I know that my mother is asleep. I can hear her whistling snores through the wall that separates our adjoining rooms. She may deny it in the morning – she has never liked to admit to sleep, as though it were a weakness, a taking of her eye off things, but it comes easily to her, even in her armchair as she watches television. Her snores are not rhythmic or regular – each one varies from the last in its volume and duration and there are moments of apnoea and fitful coughs in between. They compete with the drone of the air con to keep me awake.
We are staying at a hotel near Montclair, New Jersey – Charlie, Mum, two-year-old Nipey and me. It is July 2011, and we’re here for a solo show of Charlie’s latest work. Mum joined us on the trip, ostensibly to help mind her grandchild but really because she loves being on holiday and loves to be part of things. While she is here she makes plans for her next trip, after Christmas – to the Galapagos Islands, to see the giant tortoises. At breakfast she will talk of lunch: that’s how she lives, never in the moment or in the past, always looking ahead.
I’m on a sofa bed in the sitting room. The Nipe is in the bedroom next door with her dad. After four nights of watching Barney in the small hours with a zingy awake toddler, my need for sleep is acute. As Charlie has always been a better sleeper than I, we all agreed that tonight he would let her share with him. I don’t know the time, but it’s bright enough to manoeuvre my way to the window without turning on lights. I lift the net curtain to try and gauge the hour: it still looks balmy outside, the palm trees around the floodlit pool are motionless, there are no ripples on the water. Yesterday it was a temper-fraying 110 degrees Fahrenheit, too hot to be outdoors. We’d gone instead by taxi into central Manhattan to the Guggenheim Museum.
Rather than share a lift full of sweating tourists there, we’d chosen to walk up the long spiralling ramp to the top. The Nipe, who would ordinarily complain about such a climb and stretch her arms out to be carried, was too absorbed in a private game to notice. She was bouncing her doll, ‘Cloth Dolly’ – a strange little toy with tufty red hair, a cloth body and hard plastic shoes – along the edge of the shallow boundary wall as we looked at art. Mum was in high good form, as she would say of herself. She had studied history of art as a mature student so she knew a thing or two, and now she was in a gallery with a real contemporary artist whom she questioned and hoped to impress, finishing his sentences in that muttery way she had, as if to say she was just about to say the same thing. Charlie was competitive about his work and dismissive of a lot of what appealed to my mum, but he wanted to show off his knowledge, and for once his child, who didn’t like to be excluded, wasn’t interrupting their conversation. He was always drawn to Nipey when she was quiet, her attention absorbed in something else. He snuck up behind her now, as Mum considered a piece entitled All the Clothes of a Woman, grabbed her round the waist and lifted her into his arms.
‘Poor wee Nipey, wet and weary, sold her bed, slept in the hay. What a silly wee billy she was.’ He squeezed her and gave her lots of quick little kisses on the neck. She humoured him for a moment then gave me a pleading sort of look.
‘Dada! I’m dus busy doing something,’ she said, struggling to be free so that she could get back to her game. Always a little hurt by her rejections, Charlie was silent for a while, but became more animated when he saw the sunlight flooding through the glass dome above us as we reached the top floor: ‘Wow, look at that Tintoretto sky!’ Mum and I craned our necks to see it for ourselves – and at that moment, out of bravery or boldness or both, the Nipe dangled her doll over the wall and let her go. Down she fell, all the way to the ground floor where she hit a Japanese woman on the head. When we peered over to look, the Nipe on tiptoes and crying, a dozen faces stared back up at us.
Cloth Dolly was on the floor in the centre of a gathering crowd, limbs askew, like a tiny murder victim. A security guard picked her up, sought us out in the crowd and beckoned us down. We apologized to the Japanese woman, who was being comforted by her family, Cloth Dolly was confiscated, and we were led to a room where we were interrogated for over half an hour before the doll was returned and we were encouraged out of the building. It would be funny in the future, a funny little story to tell friends, but none of us found it funny that day. We were all too hot, too irritable, too jet-lagged – and there was something wrong with Charlie.
