Swimming Upstream (31 page)

“Don’t exaggerate,” I said, and added, weakly, “and
anyway, at least you know the brakes work.”

“She’s pregnant,” explained Shelley. The man
looked at Zara, who was being helped up by Shelley, then turned and looked at
me.

“Which one?” he said.

“Both of them,” said Shelley.

“That explains a lot,” he said, and walked round
the car to where I was standing. I was leaning against the driver’s side
window. Saliva was filling my mouth. I couldn’t move, or speak.

“Okay. I’ll take it. Two grand, right?”

I nodded. The man took out his wallet.

“No!” screamed Zara, shrugging Shelley’s hand from
her arm.

“Oh God. Excuse me,” I said, suddenly, and,
steadying myself with one hand on the roof of my car, I leaned over the kerb
and was violently sick. The man jumped backwards as vomit splashed his shoes. Zara
saw her opportunity and made a run for it.

“For crying out loud,”
said the Macintosh man, emphasising all his vowels far more than was really
necessary.

Shelley called the police. We didn’t know what else to do.

“She’s a danger to herself,” insisted Shelley. “And
to her baby. She nearly got us both run over.”

“Okay,” I agreed, reluctantly, as I stuffed a
bundle of fifty pound notes into a drawer in the kitchen. I hated the thought
of Zara being arrested, being grabbed and held against her will. “If there’s
nothing else we can do.”

An hour later the phone rang. Zara had got as far
as Faringdon tube station when the police arrived. They had arrested her under
the Mental Health Act and she was once again a patient on Strauss Ward at St
Barts.

Zara wasn’t allowed visitors until the following
day. When I arrived at the ward with a big bunch of flowers, I noticed that the
same staff nurse was at the reception desk. She smiled at me in recognition but
clearly couldn’t place me. I was just another worried face to her. Whereas to
me, it looked as though she lived here. I wondered what it felt like, working
here every day, sleeping here at nights, permanently breathing in this hospital
smell, this stench of disinfectant and broken lives.

Zara was in bed, curled up in a ball and staring
at the wall.

“I got you these,” I said, waving the flowers
around. “And I brought your pencils, and your pad. I thought you could draw
them. Look at the lilies. They’re really something.”

Zara continued staring at the wall. A tear
trickled out of the corner of her eye.

“Zara? Come on sweetie, talk to me.”

Slowly, she pulled herself up and looked at me. Her
hair was matted and sticking up like a halo round her head. Her eyes looked red
and wild. She picked at a fingernail and chewed it.

“You tricked me,” she said. “You sent the police
to get me. I thought I was helping them. I thought they’d come to catch that
man. The one who took your car.”

“I’m sorry, Zara. We didn’t know what else to do. And
he didn’t take my car,” I said gently. “He came to buy it. He took it for a
test drive.”

Zara looked up at me, and started to cry. She sat
up and held her arms out to me. “Help me, Lizzie. I don’t know what I’m going
to do. I can’t take this any more.”

“Oh, sweetheart, come here.” I put the flowers
down on a table and wrapped my arms around her. I sat down on the bed beside
her. Zara clung to me and sobbed into my shoulder.

“I can’t do this any more. I’ve had enough. It’s
the baby, that’s what it is.”

“Zara, they’ve examined you. The baby is fine.”

Zara looked up, her face pale and blotchy and tear-streaked.
“No! You don’t understand. It’s not fine at all. It’s the baby that’s done this
to me. I don’t want it. They’ve got to get it out of me. It feels like I’ve got
an alien inside me!”

“Oh, come on honey, that’s just the illness
talking…”

“No!” Zara started to thump her stomach with her
small pale fist. “You’ve got to help me, it’s got to go, it’s got to go, it’s
got to go!”

I grabbed her hand and held it firmly. “Stop,
Zara. Stop it. Otherwise I’m going to have to call the nurse.”

“So call her. Tell her they’ve got to get me a
termination. I don’t want it, I don’t want it anymore.” Zara started to scream.

I held her tight. “Shh, Zara, please. You’re
upsetting yourself.”

“Then tell them, tell them!”

