Page 83 of Days You Were Mine

It’s dark when my mother arrives, summoned by Hannah at some point during the day. She sits beside me on the bed, holding my hand between hers; she calls me ‘my poor boy’. Her hands are warm, dry and cracked from gardening; she smells of lavender soap.

‘Don’t try to talk,’ she says when I begin to apologise. ‘There’s plenty of time for that. And don’t feel you need to explain either, because you don’t. I understand.’

‘Alice …’ I say, and she shushes me.

‘It’s all right. Hannah told me who she is, and I understand, completely, you wanting to find her. Don’t feel bad about not telling me the truth; I understand that too.’

Her kindness is hard to bear, of course, and somewhere beneath the encircling madness I realise it is guilt that pins me to the bed. Guilt about Christina, guilt about Alice. The man who hurt two mothers would be a better title.

Who knew that a mental breakdown would affect the body just as much as the brain? For the all-encompassing dread I feel has given me limbs made of lead, a tight, bronchial chest, palpitations, sweats, dizziness and a surfeit of panic attacks, one after the other, which convince me I am about to die.

An emergency doctor is called out and I weep for the duration of his visit while Hannah and my mother whisper to each other in low-pitched, anxious voices. I am crying for Jacob and Alice, of course, for the destruction of their dream, for the life the three of us were not allowed to have. I am crying for aman who was once so desperate he hanged himself days before his child was born. But I cannot find the words to explain any of this, and the doctor diagnoses burnout and prescribes antidepressants and a fortnight off work.

After he’s gone, Hannah lies down on the bed next to me and holds my hand while I cry.

‘You’ll feel better as soon as the pills start to work,’ she says, and I manage to nod.

‘Do you think you might sleep?’ she asks, and I close my eyes, feigning tiredness, relieved when she gets up and goes downstairs.

All I want is to get back to Jacob. I cannot explain it, this bizarre communing with my dead father, but it is the only thing that matters, the only thing there is right now.

Alice sent me a photograph of Jacob in school uniform, aged around nine or ten. There is something about this picture that draws me in more than the others; I cannot stop looking at it. He is a handsome boy with his dark eyes and his sharp cheekbones and his full mouth; indisputably like me in this image. When I showed the photograph to my mother, she burst out crying, this woman I cannot once remember crying in my childhood.

‘It’s you,’ she said, when she was able to speak. ‘He is you.’

Now when I look at the photo, I absorb his solemnity, an adultness that belies his age. This boy who looks out at me knows more than he should; his life is not bikes and football and chips and chocolate. He looks at me and I look at him and in some bizarre, unexplainable way we are connected by pain; we know each other, we are each other; it is enough.

Then

Alice

He is dead. Not dead when I found him, not exactly, not clinically, not thoroughly. That happened in the ambulance minutes later, I am told. But my mind cannot contain this information and so instead I lie in our bed, curtains drawn against the light, a covering of his shirts, the arms of them wrapped around me. Rick is here with me as the hours turn into days, and he doesn’t say anything apart from my name occasionally, a whisperedAlice, because he understands there is nothing to say.

People come and go. Eddie. Tom. Robin. I talk to no one, Rick deals with it all.

They speak of the funeral, a horrid, pulsing word, but I will stay here in my frozen state and Rick will know, without me telling him, that this is all I can do.

He makes me drink water and eat food, tiny doll’s size mouthfuls of bread – ‘for the baby,’ he says – and though the child in my belly moves and kicks and seems ready to fight its way out, I am no longer connected to it.

Rick says, ‘Alice, are you going to stay here in this flat? Robin will cover the rent until you know what you’re doing to do,’ and I don’t like this conversation because he is forcing change right in behind my eyelids.

‘Stay here,’ I say, because although I am thinking of nothing,nothing is my chosen state, somewhere in the hinterland of my consciousness I believe Jake is still away on tour. And I am waiting for him to come back.

Rick runs a bath for me, water just above lukewarm – ‘We don’t want to boil the baby,’ he says, holding me steady while I step into the tub. He picks up the shampoo and massages it into my hair, and when I get out, he holds a towel for me and wraps it around me as if I’m a child. When I am dry, he passes me an old blue dressing gown of Jake’s to wear, and it smells so strongly of him, the scent of cedar and ferns and lime, that I am jolted into real, painful tears, as if I am crying for the first time.

We sit together on the brown sofa, Rick’s arms around me, and we cry and cry as the light changes in the window.

‘What will I do?’ I ask him, and he shakes his head.

‘Somehow we’ll get you through this. We’ll take it minute by minute if we need to.’

The baby comes that night. I wake to find the sheets soaked beneath me and I hobble through to the sitting room, where Rick is asleep on the sofa.

‘My waters have broken,’ I say, and he is fully alert before I’ve finished the sentence.

Unbeknownst to me, Rick has been studying the baby books and he knows exactly what to do.

‘We’ll call the hospital and let them know we’ll be coming in. But we don’t want to go too soon or they’ll just send us away again. We need to wait until your contractions are five minutes apart.’

---