At breakfast he had stood with an empty glass in front of the drinks dispenser, not knowing what he needed to do to get some orange juice. I watched him accept a stranger’s help when they saw him standing there. And this evening he had complained again to the stiff-faced, immaculate woman at reception that the lifts weren’t working, though behind us everyone else was happily ascending and descending. He got lost on his way back to our room when he went to get some water from the bar and had flung a shoe at the window in anger. He’d been asking me to order for him in restaurants all week, he couldn’t understand the currency and the phone was an endless source of frustration – when he tried to dial nine for an outside line, he kept getting emergency services.
The sound of something being knocked over in the bedroom, the glug of water spilt. ‘Cunt!’
I get up, turn the knob of the door. I can see our child in the slice of light I’ve created. She is lying across the bed in her vest and pull up, the covers kicked off as always and her little legs bent at the knee as is her habit, as though she’s mid sit-up. Her eyes are closed but her mouth is working furiously at her sucky blanket. She is trying her best to stay asleep.
Charlie is standing by the wall with his hands against it, inching along as though feeling for a secret opening. He looks at me in a daze, my presence adding to his disorientation.
‘Charlie, what are you doing? It’s the middle of the night.’
‘Ach, sweetie, there you are. I was just looking for you,’ he says, with no attempt at a whisper, lunging forward to embrace me. He stubs his foot on the bedside table.
‘Fuck!’
‘Be quiet,’ I hiss. Not only is he about to wake our finally time-adjusted child, he is cursing in front of her.
‘Where the hell is the toilet? I need a pee.’ I take hold of his arm and tug him into the bathroom. I turn on the light. He farts, apologizes. I groan.
‘Don’t flush, OK? It’ll wake her.’ I leave him, creep out of the room and settle back onto the sofa bed; the springs squeak in complaint.
I turn my pillow, rest my head on its cool side and listen to Mum’s snores, the air conditioning and now some new sounds: the ping of the lift, the rattle of a trolley along the corridor. Should I move Nipe back in here with me? Her dad seems drunk but he couldn’t be – he had driven all of us out to dinner so hadn’t been drinking the night before. I take the lazy decision.
I am resentful of our friends, a couple from Dublin, who are on the same floor as us but at the opposite end. They had travelled over to join us for the week, leaving their young daughter at home with her grandparents, and are having a wonderful holiday of late nights and lie-ins. She told me yesterday that they’d never had such good and satisfying sex. Tomorrow they would be flown by private jet to visit rock-star friends in the Hamptons. Yesterday morning she was in bed with a hangover, and he was running about the place getting things to help make it endurable for her, while I tried to teach Charlie how to use the room key.
‘He’s become quite dependent on you, pet, hasn’t he?’ Mum had said to me the day before. This was mystifying to a woman who, widowed at the age of fifty, was used to doing everything for herself. She was the most practical, unflappable person I had ever known; for every problem she found a solution, in a cloudy sky she always saw the patch of blue. But Charlie’s never been practical, I told her and kept telling myself, that’s not what I signed up for. He’s an artist, he’s creative, he thinks differently. I could explain away his recent disorientation, his dependency, his inability to use money, his wild outbursts: he was drunk, he was stressed, he was older (sixty-two to my forty-two now) he was bad with jet lag, the heat was getting to him, he had always been hot-tempered, had always been dark.
At his opening he had been poised and dapper in his loose black suit and trilby hat, and so articulate as he was filmed for a local television channel; he had the interviewer laughing and nodding in recognition from the offset. He posed for photos, answered questions from enthusiastic buyers, even signed some autographs. Mum had been the first to buy a painting – one of Charlie’s hens. ‘Dora’, I think he had named her, who would go nicely alongside ‘Arnold’, the hen she had purchased at his last show. The evening had gone well, lots of red stickers and several half ones, which meant that they were thinking about it. There was nothing wrong with Charlie.
