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She reached for her phone on the bedside table and gasped when she saw the time. Seven-thirty! No wonder her breasts felt like they were going to explode. Noah had gone for nearly eight hours without a feed. He must be absolutely exhausted himself to have slept for so long. However awful his colic was for her, it was worse for him, because he had no idea why he was in pain.
She struggled out of bed, grabbing her dressing gown and jabbing her arms into it as she stumbled across the room. Jacob had slept longer than usual, too, probably because of all the Calpol she’d given him yesterday to bring down his temperature. She needed to get the kids all up and moving; Lucas would be home any minute. She wanted to get her head together before she talked to him.
She heard the crunch of tyres on gravel and peered out of the bedroom window. Lucas was already pulling into the driveway. Her stomach churned with nerves. She ached to nurse Noah, but she needed to talk to Lucas more. She had to confront him and get it over and done with. She cracked the door of the nursery to check on the baby. He didn’t stir, so she carefully shut the door again and turned towards the stairs.
Afterwards, she could never say what made her stop and go back. Some sixth sense, perhaps; a mother’s intuition. Or maybe she’d known the moment she’d seen her son’s arm, but her mind, fighting to protect her for just a few more seconds, had refused to process it.
As soon as she re-opened the door, she knew something was very wrong.
Lydia (#ulink_3753a743-e64a-564e-a302-ae5c2952f120)
She’s never been so happy in her life. She was frightened at first when Mae abandoned her with strangers, because even though she’s scared of Mae, at least she knows her, she knows where she is.
But then the lady with the yellow hair came out from behind her desk and talked to the crying lady in the blue hat and the old man with the shiny bald head for a long time, and then the crying lady stopped crying and came over and crouched down beside her and said, my name is Jean and this is my husband Ernie and what’s your name? She didn’t want the lady to be cross with her because she couldn’t remember her own name, so she said Mae, because it was the only name she could think of. And then the not-crying-now lady said, how would you like to come home with me, just till everything gets sorted out? And so she did.
She’s been here for weeks and she still can’t believe how big their house is. There is an entire room with a table and chairs just for eating in and another room with a big green bath for washing yourself. There was a bath at Mae’s house, but no one ever used it for washing themselves. Once, one of Mae’s special friends stayed with them for a while and he kept his two pet ducks in it. When he left in the middle of the night without saying goodbye, Mae was so angry she wrung their necks with her bare hands.
Jean lets her have a bath every day. She has a bed, too: a real bed, not just a mattress on the floor, and it has pink sheets on it. She didn’t know what the sheets were to begin with. Clothes for a bed! It seemed such a funny idea. The first night she slept on the floor, so as not to get them dirty or wrinkled. But when Jean came in the next morning, she laughed and said it was OK if she messed the sheets up, that’s what they were for. Then Jean jumped on the bed with her shoes on, laughing until she climbed on the bed herself and jumped up and down, too.
And there is food, so much food! It seems it’s always time for one meal or another. Slow down, Jean laughs, as she crams toast into her mouth at breakfast and shoves more in her pockets for later. You’ll make yourself sick. She does, too, her belly isn’t used to feeling this full. It takes her a few days to realise that the gnawing pangs in her tummy have gone. She still fills her pockets with scraps when she leaves the table, she can’t help it, but Jean doesn’t seem to mind. You poor love, she says. We’ll soon fatten you up.
Jean takes her shopping and buys her new dresses as clean and fresh-smelling as the sheets and her very own shoes that don’t pinch or slop around on her small feet. Jean shows her how to wash her hair with shampoo and how to braid it neatly into two plaits, and she never hits her, not ever, not even when she has an accident because she’s too shy to say she needs to pee and has forgotten how to find the bathroom in this huge house. Jean doesn’t even shout. Jean strokes her hair and hugs her and says it doesn’t matter, it was an accident, we’ll fix it in a jiffy, don’t you worry.
She doesn’t ask how long she’s going to stay here. She doesn’t miss Mae at all, which proves just what a wicked little girl she really is. But she doesn’t want to think about Mae. She’s in the middle of such a lovely dream and she doesn’t ever want to wake up. Sometimes, she hopes she’s dead so she won’t have to.
