Then Alice
Then
Alice
I suppose my parents would always have found out. They could have rung all the hospitals on a daily basis. Or perhaps the hospital rang them, informing the parents of this young, unmarried, seemingly deranged mother, who cries so hard when she feeds her baby, his small, soft head is soaked in tears.
They arrive on the third day of my hospital stay, Charlie asleep in his tiny cot on wheels. I love it when they bring him in from the neonatal unit, wheeling him through for his four-hourly feed.
‘Your parents are here at last, lovey,’ says Penny, my favourite nurse, with her soft Scottish accent and her bleached Norwegian-blonde hair.
My father is wearing a suit and tie, which seems oddly formal for a hospital visit, and my mother too is dressed in a matching skirt and blouse, her rarely worn pearls a note of discordance, a hint of something I cannot comprehend. She is carrying a cellophane-wrapped bunch of carnations – did I never tell her how much I hate those flowers? – and I wave it away.
‘On the table, thanks,’ I say.
My mother tries to take my hand, but I snatch it away.
‘I’m so very sorry,’ she says.
‘Look at the baby,’ I say, gesturing to Charlie in his see-through cot, asleep with one small fist resting beneath his cheek, lips curved in a rosebud pout.
‘Lovely,’ says my mother, looking.
‘Now, Alice,’ says my father, sitting down next to the bed, not looking.
I stare at my beautiful sleeping boy, Jake’s boy, and I try to blank out the noise of my father talking.
‘We’re here to help you. And we forgive you, absolutely. Let’s start with a clean slate for all of us. I’m sure you want this baby—’
‘Not this baby, my baby.’
‘Your, er, child, to have the best chance. And so we’ve asked Mrs Taylor Murphy from the adoption agency to meet us here. Just for a chat, a preliminary chat, you understand, so that you have options.’
‘Fuck off. I’m not giving my baby up.’
This time he ignores the swearing (I never used to swear, it’s been a surprise for us both), though I see the purple flooding his face, the violence in his gaze.
‘But have you thought about how you’ll manage without your … er … boyfriend to support you? And as your mother said, we’re very sorry about all that. Alice, you’ll have nowhere to live and no money. Please be sensible. Don’t throw your life away. You could have a summer at home with us to recover and then go back to college in the autumn, and it will be as if none of this ever happened.’
‘Get. Him. Out.’
No one reacts. My father sits in his chair, regarding me with his high colour and his popping-out eyes; my mother gazes out of the window with her practised mask of a face. Her life like one long uninterrupted meditation.
Into this scene of joy trips Mrs Taylor Murphy, dressed as if for a garden party, with a voice to match.
‘Alice, my dear, what you have been through. I do hope you don’t mind me popping in?’
She exclaims at the vision that is my sleeping child – ‘Isn’t he a beauty?’ – and asks my parents if she can have some time alone with me.
‘Is that all right with you, Alice?’
‘It would be better if they didn’t come back at all.’
Despite the floral dress, the perfume – too strong, too sweet now that she is standing next to me – the dark red lips and the patent heels, I like the woman instantly.
The moment my parents have left the ward, she pulls the curtain around my bed.
‘Let’s have us a bit of privacy,’ she says.
She sits in the chair just vacated by my father and observes me with her head tilted fractionally to the side.
‘How on earth are you coping? Motherhood and grief all rolled into one, you poor darling.’
I allow her to take my hand while I sob, and she tells me, ‘Let it all out now, that’s the only way. You’ll feel better if you have a good cry.’
She doesn’t speak but continues to hold my hand, and I like her for that. What is there to say? What words of comfort can she possibly offer?
After a while, I begin to tell her things.
‘He was so excited about the baby,’ I say, while Mrs Taylor Murphy nods and listens. ‘We used to sit up in bed every night choosing names – Charlie was the one we both liked, for a girl or a boy. We would chat about our future, how we’d manage with my art and his music. How I’d finish my degree. How I’d cope when he was away on tour. We had it all worked out.’
‘I’m sure you did.’
‘He didn’t mean to kill himself. I know he didn’t. He just didn’t want to go to the hospital. It was an impulse thing. What he wanted was to be there for me and the baby, it was one of the last things he said to me.’
