Georgina

The day before your birthday, I woke up with a streaming cold.

It was raining.

I'd been trying to get a stain out of your sister's T-shirt but I must have left the stain remover on for too long and, when I went to rub the stain away, I rubbed a hole in the sleeve of the T-shirt instead.

I made your sister some porridge, a strange breakfast for late August, but she likes it. I wonder if you would have too. I still wonder about little things like that.

As I turned around to talk to your sister, I knocked the bowl of porridge off the top of the kitchen cabinet with my elbow and smashed it. Her favourite Peppa Pig breakfast bowl. And her porridge went all over the floor. And there was no more milk.

I picked up the ruined T-shirt, the smashed bowl and the porridge. I put the whole mess in the bin.

Your brother started crying. I wanted to cry too. For the T-shirt I'd just put a hole in. For the porridge that I'd made and then spilt. For the bowl that I couldn't fix. For your sister's bewilderment, still waving her hopeful spoon about, waiting for her breakfast. For all my good intentions heaped in the bin. But, you know, that's not the real reason I wanted to cry.

I can find pathos in anything these days. A broken Peppa Pig bowl leads me back to you. Spilt porridge leads me back to you. To you. The most irretrievably broken thing in my life.

I go onwards, not really knowing what I'm doing.
Hoping that I'm not messing up too badly but suspecting that I am.

I miss you. I wish you were here. I couldn't promise you a perfect life, you might not always have got your breakfast on time. Or indeed, got the breakfast that you had been led to expect. Some mornings we have to make do with toast instead of porridge. Even when you could have sworn that there was porridge cooking five minutes earlier.

Your T-shirts and your prized breakfast bowls might have disappeared mysteriously, leaving you wondering where they went.

But I wish you could be here. Down here, in this mess. Because this is all I know and it is all I have. This strange world where we all stumble around blindly, bash into a few things, knock up against a few other people and then leave.

Occasionally there is a brief glimmer of something that looks like beauty, that looks like sense. Amidst the spoiled breakfasts and rain. Sometimes I suspect that those things do, in fact, actually exist and I'm looking at the real deal, not merely a resemblance or a fraud.

Wish you were here my girl. To catch those glimmers with me.

Dots

She peers at them, the silvery marks on the backs of her hands. "Dots Mum-mee," she says. "Look, dots."
I stoop and pass my thumb over them, admiringly.
"Yes, darling. Dots."

Those strange, inverted stretch marks that cover the backs of her hands instead of my stomach.

And, even nearly three years later, the guilt is still strong enough to pin me down to the soil.


In August, the air around her is thick with ghosts, making it difficult to focus.
The quivering in the air where one stands where could have been two. Or none at all.
And the ghosts of other girls.
Ones with no scars on their hands.
Others where those scars would be the least of it.

The ghost of myself. As I was. Or as I would be now. With two. With none.
Even Reuben becomes indistinct. Lost in that shimmer of imaginings.
Then everything resolves again. Refocuses. And I carry on.


It's four in the morning here.
I woke up suddenly. And, in that haze between waking and sleeping, imagined that all of this had been some protracted fever dream. Terrible and strange.
Relief washed through me. That I could let go. Of this experience that still makes my fingers twitch into fists and my jaw muscles clench. Even after all this time. Some part of me is obviously hoping that I can fight it off, defend my family, even nearly three years after the fact.
If only my left hook is strong enough.
Not us, please. Not today.

But it's mine. Mine to keep. Hers to keep. Ours to keep. This experience. No amount of jaw clenching or punching at the empty air is going to change matters.
And, usually, I am ok with that.
But sometimes, at four in the morning, whilst everyone else is asleep, you'll still catch me very sad.
Very sad indeed.
So sad that I can't sleep.
And I haven't anywhere else to go other than here.

Little brother

He is irritable, squirming, plump, glorious, in my arms.
Glossy and new.
With a yellow pimple on his chin.

She is ash. Gone to ashes.

We put her cot up today. The cot she never slept in. Paid for a thousand years ago.

Although it was never used, it has been chipped from its trips up and down the ladder to our attic.
It looks second hand.

I'm sure there must be a word, loaned from German or from Dutch, that captures my state of mind. Perhaps there is an English one. I've just never happened upon it.

That of trying to construct sense from something you know to be chaos. To spin sense from sense-less.
Because you need something to hang your hat on.

