The Two of Us Read online

  Ivy turns her head to face me. ‘Is he . . .?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ I say. ‘The midwife says he’s strong, drinking his milk, keeping them busy.’

  Ivy extends her arms, asking for Daniel, and I pass him back to her. She settles him on her chest, kisses his hair, rubs his back as if trying to warm him. ‘I can’t,’ she says.

  ‘Not today.’

  ‘Just for five minutes?’

  Ivy shakes her head. ‘After this’ – she strokes Daniel’s head – ‘after this there’s nothing. This is it . . . this is all I have with him.’ She kisses Daniel’s head. ‘This is it.’

  After an hour, Ivy falls asleep and I cuddle Daniel for as long as I can bear before placing him in his cold cot. While Ivy sleeps I visit our boy in the special care unit.

  He too is sleeping, curled up inside a sealed incubator. Two blue pads trailing wires are attached to his chest, and another wire is strapped to his foot via a Velcro cuff. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ I am instantly reassured, he is breathing well but needs a little help maintaining his temperature.

  Two babies who can’t keep themselves warm – one lying still inside a cold cot; the other sleeping in a heated incubator, his belly rising and falling as he draws breath. There is a circular hatch in the side of the incubator, and after I have washed and disinfected my hands I am allowed to touch my boy through the narrow aperture.

  ‘Hello, baby,’ I whisper. ‘Hello, Baby T.’

  Baby T straightens both legs in a long stretch and yawns, before relaxing back into a loose bundle. I place my finger in his hand, and when he squeezes it is strong and unequivocal. I feel myself smile as if it is something happening to another person. The smile sits clumsily on my face – the first one I haven’t forced in almost two days.

  On Monday morning I arrive at the hospital a little after nine and go straight to the special care unit. Baby T – just thirty hours old – is still inside his cot, but the midwife says I can take him out and cuddle him. It’s the last day in March and warm outside; even so, Baby T is dressed in a onesy, cardigan, booties and tiny woollen cap. He makes a small sound and it moves me more than any words could. After this, when I go to see Ivy and Daniel, everything will change again; I’ll be in a different world, one where our baby is dead and smiles are not allowed. So I carry a chair across to the window and sit with Baby T where he can feel the sun on his face. I watch him sleep and watch his eyes flicker briefly open, I watch his fists clench and uncurl, I watch him breathe. When he starts crying a midwife brings a bottle of milk and I feed my baby boy. I rub his back until he brings up wind and I change his nappy, seeing for the first time his tummy, thin legs and wrinkled bottom. He sleeps in my arms for one still quiet hour before the midwife puts him back inside his incubator.

  Daniel is in his cot when I go to see Ivy. She smiles when she sees me, a thin polite smile, and asks have I ‘seen him’ yet.

  ‘Just been,’ I say. ‘He’s amazing.’

  Ivy nods, the same resigned smile still on her lips.

  ‘I brought pictures,’ I say, passing my phone to Ivy.

  She swipes through the pictures, zooming in on his face and hands. Her smile begins its journey towards her eyes (not quite making it all the way, not yet) as she looks at her boy and touches her fingers to the screen, touching his face.

  ‘Baby T,’ I tell her.

  Ivy frowns. ‘What?’

  ‘Baby T. That’s what I’ve been calling him.’

  Ivy nods. ‘T for Turvy,’ she says, and she hands the phone back to me.

  ‘Did you sleep?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘How are you?’

  What little smile was on Ivy’s face, it dissolves now as she turns to look at Danny.

  ‘I gave T his bottle,’ I say. ‘Changed his nappy.’

  Ivy nods, makes a small humph of a laugh.

  ‘They said we can take him home tomorrow.’

  Ivy swings her legs out of the bed, climbs down and goes over to the cold cot and picks up Daniel. We listen to the radio, eat sandwiches, cuddle our baby and doze until, at around six in the evening, Ivy tells me she’s tired and needs to be alone. On the way out I spend another hour with my boy in the special care unit.

  Two minutes after I get back to the flat, someone rings my doorbell. After they ring for the third time, I go downstairs to open the door.

  ‘Hi, Harold.’

