Little Darlings. Melanie Golding
park three floors down, and across the way she could see the main entrance to the A&E department. The wide sky was a shade of bright grey but it would be hot, as it had been every day for all of July. Fresh now, clammy later. The heatwave had been going on for a week, and the forecast was more of the same. It was set to break records.
The nurse was removing a catheter bag filled with yellow fluid from below the bed. She dropped it in a bucket and reached for an empty one.
‘Where’s the woman who was brought in last night?’ asked Lauren.
‘Who – Mrs Gooch, over there?’
The bay diagonally across from Lauren was occupied. Mrs Gooch seemed to be asleep, a serene baby tucked into the bed with her. The mother had long red hair arranged artfully across the pillow and pale bare arms – the effect was akin to a Klimt painting.
‘No, I don’t think so. I thought there was someone next to me. I was pretty sure.’
Riley was awake. His windmilling arm smacked his sleeping brother across the head and Morgan’s eyes opened in shock, then screwed up shut in sorrow, his mouth a little zero of injustice. There was a pause while Morgan inhaled expansively, a comprehensive gathering of breath that would certainly be used for something loud. The long wail, when it finally came, hit Riley’s face and crumpled it. Riley, in turn, inhaled at length and soon the anguish was doubled. Within a few seconds the sound built into a crescendo of indignation that interrupted their mother’s thought pattern like scissors through ribbon. Lauren flapped her hands, struggling to know what to do, where to start, who to tend to. Both of them crying, and only one of her. She knew she had to be quick – she’d read so much about attachment disorder and rising cortisol levels in the brains of babies in pregnancy and early childhood. You couldn’t leave children to cry. It had damaging effects and might do radical things to brain development, causing terrible long-term consequences. Already they seemed so angry.
‘Please,’ she said to the nurse, feeling her eyes filling up, ‘can you help me?’
‘Hey petal, no need for that.’ The nurse whipped three thin tissues from the box by the bed, pressed them into Lauren’s hand and turned to lift baby Morgan, a furious, purple-faced wide-mouthed thing from which came forth a sound that made you want to cover your ears. ‘There’s enough crying round here already without you joining in.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Lauren, wiping her eyes and blowing her nose, then uncovering herself ready to feed. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’
In what seemed like less than half a minute the nurse plugged Lauren firmly into the twins. She manoeuvred Lauren’s body, lifting the weight of her breasts, helping her get into a position to feed both at once, a rugby ball baby under each arm with pillows holding them in place. The nurse was so efficient, so quick and practised. It made Lauren wonder how she would ever manage on her own.
‘There. Snug as bugs.’
She started to stride away, but Lauren stopped her.
‘That woman over there,’ she said, ‘has she got twins?’
Mrs Gooch had opened her eyes. She looked as fresh and unlikely as Sleeping Beauty. Even as Lauren spoke it was obvious that there was only one child contained in the idyll – baby Gooch was with her in the bed and there was no sign of any other.
‘No,’ said the nurse, ‘just the one. Yours are the only twins we’ve got at the moment.’
Patrick brought vegetable sushi, fruit and dark chocolate. ‘Thanks,’ she said, without gratitude. She didn’t fancy anything but white-bread toast.
‘You need something with nutrients in,’ he said.
She stuck her lip out. She ought to be able to eat whatever she felt like. ‘All food has nutrients in. Sugar is a nutrient. So is alcohol.’
‘Alright, clever clogs. You need something with vitamins. Tell me what you want, I can go to the supermarket and bring you something else this afternoon at visiting time. Avocado?’
The thought of avocado made her nauseous. She wanted crisps.
Patrick took photos of Lauren holding the twins as they slept, and then turned the screen for her to see. In the images she was both gaunt and bloated, her smile weak and her hair greasy.
‘Don’t put that online. I look terrible.’
Patrick looked up from his phone. ‘Oh, I, sort of already did.’ The phone started pinging with notifications as comments came in. He tilted the screen to show her:
Congratulations!
Glad you are all well!
Hope to see you soon!
Soooo beautiful!!!
Wow well done you guys can’t wait to meet the boys Xxx!
Later she took matching photos of him, holding the twins while he sat in the vinyl-covered armchair next to the bed. His appearance was just the same as always. Maybe he seemed a bit tired, perhaps as if he had a mild hangover, but there was no radical change. He’d lost a tiny bit of weight recently and people – friends of theirs – were saying how much better he looked for it. Where was the justice in that? They were both parents of twins now but it was her body that had been sacrificed.
Patrick put both babies back into the cot. He was handling them with less trepidation than before, putting them down as if they were fruits that bruised easily rather than explosives that needed decommissioning. He sat down but he kept one hand in the cot with them, counting fingers, self-consciously trying out nursery rhymes he could only half remember.
‘Round and round the garden, like a dum de dum. Like a . . . what is it like?’
‘Like a teddy bear,’ said Lauren.
‘Is it?’
‘Yes. I think so.’ She pictured her mother’s finger, tracing circles on her palm. The anticipation of the one step, two steps, tickle you under there. More rhymes came to her then: Jack and Jill, Georgie Porgie, a blackbird to peck off a nose. It was like lifting the lid on a forgotten box of treasure. These gifts, not thought of for years, there in her memory all this time, waiting for her to need them, to pass them on.
‘Teddy bear?’ said Patrick, still sceptical. ‘Well, that doesn’t make sense.’
Lauren put her hand in the cot, too. She stroked Morgan’s cheek and for a few seconds there was peace. It was such simple joy to feel the grip of a miniature hand around your thumb.
‘Are they breathing?’ said Patrick.
A sudden panic.
‘Of course they are.’ Were they? They both stared hard at the boys’ chests but it was difficult to tell. She tickled them in turn until they cried, voices twining together, so similar to each other, the two sounds in parallel like twisting strands of DNA.
‘Yes, they’re breathing.’
They laughed nervously, relieved, as if they’d come close to something unspeakable but not close enough to say what it was. The ground was shifting under them. What would life look like, now?
The anaesthetist came and poked Lauren in the swollen ankles with a pointy white plastic stick. She dangled her legs so he could test her reflexes with the hammer end. She could feel it fine. It was a relief to be paraplegic no longer.
‘You should be able to get up now,’ he said. ‘The nurse will come along soon to remove your catheter.’
She’d miss that catheter. For months she’d been up seven or eight times in the night to empty her oppressed bladder. She quite liked not having to think about it – not being at the mercy of yet another uncontrollable bodily function.
‘When can I go home?’ She was sweating in the dry heat, the skin on her lower limbs stretched shiny with the swelling. Why was the heating even on in the summer? The hottest summer Sheffield had seen for forty