Three-And-A-Half Heartbeats (11 page)

Sitting at the front of the church, Grace stared ahead. Focusing on a stained glass window of an angel with her arms outstretched, she would hold the angel’s eye and leave when it was over, trying not to think about what was actually happening, because if she did, she feared she might actually lose her mind. With her parents on either side, Grace realised for the first time in her life that they could not fix everything. She felt grown up and abandoned all at once. Glancing at her mum and dad, she noticed how they had shrunk, looking every one of their combined one hundred and fifty-eight years, bowed and broken. Mac reached across and took her hand into his own. He too stared ahead, holding her hand like he used to when she was little, when it used to make everything feel better. A long, long time ago.

She was aware of the vicar standing upright and business-like, the only person who appeared unmoved, almost indifferent to the event. She tried to think of why that might be – was he so used to the disposal of bodies and the passing over of souls that the whole ghastly business had become almost matter-of-fact, routine? Or maybe he was so certain about where her little girl had gone, that ‘better place’ that everyone kept telling her about, that he saw no reason to feel sadness, confident that everything in the universe was as it should be. Grace allowed herself to hope so.

Throughout the service, she was aware of a light pressure against her thigh. Eventually looking down, she saw Chloe standing beside her with her hand on her leg, watching proceedings with an almost bored detachment, scuffing her pink wellington boot against the side of the pew and wearing her little raincoat.

Grace bent down at one point and whispered to her daughter, ‘Not too much longer now, darling,’ and her daughter smiled in response. Grace realised that every time she saw Chloe now, she was strangely silent, as though the little girl had lost her voice.

Music started playing; it was the slow segment from Tchaikovsky’s
Romeo and Juliet
. It was beautiful. Grace let the sound fill her. The lilting horn and delicate, heartfelt strings cut into her like tiny daggers; she succumbed to the sorrow and desolation of the notes as they climbed.

All faces apart from Grace’s turned towards the back of the church as the heavy oak door opened and Tom entered. Jack walked behind him, for no other reason than to offer moral support, stepping in the wake of his brother in a slow procession that seemed to take an eternity.

Tom’s arms were outstretched, his forearms bent upwards and his fingers clasped around the small coffin that contained his little girl. A single large daisy sat on top, her favourite flower. He walked slowly, wanting the moment to last for as long as possible, wanting to hold onto her and savour this contact for the last time ever. He knew that what was coming next should be delayed. Stalling, he tried to avoid the inevitable. He spoke to her in his head.
‘It’s all right, my darling, you go to sleep now, baby. Go to sleep now. I am right here, Chlo. Your daddy’s got you…’

Grace kept her eyes fixed on the angel.

As the car pulled up to the house, Grace let her gaze rove over the many vehicles that were parked on the verges, crowding the lane and filling the drive.

‘I don’t want to see anyone. I just want to go to bed,’ she murmured.

Tom nodded. This he understood. ‘I don’t think anyone will mind,’ he whispered as he rubbed at his stubble.

She stepped from the car and pushed the front door, which was ajar. Jayney was standing by the stairs, hovering. She rushed forward, crushing her friend to her in a hug. ‘Grace! Oh my God. I am so sorry. If there is anything I can do. Anything you need, anything at all, just shout.’ Jayney started to cry. ‘It’s the worst day in the world.’

Grace nodded.
Every day is now the worst day in the world. Every single day.
She spied one of their neighbours, a sweet lady who she was on nodding terms with. They used to wave enthusiastically as their cars passed and would exchange snippets about current and future weather when collecting their bins from the top of the lane on a Tuesday evening. The woman stepped forward and handed her a white envelope, then left. Grace turned it over in her hand. She noticed Ruthie across the floor, too tearful and emotional to speak. Grace looked from person to person, room to room and felt as though she were watching everything in slow motion. Kicking off her shoes, she gathered them into her hand and in her stockinged feet trod the stairs, caring little about the eyes and comments that followed her stumbling progress to her room.

Closing the bedroom door behind her, she shrugged off her jacket and unzipped her skirt, letting them both fall to the floor where she stood. She unbuttoned her shirt, pulled on her nightshirt and pyjama bottoms and crawled under the duvet. Closing her eyes, she welcomed the escape that the soft space offered.

