‘I can only hazard a guess, but probably about five months.’
I remembered the night Simon and I last made love. It was the weekend before he disappeared and, once again, I’d instigated it. Neither of us had said it, but we both knew we were still going through the motions. I’d convinced myself that if we both kept trying to make an effort, we would, in time, feel like us again. It never crossed my mind it would be the last time, or that it’d leave me pregnant.
Dr Willows led me to the nurse’s room and I lay on my side until the pain eased. She gave me a handful of sanitary towels, a bottle of painkillers and offered me a lift home. I turned it down.
It’s hard to explain, but instead of feeling emotional like any ordinary mother would after miscarrying, an eerie feeling of detachment came across me. It was like the trauma of what had just happened belonged to someone else, not me.
So I calmly lifted myself up and left the surgery. I made my slow way back to the supermarket and clocked back in, and continued where I’d left off. And as I priced up a new pallet of lemonade bottles, my colleagues had no idea I’d left the aisle as two people and come back as one. Or that I’d just killed my second child in less than two years.
That night I put Emily to bed and asked James and Robbie to fend for themselves, blaming a tummy ache on my need to hide myself away in the bedroom.
I was still yet to shed one single, solitary tear. I shut my eyes tight and dug my fingernails deep into my palm to force them out, but still I felt nothing. I thought of a life without Billy and without Simon but that didn’t work either. I was numb. I wondered if I’d shed so many tears in my lifetime that I’d now run out.
I rubbed my belly where my child had been hiding and wondered how I could have lost so much control of my life. I blamed losing it on the stress of worrying about Simon, the kids, my finances . . . and maybe even the bottle of wine that lay under the blanket next to me. I decided I was hopeless and defective and that my baby had had a narrow escape with me as its mother. No wonder it wanted to die – it probably had an inkling of what was to come.
My head throbbed, so I reached over to the bedside table, took a third painkiller from Dr Willows’s packet and washed it down with a swig of wine, straight from the bottle. I hesitated, and then took a fourth pill. And a fifth. Then a sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth. But before I swallowed my tenth, I retched and vomited across the floor.
Resting in a puddle of alcohol and bile lay all nine tablets. I couldn’t even kill myself properly.
7 December
‘Bloody thing!’ I shouted as I caught my finger in the sewing machine needle for the second time in as many minutes. It was either exhaustion or one too many drinks that blurred my vision. Regardless, I sucked my finger to stem the bleeding and headed for the kitchen to find another sticking plaster.
‘Sod you,’ I muttered to Mrs Kelly’s unfinished skirt on the dining room table. I’d go back to it later when it had learned its lesson. I wrapped the Band-Aid around my finger and thought back to when I was a child and I’d lose myself in my mum’s fashion magazines and a world of women draped in beautiful fabrics.
She had been an unappreciated seamstress with delusions of grandeur. I’d sit transfixed as she assembled beautiful dresses and coats from nothing. She’d get lost in a place a long way from the one she found herself stuck in with my dad and me. She once admitted her teenage dream had been to work for one of the great Parisian fashion houses, hand-stitching stunning haute couture creations until her fingers numbed.
‘That would have given me greater pleasure than anything else life has thrown my way,’ she said wistfully, then gave me a disappointed sideways glance to emphasise her point. She needn’t have.
My mother was fascinated by the work of couture aristocrat Hubert de Givenchy and his muse Audrey Hepburn. She would copy his refined, immaculate designs in her own way. I shared her passion, but unfortunately she had little interest in sharing any of her skills with me.
I begged her to teach me what she knew, but she’d ignore me. It was like she was afraid she’d lose her gift if she passed it on to someone else – even her only child. But as long as I kept quiet and didn’t ask questions, I was allowed to watch her work from the other side of the room.
Even as a little girl, I never quite understood why my parents had bothered to start a family – whether it was just the done thing in those days, or because I was an unfortunate accident. Either way, they didn’t really need me. I was never physically neglected, but my mum wasn’t shy in reminding me of my place in her pecking order.
‘You’re a guest in this family,’ she once barked without provocation, ‘and don’t forget it.’
Despite being aware of her many faults, it was calming watching beautiful clothes come from a cold heart. Sometimes I’d wait until she’d left the house, then sneak into her wardrobe and shut the doors so I could have them all to myself. I’d close my eyes and smell them or try to identify the materials by the muffled sounds they made when I rubbed them between my fingers.
I remembered a gift I made for her when I was nine. I’d saved up my pocket money to buy four yards of ivory-cream polyester fabric, and every night after school, I ran to my room and hand-sewed a blouse ready for her birthday. Even then I knew it was crude, but I hoped she’d be proud of what I’d learned and add her own spit and polish to it. As she unwrapped the string and paper, she gave me a half-baked ‘thank you’ but never tried it on for size, even to be polite.
A few days later, she asked me to polish the fireguard, so I went to the cupboard under the kitchen sink for a tin of Brasso. Inside lay the tatters of my blouse, cut into strips to use as dusters. It was a cruel lesson. You can either learn from your parents’ mistakes, or repeat them and use them as an excuse for your own behaviour. I vowed never to blame her for my failings. And from then on, everything I made was in spite of her, and without the need of her approval.
My mum’s dresses led long but lonely lives. Once complete, they wouldn’t be shown off at parties or to her friends; instead, they would hang in protective bags for only her to enjoy.
Dad worshipped the ground she laid fabric on. And his obsession with keeping her happy overshadowed everything else in his life, including me. I envied my friends when they admitted they were daddy’s girls. I was nobody’s girl until I met Simon. But Dad knew my mum’s calling gave her a happiness he couldn’t match.
‘Mummy!’ Emily’s panicked voice brought me out of my recollections. She was standing by the door, her face scrunched up, and I could see that she’d wet her pyjama bottoms.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s get you cleaned up and back to bed.’ I took her hand and as we walked up the stairs I racked my brains, but for the life of me, I couldn’t ever remember a time I’d felt my mother’s skin held so close against my own.