And he nips out to the waiting room to speak to Emma, then comes back to take me out to her.
It was summer then too, with the same sweat that’s a constant in this heatwave, the same sterility. It’s too much. The feeling that I will be sick, and it will keep coming and I won’t be able to stop it.
‘What’s going on, babe?’ Emma asks gently as I sit back down next to her holding Poppy and the room starts to spin again.
And after years of trying to keep myself closed, it’s like I’m losing the battle. It’s like I’m breaking open, and the world is exposing me with its online videos and its threats and its panic attacks and its tears, which are streaming now, so fast down my face that they bounce onto my chest.
It’s happening again.
Emma holds my hand in her palm and I try to take deep breaths, over and over, until finally I manage it and I start to calm.
It’s hospital and all it reminds me of, yes. But it’s also an inability, since the trauma of the video, to deal with any type of stress without freaking out, jumping to the worst-case scenario, my body hammering and convulsing and gasping, showing me clearly, visibly, that things are not okay.
‘We’re going to be here for a while,’ says Emma, Poppy and Seth playing now with the hospital toys on the floor below us. The scratchy sleeve of her jumper itches my arm and it strikes me then how she is always covered, as much of her as possible, even though it’s the hottest day of the year and the nylon must be torturous.
‘If you want to talk, it’s not a bad time to do it?’ she continues, hesitant, watching my heaving breath slow, feeling my whole body tremble gently. She looks shocked. I try not to show this side of me.
How lovely it feels to have somebody squeeze my hand.
I blink away a new onslaught of tears.
I don’t deserve this kindness. All the ways I’ve judged you, Em.
She is right. It is a good time to talk. But I can’t bear the pity and just in time, a second pair of arms is around Poppy and Ed is here.
‘Oh thank God,’ I say as he scoops her up, looks at her head, cuddles her. Despite everything, seeing him here brings a swell of relief.
‘How are you, sweetheart?’ he asks Poppy. She chomps on her dummy.
Then he turns to me, still holding her.
‘It’s not the same, Scarlett,’ he says, sitting down next to me with Poppy cuddled up in his lap and I am grateful that he knows without me saying it. I fall into him. ‘You’re okay. You’re safe. I’m here.’
Ed knows how I am with hospitals, even if we don’t talk much about why. He saw me hyperventilate at every scan appointment we had when I was pregnant with Poppy. He saw my eyes wide with panic even through the agony of labour as we arrived that night on the maternity ward. He saw me beg a doctor to let me go home though it was too soon after Poppy was born because I couldn’t cope with the alarms going off; with footsteps moving at speed through corridors.
‘It’s not serious,’ I say. ‘We just need to get her checked over.’
I am appreciative, at least, that he knows where I have gone. That although he can’t feel my sweat and may not have noticed my chest heaving unnaturally under my T-shirt, he knows. That he is acknowledging that this happened to me, which he does rarely. That he still cares, even if he didn’t come and find me last night, or ask where I had been until the early hours, alone.
‘Breathe, Scarlett,’ he says quietly, holding Poppy in the seat next to me. ‘All you have to do now is remember to breathe.’
Finally he turns to Emma who is looking the other way, trying to give us space, when a busy hospital waiting room means we only have millimetres.
‘I’m glad Emma was with you,’ he says, smiling. ‘Nice to see you again too, Emma.’
They haven’t seen each other since NCT classes over a year ago. He shakes her hand then, as Ed always does and it makes me laugh, like his formality used to.
He kisses me again, and I remember his smell, and inhale it deeply and think if I can just hold on to that smell then it’ll be okay.
Later, Ed holds my hand as we sit next to Poppy behind a curtain while a doctor looks her over. We don’t mention last night. Something has superseded all of that.
Poppy has stopped being sad and is now finding the whole thing quite the adventure, shrieking and hiding and laughing. Ed and I look like a couple, it strikes me, all of us together look like a unit. We haven’t looked like this for a long time.
The doctor turns to us, hands me Poppy.
‘You can take her home,’ she says. ‘All looks fine. It’s going to be a nasty bruise but she’ll recover. Kids do. It’ll knock you harder, probably.’
She looks at me pointedly.
‘You okay, Mum?’
And I can’t even get irritated by the thing that usually irritates me: someone who is not my child calling me mum.
I nod. Who cares, I think, who cares.
‘Yes,’ I say, picking up Poppy. ‘Thank you.’
Was that a squeeze of my hand from Ed?
Barely palpable but something.
In the car on the way home, Poppy falls asleep and I take a picture of her and post it on Cheshire Mama with a brief story about what happened. And after that there is that peace that parents experience when their child sleeps in the car. Just you two. Nowhere to go. Bit like a date night; the nearest you’ll get for a while.
I turn to Ed.
‘Poppy is okay,’ I say. ‘Can we try to focus on that? On her?’
He is silent but a minute later,
