Before She Was Mine (19 page)

Must
be to do with M, major unsettling influence, critical time. How can it
not
be her fault? Feel like calling her up & shouting. That would make me the villain, though.
Determined to stay the ‘understanding one’. Only card I have left to play.

G says to step back, let F get on with it, but easy for him because he has no children. Can’t believe, after all these years of motherhood, I’ve failed at the final fence.

‘If you want to talk,’ said Liv, ‘it might make you feel better.’

We were sitting on a soil bank at Wenlock Edge, looking out over the rest of the world. The plum blossom was out and frothy, the new beech leaves above our heads bright green, the sky gloriously
blue and white. Nearby a robin pecked about hopefully.

Liv was looking better than she had for weeks. The walk had brought colour to her cheeks and with her hair blowing back from her face she looked defiant and almost pretty, for her age. On the
way up we’d spotted wild violets and strawberry flowers, primroses, bluebells and an early purple orchid. She’d turned over a stone and found a pill woodlouse; I’d rescued a tired
bee off the path. It was like stealing another day from my childhood. I didn’t want to be called back to the present.

‘I’m trying not to think about it,’ I told her. But it was impossible. Every time I let my brain relax, I saw the doctor’s expression as he explained that the baby had
stopped developing weeks ago; the way Melody had stumbled as we’d walked through the doors of the maternity unit; the awful drive home. Over and over the film re-played.

‘That poor girl,’ said Liv.

I put my fingertips to my temples, as if there might be some kind of volume control there. ‘It’s so horrible. All of it, just horrible.’

The heart, they’d said, had stopped at sixteen weeks. They didn’t know why, though Melody could ask for a post-mortem if she wanted one. After we’d waited for a while in a side
room, a nurse had come in and said she was going to give her some tablets. I went out to the foyer then to call Michael and let him know the news. When I came back, Melody was crying hysterically.
‘They won’t give me an operation!’ she was saying. ‘I have to give birth!’ Apparently she was too far on for them just to knock her out and remove the baby that
way.

Worse was to come: she needed to go home and wait for the drugs to work. ‘How long for?’ I’d asked, appalled. ‘Forty-eight hours,’ the doctor said. ‘But I
want it out!’ screamed Melody. She’d been beside herself, and to be honest I’d panicked. Once again I’d run outside and phoned Michael, gabbling at him a load of rubbish
that it took him ages to unravel. I wanted him there at the hospital, but it didn’t make sense to have the two cars so in the end we agreed it was best if he went to Love Lane and made the
house ready for her. ‘Whatever else you do, take that kitchen calendar down,’ I said. ‘She’s got all the stages of the pregnancy marked on it.’

For that couple of days we never left her alone. We watched TV a lot, sat up into the small hours, snacked on rubbish. Then it was time to deliver the baby. Michael drove us to the hospital. I was petrified. I didn’t want to go. Before we left I argued secretly with him. I said, ‘I was there at the scan, it’s your turn. I shan’t know what to do. I’ll
make things worse. She’s
your
sister.’ It was horrible of me, but I was desperate. He let me rage and whine, then handed me my coat without comment.

She had a private room, which was something. I didn’t stay with her right through because doctors kept coming in and doing things to her, so then Michael and I would wait in the corridor.
Over and over I cursed him for forcing me to come.

Once she was settled they gave her morphine, which chilled her right out, and we were all three able to chat for a while. We talked about politics, and some TV shows Michael and Melody
remembered from their childhood that I’d never heard of. But then she started getting pains and shifting around the bed, and I slipped out to the corridor again. A midwife bustled past me and
into the room. She never even glanced in my direction.

I cried a bit, then listened for sounds from Melody, but I couldn’t hear any. After about half an hour the midwife came back out with something wrapped in a blanket and walked briskly
away.

Then Michael called me in, and told me to clean Melody’s face and hands with some wet wipes. She was just lying still, bleak and pale and somewhere else. I kept making soothing noises, and
dabbing with this wipe, while Michael fished about in the hospital bag she’d brought. None of us spoke.

Then the door squeaked and we all jumped. It was the midwife and she was carrying the blanket. I think I might have flinched. I know Michael shot me a warning glance. ‘Help her sit
up,’ said the midwife, so we pulled Melody into a sitting position, and the bundle was laid on the bed, across her lap. I thought she’d shy away, but it seemed as though she’d
asked for the baby to be brought back. She picked it up, pulled back the material covering its face.

