It’s hard to know what to do with the yellow helium balloon you’re holding when you discover your wife is missing.
Especially when there is something else that requires your hands: the newborn baby who is screaming from a cot in the corner of the room.
You hold on to the balloon.
You clutch it tighter, like it could lift you up, up and away from this, whatever this is.
You feel your chest tighten.
Your wife. Gone.
Missing from the maternity ward, a day after your daughter was born.
You stand there, looking around. For your wife, for somewhere to put this balloon, for someone to help, for something that can explain what is happening in this moment that shouldn’t look like this, that should look like euphoria and newness and nostalgia and life.
You cling, cling, cling to the balloon.
The baby cries louder.
Your chest pulls tighter.
You cling.
The usual bustle of the maternity unit happens just outside the room you are in but it feels, then, like you are sectioned off from it. You know you should go to them, tell somebody, but that involves leaving this room and you can’t remember how to do that. Can’t remember how to move.
A bell rings and an exhausted midwife sighs, her sensible shoes bouncing a rhythm up the corridor.
Finally, you remember how to turn around. Go to open your mouth as she passes. But you aren’t sure what to say because what if you’ve got this wrong? You know really though, don’t you. You know.
Another dad smiles at you as he walks past the room, soft Stan Smiths moving as fast as they can towards a family that his chest will always twitch for now.
You stare at him, living your alternate reality.
You hold on to the balloon.
A shell-shocked woman is pushed past next in a heavy wheelchair, holding a doll. Okay, a baby, but surely a doll. The woman is wearing no bra, exposed, dressing gown open, whole self open. It is just minutes since she gave birth; the most vulnerable of times.
You stand still, still.
The balloon bobs.
The baby cries. Louder again. Piercing now.
And it’s that that forces you in the end to let the balloon go, drift, and to move at wading pace across the room to pick up your daughter. You clutch her to your chest. You sit on the bed with her and wait for your wife to come back. The baby doesn’t settle. The crying gets louder.
Your wife does not come back.
The baby roots around, pursing her tiny lips for milk she should be able to depend upon.
The tightness in your chest gets worse.
Still, you wait and you wait and you wait. But you have to know, don’t you, when it’s time to give up. The baby’s cries tell you, if nothing else.
You walk to the nurses’ station.
‘Her mum,’ you say as the baby screams even louder now, appalled at the absence of food. ‘Her mum has gone.’
And they stare at you, mirroring your horror.
This is how I picture it happening anyway.
Who knows what the reality was but somehow, my husband Marc found out I was gone.
I go over and over scenarios. Flashbacks, they feel like, except I never lived through them. Doesn’t stop them coming though; hourly, maybe more. Waking me up if I sleep. Making me long for sleep if I’m awake.
This one comes now as I walk in this mismatched black and yellow bikini to the edge of the lake to dip my feet in the water and try not to spear my soles with rocks and then, submerge myself. And in that first second, perhaps two, I am able to forget what brought me here. Water’s always done that. I’m not religious but every time I submerge myself it feels like starting over.
Hundreds of tadpoles swim around my feet.
Look at you, tiny creatures, at the beginning of everything.
I think of those people who pay to have fish eat the hard skin from their feet and how it’s the start of a process of being eaten alive and how weird we are, human beings, how weird.
I am as new as the tadpoles. If only the feeling would last. Instead, what has happened slowly comes back to me. It is fully remembered by my own body. Your mind forgets, briefly; your muscles don’t.
When I am deep enough that I can’t stand, I lie on my back in this lake hundreds of miles away from that sterile room and hundreds of miles from my newborn baby.
The tadpoles don’t brave this part; fish swim around me.
I take a deep breath.
One of my expansive, milky breasts tries again to break free of its bikini top and I push it back in. Between my legs, I bleed. My stomach hangs loose like an empty plastic bag.
On the shore, a woman in her early twenties walks past, neat breasts fitted into triangles, leaking nothing but lake water, unlike mine. Her rucksack lies on shore.
My heart starts to hammer. Is that her? The woman I came here for?
But then I catch a glimpse of her face. No. This woman joins a group at the edge of the woodland and I hear the clink of a beer bottle. The smell of meat fat on a barbecue drifts over and makes me gag and I think of the signs on the drive here that warn of forest fires, but I feel no fear.
Not of forest fires anyway.
There is only one thing that scares me.
