I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death Read online

  She sees the receptionist about to argue, to insist, to stick to her guidelines and to deny him a test, but then she sees her look at Eric, properly and for the first time.

  There is a slight pause.

  The receptionist nods, finally, to the pile of forms and they walk away together, towards the waiting area.

  “ ‘Write down a list of the people you have slept with in the past five years’,” Eric reads aloud from the form—a little too aloud. “Do you think you’re allowed to ask for extra paper? Like in an exam?”

  “Ssh,” she says, and he is saying an affronted “What?” and she is trying not to laugh because it seems a sacrilegious thing to do here, in a sexual-health clinic, where other people are sitting with their heads bowed, avoiding each other’s eyes, working their way through these labyrinthine forms.

  Eric sighs, fidgets, says they need to line up some sort of treat for afterwards. “What if you don’t know their names?” he is asking, tapping his pen on the clipboard. “Do you just write Man One, Man Two? Or, if I’m being brutally honest, Man Ninety-nine, Man One Hundred?”

  At that moment, someone calls her name and she gets up, lifting her clipboard, and walks towards a woman in a green overall. Eric is behind her, hissing that he isn’t going to let her forget she made him do this, that she put him through it, even though she knows how much he hates needles. She moves in her blue trainers over the carpet, and as she does so, she considers the gravity of the possible outcome. Could it be that her ex has passed on something destructive, something stealthy and corroding? That his body scooped up something from the wearer of the flesh-coloured bra—or one of the others—and deposited it in hers? She hasn’t allowed herself to dwell on who these women were, whether she knows them, whether they looked at her clothes draped on the chair, her books stacked up beside the bed, her make-up and toothbrush in the bathroom, the photos on the walls of her sisters, her nieces, her coat hanging by the door, whether they thought, I wonder who she is. She tries not to imagine them, what they looked like, how he touched them, what they might have said together, how he could not have said anything the first time it happened, how he could turn from them to her, without giving himself away. Infidelity is as old as humanity: there is nothing about it you can think or say that hasn’t been thought or said before. You go back and back over the days, the conversations, the walks you took, wondering why on earth you hadn’t seen it, how you could have missed it, how you could not have known. The pain of it is interior, humiliating, infinitely wearying.

  She knows this; Eric knows this. It’s why they joke about it all day long, with a gleeful irreverence that probably annoys everyone else in earshot. Sometimes being flippant is the only way forward, the only way to get through.

  Perhaps this attitude, however, has been preventing her from entertaining the possibility that these tests might be positive. She realises this as she walks towards the nurse. She made this appointment mostly for show, so she could tell Eric as she dialled the number, so he could listen as she made the appointment, so she could say to him, as she headed out from work, why don’t you come too? You could keep me company. We could take the blood test together.

  She is on a tightrope as she makes her way to the consulting room, Eric behind her, the nurse in front. What, she is asking herself, will she do if something comes up on this test? If her show-appointment turns out to be needed after all? She tries out the scenario of going round to see her ex. She thinks about taking the tube and walking the very familiar route past the cricket ground, across the bus terminus, ascending the stairs to the door whose threshold she swore she’d never cross again and saying—what, exactly? I need to talk to you? I’ve got some news for you? What would anyone say in these situations? How do you broach such a subject?

  But mostly, as she rolls up her sleeve, as she makes a fist, as she turns her head away—because she never likes to see the needle slide in, the flesh yield beneath its point—she’s not thinking about her ex or the other women or the flat they used to share. She’s not thinking about the plants she had to abandon there, plants she’s sure he never waters, the walls she painted, the curtains she installed, standing precariously on a stepladder to do so. She’s thinking about Eric, about his ochre-tinged skin, the cornflake-sized scab on his face that won’t heal, the opal-pale moons of his fingernails as he types across the office from her. She is seized with an irrational urge to say to the nurse, make it all right. Please. For him. Make it okay.

  CAUSE UNKNOWN

  2003

  There is no getting around it. The baby is in earnest, his cries coming thicker and faster. He is writhing around within the confines of his car-seat, his face screwed up and scarlet with hunger, with need.

  “Can you pull over?” I murmur.

