Chapter 22
That night as Tilly lay beside me breathing through her mouth in soft gasps and snores, the weather broke. Wind tested the window catches and rain squalled around the building flinging handfuls of grit at the glass and sticking leaves to the panes like sprawled starfish peeping Toms.
I sat with my arms around my knees and my cheek resting on my legs, and tried to remember.
Mum and David had been so convincing. They’d gone over and over those confusing weeks after Tilly’s arrival until we could pinpoint the moment at which the psychosis had set in – one otherwise calm Wednesday when David, returning from an evening’s work, had walked into the house to find me clutching a bundled-up Tilly and muttering about strange people coming to the front door.
I’d stayed awake all night to watch out in case those people came back, and his initial slight amusement at my overreaction to some proselytising Jehovah’s Witnesses turned to baffled confusion at my insistence that they were coming to take the baby.
I remembered none of this. All I remembered was my fear for Tilly and my certainty that David must be plotting with others to take her from me.
We’d sat in the little café fuelled by cappuccinos and the sight of Tilly rolling around in the small soft play area.
David could hardly take his eyes off her.
‘I kept putting the money in your account,’ he said, watching over the foam in his cup as Tilly slid down the tiny slide as though launching the Queen Mary.
‘It was what the Child Support people said I ought to pay. I thought one day you might contact me and ask me about it, so I made sure it was the right amount. And I kept paying for your phone.’
I felt my jaw tighten. What did he want, a medal?
‘The money helped,’ I said with my teeth only slightly clenched.
‘It bought our food. Nappies for Tils.’ I stopped.
I didn’t want to point out that it hadn’t been enough to live on, not enough to find us a home. That hadn’t been the point, after all.
‘I never wanted this, you know.’ David fiddled with his cup. ‘You and me being enemies. Ross seems like a decent bloke.’
That felt like a non sequitur, so I ignored it.
‘I didn’t want it either,’ I said slowly.
‘I thought we’d just co-parent for a bit and then I’d go back to work and find somewhere to move out to, and we could share Tilly.
But I was so sure that you were trying…’ I stopped.
I’d made it clear what I had thought David was going to do and I didn’t want to emphasise either my breakdown or my evident mistrust in him.
Mum had smiled beatifically and helped Tilly to drink her juice. She was in her element as doting grandmother, and the realisation that she might have thought that she’d never get to see her granddaughter hit me hard.
Sitting here in my bed as the storm racketed around outside, I thought about Ross too.
He’d left us to go and talk, heading back to his office to prepare his team to help Isobel move out tomorrow.
While she hadn’t actually promised to go, he seemed confident that she would and they were going to clear out the site office and make it ready for her to move in.
It was definitely the site office now, and had stopped being ‘the shed’.
I wished he’d come with us to the café though.
There was something about his rather strung-out brand of companionship that I’d already started to miss when he wasn’t around.
And that thought hit me hard too, here in this little dark room with the rattling windows, illuminated by the blue light that lit the car park. I really did like Ross.
Could we make any kind of relationship, that intense but oddly reassuring man and me?
Would he still pay me the five thousand pounds?
If he did, that wouldn’t get Tilly and me anywhere to live in the city; we’d need to move out to one of the little market towns where, because of lack of opportunities, things were cheaper.
There would be a good deal of to-and-froing; he’d have work, I’d have work and Tilly would have nursery and school – would we have any chance to meet?
Then, as wind boomed around the building, I thought about Isobel.
Was she all right in Elm Cottage, with its leaky roof and decidedly shaky walls?
What if this autumn storm was a step too far and it razed the little house to the ground while she slept, covered with rubble and feathers?
Tomorrow morning I’d go over to make sure she was all right.
I could give everyone a hand helping her move out.
And see Ross, whispered the little voice in my head that had a huge and rather teenage crush.
To distract myself from middle-of-the-night thoughts about Ross and his wiry energy, I turned on the iPad and began an internet search for postpartum psychosis, where I learned that I had got away very lightly and fortunately.
Untreated, it seemed, PPP would usually cure itself but while under its perfidious influence mothers had ended their lives.
Or, convinced that their baby had been replaced, they’d abandoned their child.
There were worse stories too, but I couldn’t read those, not with my own daughter breathing softly beside me, it was too upsetting.
All I had done was to run away from my entire support network, convinced that I was in danger, and from some of the tales on the websites, it seemed that I had suffered a common symptom, that of impending doom and the ‘changing’ into threatening figures of those closest to me.
Poor David. He’d been terrified. Lost, bewildered, sleep-deprived and scared that his partner was descending into mental illness.
In some ways my going on the run had been worse for him than for me – at least I knew I was alive.
He had had to report me missing and then sit and wait for news, certain that any moment a body might be pulled from a river or, even worse, two bodies…
I groped for my phone and found it on top of the table, then stared at it for a moment.
The innocent little oblong concentrated all my doubts and fears, and a certain amount of shame.
How had I thought that hiding my phone and watching to see if anyone came to find it was normal behaviour?
Why hadn’t that made me wonder what the hell I was doing?
Why hadn’t I just got a new cheap phone and removed any possibility of being tracked?
Had I known, really and deep down, that of course David wasn’t tracking me?
Had some detached part of my mind always suspected that it had been my problem causing me to run and hide?
I shook the phone lightly, as though this was all its fault.
I didn’t think that I felt any differently now to how I’d felt when I’d run away, but my entire thought processes must have changed.
I’d been deep in psychosis without realising, and I’d come out of it without ever knowing.
It was a terrifying thought: that my mind could have betrayed me so totally.
Tilly shifted and grasped Brass by his scales as the wind made the walls boom and echo with the force of it, and I tucked the covers more securely around her to keep the heat in.
She was all right. It might not have been the best start in life for her, being taken on the road by her unstable mother, but she was all right.
Her delayed development could be caught up, she needn’t be disadvantaged, and by the time she started school she’d be at the same level as the other children – I’d been assured of that by nursery.
She was all right. I had to keep telling myself that.
Whump went the wind and I sighed. I could sit here all night beating myself up, but dealing with Tilly on not enough sleep was never a good idea. I snuggled myself down next to her, feeling her little legs flex and twitch and the warmth of her body as she relaxed into me again.
She’d got a father and a grandmother today. I’d got some answers. We would be all right.