The Two of Us Read online

  The doctor pushes on the bump, there is a shift onscreen and it looks as if both babies move. A small fist clenches, opens and closes again and I realize that my own hand is doing the same thing inside my coat pocket. A small white shape beats rapidly in the centre of the screen. I look at the doctor and her expression is unreadable. Again she moves the probe, pushes Ivy’s stomach and I can see red marks on her skin. The doctor scans again, using a vaginal probe this time. She tries for several minutes before she turns off the monitor.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

  Ivy pulls her hand from mine, and rolls onto her side. Her back shakes convulsively, and the way she cries, it sounds as if she’s in physical pain. In between the tears she repeats the same words over and over: ‘My baby, my baby, my baby.’

  The doctor and midwife leave us on our own.

  I watch impotently, searching my mind for comforting words, but what can I say that isn’t shallow or dishonest or fucking trivial? Ivy cries so hard that I almost tell her to control herself out of fear for the remaining baby. My face feels pulled out of shape by sadness and I feel as if I should cry too. I could force (or allow; I don’t know which) the tears to come, but it would be deliberate and disingenuous and offensive against Ivy’s raw, reflexive outpouring. So I don’t cry and I don’t speak. I stroke Ivy’s back and kiss the top of her head and when she cries herself into silence, it is a huge and shameful relief.

  At around three a.m. the midwife returns. She takes Ivy’s blood pressure and examines her cervix, and all the while Ivy lies mute and impassive as if in some kind of trance. The midwife tells us that they will need to induce labour for the safety of the surviving twin. She asks if Ivy understands and Ivy nods. The midwife says we can stay in the hospital, or go home for one last night. What do you want to do? she asks, and Ivy shakes her head and wraps her arms around her belly. The midwife says it might be a good idea to go home, get some sleep and have some final time together ‘just the four of you’.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ I ask Ivy.

  She looks at me blankly, then sits up and climbs down off the bed. She walks to the door, and I pick up our hospital bag and follow her out of the room.

  We drive home with the radio on. But the awful suffocating truth is riding with us, drowning out the music and filling all the space inside the car, inside our heads, inside our hearts. When we get back to the flat I am sick with hunger. I ask Ivy if she wants anything to eat, but she shakes her head and I feel guilty for having an appetite. I make toast, spread it thinly with butter and every bite feels dry and dreadful inside my mouth.

  Ivy says she is going to the bathroom. The flat – the street, the whole of London – is silent, and whatever Ivy is doing in the bathroom it makes no sound. After five minutes I get up from the sofa and find her lying on our bed, fully clothed.

  ‘Do you want anything?’

  ‘Could you turn off the light?’ she says.

  Ivy doesn’t protest when I remove her shoes and jeans. She lies quietly, staring at the ceiling as I take off her socks and cardigan and manoeuvre her underneath the duvet. I turn out the light, undress and slide under the covers. I wrap my arms around Ivy’s waist and rest my hand on the top of her bump.

  When I wake a little before six in the morning, I find Ivy sitting on the sofa bed in the nursery. Her eyes are red and swollen, and if she’s slept it can’t have been for more than a handful of minutes.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Is it . . . was it a boy or a girl?’ Ivy asks. ‘Did they say if it was a boy or a girl?’

  I shake my head and Ivy turns away from me, disappointed.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Have you eaten?’ Ivy shakes her head, and I feel a sudden urge to shout at her. I clench my teeth and take a deep breath through my nose. ‘You have to eat,’ I say.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘For the other one,’ I say.

  ‘Okay!’ Ivy shouts. ‘I said okay!’

  We eat bowls of cereal and drink coffee at the kitchen table.

  ‘Did you sleep?’ I ask.

  Ivy shakes her head.

  ‘You should sleep.’

  Ivy puts down her spoon and walks through to the bedroom. She shuts the door behind her. When I look in thirty minutes later, she at least appears to be sleeping.

  I phone her parents; I phone my dad and my sister. I have three terrible conversations and listen to people cry down the phone. I go through Ivy’s phone and send texts and ask people to leave us alone while we try to get through this. And as I sit on the floor, typing messages, the replies begin pinging in, and after the first few I delete the rest without reading because they all say the same thing and none of them changes anything. I text Joe and Esther and ask them both not to reply. By the time I put Ivy’s phone down I need painkillers for the pounding in my temples.

