The Making of Us (11 page)

A nurse they had not seen before came to them after a few minutes and Dean’s mum released him from her embrace.

‘The baby’s doing well,’ she said, ‘would you like to come and see her?’ The question was directed at Dean. He nodded. He did want to see her. He wanted to get away from this. His mum came with him but Sky’s mum did not want to leave her daughter.

‘I’ll come later,’ she said, ‘take a picture for me. Give her a kiss. Oh, God.’

His mum held his hand as they walked down the corridor behind the nurse. Dean could feel his head reordering itself as they walked away from the mess of grief towards a blander landscape. ‘She’s a bit tangled up,’ the nurse explained with a smile, ‘lots of tubes and things, nothing to be scared of, though. She’s very strong, she won’t have to stay in long.’

‘Will we be able to hold her?’ asked his mum.

‘Possibly. You’ll have to speak to the nurse on duty.’

They had to scrub their hands clean in a low metal sink and go through two sets of security doors and then they were in a small sunny room filled with incubators.

Dean looked around. The scenario was otherworldly. Eight babies the size of puppies wired up to flashing machinery.

‘There she is,’ said the nurse, ‘your little girl.’

Dean inhaled. She was on his far right. She was wearing a knitted white hat that was too big for her, and a gigantic nappy. Her legs emerged from the cavernous nappy splayed out like a supermarket chicken with the string cut off. Her arms were spread out and she looked for all the world as though she were sunbathing.

‘She’s beautiful,’ said his mum. ‘Oh, Dean, she’s just beautiful.’

Dean glanced down into the box. She was sleeping. Her fingers furled and unfurled in her sleep. With her wide mouth and far-apart eyes she looked a bit like a Muppet, like her face would divide in half when she opened her mouth. She looked just like him. Just exactly like him.

‘She looks like you, doesn’t she?’ said his mum.

Dean nodded. ‘Can I touch her?’ he asked the nurse.

‘Yes, you can.’

‘I’ll be gentle,’ he said, wanting to say it before she said it, before she made him feel like a big brute.

He stroked the palm of the baby’s hand with a fingertip. Her skin was warm and so fine and translucent it felt almost like nothing. ‘She’s so small,’ he murmured.

‘Just under four pounds,’ said the nurse. ‘A good weight. For her weeks. What are you going to call her?’

Dean stared at the baby and moved his fingertip to her cheeks. They were covered in a minky down. Part-Muppet, part-werewolf.

‘Isadora,’ he said. ‘Isadora Katy.’

The nurse smiled. ‘That’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘Had you already decided,’ she continued, ‘before, well …?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s what Sky wanted.’

‘Ah,’ said the nurse, ‘that’s good. Good that you’d already decided. Can we put that on her notes, then? Can we write it down? I-S-A-D-O-R-A? And K-A-T-Y? Higgins? Lovely. Great. I’ll leave you to it then, OK?’

His mum pulled a chair over for him to sit on and they sat together for a few minutes, staring at the baby. Dean was glad that Sky’s mum wasn’t here. She’d have been talking. Dean’s mum was like him, quiet, contemplative.

‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ she said eventually. ‘She’s got all of you in her. All of your Dean-ness. It’s all in there. Like ingredients in a cake.’

Dean nodded. He hadn’t expected it. Hadn’t expected his baby to look like him. The whole pregnancy had been about Sky. Everything was always about Sky. It was her body, her baby, her pregnancy, her life, her flat, her world. Dean had just assumed that his daughter would be Sky in miniature. And there she was, four pounds nothing of him. Sky would have been gutted. She’d even said it: ‘I hope this girl doesn’t look like you, Dean, she’ll be spending her whole life plucking her fucking eyebrows. And wailing at the moon.’

But his features sat well on her, tiny and undercooked as she was. She was pretty.

Another nurse joined them and smiled. ‘Beautiful little thing,’ she said. And then she turned to Dean and she said, ‘I’m so so sorry for your loss.’

Dean felt like he’d been slapped. His loss. He hadn’t realised until just then that he’d lost something. He tried to bring Sky to mind; not the Sky who’d just died on a delivery table, or the Sky who’d spent the last six months hating him, but the other Sky, the one he’d spent three years lusting after, fantasising about, the prettiest girl he’d ever been with. He wasn’t sure he’d ever loved her, but he’d liked her, more than he’d liked anyone else he’d been with.