‘Oh,’ she said wonderingly.

Please don’t make me look
, I was praying, but she reached out and drew me in by the lapel of my shirt. I took a breath and lowered my eyes. And it was a baby’s face I saw,
peeping out. Tiny, really tiny and very red, but definitely the face of a baby. I think I let out a yelp, a kind of hiccuping sob.

‘It’s a girl,’ whispered Melody. ‘I want to call her Elizabeth.’

Michael moved round in his seat and I saw he had a camera with him. ‘Mel,’ he said gently. She angled the baby so he could get a proper view, and he fired off four, five, six
photographs.

‘The hospital told us to take pictures,’ she said. ‘Because, because—’ And there she’d broken down completely.

That hospital smell, the clanking of trolleys in the corridor, Melody’s eyes full of bewildered pain. I would be in that room forever.

‘Freya,’ said Liv, into my ear. ‘Frey. Freya.’

I was back on Wenlock Edge with the breeze stirring my hair. A buzzard circled. Bluebells shimmered through the trees. Over the fields we’d crossed the grass was whorled into penny-sized
tunnels where small rodents had forged their undercover runs. Nature thrummed with life, while Melody’s baby was dead.

I scrambled to my feet, shouting into the wind.

‘Why did she have to go and get pregnant anyway? There was no
need
. Everything was fine as it was.’

Behind me, silence.

‘Tell me that was awful of me. Tell me that was an awful thing to say.’

I turned and saw Liv rock herself forward onto her hands and knees, then stand up stiffly.

‘I hate babies,’ I said. ‘I hate people being pregnant and getting married and making . . . upheavals. I hate the way you can be in a shop and everyone’s cooing over a
pram, going “ahh” at some snotty toddler. It’s not some great achievement. But you’d think it was, you’d think it was like climbing Mount bloody Everest. And then when
things go wrong – I hate being dragged into the drama. And there always is a drama. It’s like you’re waiting for a bomb to go off. It’s like shrapnel flying.’

Liv’s eyes, grey and steady.

‘I’m
never
having children. Or getting married. I don’t want to be a part of any of that. I might go live on an island somewhere. In a Scottish croft, on my
own.’

‘You’d be missed.’

If I could have clicked my fingers and been five hundred miles away, I’d have done it. ‘I don’t care.’

‘I do.’

Way below us the fields were smooth and velvety, even the newly ploughed ones. Cloud shadows crossed the landscape, chasing over yellow rape and reddish soil and mossy-dark hedgerows. We stood
for a long time, watching.

Liv said, ‘It’s funny being so high up. It gives me a sense of power.’

‘Does it? Makes me feel the opposite. That we’re dots in a massive landscape, worth nothing. Worth as much as a beetle.’

‘You’re worth a lot more than that to me, Frey.’

‘Perhaps we’re all just beetles, scurrying about, and we don’t realise it.’

‘Perhaps we are.’

On our way back down to the car park Liv was delighted to find a badger sett. Round the base of a big oak the banks had been dug up and scraped, the sandy soil smoothed and
trampled, paths worn through the grass.

‘How do you know it’s not just a gang of chunky rabbits?’

‘The entrances to the sett: see how wide they are? Badger holes are badger-shaped. Oh, and look, Frey, this is a latrine.’

‘You don’t say.’

She bent to examine the massive pile of sloppy poo. ‘It’s a significant one. Can you see the older droppings underneath?’

‘Only if you wave the flies away.’

‘This badger’s been eating fruit. You can make out the pips. And insect cases. Are those little bones?’ She edged round, squinting to get a better view. Her face was alight,
she couldn’t help herself.

‘What are badgers, exactly?’

‘They’re mammals.’

‘Yeah, but what group do they belong to? They’re not rodents, they’re not canids.’

‘They’re mustelids. Like stoats and weasels, mink, otters, ferrets. Pine martens. Polecats.’

‘Why are they so fat, then?’

‘I don’t know. Because their legs are too short to do aerobics.’ She straightened again and I noticed her hand go up to her breast automatically and pat the place where the
lump had been. Something about the movement disturbed me, reminded me of how anxious she was before the op. I thought we’d passed that stage.

‘Liv?’

‘Hmm?’ Now she was peering at some animal hairs caught in the barbed-wire fence.

‘When are you due to get the lab results?’