  Ivy wakes after one in the afternoon. She takes a shower and changes her clothes, then comes and sits next to me on the sofa. She kisses me on the cheek, strokes my hair then rests her head in my lap where she lies still and silent for close to an hour. I doze sporadically, slipping in and out of pre-sleep scenes where I am lost in some place that is at once familiar and alien.

  It’s almost three in the afternoon when Ivy sits up, brushes her hair off her face and says, ‘I suppose we should go.’

  ‘I spoke to your parents,’ I tell her. ‘Your mum said she’d come up.’

  Ivy shakes her head and fresh tears roll down her cheeks. ‘Not now. Not yet.’

  And all I can think is: this is not the way it is supposed to happen.

  Chapter 32

  The hospital car park is full and we have to drive two circuits before we find a space. There are visitors carrying flowers, fruit, sweets, magazines. I see one young man holding a balloon printed with the words: ‘It’s a girl!!!’

  I shoulder Ivy’s hospital bag, still packed with enough clothes for two babies, and we hold hands as we walk quietly into the hospital. People nudge each other and smile and try to catch our eyes, the expectant couple, as we make our way through the corridors and ride the lift to the delivery suite. I push the buzzer on the intercom and squeeze Ivy’s hand while we wait. I don’t remember there being a buzzer last night. It is just fifteen hours since I came home from the shoot on Friday night, and in that time – less than a day – the entire shape of our world has changed forever.

  A doctor examines Ivy and confirms again that one of our twins – Danny if he’s a boy, Danni if she’s a girl – is dead. The doctor explains what is going to happen and connects Ivy to a drip. They attach a monitor to her bump, and another to the scalp of the baby we have yet to find a name for. A bedside monitor beeps with a single, rapid pulse. Our midwife tells us it will take several hours for the drugs to induce labour and suggests we try and rest.

  There is a television mounted to the wall, and we watch films and old detective shows and cookery programmes and panel shows and commercials, not changing channels but staring through the box, passing occasional comments to fill the silence on this side of the screen. I fetch food from a supermarket concession in the hospital foyer, and we eat pre-packed sandwiches and crisps and drink bottles of juice and water. The food makes me feel sick.

  Ivy sleeps for maybe two hours in the late afternoon. I turn the TV off and close my eyes, but sleep doesn’t come. Without the background drone of Saturday daytime television, the steady beep of the monitor fills the room. Does our baby know its twin is dead? Is he or she distressed, sad, lonely?

  Inside my wallet is a laminated card, given to us at our antenatal class. Printed on one side is an acronym to help dads ask the right questions and make the right decisions while the mums go through labour. If anything goes wrong, you consult the card and work though the word: BRAIN: What are the Benefits to going ahead with this decision or procedure? What are the Risks? What are the Alternatives? What does your Intuition tell you? What happens if you do Nothing?

  None of it helps.

  The baby’s
heart beats at between 120 and 130 beats a minute. I count in time with the monitor: one, two, three, four . . . all the way up to one hundred and twenty, or one hundred and twenty-four, or one hundred and thirty-two . . . over and over and over.

  The sun sets between six and seven, and the sky – streaked gold and rose and purple – is beautiful. And I count to 124, and 122 and 127.

  When Ivy wakes it is completely dark outside our window.

  ‘I think it’s happening,’ she says.

  The midwife is called Phoebe; her shift finished an hour ago but she is staying to see this through to the end. She tells me they will attempt to deliver both babies naturally. Even so, there are another four medical staff in attendance, their mute bodies seeming to amplify the silence, making it palpable and ominous.

  Phoebe is the one who takes charge of the situation, everybody else apparently here only on standby – despite her professional demeanour, Phoebe’s eyes are wet with tears. Ivy is offered an epidural to help her deal with any pain. The midwife says it will make it difficult for Ivy to feel the contractions and know when to push, possibly prolonging labour. Ivy asks for the injection. The tension in the room ebbs and flows with the contractions, and Phoebe – her voice soft and Irish accented – tells Ivy when to breathe and when to push. Ivy is passive and expressionless throughout. She stares straight up at the ceiling and closes her eyes for minutes at a time. Phoebe stares at me, grimaces, and mouths the words: Help her!

