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My baby isn’t mine. It sounds strange to say it, because she is so much mine it hurts, but technically she’s not mine. My sister Janie was killed three years ago in the same crash that screwed up my leg. She was on the back of my bike. I was riding it. I was not responsible. Like hell. Technically, I was not responsible.
Lily was born just as Janie died, snatched from her belly and the jaws of death. It must be weird doing a Caesarean on a dying woman. I wasn’t there. But as soon as I was conscious I knew.
The baby was in intensive care. Janie was in the morgue. My mother was in despair. My father was incandescent with rage. I was in traction. And where was Jim, Janie’s about to be ex-boyfriend, or so she swore though she never got round to telling him, or he never got round to listening. We didn’t know where Jim was.
‘You mustn’t worry about it,’ my mother repeated like a mantra over the hospital soup. ‘You just take time to get better. You mustn’t worry. You mustn’t worry.’
She was talking to herself, of course, telling herself not to worry. Just chanting, quietly, for comfort. She was in shock, I suppose. Dad just strode the green-tiled corridors, up to the baby unit, down to me, up to the baby unit, down to me. He was like one of those depressed animals in the zoo, repeating and repeating his movements, up and down, up and down, to and fro, to and fro, in the cage of his disbelief. I was no different: my thoughts spun to and fro like her words and his feet. ‘Where’s Jim, how can we keep the baby from him, when can I walk, when can I walk, where’s Jim, I’ve got to get the baby, when is Jim going to walk in here, when can I walk, where’s the baby?’ You never know how grief will get you, until it does. All I wanted was to do things, as if doing things might change the big thing. But I couldn’t do anything. Not even the normal things you do whether or not there is grief. Couldn’t go out, or be at home, or cook, or move … I filled my time by demanding to see doctors, as if the more I saw of them the quicker I could be better. All that happened was they began to hate me.
There was a nice nurse, Dolores. She was on nights, and didn’t make me take my pain-killers. ‘I have to think,’ I said. ‘Don’t make me drugged.’
She went along with me for a while and then said: ‘You’re only thinking the same things over and over, why bother? If you’re not going to do anything, you should just get some proper rest.’
‘How do you know what I’m thinking?’ I asked her.
‘You’re talking in your sleep,’ she said.
I told her about it. How Janie was only on the back of my motorcycle eight and a half months pregnant because Jim had made one of his fairly regular phone calls that he didn’t give a fuck about any fucking injunction she said she’d take out and he was coming over now. How he’d done it before. How Janie preferred a dashing escape courtesy of her sister. How I didn’t know for certain that what she escaped from would have been as bad as what she got.
What if Jim comes for Lily?
‘What if he comes!’ I was shouting, shouting and fighting through flame, floating, clutching a child, someone was holding my ankles and my leg came off in their hand, and I floated on up and up without it …
I woke to find myself in Dolores’ arms, my head on her shoulder. The nightlights glowed, the plumbing rumbled. Hospital smell, hospital heat. Dolores’ big brown eyes in the dimness. Why am I so comforted by the idea of an African night? She gave me a glass of water and wrapped a blanket round my shoulders.
‘I looked upstairs before I came in,’ she said. ‘The little one’s OK. She’s weak but she’s OK. No one going to take her anywhere, that’s for sure.’
‘He’s her father,’ I mumbled.
‘She registered yet?’
‘No.’
‘Nobody knows who’s her father then. We don’t know him. Her mother dead.’
‘He’s a pig.’
‘You can’t do anything yet,’ she said.
‘He could turn up any time.’
‘Child’s on a tube. She’s not travelling.’
‘I must have her. I must, you know.’ I knew. There was never any question. Little Janie, my little sister, all of ten months younger than me.
‘Think about that then,’ said Dolores.
‘Yes.’
‘Can you keep her? Can you feed her? You a sensible woman? What your husband say?’
‘No husband.’
‘That’s hard.’ I looked up at her. She knew how hard it was.
‘How many do you have?’ I asked.
‘Three,’ she said. ‘Kwame, Kofi and Nana. My mother helps.’
I can keep a child. I can work. (Jesus. I’m a dancer. My leg is in traction. I’ll have to be something else, then. Can I work? Yes. There is no question.)
‘But he’ll be able to take her.’
‘Fight for her.’
Fight. How? In court? Adoption? How does that work? He’d have to agree. Would he agree? Would he have to agree?
‘I tell you two things,’ murmured Dolores. ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law. And nothing succeed like a fait accompli.’
‘When can I walk?’
‘Consultant coming round in the morning.’
He won’t tell me anything. They never say anything in case you sue them when it takes longer, or doesn’t work out the way they said it might. Got to walk, got to walk.
I slept again, and dreamt of faits accomplis.
*
The next morning I had the day nurse wheel the ward pay-phone over to me and called Neil.
‘Janie’s dead and I want to keep her child.’
Neil was silent for a moment.
‘Janie’s dead.’
‘Yes.’
He started crying. I sat there. Fed in another 10p. I didn’t cry. He continued.
‘I’m so, so …’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘How?’ he said.
‘Crash.’
‘But the baby …?’
‘Fine. Early, but fine.’
‘And Jim?’
‘Neil, we haven’t seen him. I don’t know if he knows. But Neil – you mustn’t tell him. They had a row … Look, come and see me. Please.’
‘Yes, yes … of course.’
‘I’m in hospital.’
‘Oh, God – are you all right?’
I burst out laughing. Then crying. ‘Come this afternoon. This morning. Come now.’
