Little Darlings

After Patrick had gone, Lauren sat, dry-eyed in the quiet, knowing there was chaos to come. For the moment, though, they slept. From the bed she observed the twin cocoons that were the babies, swaddled in white, with a disbelieving awe: did I do that?

The hospital was not silent, neither was it dark, although by now the windows were made of black mirrors. Lauren’s reflection had deep shadowed holes where it should have had eyes. A vision of horror. She turned away.

The building had a hum of several different tones forming a drone, a cold chord that wouldn’t resolve. Lauren put her head on her pillow and realised that one of the singers was her hospital bed, which harmonised dissonant with the slightly lower, much more powerful hum of the heating. Then there was the hum of her bedside lamp, which had a buzzy texture that she actually found quite soothing. She closed her eyes, still propped in a sitting position with the bright lamp blasting through her eyelids. She breathed deeply in and out, three, four times. Sleep was coming. She’d waited so long for this.

A whimper from one of the babies struck through her thin slumber with an urgency that felt physical. Her eyes were forced to open, but every time she blinked she could see a backdrop of red with dark streaks where a map of the veins in her eyelids had been burned onto her retinas. She batted the lamp away from her face with a clang.

Perhaps he’ll go back to sleep, she thought, with a desperate optimism. Riley’s whimper became a cluck, and then a cluck cluck cluck waaaa, and then she had to take action. One crying baby was enough.

She pulled the trolley as close as it would come, but found she couldn’t lift him. She needed one of her hands to stop her numbed useless lower half falling out of the bed as she leaned over, but two to lift the baby, with a hand under his head and one under his body, as she had been shown. Riley’s mouth was open, his eyes screwed shut, legs starting to stretch out and arms reaching, searching trembling in the air for some resistance, finding none.

Lauren thought about the womb and how it had contained them both, fed them and kept them warm. She felt bad for them, that nature had taken away their loving home and put her there in its place; that they’d been pulled from her uterus and placed in her arms, where she was the only thing standing between them and oblivion, them and failure, them and disappointment. She, who couldn’t even pick up her boy and fill his little tummy, which was now, face it, her only purpose in life.

Morgan heard his brother’s crying. He was shifting in his sleep, not quite awake but he would be soon. Lauren reached out and gathered up the front of Riley’s sleep suit in her fist until he was curled around it tightly in a storks’ bundle. She held her breath and lifted him one-handed, worrying about his head dangling backwards on his elastic neck for the second it took to transport him to her lap. But then she figured, two hours ago during the birth he’d been gripped with metal tongs and pulled by the head with great force on the confidence that that neck, seemingly so fragile and delicate, would bring the rest of him along safely.

As she struggled to feed Riley, Morgan woke up properly and cried with hunger. She listened, helpless, the sound an alarm she couldn’t turn off, a scream wired directly into her body, taking up all of the space in her brain so that she could think of nothing but feeding him, of doing what was necessary to soothe the boy, to make it stop. After a few agitated minutes, she found herself sliding a little finger into the corner of Riley’s mouth to unlatch him. With difficulty, she placed him back in the cot, one-handed, straining crane-like to swap him over with his hungrier brother. For a while there was only the sound of little lips smacking, one baby feeding and the other contemplating until Riley remembered he hadn’t finished his meal and thought that his heart might break.

She fed one while the other demanded to be fed, and went on in this way like Sisyphus, thinking there had to be an end to it but finding that there was not. She pressed the buzzer for help, but when the midwife came she seemed so irritated and abrupt that Lauren didn’t feel she could call again. The night stretched out and jumped forward as her shredded brain tried to doze, to rest and recharge after the labour, the day and night and day of not sleeping and then this night, this long night of lifting and swivelling and feeding and sitting in positions that hurt for scores of minutes too long, her back complaining and her arm muscles torn and her nipples cracking and bleeding and drying out only to be thrust into the hard, wet vice of her baby’s latch. And then, as the drugs from the blessed injection wore off, there was the pain from the destruction of her pelvic floor. Where they had cut her and sewn her, where her mucus membranes had been stretched to the point at which they tore.

