turned her back again.
And just like that, the anger that had given me so much heat and speed was extinguished, leaving a leaden cold sadness in its place.
‘Mum. Please don’t go.’
And she didn’t. Instead she turned and walked towards me, her cheeks red and damp with tears. ‘Stop taking it out on me.’
‘I’m not.’ I wiped my tears away with cold fingers, my tissue now balled and crumpled up against Mum’s in my pocket.
‘You blame me. And you should. After all, I probably gave you the faulty gene. It won’t be your father. Nothing was ever his fault.’
‘It’s no one’s fault. It doesn’t matter who gave anyone what.’
She looked so sad and desperate then, lost like a child swallowed by a crowd. And so I went to her and hugged her as close as I could with Mia in the sling between us. ‘It’s OK, Mum, honestly it is.’
‘It doesn’t matter what you say. I know that Jesus loves you,’ she whispered to me. To Mia.
I pushed our trolley through the supermarket car park and, as I searched for my keys, a Range Rover ploughed through a puddle so big that it showered Mia and me with muddy rainwater. My jeans were covered in it. Mia’s legs were stippled with it. I looked down and her head and face were baptized by it.
Back at home I took Mia out of the sling, laid her down in the hall and patted gently at her cheeks with an antibacterial wipe – the tenth or eleventh time since leaving the car park. But what if the bacteria had made its way into her mouth? I pulled gently, as gently as I could, at the corners of her tiny mouth so it stretched like a clown’s, and wiped the insides with the bitter and abrasive wipe.
I took shallow breaths that didn’t fill my lungs as Mia wailed. I did the only things I could remember to reassure her – kissed her, sang to her, I will love you love you love from the bottom of my heart – all the while crouched on the floor by the front door, trying to think and remember and please think, think, what should I do to stop that puddle from seeding a new and corrosive sickness in her?
Still she cried and with every piercing call issued from her tiny mouth I wondered how this puzzle would ever resolve itself. How there would ever be a time when we wouldn’t be lashed together like that, trapped – her helpless without me, me powerless to truly help her.
I looked up. ‘Dave, where are you? I need your help. We’re covered in muddy puddle water.’ But there was nobody home. A pile of unopened post in a shoebox by the door. The burnt remnants of lunch in the air. The rug that had rumpled and turned as I hurried out of the door earlier, anxious not to be late for Mum. All of it, exactly as I had left it.
I lifted Mia to the ceiling and held her there, hoping that my face would cheer her up. But she wailed more, now turning crimson in her anger.
‘I love you. It’s going to be all right. You’re going to be all right. Dave, please, are you upstairs?’
I stood up, pressing her close to me as I kicked off my shoes. Balancing her with one arm as I hooked a finger under each sock, peeling each one off in case splashes of dirty puddle water had touched their fibres.
I walked to the bottom of the steps and buried my face in Mia’s neck, trying to calm her with my closeness, trying to slow my own breathing and thinking of how Mum had said: Yes, yes, I understand, even though she hadn’t understood. About how Dad would have listened and how I would have listened to him.
I kissed Mia’s cheeks over and over, tasting the salt of her tears. Kissed her brow, tasted the salt of her skin and my heart broke once more with the facts of it:
Salt.
Once so cheap and inconsequential in our lives. Pinched into soups, scattered on icy doorsteps. Swum in and washed off. Salt had once scattered and flowed round us so silently and unmemorably that we had barely noticed it.
Now salt was of consequence. Salt was the missing ingredient in Mia’s life: her body’s inability to hold on to it made the mucus in her lungs a thick and sticky spider’s web for infection.
I thought of the waiting room we’d sat in, moments before diagnosis, as the sun tried to cut through the pollution-dusted window. How I had licked Mia’s brow and tasted the sea.
Woe is the child whose brow tastes salty when kissed, for they are cursed and soon must die.
The first time a salt-doomed child was recorded in writing, back in the Middle Ages. The words rang around my head as I held on to the stair banister for balance, sad wisdom from another age, written of the babies who coughed and coughed then died before they even learned to talk.
We knew more now, but not enough.
‘Dave,’ I shouted. ‘Please be here. You have to come here.’
Another way of looking at things, Richard had said, eyes shining.
But as the sweat gathered on my skin and my mouth dried of the right words and songs for my daughter, all I could see was life spiralling angrily and painfully towards a series of horrific endings.
Hurry, hurry.
Time is running out.
‘Dave!’
I sat on the stairs and thought of the bacteria now finding a new home inside her chest. I imagined it, sly and malignant, bedding down into her lungs, twining round her like poison weed, doubling and doubling in numbers, every tick of the second hand rooting them deeper, letting them burrow where no antibiotics would ever find them.
I was late to administer her last dose of antibiotics for the day. I’m sorry, so sorry.
I scooped her to my chest and ran, thundering down steps, my bare feet slipping, almost losing us on the bottom step, until I reached the kitchen.
Mia screamed and screamed. I couldn’t think. Maybe she was in pain, maybe she was hungry. Maybe she was dying.
Alone with the choices, alone with the syringes and the screaming, the baby screaming, I tried to remember what she needed first, what the danger signs were, where the new dangers lay, what might need to come first.
I took the antibiotics out of the fridge with hands that shook. The cap locked as I tried to unscrew it. I pressed it down hard, tried to release the safety catch and turned again, and again, and again but still it stuck, still it resisted. It fought me, kept me from helping her. I screamed to something above me in anger, defiance and frustration. I pushed and turned through gritted teeth, pushed so hard that the bottle slipped through my grasp as the lid opened. Heavy brown glass bounced on the wooden floor leaving a trail of medicine, and for a moment I gazed at it, spreading into a glistening white fern pattern.
The pharmacy was closed now and that was the last bottle. I had nothing in stock in the cupboard.
Bad mother, bad mother. Screaming child still screaming.
‘Dave!’ A sound so splintered and spitting I did not recognize it as coming from me. ‘Please help. I need you. I don’t know what to do. Please help.’
A damp towel sat in a mocking heap by the dishwasher, reminding me that I should have put it in a boil wash that morning to kill the bacteria that would harm my baby if left to multiply. I hadn’t done it, I had forgotten, and now my baby was screaming with hunger and the pseudomonas bacteria were increasing at such a rate that I wouldn’t be able to touch that towel without rubber gloves in case my skin became a vehicle for their transmission.
How long, how impossible the battle when the enemy was everywhere you looked, on every surface forever.
In frustration, I raked at my arms with my fingernails. Then I remembered reading that many people, most people, unknowingly carry staph bacteria on their