say any of that because the anger in his face was like steel. His baby was crying and compromised, his wife’s wounds self-inflicted and his house needlessly broken by her.
Bad, bad, bad wife.
I had tried to explain but he had heard all those things before, about my mother and father, about our child. He was tired of hearing about these things that never changed but got talked about, round and round, without resolution.
And it occurred to me: a symptom doesn’t have to be a change. A symptom can be no change at all.
So I left to get help.
As soon as I was in the car, breathing the smell of its upholstery still warm from the day’s heat, I was calmer. I dialled the registrar and explained that I had dropped Mia’s antibiotic in the sink by mistake and needed a replacement. Yes, of course, she said, as if it happened all the time. That will be fine. Calmer still. We’ll leave replacement antibiotics at the hospital pharmacy but you’ll need to hurry because they will close soon.
I would return with a blue-and-white paper bag and Dave would see that I was not a bad mother and wife, after all.
I could emerge from these shadows.
By atoning, as Mum would say.
I turned the keys in the ignition. Underfoot a crisp packet crackled and slid. I moved it aside and felt biscuit crumbs and a balled tissue at my fingertips. A bottle that had been there too long, abandoned and half-drunk, the water unable to evaporate into thin air because the lid was closed; bacteria multiplying, toxicity intensifying until soon it would be too dangerous to water plants. I needed to throw it away, as soon as possible, before it leaked and caused damage.
As I drove, I thought of how Dave had looked at my bleeding wrist. He had been concerned but also suspicious, I think, as if it were not the glass from shattered bottles that had caused a slow trickle of blood. As if I was now capable of anything. A new problem in his life, something to monitor and perhaps to contain. Another item on his long exhausting list.
And in that moment I had imagined Richard. The thought had come unbidden. Would he have picked me out of the glass? Had his wife ever fallen apart, and had he held her then, instead of clearing up around her with a face full of cold contempt?
I drove through the neighbouring streets with their red-brick houses and plane trees, past playing fields and a football pitch where boys stood in a huddled mass, like petals on a stem. We’d chosen the area for the schools and the borough football club. We had come for the village feel. We had come for the small shops and the busy swings. We had come for the many speed bumps designed to keep children safe, which I now sped over.
I arrived at the local hospital. The last time I had been there my womb had been contracting and Dave had held me up as my legs gave way, my arms stretched wide against him – an eagle, grounded. Only an hour before we’d been sitting on the living room carpet watching Friends re-runs with him feeding me bits of bagel, and Fanta from a straw. Occasionally I’d gasp and he’d say: contraction or carbonation? And I’d laughed every time.
It was this hospital that had delivered all we’d ever wished for. Us. A family.
I walked through a crowd of Accident and Emergency patients – antiseptic and alcohol in the air, a child cradling an arm, a waxen wheezing man – until I reached the pharmacy.
A queue moved in fits and starts until finally it was my turn.
‘It’s Cath, Cath Freeland.’ My voice quivered at its edges. ‘Here to collect Augmentin for Mia Freeland. Dr Korres will have rung it through.’
The woman, whose hair swept across an acne-pocked forehead, lowered her gaze to a screen. She tapped and stopped. Tapped and stopped. ‘The pharmacist has gone home for the evening so can you come back tomorrow morning?’
‘No, I’m sorry but I need it now. They said it would be waiting here.’
‘Your request has come from the children’s hospital. That needs a pharmacist. We’re only open for non-prescription items now.’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘This is urgent. My daughter needs antibiotics. She has cystic—’
‘If it’s urgent you can bring your daughter to A & E and they might prescribe? Depending on the circumstances?’
‘She needs her dose. I give it to her every eight hours. I dropped the bottle. It smashed. I didn’t mean to drop it. It’s Augmentin. 125 milligrams.’
‘As I said, if it’s urgent—’
‘But she’s got cystic fibrosis!’ I could feel my voice getting shriller, more panicked. ‘I can’t bring her to A & E. There’s a guy back there coughing up his lungs. I can’t put her near that.’
‘I’m sorry. All I can suggest is that you come back in the morning.’
‘Wasn’t it rung through?’
‘I can see it on the system, but it needs a pharmacist to handle it as it’s a prescription drug. If you’d been here an hour ago …’
‘This is ridiculous.’
‘It would be illegal for me to give it to you, OK? I can’t do any antibiotics because I’m not licensed, all right? All I can do for you is whatever’s not on prescription. For anything else you have to get a doctor.’
I turned away and leaned against the wall, the metal roll and close of the shutter unpeeling my nerves all over again.
I couldn’t go home, not until I had atoned.
I walked out on to the street and looked toward the entrance of the birthing centre. I looked up and counted quickly – one, two, three floors up to the ward where Mia had been born in a room bordered with mauve butterfly stickers.
Mauve: to calm the mother through her birthing ordeal.
Butterfly: average lifespan, one month.
I wanted to go back to the birthing centre reception. I wanted to sit on the single orange plastic chair that I had sat on eight weeks prior when it had been me, Dave and Mia for the first time. A family. I wanted to sit on that same chair. A chair that a thousand new mums before me had sat on, waiting for their partners to collect them and bring them home – sore with their ordeal, new life in a car seat at their feet.
I wanted to sit there until a security guard became so discomforted by me not having a baby at my feet nor any sign of someone coming for me that eventually he would ask: Can I help you with anything?
And I would say:
Yes, I am looking for something.
I didn’t know my newborn baby was the messenger for a new life.
And I need to find my old life because I didn’t have the chance to say goodbye.
I want it back, I need it, I miss it. Can you help me find it?
But the security guard would say: I’m sorry, I can’t help you and would you move along, please?
And the hospital would not come to my rescue if I sat motionless in an orange plastic chair, as it had not come to Mia’s rescue by prescribing her replacement antibiotics.
My life would continue as it was and Mia would continue to hold a death sentence in her cells.
Then I felt the essence in me that kept me upright and moving, drip lower and lower into my feet – filling them, pinning them to the lowest ground. A seabed, somewhere.
I tasted salt – my salt – on my top lip and thought of how much warmer it would feel on the surface of the sea.
And I thought of Richard and how he had offered help.
Help is what you call out when you’re drowning.
Back in the car I retrieved