She lost track of whether she slept. It seemed to Lauren that she did not, yet she found herself setting one baby down gently in the cot, blinking once and noticing that most of an hour had passed.

The curtain between her bay and the next had been drawn across. The nurses must have brought in another new mum. The twins were quietly dozing, inverted commas curling towards each other, peaceful.

From the other side of the curtain she could hear a cooing, a mother talking to a baby. The voice was low, muttering, somehow unsettling. Lauren couldn’t work out why it sounded odd. She listened for a while longer. Just a woman, murmuring nothings to her baby – why was it troubling her? There were baby sounds too, though this baby sounded like a bird, squawking softly, quacking, chirping to be fed. Then something else, another sound, more like a kitten. Lauren let her eyes close and drifted, dreaming of a woman with a cat and a bird, an old woman all skin and sinew, holding an animal in each hand by the scruff and feeding them worms from a bucket. Both hands full, the old woman used her long black tongue to encircle and trap each worm, pulling the wriggling thing free of the squirming tangle before trailing it into the mouths, the open beak of the bird and the gaping jaws of the kitten. The kitten’s needle teeth nipped at the membrane skin of the creature and it recoiled, panicked, in a futile effort to escape before it was dropped, falling from the mother’s black unfurling tongue across the beak and the jaws of the bird and the cat, each snapping at the fat wet worm until they tore it in two and turned away from each other, mouths working with smacks and gulps, sulkily satisfied with half. The old woman was telling the animals something as they fed, some urgent legacy, the details of which Lauren couldn’t quite catch, whispering, pressing on them the importance that they remember everything she said to them, that their lives depended on it. In the dream, the animals listened for as long as they could, but then they cried out because they needed more food. And as they cried out, the sounds became less like a bird and a cat and more like human babies, a squawk became a cry, the kitten’s meow trailed off to a soft baby whimper. In the dream, the woman held the animals and shushed them as they transformed, rocked them gently as their human forms emerged and then she laid the twin babies gently in the hospital cot.

Lauren’s eyes flew open. The dream lingered – there was a smell of something animal in her nostrils and she shook her head to rid herself of the disturbing images. All was silent except the breathing of her twins and the nearly imperceptible sounds of another set of twins in the next bed. Another set of twins. The woman in the bed next to hers had twins too, she was suddenly sure of it. She listened carefully – two babies snuffling, definitely. What were the chances? The dream forgotten, Lauren was pleased – she wanted to peek around the curtain and say hi but she couldn’t have reached. Besides, it was still the middle of the night. She’d have to wait until morning. Two sets of twins in one day. Maybe that was a hospital record.

Stuck in the bed, her body weakened by the spinal injection, sleep-deprived, sore and exhausted, Lauren consoled herself. At least she’d have someone to talk to now, someone who’d been through something similar. The sun was creeping into the edges of the windows, lending its peach to the white and yellow of the electric light on the ward. Behind the curtain, all fell quiet; the other mother of twins must have fallen asleep. Lauren shut her eyes again, but the moment her eyelids met she could hear the breathy swoosh of her baby’s cheek rubbing up and down on the cot sheet as his little head moved left to right, searching out a nipple. She forced her eyes open, pushed her body into an upright position, braced herself for the pain in her arms as she swivelled and lifted the child to feed.

Chapter 3 (#ulink_df7b6c36-5da9-5852-86ac-870d8a84fe0a)

Come away, O, human child

To the waters and the wild

With a faery hand in hand

For the world’s more full of weeping than

You can understand

FROM The Stolen Child

BY W.B. YEATS

July 14th

One day old

9.30 a.m.

The nurse swished the curtain back against the wall, jolting Lauren awake. There was nothing behind it, only an empty space where a bed could be parked.

