Little Darlings

He looked at her. His eyes were glazed in a film of tears. ‘Well, yeah,’ he said, ‘that too,’ and he kissed her.

Immediately a midwife started to arrange pillows, propping her up so she could feed the babies.

‘You should feed as much as you can now,’ she said. ‘It helps your uterus to contract.’

Feed as much as you can, she thought. As opposed to the meagre efforts I’ve been making so far.

As the midwife stuffed a tender nipple into the mouth of one twin and then the other, Patrick turned away. He shuffled around looking for change for the vending machine and headed off to get them both a cup of tea. By the time he came back and sat down, the midwife had left. He picked up a magazine but didn’t open it. His hands were shaking.

‘It’s six o’clock,’ he said.

‘Right,’ said Lauren.

‘I should go, before I get kicked out.’

‘I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if you stayed for a while.’

‘OK.’ He breathed in loudly through his nose. She waited for what he would say next. ‘But I’ve got to get to the shops, and everything.’

She wanted him to take her home and look after her. He’d done that once, early on. Only the second time Lauren had gone to his flat. In the night she’d started having terrible stomach pain, food poisoning most probably, from a bad takeaway. The next day he’d boldly insisted she stay with him until she was better. She didn’t want to stay – it was early days and they were still being polite, seeking to impress each other. Neither had yet heard the other fart. For a week she vomited near-constantly and her bowels had never moved faster. If this doesn’t put him off, she’d thought, and it hadn’t. He set up a bed for himself on the couch and tended to her every need. He did it all without complaint, and yet even then there’d been signs that he wasn’t a natural caregiver. She heard him, unable to prevent himself from gagging on the smell when he entered the bathroom after her, twice or three times that week. Also, he cooked with a certain undisguised reluctance (always did, she would discover), huffing when required to alter anything at all during the process. It didn’t really matter then because she ate almost nothing that week anyway. And it meant she loved him all the more, for doing what he did, making such an effort to override his natural inclinations. It proved without question that he loved her.

The erosion of enthusiasm for self-sacrifice can happen fast in those for whom it’s an effort to start with. It can be like dropping off a cliff: I care, I care, I care, I don’t care; for how long exactly are you planning to be ill? Patrick must have used up all his caring that week. When she was ill in the early months of pregnancy, he’d seemed more irritated than sympathetic. She found ways of coping. She would list all his good points, in between retches.

He fidgeted in his seat for a few more seconds, then looked at his phone and got up. He kissed all three of them on the head and said he loved them, the new names sounding less strange now but still out of place somehow. ‘Bye-bye Riley, I love you. Bye-bye Morgan, I love you. Bye-bye Mummy, I love you.’ The word Mummy jarred. It took a moment before she realised he meant her.

Patrick walked the short distance to the corner of the bay, turned and gave a weary wave.

‘See you in the morning,’ he said.

He earns enough so I don’t have to work, she thought. My mother liked him, when she was alive. He’s funny. He’s got lots of friends. He’s really good looking, in my opinion.

With a son on each breast she watched the tendrils of steam diminish as her tea went cold in its brown plastic cup on the bedside table. The sun sank beyond the car park but the electric lights held back the darkness. Home seemed like a different country, one to which she might never return.

Chapter 4 (#ulink_0ceebcd5-f941-57cd-b5dd-cc9754a52abc)

Night fell outside, and the babies seemed to know it: they were awake.

‘Sleep when they sleep,’ the nurse had said, Patrick had said, her mother-in-law had said many times when she was pregnant. Sleep when they sleep: neat, and as far as unsolicited advice went, sensible enough. I would do that, she thought, if I could, but they were asleep all day in between crying and being fed. Now they were awake and she wanted to watch them discovering themselves and each other and the edges of their little world but her eyelids were heavy, her head throbbed. If she closed her eyes she knew she’d be dragged under in an instant. She felt she should be awake for them, that she was duty-bound. This and the pain helped to keep her conscious at first. Her nipples were torn and raw, and the pain in her uterus was dulled only slightly by the co-codamol she had recklessly taken despite the implied threat of further confinement (‘Are you sure? It might make you constipated, flower’).

Coos and snuffles turned into cries and she fed them, both together for the first time without the midwife’s help, managing to balance one while positioning the other with one hand. Riley, the smaller of the two, seemed to find it harder to get started and she had to reach around Morgan and slip her little finger between him and the nipple, repositioning him twice before he was able to feed. She wasn’t watching the clock. Hours started stretching out into lifetimes when she did that. Feeding time went on and she thought it might go on all night but then they each dropped off the breast, asleep, like ripened plums from a branch, and she set them down. The moment both twins were in the cot she let her eyes shut and her brain shut down and her body melted into the bed. She entered a kind of sleep in which she was poised, a part of her remaining on high alert, jerking her out at the slightest snuffle. A meagre kind of rest, but all she could afford.