  We are on a long, deserted stretch of French road. On one side is a thicket of maize, unmoving in the still, heated air, on the other a wide stretch of sea, some dunes, covered with scrubby, dense undergrowth.

  Will steers the car to the verge, pulls up the handbrake. I squeeze through the seats to retrieve the baby from the back seat, and Will says, “I’ll just walk down to the sea for a bit.”

  I’m negotiating the fastenings of an unfamiliar baby seat, easing tiny, angry limbs out of black straps, cradling the vulnerable skull of my son, making sure I don’t drop him as I lever myself back into the passenger seat, so I’m not really thinking about what Will has just said, when I say: “Fine.”

  The baby is furious, ravenous, fists and legs pumping with outrage. I am grappling—juggling, really—with my shirt buttons, the clips of my feeding bra, a muslin square, a breast pad. It is hot and the baby and I are sweaty, slick. Quite a skill, this: the tessellation of two body parts, the docking of jaw with breast. I still haven’t got the hang of it, not yet. I have watched others do it, in cafés, on buses, in the fitting rooms of shops. The smooth, upwards motion of it, their lack of fuss, their ease, the way their babies don’t seem to move or twist, happy to remain there, peacefully feeding, and I stare at them, covert, envious, wondering how they do it, how they pull it off, and will I ever be as good as that? I never seem to get it quite right, always seem to be ham-fisted, flustered, my son slippery as an eel in my novice grasp.

  We give it a try and the baby is so desperate he goes for it with a sudden, snapping pounce. My hands curl with pain. There is no one to hear me cry out. I press my fingers to my forehead, hum to myself, wait for the agony to pass.

  We are in France for two weeks. I’m not sure what impulse drove me to book a holiday when my baby would be only nine weeks old but that was back in the before, when I was still pregnant, when I had imagined wafting about in the summer heat, a baby on my hip, seeing friends, visiting galleries, reading, perhaps working, going about my life undisturbed.

  The truth is that my life is nothing like this. The truth is that I am not doing so well. I am having trouble keeping my head above water. I did not have the natural birth we all dream of, in a quiet, dark room at home, labouring away, aided only by spritzes of essential oils and soft-voiced doulas. I had a series of interventions in an understaffed, over-lit hospital ward, a long and frightening labour that went on for days and nights, then an emergency C-section that went awry: the baby became stuck, his heart rate dropped, I lost a lot of blood. I was patched up and sent home. The truth is that, just over two months ago, this baby and I nearly died. The resulting scar across my abdomen looks, according to my sister, “like a shark bite.”

  The truth is that I cannot sleep, even when the baby isn’t feeding. When I do manage to sleep—on the sofa, sitting up in a chair—I am beset by short, frantic dreams where someone is committing violence upon me, upon my baby, or dreams where someone has wrenched him from my arms, or where I look over at the Moses basket or the pram and it’s empty. I try to walk upstairs and find that I can’t, my head swimming and fizzing on the sixth or seventh step. I can’t wander to the park. I can’t drag myself along the road to the shop. My son and I rega
rd each other in the shaded two ground-floor rooms of our flat while a heatwave surges around the outside walls. My friends come round and it’s as if I can’t hear them, as if they’re behind glass or under a body of water; they seem so far away, sitting across the room. How was the birth? people ask, a kind and eager look on their faces, and I have no idea what to say.

  The feeding goes on all day, all night; the baby seems hungry, but halfway through he will rear back, his knees drawn up, his face contorted with pain, with dismay, and then he will howl, he will scream, he will yell for hours and hours, until it’s time to feed him again.

  Something is wrong, I know. Maybe it’s me. Maybe my milk is no good, too much or not enough. Maybe I’m not doing this right. Maybe I’m just rubbish at it. But I’m so wary of doctors, of forms, of hospitals, so rehearsed in the way they can suck you in, chew you up and not spit you out for a long time, that when I see the health visitor, I pull my face into a smile and say, everything’s fine. Yes, all good. No, I don’t cry more than usual. Yes, he’s wonderful, yes, he sleeps, yes, I’m absolutely fine.