But then one day Jean answers the telephone and when she comes off she’s crying again. Ernie asks her what’s the matter and Jean collapses in his arms, I’m not going to let them take her, she says. What do they know, these social workers, I’m not giving her back to that wicked woman, over my dead body.
But Jean won’t be able to stop Mae. No one can ever stop Mae when she’s made her mind up about something.
Jean does her best, she writes letters to important people and she begs and pleads, but it’s no good. The night before Jean has to take her back, she cooks her favourite macaroni and cheese followed by chocolate ice cream. Jean brushes and plaits her hair and reads her a story and tucks her into her nice clean warm bed with the pink sheets for the last time and her face gets that strange look people have when they’re trying really hard not to cry. Jean kisses her cheek, I’ll never stop fighting, I’ll make them listen, I’ll come back and get you, just you wait and see. But she knows deep down it’ll never happen. Davy promised he’d come back for her, too, but he never did.
Mae is waiting for them at the shop where she left her, looking so different in a normal mummy dress instead of the low tops and short skirts she normally wears that she almost doesn’t recognise her. Mae bursts into noisy tears and throws her arms around her in a suffocating hug, my baby oh my baby thank goodness you’re all right!
She doesn’t want to let go of Jean’s hand, but Mae is holding on to her so tight she can’t breathe, pulling her away. You’ve been very kind, looking after her while I was under the weather, she says, but I’m right as rain now, few pills, bit of rest, just what the doctor ordered. Mae’s fingernails dig into her shoulder, but her mother’s bright smile doesn’t slip.
She wants to beg Jean not to let her go, she wants to run right out of the shop and keep on running as far away from Mae as she can get. Her heart is beating loudly in her ears and she feels hot and shaky and sick in her tummy. Her little hands clench into fists by her sides. She wants to hit something, she wants to hurt someone as much as she is hurting, and she realises, in a kind of dazed surprise, that this is what angry feels like.
She doesn’t know why Mae even wants her back. Mae says she’s never been no good, nothing but trouble since the day she was born. Should have got rid of you when I had the chance. But maybe Mae has missed her after all, she thinks hopefully. Maybe things are going to be different now.
It’s only when Mae is marching her back down the high street, towards the bus stop, the grip on her shoulder so tight she knows she’ll have bruises tomorrow, and leans into her and says, you think I wanted you back, you little cow, they was going to take the house off of me with you and Davy both gone, now you’re going to fucking well earn your keep, that she understands Mae hasn’t missed her at all, and if she thought it was bad before, it’s going to be a hundred times worse now.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_054fdcbc-bbdd-5d07-ad93-3c03b891030d)
Saturday 8.30 a.m. (#ulink_054fdcbc-bbdd-5d07-ad93-3c03b891030d)
Fear and loss seeped like moisture from the room’s neat beige walls. This was where they brought you when there was nothing more they could do. Maddie stared at a cork board covered with leaflets. What To Do After Someone Dies. Living With Grief. After Suicide: A Guide For Survivors. Coping With A Terminal Diagnosis. Palliative Care: What You Need to Know.
She turned away, her stomach churning. So much pain and misery in the world. How had she ever thought she’d be lucky enough to escape?
She felt strangely disconnected from everything, as if she was moving underwater, or trapped behind a thick glass wall. She knew her baby was dead. She could still feel his chilling weight in her arms, and yet she couldn’t take it in. The reality was so monstrous, her mind refused to accept it.
She’d known Noah was gone the second she’d seen his arm dangling through the bars of his cot, his body strangely still. If she lived to be a hundred, she would never forget the thousand years it’d taken her to rush to his cot and pull the blanket away from his cheek. His face had been waxy and deathly pale, his lips a deep mottled blue. When she’d touched his cheek, he’d been cold.
She had no memory of rushing to the window and screaming down at Lucas, though she supposed she must have done. Her throat was still raw. She didn’t remember scooping her baby out of his cot, either, but she would remember forever the cold, dead weight of him in her arms. She could feel it still. The back of his head, where she had always put a steadying hand, like a ball of stone. Her precious, warm, milky son, now a stiff, cool statue, a porcelain doll. Already she couldn’t remember what he looked like alive. When she tried to picture him, all she could see was his face, deadly white but for his indigo lips and the purple blotches on his skin where the blood had settled.