Of forcing yourself to find beauty and meaning in something that you know has neither of those qualities.
To drag them out of this mess by sheer force of will.

Of perfecting the art of fooling yourself that there is something meaningful and beautiful lurking under all that mud. And there just might be. Or perhaps that is simply a double bluff.

But.

Even if it is just for a short time that you are fooled.
Even if the beauty and meaning that you construct flicker in and out of focus, slither out of your grasp.
Even if you know that you put them there yourself, for yourself to find.

It is enough.

August

It's August again.

It's very hot here. Not much like England. The air feels like luke warm tea with one sugar. I smell like soured breast milk and sweat. The me of 'before all this happened' frowns in disapproval.

Jessica and I play in the back garden. She chases me with a watering can and I hide in pathetically undefended places. With my head wedged under my T-shirt. With my face hidden in the leaves of the next door neighbour's tree but the rest of my body sticking out.

Unsurprisingly, I got watered rather a lot this afternoon.

We have squelchy wet sand on a plastic mat, interspersed with stones stolen from her grandmother's rockery.
"All mudd-dee," croons Jessica, slopping the wet sand over her feet, "all mudd-dee."
"Yes, my darling. You're right. All muddy," I reply.

She chalks my big toe, blue. The remainder, orange.
I wonder what she makes of my adult toes.
I have ugly feet, a hammer toe on the third toe of right foot.
I remember looking at my own mother's body with my teenage vanity and wondering how it ever got that way. One day, Jessica will look at me that way. In her turn. Probably sooner than I would like to suppose.

Her latest medical report contains the word, remarkable. Remarkable.
I let out a breath I have been holding for a long, long time.
Yet, lobes in my lungs remains partially inflated.
Either not naive enough, or not quite ready, to exhale. Yet.
You'll jinx it don't you know?

I feel the scars on her feet. Little raised lumps.
For a child born as prematurely as she was, she is remarkably unscarred. Surgery only ever got as far as signed consent forms and desperate conversations with the consultant as to which anaesthesiologist had put his own son under.
Tiny stars dot her hands and feet. There is one larger, thicker scar on the join between her ankle and her foot. I'm ashamed to say that I am not even sure what this scar is from.

Sometimes I find myself rubbing Reuben's feet and wondering where his scars are.
Sometimes I find myself, in the blurry wee small hours of the morning, wondering how Reuben will feel about his dead twin.
In my dreams, babies only ever come in pairs.

My mother's next door neighbour comes round to return my car keys. I've left them in the lock of the boot. This happens more frequently than I would like to admit.

"Thank you so much," I say. "I don't know where my mind is these days."
Although that is a lie.

I have a memory of walking up my mum's drive and this lady, who I don't know very well, stopping me and saying that she was sorry. Sorry about the twins. And I flung myself at her, sobbing, "I lost her. I lost her."
We don't speak about that today. We never have.

She was so sweet. She just hugged me. What a kindness. In a world so very far from kind.

I lost her.

It's August. Once again.

It seems that I am not the only one . . .

. . . .who is a little confused about the date.

My dear little car confidently informed me today, via the clock radio, that the date today is the 15/08/2008.

I know the clock is broken. It has been broken since before the real 15/08/2008. I could take it back to the dealership and get it fixed but I am . . .lazy. This is not some sign that time is spinning backwards, my perfectly normal little old Ford Fiesta is not suddenly going to spew me out back into the midst of three years ago, in a Back To The Future stylee. Although that would make quite the blog post, I have to admit. It's a sign that I am lazy and don't particularly care about knowing the date (the one that the world is agreed upon) or arriving anywhere on time.

Now I find that my eye is irresistibly drawn to the digits, surely incontrovertible proof that something is happening. Is bound to happen. 

I am counting down the days. 

In anticipation of what I am not entirely certain. 

The return of the past?

An opportunity to go back and save her?

Perhaps that would be impossible even if I could, somehow, revisit that time.

And maybe she would not be there. She is not a creature who has much to do with time any longer. Perhaps death removed her from this continuum where her mother still paces back and forth and frets over her broken car and what this all meant. If it meant anything.

I find that I still pick and pick at this idea.

And re-visiting the lines from my original post, I find the final line, overlooked by whoever was speaking in that radio interview that first drew this quote to my attention.

‘It does not seem to me that we understand the laws governing the return of the past. But I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like. And the longer I think about it, the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead , that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision." 

