Go to Sleep (6 page)

The Sundays, the mid-week trysts, none of it was ever enough for me. I needed more of him; I needed to know where he was, who he saw when he wasn’t with me. Ruben, though – he needed nothing. It was always the same, he’d just parry me off with that laugh, those mocking eyes and then the shutters would come down. The first time I told him I loved him you could see the effort it took him not to laugh in my face.

‘You’re not getting all serious on us, are you?’

But just when I thought I’d rather leave him than have to put up with
this
, he’d lean over, kiss me and disabuse me of the notion, and I was on fire all over again. I would have settled for anything, taken whatever scraps he tossed me. I was starting to hate him for it.

My next contraction announces itself a whole four hours later. This one is angrier, pinning me to the floor. I wait for it to subside, drag myself up, instinctively reach for the phone. They will be back from work now, Dad and Jan, all pleased with themselves that they haven’t missed the big event – especially Jan. She’s dying to be part of this, and I should really let her in after all this time. I don’t even dislike her any more, if I ever did. She’s a good woman and she’s right for my dad. I don’t know. There is no person closer to me than Dad. I’ve long since come to terms with his thing about Ruben. The letter. Letters. I’d even go as far as to say I understand him doing what he did – I think. So, for his sake, I have been trying with every vein and sinew to include her, even
love
her – just a little bit. Yet until today, until my first non-contraction, it had
never really hit me just how much I actively
do not want
Jan there.

I pick up the phone, put it back down, torn between doing the right thing and doing what I want. And what I want, what my every instinct has been guiding me towards since I knew I was pregnant, is to do this on my own. I can’t explain it other than in the most trivial terms. One – as much as I adore my father, he also really, really irritates me. Always has done. I try, I try, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. Two – Jan is not my mother. She rushed things with me when she first arrived on the scene, it had only been a year since Mum died and whether I wanted to legitimise my natural antipathy towards any new woman in Dad’s life, or whether she did truly offend me, it felt like she almost bullied me into accepting her. But I do, now. I completely accept Jan as Dad’s partner without fully embracing her as part of my own life. Yet I know that’s not good enough. I know it’s mean and petty, and I know I’m better than that. No, whatever is holding me back is chemical and irrational, and however I try to justify my misgivings I cannot put my finger on the problem.

Another contraction, one of those monsters that lays me out on the floor, so that twenty minutes later I’m still lying there, snatching for breath, trying to regain equilibrium; trying to convince myself things are still fine. Fuck it. I haul myself up, pick up the phone. I book a
cab for 9 p.m., and that will be that. By nine this evening these contractions will be coming thick and fast. Whatever the midwife might say to the contrary, I am on that ward tonight. The next time I step back across this threshold is with a baby in my arms, and once again the thought both terrifies and thrills me to the core.

I run a deep, warm bath; slowly, slowly lower myself in. The heat strokes my calves and thighs, and the pain eases off a little, the sting of the water singeing then soothing my back. With a rolled up towel supporting my neck, I lie there, feeling balmy, feeling just fine, and all I can think of is Mum. She used to tell me that happiness is the gap between what we want and what we have. She used to make it sound like a warning, a yardstick – something to do with work and ambition and achievement. But now I realise it was no such thing; she was simply telling me not to look too hard. The good things are there in front of you.

It will be fifteen years on 3 December; a landmark most would observe – but not me. I’ve never cared much for the charade and ceremony of anniversaries; Dad neither, as far as I know. The first year we mutely, awkwardly made it clear to one another that we hadn’t forgotten – but we didn’t mention it, and we haven’t much mentioned it since. I don’t know why, exactly. It’s partly to do with us and the odd dynamic of our relationship, but it’s a lot to do with Mum, too. She would have found
it false, I think. She hated Mother’s Day – hated any and all ‘newfangled’ celebration, which she’d write off as another conspiracy by the greetings card industry. Margaret Massey would definitely deem it ‘silly’ for Dad and I to bow our heads in her memory. When I remember Mum, it comes organically in the places that were special to
us
– the coffee shop at the Anglican; the riverfront. Oh, how she loved the river.

