‘Dave, come on. She’s almost asleep.’ My smile was fading but his was wide and bright like a row of circus bulbs and part of me thought, let him just enjoy it.
‘BABY!’
His volume made me flinch. ‘Dave, please stop.’
‘What? Come on! Mia is here!’
Mia. Found on page 89 of The Great Big Book of Baby Names and circled like a bingo number. He kissed me on the forehead and I smiled for him. I kissed Mia and there we were, connected in a Russian doll of kisses. What a lovely family, someone looking on might have said.
‘It’s all right,’ he whispered. ‘Nothing’s going to get us now.’
And I believed him. I really think I did.
It was the kind of summer where everyone knew it was going to be a good one, right from the first days of the end of spring. The week she was born, the doorbell rang twice a day with deliveries of fresh-baked muffins, wrapped packages of soft toys, and cards printed with storks, peppered with sequins.
Mum, my sister Caroline, Dave’s mum. Our house seemed constantly full of people making the tea, padding in and out of the living room in their socks holding plates of cake, burbling their news. I would look up occasionally, to make a show of listening, but she was always there, cradled in my arms – a tiny person wrapped warm and safe in blankets, peacefully living out her first days in soft, new skin that shone like crushed diamonds.
I am lucky, I thought, in the mornings, as Mum emptied the dishwasher and waxed lyrical about the church pews being cleaned with an alternative furniture polish that had given Sarah-from-six-doors-down a terrible thigh rash.
I am so fortunate, I thought in the afternoons, as Dave and I walked – no, strolled – in the local park, gripping pram handle and coffee cup, like all the other parents.
A hood and a hat for the blinding sunlight.
Balled socks and folded babygros in neat stacks.
Floral fabric conditioner and frying onions lacing the air and warm, sweet milk everywhere. Bubbling away in me. Poured over the porridge that would feed me, so that I could make yet more milk to feed her. I never felt like an animal, not in the way of feeling hunted or preyed upon, but I also didn’t feel any more complicated than an animal. It was hard to explain exactly. Grazing and feeding her. Sun up, sun down.
There were plenty of times when, despite how happy I was, how honestly happy I was, I would start to think about the past. But I could always stop myself, because the important thing was that she was here.
Dave and I had spent ten years together already, looking at each other – across kitchen and restaurant table. Staring and blinking and watching and glancing in bed, meeting rooms, waiting rooms and at parties. De-coding the hidden messages in each other’s eyes. We knew every wrinkle, line and tic in each other: the single eyelash that ran counter to the rest. How the face contorted with laughter and tears.
The right time, then, to greet something new, a new version of ourselves with her barely there hair and tense red fists wrapped in a cellular blanket – cellular, like the mathematics paper marked with its complicated workings and rubbings out.
And there were other times, more than I care to remember, when Mia writhed and bobbed and made her warning siren sounds with a rounded mouth. And I worried. Like any mother would. I would pull her away from a feed, the sweat that had once sealed us now escaping, tickling and itching, all the while thinking: She is in pain. Something is hurting her.
‘She needs a new nappy, that’s all,’ Dave would say. ‘You’re just worried about things going wrong.’ That smile again.
Didn’t he know that after ten years together you can tell a genuine smile from a fake smile?
Why didn’t he say what he meant? Don’t spoil this for us, Cath.
On the early evening of the twenty-fifth day I drew the curtains against the setting sun and answered a phone call.
‘Is this the mother of Baby Freeland?’
Her mother. Hers.
Yes, I belonged to her.
‘Mia Freeland is her name now.’
I wanted her tone to change, to lilt into a floral exclamation of how lovely a name, but she was hesitant. She told me that her name was Kirsty and she was a health visitor, based at our local GP practice in Terrence Avenue.
‘There were some results from the blood test, the heel-prick test,’ she said.
I got hold of a flap of skin on the edge of my thumbnail and sucked through my teeth as it tore. Test. My four-letter word. Dave and I had failed so many tests already, each time more stinging than the last. But Mia was here now. Our final pass.
‘Are you still there?’ said Kirsty.
The heel-prick test, yes. They had taken a spot of blood from Mia’s heel when she was only a few days old, like they did with every newborn in the country. I had flinched when the thing like a staple gun had punctured her snow-white skin, so much worse than if it were piercing my own. A card was pressed to this tiny new wound and then lifted away to reveal a roundel of red. Now there were results. They hadn’t told me to expect results.
‘Yes, I’m here. Do you phone everyone with their results?’
‘Not unless there’s something, you know, definite to say. In Mia’s case they are inconclusive, which means we need to do more tests. Can you come to Atherton General tomorrow morning at eleven?’
‘The hospital?’
‘Yes, Atherton General, a bit past Clyde Hill … Fourth floor, paediatric outpatients’ reception. They’ll know to expect you.’
‘But what are the tests for?’ My stomach twisted and complained.
‘Her levels look a bit abnormal.’ There was a pause and paper shuffle. ‘For cystic fibrosis. I’m putting you on hold for a moment.’
The soft thump of blood drummed its quick new tune in my
