68

Joanne Fish was born in Ipswich in 1968. Her parents split up when she was five years old and she moved with her mother to Norwich. Her mother died in a car crash when Joanne was ten and she moved to London to live with her father and his girlfriend in Lewisham. Her father was an actor, an alcoholic, always out of work and spending his dole money in the pub. He loved Joanne. She was his only child and the only child he would ever have after a vasectomy went wrong and resulted in the removal of both his testicles. His girlfriend was called Drew. She was twenty-one and a drug user. Joanne’s father left the two of them alone most nights when he went to the pub. Joanne would watch Drew in fascination, fixing up her drugs, tying off a vein, flicking the needle, sticking it in. She’d been living with her father and Drew for nearly two years before the inevitable happened and Drew offered to let her try it for herself. Joanne had just turned twelve.

Drew moved out when Joanne was thirteen and took her drugs with her. That was when Joanne started stealing. She stole clothes mainly, which she sold to girls at school. Then she started stealing from girls at school because it was easier. She was expelled six months later and put into care shortly afterwards. Between her fourteenth birthday and her eighteenth birthday she spent a total of eighteen months in juvenile detention centres and she was given her first proper prison sentence a week after her eighteenth birthday – three years for aggravated burglary. It was at Holloway that she finally found something she loved to do. Acting. Her teacher was a tall, thin man called Nicholas Sturgess, ten years her senior. He proposed to her the day she was released and she moved straight into his house, a three-bedroom terrace in New Cross.

She got a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama, completed a BA in Acting in Film and graduated when she was twenty-five. Her father died of liver failure two years later and Joanne nursed him until the end. Shortly afterwards, she and Nick started talking about having a family. They tried for three years without success, then embarked on a course of fertility treatment. Joanne’s years of drug abuse had damaged her reproductive organs, but finally, six months after starting treatment, Joanne’s period was late and a test revealed that she was indeed pregnant. Her pregnancy went smoothly and she delivered an eight-pound baby girl on New Year’s Day, the first girl to be born that year in the borough. They called her Maisie and took her home. Joanne had never felt so happy in her life. For once she hadn’t made a mess of things. For once she had everything a person was supposed to have. A career. A home. A lover. A family. Maisie was a good baby. She fed and she gained weight and she slept as well as could be expected. But Joanne was tired. Very tired. The labour had taken her through two nights of sleep and she still hadn’t recovered. So Joanne slept when she could, snatched moments, here and there. She slept when Maisie slept, either next to her on the double bed or on the sofa while she fed.

One Thursday afternoon, when Maisie was three weeks old, Joanne put her to her breast, her small soft body resting on a pillow on her lap. She switched on the television and she flicked until she found a programme she wanted to watch. It was Bargain Hunt. She watched for a while. Two married couples who’d met on holiday dashed round an antique fair, with one hour to find three antiques. The last thing she remembered was a woman looking at a cut-crystal decanter, buying it for twenty-five pounds. She adjusted Maisie’s head slightly, angling her nipple back into her baby’s warm mouth. And then she fell asleep.

When she woke up, Bargain Hunt had finished and Maisie was still and cool on the pillow. She put her hand to her cheek, gently, not wanting to wake her. Her skin felt icy. She looked blue. Joanne picked her up, and held her to her chest. Maisie flopped from side to side. She patted her back. She laid her back on the pillow and stared at her. Her heart pounded in her chest. What had been only a faint sense of discomfort had grown into a sickening certainty. Her baby wasn’t breathing. She rested the pillow on the sofa and got to her knees on the floor. She opened Maisie’s mouth and tipped back her head. She breathed into the sweet milk-scented cave of her mouth, once, twice, three times. She put her ear to her baby’s tiny ribcage and listened for her heartbeat, that sound that she’d listened to every month at the antenatal clinic while she was pregnant. She couldn’t hear it. A sob caught in her throat and she choked. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came.

She called the ambulance. She told them what had happened; she told them where she lived. She put down the phone, then she rested her cheek on her dead baby’s stomach until they came and took her baby away.

Nick met her at the hospital. Asphyxiation. Her baby had been suffocated to death, by her. She’d crushed her against the pillow, with the weight of her tiredness and the depth of her sleep.

