I was still trying to move in advance of the story, to think my way through to the end. Had my mother’s sectioning meant that I’d somehow been damaged? What did any of this have to do with me?
‘Libby.’ David leaned into the conversation now. At my side I heard Ross take a small shuddering breath and move slightly. All sounds seemed magnified, Tilly’s bead-dropping was a titanic clash, I could swear I could even hear the sweep of feathers as the bird on the sofa moved against the torn fabric. ‘It’s a heritable condition. You fell into postpartum psychosis, and you went down so fast that we couldn’t help you in time.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. It was a good cover story, I had to give him that, but that chill had stopped tiptoeing and was now tap dancing on my spine. No. This wasn’t true. David had an angle and I just had to find out what it was.
‘I wanted to be there, I knew the signs, but when Tilly came early, and then David reassured me that you were fine, and yousoundedfine when we Zoomed to meet Tilly…’ This was all on another breath. My mother was respiring her entire half of the conversation, as though the words were something that had to be wrapped in air to come out. ‘I…we… made the mistake of thinking it was all right.’
Ross stirred. ‘Libby had postpartum psychosis?’
David looked at Ross now and I could see how tired his eyes were. ‘It happened so suddenly. Tilly was about ten weeks old and out of nowhere Libby was accusing me of having her bugged. She wouldn’t let me hold the baby, she wouldn’t eat anything I gave her. She wouldn’t sleep. She’d spend the nights pacing the room holding Tilly and talking to herself. I couldn’t get her to a doctor, she wouldn’t leave the house, but I got some sleeping pills to try to help her to sleep and she wouldn’t take them…’ His voice broke, and he put his hands over his face. ‘I couldn’t leave them. I was afraid—’ He stopped very suddenly, dropping his hands to reveal an expression which told us all very clearly what he’d been afraid of.
‘It wasn’t your fault.’ Mum gently touched his shoulder.
‘But Iknew!’ David jumped from his seat, the abrupt movement making Tilly look up, startled, and diamonds rolled to form an abstract pattern on the tray. ‘I knew what was happening, and I couldn’t stop it, and I should have got help faster! For Libby, for me, for all of us!’
I could see Ross out of the corner of my eye. He’d taken half a step away from me and was more of a dark presence than a person. ‘She was ill,’ he said, flatly.
‘Yes.’ Mum came back in. ‘The doctors advised us not to say anything to her – toyou.’ Her eyes came back to me again. ‘I never mentioned it before because… well, because I was ashamed.’ Now she looked down at her knees. ‘People aren’t always kind about mental illness,’ she said carefully.
‘The doctors didn’t want you to have the idea put in your head,’ David went on, picking up smoothly as though they’d rehearsed this. ‘I told your midwife about your history too, and she said that it wasn’t inevitable that you’d getPPP, and to keep an eye out for symptoms and take you to the doctor if anything flagged up. And it didn’t,’ he said bleakly. ‘Until it did, and by then it was too late.’
‘Hang on.’ I was trying to think back, through that tangle of sleeplessness and anxiety that new motherhood had put me into. ‘Just hang on. None of this is what I remember happening.’
Over at the table, Isobel had got down onto the floor and was helping Tilly pile beads into loose heaps. She kept shooting glances my way, but they looked sympathetic more than anything. The bird was pecking at the sofa stuffing but I couldn’t even muster the energy to ruminate on the damage that beak could do.
‘What do you remember?’ David asked.
‘None of this! You’re just… I don’t know, trying to create a story to cover up your behaviour!’
My leg was still shaking. Up and down, up and down, as though a heavy weight was leaping above it. I was cold, that was all. Cold and a bit shivery, hardly surprising given the damp and the clouds that were gathering beyond the window. There was a wind rising too, I could hear it susurrating through the treetops and small twigs waved a greeting through the top panes.
‘You got… weird,’ I said finally, addressing David directly. ‘As soon as Tilly was born, you were distant. You weren’t around after she was born, you just left us. You went off for twodays!’ I hesitated. That memory was distant. While I could remember the first few weeks of being home with a new baby, memories of the time after that were obscure, as though seen through gauze.
‘Of course I was around. I went to work, and I came straight home to you both.’ David sounded tired more than anything. ‘I’ve got the photos of Tilly’s first bath, her first smile, to prove it.’
‘And then… I was just sotiredand you weren’t there…’
‘I had towork, Libby! You took maternity leave and I was covering the bills so you had money, and I was acting in the evenings and doing voice-over work during the day!’
‘And then… and then… you started stalking me.’
David sighed and looked back towards Tilly again, who, with Isobel’s help, was now drawing. ‘I really didn’t,’ he said softly. ‘It was all in your head. And we couldn’t help you because you ran away.’ His voice broke again.
‘David came home one afternoon and you’d gone.’ Mum sounded tired too. ‘Taken almost nothing except your car and some baby things. We tried to find you but…’ She trailed off and swallowed. ‘We were very afraid something had happened to you. And because I knew how it could go, I thought…’ Now she stopped completely and shook her head. Her expression spoke the rest of the sentence though.
I rubbed my head. I had the vaguest twitch of a memory that felt like remembering a dream, in which I’d run out of the house, strapped Tilly in the car and driven off. But I’d done that dozens of times, going to the shop, going to the library – why was this memory any different?
‘You were living in your car.’
‘With a baby.’
No. None of this was true. Itcouldn’tbe true. I looked at Ross. ‘This is all rubbish,’ I said, but couldn’t muster any volume. ‘I need to… I just need some air.’
Nobody moved to stop me. I walked out of the house into the building gale, where hail shrapnel hail periodically cut the air into small, sharp slices. They were lying. Theyhadto be lying. I wanted to walk and walk until I was too tired to think, too tired to process the words that kept running through my head.Psychosis. Delusions. Inherited.
I knew about postpartum psychosis, of course I did. I’d read about it, along with postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety, it must have been mentioned in the classes I’d— thatwehad done before Tilly’s birth. But none of it had been gone into in any depth; these things were mentioned in passing, prefaced by ‘you should be aware of’ and bookended by ‘but very rare’. Surely… no. But my mum had suffered too?
‘Hey.’ It was Ross. He must have followed me out; now he was standing under one of the trees with the last loose leaves being shaken down around him as the topmost branches flailed in the rising wind. ‘Are you all right?’
