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

  “No, you don’t,” says the doctor, shaking his head.

  “But it’s mine,” you mutter, with rising menace, curling your hands into fists.

  Your sister, who has stayed with you throughout this whole long day, who knows what might happen next (“don’t provoke her”), gets up from her chair and steps into the corridor with the doctor. You don’t know what she says to him but she returns with a small, sad, wrapped package and hands it to you.

  There is a school of thought out there that expects women to get over a miscarriage as if nothing has happened, to metabolise it quickly and get on with life. It’s just like a bad period, a friend of mine was told, briskly, by her mother-in-law.

  To this, I say: Why? Why should we carry on as if it’s nothing out of the ordinary? It is not ordinary to conceive a life and then to lose it; it’s very far from ordinary. These passings should be marked, should be respected, should be given their due. It’s a life, however small, however germinal. It’s a collection of cells, from you and, in most cases, from someone you love. Yes, of course worse things happen every day; no one in their right mind would deny that. But to dismiss a miscarriage as nothing, as something you need to take on the chin and carry on, is to do a disservice to ourselves, to our living children, to those nascent beings that lived only within us, to the person we imagined throughout the short pregnancy, to those ghost children we still carry in our minds, the ones who didn’t make it.

  During the very week in which a miscarried baby of mine would have been born, I found the following passage in Hilary Mantel’s memoir, Giving Up the Ghost:

  [Children’s] lives start long before birth, long before conception, and if they are aborted or miscarried or simply fail to materialise at all, they become ghosts in our lives…The unborn, whether they’re named or not, whether or not they’re acknowledged, have a way of insisting: a way of making their presence felt.

  If asked, I could reel off exactly, instantly and without hesitation, what age all my miscarried children would be, had they lived. Is this odd? Is it macabre? I have no idea. This is information I hold very close. No one has ever asked me this question and probably never will—miscarriage is still a taboo subject, one women will rarely broach, share or discuss. I can count on one hand the conversations I’ve had with friends about it, which is odd, if you consider how prevalent it is.

  Why don’t we talk about it more? Because it’s too visceral, too private, too interior. These are people, spirits, wraiths, who never breathed air, never saw light. So invisible, so evanescent are they that our language doesn’t even have a word for them.

  —

  On the first occasion—when I don’t even know, can’t even conceive that there will be more—I leave the bad-news room. I go home. I stop on the way back to buy painkillers: the nurse said I might need them. I also have to buy maternity pads and it comes to me, as Will and I drift up and down the aisles of a vast chemist in an out-of-town shopping complex, that they will be in what is called the Mother & Baby section.

  I come to a stop beside a display of false eyelashes.

  “What?” Will says, taking my hand. “Are you okay?”

  I tell him, in as few words as possible, about the Mother & Baby section. I point it out. It is signposted by a picture of a crawling, nappied infant, turning around to smile at the camera.

  We leave the false eyelashes and head across the tiled floor. I don’t see, I don’t look at, the sleepsuits for newborns, the nappies, the jars and jars of baby food, the barrier creams, the pillowy rolls of cotton wool, the breast pads, the boxes of formula, the bottles, the sterilisers for microwave and hob, special offer, the woman with a tiny pod-being in a sling. I don’t see them, I don’t. I tell myself this.

  My son is lining up cars on the narrow windowsill when I get back.

  “Hello,” I say.

  He doesn’t look up from his game but he smiles to himself and whispers, “Mama.” He’s not big on hellos or goodbyes. “A parky base,” he says instead, meaning “parking space.” He slots a car between two others.

  “That’s great,” I say. I look at him. I stare. I can’t look away. The groove at the back of his neck, the dents over his knuckles, the way the hair grows in a swirl on his crown. He seems miraculous.

  “Where go?” he asks, fixing me with a firm, toddler gaze.

  “The hospital,” I say, “but I’m back now.”

  He still looks at me, unblinking, a yellow car in one hand. But he doesn’t ask anything else.