I feel the slime and rocks as I wade out of the lake. I don’t have shoes on my feet like the other swimmers; there wasn’t the time to think of it. The time, or the inclination.
I sit down on the shore, the rocks immediately digging into my thighs. I experiment, pushing them into the ground, feeling them imprint. Feeling them hurt. Harder. They should hurt.
I should hurt.
‘You want a beer?’
It’s the woman who just walked past. French, knowing automatically that I am English, as often happens. She is barefoot; has come down to the water to paddle her feet, cool down.
Her hand, outstretched, brandishes a stubby bottle.
I look up at her and want to laugh. Me? Really?
I have a baby face that has meant I am often mistaken for someone younger than I am. But everything from the breasts down surely now paints to weathered? My hand sits awkwardly over skin I could scrunch up like Play-Doh.
‘No. I’m okay thanks.’
Perhaps she just feels pity for me; alone, no joy.
She shrugs.
‘Pas de problem.’
As she walks back to her friends, she is framed like a picture, steep rocks behind her, lake to the side. Something ridiculous happens and three women on horseback arrive and head straight into the water next to me, the horses paddling, majestic, and the whole scene would be idyllic if I weren’t living in it, if I didn’t know that it is a hell.
She smiles at the horses, this other woman, wades out to stroke them and looks up, awed. And then she walks away, her already tanned body about to spend a summer outdoors, travelling perhaps, drinking at times, lazing in hammocks, on parched sand, in beach bars. It is May, and everything is ahead. Being young and wild is how it should be, but not how it is guaranteed to be, we now know. Not so long ago, we lived through a pandemic. If you can, you kiss and you dance and you share a beer. If you can, you live.
I watch her. Remember how that feels, to live. Twist the rings on my left hand, one at a time, like I’m fixing machinery.
I remember how it is to be her. How a tan and an ankle bracelet make you feel when you are young; a goddess, a myth, for those two weeks after the flight lands home, until September forces you into tights and your hair braid unravels and your tan peels off on your fingertips in front of EastEnders.
I look down at myself. Could she really have mistaken me for one of her own; someone who was working in a bar for a few months to save enough to head to South East Asia?
I look around.
If that’s not her, where is the woman I’m waiting for?
I feel a tug of impatience.
The lake laps at my unpainted toenails, uncared for feet. It pushes it a bit, creeping all the way up to thighs that are now smarting from the rocks.
More young people arrive, carrying boxes of wine, picnic blankets and camping chairs over the rickety bridge from the patch of land that functions as a car park. Music comes with them, moving in their wake, like it’s emitted from their pores when really it’s just their iPhones. There is a strong smell of weed.
It’s Friday, late afternoon, just slipping into evening. Friday at the lake means party time. Even the fishermen swig from those fat beer bottles as they finish up; the Gallic equivalent of the after-work pint.
Many of them put a hand up to wave. The world is friendly, since Covid-19. We like people more than we did.
All of them are framed by the rocks that climb up on each side like they are hiding the body of water from view. Perhaps they are: nature is smart; keeping a natural beauty away from the bulk of tourists seems as good a reason for the formation of some rock as any. I think of my sister Loll, then: a pharmacist, who would be exasperated if I said that out loud.
It hurts to think of Loll.
I press harder onto the rocks.
My thighs sting. My breasts throb.
The water is so clear that I can see my reflection in it but that’s not something enjoyable.
My face without make-up looked young and bright not so long ago. Now it had a tendency towards sleep-deprived and drawn. Lots can change in a few months. Faces. People. Lives.
When other people walk by, they would think I have a hangover maybe, or – if they had seen my tent, at a campsite round the corner – that I’ve been travelling for too long, in need of a hot bath and a freshly washed duvet. Similar to a lot of the people across the lake, whooping, shouting to friends to join them in the water. When they swim, they are lithe like fish.
I look down at myself. My limbs thin, contrasting with my middle.
If people asked, I would tell them my name is Kate, as planned, but they don’t because I don’t speak to them or I bat them away, like I did with the Frenchwoman and her bière.
I don’t speak to anyone, as much as I can help it.
Sometimes in the evening, I see the wetness spreading outwards on to my T-shirt from my nipples. I glance down, clasp my hand across my chest. I try my best to drift off so that I don’t have to think about it.
And then, I do talk.
And it’s always a version of the same thing.
‘Please, I want to live.’
And with that line, every time without fail, I wake up.
Because I scream it so loud.