There was a knock on the door as it opened. Olive came in with a cup of tea. ‘Here you are, darling, thought you might like a drink.’ She placed it on the bedside table and sat on the edge of the bed. Her weight pushed the mattress down and Grace listed towards her. Olive’s words were delivered slowly in barely more than a whisper. ‘I can’t tell you that it will get better, because I’m not sure it does and I have never lied to you, Gracie, but I can tell you that you are a strong woman who will find a way through this. God will—’

‘Don’t you mention God to me,’ Gracie snapped. ‘Don’t you dare! There is no God!’

‘Darling, don’t—’ Olive began.

‘I mean it. There isn’t. What kind of God gives a germ to a baby girl who didn’t stand a chance?’

‘I don’t know how to answer that.’ Olive knotted her fingers in her lap and swallowed her tears.

‘Well, I don’t know either.’

They sat in silence for some minutes, both trying to erase the image of the little girl’s coffin being lowered into the soil on that sun-bright winter’s day.

‘I promised her it would all be okay. I told her we’d get ice cream and that she could watch
Frozen
. That’s what I told her. And she was hungry, Mum…’ Grace’s face crumpled as, open-mouthed, her tears flowed again. ‘She was hungry and I didn’t give her any breakfast and she was hungry and I ate a bun. I ate a bun and laughed while she was lying there…’

Olive shook her head. ‘You can’t do that, Grace. You can’t go over every detail and blame yourself.’

‘Can’t I? Why can’t I? I think you’ll find I can do what the fuck I want. And I want you to go now,’ Grace retorted.

They fell silent again.

‘I mean it. I want you to go! I don’t want to see anyone!’ She was shouting now.

Olive laid a hand on her daughter’s arm. ‘If I could take all your pain and put it into me, I would, I would do it in an instant.’ she whispered as she crept from the room.

Grace placed her head on the pillow and listened to the murmur of conversation that floated up the stairs. Once or twice she heard laughter – how dare someone be laughing, laughing in her house, laughing today, laughing at all? Closing her eyes, she pushed her face into the soft surface of the pillow and wished for sleep. Remembering her mum’s words, she whispered into the dark, ‘There is no God. There is no God. There’s nothing. I don’t want to be any more. And yet I keep waking up. No one is listening to me, no one is helping me escape. What do I have to do to make this stop?’

An image played in her head, over and over, as it had since that morning when she’d watched her husband with vomit clinging to his skin as he bent over their little girl. It was like a movie that she couldn’t switch off, on a loop. She saw herself holding her newborn, kissing her little face and whispering, ‘Welcome to the world, little one. I’m Grace, I’m your mum and I love you.’

Grace must have dozed off because she woke with a start when the bedroom door opened. She recognised the outline of Tom as he shuffled in, removed his jacket and dropped it over the chair that sat in the corner. He tiptoed round the bed and slid down onto the mattress in his trousers, shirt and shoes. She could smell sweat on his skin and alcohol on his breath as he exhaled.

The two lay side by side, listening to family, friends and those they vaguely knew milling around below them. In other circumstances it would have been amusing that, in their own home, they were confined to their bedroom while strangers ate their food, sipped their wine, glugged their whisky and admired the cut of the drapes. But this wasn’t other circumstances, this was January the twentieth, the day their hearts had been further ripped in two. There were no rules on how to behave and no previous experience on which they could draw; it was entirely new, raw and all-consuming.

They lay in silence as the house grew quieter and quieter. Night crept up on them and threw its dark veil over the darkest of days.

Sepsis claims 37,000 lives every year in the UK. 37,000…

Grace woke in the throes of a nightmare. The sheets were twisted about her body and she lay in a cloying film of sweat. Her heart was racing, her throat was dry and tears clogged her nose. She sat up and closed her eyes, swallowing hard, trying to picture something different, trying to make the moving image that lurked behind her eyes go away.

It was the same dream she had on a semi-regular basis, where she imagined driving up to the hospital, getting out of the car and taking Chloe by the hand. But before they walked into the building, her little girl looked up at her and said, ‘Can we go home, Mummy?’ Grace then laughed, packed her back into the car and drove her home in time for tea and
The Gruffalo
.