  ‘Flowers came,’ says my next-door neighbour, fidgeting with his hands, apparently reluctant to meet my eyes.

  ‘Right.’

  Still looking at his feet, Harold asks, ‘What happened?’

  I take a deep breath. ‘We had two boys,’ I tell him. ‘Twins. But one of them was . . . they call it stillborn – he was born . . .’

  Harold nods. ‘I’m sorry.’

  If I thought it wouldn’t terrify him, I’d hug him. Not for his sake, but for mine. Harold is the first person I’ve spoken to in the flesh outside of the hospital since Friday.

  ‘I’ll get them,’ Harold says, and he disappears into his flat, leaving me alone. After a minute Harold arrives with a large bunch of white lilies. He goes back into the house as I read the card: ‘Sending love at this time, Joe & Jen’. Harold returns with flowers from Phil and El: ‘All our love at this sad time’. Harold brings flowers from Maria, Eva and Ken, Esther and Nino, all of them sending me their love at this tragic fucking time.

  ‘Can I do anything?’ Harold asks.

  I consider asking him to take all these flowers and throw them in the nearest skip, but instead I ask him to help me bring them up to the flat. I offer him a drink, but Harold says he has to do his homework.

  We now have more bunches of flowers than things to contain them, so I drive to the department store in Wimbledon and buy three new vases. On the way home I stop at the supermarket and buy fresh milk, bread, fruit, ready meals and wine. Back at the flat I pull the supermarket receipt from my jeans pocket and find a small scrap of burst red balloon. I put the receipt in the bin and the scrap of balloon into a compartment inside my wallet.

  After I’ve sorted out the flowers, I eat a frozen lasagne for two and finish an entire bottle of Shiraz. When the wine is finished, I open another bottle and get almost halfway through before I fall asleep on the sofa.

  On Tuesday I take Baby T to see his mother.

  I hold Daniel while Ivy cradles her live baby and sobs. We introduce the brothers to each other, and although two days have passed since Daniel was born sleeping, the boys still look identical. On the midwife’s advice I have brought our camera and we take photos of Daniel on his own and with his mother. Phoebe is on duty today, and she takes pictures of Ivy and myself with Daniel, but we take no pictures of the two boys together. Phoebe brings a plaster kit into the room and takes impressions of Daniel’s hands and feet. As the moulds set, she cleans him gently with cotton balls and water. She asks if we would like to keep a lock of his hair but Ivy says no. Ivy changes his clothes. Naked, Daniel’s skin has less colour than his brother’s, his still chest and tummy have a faintly blue tinge to them, and it’s an overwhelming relief when she redresses him in a clean white babygrow.

  With all the ceremony and formalities finished, with the casts of Daniel’s hands and feet dry and wrapped inside a towel, it still takes over an hour of crying and cuddling to say goodbye to our baby boy. Dressed now, and with our bags packed, Ivy sits in a chair by the window, holding Daniel against her chest and stroking his hair while I perch on the bed cuddling Baby T. And as ashamed as I am for feeling this way, I want this to be over now. I want to go home and move on with our son.

  Just as I’m considering saying something, Ivy stands up. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Let’s go.’

  Chapter 34

  A week after we bring our son home, he still doesn’t have a name.

  Ivy has tried breastfeeding him but – possibly because he spent his first three days apart from his mother, taking his milk from a bottle – Baby T can’t or won’t lat
ch onto Ivy’s breast. Ivy expresses milk, but she has no desire to give our baby his bottle. So instead, I give him his bottles and Ivy spends large parts of the day uncommunicative, curled into the corner of the sofa (as if trying to disappear behind the cushions) lost in a daze or the pages of a book. Baby T doesn’t cry often, but more than once I have watched Ivy wince at the sound as if she resents him for disturbing her. In spite of this, she now sleeps in the nursery where she can watch over him throughout the night. Originally we had planned to have the twins sleep in Moses baskets in our room, but as he spent his first days in an incubator, the least we can do, Ivy says, is let our son sleep in his own nursery. And so, while Baby T sleeps in his basket, inside his cot, Ivy sleeps on an uncomfortable sofa bed that isn’t long enough to stretch out on. I sleep alone in our double bed.

