Cath Staincliffe - Crying Out Loud

‘So, you never met him?’

‘No – before my time.’

‘And you were a suspect?’

She hesitated. ‘Yes, I’d found Charlie. And they had to “rule me out of their enquiries”, as they put it. They went over and over the same ground. Had we rowed? Did Charlie decide he was staying with his wife? Before they interview you, they ask you these medical questions so I had to tell them I was pregnant and they tried to use that.’

I looked across at her, startled. ‘Really?’ It was a fact I’d not come across in any of the media reports.

‘Had we argued about the baby? I told them time and again that Charlie didn’t even know about the baby.’ Her voice began to shake. ‘That was why I arranged to meet him; it meant he’d break his promise to Heather about not seeing me but I was desperate to tell him about the baby. I’d only done the pregnancy test that week. It was a total surprise – an accident really, but I was over the moon and I knew Charlie would be as well. The baby was due in June and by then the whole mess would be sorted out. We’d be together.’ She sighed and leant forward, bracing her arms. ‘If I’d only got there earlier,’ she said quietly. ‘Saturday’s always a big day at work: weddings and parties and festivals. Although we get the tents up on Friday, so there’s plenty of time to dress them, there can be last-minute glitches. I’m on call most of the day. Then I’ve errands to run: the dry-cleaners, grab something nice to eat. I was supposed to be at the cottage around five but when I knew that was pushing it, I texted Charlie to say I was running late. It was just after six when I got there.’

She rubbed at her face and took a deep breath. She looked straight at me, her grey eyes stark with emotion. ‘And it was too late.’ There was a tremor in her voice. ‘He never knew about Rowena, our baby, and she never met him. So this…’ she pointed at the envelope, ‘… please just find out what the hell they think they’re playing at.’

That first night with baby Jamie was terrible. Enough time had elapsed since Maddie was born for the memories of looking after an infant to become smudged and hazy. And Maddie was my baby. This was a stranger and that added to my anxiety.

Even though Jamie slept for three hours after an eleven o’clock feed, I didn’t. As soon as I turned out the lights the worries crowded in on me. What if Ray was right? What if something happened to her while she was in my care? Cot death! I snapped my bedside light back on and checked that she was still lying on her back. The room was cool but I got out of bed and opened the window a little wider. Back between the covers, I turned the light off and tried to distract myself by concentrating on what I wanted to get out of my forthcoming meeting with convicted killer Damien Beswick.

I couldn’t hear Jamie breathing. Dread stole through me. I turned the light back on and crossed to the travel cot that I’d borrowed from the neighbours across the road. Peering closely at her chest, I held my own breath, as if stilling my body might magically animate hers. And it did. An almost imperceptible shift – so slight that I had to measure the movement by contrasting the motion of the popper on her Babygro with the static pattern of yellow ducks on the navy material of the cot.

Jamie jerked in her sleep, her arms flew akimbo and her eyelids fluttered open. Startled, I almost squealed as the kick of surprise shot a spike of adrenalin into my heart and sent tendrils of it snaking down my back.

It was ridiculous. She slept on, her eyelids slowly closing and her mouth moving in an imaginary suckle. But I was shot to pieces. Too tense to sleep, I sat up in bed and opened my book. But even the magic of Kate Atkinson couldn’t soothe my chattering mind. I’ll explain later. How much later? I had half expected the doorbell to ring while we were having tea. A friend or acquaintance to be standing there, apologizing for the melodrama, explaining how she’d been taken ill and had to get to A &E, or how her baby-minder had cried off and she was desperate for that interview.

But of all the excuses I could think of, nothing really seemed plausible. What would drive you to abandon your baby without explaining at the time? How long would it have taken to tell me what was going on? Another five minutes. Why so cloak and dagger? Ringing the bell and disappearing before I could see her. She’d had time to write a note, time to pack nappies and formula, so there had been some foresight.

Where was she now, the mother? Awake somewhere, fretting about her baby? Sick with anxiety, fearful that something might have gone wrong? Struggling with the enormous pain of separation? The baby was so small, so young and still at an age where it’s hard to separate mother from child: physically, emotionally still bound together. When Maddie was that tiny I’d been overtaken by a dark, panicky and crippling sense of looming disaster whenever she was away from me, even for an hour or so. Perhaps it’s a response hardwired into us to keep us caring for our young ones, or maybe I was a bit paranoid, or depressed, struggling on my own with a patchy support network and coping with my first baby. Whatever, I couldn’t imagine Jamie’s mother was resting easy tonight.

A dozen nappies; we’d already changed Jamie twice. At a rate of six a day there was enough for two days. Was that significant? Would her mother be back then? But there was only one change of clothes – which suggested she hadn’t planned to be gone so long.

The questions came at me all night long; a perpetual quiz with no answers. When I did drift off, just before three, Jamie woke up, crying for a feed. No doubt there are devices you can buy to keep a night bottle warm but we hadn’t got them. Instead I was forced to try mixing a bottle while I jiggled her on one arm and felt the cold steal round my ankles and my neck.

I fed her in bed. My eyes were dry and tired and I closed them as much as I could. She became dozy towards the end of the feed and I was tempted to just lay her back in the cot but her nappy felt heavy and damp and was starting to leak out of the edge on to her clothes. I winded her first, the air escaping in a watery gurgle. I wondered if her crying had woken Ray and wished he was here giving me some moral support. Highly unlikely given his objections to the whole enterprise.

Jamie complained when I wrested her out of her Babygro – not loudly but the night was silent and so every noise was magnified. It’s rare that things are so quiet in south Manchester, with the trains passing quarter of a mile away, the roads busy, aeroplanes in the day and, most of the year round, students having fun late into the night. But this night was still. The city slept. Even the wind was resting.

Nappy changed, I remembered the old trick of putting my fists through the Babygro and drawing it over hers. The jumpsuit was barely damp and would last till morning.

‘There we go.’ I lifted her up, her face level with mine. She smiled and for a moment there was a connection there, person to person; for a moment she wasn’t a puzzle or a burden or a cause for concern, but a little human being smiling at me.

‘Back to bed.’ I drew her close and moved to the cot. She convulsed once and threw up all down my neck.

And I tell you this – way more liquid came out than ever went in.

Night bled into day and by then Jamie was wearing a hastily adapted roll-neck T-shirt of Maddie’s in black and white stripes. Très chic. The kids got up at seven thirty and joined us in the kitchen, followed shortly by Ray.

‘Did you hear her?’ I asked him.

‘Loud and clear.’ He clattered around, pouring muesli and slicing bread. A small, irrational part of me resented the fact that he had left me to it. That he hadn’t sought me out and shown a bit of solidarity. But I understood the way he worked, too. Ray saw this as my problem; he thought I was handling it the wrong way so he would stand well clear, palms front, arms out to the side in a hands-off gesture and watch me sink or swim, eager for an ‘I-told-you-so’ opportunity.