‘Dada? Mum!’
I get up, go back into the bedroom, turn on the light. Nipey is sitting up in bed, holding her forearm against her eyes to shield them from the stark brightness, her face crumpled with confusion. ‘It’s not my fault,’ Charlie says, without turning around. He is standing at the side of the bed, with his boxers around his ankles. He is peeing onto the white sheets. ‘I couldn’t find the toilet.’
*
It’s a grey afternoon in February 2012. We are at home in Dublin, eight months after our trip to the States, now a hot summer memory. A friend and her children are here to play. Charlie has been up in his studio working/hiding since they arrived – he doesn’t like children who aren’t his own, dismissing them universally as too noisy, too snotty, too messy. This morning he went from room to room to remove or put out of reach all of his collection of toys so that they wouldn’t be touched or disturbed.
I am at the sink filling the kettle when I hear Charlie call me. I open the kitchen door, stand by the banisters and shout back at him. ‘Julia?’ he says again. His voice is quiet and near. I walk through the hall, stop at the bottom of the stairs. Charlie is standing at the top of them.
‘Can you come up here please?’
‘What’s wrong? You sound strange.’
We’d just come in from the garden – my friend and I had been down at the wooden playhouse, trying to keep warm and make conversation while shunting our kids up the ladder or holding them round their waists as they hung off the monkey bars. We’d trampled back indoors when it began to get dark, mucky and cold with dog dirt on our shoes. The orangey light coming from the kitchen had cheered me. I’ve always disliked afternoons, am always happier in the evenings. And I’d felt disconcerted that day. My mother had set off for her trip to the Galapagos Islands a few days earlier. She wasn’t fit enough, I thought, for such a long journey. I never liked her to be away and always worried about her, had a general sense of unease, until she was home again.
Has one of the kids damaged something of Charlie’s? This is what I am thinking as I climb the stairs. He takes my hand and leads me in silence to the sitting room. What is he about to show me? I imagine spilled paint, broken toys, smashed vases. Nothing. Everything is normal, everything is in its place. He tells me to sit down. I sit, he sits on the coffee table opposite me, our knees are touching. I want him to do something silly, the sort of thing he does to make Nipey laugh – I want him to stand on the coffee table and balance on one leg without wobbling.
He says that there had been a phone call: that my mother had gone swimming that morning, that there had been a big wave, that the wave had knocked her over and that she had died. My mother has died. My mum was dead, is dead.
I see her stride into the water in her black Speedo swimsuit, a cap of white rubber roses high on her head and those swimming socks that kids wear on her incongruously tiny feet. I see her arms at her sides, hands turned outwards, always graceful, though she is heavy, always girlish though she is seventy-two. I see her lower herself into the water and start to swim, taking small, swift breaststrokes that somehow propel her forward. I imagine the water: clear, almost translucent, and warm. ‘Ah, this is heavenly,’ she says aloud to herself through the metallic-sounding suck of the retreating tide.
I see the wave she doesn’t see, building behind her: huge, heavy, grit-filled. I see it crash down on my mother, I see her tumble, she looks frightened but as if it is a fright that she will recover from once she regains balance. Then I see her submerged and silent, hair floating above her and in her face, sand in her ears and her eyes, the muted sound of her own gasping breath. A gargled shout for help, unheard. No one knows that she is dying, has died. Under water it is still secret, still unknown and therefore still not true. Then up, ears pop, exposure and panic and shouting. ‘Help!’ ‘Get her out!’