  In the evenings we sit in front of the TV. We eat our supper off our knees and make innocuous small talk while Ivy expresses milk and I drink anywhere between most and all of a bottle of wine (this on top of the two or three beers I drink during the day). I have tried bringing up the subject of Baby T’s name, but whenever I do, Ivy retreats and cries and asks – irritated – what is the rush?

  On a cold but sunny Thursday, one day before he was due to be born, we bury baby Daniel. His twin sleeps impassively in the double buggy as the casket is lowered into a small hole in the ground. We haven’t seen Daniel since we said goodbye in the hospital eight days ago, and now, as he disappears from sight, I wish with all my heart that we had visited him one last time and given him a teddy bear to keep him company. A man asks would we like to scatter earth, but neither of us does. Ivy turns to the buggy, and with tears rolling down her cheeks she very carefully lifts Baby T into her arms. With one hand under his bottom and one cradling the back of his head, she kisses him on his forehead, nose and both cheeks and says, ‘Come on, baby, let’s take you home.’

  Chapter 35

  On Easter Sunday, Ivy says she is going to church. Ivy and I have been together for eight months and one week and this is the first time she has mentioned church. She doesn’t ask if I want to go, but simply announces she is taking Baby T to Easter Mass. I pull on my coat nevertheless, and as the three of us sit at the back of the church, I wonder if there is any way back for me and Ivy. She hasn’t been hostile towards me, but neither has she shown any interest or affection. And whilst I have enjoyed watching her bond with our son – reading him stories, singing to him, making silly faces – I have watched as an outsider. Also, Baby T is latching on now and takes the majority of his milk from the breast; and whilst this is good – better than good – for mother and baby, feeding our son is something I am now excluded from. Ivy sleeps and dozes throughout the day, and when she does she curls up with Baby T beside her. So while the three of us sit together in the Church of Christ the King, I don’t feel like we are here as a family.

  On Thursday Ivy’s parents came to visit, and Ivy emerged a little further. She smiled on occasion and even managed a small laugh at her parents as they made a fuss over their grandson. We cried, of course, but the simple fact and presence of Baby T kept us all anchored to the present. Ken shared a bottle of wine with me, and at the end of the night I bedded down on the sofa while the Lees took our room and Ivy slept in the nursery. Even with pillows and a new blanket, I tossed and turned for more than an hour before giving up on the idea of sleep. The house was too still and quiet for me to turn on the TV or even the kettle, so I turned my attention to the bookshelves, looking for something soporific. I picked up and replaced maybe half a dozen books before I noticed . . . all Ivy’s half-read books – Catch-22, Crime and Punishment, Lord of the Rings and twenty more besides – are gone. When or where, I don’t know, but the discovery unsettles me. Maybe our story, incomplete as it is, maybe she has abandoned that, too.

  The next day we walked on the Common and Ken and Eva bought us all lunch in The Village. Strangers approach you when you have a new baby; they will walk up to your table uninvited, stroke your baby’s cheek, tell you he’s gorgeous and ask his name. And you grit your teeth and smile politely and say thank you, and you laugh when you tell them he doesn’t have a name yet. And when they look at you with that hint of disbelief, you turn away, call the waiter and order another large glass of wine.

  As we said our goodbyes in the early evening, Eva hugged me and told me to be patient. Ken kissed me on the neck, something he has never done before, and it is the most affection anyone has shown me in almost two weeks. My own dad still hasn’t met his first grandson; I’m not sure Ivy is ready yet, and I’m not sure I want my dad to see us like this.

  On Friday, Eunice, our big exuberant midwife, came to check on mother and baby. She went through her own version of the routine that is now becoming familiar to me: hugs, kisses, tears, congratulations and apologies. Eunice suggested Ivy might want to get a prescription for antidepressants. She explained that Ivy would need to stop breastfeeding, and Ivy simply shook her head. Eunice told us that Daniel was ‘with Jesus now’, and I had to leave the room. I don’t know if I was angry with Eunice for this blithe dismissal, or angry with myself for not believing her. It occurred to me that maybe I need antidepressants, too, but the thought frightened me and I turned away from it.