  I hold Ivy’s hand but I don’t know what to say. I form words in my head: you can do this; nearly there; well done – but they’re all inadequate; all inappropriate; all wrong.

  The first baby is born at fourteen minutes past one on Sunday morning, March 30th. He’s a boy. The less active of the twins, we used to call this baby Turvy, but the nickname sounds shamefully frivolous now.

  The midwife asks if I want to cut the umbilical cord, but I shake my head.

  Ivy holds her son to her chest and cries and kisses his thin, wet, dirty hair.

  This is supposed to be the happiest day, the happiest moment of my life. And maybe – as I look at my perfect baby boy, loose purple skin covered in wax and blood and gunk, eyes screwed tight against the world – maybe for a split second it is. And then it’s gone, because – and everybody in the room knows this – Ivy still has one dead child to deliver. Even our new baby is quiet, as if he too understands that his big moment has happened in shadow.

  Phoebe asks if he has a name and we say no.

  Time passes in the hard, conflicted silence of the room; me sitting beside the bed, Ivy pulling our boy against her as if, having just given birth to him, she is trying to reabsorb him into her. Phoebe busies herself, arranging equipment, checking Ivy’s pulse, taking the baby’s temperature. She says our boy is healthy and doing fine, but he is colder than he should be and needs to go to the special care unit. When she goes to take him from Ivy, Ivy becomes hysterical.

  ‘Don’t take him. Please. Please! Don’t take my baby!’

  I put one hand on Ivy’s forehead, another on her hand, and she pulls the baby tight to her chest.

  ‘Your boy is doing fine,’ says Phoebe. ‘He’s doing great. But he needs a little extra attention. Just for a short while.’ As she speaks, Phoebe takes hold of the boy and pulls him gently from Ivy’s grip. Ivy’s face is a mask of sadness and fear, and she holds onto her child until her arms are fully extended. When, finally, she lets go of her son, her hands fall limply to the bed and her expression glazes over as if she has become suddenly catatonic.

  Our boy is placed in a plastic-sided cot that I hadn’t noticed until now, and he is taken from the room. As the doors swing closed he starts to cry – the sound echoing and fading down the corridor.

  Danny – he is a boy, too – is born ‘sleeping’ at two twenty-eight. Identical twins. The doctors had to cut Ivy and use forceps to facilitate the delivery, and Danny is slick with blood when he emerges. The midwife does not ask if I want to cut the cord and she wipes the baby before placing his still body in my hands. Like his older brother, Danny’s eyes are closed. Whereas his brother was tensed against the cold brightness of the delivery room, Danny is relaxed and peaceful.

  Ivy’s face is turned away. ‘Is it . . . is it okay?’ she asks.

  ‘He’s beautiful,’ I say, ‘here.’ And I hold the baby out to her.

  Ivy turns to me and smiles, but only with her mouth. She takes Danny. ‘Hey,’ she whispers into his neck, and she kisses the top of his head, his nose and his lips. ‘Hey there, baby.’

  We are transferred into a private room where Phoebe helps Ivy express a small amount of breast milk, which will then be given to our boy in the special care unit. Phoebe says I can stay, but Ivy encourages me to go home and sleep in our own bed. She asks me to call her mother and father but to keep them away for the time being. She wants to be alone with Danny, she says.

  In the corridor, Phoebe hugs me and we cry together. I ask her what went wrong and she says that sometimes it ‘just happens’. There is no obvious cause, no immediately apparent reason why one of our boys survived and the other died inside his mother. She tells me they will keep Ivy in for a day or so, and that Danny will be able to stay with his mother. The idea sounds macabre, and I say as much to Phoebe, but she assures me that it will help Ivy deal with her grief and say goodbye to our boy. She explains that they will put a cold cot in the room, and when Ivy is not holding him, this is where he will stay.