I can’t imagine her face – I can’t imagine it as not awake and not asleep, where there was always a flickering behind her lids, a twitch around her lips, a sense that she would wake again at any moment. Her swimsuit is shiny wet and bulging, her white hair made dark with the drenching. On the beach there are frantic attempts at resuscitation, people gather around her, kneel beside her, others run. But this is so far away from us. It is still a secret – an unseen, unheard thing. Far, far away from Bray, from me, from Charlie, from Nipey. It is unable yet to hurt us. Far away from Lifestyle Sports in Dundrum where my sister is shopping for runners. Her phone rings. It is our aunt. She has some news that she needs to rid herself of, and she just says it out straight. My sister says, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’
*
I have a freeing, floating feeling as Charlie drives us through Bray high street on our way to my sister’s home in Dundrum. My sister, a nurse, the practical one and now, abruptly an orphan, is the person my three other siblings and I gravitate to. I feel an odd sense of lightness, of relief. My mother is dead and nothing else matters – not work, not money, not friends, not worries – normal life is suspended, has stopped.
My eleven-year-old niece sits on the bottom stair and howls; my sister holds her. The front door is open as people come and go. I watch my big brother walk up the front drive, smiling his Mum-like smile, the one she would use before imparting any bad news. He is wearing a duffel coat that makes him look like a schoolboy and more vulnerable than I need him to be.
Lately, Mum had begun to pause on uphill walks, but she would never say she found them hard. She would simply stop, put her hands on her hips, lean slightly back on her feet, gaze out at the view and make some comment about it, until she felt able to continue. She liked to keep moving, she was no good at being still. Even when she was sitting at a dinner party or lecture (she still went to college, still got degrees) she would swing her legs below the table or desk. She was only five foot two, though she always seemed taller, and her feet never quite touched the ground.
She was cleaning out a kitchen cupboard when she told me that her blood pressure was a little high. She made a clatter with saucepans to drown out my questions and concern. She hated me worrying about her health. She was going on holidays, she was walking every day to keep fit, she was perfectly fine. She busied herself with her packing in the days leading up to her trip, taking pride in how efficiently she used limited space by rolling up all her outfits. The clothes she bought these days were selected not for their style or even for their colour, though she always knew what suited her, but for their un-creasability and comfort. Her suitcases were lightweight too, all her cosmetics travel-sized and already transferred into a see-through bag many days before departure, her travel documents arranged in a coloured wallet on the kitchen table beside envelopes for the gardener and the cleaner.
On the night before she left we all saw her to say goodbye. ‘But you said you had a surprise for me,’ her youngest grandchild complained as we were leaving. Of course, she’d almost forgotten. Mum trotted upstairs, humming tunelessly as she went, and returned with a small, big-eyed, toy Dalmatian dog for Nipey. She stood at the front door and waved at us; we waved back at her from the gate.
*
The next day, my sister collects me and the Nipe, and we all gather again, this time at my eldest brother’s house in Rathmines. There is too much food on the kitchen table and more is continually being delivered to the door in cling film and tinfoil by neighbours. None of us can eat. We oscillate between normal and devastated, there are even moments of laughter. Texts ping into our phones every few seconds. Because Mum has died so far away, bringing her home is complicated. We contact embassies, ambassadors, honorary consuls, undertakers, check that her travel insurance will cover the repatriation of the body. Mum has a long final trip to take. First she is put on board a ship called Legend, later she is transported to the harbour, and from there to the cemetery of San Cristóbal. Another brother, the second eldest, who lives in the States, will travel from Boston to Ecuador to meet her, from there he will bring her back home. The youngest will catch the first plane he can from Washington, DC.
Charlie is not here yet but he is on his way. He is going to collect us and bring us home. I am lying under a duvet in the sitting room by the fire. The children are watching a movie beside me, unsettled by their suddenly rule-free lives: yes to more chocolate, we say, distracted, yes to staying up till ten.
When I answer the phone to Charlie I hear a long sigh and my stomach lurches.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Jesus, I’ve been driving around Dublin for hours. I don’t know where the fuck I am.’
‘Charlie, calm down. Where do you think you’re near?’
‘Down in the docks. I’m down in the bloody docks.’
The docks are nowhere close to my brother’s home in Rathmines, which he has visited a dozen times. Advice is pointless when he is this angry – with himself for getting lost again, with me for asking to be collected, with my mum for up and dying, with my brother for living in fucking Rathmines.