  I go into the bedroom and pull all the maternity clothes out of my wardrobe and on to the floor. I strip off the clothes I am wearing and add them to the pile. I try to sort them, to fold them, to put tops together, then trousers, but somehow I’m crying again and shivering because the bedroom is cold. Everything is tangled: jumper sleeves cling to skirt hems, trousers are inside out, bras clutch with their hooks to T-shirts. I hurl the lot across the room, towards the wall.

  Will steps through the doorway. He is in the middle of saying something but stops.

  “Can you please,” I shriek, and it’s the first time I’ve raised my voice all day, and it feels surprisingly good, “get a box and put all this into it?”

  He walks around the bed and surveys the scattered clothing. “What is it?” he asks.

  “It’s my maternity clothes. I want them put away.”

  I move about the house, collecting anything to do with babies. There is some stretchmark ointment in the bathroom, a row of books on the shelf, a bottle of folic-acid tablets; there are the envelopes from the hospital detailing appointments, due dates; there are cards from friends with pictures of things like prams and storks and bootees. I put all these into the box that Will has left beside the bed. I crush the lid shut. I tape it down.

  —

  Are you still pregnant if the baby is dead? I’m asking myself this as I push my son in a swing. It is a cold day. I have dressed him in mittens, a hat, matching scarf, thick socks, wellies. He swoops towards me, then drops away, towards me, away. A stream of whitened breath streaks from his mouth.

  Does it still count? There is a baby inside you, I say to myself, but it’s dead. It’s still in there. I imagine it clinging to the sides, those stretchy velvet walls, by its fingertips, refusing to let go. I want it out, more than anything. More than anything, I want it to stay.

  A woman slides a child, older than mine, into the swing next to us. She gives me a smile and I smile back. She straightens up and I see the distended curve of her belly, the way the clothes stretch and pull over it. Eight months gone, easily, maybe nearer nine. In a month, she’ll have a baby, it will be out of her and breathing.

  She stands on the opposite side of the swing, and it’s only as she starts to push that I notice she has more children, twins, in a double buggy behind her, and when I see this, when I see I am surrounded by children, all hers, I experience such a flash of hatred for her that I have to turn away, ashamed.

  —

  “What do you think we should do with it?” I ask Will that evening.

  He is lying on the sofa, reading a paper, and makes a “Hmm?” noise but doesn’t stop reading so I come and stand in front of him.

  “I don’t know what to do with it,” I say, “when it comes out. Whenever that may be.”

  He looks up.

  “I don’t want to bury it as we’re not going to live here much longer. I mean, imagine leaving it behind here, in this city, in the garden of this flat, while we all go somewhere else. I don’t want to do that, not at all. It seems an awful idea. I could never do that.” I’m talking very fast but I don’t seem to be able to stop. “So I don’t know what to do. What do you think?”

  Will is still looking at me. The paper is getting crushed in his hands. “Um,” he says.

  “I looked on the internet,” I say. “They have all these support-group things, chat rooms, you know, for people who have…people who…people in our position.”

  “Really?”

&n
bsp; “Uh-huh.”

  I haven’t told Will that, after he goes to sleep, I’m spending a lot of time in these shadowy, unreal, half-lit places, where strangers tap out their innermost anguish in strange abbreviations: the Morse code of the miserable. “GTH” means “gone to heaven,” an assumption that makes me grimace. “DD” is “dear daughter”; “DP,” “dear partner.” You can send virtual hugs by writing the person’s name surrounded by repeating parentheses—the more there are, the more intense the gesture. You can sign your name with a list of how many miscarriages you’ve had and at how many weeks. There are saccharine animations of babies gaining sparkly wings and ascending up the screen. I never post anything and the whole thing makes me horribly uncomfortable, but, nonetheless, I’m fascinated, unable to look away, meting out the dark, sleepless hours of the night by scrolling through the private pain of people I don’t know and will never meet.

  “Anyway,” I say, “someone mixed the ashes with soil in a pot, then planted a flower on top of it.”

  Will puts the paper to one side, frowning, rubbing at his forehead.

