Page 58 of Clever Little Thing

The waves of pain came, over and over. I vomited. Irina told me to lie on my left side and gave me water to sip that tasted of dirty coins. “Don’t leave me,” I begged. She left again, only to return with a pair of scissors wrapped in a cloth.

In a moment of clarity, I saw little raised bumps on the white ceiling, like ringworm. Blanka had looked at this and dreamed of journeys to other worlds. Of going to another galaxy in the TARDIS. I closed my eyes, and I was standing in a red desert with Blanka. Three suns appeared above the horizon: dawn on a new planet.

A slap in the face brought me back to the cold, damp room. Another slap. “Charlotte? Listen. You cannot sleep. You must push now. Now, Charlotte.”

“No,” I moaned. “I can’t, I can’t. Please.” I closed my eyes to be with Blanka. I deserved this. I accepted it. I just wanted it to be over. My baby was dead; Irina’s wedding dress would become its shroud.

She got behind me and pulled me between her legs with superhuman strength. She held my hands. “Charlotte. It’s coming. Get ready. Now push.”

The pain became a blazing white sun, and I was inside it. A circle of women surrounded me, murmuring prayers. Not Edith or Dianne, but Irina and her mother and her mother’s mother. I was Irina’s daughter, and this was her grandchild. Women from her family moved around me, praying, bringing tea and towels. I smelled flatbread fresh from the oven. I had to keep this line of women going, the women who survived, who would do anything for their girls. Blanka had broken it, but I could make it whole again.

It wasn’t Irina’s fault that Blanka died. It wasn’t my fault. I felt love surrounding me. I pushed. I pushed. I pushed.

Then Irina was snipping in a brisk, professional way, and then holding a tiny baby, greasy with vernix, small enough to fit in my cupped hands. “A girl,” said Irina, trembling a little. She didn’t hate me after all. But I was afraid to look, afraid of how I’d fail this daughter.

Irina clasped my shoulder. “You are good mother,” she said. I looked at her, and something passed between us. It wasn’t her fault that Blanka had died. She could have done better, but she did the best she could. And I too was doing the best I could.

32.

I hobbled down the corridor to the NICU. It was slow going. Irina had done everything right, the doctors said, but it took a little work to stitch me up after what she’d done with her scissors. They had removed glass from my scalp and put a couple of stitches in my hand too. An accident, I’d told Pete. Fainted from the pain, and my head hit the glass door. I wasn’t sure if he believed this, but he didn’t ask any more questions for now.

In the NICU, my baby, one day old, lay in a Perspex tank under a jaundice lamp, with tubes coming out of her mouth and nose and wires attached all over her. As well as jaundice, she had underdeveloped lungs. A nurse wearing reindeer antlers approached me: it was Christmas Eve. “Just sit down in the rocker there, and I’ll bring her to you.” I brought the baby to my chest, under my hospital gown, so we were skin to skin. But holding her didn’t feel the same, with all the tubes and wires attached. And she didn’t have the wonderfulsmell that Stella had had. She just smelled salty and fishy. All she did was sleep, so after a while, I gave her back to the nurse.

Pete was on his way with Stella so she could meet her little sister, and I was nervous about how she’d react. To be precise, I was nervous about how Blanka-in-Stella would react. Blanka was accustomed to getting all of my attention. She might not respond well to this new arrival, who kept me in hospital when I could be helping her. I was grateful that only Pete and I were allowed into the NICU. For now, Stella was only allowed to look at her little sister.

I met Pete and Stella at the entrance to the NICU. I hugged Stella, but couldn’t read her expression. I led her up to the NICU’s viewing window and showed her which baby was ours. Just at that moment, the baby opened her eyes, and her fists clenched and unclenched. She had an expression on her face like someone trying to remember a dream.

Stella smiled to herself, and I felt a rush of relief. Blanka was great with little ones. I didn’t need to worry. Stella would put this baby at ease, the way Blanka had put Stella at ease when they first met.

I wanted to ask, “Who is this person you hate so much?” But that wasn’t how this worked: Blanka was here, inside Stella, but she was still herself. She didn’t offer up information or answer direct questions.

We left the baby to sleep and returned to my room. Stella pulled out her crochet project, a complicated-looking blanket with tassels and a hexagon pattern. She had been good as soon as she started—but of course, that was Blanka too. I shrank from the blanket.

A nurse brought us champagne and tea and scones. Pete had putme in the nicest maternity hospital money could buy. It was a forty-minute Tube journey from our house, but the room had a view over Regent’s Park.

“What do you think about Luna for a name?” Pete said. I forced myself to focus on him. He looked so well-groomed and manly in the maternity ward, a place of nurses and disheveled mothers, almost like a handsome doctor in the soap I’d watched with Maureen.

Stella and Luna, star and moon. It was a bit too cute, but Luna was a pretty name, and I had no energy to think of alternatives. My stitches stung and itched. My hand throbbed. “Fine,” I said. I wondered if he had his tattoo planned already.

Pete poured the champagne. But I didn’t feel like celebrating. Before I got pregnant, I’d worried about miscarrying, about losing the baby, but I never dreamed that it was Stella I would lose. She took the clotted cream and all the scones and went into the en suite bathroom—a perk of private maternity care—and shut the door.

“I need to talk to you about her,” I said.

“Don’t worry, Christmas is under control,” said Pete. “The hospital will probably give you a Michelin-starred lunch tomorrow, and Stella and I will make do. I was up late wrapping presents last night.”

The previous Christmas, Stella had put her hands over her ears and screamed when anyone pulled a Christmas cracker. But when Edith asked her if she “still” believed in Father Christmas, Stella shot back that obviously quantum physics explained Father Christmas: it was no problem for him to deliver millions of presents in twenty-four hours because he was a particle that could be in several places at once.

Suddenly I sat up. “Pete, how long has she been in the bathroom?”

He was about to nod off in the visitor’s armchair, but I seized his arm, my heart banging: Blanka could be doing anything to Stella in there. She could be gobbling my painkillers. Blanka had shown me she would hurt Stella if necessary.

“Get her out of there!” I shoved my tray table aside and heaved myself out of bed.

“Jesus, Charlotte. Calm down. She doesn’t like me going into the bathroom when she’s in there anymore. She’s growing up.” Pete knocked. “Stella, honey, you OK in there?” The lock clicked, and Stella’s head appeared around the door.

“I’m having a picnic.” The door closed again.

Pete stared at me. “She’s just eating scones. You scared the hell out of me, screaming like that. What did you think was happening in there?”

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