The Two of Us (32 page)

I force a smile.

I don’t know why I’m not more excited. I’ve wanted and planned this for a long time and everything went perfectly. The actors were brilliant, so was the cameraman, and –
the big worry – it didn’t rain. But even so, where I should feel buoyed, I simply feel deflated. Maybe it’s the story. On paper it looked good, but now, committed to film, I
don’t feel so confident.

We aren’t scheduled to shoot again until late April. Watching the film, viewers will see seamless chronological continuity, but in the space between this scene and the next, I will have
become a father. Maybe that’s why I feel so disorientated.

‘Next time I see you . . .’ says Suzi, widening her eyes. ‘Here,’ and she hands me a large yellow Selfridges bag. Poking their heads from the top of the bag are two teddy
bears, each one surely (I hope, for Ivy’s sake) twice the size of my soon-to-be babies.

‘Good luck,’ Suzi says, and something about it makes my stomach clench.

Ivy is awake when I get back to the flat.

She is sitting on the sofa, an open book splayed face down on the floor.

‘Hey, babe,’ I say, going to her and kissing her on the forehead. ‘What you doing up?’

‘Couldn’t sleep,’ she says, and as she looks at me her expression collapses as if she has been holding back an enormous weight of emotion and can contain it no longer. She
screws her eyes tight and starts weeping in great racking sobs.

‘Honey, what’s up? Are you okay?’

‘The baby hasn’t moved all day,’ she says in between the tears.

I pull Ivy to me and hug her gently. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Tops,’ she says, putting her hands to the top of her bump.

‘Tops never moves much.’

‘That’s the other one, this one’s always wriggling.’

‘Have you seen any blood?’

Ivy shakes her head and seems to regain a little composure. ‘No.’

‘Maybe he . . . she . . . maybe it’s asleep?’

‘Not all day.’

‘Are you sure it hasn’t moved?’

‘I don’t think so; I mean . . . sometimes it’s hard to tell with both of them. But . . .’ she starts crying afresh.

‘What do you want to do?’

We drive slowly and in silence but the air in the car is dense with a kind of deliberate, determined non-thought. Ivy, slumped sideways in her seat, stares straight ahead, and
I focus my attention on the road and the steering wheel and the lights and the hairs on the back of my fingers. The doctors will talk in facts, but before they do we exist in a small cocoon of
will, denial, hope and fear. While we are inside this silent bubble, the world is on pause and there is a chance that, when it starts again, everything will be as it should. Until then, it feels
that by speaking, or even thinking about . . .
it
. . . we risk breaking the fragile barrier and letting something terrible inside. And so I stare straight ahead, and try to control my
pulse and my breath.

We pull into the hospital car park at seven minutes past one on Saturday morning. Ivy waits in the car while I go around to the boot to collect her overnight bag. Ivy is thirty-five weeks and
one day pregnant; she is not in labour and not due to give birth for another thirteen days, and I hesitate before removing her bag because it feels like the kind of presumption that might provoke
fate. Standing in the cold, my eyes adjusting to the weak light, I notice several spots inside the boot that look like dark spilt liquid – like blood. I go to touch one and realize it’s
a fragment of burst Mother’s Day balloon. Unwittingly I have parked in the same spot, beneath the same lamppost where – just six days ago – Ivy let the remaining balloon drift
into the night sky.

‘What are you doing?’ Ivy says from the front seat.

‘Nothing,’ I tell her, gathering up the scraps of burst balloon and slipping them into my pocket.

The hospital is still and quiet; the fluorescent-lit corridors all but empty. We pass a man polishing the floor with a whirring machine. He stands aside and nods at us with a small smile, which
I can’t return. There is more noise in the delivery ward. Not the howling and crying and cursing that I had been fearing, but the calm conversation and efficient bustle of staff reading
notes, making phone calls and going about their work. There is one other couple in the waiting room – the woman appears to be in early labour, measuring her breath, wincing, gasping
periodically. Her partner is playing a game on his iPhone.

Ivy sits with one hand over her eyes and the other resting on her bump. I put my arm around her shoulders but she doesn’t seem to notice. I pull her towards me and she resists, leaning
away. It’s almost an hour before one of the midwives takes us through to a small room.

She asks questions: has Ivy had a fall, has she been in pain, has there been any blood? Ivy answers no. She says nothing has happened, she tells the midwife she is expecting twins and one of her
babies has stopped moving. The woman asks when is Ivy’s due date and is this her first pregnancy. April, Ivy says. Yes, she says. The midwife asks have Ivy’s waters broken, has she had
cramps, has labour started. I already told you, Ivy says, nothing has happened, my baby is not moving. The woman asks when was the last time your little one moved and Ivy shakes her head and breaks
down crying.

The midwife lies Ivy down on an examination table and asks her to lift her top. She presses her hands against Ivy’s stomach, working methodically around the bump. Next she uses a hand-held
device to listen to the babies’ hearts. It emits a clear fluid beat when she holds it to the bottom of Ivy’s belly, but when she slides the device to the top of the bump, all I can hear
is white noise and static.

I ask, ‘Can you hear anything?’

‘Something,’ the midwife says, but her tone does nothing to reassure me. ‘I’ll be right back,’ she says. ‘I’m just going to find the doctor.’

I hold Ivy’s hand and she squeezes it back. I open my mouth to ask if she is okay, then close it again and make a silent wish.

The midwife returns with a young woman who she introduces as Dr Edwards. Dr Edwards asks Ivy all the same questions she already answered. She listens to Ivy’s abdomen. She pushes on her
belly, shifting the bump to either side. Something – maybe a knee or a fist or an elbow – moves inside Ivy’s stomach. The doctor pushes the bump again, the top this time, kneading
the flesh with the heel of her hand.

‘The baby at the top doesn’t appear to be moving,’ she says. ‘I can’t hear a heartbeat there.’

‘That’s what I’ve been telling you,’ Ivy all but shouts. ‘I told you this. Why isn’t anybody listening to me?’

‘Try and stay calm,’ the doctor says. ‘The other one is responding well.’

‘Is my baby dead?’ Ivy says. ‘Please tell me. Please. Is my baby dead?’

The midwife puts her hand on Ivy’s forehead.

‘I don’t know,’ says the doctor. Her tone is neutral and I hate her for it.

The doctor turns on a monitor, picks up a tube of gel and tells Ivy, ‘This might be a little cold.’

We’ve been here before: the monitor, the white crescent of light, the image of two babies cuddled together inside their mother’s womb. Ivy looks away from the screen, staring
straight up at the ceiling.

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.

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.