I’m about to suggest that he ask for directions when he says he’s going home and that he doesn’t care how we get there. He hangs up. I curl into the foetal position, close my eyes. Why is he shouting at me when my mum has just died? Why is he looking for my attention when he should be looking after me and Nipey? Why is he being so useless and so selfish? Why the hell can’t he find his way around Dublin any more?
When I get back later that night, in a taxi, my child asleep on my knee, I feel full of self-righteousness and determined not to forgive or even speak to Charlie. I settle the Nipe and go straight to bed. Charlie comes in; he is crying. He kneels on the floor beside me. He takes my hands in his, he says he is extremely sorry, that he loves me deeply.
‘There’s a badness in me,’ he says, as he’s said before. ‘I got it from my father. You know that I adore you, don’t you? I miss her too. I want to help you. I don’t understand what happened.’
*
In the coffin at the funeral home there is a cross woman with heavy foundation and a downturned mouth. She is in my mother’s clothes – the ones my sister and I had chosen for her – a long knitted purple cardigan with a white square pattern along the front and around the cuffs, black trousers, a pink blouse and a pearl necklace. But the necklace isn’t where it should be. The front of it is tight around the woman’s neck and the rest has fallen down the side of her body.
‘That’s not Mum,’ I say aloud, and for a moment it really isn’t and there is rush of adrenaline through me. They’ve got the wrong person. I need to see the big toe on her left foot where an ingrown nail had been removed many years earlier, but I can’t bring myself to look at her feet – we’d chosen slippers rather than shoes to keep them warm. So I look away and try to focus instead on the painting that’s on an easel beside the coffin. The portrait, a birthday gift from my big brother, who knew my mother would love to sit for an artist and chat to him as he worked, captured her in a way that no photograph ever did. In photos she often appeared out of focus, blurred, as if she was on her way to somewhere, or addled, the slight turn in her eye more evident than it was in real life. The brother who had travelled home with her body, the one Mum used to call ‘the Bear’, was the only one of us who had chosen not to see her dead; he wanted to remember her as she’d been. He is in the room with us but he keeps his head bowed. When they put the lid on the coffin, his bottom lip trembles and seeing this makes me start to cry again.
*
I see crowds of mourners standing in the forecourt of Donnybrook church, waiting for us to arrive. Inside, it is completely full, every pew taken, people standing at the rear. It’s the fullest I’ve ever seen it. It makes me feel so proud of my mother but also weak with grief.
One of the undertakers stumbles with her coffin as he tries to rest it on the stand by the altar. Please, please don’t drop her. Please don’t be careless with something that requires so much care. Please no one make fun of my mum.
At the end of the service, I hold my little girl’s hand as we walk towards the grey light of the opened church doors and the choir sings Fauré’s ‘In Paradisum’. I don’t know where Charlie is – behind us or ahead – and I don’t remember him beside us during the service though I know that he must have been. Last night after the removal of the coffin from the funeral home to the church, when there had been a gathering of neighbours and old friends back at my mother’s house, he had asked me twice when we could go home because, he said, he was bored.
The light I imagine around my mum is golden. People bow their heads as we pass, bless themselves, feel in their pockets for tissues. So many of them are old and frail with limps and sticks and seem much closer to death than my mother. She had so many trips still to take. It was a beautiful way to go, everyone says, a beautiful death. And she always loved swimming, always loved the sea. I imagine her now, but as a young girl again, swimming at night in the inky still water of Bantry Bay towards the lantern-lit rowboat where her parents waited for her.
*
‘Watch me, Mum,’ my four-year-old says, bobbing below me in the water, her bright eyes fixed on mine to make sure she has my attention, her tiny fingers gripping the pool’s edge. She takes a big breath, puts her thumb and finger over her nose and ducks under the water. Up she comes seconds later, her wet, perfectly round face beaming under an electric-blue cap.
‘That was brilliant!’ I say, bending towards her, a pair of blue plastic covers on my shoes.