  In several months’ time, I will be at a doctor’s surgery in the town where I grew up, waiting for my mother to come out of an appointment, and I will be trying to feed my son. He will be doing his stopping and starting, his rearing, his screaming, his writhing, his knee-jerks; I will be doing my back-patting, my moving around, my latching him on in an upright position and I will walk back and forth while I do this, because he can only feed if he’s in motion. I will be clutching his now considerable six-month-old form as I pace up and down, turning and turning when I meet a wall, like a long-distance swimmer. A woman will walk by, regarding us with sidelong interest. I will ignore her, trying to soothe my child, lugging him from one wall to another, coaxing him back on the breast. She will walk by us again, giving me a smile.

  “Hello,” she will say. “I’m a breast-feeding counsellor. Does your baby always feed like this?”

  I will answer by bursting into tears.

  Within seconds, I am in her office and she is holding my son. I’m trying to explain that I’m not a patient at this practice, that I live in London, that I’m only here with my mother, but the woman is shrugging, smiling, saying it doesn’t matter. She asks me about my son, and I tell her that he starts well but then jerks back. He seems to get a sudden pain halfway through. I tell her I have to feed him at home, always, because we can’t do it in public, and I have to unplug the phone and disable the doorbell because any noise at all can disturb him and cause hours of screaming. I tell her all of this, which for me seems normal, but the act of speaking it makes me realise that it’s not normal at all.

  “So you stay at home with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just for feeds or between feeds as well?”

  I think about this. “Well, between feeds he’s usually…”

  “Crying?”

  I nod.

  “So you feed him, or try to feed him, then he cries and after that?”

  “I try to feed him again.”

  She bounces him up and down on her knee, making him smile, making him grab for her necklaces. “Does he bring the milk back up?”

  I shake my head.

  “I think,” she says to him, and he listens to her, rapt, “you’ve got gastro-oesophageal reflux. They sometimes call it silent reflux but I don’t know why because it’s anything but. The bad news is that there’s nothing you can do about it, but the good news is that it goes away by itself at around six months and I would say,” she lifts him high in the air, “you’re almost there.” She waggles her head from side to side. “So you’re going to be fine. More than fine. The question now,” she still addresses him, “is what we’re going to do about Mummy. Because Mummy’s been doing a wonderful job looking after you, but now she needs a bit of help too, doesn’t she?”

  But this is all to come. Right now, my son is nine weeks old and I’m finding my way, blundering forward with this new job, this new life. Right now, I’m in France, for reasons that are no longer clear to me, trying to breastfeed in a hot car by the side of the road. Right now, Will has disappeared over the dunes to look at the sea, and two men are rustling their way out of the maize field on the other side of the road.

  I see them from a long way off. My son has finally settled to the feed and I’m holding myself as still as possible so as not to disturb him, so as not to set off one of his episodes of pain and screaming.

  They are carrying bedding rolls on their backs. Their clothes are torn, sun-bleached, their skins tanned brown. One has peroxide-white hair, the other a straggly ponytail. They are looking at the car, conferring, deciding. They cross the road without looking because it is the kind of road where you can do that: empty, quiet, deserted.

  I watch their approach along the dusty asphalt. They are straight ahead of me now, obscuring the vanishing point. I glance over towards the beach. Where is Will? Can he see them coming? Would he hear me if I called?

  There is no sign of him. The men are getting closer. They are walking faster; their eyes bore into me, into the car. One is wearing flip-flops; the other walks in bare soles over the hot road.

  I cast my eyes towards the ignition. Could I simply drive away? Lay my baby on the seat and hit the accelerator, come back for Will later? The ignition is empty: Will has taken the car keys with him. I reach out my hand to depress the door lock but there isn’t one. I scan the dashboard of the unfamiliar rental car. There must be a button that locks all the doors but I can’t see it. There are air-conditioning controls, dials to make the car hotter or cooler, switches to bring the windows up or down. There are endless controls for the sound system, settings for CD, for cassette, for more volume, for less.

  I am scrabbling around now, my son fallen off the breast, and he is wailing, a high-pitched note of dismay, aghast at the interruption, and the men have seen my panic, seen my problem, and now they are running and I have no idea what they want—money, car, baby, woman—but I don’t want to find out, I don’t need to know the answer to that question because maybe they don’t even know themselves. Maybe they’re just ready to react and exploit whatever they’ll find here. Still I fumble over the car controls, still my son yells, still the men come, bearing down on us.