When he came he said the only thing to do was to get the baby out of hospital as soon as it was safe to do so, take her home, and hold tight. Apply for parental responsibility. If Jim showed an interest, fight it out. ‘Get her home and love her and be a good parent,’ he said. ‘Any judge will respect that. And get married.’
*
You see why I find it hard to be mean to Neil. The petunias gleamed at me like clear thoughts in a mist of confusion. It’s been three years and for those three years Jim has not turned up. I kept track of him. He is well off and well respected, and his nature remains better known to me than to the police or to anyone with any influence over the situation. It’s up to me to make sure he never sees Lily again.
Therefore I don’t need anything on my record. Anything at all. I could make a living without the car, that’s not the problem. The licence itself hardly matters. What matters is the good name. I need my good name to keep her.
I’d been balancing it up. Seventeen unreported black eyes that he gave her (I kept count) and one injunction that she never brought versus several thousand quids’ – worth of lawyers saying that I’m a drunkard, irresponsible, incapable, single and not the child’s parent. That’s what I was thinking about. That and the fact that that morning, the morning of the night I was out with Neil, Jim had rung up and left a message saying he wanted to talk to me.
*
I slept a little because you have to. At around seven I came out of a bleak doze to find that my mind was made up. An hour later I got on the telephone to a certain police station. I didn’t think Ben Cooper would be there but it was possible and I felt I should move as quickly as I could. I was in luck, I suppose. He was there.
Ben Cooper. We first met when we were both instructors on a motorbike road safety course – he as a young cop, me in one of many attempts to prove myself normal, fit, helpful, a credit to the community and in steady employment. Ben Cooper the Bent Copper.
‘Hello, stranger,’ he said when he came on the line. He always said that. It was his little joke. In fact we saw each other occasionally. Not by design, but just because he made a point of never letting anyone go, just in case. I’d been trying to let go of him because I don’t like the guy, and in fact I don’t think I’d seen him to talk to since Janie died.
I didn’t want to ask him, but I honestly thought it was the right thing to do. Perhaps my thinking was screwed. Perhaps the cold light of dawn that you see things clearly by is meant to come with sobriety after a good night’s sleep, not still half-drunk after a night of fretting. Whatever.
‘Ben,’ I said. ‘Can we meet?’
‘Mmm,’ he said.
‘Slight problem,’ I said.
‘Want to cry on my shoulder?’ he said.
‘Mmm,’ I said.
‘Professional shoulder?’ he said.
‘Mmm,’ I said.
‘Anything you want to tell me now?’ he said.
‘Can I?’ I said.
‘I’ll call you right back,’ he said.
Two minutes later he had the gist. He took the arresting officer’s number and my registration number and the case number and a load of other numbers and I took the number 500, which was how many quid his professional advice cost these days. Cheap at the price if he could do it.
‘Oh, I can do it,’ he said. ‘You get some sleep. You sound terrible.’ I didn’t tell him Lily was due at nursery in an hour and a half.
TWO (#ub48330bd-c5fd-5b1d-97fe-5ea89185924b)
In the Pub with Ben (#ub48330bd-c5fd-5b1d-97fe-5ea89185924b)
I took Lily into nursery on the bus. It seemed years since I’d been on one. It smelt the same; grimy London Transport smell, like coins. The day was getting ready to be warm. The clippie gave Lily the dog-end of the ticket roll and told her it was toilet paper for her dolly. Lily went bug-eyed with delight and the clippie crooned at her. I was impressed. A nice old-fashioned bit of London-ness on the Uxbridge Road.
I left Lily with the hamsters and wax crayons and went up west to fetch the car (yes I know the West End is east of west London but the West End is Up West, it has to be). My blood alcohol level was probably not much lower than it had been when they pulled me, but no one was counting at nine in the morning. I drove back to Shepherd’s Bush and slept for two hours.
The phone woke me. Usually I’d just roll over and let the machine take it but I was nervous and so I found that I had answered it before I was even awake. It was Jim.
‘I want to see my daughter,’ he said.
‘Fuck off,’ I said.
‘Angie, listen,’ he said. Arrgghhh! Don’t want to listen won’t listen why should I listen?
He went into a speech. He must have prepared it carefully but its niceties were wasted on me, drowned in hangover, sleeplessness and anger. I could hardly hear his voice for the NO NO NO ringing in my head.
Then I woke up. Woke up too to the fact that he was being reasonable and I wasn’t; he was being civil and I wasn’t; that everything from here on in can be taken and used in evidence.
‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Hello? Who is that?’
‘Angie? It’s Jim.’
‘Jim! God – hello. Oh …’ I tried to convey double confusion: natural confusion at it being him, and further confusion to give the impression that I had thought that it wasn’t him.
‘Jim, I’m sorry, you woke me up …’ Shite, should I admit that? Bad mother sleeps late in morning, answers phone when incompetent, what if it had been an emergency call from the school?
‘What? Er … did you hear what I was saying?’
‘No. I mean. Jim – why are you calling? What do you want?’
He relaunched. He sounded nervous – not surprisingly – and somehow well-intentioned. He was breathing as if he was reminding himself to.
‘Angie. Um. I know it’s been a long time and I know this is going to come as a shock to you but as you know I never intended that my separation from my daughter should be permanent and the time has now come when I think it would be the right thing for … for us to meet. I want to meet her. To see her. Meet her …’ His voice fizzled out. He’s as nervous as me, I thought. He really wants this.
Fear took my heart in both its hands and squeezed.
‘I don’t think I can say anything about this until I’ve had some advice,’ I said finally.