She supposed Lucas had called the ambulance and her mother. She didn’t know how long it’d taken for the paramedics to get there. She hadn’t wanted to let Noah go, refusing to let anyone take him from her arms. It was Sarah who’d finally persuaded her. Maddie had handed Noah’s cold little body to her mother, watching as the paramedics briefly examined him and then wrapped him tenderly back in his blanket. She’d felt the emptiness of her arms and had known instinctively the feeling wasn’t ever going to go away.
‘Maddie, stop that. You don’t take sugar. Maddie! Stop!’
She jumped and glanced up. She was standing at a counter at the side of the room, spooning sugar into an empty coffee mug. It was already a quarter full; she must have added at least six spoonfuls without even knowing what she was doing.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, dropping the spoon so that it clattered onto the counter. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’
She sat on the tan leather sofa, pinning her hands under her thighs to stop herself from plucking at her clothes. It didn’t matter what anyone said. It was her fault Noah was dead. She’d wished him gone. She hadn’t meant it, of course, but she’d got exactly what she’d asked for. Maybe, deep down, in a corner of her mind too dark for her to see clearly, this was what she wanted.
Maybe she’d even made it happen.
‘He kept crying,’ she burst out suddenly. ‘No matter what I did, I couldn’t make it stop.’
‘He had colic, Maddie,’ Lucas said hoarsely. ‘He couldn’t help it.’
She stared down at her lap. Her legs were jiggling, but she seemed powerless to stop them. ‘I could hear it in my head, all the time. The non-stop screaming, on and on. Sometimes I didn’t know if it was him crying, or me. I tried to be patient, I did my best for him, but nothing made him happy. No matter what I tried, it didn’t make any difference. He never stopped screaming.’
‘It wasn’t your fault, Maddie.’
‘I couldn’t make him better. I’d feed him and change him and cuddle him and nothing helped. I couldn’t stand it anymore.’ She covered her face with her hands. ‘I just wanted it to stop.’
When Lucas spoke again, he sounded wary. ‘Maddie, what are you trying to say?’
‘I wished he hadn’t been born,’ she said bleakly. ‘I wished he wasn’t here. Sometimes … sometimes I even prayed he’d just disappear. That someone would just … take him.’
‘Maddie—’
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ she cried wildly. ‘I wanted someone to take my baby! What kind of mother would fantasise about something like that?’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Lucas said again, but his voice sounded less certain.
He sat next to her and put his arm around her, and she leaned into the familiar bulwark of his shoulder, but it no longer seemed comforting or safe. He was like an oak that had been hollowed out, as vulnerable as she to the coming storm.
Chapter 10 (#ulink_54eec502-9ce2-536e-9972-bcd8f1e6d472)
Saturday 10.00 a.m. (#ulink_54eec502-9ce2-536e-9972-bcd8f1e6d472)
The door opened. One of the doctors who’d met them from the ambulance came into the room, followed by a middle-aged woman wearing round gold spectacles and a painfully sympathetic expression.
‘Mr and Mrs Drummond, first let me offer you my deepest condolences,’ the doctor began, pulling up a hard plastic chair opposite the sofa and placing a file on the coffee table. ‘I am so very sorry for your loss. I can’t begin to imagine how you must be feeling.’
Maddie stared at him blankly.
‘My name is Leonard Harris, and I’m the duty doctor at A&E today. This is Jessica Towner,’ he added, as the older woman took another chair beside him. ‘She’s our family liaison and bereavement counsellor. She’s here to help you through the process and explain everything that will happen next.’
‘I’m also very sorry for your loss,’ the woman murmured, her voice a respectful whisper. Maddie had to strain to hear her. ‘I’m here to help you in any way I can. I know what a distressing time this is, so if there’s anything I can do to make things a little easier, please ask.’
