LITMIR.BIZ

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with rage. I was in traction. And where was Jim, Janie’s about to be ex-boyfriend, or so she swore though she never got round to telling him, or he never got round to listening. We didn’t know where Jim was.

      ‘You mustn’t worry about it,’ my mother repeated like a mantra over the hospital soup. ‘You just take time to get better. You mustn’t worry. You mustn’t worry.’

      She was talking to herself, of course, telling herself not to worry. Just chanting, quietly, for comfort. She was in shock, I suppose. Dad just strode the green-tiled corridors, up to the baby unit, down to me, up to the baby unit, down to me. He was like one of those depressed animals in the zoo, repeating and repeating his movements, up and down, up and down, to and fro, to and fro, in the cage of his disbelief. I was no different: my thoughts spun to and fro like her words and his feet. ‘Where’s Jim, how can we keep the baby from him, when can I walk, when can I walk, where’s Jim, I’ve got to get the baby, when is Jim going to walk in here, when can I walk, where’s the baby?’ You never know how grief will get you, until it does. All I wanted was to do things, as if doing things might change the big thing. But I couldn’t do anything. Not even the normal things you do whether or not there is grief. Couldn’t go out, or be at home, or cook, or move … I filled my time by demanding to see doctors, as if the more I saw of them the quicker I could be better. All that happened was they began to hate me.

      There was a nice nurse, Dolores. She was on nights, and didn’t make me take my pain-killers. ‘I have to think,’ I said. ‘Don’t make me drugged.’

      She went along with me for a while and then said: ‘You’re only thinking the same things over and over, why bother? If you’re not going to do anything, you should just get some proper rest.’

      ‘How do you know what I’m thinking?’ I asked her.

      ‘You’re talking in your sleep,’ she said.

      I told her about it. How Janie was only on the back of my motorcycle eight and a half months pregnant because Jim had made one of his fairly regular phone calls that he didn’t give a fuck about any fucking injunction she said she’d take out and he was coming over now. How he’d done it before. How Janie preferred a dashing escape courtesy of her sister. How I didn’t know for certain that what she escaped from would have been as bad as what she got.

      What if Jim comes for Lily?

      ‘What if he comes!’ I was shouting, shouting and fighting through flame, floating, clutching a child, someone was holding my ankles and my leg came off in their hand, and I floated on up and up without it …

      I woke to find myself in Dolores’ arms, my head on her shoulder. The nightlights glowed, the plumbing rumbled. Hospital smell, hospital heat. Dolores’ big brown eyes in the dimness. Why am I so comforted by the idea of an African night? She gave me a glass of water and wrapped a blanket round my shoulders.

      ‘I looked upstairs before I came in,’ she said. ‘The little one’s OK. She’s weak but she’s OK. No one going to take her anywhere, that’s for sure.’

      ‘He’s her father,’ I mumbled.

      ‘She registered yet?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Nobody knows who’s her father then. We don’t know him. Her mother dead.’

      ‘He’s a pig.’

      ‘You can’t do anything yet,’ she said.

      ‘He could turn up any time.’

      ‘Child’s on a tube. She’s not travelling.’

      ‘I must have her. I must, you know.’ I knew. There was never any question. Little Janie, my little sister, all of ten months younger than me.

      ‘Think about that then,’ said Dolores.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Can you keep her? Can you feed her? You a sensible woman? What your husband say?’

      ‘No husband.’

      ‘That’s hard.’ I looked up at her. She knew how hard it was.

      ‘How many do you have?’ I asked.

      ‘Three,’ she said. ‘Kwame, Kofi and Nana. My mother helps.’

      I can keep a child. I can work. (Jesus. I’m a dancer. My leg is in traction. I’ll have to be something else, then. Can I work? Yes. There is no question.)

      ‘But he’ll be able to take her.’

      ‘Fight for her.’

      Fight. How? In court? Adoption? How does that work? He’d have to agree. Would he agree? Would he have to agree?

      ‘I tell you two things,’ murmured Dolores. ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law. And nothing succeed like a fait accompli.’

      ‘When can I walk?’

      ‘Consultant coming round in the morning.’

      He won’t tell me anything. They never say anything in case you sue them when it takes longer, or doesn’t work out the way they said it might. Got to walk, got to walk.

      I slept again, and dreamt of faits accomplis.

      *

      The next morning I had the day nurse wheel the ward pay-phone over to me and called Neil.

      ‘Janie’s dead and I want to keep her child.’

      Neil was silent for a moment.

      ‘Janie’s dead.’

      ‘Yes.’

      He started crying. I sat there. Fed in another 10p. I didn’t cry. He continued.

      ‘I’m so, so …’

      ‘Yes,’ I said.

      ‘How?’ he said.

      ‘Crash.’

      ‘But the baby …?’

      ‘Fine. Early, but fine.’

      ‘And Jim?’

      ‘Neil, we haven’t seen him. I don’t know if he knows. But Neil – you mustn’t tell him. They had a row … Look, come and see me. Please.’

      ‘Yes, yes … of course.’

      ‘I’m in hospital.’

      ‘Oh, God – are you all right?’

      I burst out laughing. Then crying. ‘Come this afternoon. This morning. Come now.’

      When he came he said the only thing to do was to get the baby out of hospital as soon as it was safe to do so, take her home, and hold tight. Apply for parental responsibility. If Jim showed an interest, fight it out. ‘Get her home and love her and be a good parent,’ he said. ‘Any judge will respect that. And get married.’

      *

      You see why I find it hard to be mean to Neil. The petunias gleamed at me like clear thoughts in a mist of confusion. It’s been three years and for those three years Jim has not turned up. I kept track of him. He is well off and well respected, and his nature remains better known to me than to the police or to anyone with any influence over the situation. It’s up to me to make sure he never sees Lily again.

      Therefore I don’t need anything on my record. Anything at all. I could make a living without the car, that’s not the problem. The licence itself hardly matters. What matters is the good name. I need my good name to keep her.

      I’d been balancing it up. Seventeen unreported black eyes that he gave her (I kept count) and one injunction that she never brought versus several thousand quids’ – worth of lawyers saying that I’m a drunkard, irresponsible, incapable, single and not the child’s parent. That’s what I was thinking about. That and the fact that that morning, the morning of the night I was out with Neil, Jim had rung

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