I got up and stuck my head out of the room, and
looked down the hallway. Zara was scaring me and I couldn’t see anyone around
to help. Zara’s voice got louder and louder behind me. I wondered if I should
go and find a nurse or whether Zara would calm down again in a minute or two. I
didn’t want her to start telling the nurses to give her a termination; I knew
that couldn’t be what she really wanted. I wondered if I should maybe go and
try and find Shelley, who was at work on the cancer ward. She would know what
to do.

Finally, a nurse came walking down the corridor
towards us. She spoke gently but firmly to Zara and then a consultant came in
too. Zara was alternately screaming and then sobbing and biting her hand. But
within minutes she had been sedated and was soon drifting off to sleep.

I watched her for a moment and stroked her hair. Then
I bent and whispered into her ear, “It’s all going to be okay, honey, I
promise. We’re going to get you better.”

I followed the consultant out of her room. He was
a small-framed man, in his early sixties, I guessed. His head was virtually
bald, all bar a few patches of white hair, and he had kind eyes behind big
thick glasses. I couldn’t help but notice with irony that he had hair growing
out of his ears.

“We can’t locate her parents,” he said. “I wonder
if you can help? Do you have another contact number for them?”

“No,” I told him. “Only the one she has given you.
To be honest, they don’t have much contact with her. I’ve never even met or
spoken to them. Please talk to me. I’m her closest friend. I need to know what
you’re going to do to help her. You must be able to see that she’s desperate.”

“Come with me.” The consultant took my arm and
moved me into a side room off the main corridor. The room had beige plastic
sofas with beige plastic cushions to match. A pot of plastic flowers sat on a
side table along with a pile of magazines. “We need to stabilise her mood,” he
said. “The anti-depressants aren’t enough on their own. What she really needs
is a mood stabiliser and an anti-psychotic too.”

“Okay,” I nodded. “That’s great. So that was the
problem then? She was on the wrong drugs?”

The doctor looked uncomfortable. He blinked hard
with each eye alternately and his glasses moved up and down on his nose. “I’m
afraid it’s not as simple as that. We stabilised her mood initially, the last
time she left the ward. We prescribed Lithium, and it seemed to be working
well. But then when she discovered that she was expecting, we had to stop the
medication. Lithium can’t be taken during pregnancy. All the research shows
that it can be harmful to the developing foetus. There is no alternative drug
that’s effective and safe in pregnancy. So we are in a bit of a predicament. I’m
afraid that there is no other way to put this. Zara has a rather difficult
choice to make. It’s either her mental health, or the baby.”

“What?” I whispered. “You’re kidding, right?” Even
as I heard my voice, I knew that I sounded stupid, that this was no joke.

“She’s a little over eighteen weeks pregnant,” the
Consultant continued. “So a termination carries some risks, but it’s not
unusual to carry out the procedure at this stage. And in her situation….well, I
simply don’t believe that her mental state is going to improve by itself.”

I backed into the sofa and sat down heavily onto
one of the plastic cushions.

“This can’t be right,” I said. “There must be
another way.”

The consultant shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“This baby, it’s everything she has always wanted,”
I protested. “She’s in a bad way right now but you should have seen her a week
ago. A few days ago, even. She was on Cloud Nine.” I stopped and realised how
that sounded. Cloud Nine was a dangerous cloud for Zara to be on. “She was so
happy,” I corrected myself, as if trying to alter Zara’s mood with my words. “About
the baby, I mean. Look, she’s lost one before, and she can’t lose this one too.
Please. There must be something you can do.”

“I’m sorry.” The Consultant scratched his head and
took off his glasses. His eyes were big and a little bloodshot. He blinked hard
several times. “You know she’s saying she doesn’t want it?”

“But that’s just the illness…” I protested. I
stopped. “Isn’t it?”

“It’s hard to say.” The Consultant blinked again
and I saw that in fact he had a tic. For some reason it made me want to put my
arms around him.

Then I realised, suddenly and with alarm, how
futile this situation was. I didn’t know which bit of her was in fact the real
Zara: the high, happy Zara or the low, tearful depressed Zara. I cast my mind
back to try and remember a time when she had been just somewhere in between, so
that I had something to go on. I remembered her sitting in the King’s Arms the
previous summer, the day we met up again. I remembered her telling me how much
she had regretted aborting Doug’s baby. I knew that this could not possibly be
what she would choose, if choice was really something that was open to her. But
was she well then? Or was that the illness talking too? She had terminated her
first baby, after all. I remembered Doug saying that she had been ill and I
realised now what he had meant. He hadn’t meant physically. Zara had been
unwell long before I had known her.

