Hide And Seek (Part 2) - Amy Bird

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I don’t actually say that, do I, and nor would I. Bit odd. But I guess that’s what I can say to little Leo, when he starts being his own person. So it’s fine to think it, as I bring Will Rich Tea biscuits and tea, like my mum used to bring to me when I was sad, and it was too early in the day to simply say the next morning would wash the grief away. Plus he hasn’t really got a mummy at the moment, has he? Never had one, in the real sense. May have to work on the Sophie Reigate née Travers bit, in due course. But for now, he has me. I need to look after him. And I guess maybe I do need to practise. Because it’s not long now, until I’m due to pop. Three and a half months. Three and a half months to learn how to look out for a defenceless little person. Learning how to let it feed on you. For it to get enough sustenance without sucking you and your existence totally dry. Oh, Mum – the eternal postcard: I wish you were here. I would give up all the antenatal classes in the world for half an hour of your wisdom.

      It would be better, of course, if I didn’t also have to practise the sleepless nights bit right now. It’s like, really, thanks Will, thanks for lowering the balance of my sleep bank before I’ve even become so huge that I can’t sleep at all. Or before we’ve even got a wailing sprog to attend to. Because, honestly, I challenge anyone to sleep through Will’s sleeping. Quiet evenings, maybe, but not quiet nights. He’s never been much of a snorer, but he’s sure as hell making up for it now. Not by snoring. No, that would be fine. It’s the tossing and turning, and the drumming, and the muttering that get me. Like really sinister muttering, if you didn’t know him. ‘Mummy’ he’ll murmur, which would be a bit Norman Bates if you didn’t have the back story. Plus ‘talk and die’. Ghoulish to anyone else. But I know he’s worried about his lecture, I’m sure of it. There’s only so much compassionate leave you can get out of a case like this and time is ticking before he needs to deliver it. They’ve already rescheduled to make allowances for him. Understanding his bad sleep etiquette doesn’t make it any less annoying, though – just as you’re about drifting off to sleep, there comes another ‘drum drum drum’ of his fingers on the bed posts, or he’ll roll right over onto you and your precious load, and sleep is suddenly hours off through fear of foetal crushing. I guess it’s maybe a blessing when he’s turned away from me, like he is at the moment. If he were hugging me in his sleep, like he always used to, little Leo would have been tapped to death by Will’s fingers by now.

      But it can’t go on, can it? Because what I’d need, if it were little Leo I was looked after, is a solution. That was always Dad’s role. I’d come to him as a teenager, whinging about something, and he would just say: “Look, wipe away the tears, and tell me what you’re going to do about it.” Practical and pragmatic. Shame he didn’t have time to do anything practical when the other car came ploughing head-on, the wrong way down a dual carriageway. But now. Follow Dad’s advice. Don’t cry about it. Be proactive. What am I going to do, about Will, about this sleeplessness?

      And I think I have an idea. Yes, there we go. That’s what I can do. It’s in two parts. The first, I can find in my medicine cabinet.

       Chapter Three

      -Will-

      Ellie, she thinks she has all the answers. All the explanations for everything. For her own behaviour, for everyone else’s behaviour. But for all her knowledge, all her senses, all her knowing, she doesn’t feel what I feel. If she did, she would never have told me those lies. She would never have let me imagine a life with Max Reigate. Right from the start, right from when she looked him up and found his initials, she should have told me. I don’t know when the rules changed. We always tell each other everything. Or at least, we did. But there are apparently different rules now. Apparently we only have to tell each other everything when it suits us. Full disclosure – but only when convenient. After it actually fucking matters. After you’ve actually emotionally fucking invested in a new future.

      Count to ten. Come on, remember – mother of your child. No arguments causing miscarriages. Retrieve the hammer out of the crib and install it in the toolbox. Go back upstairs, into the nursery, with its ghoulish dead-father crib, and smile at your pregnant wife.

      Looking at her, through my smiles, I know she doesn’t feel how I feel about something else too. Doesn’t feel as I feel about a mother who simply thought ‘Hey, this is all too difficult since my husband died. So even though my little son has just been left fatherless, I’m going to make him motherless too, by just giving him unfeelingly away.’ You’d think she would. With her own mother, up on the almighty pedestal she’s now deified on, and with her own impending motherhood, you’d think she would have as little sympathy for Sophie Travers and she does for Gillian.

      In the spirit of full disclosure, I test her out again. But no. Same old response. Ellie just goes on about the blood clot again. “There may have been an accident,” she says, seated on that sex-cum-nursing chair like it’s a judge’s bench. “That might be what Gillian was referring to. Or someone attacked him. Imagine how Sophie must have felt. Like she couldn’t be a mother at that moment; just a grieving widow.”

      But I don’t want to imagine it. I haven’t got the mental space to imagine it. The only things I have space for are this: the concerto; hatred of my non-parents; sorrow, true horrible devastating sorrow, of my life not lived; Ellie lying to me; and the blood clot. The phrase Ellie heard Gillian use: What happened that day. Because, you see, I haven’t forgotten those words. Or how they link to the blood clot. And there, again, I know more than Ellie. Partly because, you see, I am an expert in this area. So I know these blood clots. I know what they mean. The violence they entail. And I also know because there is now not a single page of the internet that mentions Max Reigate that is unread by me. I know that when he left home, he was fine. I know that when he started to record that album, he was fine. And I know that mid-way through, he died.

      And I know what that means.

      Talk and die.

      I know it’s not just a blood clot, of course, the talk and die phenomenon. Christ, if anyone knows that, I do. But these people who write these Wikipedia entries, they’re not going to be able to differentiate. Say to the average person: there was an epidural haemorrhage, a build-up of blood between the brain and the skull, and they’ll say oh, right. You mean a blood clot. Not getting, in their ignorance, the fatal beauty – sorry father, my dear departed father, but I mean from a scientific point of view – of the pressure of the bleed from damaged blood vessels around the skull trauma just building up, building up, until gradually gradually the pressure on the brain gets too much. An almost perfect murder, it would be, in some regards. If you gloss over the fact you need everyone not to notice you hit the victim on the head, and need to get the pressure just right, plus cross your fingers a lot that they won’t just pass out concussed immediately or, even more disappointingly talk and…talk.

      So, what I mean is, Wikipedia saying ‘blood clots’ isn’t going to rule out talk and die, is it? I mean, a mighty coincidence if it was that, what with that being my area of academic specialism and all. Unless that’s what subconsciously got me interested in the area? You might say I could just find Sophie. Ask her. And I will do. In due course. But I’m a scientist. I like to develop my thesis and my research. I like to make my scientific case. And so before I put her to the test, before I get her to confirm my theory, I will get my facts. Then we’ll see what she has to say. About whatever happened that day, with my dad. My dad, Max (still getting used to it). With my background, perhaps I should be the last person to say ‘But healthy pianists don’t just collapse in the middle of recordings!’. But, you know, healthy pianists generally don’t just collapse in the middle of recordings. What perhaps happens is that before the recording, at home, say, like one of those typical domestic epidural haematoma cases, someone –

      But part of the protocol, it seems, for my present situation, is if I start to share these theories or appear a little agitated, Ellie pops open the valium. Not for her, in her present condition, but for me. To quieten me. So before I can fully get my head round the theory of the special clot, of who might have caused it, tablets that Ellie has found from goodness knows where are in my hand. And because I still just about trust her – even now, after what she kept from me – it’s only

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