Strangely, it wasn’t the dream itself that upset Grace; in fact quite the opposite: it was lovely to see Chloe again, to feel her hand in hers. It was waking up to the miserable reality that left her reeling and feeling physically sick.

Grace knew that the nightmare was a manifestation of the one obsessive thought that haunted her above all else. It was real and constant, the thought that had she acted differently, taken another decision, done… something, anything, Chloe might still be with them. She couldn’t bear the idea of apportioning blame and even at her most rock-bottom she knew that this would only make things worse. But it was very hard not to, impossible to fight the questions that dogged her. How had that infection got into her daughter’s body? Had someone given it to her? Was it her bug? Was it her fault? Did you catch sepsis from other people? Why hadn’t Mr Portland kept Chloe in hospital just in case? Was it Tom’s fault for letting her sleep? If he’d made Chloe stay awake, would she still be alive? And perhaps worst of all, there was the knowledge that while Chloe had been fighting sepsis, she and Tom had been drinking red wine and making love under the duvet. The memory made her retch.

Without Chloe, Grace felt a seismic shift in her place in the world. It confused her how something so shattering, so cataclysmic could be forgotten, but it was. At least once an hour and periodically through the night, in a break from grief, she would sit up straight and listen for Chloe, or wander the hallway in search of her and had even placed her hand to her mouth to call for her, wanting a hug and to feel her daughter’s skin against her own. When her mind caught up with the reality that this was futile, so she would hurt anew. She tried to learn the fact that she no longer needed to focus her energy, finances and planning on what would be best for her daughter, pondering her daughter’s future long and short term. There was no longer a future for her daughter. But this information simply would not sink in. It was too horrible to contemplate, the fact that her little life had just ended. Stopped.

It was a time of nothingness. Nothing mattered, nothing made her happy, nothing could soothe her sadness, and when she tried to picture her own future, all she could see was nothing. Grace remembered when she had a never-ending to-do list that churned inside her mind: big things and small things that filled up every second of thinking time, pointless tasks and worries that jolted her from sleep in the early hours. She used to wish it would stop, wanted a clear head. Now she knew that to be preoccupied in this way was a luxury. How she would welcome it. Now there was nothing; she was blank, like a computer that was wiped. Nothing.

When she wasn’t crying, she was raging, furious at everything and everybody. A man from the church had come round one day, knocked on her door, offered his condolences and asked if she’d be interested in a visit from the vicar, or would she like a chat with the grief counsellor at the church. Grace had shivered in abhorrence and looked him squarely in the eye as he glanced past her at the mountain of used coffee cups and the growing pile of dirty laundry swamping the kitchen. ‘So, this visit from your vicar or chat with your counsellor,’ she’d said, ‘will it bring my Chloe back?’

He had smiled uncomfortably, shifting awkwardly on the spot. ‘Well, no, dear.’

‘Well you can piss off then.’ With that she’d closed the door. She doubted he would bother her again, but at least he wouldn’t be leaving disappointed: he now had not only the state of her house to discuss, but also her extreme rudeness, which would quickly be interpreted as the first stage of a total mental breakdown. And maybe he’d be right. Who cared?

She began to question why they’d chosen to have Chloe’s funeral in a church, paying lip-service to the fairy story, inadvertently supporting the myth.
It’s
all bollocks,
she thought furiously.
All of it.
She found it impossible to recall much of that day, as though her mind had closed off the most painful bits, but she remembered the unnatural quiet in the church, despite all those people crammed in there, shoulder to shoulder, heads bowed.
Dignified.
Grace snarled. How come there’d been so many people? Nothing else to do on a sunny morning? Were they that desperate for something to talk about? She could imagine the trite, banal comments –
‘heart-breaking, it was’… ‘such a tiny coffin’… ‘didn’t the mother look terrible’
– and it made her sick. What did they know?

She couldn’t even bear to speak to her family, couldn’t listen to their tears and words of remorse, couldn’t cope with seeing her parents so fractured, her mum fighting to keep her emotions in check, her dad broken. She simply couldn’t cope. Her mobile phone was permanently off and the landline went straight to answerphone, collecting the many messages that continued to flood in.