She once told me how she would wheel me down to the promenade when I was newborn, in the wee small hours, the slap and pull of the river the only thing that would lull me to sleep. And that scorching hot summer of 1990, we’d taken the ferry across to Seacombe and walked the length of the riverside pathway all the way to New Brighton, just the two of us. ‘You’ll be old enough for
Moby Dick
soon,’ she’d said, gazing out to the sudden blast of wide open space where the river met the Irish Sea. ‘Finest book in the English language,’ and she’d winked at me. ‘Course he was half a Scouse, though. You know, I was going to call you Ishmael if you’d been born a boy?’

Even then, as a young girl, it jarred to hear her talking that way. That one as cautious and pragmatic as Mum could find beauty in the lawless sea didn’t sit right somehow. Now, looking back on it, I wonder if she knew, even then?

Before she went into hospital to have her breast hacked off – so cruel, so pointless; she was gone six months later – we
took the ferry one last time. ‘I need you to be very brave, darling,’ she said. ‘Mummy is very ill.’ There was no swashbuckling talk of slaying the beast or staying positive, neither was there any sadness or self-pity. She was over the shock by then; she was back into Mum mode, planning for her absence in the days and weeks ahead, cooking and stewing and stocking the freezer with Tupperware tubs of curries, casseroles, pies and puddings; re-ordering her filing system of bills, policies and documents in a way that would make sense to Dad; decking the corkboard out with notes and reminders about dental appointments, parents’ evening. And only when she was certain there was nothing for us to deal with but the naked terror of our grief, did she break the news; first to Dad, and then, as late as humanely possible, to me. Ruben and Mum in the space of a year. I wanted to die myself.

The sea was wild that morning as we headed down the gangway; the boarding platform swayed and creaked with the swell and suck of the tide, squashing down on the huge rubber tyres that formed a bulwark to the ferry terminal, and the sound and fury made my head spin. We sat on the top deck, and the wind flayed our faces and made light of our tears, and she held my hand tight, smiling, proud, as we took in the city skyline together one last time.

‘Will you promise to be brave for Mummy?’

I hadn’t called her Mummy in years.

* * *

She should be here now, sharing this with me. I’d have told her by now; told her it was Ruben and why I didn’t want him involved. Seeing me in pain, seeing me alone, she’d be cross, at first. Why did I have to make everything so
difficult
? But her disappointment in me would last an hour, a minute, no time at all; and nothing but nothing could encroach upon her love for her grandchild. Right now she would be busy nesting for me; bustling around, sweeping the floors, bleaching the toilet, washing, ironing, packing, unpacking and repacking my overnight bag, keeping a tight rein on her excitement, quietly timing the contractions. She’d wait until the final howling pangs of labour, till I was vulnerable and helpless, poleaxed by pain and battered with fatigue and then, only then, would she run me up to the hospital. Would they still have the Volvo? I like to think so. As we drove, Mum would quietly tell me she was moving in for these next few weeks – just while I got my bearings. Spent, I would acquiesce. Secretly, silently, I would be grateful. Oh, Mummy . . .

I stare at the bathroom ceiling. Cobwebs. Not the magical, symmetrical gossamers of fable and fairy tale, just limp strings of dirt that I can no longer reach. Maybe
that’s
something I’ll let Dad and Jan take care of. I pull the plug, and immediately feel a spasm. Another lacerating contraction nails me to the emptying bath. For ten seconds that seem to last ten minutes I’m screaming for
help as someone rams a knife deep inside me and drags it around my womb in broad, circular sweeps: out, then in, then out again. It passes, leaving only the faintest after-shiver. Time seems to have speeded up now. I find myself wondering if I should ring James Mac. I need to make sure, just one last time, that he’s nowhere near that wretched crackhead mother of his. I’m shivering all over as I haul myself out of the bath. In the mirror I catch my face unawares, older and harried, the pinch of my forehead snarled above my nose in fearful anticipation of what lies ahead; yet my eyes are dancing with excitement, goading the fireworks, counting me down to the Big Bang.

Not long now. Contractions are ten minutes apart. Stinging, scorching. Soaring. Impossible.

I go under, give in to the howling of my womb, clenching, unclenching, clenching, unclenching.