The doctor leaned forward, his clasped hands dangling between his knees. ‘I know you must be in a state of shock right now,’ he said, ‘but there are a few questions I have to ask. There are certain procedures we have to go through, and a few decisions you need to make, which Jessica will discuss with you in a moment. If we can sort some of these things out now, you’ll be able to go back to your family and grieve without any more interference.’ He waited a moment for this to sink in, and then reached for his file. ‘We just need to check a few facts first. Your son’s name is Noah Michael Drummond, correct?’
‘Michael was after my father,’ Maddie said automatically. It was suddenly important they understood her son wasn’t just another statistic, a name on their forms. He would never have a chance now to show the world who he was. She had to speak for him. ‘We both liked the name Noah. We wanted something old-fashioned.’
‘And he was born on the third of February this year?’
Lucas nodded.
‘There were no problems with the pregnancy or birth? No complications during labour or delivery?’
‘No, none.’
The doctor ran through a series of routine questions about Noah’s birth and the first few weeks of his short life. Maddie tuned him out, letting Lucas answer all of them. She found herself unable to concentrate on what the doctor was saying. The questions were pointless anyway. Apart from colic, Noah had never had a single thing wrong with him, not even a cold. Her pregnancy had been ridiculously easy, and Noah had had a normal birth, her labour taking less than four hours from her waters breaking to his delivery. She hadn’t even needed an epidural. She was good at having babies. Shelled them like peas, her mother said.
‘Maddie,’ Lucas murmured, squeezing her hand.
They were all looking at her. Clearly, someone had asked her a question.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said thickly. ‘Could you say that again?’
‘I know it’s difficult, Mrs Drummond. I’d just like you to walk me through the last time you saw Noah alive.’
Oh, God, Maddie thought, spots dancing in front of her eyes. Oh, God. She was never going to see him open his eyes again. Never see him smile …
‘Maddie,’ the bereavement counsellor interjected suddenly. ‘Would you like to step into the bathroom for a moment to tidy up?’
‘You’re leaking,’ Lucas murmured.
She glanced down. The entire front of her T-shirt and fleece were soaked with breast milk.
The counsellor led her to a small en suite bathroom at the back of the room and shut the door behind them. Maddie stood mutely as the older woman unzipped her fleece and gently pulled her soaked T-shirt over her head as if she were a child. It was like her body was crying, the milk running down her skin in an unstoppable flood of tears.
‘Here, love, use this towel,’ Jessica said, as Maddie unhooked her sodden maternity bra. ‘I’m going to find you a clean T-shirt and bra from our donations box. Would you like me to see if I can find you a breast pump, so you can express a bit, just to tide you over?’
Maddie nodded. When Jessica slipped discreetly out of the room, Maddie sank onto the closed lavatory seat, pressing the towel against her chest. What was she supposed to do with all this milk now? You couldn’t just stop breastfeeding overnight. When Jacob had been nine months old, he suddenly refused to nurse and she’d ended up with mastitis. It’d been agony. Emily had been so much easier. She’d been able to wean her gradually, tapering the number of her feeds over a period of weeks. She’d have to do the same now, she supposed, expressing just enough milk to keep from getting engorged, until her milk flow dried up naturally. She realised with a nauseating sense of horror she’d effectively be weaning a dead baby.
The counsellor returned a few minutes later with the promised clothes and a hand-held plastic breast pump. ‘If you’re wondering what to do with it, there’s a milk bank here at the hospital,’ she said gently, as if she’d read Maddie’s mind. ‘They use it for premature babies in the NICU. You could donate your milk, if you wanted. It wouldn’t be wasted.’
Maddie nodded, not trusting herself to speak. The idea of expressing milk for a dead child was more than she could bear.
Jessica left her alone in the bathroom and she pumped off just enough to relieve the fiery heat in her breasts. When she was done, she put on the bra and plain white T-shirt Jessica had found for her and returned to the grief room. Another man had joined the doctor and Lucas while she’d been gone. She knew immediately he was a policeman, despite the raincoat he’d tactfully buttoned up to hide his uniform.
‘PC Tudhope is going to sit in, so we don’t have to go through the same questions again later,’ Lucas said.