‘No, Mum, that wasn’t it,’ she replies, her little eyebrows arched. ‘I can do it really goodly. Watch me again.’
It is the 25th of June, 2013. The doctors hadn’t wanted to discharge me. They said I’d lost too much blood. I was weak, sore and grieving for the baby I had delivered and said goodbye to just the day before, but I was yearning to see the one who was still here, whose strong little heart was thumping below me now, solid legs kick, kick, kicking in the water.
My sister had collected me from the hospital and had driven me out to the swimming gala. I’d told Charlie to meet us there; it was close to our home in Bray. He isn’t here when we arrive – all the children were brought directly to the pool by the Montessori bus – and I only become aware of him when the Nipe shouts at him to watch her too. I wave over and am about to make my way towards him when I see that he is scowling. I turn back to face the pool, try to locate my child in the water to distract myself from tears. Whatever the problem is, I am not strong enough to face it. Not today. Another father steps forward and offers me a seat. The other parents all know about the baby and are keeping a hushed and respectful distance.
I never wanted only one child. I’d grown up in a chaotic family of five, and the support of my siblings after my mother’s death a year and a half earlier made me determined to try again. This was an IVF pregnancy that had taken a long time to achieve – I was now forty-four years old. I had a large early bleed and thought I had lost the baby, but her tiny heart, a blurry white dot on a black-and-white screen, was still pulsing away. When it happened again a couple of weeks later, I was told that I had a subchorionic haematoma (an accumulation of blood between the uterus and the placenta), that I needed strict bed rest and that I could lose the baby at any time.
Though I was confined to bed, the bleeding continued and a decision was made to admit me to hospital where I would spend a further month. It was very difficult to be separated from my daughter but Charlie was managing remarkably well without me – I resolved to help him less when I got home, to encourage his independence. He had become increasingly reliant on me since my mother’s death, and I resented this dependence. He seemed less and less able to do things for himself, which I took for laziness and apathy. I was highly irritated by his behaviour and had long since given up expecting him to do anything with me. A second child was perhaps a mistake given how much we now argued, but I didn’t want the Nipe to grow up on her own.
Twice when she’d arrived to visit – pushing with her dad to help open the heavy door to my room – she had bounded into my arms in tights but missing her skirt. He was just being a man, I told myself. The Nipe, quite fond of telling tales and getting others into trouble, whispered that her dad had forgotten her pizza in the oven one evening and it had burned. She giggled about him putting her in the bath with her socks still on and told me quite proudly that she had had to show him how to find my hospital room. Charlie visited once a week and generally didn’t phone in between, but I accepted this; he wasn’t used to minding his daughter full time, and I couldn’t allow myself to worry about her when I was so focused on keeping the baby alive. It was a quiet battle being fought by the two of us, mother and unborn child; her survival was all I thought of each time I went to the bathroom, each time I flushed and saw blood.
I became happily institutionalized, with particular things I did at particular times of the day. Bed-bound as I was, my sense of hearing became more acute and soon I could differentiate between the sounds of the blood-pressure monitors, the dinner trolley, babies’ cots and even the different walks: midwives – rapid and soft-shoed; consultants – noisier, purposeful; mothers in labour – a slow trudge with occasional pauses.
On a day when I’d got bad news about my baby – a blood test suggested that even if she made it, she might have serious health problems – I sat cross-legged on my bed in the dark and sobbed: the sort of sobbing that comes from your stomach, so natural as a child but physically painful as a grown-up. A midwife I’d never met before – dark-haired, large, from the country – sat on the side of my bed. ‘You’ll be OK, pet,’ she said, sounding like my mum. Then she rubbed her hand along my leg, just as Mum would have done. ‘You’ll be OK, pet.’ How those four words used to irritate me, so blasé, meaningless, offering no practical advice, no sign that she was taking my circumstances seriously. But that night they comforted me like no other words ever had, aside from the ones she said as she got up from my bed, again like the ghost of my mother. ‘How about a nice cup of hot milk?’ Not Valium, not Xanax, not two paracetamol or peppermint water, not even tea, but a nice cup of hot milk. And after my cup of hot milk she tucked waffle blankets around me, and I and my tiny, worn-out little fighter slept soundly.