‘It’s such a tragedy. I cannot imagine what you must be going through.’
‘I don’t want to give Charlie up. He’s all I have left.’
‘I can understand you feeling like that. I know I would feel exactly the same. I will tell you something though about babies, Alice. They soak up their environment like a sponge and this acute grief you’re experiencing, it’s going to affect him. I wonder if you can step outside of your own situation for a moment and imagine these two choices that Charlie has and see which one you think is better. He could grow up with you, his natural mother, who would love him with all her heart and who would struggle and fight, I’m sure, to provide him with a good life. But it would be hard, for you and for him. Hard to find enough work to support yourself. Hard to get back to your career as an artist. Hard to find anywhere decent to live. I think I’m right in saying your parents don’t support your choice to keep the baby?’
‘My parents are shits.’
‘And then,’ Mrs Taylor Murphy carries on regardless, ‘Charlie could grow up with two parents who are desperate for a child, particularly a little boy, and have plenty of money to give him the best possible education, and a beautiful house in Yorkshire with acres of land and a swimming pool and a tennis court.’
‘I don’t care about money. It’s my child’s life we’re talking about.’
‘Exactly. You do see, Alice, don’t you, how different those lives would be for Charlie?’
And the thing is, I do. Her words, her pitch, her bid for my boy: just this, it makes so much sense. I’m not sure I will manage to bring him up on my own. Where would I live? How would I finish my degree? How would I ever support us? I might be able to draw a single-parent allowance, but would it be enough to cover rent, food, clothing, heating, all those things I’ve never had to think about? I am twenty years old and I don’t know where to start.
Penny comes in now and wheels Charlie away for his bath.
‘Cup of tea for you, my darling? And one for your visitor?’
And perhaps it is simply because my son is out of sight that when Mrs Taylor Murphy brings out the ‘preliminary’ adoption papers for me to look at – so much emphasis on that word today – I say, ‘Just tell me where I have to sign.’
I don’t see my parents again, although I am sure Mrs Taylor Murphy will have imparted the good news, the impending handing-over of my son.
Just before she leaves, she asks why I put Rick’s name down on the hospital certificate instead of Jacob’s.
‘The nurses only allowed him to stay with me because he said he was the father.’
‘You know what, Alice? Maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe in the future, when your child wants to contact you, he’ll find two parents ready to meet him instead of one.’
And she gives me that little fantasy to hold onto, the prospect of meeting my child again once he’s an adult.
In our last days together, the nurses, aware that I’m having Charlie adopted, ration the time I spend with him.
‘Don’t let her get too attached,’ I hear one of them telling Penny, who smuggles him in outside of feeding time. ‘It will only make it harder when she has to say goodbye.’
Goodbye. How is that even possible? I have an acute pain in my heart, physical, like the gouging of a javelin, every time I contemplate it. During the night-time feed, three o’clock on the dot, I am left alone with him in the darkness. And I whisper my secrets to him, filling his tiny ears with hopes and dreams as the stars stud the sky outside our hospital window.
‘You’ll be like your father. You’ll be tall and handsome and funny and brave. You’ll be musical. Artistic. I will love you all the way through your childhood. And when you’re eighteen, we will find each other again.’
On our last day – Mrs Taylor Murphy is due to arrive at ten the next morning, to take Charlie off to his foster parents – Rick comes to visit.
‘Tea and biscuits, Richard?’ asks Penny, who loves Rick and always gives him extra custard creams.
‘You’re a wonder woman,’ Rick says. ‘And do you think we could have a few minutes undisturbed? Just want to make sure Alice is all right about tomorrow.’
‘Leave it to me,’ says Penny, pulling the curtains around the bed.
For a moment we just look at each other, no need for words.
‘Don’t bully me, Rick.’
‘He looks like Jake even now at a few days old. Imagine how much he will look like him when he’s older: twelve, eighteen, twenty. And you won’t be there to see that happen. How can you bear it?’
‘I don’t have a choice. Not if I want what is best for him. And I do want that, more than you could ever imagine. Where would I live? In your squat?’
Rick shakes his head. He grins, then grabs hold of my hand and kisses it.
‘The thing is,’ he says, ‘I’ve just had the most genius idea.’