Taxi should be here any moment.

Happiness.

The distance between my own life and this tiny new life within is just a few small steps. Mum had it right. Finally, I’m anchored. I might have been blown away, once, lost chasing rainbows – or shadows. Not now; not any more. As I steady myself against the door jamb, breathing, blowing, riding out the rising tide of pain, I feel wonderful. It hits me, hard and beautiful. I’ve arrived somewhere – someplace safe and gorgeous. The distance
between what I want and what I have is just the width of a tender thread, now. Finally, and for the first time since you went, Mum, I have a sense that my life is taking a deep breath, clearing its throat, preparing to start again. A blare of horn from below. I shuffle out and down to the taxi.

He didn’t even dump me; didn’t tell me it was over.

That first Sunday when he didn’t show I waited till mid-afternoon before I accepted Ruben wasn’t coming round. I thought it would just be something obvious; work had called him in or his Mum was ill and he’d been keeping house and home. Yet when I phoned to check, I had this horrible sump in my guts – the crushing sensation he was there in his front room, shaking his head to tell his sister not to put me through. I fought the paranoia back down; there’d be a simple explanation. We’d been looking forward to Bonfire Night in the park; we’d even started talking about what we’d be getting each other for Christmas. Ruben had put his arm round me, walking me back from town the other night and although he had not yet once referred to me as his girl in all the time we’d been seeing each other there was a sense that
we were closer, somehow. We were a proper item. I carried on calling.

By the Wednesday, I’d become obsessed with the idea that he was seeing someone else. The thought consumed me so utterly that I found myself needing to be vindicated. I no longer cared how much it would hurt me. I wanted to trap him, make him squirm; let him know how little he now meant to me. I went to his work, but he hid in the kitchen. I went to his house, and nobody would answer. Three brothers, two sisters and his mother all at home, and not one of them could hear the doorbell.

The last time I went to Ruben’s – the time I made up my mind I’d call no more – I had another strong sensation he was there, he was watching me. Yet when I jerked myself round, glaring up at every window in the house, nothing. There was no Ruben; there was nobody.

I was numb, then angry, then just plain sad to have been used like that. To have let myself be used so. I’d been asking for it. Playing Let’s Pretend in my big house, performing for him; bending myself to his will. I’d been asking for it, right from the start.

And if it hadn’t been for Mum, I would have grieved on and on. But she knew, my mum. She came and sat next to me on my bed and asked, in that way of hers, if everything was okay and the rapture of confession overpowered me. I sobbed and sobbed and out it all poured. And Mum
just sat there and held me, stroked my hair, told me it would all be fine. But it wasn’t fine. Somewhere out there, Ruben was walking the streets with his new squeeze. His true love.

I have been up for almost twenty-four hours now. I am tetchy and anxious. Twice I have been to the hospital, twice they have sent me home – the latest, just now, dismissed with no little irritation by the matron herself.

‘What you’re getting isn’t much worse than period pain,’ she said, smiling as if to make me feel foolish. I wanted to slap her, but through gritted teeth told her that, with all due respect, this was several degrees worse than the Curse. I splayed my arms out on the reception desk to support my unwieldy mass. Matron nodded over to a woman being rushed through in a wheelchair, a projectile of foul language spewing across the room: ‘Now
that’s
labour pain, Mummy!’ she exclaimed, gleeful almost. ‘That’s when you really know!’

‘But I
am
in labour,’ I protested. ‘My waters broke sixteen hours ago.’

She simpered through her exasperation, arched an eyebrow and took me through to a room.

‘Here. Lie down.’ She examined me briefly, and a little roughly. ‘Your waters are still intact, Rachel. You must have had a little accident. And your contractions are still irregular. You haven’t had one now for, what, forty minutes?’

‘No . . . but they were five minutes apart when I checked in before.’

‘This
happens
, dear! You’ve still got a way to go. I’m sorry.’ I didn’t move. She eyed me intently, her tiny blue eyes piercing through me. For a beat, I think she’s relenting – but then the firm set of the jaw, and the eye contact is over. ‘There isn’t a bed for you, just now. This one is needed. You can sit in the waiting area if you are really refusing to go back home.’