‘I’ve had them.’ She carried on fingering the little tuft of fur. ‘They called me in when you were staying at Melody’s.’

‘And?’

‘We’ll talk about it later. It can wait for another day. It’s not important.’

‘Mum!’

‘No, I’m not laying anything else on you just at the moment. You’ve had enough with Melody. Melody must come first.’

For God’s sake
, I wanted to shout.
It’s not a bloody competition
. ‘But now I’m really panicking. You have to tell me.’

She sighed. ‘It was only the results of the re-grading. Turns out I will need chemo.’

‘What? Why didn’t you ring me?’

‘You were in Nantwich. I didn’t want to drag you away. Geraint went up to the hospital with me, so I wasn’t alone.’

Bet he was some bloody use
, I thought. ‘And?’

Finally she left the wire and turned to face me. ‘Well, they’ve had a good old look and re-graded the tumour. Which, in a way, is a relief. For once it’s just, “This is
what we’re going to do; lie back and let us get on with it.”’

‘When do you start?’

‘Next week.’

‘Jesus.’ So ignorant, I wasn’t even sure what chemo was. Some kind of beam or ray? A tablet? Did they inject you? ‘I’ll go with you, keep you company while you have
it.’

‘That would be nice.’

The wind stirred the grass, the leaves. She linked her arm through mine and started to walk me back down the hill. Part of me wanted to wrench free and yell at her for making me feel so guilty.
I was angry, too, that the cancer stuff wasn’t gone and Liv wasn’t free just to be my mother, safe and normal. There seemed to be no refuge anywhere.

‘Listen,’ she went on, holding the kissing gate for me. ‘I’ve had a space to mull things over, and this is where I am: the operation’s done and healed, the
tumour’s out, my lymph nodes were clear. So that’s the biggest part over. The chemo’s only mopping up. Twelve sessions over eight months, and that’ll be it. I can draw a
line under it all.’

‘If it wasn’t for me, you’d already have drawn your line.’

‘Frey. Don’t be ridiculous! I should be
thanking
you. That day they told me it was cancer, my brain just scrambled. I was useless. But you, you took charge, you made the
doctors check again. And you were right. I look back, and you were terrific. Eight months,’ she said, ‘eight months to get through. The fight with the cancer’s over, now I’m
battling chemo. And the sooner we start, the sooner we finish.’

‘Your hair?’

‘It’s only hair, for goodness’ sake. Dead cells.’ She teased out a few strands, wound them round her finger. ‘When it grows back, I might go for a new style.
Something shorter. Then it wouldn’t get in the way when I’m doing my surveys.’

The thought of her hair going made me feel more wobbly than anything to do with the cancer so far. Liv
was
her hair. That spread of sandy grey across her shoulders and down her back, wavy
hanks of it sliding forward each time she bent over her keyboard or stooped to examine some ditch. It was her most striking feature. It set her apart from other mums her age. Witchy, I’d
heard Melody call her; Wild Woman; Dances-with-Voles.

Voices from the time before.

I remembered, out of nowhere, Liv taking me out of primary school to go get a tooth drilled, and how she’d coaxed me with promises of treats afterwards – a Beanie mouse, an extra
bedtime chapter of
Kittens in the Kitchen
, a go with the new Longworth trap. I longed to conjure up something to make things better for her, the way she used to for me. What a comfort it
must be to hold that sort of power. Perhaps that was why people had children, for that brief opportunity of fixing someone’s world.

An ache in my jaw made me aware of how I was holding myself, my teeth gritted, my shoulders tense. Against me, though, Liv felt relaxed. We made our way through fields of cowslips and
dandelions, down lanes edged with wood anemones.

On the last stretch down to the car park she said, ‘Anyway, Alan R is going to run the Meres and Mosses events this summer for me, and Veronica’s logging the invertebrate
sightings.’

‘That’s good,’ I said. The world might be ending, but if the bog insects were being catered for, all was well.

‘It is, isn’t it? Small, good things.’

And we carried on walking, two human specks in the middle of the great uncaring hillside, trying to brace ourselves against what was to come.

I’d been planning a risotto for tea, so I took myself straight to the kitchen. Lying inside the tray of the weighing scales was the corpse of a stoat in a clear plastic
bag. So far, so Geraint. Yet I could also tell by the sizzling sound and smell of meat that there was proper food in the oven. Apparently he’d got himself together enough to stick in three
potatoes and a chicken.