LITMIR.BIZ

      She should have been a photographer.

      I’m looking at a spread of her images left on the kitchen table. They’re so good – clean lines, perfect colours, and a natural knack to frame her subjects. There’s a great one of me flying a phoenix-shaped kite, and several more of our gang, all pulling faces, at the pub quiz night. A few years ago, Erin was never without a camera – when did that stop?

      I find myself studying an old picture of Maisie that’s stuck on the fridge, sharing a magnet with the menu for the local Chinese take-away. She’s on her feet, chubby legs trembling, and using the sofa to move herself along. The grin on her face is pure joy. I remember, despite being out of shot, being there behind the baby, arms stretched out waiting to catch her if she fell. I blow her a kiss before leaving the house.

      Outside the front door the rain has stopped. The temperature has risen and there’s a sweaty haze hovering above wet ground. Lydia’s house is a short walk from Valentine’s Way, but I take the longer route, up Hawthorn Avenue. Outside number 27, I stop, lean up against one of the stone pillars at the entrance. They’re new. And the front garden’s different; denser, with loads more scruffy shrubbery that makes me want to get in there with some secateurs. Someone has planted ivy that’s grown wild around the front bay window of the ground-floor flat. It looks like shit; messy, unkempt and it saddens me.

      Behind that window was once our living room and behind it, in the middle of the flat, was Maisie’s bedroom. It was there that Erin first told me how she felt afraid and I told her she, we, had nothing to fear.

      I really believed back then that nothing could touch us.

      It was there on the 10th May 1998 that I learned she was right and I was so very wrong …

       The air in the flat is tight. I grasp the brass hook handles and pull the sash window in the living room until it raises its standard three inches. There’s no fresh burst of outside air but better to leave it open, I think. There won’t be any three-inch high burglars getting in tonight.

       Erin’s asleep, has been for hours. She’s exhausted and the doctor has given her something mild to help her sleep. I debate a brandy. Sleep for me feels impossible – eyes will be closed with my mind still pumping, going over and over stuff. Pouring a half glass, I’m already regretting it at the first sip, regretting what I’ve become. I swallow it in two gulps, look around and check the plugs, like I always do, before looking in on Maisie and going to bed.

       Maisie’s room, next to the living room, is even more stuffy and still and I open the window, pulling aside the heavy curtain Erin insists on having to try to convince our thirteen-month-old daughter it’s night time. She’s too clever though, knows she’s being duped and we end up listening to her babbling in the room next to us for at least an hour after bedtime every night. Tonight, she’s kicked the sheet off and has bundled herself into the furthest corner of the cot, her face rooted into the crumpled cotton and her left arm slung over Elephant.

       I move her, turn her over, Erin’s maternal words of warning whispering in my ear. ‘She shouldn’t sleep on her tummy,’ something my own mother had always insisted Erin was wrong about. And as my hands touch her, as my fingers grasp my baby, my flesh and blood, I know immediately. She’s so cold; my first thought is that there’s no coming back from this. As I turn her over, even in the moonlight I can see her face is mottled blue.

       One second: she’s on the floor and I try to breathe life into her cold lips.

       Two seconds: I listen for the sound of her fluttery heartbeat in her silent chest.

       Six seconds: She’s in my arms and I’m in the living room, the phone in my hand. The voice answering my call for an ambulance is calm and tells me the paramedics are on their way.

       Ten seconds: I open the airing cupboard in the hallway, pull out the first thing I see, a coloured crochet blanket, try to wrap her in it, the phone held in the crook of my shoulder and ear.

       ‘She’s so cold,’ I say to the woman on the end of the phone, my instinct already telling me her shift will end in tears. My eyes are on the doorway to our bedroom at the end of the corridor, the bedroom where Erin’s sleeping.

       Fifteen seconds: Inside I’m screaming, ‘Erin! Wake up!’ But the cries stay put. I’m pacing with Maisie swaddled in my arms. I whisper to her not to worry. I tell her I love her. I ask her not to leave us. Please. Maisie. Please. Don’t leave us.

       I stop being aware of time when there’s a banging on the front door and suddenly three people are all barking orders at one another trying to resuscitate our first child on a blanket on the living room floor. Our bedroom door opens.

       Then Erin is howling, a sound I will never forget. She’s clutching her stomach, swollen with twins, with one hand, scrambling to grab hold of Maisie with the other. She’s on the floor, just repeating, ‘No, no, no’ on a loop. ‘DO something,’ she screeches at no one in particular, before folding in half. I get down on the floor, squeeze my eyes shut, grasp her so she can’t move, knowing that if I let her go, she will simply break.

      I quicken my pace to Lydia’s. It’s still bright out, despite a sky laden with lilac, rain-heavy clouds. Cars, their lights on low, drive by and splash me but I’m oblivious, as I throw my head back and look to the heavens. ‘Life,’ I tell Maisie, ‘is about choices. Some we regret. Some we’re proud of, and some will plague us forever.’

       8. Erin

      THEN – May 1998

      Erin couldn’t breathe. From somewhere beneath her mouth, beneath her neck, she felt as if she was being kicked. Maybe she was dreaming. Maybe she was dreaming about being mugged.

      Her babies were telling her to find air. She opened her mouth, and instead of the gulp she’d expected, she heard herself cry out. Maisie.

      She began to rock. Forwards. Back. Forwards. Back.

      What was she doing on the living room floor? Who were all these people? How did she get there?

      Dom was holding her. But he was gripping her too tight, so she began to hit him. Hard.

      Next to them, there was a man huddled, bending over something. She wanted to pull away from Dom, let her eyes land on the sight she knew she’d already seen; to let herself look at it from further back so she could talk herself through it. Her head moved slowly left to right. No.

       No, no, no, no.

       One two, buckle my shoe. Three four, knock on the door.

      There was someone knocking on the door. And there was a strange woman letting him in. Erin counted. One, two, three, four. There were now four strangers in her living room, all dressed in black trousers and white shirts, all of them bent over something, someone. She began to wail, heard the sounds coming from herself and thought there must be some mistake. Even when she held her mother’s hand as she had taken her last breath, Erin had been silent. She wasn’t a screamer. Erin wept into Dom’s chest and felt afraid, really fearful, that she would now, after this night, always

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