Chapter 16

A Thursday in June, 2013

It gushed from between my fattened thighs; it drenched the bed sheets and soaked right through the mattress, leaving dark red circles in large patches. Its dark stained colour was all over my body, as though my body had been painted with large brushstrokes of red. I had been bathed in my own blood; it had turned my hair from dull blonde to brown. There could not be much left in my veins. My black nightgown was stuck to my skin.

My engorged breasts throbbed from the milk that was being produced; somebody had forgotten to inform them that they were no longer needed, that they were now obsolete. Like me as a mother. I was no longer required, I served no purpose.

But instead they produced and grew and grew, swollen and roasting. I wanted to pierce them with a knitting needle. Piercing them was the solution. I got up and walked from the bedroom into the kitchen. I reached into the top drawer of the sideboard. I fumbled around in the dim light until I found a kebab skewer. It sparkled – it was clean and unused. Perfect, I thought.

I retraced my steps back into the bedroom and then went through to the bathroom. I stopped at the bathroom cabinet mirror. I turned on the light over the mirror.

I aimed directly at my left nipple with the skewer. I punctured the faint-brown skin, tearing right through the nipple, right in the very centre. The yellowy grey gunge spurted everywhere. It was mixed with blood. This blood was a light red in colour. It was all mixed together. The milk and blood flowed from my breast. It had splattered everywhere. It was on me, on the walls, it stained the toilet bowl, the bathtub. I gazed back at the mirror. My face was stained with my own bodily fluids, and splashes of colours interrupted my freckled face.

Then ignoring the wounded breast, I refocused my attention. I took aim at the right breast. Again I carefully aimed the skewer so as not to miss, but I was not able to get the exact angle of the protruding nipple on the small bathroom-cabinet mirror. I opened the cabinet door, so that the mirror was nearer so as to perfect my aim. It was more difficult with the second breast as the bodily fluid that escaped after the first piercing had stained the mirror, obscuring my vision of my intended target. I tilted my head so that I had the perfect uninterrupted view. I pierced myself a second time. This time I struck harder because the second breast was the more engorged and the more painful of the two. The stabbing needed to be fierce to stop my own body torturing me. If my body didn’t know that it was inflicting pain on its own very being then I needed to act to stop the torture. I had to rescue me from myself. My own flesh was devouring my mind. It had to stop.

I was drenched in my own mess; it had managed to even grace my swollen vacant stomach with its presence. How sordid, I thought. It was as though the fluid was sneering at my bloated belly. I banged hard against my stomach, trying to instantly deflate it, hoping that the bloated bulge would disappear, that the hangover of a dead child would lift, that I would be relieved of a tragic death, that the nightmare would be over soon.

The puncture wounds in my breasts instantly relieved the pressure on my chest. The horror of self-harming had not yet been realised by my mind, only by my body. My body didn’t care because it was so fucked-up and confused that it no longer could distinguish the different kinds of pain.

It was my mind I had chosen not to focus on – it was a much more complicated matter to heal. You can fix tits, I told myself. I remembered what the kind midwife had told me: heal from the inside out. That was what I was not doing.

I turned my head and saw him approaching. He wore a long coat. It was pristine white. He had a gold name-badge with dark brown lettering. I thought I could read the word ‘Doctor’ on it, but he was too far away from me to make out his second name. It looked like it began with ‘De’.

He had dark-brown hair parted to the right; the fringe swerved over his forehead. He had green eyes, very green, the colour of olives. He had a button nose and, on closer inspection from where I lay, it was too small for his face. He needed something a size bigger to fit in with the contours of his head. His lips too were not full enough for his face. Everything seemed to be a size or two too small for his body and that included his neck. It looked as though they had just propped the head on his shoulders, like they had forgotten his neck – that they then suddenly remembered it and stuck it in at the last moment.

“Lynch, Afric Lynch, if you would like to come this way?”

He invited me to follow him into a room with a huge monitor with hand-scanners attached to it. He closed the door behind me and we were alone. I squinted to read this name badge. Its deep brown lettering read ‘Doctor Death’. I looked up at his olive-green eyes but his eyeballs had disappeared and were now replaced with sheets of shiny steel. His steel eyes gawked at me, as he smiled to reveal solid gold fangs behind his thin lips.

