his arms.
‘One stat perhaps it
is
important to remember,’ he added, ‘is that a third of women will experience some bleeding during pregnancy and, if you do, you should come straight to the Day Assessment Unit, just to alleviate any worry.’
Even though I
was
worrying, all the time.
Joe was all for just getting it out as soon as possible and I can’t say I disagreed with him. ‘And what if you delivered the baby early?’ he said. ‘What chance of survival would the baby have if we just took it out sooner?’ For some reason, I found Joe’s complete lack of medical terminology very endearing.
‘A baby born at twenty-six weeks has around an eighty-per-cent chance of survival,’ he said. ‘At twenty-eight weeks, it goes up to ninety to ninety-five, and at thirty weeks plus, we expect pretty much the same survival rate as full-term.’
Joe grinned at me. I had to admit, this was far better than I had thought.
‘See, you’re seventeen weeks or thereabouts now, so you only need to go another twelve weeks,’ he said, ‘to be basically out of the woods.’
You’re so optimistic
, I was thinking.
How can you be so optimistic?
‘That’s a week per step of the AA plan.’
Dr Love looked at me, then Joe. Joe and I looked at one another.
‘Sorry, that’s our, er, personal joke. I didn’t mean AA as in Alcoholics Anonymous …’ said Joe. ‘It’s basically … AA stands for ‘Alternative Antenatal’. It’s this list Robyn and I drew up, stuff for us to concentrate on other than, you know, what could happen.’
Dr Love was nodding. You could tell he was confused but didn’t take it any further.
I changed the subject. ‘What I want to know is, how much can stress be a contributing factor?’ I’d thought about sending Joe out of the room and having a private conversation with Dr Love about this, but then, I figured, Joe would worry more if I did that, he’d think there was something I wasn’t telling him. Better to double-bluff him, as it were.
‘There are no statistics to say that stress has any bearing on stillbirth,’ said Dr Love, ‘but I do think it’s down to attitude. While many women see having a child as a very natural part of life, some see it as an inherent danger. And there is research to say that you and the baby have an easier time in labour and childbirth if you
don’t
see it as an inherent danger … If you let nature take its course. If you relax.’
He clocked the look on my face. ‘Although, obviously, in your situation, that is easier said than done.’
I thought for one mad second about confessing to not being able to get on the Tube and to the panic attacks. (That week, I’d had one in Tesco’s, where I’d gone to get some milk, but had made the mistake of going down the nappy aisle. It had triggered a memory of the nappies we had piled high in my bedroom for weeks when I was pregnant with Lily. When we’d come home with no baby, I’d made Joe give them to charity immediately, because I couldn’t bear to look at them.) But, thankfully, just as I opened my mouth to speak, Dr Love said, ‘Most importantly, try and relax and enjoy this pregnancy. You deserve to. You’ve been through enough.’
We went to Waterlow Park again after the meeting. It felt even more exciting than the last time we were here because, back then, after the first scan, the baby had felt more like a dream, an idea. Now, I was seventeen weeks and showing (only a little, but there was definitely a comforting protrusion when I stood to the side). This was really happening.
We stood on the bridge of the lake and watched the ducks.
‘I’m so proud of you,’ said Joe.
‘And I’m proud of you,’ I said. ‘Of how positive you’re being, especially considering what else you’re going through at the moment.’ Joe was leaning on the bridge, waving at the ducks as they drifted beneath us. He was actually trying to strike up a friendship with a duck. ‘How are
you
, Joe?’ I said.
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you,’ I repeated. ‘I feel like, in all the drama of the baby, the fact you’ve just lost your mum has got lost. I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah, taking all the limelight. Can’t bear not to be the centre of attention for two minutes, so has to go and have a baby,’ he said, then adding quickly, ‘Sorry,’ when he saw I wasn’t laughing, that I was actually trying to have a serious conversation. ‘But I don’t need to tell you how I am, do I? Because you know. You understand what it feels like.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I guess I do, but then everyone’s different.’
There was a pause.
‘It still feels unreal, I suppose,’ he said, eventually. ‘These things happen to other people, don’t they? But it’s happened to my mum. Our mum.’
‘How
are
your brothers?’
‘That’s the thing, I don’t really know. We’re usually close – I thought we were close – and yet we’ve hardly talked about it. I think it’s too painful, like we can barely cope with our own grief, let alone one another’s. So now, when we talk on the phone, we chat about the frigging football scores. I’ve never talked about football with my brothers, ever, in my life! And the other day, when we all called round one another because it was Mum’s birthday, I ended up having a ten-minute conversation with Rory about verrucas – about whether I’d ever had a verruca frozen off and did it hurt? I mean, nuts!’
I was laughing. ‘I think it’s normal,’ I said. ‘Just because this massive thing has happened, doesn’t mean life is any less banal, which I found comforting in an odd way. I remember when Mum’s ashes were delivered to our door by the guy from the crematorium and Leah’s exercise bike from Argos Online turned up at the same time. There was this kerfuffle at the door. For a second, I don’t think Dad knew who to talk to first.’
‘I miss her like hell, though,’ Joe said, when we’d stopped laughing. ‘It’s like a physical pain, grief, isn’t it? Right there.’ He put a hand to his heart. ‘I know what people mean now when they say, “I felt like I’d been stabbed in the chest.”’
‘Well, just remember, the reason you hurt so much is because you loved her so much.’
He nodded. ‘That’s a lovely thing to say,’ he said. ‘Yes. Such a comforting thing to remember.’
‘Yeah, she’s your mum and you love her. Nobody can take that away from you.’ I said. I was thinking about Grace, too, and Cec. I was thinking of those bonds that can never be broken, not ever.
Joe sighed and lifted his face to the sun. Then he put his hand on mine. ‘See,’ he said. ‘We can still talk.’
Dear Lily
I’m thinking about you so much today. I miss your dad. I even miss Kilterdale. I miss what we never got to have.
I’m having fun at uni and I’ve got some great friends but, some days, I can’t help thinking about how life might have been: about being your mum, and us being a family.
Today, you’d be three. (That’s if you’d been born on your due date, of course, which is unlikely, but I find it helps to have a date I can remember you by. A positive date.) Maybe we’d be going to feed the ducks, or having a little party. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I like to imagine what you’d be like and where we’d live and what our family would be like: I imagine we’d live in Lancaster, in a Georgian townhouse, and we’d run a café, or your dad would be a teacher and I’d run a bookshop and look after you. You’d have my thick hair and your dad’s beautiful hazel eyes. I know I’m lucky to be at university with all the opportunities it offers, but sometimes I wonder if I’d have preferred that life. Sometimes all the opportunities confuse me. Take boys: I’ve met some lovely guys here, but none that come close to Joe, which, to be honest, has been a shock. Everyone said: ‘You wait till you get to university, you’ll have so much choice!’ But what if you choose right first time? What if you found The One but just too early?
Most of the time I don’t think about what happened too much, because it’s too painful but, today, the worst thing is not having anyone to talk about you with – because it’s like you never existed. But I want to talk about you sometimes because you are still my baby. That’s why I write to you and I always will.