They buried her the following week, just the two of them. Joanne couldn’t deal with anyone else. She couldn’t deal with anything. Nick said, ‘It’s not your fault, it’s not anyone’s fault.’ Then Nick said, ‘It’s my fault. I should have taken more paternity leave. I should have been there for you both. I knew how tired you were.’ Nick said, ‘We will get over this. We will.’ Nick said, ‘I love you, Joanne. I love you. Please, don’t cut me out.’ Nick said, ‘Maybe you should think about therapy.’ Nick said, ‘I can’t go on like this.’

And then, one day, five months after Maisie’s death, sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s surgery, hoping to be prescribed some antidepressants strong enough to block out all the pain, Joanne saw Toby’s advert in Private Eye. She picked up her pills from the chemist, she went home and she composed a letter full of lies. When Toby wrote back and offered her the room, she packed a bag and she left. It was a Saturday morning. Nick was at the barber’s. She left him a note that said, ‘Don’t try to find me.’ There was a march down her street in support of the legalization of cannabis. A man dressed up as a cannabis leaf smiled at her as she loaded her suitcase into the boot of a taxi. ‘Peace, man,’ he said. ‘Peace.’ He pressed a small unlit spliff into the palm of her hand and he carried on his way.

She settled into Toby’s house and started temping. Every week a different company, a different role. Everyone seemed to want to employ an out-of-work actress. People seemed happier to think that someone creative was filing their paperwork or entering their data or answering their phone. And Joanne loved the freedom that the anonymity of temping gave her. She could be anyone she wanted. She made up stories. I live in Chelsea. My husband’s an art dealer. I live in Chiswick with my sister – she’s a hairdresser. I lived in LA when I was twenty-one, slept with Christian Slater. She took each job as if it were a role in a film. She planned her costumes, researched her part, learned her lines. Every day when she left Toby’s house she became a different person and, every time a temp job finished, so did the person she’d created. The clothes she’d worn would be laundered, ironed, folded up and put away and a new wardrobe would be purchased. Sometimes a job didn’t last long enough to wear everything she’d bought, and clothes would stay unworn in carrier bags, cosmetics unopened in drawers.

And then, one day, she’d been walking home from the Tube station and a tall, fair man had grabbed her elbow. It was Nick. ‘I thought you were dead,’ he said. ‘I thought you were dead.’ She packed a bag and she checked herself into a small hotel in Bloomsbury. She stayed there for two weeks, until she ran out of money, then she came back to Toby’s house. Toby had changed. His hair was cut brutally short. He had a black eye. He seemed harder, more substantial. He made her talk to him. It was the first time she’d talked to anyone, as herself, as Joanne Fish, in more than two years. It was very strange. Toby gave her a note from Nick. It said, ‘Please come home. I haven’t moved on and I can’t until you’re back where you belong. Nothing in this world makes any sense without you. I love you.’

She didn’t know what to do, what to think. She’d put Nick in a box when she moved into Toby’s house and she’d imagined that he’d have done the same with her. She thought about him occasionally, imagined him with a new wife, a new baby, getting on with his life. And who could blame him? She couldn’t imagine why he’d ever have wanted to be with someone like her in the first place, someone whose body was raddled and old before its time, whose arms were scarred by years of drug abuse and stained with the ink scribbles she’d endured to prove her worth in prison. She’d failed as an actress. She’d failed as a mother. She’d failed as a human being. But for some reason he still wanted her in his life.

She kept the note close to her at all times. She pulled it out of her handbag and read it at work. She absorbed its meaning word by word, day by day. And every time she read it, she let a little bit more of her old self trickle back into her soul. And then Toby called a meeting, told her something she’d never thought possible. He was selling the house, kicking her out. He talked to her in his room, told her she was turning into a freak. She’d suspected as much, but to hear it put so frankly, so directly, was like having a bucket of iced water poured over her head. She went to bed at midnight that night, full of wine and thoughts and feelings. She glanced round her room, at the shadowy lumps of unworn clothes and the ghostly images of her dead mother and father in the frame next to her bed. She picked up the picture and peeled off the back cover. Then she pulled out a picture of Maisie and held it to her heart, hot, steady tears flowing down her cheeks.