She had shut her eyes between feeds and the world jumped forward three hours. The sun was up and getting on with things, drowning out the electric lights and transforming the room, from a cave to an open space. From the window there was a view of the car park three floors down, and across the way she could see the main entrance to the A&E department. The wide sky was a shade of bright grey but it would be hot, as it had been every day for all of July. Fresh now, clammy later. The heatwave had been going on for a week, and the forecast was more of the same. It was set to break records.

The nurse was removing a catheter bag filled with yellow fluid from below the bed. She dropped it in a bucket and reached for an empty one.

‘Where’s the woman who was brought in last night?’ asked Lauren.

‘Who – Mrs Gooch, over there?’

The bay diagonally across from Lauren was occupied. Mrs Gooch seemed to be asleep, a serene baby tucked into the bed with her. The mother had long red hair arranged artfully across the pillow and pale bare arms – the effect was akin to a Klimt painting.

‘No, I don’t think so. I thought there was someone next to me. I was pretty sure.’

Riley was awake. His windmilling arm smacked his sleeping brother across the head and Morgan’s eyes opened in shock, then screwed up shut in sorrow, his mouth a little zero of injustice. There was a pause while Morgan inhaled expansively, a comprehensive gathering of breath that would certainly be used for something loud. The long wail, when it finally came, hit Riley’s face and crumpled it. Riley, in turn, inhaled at length and soon the anguish was doubled. Within a few seconds the sound built into a crescendo of indignation that interrupted their mother’s thought pattern like scissors through ribbon. Lauren flapped her hands, struggling to know what to do, where to start, who to tend to. Both of them crying, and only one of her. She knew she had to be quick – she’d read so much about attachment disorder and rising cortisol levels in the brains of babies in pregnancy and early childhood. You couldn’t leave children to cry. It had damaging effects and might do radical things to brain development, causing terrible long-term consequences. Already they seemed so angry.

‘Please,’ she said to the nurse, feeling her eyes filling up, ‘can you help me?’

‘Hey petal, no need for that.’ The nurse whipped three thin tissues from the box by the bed, pressed them into Lauren’s hand and turned to lift baby Morgan, a furious, purple-faced wide-mouthed thing from which came forth a sound that made you want to cover your ears. ‘There’s enough crying round here already without you joining in.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Lauren, wiping her eyes and blowing her nose, then uncovering herself ready to feed. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

In what seemed like less than half a minute the nurse plugged Lauren firmly into the twins. She manoeuvred Lauren’s body, lifting the weight of her breasts, helping her get into a position to feed both at once, a rugby ball baby under each arm with pillows holding them in place. The nurse was so efficient, so quick and practised. It made Lauren wonder how she would ever manage on her own.

‘There. Snug as bugs.’

She started to stride away, but Lauren stopped her.

‘That woman over there,’ she said, ‘has she got twins?’

Mrs Gooch had opened her eyes. She looked as fresh and unlikely as Sleeping Beauty. Even as Lauren spoke it was obvious that there was only one child contained in the idyll – baby Gooch was with her in the bed and there was no sign of any other.

‘No,’ said the nurse, ‘just the one. Yours are the only twins we’ve got at the moment.’

Patrick brought vegetable sushi, fruit and dark chocolate. ‘Thanks,’ she said, without gratitude. She didn’t fancy anything but white-bread toast.

‘You need something with nutrients in,’ he said.

She stuck her lip out. She ought to be able to eat whatever she felt like. ‘All food has nutrients in. Sugar is a nutrient. So is alcohol.’

‘Alright, clever clogs. You need something with vitamins. Tell me what you want, I can go to the supermarket and bring you something else this afternoon at visiting time. Avocado?’

The thought of avocado made her nauseous. She wanted crisps.

Patrick took photos of Lauren holding the twins as they slept, and then turned the screen for her to see. In the images she was both gaunt and bloated, her smile weak and her hair greasy.

‘Don’t put that online. I look terrible.’