  “I don’t fancy that,” I say eventually. “Do you?”

  He seems unable to formulate a reply, unable to contribute to this conversation, so I turn away and pick up the phone, take it into the cupboard where the washing-machine is shushing and, sitting in the dark, I dial my friend’s number.

  “I don’t know what to do with it,” I say, “after it comes out.”

  I can hear her thinking. She’s a medic. She studied for twice as long as I did. She has letters after her name. She saves lives every day. She knows things.

  “You need to have the operation,” she says, in a modulated, level voice. I wonder if this is the one she uses to talk to her patients, to tell them unfortunate test results or frightening news. “It’s a very straightforward procedure. You’ll be under a general anaesthetic and when you wake up it will all be over. Phone them tomorrow and tell them. Book yourself in.”

  “Can’t do that,” I say.

  The washing-machine sloshes and whirls the clothes. I see a sleeve of my son’s favourite shirt reach out towards a hem of a nightgown.

  “How long are you going to leave it?” she asks instead. “This isn’t doing you any good, all this waiting around. Not to mention it’s dangerous. They shouldn’t,” she mutters, almost to herself, “be letting you walk about like this.”

  “Dangerous?” I repeat, my voice rising. “How can it be dangerous? The baby’s dead, what more can possibly—”

  “I meant dangerous for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Yes. Didn’t they tell you that?”

  I open the door a crack and look towards my son’s bedroom. The doorway is dark, silent. “No, they didn’t,” I say, keeping the door ajar with my foot, my eye on the softly dim space where my son is lying. “Why?”

  “There’s a risk of infection from carrying this for days on end. An ever-increasing risk, as time goes on. Think about it logically. It’s unusual, how long your body has held on to it—”

  “Is it?”

  She sighs. “I don’t know why this has happened. Why the baby didn’t make it, why your body isn’t expelling it, why it isn’t letting go, but these things just happen sometimes. In unusual cases. You’ll probably never find out the reason. But what you need to do now is put your safety first.”

  I push the door away from me with the toe of my slipper and let it swing back, away, back. I don’t answer but fiddle with the arrangement of washing powders on the shelf, looking again for my son’s shirt in the tumbling wash.

  She speaks again in her soft voice: “If it’s not out in two days I’m booking you in myself.”

  —

  We go to the beach. The sea is flat silver under a lapis sky. There is a single cloud near the horizon, a teasel of white. My son zooms around the sand in circles, a bucket in one hand and a piece of wood in the other. The winter sun is low and forces me to shade my eyes with my hand.

  I kneel with my back to the glare and start to dig a hole for my son. He likes holes. He moves about the sand around me, always near me, as if tethered, like a small tugboat.

  I dig. Water is seeping through the knees of my trousers. The plastic spade starts to bend, but I buttress it with my fingers. I hear, somewhere behind me, the shrill of Will’s mobile phone and him saying, “Yeah? How are you?” and my son, also behind me, muttering something to himself. I dig, deeper and deeper, until I reach the level of water and what I am bringing up on my spade now is the consistency of new cement. I slop it on to the pile of sand beside me and what is in my mind, what I am thinking is: feather.

  Most of all, it looked like a feather. Curled like that and grey-white and floating. And as I think the word “feather,” the two eliding syllables of it, the susurration of its sound, my son appears at my elbow and, held in his hand, is a feather.

  I hold the spade, poised above the hole. I stare at him.

  “What this?” he says.

  I look at it. It is white, its gossamer fronds tremble in the breeze, and it is held in the grip of his thumb and finger. I clear my throat.

  “It’s a feather,” I say and, as I do, I look for Will. Come here, I want to say. Do you know what happened? But he is over by the promenade wall, his phone clamped to his ear; he is kicking at some seaweed and speaking in bursts.

  “Fevver,” my son repeats, in the way he does when he hears a new word, “fevver, fevver.”

  “Yes,” I say, “feather. From a bird. Do you know that when they fly—”

  But he isn’t interested in that. “For you,” he says, and I take it, the feather, I cradle it in my palm.