  It is after six in the morning when I get back to the flat, and the sun is rising above the silhouetted trees and houses on our street. The flat feels unnaturally quiet and empty – it feels today as if it is missing not only Ivy, but the two babies she has been carrying since the middle of last summer. Since forever ago.

  I feed the goldfish, clean yesterday’s dishes, make coffee and take it into the nursery, where I begin dismantling one cot, one mobile, one baby bouncer. I take the disassembled parts down to the car along with the extra, unneeded Moses basket. I remove the second car seat from the back of the car and transfer it into the boot with the rest of the stuff baby Danny will never get to sit, sleep and bounce in. When I go to open the front door of the flat, my hands are shaking so much that I can barely fit the key into the lock.

  And now, finally, the tears come. Angry, hysterical tears, and I’m so grateful for them that I shout at the walls like a drunk, and grind my knuckles into my temples until white spots crackle across my vision.

  At one minute past nine o’clock I drive to the charity shop, but I’ve forgotten it’s a Sunday and everything is closed. I’m tempted to leave the stuff on the pavement, but it feels disrespectful to Danny. I drive to Earl’s Court and pull up outside El and Phil’s flat. But as I sit behind the wheel, listening to the engine cool, it occurs to me what a bad idea this is. El can’t be relied upon not to say something crass and stupid; and the state I’m in, I couldn’t be relied upon not to slap him. And even the thought of some imagined facetious comment has me gripping the steering wheel tight enough to make my knuckles pop. So as much as I want to talk to Phil and sit with El, I put the car into gear and drive back to the flat.

  I haven’t slept more than half a dozen hours in the last forty-eight and I feel sick. I make more coffee and call my dad. We don’t say much. I tell him what happened, and while I sob down the phone Dad says things that are supposed to comfort me. You’ll get through it, son, he says, eventually you’ll get through it.

  He repeats this phrase to me as I sit in the fairy-tale nursery, crying, staring at the indents in the carpet where baby Danny’s cot stood only one hour ago.

  Chapter 33

  When I walk into Ivy’s hospital room on Sunday evening, she is lying in bed with Danny, caressing our boy’s head with her cheek. Pink, peaceful and beautiful – he looks alive. Perfect fingers curled into tiny fists, fat cheek resting against his mother’s chest. Ivy’s eyes, too, are closed.

  I sit in the chair beside the bed and stroke Ivy’s head. I run m
y hand over her brown hair, following the line and flow of it to where it falls against Danny’s shoulder. I let my hand drift onto Danny’s head and it’s as cold as a stone. When Ivy opens her eyes, I flinch.

  ‘Hey,’ I say.

  Ivy looks through me, expressionless.

  A new mother and her baby should be a beautiful image, the most beautiful image in the world. Ivy looks like hell; like she hasn’t slept and hasn’t stopped crying since I left this morning.

  Inside my skull I say: Are you okay? Did you sleep? I’m sorry.

  I say, ‘Have you seen baby . . . the other baby?’

  Ivy shakes her head. A tear forms in the corner of her eye, thinning as it travels across her cheek and down her chin, disappearing into Danny’s sparse brown hair. He’s been cleaned since yesterday, but his head is damp and sticky with accumulated tears.

  ‘Can I hold him?’

  Ivy’s bottom lip trembles, she holds Danny closer to her chest, closes her eyes, presses her cheek against the top of his head. And then she relaxes, opens her eyes and passes my son to me. He weighs nothing at all; born five weeks premature, Danny fits comfortably into my cupped hands and he weighs . . . nothing. He is dressed in a white cotton onesy and his chest is warm with absorbed heat from Ivy. One side of his face, too, is warm, his cheek soft against my neck. The other side of his face, though, like his back and bottom, is cold through the thin material. I push my index finger into his curled palm and it feels as if his tiny fingers, his perfect fingers, grip back.

  ‘We should go and see his brother,’ I say. ‘He doesn’t even have a name.’

  Ivy’s chin dimples and I wonder how many tears a person can physically make.

  ‘We can’t call him Turvy forever,’ I say, forcing a smile. But it’s too soon, and Ivy turns away from me.

  ‘Have you seen him?’ Ivy says.

  ‘I thought we could go together.’