It was always going to be East London. Staying in the South-East is too risky, someone will recognise me – Annie, Rees, a mum from Millie’s nursery – they’d tell Kit, who in a few hours will go to the police. North is out – unfamiliar – so is West – wherehelives. If I want a place I know well, that leaves only East London where my law firm, Dulwich & Sullivan, is.
The escalator delivers me up to Bishopsgate. The streets are buzzing, it’s Friday night, bankers, lawyers, analysts emptying their skyscrapers for beers and cocktails. I head to Spitalfields, searching for anything familiar – food trucks, stalls, shops – because the guilt is very bad now, I’m retching with it. I move through the market in blurts of speed, then have to stop, steady myself against walls.
Check-in at The Spitalfields Hotel is automated, no receptionists or concierge, just a row of silver iPads, a line of empty baggage trollies. My fingers tremble as I type in my name, swipe the credit card that isn’t linked to my joint account. I squeeze mywrist waiting for the key card to appear. At the door, I can’t hold the card steady, I have to swipe three times at the lock before it flashes green.
The colour scheme of the room is an attempt at Shoreditch cool – white and neon green. A king-size bed claims the centre backed by a lime headboard, behind is an illuminated map of Shoreditch – the parallel stretch of Commercial Street and Brick Lane, the Truman Brewery, Boxpark. Other than that, the walls are blank. Nothing to remind me of Kit or Millie.
My heart is thundering. I set the angel’s trumpets on the desk. I want to unpack but, as the adrenaline fades, the contractions in my abdomen grow sharper. I fumble for my painkillers. The midwife said I’d experience ‘discomfort’ after the C-section. An understatement; I felt like I’d been sawn in two. Kit had to call the hospital for something stronger. They refused initially, the midwife said it would affect breastfeeding, until Kit said in a low, dangerous voice I’d never heard before, ‘Read her notes. She’s had a stillbirth. There’s no baby to breastfeed.’
I walk to the bathroom, undress. Once, I might have watched myself in the mirror, proud of the curve of my hips, the small roundness of my breasts. Now, I can’t bear to see the raw slash of scar, my stomach that, only a month ago, was firm and full. I train my eyes to a single bubble of grout between the tiles while I take off my T-shirt, unzip my jeans, carefully pull apart the abdominal band. Cass, Kit’s sister and an A&E doctor, gave it to me at the hospital. ‘My obs friends swear by it,’ she said, trying to sound normal. ‘It supports your core.’ Released, my belly still looks like I’m four months pregnant, though it’s nothing more than an empty pouch.
Lochia trickles down my thigh, a beautiful word, when I first heard it, I thought of deep freshwater lochs holding ancient secrets, mythological monsters, magic. But later, when I understood it was the discharge after giving birth – a mix of blood, mucus, uterine tissue – I hated it. Because my body is doing the opposite of keeping or holding. It’s draining. It’s shedding. It’s acclimatising to losing my baby when I have not acclimatised to losing her.
I turn on the shower. The water is a relief, transforming everything into itself, the lochia dissolving into silver before circling the drain. Three weeks ago, in the hospital shower, I watched a different transmutation of blood to water, Kit was in the cubicle with me, his shirt translucent against his forearm, his voice unbearably gentle,Lift up your arms, babe, but I couldn’t, my mind had unlatched from my body, the circuitry blown, he had to lift them for me, wash for me. But he isn’t here now. I turn the temperature up to the max. Water deafens my thoughts. Heat sears away my tears.
It is so quiet when I come out from the shower. I hear a key card sliding into a lock, a door banging against the wall, but that’s all. I don’t believe it, the silence. It feels like they’re about to walk in, Millie will fly at me, bury her head into my thigh, Kit will fling his coat over the back of the chair. My body is on high alert for them. How do I tell it they’re not coming?