Still taken from Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, only now slightly more complete.

And I wish I could know that I did. That I did appear in her field of vision.

When the light is a certain colour, when the rain slants in a particular fashion, when there is a stillness to the atmosphere. 

Or perhaps, it is when there is a storm. 

Does she see me? Do I appear in her field of vision? On occasion.

Or are we forever cut off in mid-breath, all lines of communication down?

Then what I am to do with all this mess in my heart? This troublesome mind that itches and wants?

How I wish I could reach her. I don't care to know when, I'm not fussy about that. 

I don't want to know the particular blend of conditions that would conjure me to her.

Just as I am forever conjuring her to myself.

Just to know it could happen would be enough.

That this isn't a one way street. 

I hold the sturdy weight of her sister asleep in my arms. With her beating heart and heavy limbs. And I can't believe that this, this experience that so saturates me and her siblings could come to just . . nothing. 

All to naught, to a . . . withering. Surely that simply cannot be? I cannot let it be. I can maintain both sides of this strange relationship if necessary. Just give me a basis for doing so.

And I can't stop thinking that I am nearly there, this thought tickling at the edges of my brain, that same feeling you get just before you grasp something complex and slippery. 

Time is a trickster.

Perhaps her death was always just waiting. 

When I was four, it was waiting.

When I was sixteen, it was waiting.

Was it always waiting? For her?

And perhaps it is still waiting, waiting for me to go back and find it. Find her.

One of those moments with no beginning and no end.

29th August 2008. My own perfect circle.

Trudge, trudge. Surely the circumference is getting a little worn now.

I'll let you know if my car actually does turn into a time machine. Eleven days to go until the day she was born. According to my car. You never can tell.

Us

I promised myself that I would never write about him here.
And yet . . .

It's our wedding anniversary this week.

We were so hopeful. I look back at those drunken evenings, filled with potential, possibility and scribbled schemes on scrappy bits of paper. Lists of pros and cons. Holiday plans. Wedding plans. Furniture rearrangements. Plans to re-landscape the garden. Lists of baby names.

Sometimes I think that was all we had in common. Hope and a liking for plans.
It was enough to keep the conversation going for over a decade.

But now we have fallen. Silent.
I hope it's not a permanent state of affairs.

In the evening, the dull, dual buzz of baby monitors fills the house.
Although Jessica is nearly three and doesn't need a baby monitor.
We pretend it is so that we will hear her fall out of bed.
But we both know it is so we can listen to her breathing.
Just checking. Even after all this time.

He sits downstairs with a drink.
I think he is looking for our half-made daughter at the bottom of a glass.
But she isn't there.
I've checked.
I still have a good look around down there from time to time.
Just in case I missed her.

I sit upstairs.
Looking in the sparks and wires of the internet.
But I suspect she's not here either.
Only a pale imitation of someone who might have been her. Once.

He knows that I am searching for her.
That I write here in this semi-public diary.
Pouring my heart out to strangers and yet . . . he has never sought this place out.
Perhaps he doesn't care to know what I think.

Perhaps I have already bored him half to death with it all.

Whereas if I knew he was talking about her, anywhere, I would be there. Like a rat up a drain pipe.
Because I don't know what he thinks about her. If he thinks about her at all.

When he does mention her name, I am mildly shocked.
As though he no longer has any claim on her.

We are not always silent.
I have my evening store of anecdotes, saved up from my tiny patchwork day with two young children.
Small miracles and disasters.
He has his tales of work and the outside world, the latest car and TV series.

But we no longer plan. Only half heartedly. With caveats.

Sometimes I think it was all that hope that did for us.

Playing favourites

Within our family, there have always been fairly well-acknowledged 'favourites', special relationships between various members that just don't exist for others. I don't know if we are particularly unusual in this regard, it isn't something that I've discussed with many other people in real life for fear of opening a can of worms, somewhere along the lines of 'My parents never loved me, sob sob, they always loved my brother, Jim, more. I've been scarred for life . . . . '

I know, for instance, that I am not my father's favourite child. My younger sister is. I don't find this particularly upsetting, perhaps because it has always been out in the open. I know it. She knows it. My father will neither confirm or deny it but his refusal to say anything (when confronted about his supposed favouritism) along the lines of, "Pish, I love you both just the same" leads me to believe that my sister is, in fact, his favourite. And I can see his point of view, my sister is less neurotic, more athletic, taller, prettier and generally an improvement on me. If I were my father, I'm sure she'd be my favourite too.