‘Am I not going to have a little sister?’ our daughter asked on the day they couldn’t find a heartbeat. When the baby gave up the fight it wasn’t dramatic or violent, with sudden pains and bright blood on the bathroom floor, as had happened so many times in the seventeen weeks she’d been inside me. Each time I’d tell myself that she had gone, but each time there her tiny heart would be on the screen, beating impossibly on. When she left it was silent. She just curled up, cut off, shut down. Now I think I felt her leave; something made me lie down on the day her heart stopped beating, a sudden internal change took my energy away, made me feel overwhelmingly lost.
She fitted in the palm of the midwife’s hand; her miniature legs dangled over its edge. ‘Does she look like a baby?’ I heard myself ask several times, and then I stopped asking that question. It wasn’t fair of me to demand that my baby look baby-like when she had done so much just to try and stay alive. The midwife laid her down on a bed of cotton wool, lifted her into a small plastic container and handed her over to me. Charlie inched forwards; both of us were frightened.
We looked down together at a tiny, perfect human being – everything was there and where it should have been: eyes, nostrils, lips. Her lifeless arms were crossed over her minute yet somehow swollen belly. A thick vein was visible beneath the still-warm skin of her head; it ran from the top of her forehead to just above her closed eyes. It made her look distressed. We didn’t know what to do – it was torture to hold her and torture to hand her away. It was all warped, all wrong – mother and father with their newborn but their newborn was born too soon, born but dead, our baby but gone. They called her by the name we gave her, Lucia, they encouraged us to spend time with her, they could not have been any kinder. My sister said two of the nurses cried.
That night, another midwife made me a snack of cream crackers and cheese. I was still woozy with grief and from the general anaesthetic and she told me to stay lying down. I lay still and listened to her lick her thumb as she spread butter on each cracker, as though she were making a small meal for herself.
They hugged me – the dinner ladies, the domestics, the midwives, the consultants, the pastoral care workers – they held my hand, they sat with me, they prayed. C’è sempre un perché, there is always a reason, the lovely Italian nun told me – she had sought me out in the cafeteria when she heard that our baby hadn’t made it. C’è sempre un perché.
We asked the Nipe if she would like to put anything in the shoe-box-sized coffin that Lucia would be buried in. She carefully selected some toys: a tiny white rabbit, a plastic bracelet, a doll’s blanket to put over her. Later that morning she took them all back out – she didn’t want her toys buried in the ground where she could never play with them, and she had already given Granny her ballet shoes.
*
It’s the swimming gala finale. The children have been practising this part for weeks. They line up poolside like a row of pot-bellied little ducks. The Nipe is third, the boy in front of her needs the loo, the girl behind keeps shunting her forward. She searches for me in the crowd, folds her arms, shakes her head, mouths that she’s not doing it. I make reassuring gestures, give her two thumbs up. She has never jumped in by herself before; like her mother, she is physically cautious.
I go to stand beside her dad. ‘It’s nearly over,’ I say.
‘Why did you drag me out to this fucking thing?’
‘We promised her we’d be here.’
There’s only one ahead of her now. He cannonballs in, soaks everyone. She seeks us out, waits to see if we are watching. I wave over.
‘Fucking waste of my time.’ He peels the blue covers off his shoes.
She edges slowly, slowly forward, her arms straight out in front of her, her focus on her teacher in the water, whose own arms are outstretched to catch her. Nipey hesitates, starts to whimper.
‘I’m going to wait in the car,’ Charlie says and strides to the door, which he cannot open.
The Nipe steps off the edge.
‘Bastard!’ he roars, trying again to pull the door that he needs to push.
She leaps into the air, curls her legs under her, dive-bombs into the water.