  I manage to get out a single word: “Thanks.”

  My son is decisive now, business-like. He points. “Sea,” he says, and tugs at my hand.

  We walk towards the water, where waves rise and collapse on a sheen of sand. My son is transfixed by the prints his wellies are making. I cup the feather in both hands. I think I’m about to cry but I don’t.

  I hold the feather high, above my head, and my son raises his face to see. I let it drop, releasing it into the air. I think it might swirl and swoop down, that he might like that, that he might pick it up and say, again, again. But it doesn’t. It rises higher and higher, borne on what seems like nothing. We watch it together. Up and up and up it sails, directly over our heads, and then it vanishes.

  I look back at him, at his face tilted towards the sky, at his body bundled inside his red coat.

  “Gone,” he says.

  I nod. I take his hand. We begin the walk back up the beach and I see that Will is coming towards us now, waving and waving, as if I can’t see him, as if I am far in the distance on a dark, crowded plain.

  * * *

  * Miscarriage statistics, Tommy’s, tommys.org

  LUNGS

  2000

  Credit 4

  I am in the shallows of the Indian Ocean, out beyond the breakers, my shoulders and head above the surface. It is my favourite place in the sea, just before the tipping point, the releasing, chaotic thunder of the turning waves, and close enough to shore to view the land from the water.

  I have lived a great deal of my life near the sea: I feel its pull, its absence, if I don’t visit it at regular intervals, if I don’t walk beside it, immerse myself in it, breathe its air. I take excursions to the coasts near London—the tea-coloured waves of Suffolk, the flat, silty sands of Essex, the pebbly inclines of Sussex. I have, ever since childhood, swum in it as often as I can, even in the coldest water.

  There is, I find, great solace to be had from it. Karen Blixen wrote, in her Seven Gothic Tales, “I know a cure for everything: salt water…in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”

  When I was a child, one of my favourite picture-books was about a childless couple living in a fisherman’s cottage in the Outer Hebrides. The man finds a baby washed up on the seashore and takes it home to his wife. They know it’s a se
lkie, a creature that slips between human and seal form, and they do everything they can to keep the boy from the sea, to trap him in his human form. To no avail, of course.

  I spent hours lying on the floor of my bedroom, poring over its watercolour illustrations of cliffs, of waves, of storms and, in particular, the page where the boy dives into the sea and turns back into a seal. There was something about the duality of the selkie, a shape-shifter with two existences, a child who hankers for a different form—found in both Irish and Scottish mythology—that caught my imagination. I would, whenever I could, leap into the sea, duck my head into the water and wait for the metamorphosis, for my limbs to shrink, for my hair to disappear, for my sealskin to cover me. I would resurface crestfallen, disappointed, still in my stubbornly human form.

  The watercolour pages of my selkie book flit through my mind as I tread water in the Indian Ocean. The idea of transformation, transubstantiation, still holds its lure. This water is green, marbled with white. It flexes beneath me, warm and supple. It snatches and grumbles over pebbles nearer the beach. I have a view of jagged umber cliffs, a line of woven huts, towering, yellow-topped trees. I can see a line of goats making their plaintive, clinking way down a track, a group of women stepping into the sea, sinking into it, their saris billowing around them into bright, gilded parachutes. Their laughter bounces towards me, across the water. Further down the shore, two men scrub at an elephant with brooms, the enormous creature submitting blissfully to this treatment, eyes closed, wavelets advancing and retreating around its massive, bent knees.

  I rise and fall with the pulse of the sea. I wait, treading water between ocean and surf, letting the humpback of a wave approach, lift and release me, passing on. I lie back, looking up at the merciless, cloudless sky, thinking that I should maybe go in, thinking about where to visit next, thinking about the yoga class I took the day before, on the clifftop at dusk, the mellifluous voice of the instructor who, when we were bent double, gazing at our ankle bones, our arms wrapped backwards about our sacrums, reassured us that “everything is normal.”