‘Two days after I fell down the stairs and had the accident, I went into labour. Three weeks early is pretty unusual for a first baby. Probably the shock.’
My whole body starts to shake at the memory. The last one before things went so badly wrong.
Adam paces a few steps across the campsite to put our bottles into the recycling; quick glance back at me over his shoulder. He thinks he is being subtle but I know that he is keeping eyes on me at all times. Monitoring me on Marc’s behalf.
When he comes back he opens another beer.
‘Want one?’
I shake my head. Two has already had an effect, after nine months sober.
I need to be lucid.
The day I went into labour was a Saturday. I was sitting on a birthing ball in the kitchen with my hospital bag spread out on the table in front of me, vests and tiny nappies and bottles of Lucozade spilling out everywhere. Repacking, again.
Fixating on all of those tiny details you fixate on at that point in pregnancy. My head had never been so consumed by two behemoths simultaneously. It hurt. They flip-flopped. Pushed each other out for a front-seat place. Did I really need gardening mats in my changing bag? Was my husband cheating on me when he said he was at band practice? If I left him today, where would I take my baby home to? If I didn’t leave him, would I be safe?
The bulb in the kitchen flickered.
‘We must change that,’ I thought, the last moments when the mundane mattered to me, before Marc walked in and the whole thing was set in motion.
‘Hello,’ I said.
He looked up. Grabbed the cafetiere. ‘What’s with the gardening mats?’
‘To kneel on during the birth,’ I said, embarrassed as I often was talking about these details. Boring me. Unsexy me. ‘They mentioned it at NCT, remember? That it can be useful in some positions. Doesn’t matter.’ I laughed awkwardly.
‘I think you’ve remembered that wrong,’ he said, a scoff. ‘I doubt she meant actual gardening mats.’
The adoration that had welcomed me home from the hospital had become boring to him now. I kicked myself for being so naïve, thinking that might be permanent. It hadn’t even lasted the weekend. How often had this happened?
My cheeks reddened. I wished I was standing up; authoritative, proud.
But the baby was heavy and bearing down by then and I was sitting down most of the time now, bouncing a light rhythm that I had stopped noticing.
Something in me had switched; I knew I needed an answer, to bring this to a conclusion. I knew I needed to leave him, and if I was doing that, what was the point of staying silent?
To my annoyance, my voice shook.
‘Marc, where have you been going when you said you were practising with the band?’
I shudder, remembering his facial expression as he looked up slowly from making his coffee. A smirk. An arrogance. A knowledge that it didn’t matter what I knew; I would never leave.
Back in the now, I break from my story and look at Adam. I can see the darkness of sweat in the armpits of his T-shirt.
The complacency was the worst thing. Marc could barely make himself sound sorry.
‘It’s not like you care where I go,’ he muttered, sulky, a child.
‘You’re right,’ I said slowly. ‘I don’t care. I don’t want to be with you anymore. I want a divorce.’
I hadn’t left him when he tried to drown me in the sea but the stairs had been the final straw. The threat to my baby tangible. I thought back often to what his mother had said that day in the care home: yes, she spoke through the fog of dementia but hadn’t some of it rung a bell? This raging man, rejected by women for years and now desperate to show them who was boss.
And now, the limited amount of protection my pregnancy had given me about to be gone.
I thought back to that beach.
What reason now would he have to pull my face out of the water? What was I waiting for here, other than death?
I stopped bouncing the rhythm.
He burst out laughing.
‘Divorce! Even your family knows I’m the best you’ll get. So don’t fucking speak to me like that again.’
And then the usual trajectory began. Marc sneered at me, about what I had done wrong, how I had ruined our relationship and he came for me. I felt the baby move; his fingers trace a line on my neck as I was forced backwards off the ball and up against the door.
But this time, something new.
‘All this band business, you’re acting crazy,’ he said then, and it was the quietness that gave me the goose bumps. The calm. Like he had just thought of something. ‘You do know that imagining things is an early sign of losing your mind?’
He walked away from me.
‘Not surprising,’ he muttered. ‘Crazy is in your genes.’
I hated him for lying. It had happened. Macca said those things.
Didn’t he?
But I hated him for everything else too. For the sneer in his voice. For the flippant way he talked about mental health, void of sympathy. I hated him on my mum’s behalf. When she went through her postpartum psychosis, the worst thing that had ever happened to her, he would have laughed and called her ‘crazy.’
I imagined that future daughter again.
The baby felt so low now, I thought it would burst into the room. I tried to breathe.
Are you a girl? And if not, is that any better; a boy, learning to be a man with an example like this?
‘What?’
‘In your genes,’ he repeated. ‘That’s why they’re monitoring you, right? Because you’re genetically predisposed to be crazy?’
I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, Marc.
He hopped up, large frame on our kitchen worktop; dangled his bare feet like a teen. Dared me. Would I really oppose him now? I touched my hand to my stomach, held it up. Moved my fingers to my neck, sore from my fall.
Something surged in my insides. Not now. Not now. But the baby wasn’t interested in my timelines.
In seconds, I was bent double on the floor, then flopped over my pregnancy ball like a rag doll, rasping for breath. It couldn’t be happening now, could it? I still had three weeks. I glanced at my phone, up on the table.
I looked up at Marc. When people say words can hurt more than physical pain, they aren’t counting labour. Nothing he said in that moment could mean anything. Bring it on, I thought. Whatever.
But I was wrong.
‘You break up with me or start telling anyone any lies about me,’ he said, eyes on my belly, ‘and I swear to God I will take that baby off you. I will take that baby and let them know how crazy you are. So that no one in their right fucking mind would let you near them.’
I looked up from the floor.
I was wrong. There were words that could penetrate.
Breathe, breathe, breathe.
Breathe.
When Marc, still smirking, went to the toilet, I had time to send a message to Steffie. I typed as my breath came short and shallow, knowing labour was coming soon, that something worse may be coming even sooner, typing against the clock, before it wasn’t possible anymore and my body insisted on my full attention.
‘Everything is a lie,’ I messaged Steffie then, as I accepted that I was in the early stages of labour; pain I had never felt, meaning I typed fast, with errors and random letters in the middle of it.
Send.
I was bringing a person into existence. I was doing that with just my own body. I was strong.
I was about to start a second message, to try and explain better. I knew it would be a shock: all the Jekyll and Hyde clichés were true with Marc. People thought he was a character, a joy, a gem, a big kid. A romantic, an old-fashioned guy. A traditionalist, buying me that big expensive diamond that we couldn’t afford and I didn’t even like and that I would never in a million years have chosen.
But they would see.
Breathe, breathe, breathe.
I started typing.
But then he came back from the bathroom and, in between contractions, I slipped my phone away into my hospital bag.
My husband sat down on the floor against the wall. Locked eyes with me. I braced against the ball. The wave started to build again. He didn’t even register. Our baby was coming; he was too focused on threatening me to pay it much attention.
‘You’re not in control of your own mind, inventing all this stuff about the band,’ he ploughed on. ‘As if anyone would let you keep a baby if I told them that.’
These are contractions, I thought: I should be timing this. But to do that I would need someone who could press a button on a timer. Who wasn’t – as ever – too focused on themselves.
‘My mind,’ I gasped. ‘Is fine.’
One eyebrow rose. ‘You sure?’
And the truth? He had ravaged it so thoroughly by then that no, I wasn’t sure. I was no longer sure of anything.