No, he hadn’t lost the love of his life. He hadn’t lost his soul-mate. But he had lost the person who was going to bring up his baby. That person had gone, taking her milk and her lullabies and her enthusiasm for buying small pink dresses with her. This baby had no mother. One day soon, this baby would be big enough to leave this sunny little room and someone would have to take this baby home and raise it. And everybody was going to turn and look at him.

Images flashed through his head: an empty flat, a screaming baby over his shoulder, the black night outside the window, a bottle of milk illuminated and rotating in the microwave, his life desiccated to an existence of shit and noise and solitude. Dean said he wanted to go to the toilet. Instead he slipped out of the building and into a canopied walkway where he rolled together a spliff with shaking hands and sucked the life out of it.

He contemplated walking home. It was just getting dark, the day had gone by without him even noticing. He glanced up at the building. He thought of what lay in there. A tiny, too-early baby with tubes and wires extruded from every orifice; the body of that baby’s mother, floppy and drained of blood like a kosher calf; the baby’s grandmothers, sick and bleached and aged ten years in half an hour. He thought of the expectations, the needs and demands that lay inside that building. He felt sick. He felt weak. The sky loomed above him, purple and low. The walls of the building squashed up against him. He was being compressed from every angle. He knew he had to run, in one direction or another.

He chose away.

Maggie Smith pulled the clear wrapping from a two-pack of Rich Tea biscuits and snapped one in half. It broke with a sound like a twig being stepped on in a forest. She dipped the corner of the semi-circle into her mug of tea and let it soften for three seconds before transferring it to her mouth and sucking the soft bit off the end. She gazed at her mug. And it was
her
mug. She’d brought it with her from home, tired of the taste and fragility of plastic. It was one that she’d taken from her mum’s house, after she died, a solid brown mug with a cream interior and a handle that looked like it had been stuck on as an afterthought. A hairline crack was forming on the mug, running downwards from the edge. She’d have to be careful, she pondered, the whole thing could give way one day and she’d be scalded.

She set the mug down gently on the table to her left and then she looked at the man in the bed and she smiled.

‘How are you, Daniel? Can I get you anything?’

The man in the bed grunted. That meant that he was in pain.

‘More meds, love? Shall I ask for more meds?’

He grunted again, and winced.

Maggie got to her feet, smoothing down the front of her trousers, and stuck her head around the door. Outside, the plush, carpeted corridor was empty. She turned her head from left to right. It could be a hotel when it was empty like this, she thought, a kind of two-star airport hotel possibly, with its eighties colour scheme of peach and spearmint, its upholstered seating of tubular metal, framed watercolours of French fishing villages and plaster moulded up-lighters.

She padded down the carpet towards a small glazed work-station where two women in white overalls sat leafing through paperwork.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ she began, in her gentlest, most considerate voice – who knew what onerous task she might be distracting these women from? – ‘Mr Blanchard, he seems to be in some discomfort … when you’re free, not now, when you get a minute …’ she tapered off.

One of the women – Maggie thought her name was Sarah but couldn’t be sure, there were so many people here, they came and went and it was hard to keep track – smiled patiently and put down her paperwork. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’ll come right now.’

Maggie had never been to a hospice up until two weeks ago and she felt the same sense of awe about it as she’d felt about midwives on birthing units after she’d given birth to her first child, twenty-five years ago.
Wow
, she’d thought,
people do this
. She’d toyed with the idea of being a midwife herself for a while after she’d had her children, wanting to be part of the miraculous work they did, but the desire faded. Now she felt the same way about the men and women here. To be present at the far side of the spectrum, to give dignity and grace to these fading moments, to witness the exit of a whole human existence. It was truly inspiring. She felt at home here now. She felt like she belonged.

She followed the nurse back to Daniel’s room and watched as she fiddled with the dials on the equipment to which he was attached.

‘Thank you,’ she heard him whisper, as the morphine drained into him. ‘Thank you.’

‘You are very welcome!’ trilled the nurse. She paused and pushed her hands into her pockets, stood for a while and gazed down upon him, smiling. ‘Can I get you anything else, Mr Blanchard? Some juice? A paper?’

Daniel smiled, a small pucker of his lips, and shook his head, just once.

‘OK!’ sang Sarah. ‘I’ll just leave you here with your friend then, let you get some rest. You should start to feel a lot better very soon.’ She gave his hand a squeeze where it lay against his white bed sheets, and then she left.

