Baby Love. Louisa Young

oh, no, he sent her a present once. A bottle of Postman Pat bubble bath. He doesn’t even know she has eczema. Doesn’t even know she can’t even use soap without her skin erupting into an unbearable heat and itching that has her trying to claw it off, and raking flakes off beneath her fingernails. Hasn’t heard the crunching sound of compulsive midnight scratching. Doesn’t know that I change her sheets every day when it’s bad. Hasn’t seen the bloodstains, the tiny scars made by four little nails tearing, a miniature bear’s claw, on her shoulders and her legs and her arms. Doesn’t even know that it’s quite hard to explain to a two-year-old (as she was) why she can’t have her present. I poured out the bubble bath and put her medicinal bath oil in the bottle. But it wasn’t pink. Oh, the tragedies of small lives. I considered adding cochineal. But would that make her skin worse? Or dye her pink? I made her a pink mermaid tail, covered with sequins like a dance costume. I killed her mother.

      *

      I had followed Neil’s advice. Jim never turned up at the hospital. Mum and I sat there waiting for him, talking through what Neil had said.

      ‘I should look after her, shouldn’t I?’ I said. Mum said I needed looking after myself.

      ‘In the long run.’

      ‘We’ll all go home, and we’ll all see how it goes,’ said Mum. Sometimes she gets firm. Sometimes her little fears drop away and in the face of something big, she becomes big. She was a teacher. She can make me feel like a little child.

      ‘Your father and I will make the parental responsibility application, and we’ll all stay put a while, and when things have settled we’ll see how they settle. It’ll be better coming from a couple.’

      ‘Why can’t we just have her!’

      ‘We can’t because we can’t. She’s the law’s. But they’ll see it our way. Neil says we have a good chance. Don’t you worry, not now.’

      They were still telling me to rest my leg when I lost all my patience in a rush, and hobbled upstairs to the baby unit, soul racing on ahead, and said, Look, can she come out, please, please, please, is she ready, can we take her? Mum and Dad came up after me. A nice kind devoted family, trying to triumph over tragedy, wanting to take their baby home.

      Mum had been in every day. The nurses liked her. The doctors liked her. They felt, as much as hospital staff can allow themselves to feel, for our tragedy. One little junior nurse cried whenever she saw Lily and had to be moved to a different ward. So Mum was there and I was there and Dad was there and Jim was not.

      Neil said he had seen him, and he had not heard about what had happened. It seemed unbelievable. Apparently he had sobered up and imagined that Janie was taking a break and decided to let her stew a little before fetching her home. It had happened before. I think he was glad it had happened then – gave him an excuse not to be around for the birth. Like so many hard men, Jim can’t take anything really hard.

      Neil said I was never again to ask him not to tell someone something. ‘Your girlfriend’s dead, by the way, only I’m not meant to tell you.’ Well, Jim must have found out sooner or later.

      I was all for just taking her, once she was off her tubes. I was going to sneak upstairs on my crutches, tuck her inside my leather jacket, and ride her home on the Harley with my sick leg dangling in the wind. Never mind that the Harley was a write-off, that I could hardly walk, that the hospital authorities would chase me up, that it was a truly idiotic scheme. I was on drugs. It seemed a great idea to me. Mum repeated her mantra. Neil said no, and organized a little meeting at the hospital.

      We sat in a greenish room. Pigeons were nesting somewhere outside the aquarium windows and their babies’ caterwauling sounded like serial murder. There were fag ends on the floor and plastic chairs that you couldn’t wrest apart from each other. My leg hurt. Mum looked as if she were in shock, Dad looked determined, Neil looked worried. God knows what I looked like.

      We told them that Jim was out of the picture, not interested. He hasn’t even been here, we said. They said they would have to make inquiries, let him know. We said why? Anyway he does know. He knows she was pregnant. He knows how long pregnancy takes. He knows our phone numbers. If he’s interested let him come and ask. It’s not as if they were married. What rights did he have? They said someone had to find out. We said let whoever is interested find out. We said that formal adoption procedures were being put into place. We said that Mum and Dad had applied for parental responsibility under the Children Act 1989. We said the court would sort it all out but in the meantime Lily should be with her granny. Neil blinded them with legal science. They were understaffed. We were there. Dolores kissed me as we left.

      So we took Lily home, and she was ours. A member of our family. Out into the world, out of intensive care, safe and to remain so. The only fly was when Jim rang me, a month after she was born, the day we got home to Mum’s.

      ‘Hello, Angeline,’ he said, sounding serious and sober. I could just picture him: clean shirt, clean-shaven, his bog-brush hair brushed, his face pink. Jim is a very big man and specializes in bonhomie. He used to wear tartan trousers when he was younger, but he doesn’t think it appropriate any more. He used to be quite funny before he got a job and started taking himself seriously. He’s quite good at his computers apparently. Men like him; women find him attractive, even now – well, then – when his face was already going a bit blobby. He worked out, but the flesh was creeping up though he was only, what, thirty-three. When he’s angry his face goes red and he shouts and shouts and shouts. He’s a bully. He drinks too much and cries when he apologizes. I don’t imagine that he’s changed. I’d like to be able to tell you what Janie saw in him but I don’t really know.

      ‘Hello, Jim,’ I said. I was quivering. Anger and fear. It’s a bad combination.

      ‘I suppose we ought to talk,’ he said.

      ‘Don’t see why,’ I said.

      ‘It’s mine, you know,’ he said.

      ‘It?’ I said. ‘Yeah.’

      ‘I heard it was a girl.’

      ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She is.’

      ‘She’ll need to be registered,’ he said.

      ‘Yeah,’ I said. I was so glad Mum hadn’t answered the phone. She didn’t know the half of it, but she knew enough.

      ‘Call her Jane,’ he said.

      ‘Fuck off,’ I said. Janie had chosen Lily. Lily for a girl, Edward for a boy. If he didn’t know that he didn’t deserve to know.

      ‘Well,’ he said.

      I said nothing.

      ‘I don’t know why you’re being so high and … sorry,’ he said.

      I said nothing.

      ‘You’ll have to put my name on the birth certificate,’ he said.

      I said nothing. Then, ‘yes’.

      Well. It was true. You can’t dodge truth. Janie didn’t. And I can’t.

      ‘I insist,’ he said.

      ‘I said yes,’ I said.

      He began to blurt: ‘Look, it’s not been easy for …’

      I hung up.

      Mum was furious when I told her. Dad nearly blew a fuse. He stormed out of the house, and came back half an hour later saying, ‘She’s right, you know.’

      ‘It doesn’t seem right,’ said Mum. But it was true. So.

      *

      So I rang Jim the morning after I saw Dizzy and told him he could come. I told him I would not tell Lily that he was her father. I asked him as a favour not to tell her himself.

      ‘Just come and see her, see how it goes, see what is going to happen, and tell her later. If you bugger off again how will it be for her?’ (‘Yes, you have a daddy, here’s your daddy, oh, yes, but