I sprang upright in the bed. I extended my arm to the far side, checking to see if I was alone. The sheets and my nightgown were soaking. I turned on the bedside lamp to my right. I forced open my eyes. I examined the dampness. It was not blood but a lather of sweat that had drenched my entire body.

The small grey digital clock read: 04:11 am.

I reached for some water. I was completely disorientated. Panicked, I looked around me, desperate for a signal to tell where I was. I was relieved to discover I was in our bed and not in another room with cream walls, clear plastic tubes and large monitors.

The nightmares had started. The lady with the kind face had said they often happen. She’d said that often women relive the traumatic reality of losing a baby; she’d promised me that with time they would pass, that they would fade and some day they would disappear altogether. She said that I would dream again, happy dreams. However, she had failed to promise when this might be. For now, these nightmares would be my nocturnal bed companions.

I got up and had a cool shower. I stood there in the darkness as the water spilled over me, and thumped onto the bath’s surface. The rhythm of the spilling water relaxed me. I stayed there for what seemed like hours.

Luke would be back in less than twenty-four hours. I still needed to work out how best to explain it to him – to clarify the reason for the deceit – why I had kept it all from him – why I had lied about Liverpool, about going to an IT conference for work. I needed to make it – the explanation – as painless as possible for him. Luke would want facts not emotions – well, at the start of the conversation anyway.

I wanted him to understand, to forgive me for keeping the truth from him. I wanted him to tell me that it was all okay now – that we were okay and that he would have done the same thing too if faced with similar circumstances. Unlikely, I thought.

But, most of all, I wanted him to understand that I was trying to protect him from our new reality, that I needed to protect him from himself, from his own sadness.

I was now afraid that the nightmares would reveal to him my total heartache.

I had just one day to work out how to tell him – so he understood. I felt almost criminal, as though it was my fault, as if I had caused our loss and pain. That it was my fault that our daughter was imperfect.

I looked down at my bloated belly. “Ruby, are you there, are you listening to me?” I had momentarily forgotten that my belly was empty. I looked from my belly to the ceiling of the bathroom.

“Ruby, how will I explain it to your dad? One of your dad’s many great qualities is his attention to detail. You know, that is why he is so successful – because he reads the fine print, all the fine print – and when it comes to his dead daughter, he will want to know what every inch of her body was like – I will have to describe it all – relive all your imperfections for him.

“Ruby, do you think that he will blame me for it all? Will I be on the stand, on trial for our dead daughter’s imperfections? I don’t think that I have the guts for that. I could not now go through all that, all the blame. I think that my batteries have finally run out. So I will need to explain it all – properly and calmly – to your dad. He will want more of the detail and less of the emotions, so that logically he can understand all the different reasons that I did not tell him the truth. He will then assess the situation in a rational manner. And then with time – lots and lots of time – he can accept it too – someday – that we created a flawed child.

“Ruby, when I found out you were terminally ill, I decided that there was no room for anger or blame in my heart. So, what it is about is acceptance, grieving, and trying to stay strong. Then some time in the future, who knows when but eventually, it is about moving on. One day, eventually, we will get back to reality. Of course, Ruby, reality will be a different version from before, and that is fine too – I can accept a different version – but please, Ruby, send me some type of reality soon – some version for Luke and me to work with.”

I stripped the bed of the sheets. In the low light I fumbled through the bed-linen press and located a clean crisp double sheet to sleep on.

I got back into bed, switched off the light. Maybe the nightmares might cut me some slack, I might get a few uninterrupted hours of rest, and I badly needed to rest. I drifted off to sleep.

My phone pinged and left a message from Swift Delivery: Consignment Number AER33456/9 for overnight delivery has been successfully dispatched from NHS Royal Merseyside Women’s Hospital via London Heathrow, final destination to: Apt 1, Coliemore Road, Dalkey, County Dublin, Ireland. Please log onto our website to track your consignment.

By now I was fast asleep; the nightmares had taken the rest of the night off.