Mum and Dad have told me to go back to sleep.
We, that is me and the newborn, have just escaped one of those first-world crises that deserves no sympathy at all – a loft conversion, the ceiling vomiting down the stairs. The plan is to stay with my parents in Ayr for the duration.
I lie there in the single bed I used infrequently as a teenager, staring at the cheap paper lampshade and the wobbly edge of paint between ceiling and wall. Through the curtained window, I can hear Dad’s whistle as he pushes the buggy towards the beach.
This ground-floor bedroom is as serviceable as all the others I have inhabited. A room that had other functions in the months I was away. There is a bookcase filled with House Group reading material, and a collection of chairs pushed up against the walls for those mornings when the church group calls. Now the bed is crushed into a corner, so as to keep the baby from falling from it. I rearranged the furniture myself, like a maniac, the first night.
There is only the dry noise of the wind through the trees now Dad’s whistle has died away. It is one of those rowdy sea winds that throws the branches against one another. Being in the midst of a strong wind is how it has felt since the morning the chorionic villus sampling results came in.
Within hours of receiving them, like a Victorian lady in crisis, I had a violent attack of the nerves.
My skin and my self crawled with something no scratch could soothe. I put it down to relief that our baby could live and guilt over how I had allowed myself to be coerced into believing only ‘healthy’ children deserve to.
My father-in-law, the doctor, who had advised us to abort, weighed in again, ringing with news that I had gone down with multiple sclerosis. ‘The nerves’ had left me weakened down one side of my body, pins and needles scattering through my limbs and my back.
When I mentioned the words ‘multiple sclerosis’ to the consultant at Addenbrooke’s, his pencil snapped in half.
‘MS employs the word multiple for a reason,’ he said, his eyes fixed on my vast stomach, stowing the pencil halves in the drawer of his desk. ‘No professional would diagnose you with it until you had had another deterioration. It would be no kindness to use that diagnosis at this stage.’
More than stupidly I then rang the MS Society for reassurance, and was told that it was rare to have an ‘episode’ in pregnancy. ‘The reason women are counselled not to have children’, she said, ‘is really about how quickly their symptoms deteriorate once a child is born. It is an exhausting time.’
And it is. Matthias has been back to work since we returned from hospital. When the midwife comes knocking and finds me alone, I confess to her that I don’t know what the hell I am doing.
‘Don’t worry,’ she tells me. ‘If you’ve been parented well, you’ll be fine.’
I take to my bed.
I am a terrible mother, and this knowing means I do not sleep, but lie rigid in my parents’ single bed, staring at the paper lampshade in a curtained gloom.
Soon I am worrying whether Dad has bothered to take the baby’s hat and mittens with him, and once I struggle down from that worry the next one starts to loom. They have already been gone an hour. Worry has become a convincing cover for a yawning lack of love.
I have substituted milk. The Bean feeds until he’s sick. He cries for hours. And each time he does I am unable to find the emotion to talk, or hug, or smile. Instead I lift my shirt with resignation, marooned on the sofa in front of some truly terrible daytime television, the constant pins and needles a ghostly reminder that self-catheterisation will be next.
I am not good at doing nothing either. Boredom has always felt dangerous. It is the time of day for a lynching, the time that leaves enough space for that appalling sickness for home. Made mute by the collective lies we tell ourselves about how wonderful new motherhood is, I have had no authentic conversation with anyone for months.
It will be the first time in my relationship with Mum that I am able to feel empathy for her, and what she might have gone through in those early years. It is hard enough having a single baby, without looking after two crazed stepchildren too. I try to imagine how she might have survived, and frankly can’t.
While the building works at home slow to a standstill, away in Ayr I spend a good deal of time in church, or being pleasant to fellow congregation members in tedious community hall-type settings, elderly men peering down my shirt as I feed. But all of it is better than being alone with the knowledge of how terrible I am.
But Mum and Dad are good. Here the days are not as diabolical as they were at home. There the Bean was often even more relieved than I when Matthias got in. They did baths together, they did crooning and they did love. In Scotland there is holding, and hugging too. Mum and Dad shuffle the Bean away at every opportunity so that they might sniff and tickle and poke. Each morning Dad walks along the seafront with dog and buggy. Back home, he sings. For whole hours our Bean forgets his hunger. He forgets to cry.
Through the curtained gloom I hear the dog’s claws clack along the garden path outside and fly from the room. Head full of missing mittens, hats and feeds I find Dad out in the hall, bent over the buggy, lifting the Bean from beneath his blankets. He is singing in barely audible tones:
‘If that mockingbird don’t sing, Papa’s going to buy …’
In the mouth of the hood the Bean’s huge brown eyes blink in that sleepy slow way babies do, as if they want to check what’s in front of them can’t disappear. When his lids reopen the Bean watches love, transfixed.