That first week with Maria was like falling in love. Nothing in my life before or since felt stranger than that unreal week. The baby herself was magical: the faint vanilla smell of her; her vivid dark eyes, which as the week went by altered in color from inky blue to the blue of a mussel shell to a lighter, more astonishing color, pale and vivid as a thread of blue ice in snow. I stared at her tiny fingers; lifted up her hand, marveling at the lightness of it, no more weight than a rose petal. I felt that she was studying me, too. Perhaps not marveling quite as much. I almost wanted to apologize in advance. Thinking of that magistrate’s comments. The terrible childhood idea. I’m so sorry it was my life you landed in. This is it. This is who you got. I’ll do my best.
At least Maria wasn’t born into squalor and starvation. I found myself doing little calculations like that. Trying to weigh up the ways in which my life and hers would be different. The tasseled Moroccan flat was filled with sweet-smelling freesias and roses, and fruit—someone even found bananas from somewhere, though I had to hide them when Bobby was around. There were constant visitors that first week: Stella and Tony and Gloria and Beattie and Bobby, and each of them lifting the baby and gazing at her as if she was the most breathtaking, astonishing, miraculous thing—which she was, of course. She slept soundly, snuggled in cashmere, her wrist encircled in a gold christening bracelet. She didn’t enter the world with her mother in shackles either, in D-wing of Holloway. But I did go back there, sooner than I’d hoped, and my little respite of cashmere and gold, freesias and fruit, was brief.
Here’s what happened: about a week after the birth, Gloria was visiting. I was suddenly in staggering, burning agony, wondering if something wasn’t very wrong indeed. I went to the bathroom, to try and examine myself, but somehow couldn’t even crouch down to do it; my body from my vagina upwards was ablaze, and the next thing I knew, I blacked out on the bathroom floor. I had no memory of falling, or of anything else after that. If Gloria hadn’t been there, I dread to think what might have happened, how long it might have been until someone came.
I woke in a hospital bed. Metal bar behind the pillow at my head. Handcuffs on my wrists.
After giving birth, Beattie had stitched me, rubbing me first with an ice cube to numb the pain and doing it as swiftly as she could, giving me a huge slug of whiskey to try and get me through it. It was brutal, but that pain was nothing to what I felt on waking up, in Homerton Mothers’ Hospital, to the sight of police and doctors and that clinking sound between my wrists and the knowledge that I was defeated.
I knew Gloria would be sorry that she did what she did. She told me later she was scared, more scared than she’d ever been, and she thought I was going to die. In fact she was right: I would have died if she hadn’t made the decision to get me to Homerton Mothers’ Hospital and in fact driven me there herself and left me there in reception—not wanting to be caught for aiding and abetting a prisoner on the run—but that wasn’t much comfort, then. I wanted to die. Turned out I had septicemia from the stitches, and, without the help of antibiotics, the feverish spasms that were shaking my body from my bowels to my head would have cost me my life. That was nothing to me. All I could think of was how stupid Nature is, as my dumb cowlike body continued to produce milk from my aching breasts, flooding my hospital gown; not understanding that it had all been for nothing and there was no use for that milk now. It would never reach the baby. How could I know when I’d see Maria again?