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 the piece of paper from my wallet, with Richard’s mobile number and email address written in looping blue ink.
I dialled his number and left a message explaining that I needed replacement medicine. Augmentin. Because I’d made a mistake. I explained that I needed it as soon as possible and perhaps he, being parent to a kid who’d need antibiotics on a regular basis, might have a spare bottle in the back of a cupboard.
Then I drove towards Hampstead.
I got his text message. Beep, beep, at a set of traffic lights, red. I checked it. It was his full address followed by a cross: a kiss, a hug perhaps?
Green, go, and up, up into leafy Hampstead where strong sun had followed the day’s earlier rain and people had probably bunked off, escaping the dry air of the office onto the heath because how amazing did this day turn out to be? Wandering around, sweating through a film of sun cream, holding hands or playing football. Resting against grassy banks or standing outside pubs, dewy pints in hand. Nuts in glasses, chips in bowls. Nothing else to do for the evening but talk and laugh.
The last time I’d been in this neck of the woods was visiting my almost-friend Julia, who lived nearby in Gospel Oak. We’d met while we were both pregnant. Her baby was born a day after mine, we had the same make of buggy and a shared taste for romantic comedies. It should have been the start of something beautiful.
The last time I’d seen her, we’d met on the heath with our babies, and, for about fifteen minutes, it was all I had hoped for; all smiles and sunglasses and normal talk about breastfeeding and TV binges and bad sleep and I thought well this is going to be fine, I don’t need to tell her about Mia. Mia had been diagnosed a week earlier.
But then she said her baby had a cold and that the doctor had prescribed saline drops to put in his nose and wasn’t that wrong because you weren’t supposed to give a baby salt like, ever?
When I swallowed it was like there was a big round pebble stuck in my gullet. Looking back, I should have turned the pram around and gone home but I kept walking with Julia at my side, clinging to the day.
Soon enough Mia needed feeding and I had to stop the pram and get her medicine. Julia saw me prepare it all and although she didn’t comment, because we didn’t know each other well enough for that, I did think: perhaps I should tell her about Mia’s CF anyway? Maybe if I share it all with her she’ll reciprocate by telling me she’s in an abusive relationship, or that she’s dying: something terrible like that. We might have a motherhood of shared loves, shared heartaches, that kind of thing.
But when I told her all she said was: Gosh, I’m sorry and: Is there a cure?
And I said: No. There is no cure.
Then she fell silent and she had to look down at her shoes trimmed with scarlet, which only made me feel bad for her so I said something like, It’s not as bad as it sounds because medical science is very hopeful in the current climate. Which seemed to make her feel better.
We pushed our prams around the lake and I wondered about the fountains spraying bacteria into the air. What does a single bacterium weigh anyway? Do they float like pollen or sink like fish eggs?
Julia confided that her best friend’s middle child had recently been diagnosed with asthma.
Did that count?
No, Julia, it did not.
On the far side of the heath the roads were broad with gaps between each sprawling, wide-fronted residence: some gated, others hedged. I found his road easily. No house numbers, just names. His was The Cedars.
I parked on the road, wound down the window, breathed an early evening air that was still thick with summer warmth.
The driveway to his black-and-white house was big enough to have a garden with a shed in the front. The shed was painted pale grey and guarded a side path that, I imagined, led to something landscaped and lush – space enough for a dozen picnic blankets in the sun. A place for watering cans and wine bottles, teapots and teepees. I pictured a woman lying there, her face towards that sun, hair fanned like a halo. His hand stroking her forehead, or maybe holding her there.
Even as I stood at his doorstep, even as I rang the bell that trilled like an electric bird caught in a brass cage, I didn’t know what I would say. Richard had a wife, and a daughter I couldn’t be near; whose air I didn’t want to breathe. I tried to remember the rules for cross infection. Was it twelve feet between patients? And no shaking hands. A distance to leave between us.
What if she answered the door? What if she spoke and the air carrying her words wafted an infection that stuck to my clothes, perched in the strands of my hair? What if I carried it home to Mia’s skin as I bowed my head to feed her, to kiss her?
I stepped back abruptly and turned to walk away when I heard, ‘Cath.’
It wasn’t a question and there was no surprise in his voice. It was a statement, said like I’d been standing in front of him, all day.
When I turned around I saw that there was no surprise in his eyes, in the creases around them or the circles under them. His mouth was a gentle smile which suggested