And then she woke when there was no sound: why was there no sound? Had she done something wrong, were they suffocating? Were they breathing, had they died? She placed a hand on each baby and waited for the rise and fall, the sound of air being drawn in, a sign of life. Under the harsh light, under her two hands they breathed, they moved, they lived.

Lauren’s heart slowed by degrees. She thought of all the people that would be heartbroken if she let them die. Her gran, his mother, his father and hers. Patrick’s sister Ruthie and the cousins, Sonny and Daisy. The funeral, how she did not want to go through that or watch Patrick go through it. Was this the love, this fear of them dying? Perhaps it was. She lay with her eyes open, unable to stop a series of appalling ideas from flashing in her mind. Dropping them on their heads on the hospital floor. Crashing the car with them in it. A plastic nappy bag on the face, obscuring the airways in seconds while her back was turned. These things were so easy, so quick, and they actually happened, they were real. She was right to be scared. She looked at the babies, fixing them in her memory, their personalities emerging already – Riley frowning in his sleep, dissatisfied with something. Morgan, abandoned to it, relaxed and satiated. I will never forget this, she thought.

They were asleep. Sleep when they sleep. And she wanted to watch them to make sure they kept breathing but she clicked off like a light.

She dreamed of the bird and the cat again and awoke drenched in sweat and dread. How long had she slept? Impossible to know. The curtain between her bed and the next had been drawn across once more. This time there was no mistake: there was a woman in the next cubicle. The lamp inside was lit; she could see a silhouette on the curtain, long thin shadows stretched out to the ceiling. A creaky voice began to sing an unfamiliar song.

As she was a-walking her father’s walk aye-o

As she was a-walking her father’s walk,

She saw two pretty babes playing the ball

Lay me down me dilly dilly downwards

Down by the greenwood side-o

And the woman had two babies, Lauren was sure. There, the sound of two together, both cooing and grunting, as if they were singing along with the strange lullaby.

She said pretty babes if you was mine aye-o

She said pretty babes if you was mine

I’d dress you up in silken fine

Lay me down me dilly dilly downwards

Down by the greenwood side-o

Lauren felt an urge to visit the toilet, a sudden pressure on her bladder strong enough for her to answer it with a movement a bit too fast for her body. She swung her legs out of bed. Her knees buckled as she stood, but she held herself up with both hands on the bed rails. She perched there, testing herself. She could walk; she was just a bit unsteady. There was no sunburst of blood on the sheet. The muscles in her pelvic floor, cut and torn and sewn up, held her in place for now and she took her hands from the bed, allowing her feet to take their burden back. She checked the babies, still breathing, feather breaths on her cheek. Blood rushed from her head to serve her limbs and she waited for the feeling to pass, the floor to cease shifting under her like the deck of a sea vessel.

The clock read 4.17. The windows, black mirrors.

She took a penknife long and sharp aye-o

She took a penknife long and sharp,

And pierced the two pretty babes to the heart

Lay me down me dilly dilly downwards

Down by the greenwood side-o

Maybe Lauren would ask her to stop. The singing might wake Mrs Gooch. Plus, it was a horrible song, the words were creepy and the tune was weird, sort of sad and angry. She’d been pleased, initially, when she’d realised there was another woman on the ward with twins but she wasn’t sure she could be friends with someone who had no consideration for others.

The curtain had been pulled all the way around the cubicle, boxing it in. There was a gap of a few centimetres at one corner and Lauren widened it, peering through. The lamp was angled at her face, she was caught in the glare. She held a hand up to shield her eyes.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. The woman did not respond, kept humming the strange old tune. She tried again, a bit louder. ‘Excuse me?’

There was no hospital bed. The woman was sitting in the chair, the same as the one of pale green vinyl next to her own bed, next to all the beds on the ward. The scene was too small for the cubicle – without the bed there seemed too much floor space. The distance between Lauren and the woman was as wide as a river. The woman was leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and a large basket between her bare feet, feet dirty enough to stand out black against the floor. Rags from the woman’s dress were long fingers trailing against those feet, against the floor, forming a fringe over the basket. The glare from the angled lamp meant that Lauren couldn’t see the babies in the basket but she could hear them, ragged phlegmy breaths and two – definitely two – high-pitched voices murmuring. She took a step inside the cubicle, moving to get a better look, more from curiosity than anything else because she could see at once that this woman shouldn’t be there. She must be homeless. She wore several layers of clothing, as if she were cold even though it was oven-hot in the hospital. But when Lauren stepped closer she began to shiver. She was at once aware of the thinness of her hospital gown, cold air surrounding her, whispering around her exposed legs and entering the gown from below so that she wrapped her arms across herself to stop it. There must have been an air-conditioning outlet right there above them. It was a damp cold and there was a muddy, fishy smell which must have been coming from the homeless woman. Lauren sensed that she had been noticed, she knew it, but the woman hadn’t moved at all, not a millimetre. She was singing again.

She throwed the babes a long ways off aye-o

She throwed the babes a long ways off

The more she throwed them the blood dripped off