Maggie picked up his other hand and held it inside both of hers. She watched him for a moment, watched the lines of tension start to ease from his face, his beautiful face. She still remembered the first time she’d seen that face. Just over a year ago. He’d appeared to her like an apparition, a grimacing angel, above the desk that she manned twice a week at the physiotherapy practice.

‘Good morning,’ he’d said, and she’d immediately been enthralled by his accent, a soft, milky French affair. Then she’d caught the strong angles of his face, the cushiony lips, the black hair streaked with silver, the olivey skin, the turquoise eyes, and felt her stomach collapse in on itself. It was rare, as a woman of a certain age, to find a man of a comparable age who made your stomach sag and your heart begin to pump more purposefully.

‘Good morning.’ She’d smiled, feeling glad that she’d treated herself to that teeth-whitening session a month earlier, feeling prettier for it. ‘Can I help you?’

‘It’s my back.’ He winced. ‘My friend recommended this place. He said I should see a Candy Stapleton?’

‘Ah, yes.’ She smiled again, showing off her lovely white teeth. ‘Of course. Would you like me to make you an appointment?’

He straightened himself and stared at her, disconsolately. Maggie’s heart ached for him. ‘I was hoping to see her now. Today. I was hoping for immediate attention. My back is so …’ He winced again and clutched his lower back.

Backs. Always backs. Knees in skiing season, backs the rest of the time. She looked at him sympathetically. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Take a seat.’

He was there for nearly three hours in the end. Long enough for some unforced conversation to surface, long enough for her to find out that he was indeed French, that he had lived in England for nearly thirty years, that he had never married and that his back had been troubling him to a greater and greater extent for the past two months. Maggie made him a cup of tea from her kettle and told him that she was divorced with two grown-up children and that she’d been working at the practice for nearly five years. Just for pocket money. Her ex-husband looked after her very nicely, she didn’t really need to work. She tried her hardest to make herself sound interesting. She had made the assumption that because he was French he was intrinsically more interesting than her. It occurred to her that there were probably boring people in France too but it seemed somehow unlikely. England was just the sort of boring place where boring people came from, Maggie felt. And she included herself in that.

He wasn’t much of a smiler. He didn’t smile once for the full three hours he was in the waiting room, not even when she gave him his tea. But then, she’d concluded, who smiled with a bad back?

He came in every day after that, to see Candy. The therapy didn’t seem to be helping much; if anything his back grew worse and worse as the days went by. Eventually Candy referred him to a specialist at the local hospital and Maggie knew that she might never see him again so she did one of the bravest things she’d ever done in her life and said: ‘Maybe we could …’

And he had smiled and said: ‘Yes, we could. Tomorrow night? We could have dinner? Yes?’

She’d smiled gratefully at him. She’d been about to say that they could meet up for a cup of tea, but dinner was really what she’d been after. She was glad that she hadn’t misread the signals. She was glad that he wanted to take her out for dinner.

That first dinner had been a muted affair. Daniel’s (for that was his name) back had been an issue. He’d numbed the pain with red wine and little white pills that he kept in his jacket pocket in a clear plastic pot. By the time their desserts had arrived he’d been straining to get out of his chair so they’d retired to a corner of the bar where they had a small low sofa and some flattering lighting, and things had improved for a while. Daniel had complimented Maggie on her hair: ‘It is very lovely hair, Maggie, you look after yourself.’ And she did look after herself. She’d not been a good-looking teenager and then in her twenties she’d let herself get fat with the babies, sat around like a pudding really for the best part of a decade. Then she’d got divorced and lost the weight and suddenly there she’d been, thirty-six years old and a very attractive woman, like a stranger who’d been hiding inside her all along. She’d got more and more attractive as she headed towards her forties, her bones finally fitting well inside the flesh of her face, keeping her make-up modern and fresh like they told you to in the magazines, professional highlights and a good diet. She’d never looked better than she did on her forty-second birthday. She’d peaked and then it had started to go and she’d thought:
No, not yet, I’ve only just got used to being attractive, I’m not ready to let go of it yet
. So the odd little procedure, the teeth whitening, a tiny bit of Botox and some fillers, expensive supplements and creams, and now she was fifty-three and, in a soft light like this, away from the cruel scrutiny of English daylight, she could still pass for forty-two, she really could.