But even if a baby
was
what she really
wanted, how could she be a mother, how could she raise a child, like this? They
had to stabilise her, there was no other way. And to do that, they would have
to kill her baby. Once she was stable again, I had no doubt that she would be
in pieces over what she had lost. But right now, what other options were there?
She could never be a mother to her child, not like this. And she couldn’t stay
like this for the next five months, biting herself and crying.

“I get what you’re saying,” I said. “And I know
she’ll agree. Right now she just wants to feel okay again.”

The Consultant nodded. “I know this is difficult,”
he said. “We’ll talk to her in the morning.”

Then
he was gone.

The operation was
carried out two days later. Zara gave her consent immediately and without
hesitation. And, as I’d predicted, once she was stable and realised what she
had lost, she was heartbroken and her grief was hard to bear. I sat on the ward
on and off for days, and held her hand while she cried, and I wondered briefly
if she would soon begin to hate me for now having what she had lost.

I left for Paris in the autumn. I had just had my twenty
week scan, and was told that the baby was a girl. I was over the moon. “I’m so
happy! It’s a girl!” I told Tim, on the phone, as if I would have felt any
differently if it had been a boy. “Hurrah! It’s a baby!” said Tim. I had called
Sandy and told him that I wouldn’t be coming back to work. I packed and finally
booked my ticket.

I knew that Shelley thought I was crazy.

“Do you really want to give birth in a foreign
country where you know no-one and have no support?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what I want to do.
It may be hard to understand. But I want this new start. And besides, I’ll make
friends.”

Both Zara and Tim knew that there were deeper
reasons why I needed to go, and both of them accepted my decision. Zara was
stable and Tim and Shelley had promised to look out for her.

“Don’t worry about me,” said Zara. She had
recovered surprisingly well and appeared to be accepting with grace that this
was her fate and the fate of her unborn child. “I’m going to make it, you know,”
she told me.

I held her tight. “I know,” I said. “I could have
told you that.”

Tim had borrowed a car from a friend at work and
he took me to the airport.

“So,” he said, after I’d checked in, and we were
stood at the gates to the departure lounge. “You’ll keep in touch? Let me know
when the baby’s born?”

“Of course.”

“You know I will be there for you. Be a proper dad
to her. If you change your mind. You know?”

“I know,” I said.

“Call me. Any time. Night or day.” He looked at
me, blinking back tears.

I looked back at him and nodded. “Thanks.”

 “So,” he said. “How does it feel?”

I smiled. “It’s like the feeling you get in the
pit of your stomach when you jump out of an aeroplane.”

“Never done that,” said Tim.

“Me neither,” I said, and shuddered. “But I can
imagine.”

“And …. Don’t do that by the way,” said Tim. I
smiled. “You don’t have to go,” he added, one last time. “It’s not too late to
change your mind.”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t say, “You could come with
me.” Because we both knew that this was a journey I had to make alone. For a moment
we stood by the gate, looking at each other and smiling. Then I kissed him, and
took hold of my trolley and said, “Goodbye Tim.”

“Just you?” said the flight attendant, taking my
passport and boarding pass.

“Just me,” I smiled, and walked through the gate. Just
me and my baby.

We live in a town called Eaubonne, just to the North of
Paris. It has everything we need, including the forest where we run and walk
the dog by the lake and, in summer, have lazy picnics. There is a modern
competition-sized swimming pool right by the rail station, from where it is
only a twenty minute hop into the Gare du Nord.

Like me, my daughter Helena is a keen swimmer - in
fact she is a much stronger swimmer than I, and an able all-round athlete. She
attends the Association Sportif, a sports college nearby where she is studying
for the International Baccalaureate but is also in training in earnest for the
Pentathlon Moderne. She gets up at five each morning to run and then swim, and
I join her at least twice a week. The pool is quiet most of the time. There is
just one diving board in the middle, at the end, and the lanes are marked out. Along
the other side is a wall of windows with doors opening out onto a terrace. I
have never swum in a lovelier pool.