I wrap a towel round myself and open a bottle of water, trying to enjoy each swallow.This is just like work, I tell myself,you’re in a hotel on a business trip, nothing’s wrong, but it doesn’t work, the panic is white-hot and blank:How could you have left? What kind of mother are you? What kind of wife?
I head to the window, push it open. It’s summer, the air outside is barely colder than the humidity of the room but I gulp it down anyway.
The outdoors calms me, like it always does. Every night since I found out I was pregnant with Faye, I’d make my way to the garden. Seasons didn’t matter. In November, when the morning sickness was the worst, I’d stand in the greenhouse, let the freezing, soil-scented air take the nausea away. In April, when I was so big, it hurt to walk, I’d sit in the canvas deckchair, looking towards Canary Wharf – the banks with their names blazing across the river, the ruby lights of cranes, the white dome of the O2, its yellow-taloned struts.
A few weeks ago, a storm ripped through an entire section of the O2’s sheeted roof, peeling back its metal ribcage, sending sheaves of white floating down into the Thames like the wings of swans, and, standing at the top of The Wedge, I wondered what would happen if I opened the window and gave myself over to the gale. Would it tear through my skin? Would it drive me out of my room? Who would I think of as I hurtled down? Faye, Millie, Kit, of course. But if I’m being truthful, brave, honest in a way I can only be away from home, there is one other person I’d think of before my skull smashed against the pavement.
Him.
From: Kit McDermott
20:04
I’ve called everyone I know. No one has heard from you. I’m really starting to freak out. If you don’t come home soon, I’m calling the police.
From: Kit McDermott
20:05
Have you left me? You can’t say you love me and then leave me.
5
DisplayCase
Then
The start. The beginning. For lawyers like Kit and me, the beginning is always obvious – on X date, the claimant purchased this company, the defendant transferred Y pounds. But in memory with its twists and turns, shafted light and shadowed undergrowth, the beginning is impossible to discern. I’ve tried countless times, I am constantly revisiting the matted knot of those months when I was thirteen, trying to unravel it into smooth, clean strands. How did it begin? Why?
Perhaps it was the display case. Mama packed it away years ago, along with everything else she’d inherited from her parents back in Singapore, zipped them up into an old suitcase because she couldn’t bear to see them. There were lots of things Mama couldn’t bear to see. A pair of jade earrings carved in the shape of peaches. A gold peacock brooch, the fanned tail studded with diamonds. A painting of a woman brushing her hair made entirely out of feathers. Mama wrapped that in six copies ofMetroand slid it under her bed.
But now, she needs the old suitcase; Mama is a violinist, she has a concert in Berlin. By the time I drift into her room, she’s already hauled the suitcase down and emptied its contents out onto her bed. Now, she’s packing – slipping her velvet concert dress off its hanger, folding it in half. I sit quietly on the corner of her quilt because I like watching her.
She’s mesmerising. I love how she moves through the world, forceful, regal, so unlike me with my long arms, my gangly legs. She has delicate features, clear, fair skin, she wears her black hair in a long, lustrous ponytail. I look nothing like her. At St Matthews, it is a running joke that I am adopted; my father, whose face I don’t know, nevertheless appears on mine, in my nose that is slightly too large, the dull brown of my hair, my murky-brown eyes. If I say this out loud, Mama flinches, before taking me by the shoulders and looking me full in the face. ‘You’re beautiful,’ she says. ‘Everything about you is beautiful.’
So, I am watching her, sometimes smoothing her concert dress, sometimes running my hands over the objects she’s emptied out onto the bed. In bubble wrap, they cast strange shadows, their contents impossible to discern. I lift the closest package onto my lap.
‘That belonged to my father,’ she says quietly, before fitting her shoes into the suitcase, and I glimpse that deep hurt in her, which she tries so hard to hide. Though she’s filled my childhood with flowers and music, though she swears that I am her family, the only person she’ll ever need, I know the truth. We are unwanted by my father, who left us before I was born, by her family, who never spoke to her after she told them she was pregnant. We are exiles.
‘Unwrap it if you want.’