  Just as they reach the outermost point of the car—so close they could put out their hands and touch the curve of the bonnet—my fingers find, down near the door handle on the driver’s side, a button with the symbol of a padlock. There is a deep, chiming clunk from all five doors of the car. Locked.

  The men reach the car. They yank at the doors, front and back, they flatten their palms against the window, they peer in at me, sitting there, one breast exposed, a flailing baby in my arms. The car rocks from side to side but I continue to sit, contained, safe, moated inside metal and glass. I look into their eyes—wild, they are, and blue as the cold, cold sea—I look at the striating lines of their palms, pressed white to the windows. I am panting, they are panting.

  One slaps the roof in frustration, in fury. It produces a low note, like that of a bassoon. Then they leave, walk away, rejoining each other at the far end of the car, drifting over the road, melting back into the stalks of maize.

  LUNGS

  2010

  As soon as the water gets too deep for my son, I take him on my back and we half wade, half swim in tandem, him gripping my shoulders with his small hands.

  We are wading out to a platform some distance from the shore; another guest at the hotel told us it was “easily walkable.” My son and I have been sitting on this African beach, in the shade of a palm tree, all morning, and now the baby is asleep on a towel, watched over by my husband, so my son and I have gone on this aquatic adventure.

  I am here to write a travel piece about sustainable tourism in East Africa. We have flown into Tanzania, seeing the white summit of Kilimanjaro piercing up through the thick fleece of clouds. We have taken a small, rattling plane to land on a strip of road between banana trees on Z
anzibar. We have walked through spice forests in leech-proof socks, slept in rush-woven huts, climbed the zigzagging steps of a lighthouse on an uninhabited island, searched the vegetation for a rare and reclusive species of deer.

  This press trip ends with two incongruous days at a resort hotel, a place more luxurious, more lavish than anything I have ever seen before. Not a great deal of sustainability to be found here. Men in white jackets rise at dawn to rake the seaweed off the sand. Dried leaves are removed from trees with something that looks like a vacuum cleaner. If you sit on a chair, someone materialises at your side with a tray of cool drinks. If your gaze happens to fall on the azure water of the pool, you will be offered a towel. Things happen around you, unseen, as if benign and house-proud poltergeists are at work: fresh flowers appear at your bed, your hand towels assume the shape of a swan, your clothes are rehung, refolded, rearranged. My son cannot believe it and neither can I. I spend a great deal of my time thanking people for tasks I wouldn’t expect anyone to perform for themselves, let alone on my behalf.

  It is a relief to be in the sea. No one is in danger of rushing towards me with an ice-bucket, a finger-bowl, a complimentary tray of hand-made chocolates. No one is trying to clean the sea. The water is a clear turquoise, the sand white; shoals of tiny fish arrow and tack around my legs, first one way then the other. The platform bobs before us, tantalising, almost airborne.

  —

  I didn’t fly in an aeroplane until I was in my last year at school, when I went on a Latin class trip to Italy. Arriving in Rome, age seventeen, was like receiving a blood transfusion. On the bus from the airport, I was assailed, astonished, by the colours of the city—the pale ochre stones of the buildings, the relentless blue of the sky, the green scooters, the tarnished gold of the coins, the black hair of the men who gestured at us, as we stared out of the bus window, smacking their lips. Mesmerising to me were the plates of spaghetti and basil, the baskets of saltless bread, the strange, lumpy pillows, the shutters over the windows, the noise of car horns, the clitter-clatter of street crossings, and the plush-vowelled language, with its arpeggio dips and peaks. The Spanish Steps, the fountain in the shape of a boat, the pink house where the poet died, the shape of the Colosseum, like an orthodontist’s cast of a mouth. I had never seen anything like it. I loved it all to the point of pain. I was dumbstruck, on the constant verge of tears, devastated by the idea that I would have to go home at the end of the week, and this place, these piazzas, these lives, would carry on without me. I wanted to see everything, go everywhere, never to return home.