  Now, sitting in the cold church on the border of Wimbledon Village, I wish that I had the refuge of faith. A place where I could find reason or solace; a place where I could offer up a prayer or a message to my dead baby boy. But wishing doesn’t make it so. This thought reminds me of Ivy’s purported belief in the Wish Fairy – these things that seemed so cute and wonderful just two weeks ago, they are revealed now as hollow and fatuous.

  ‘Today,’ the vicar tells us, ‘we celebrate the day Jesus came back from the dead.’

  I glance sideways at Ivy, but she has her eyes closed and her head bowed.

  And so, in the absence of faith, I, too, close my eyes and make a wish: I wish Daniel was sitting here on my lap, cooing and crying and breathing, and I wish that I could have Ivy back the way she was when we fell in love.

  Chapter 36

  I’m standing on a rooftop, staring down at a love heart chalked onto the concrete fifty feet below. We’ve been here since five a.m., to shoot the sun rising over the rooftops of the sleeping city.

  Ivy is out there, and my son, thirty-one days old now and still without a name. It’s the last day in April and we are shooting the second rooftop scene for Reinterpreting Jackson Pollock. And whilst I’m here in person, my thoughts are elsewhere. I was going to cancel the shoot, but Ivy wanted me to do it. She said it would be good for me, but more and more I’m forming the idea that she is happier when I’m not around.

  This is the scene where our heartbroke hero – depressed, alone – considers throwing himself to his death. When I read it on paper, the scene felt poignant. Now, with all that has happened, as I lean over the parapet wall and feel the cold brick digging into my hips, now it seems trite and insincere. When I explained the plot to El he called it ‘fuckig stupid’. I get the impression that our actor and the assembled crew feel the same way. Or maybe I’m simply projecting. When I arrived on set I could sense their emotional machinery trying to find the balance between normalcy and compassion, sympathy and restraint. I watched their expressions flicker and distort as they attempted to smile just enough but not too much. Only Suzi cried. ‘I promised myself I wouldn’t do this,’ she said, ‘but . . . I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry.’ I feel bad for her, because this is her script, this is her baby, and it should be amazing. Instead, we move through the shots in a perfunctory manner, crossing them off and moving on to the next, embarrassed by the contrived sentimentality of it in the face of real life. How could a jilted lover ever contemplate suicide in a world where babies are delivered stillborn?

  I’m getting through a bottle and a half of wine a night now, and I experience a wave of nausea and vertigo as I look down on the gaudy chalk heart. I’m tired.

  Joe is standing behind me. I can hear him breat
he through his nose, and every so often I catch the smell of coffee and bacon on his breath. We shot yesterday and the day before, too, covering all the interior scenes. In the story, this is where it starts going right again for our hero. When we wrap, that will be all our filming completed. Then we’ll edit, add sound, grade the film and move on to the next thing. What the next thing is for me, I don’t know. I don’t think it involves me and Ivy together. We are different people now.

  Ivy still sleeps in Baby T’s room, while I sleep alone in our double bed. I run most days and Ivy has started doing yoga again. She reads in the nursery; I watch TV on the sofa. Because we are on different schedules we tend not to eat together any more. We occupy the same space, but we interact less and less. Sometimes we go for walks, pushing Baby T across the Common or into The Village for coffee. But even then it feels to me like we are strangers sharing nothing more than proximity.

  On the nights when I don’t pass out drunk, I take over-the-counter sleeping tablets. The packet says they are one-a-night, but I take them two at a time. And even so, most nights I have nightmares. Some mornings I wake up and for a few seconds I have forgotten that Daniel died in his mother’s womb. And then I remember.

  Joe’s hand comes to rest on my shoulder. He hugs me tight against his side, whether out of camaraderie, or sympathy or fear that I might just throw myself off this fucking roof . . . who knows?

  ‘Ready to go?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ I tell him.

  We shoot the final take of the final scene at around ten thirty. It was cold and dark when we set up almost six hours ago, but the sun is already warm now and the sky is a clear, cloudless blue. I watch the final shot on the playback monitor and it looks fine. Whether it’s poignant, melodramatic, filmic or flat, I honestly can’t tell; I don’t have the perspective to view it objectively.

  ‘It’s a wrap,’ I shout, and everybody claps and slaps each other on the back.