‘It’s just a formality,’ the constable added quickly. ‘Please, it’s not my intention to intrude on your grief or suggest any wrongdoing on your part at all.’
‘It’s fine,’ Maddie said dully.
‘Mr Drummond has explained that he was away for work until this morning,’ the doctor said, picking up his file again. ‘So perhaps you could start by saying how Noah seemed to you yesterday?’
‘He seemed fine,’ she said helplessly.
‘Was he eating normally? Did he show any signs of distress at all? Did you notice if he had a temperature?’
‘His temperature was normal. I know, because I checked it twice. Emily and Jacob – our other two children – they both have chickenpox, so I thought he might get sick, but he didn’t have a fever and he took all his normal feeds. He seemed fine,’ she said again.
The doctor looked up from his notes. ‘Your other children have chickenpox?’
‘Emily came down with it a few days ago, and then Jacob the day before yesterday. Why? Is that what—’
‘We can’t rule anything out at this stage,’ the doctor said, gently cutting her off. ‘So, what time did he go down for the night?’
‘His last feed was around ten. He doesn’t usually settle properly after it, because he has colic. I’ll put him down, but he doesn’t really sleep for more than a few minutes at a time. He cries for hours, sometimes. Nothing seems to help.’ She glanced at Lucas as if for confirmation, and he took her hand and squeezed it. ‘We’ve tried everything: colic tablets, gripe water, rubbing his back, a warm hot-water bottle on his tummy, massage, everything. I’ve even tried changing my diet and cutting out dairy and anything spicy, in case it’s something in my milk upsetting him. I asked my doctor if it might be my antidepressants, but he said they wouldn’t affect it. The only thing that seems to help Noah is walking up and down the corridor with him. You can’t even sit down, or he starts crying again.’
It suddenly occurred to her she was still speaking about her son in the present tense. But she didn’t have to worry about Noah crying anymore. Nothing would ever upset him again.
The policeman’s expression sharpened. ‘You’re on antidepressants, Mrs Drummond?’
‘I had postnatal depression after Jacob,’ she said, wondering if he would judge her for it. ‘I’ve been on them ever since.’
‘My wife hasn’t had a depressive episode in nearly two years,’ Lucas interjected quickly.
The doctor made a notation on his pad. ‘Was Noah’s colic worse than usual last night?’ he asked.
‘No!’ Maddie exclaimed. ‘That’s the thing! He didn’t have colic! He didn’t cry at all!’
‘Did you think that odd?’
‘I thought maybe he’d finally outgrown it. Doctors call it hundred-day colic, don’t they?’ she asked desperately. ‘He’s not quite ten weeks old, but I thought maybe he was growing out of it a week or two early, like Jacob did. I didn’t go in to check on him because I didn’t want to wake him. Jacob’s colic was never as bad as Noah’s, but—’
‘You didn’t check on him?’ Lucas interrupted. ‘All night?’
Maddie hesitated. How could she admit she hadn’t checked on their son because she’d been worried sick about why her husband had borrowed some money without telling her? How utterly trivial and unimportant it seemed now. ‘I was just so grateful he’d stopped crying, I didn’t even think why,’ she said wretchedly.
‘In most cases like this, there’s nothing you could have done even if you’d checked him every ten minutes,’ the doctor said gently. ‘I know it’s easy for me to say, but please don’t blame yourself.’
The constable leaned forward. ‘Mrs Drummond, just so I can be absolutely sure of the timeline: you put him to bed around ten last night, and he seemed perfectly fine, everything normal. And then you didn’t look in on him again until this morning, at around seven-thirty, when you found him?’
It didn’t matter how nicely they said it. She hadn’t bothered to see if her baby was all right because she’d been too thankful he wasn’t crying. All that time she’d been praying he wouldn’t wake up, he’d been lying in his cot, cold and dead.
‘I didn’t set my alarm, because Noah usually wakes me long before I need to get up,’ she said, anguished. ‘As soon as I woke up, I went to check on him, but—’
‘No one’s blaming you,’ the doctor said again.
‘You were the one looking after the children yesterday? They weren’t with a childminder or relative?’ the constable asked.