My sister occasionally tries to make this up to me by claiming, hollowly, that I am our mother's favourite child. But we both know that this, although kindly intentioned, is laughable. I think our mother likes us both equally, I'm fairly sure my sister actually thinks the same. She's just trying to redress the balance.

My grandmother made no bones about the fact that she favoured the eldest child in each family, as she was the eldest child herself. But within this hierarchy of favourites, the 'eldest eldest', the first grandchild, ruled supreme. 

Amongst the grandchildren, it is recognised that some of us have so-called 'shining hero' status and, no matter how obnoxiously we behave or how badly we mess up, we will be excused if we are one of the 'special' ones. This operates separately from birth order and appears to be allocated at random. Just bad luck if you aren't selected. Thus cousin E complains about cousin J, "Hrumph, he can never do ANYTHING wrong JUST because HE. IS. J. Everyone in the family will always stick up for him simply because you all think he's SO great. No matter the evidence to the contrary."

But none of us are dead. I have no experience of this sort of interplay in a family where one of the siblings, or cousins, or grandchildren, is dead. Georgina is, in fact, the only infant death to have occurred in this, and the previous, generation. 

I do sometimes wonder what it will be like for Jessica and Reuben to grow up knowing that they had a sister who died. That, where there are two, there might be three. 

Perhaps they will take after their father and just won't be 'reflecting on what might have been' kind of people. 

Because I am someone who likes to conjure up problems that don't currently exist a good decade or so in advance, I have already had hypothetical fights with a teenage Jessica. These proceed along the usual lines (I hate you, I never asked to be born, but I WANT to stay out until 3 am, date this undesirable boy, drink three litres of cider) until the denouement of, "I bet you wish I had died instead of Georgina. I bet you wish that she was still alive and I was dead so you'd have your perfect daughter who you think is SO great." 

And yes, I do like to trouble trouble LONG before trouble troubles me. 

My relationship with all my children is, at the centre, the same. I love them. They head butt me, ignore me, vomit on me or they pull the ultimate act of defiance and die on me thus removing themselves from my sphere of influence forever. Still I love them.

It is hard not to imagine Georgina as something otherwordly. Sometimes I lose sight of the fact that she would have been a real, honest to goodness, human child had she survived. Burping. Filling up nappies. Saying "no, no, no, no", when asked if she loves me (Jessica's latest wheeze). 

As time passes, Georgina has become something purer. A spirit, a thin little ghost girl, ageless, wise, pure. Barely touching the earth. I feel the need to defend her, to keep mentioning her, just because nobody else will. 

Will her brother and sister think I love her more? 

That Georgina is, somehow, my favourite? 

Because she is dead? 

And, Reuben, whose birth was so far away from the absolute bomb shell of his older sisters'? Their birth feels like the epicentre of an earthquake. I watched Jessica hover between life and death for weeks at a time, so defenceless. During those early days it felt like I was walking into hell, every time I walked into that NICU. Every single day, I woke up and I had to walk back in again. To Jessica and her sister. And then just to Jessica. 

That experience did something to me. I will never, ever be the person that I was. Not ever again. And the girls were right there, with me, in the midst of it. 

My love for the twins has a desperate and despairing edge to it that my love for Reuben does not. Not more. Not less. Just different. My love for him in the immediate aftermath of his birth had a contentment and a peace that would have been inconceivable with the girls. How will he feel? Sharing the spotlight with a bona fide medical miracle? 

As my sister in law said, "Everyone thinks their children are special. But Jessica really is special."

She is. It is hard to reconcile that with a living, breathing, nearly three year old who can occasionally drive me to absolute distraction. Sometimes, mid telling off, I see that tiny, baby again. I hear the ventilator wheeze and the alarms beep. And a voice whispers in my ear, "She nearly died you know. How can you not let her soak her baby brother with the watering can / eat gravel / kick you in the shin / throw her toast on the floor?"

But Georgina is special. Reuben too.

They are all equally special to me. Although nobody will ever be shocked or amazed by the story of the beginning of Reuben's life. Or the beginning and end of Georgina's. Events took expected turns.

I don't think that there will be any favourites in this family. I hope they won't feel that there is.

I love them. My dear, dear three. 

And I can't imagine loving one any more than the others.