The nurse swished the curtain back against the wall, jolting Lauren awake. There was nothing behind it, only an empty space where a bed could be parked.

She had shut her eyes between feeds and the world jumped forward three hours. The sun was up and getting on with things, drowning out the electric lights and transforming the room, from a cave to an open space. From the window there was a view of the car park three floors down, and across the way she could see the main entrance to the A&E department. The wide sky was a shade of bright grey but it would be hot, as it had been every day for all of July. Fresh now, clammy later. The heatwave had been going on for a week, and the forecast was more of the same. It was set to break records.

The nurse was removing a catheter bag filled with yellow fluid from below the bed. She dropped it in a bucket and reached for an empty one.

‘Where’s the woman who was brought in last night?’ asked Lauren.

‘Who – Mrs Gooch, over there?’

The bay diagonally across from Lauren was occupied. Mrs Gooch seemed to be asleep, a serene baby tucked into the bed with her. The mother had long red hair arranged artfully across the pillow and pale bare arms – the effect was akin to a Klimt painting.

‘No, I don’t think so. I thought there was someone next to me. I was pretty sure.’

Riley was awake. His windmilling arm smacked his sleeping brother across the head and Morgan’s eyes opened in shock, then screwed up shut in sorrow, his mouth a little zero of injustice. There was a pause while Morgan inhaled expansively, a comprehensive gathering of breath that would certainly be used for something loud. The long wail, when it finally came, hit Riley’s face and crumpled it. Riley, in turn, inhaled at length and soon the anguish was doubled. Within a few seconds the sound built into a crescendo of indignation that interrupted their mother’s thought pattern like scissors through ribbon. Lauren flapped her hands, struggling to know what to do, where to start, who to tend to. Both of them crying, and only one of her. She knew she had to be quick – she’d read so much about attachment disorder and rising cortisol levels in the brains of babies in pregnancy and early childhood. You couldn’t leave children to cry. It had damaging effects and might do radical things to brain development, causing terrible long-term consequences. Already they seemed so angry.

‘Please,’ she said to the nurse, feeling her eyes filling up, ‘can you help me?’

‘Hey petal, no need for that.’ The nurse whipped three thin tissues from the box by the bed, pressed them into Lauren’s hand and turned to lift baby Morgan, a furious, purple-faced wide-mouthed thing from which came forth a sound that made you want to cover your ears. ‘There’s enough crying round here already without you joining in.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Lauren, wiping her eyes and blowing her nose, then uncovering herself ready to feed. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

In what seemed like less than half a minute the nurse plugged Lauren firmly into the twins. She manoeuvred Lauren’s body, lifting the weight of her breasts, helping her get into a position to feed both at once, a rugby ball baby under each arm with pillows holding them in place. The nurse was so efficient, so quick and practised. It made Lauren wonder how she would ever manage on her own.

‘There. Snug as bugs.’

She started to stride away, but Lauren stopped her.

‘That woman over there,’ she said, ‘has she got twins?’

Mrs Gooch had opened her eyes. She looked as fresh and unlikely as Sleeping Beauty. Even as Lauren spoke it was obvious that there was only one child contained in the idyll – baby Gooch was with her in the bed and there was no sign of any other.

‘No,’ said the nurse, ‘just the one. Yours are the only twins we’ve got at the moment.’

Patrick brought vegetable sushi, fruit and dark chocolate. ‘Thanks,’ she said, without gratitude. She didn’t fancy anything but white-bread toast.

‘You need something with nutrients in,’ he said.

She stuck her lip out. She ought to be able to eat whatever she felt like. ‘All food has nutrients in. Sugar is a nutrient. So is alcohol.’

‘Alright, clever clogs. You need something with vitamins. Tell me what you want, I can go to the supermarket and bring you something else this afternoon at visiting time. Avocado?’

The thought of avocado made her nauseous. She wanted crisps.

Patrick took photos of Lauren holding the twins as they slept, and then turned the screen for her to see. In the images she was both gaunt and bloated, her smile weak and her hair greasy.

‘Don’t put that online. I look terrible.’

Patrick looked up from his phone. ‘Oh, I, sort of already did.’ The phone started pinging with notifications as comments came in. He tilted the screen to show her:

Congratulations!

Glad you are all well!

Hope to see you soon!

Soooo beautiful!!!

Wow well done you guys can’t wait to meet the boys Xxx!

Later she took matching photos of him, holding the twins while he sat in the vinyl-covered armchair next to the bed. His appearance was just the same as always. Maybe he seemed a bit tired, perhaps as if he had a mild hangover, but there was no radical change. He’d lost a tiny bit of weight recently and people – friends of theirs – were saying how much better he looked for it. Where was the justice in that? They were both parents of twins now but it was her body that had been sacrificed.

Patrick put both babies back into the cot. He was handling them with less trepidation than before, putting them down as if they were fruits that bruised easily rather than explosives that needed decommissioning. He sat down but he kept one hand in the cot with them, counting fingers, self-consciously trying out nursery rhymes he could only half remember.

‘Round and round the garden, like a dum de dum. Like a . . . what is it like?’

‘Like a teddy bear,’ said Lauren.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes. I think so.’ She pictured her mother’s finger, tracing circles on her palm. The anticipation of the one step, two steps, tickle you under there. More rhymes came to her then: Jack and Jill, Georgie Porgie, a blackbird to peck off a nose. It was like lifting the lid on a forgotten box of treasure. These gifts, not thought of for years, there in her memory all this time, waiting for her to need them, to pass them on.

‘Teddy bear?’ said Patrick, still sceptical. ‘Well, that doesn’t make sense.’

Lauren put her hand in the cot, too. She stroked Morgan’s cheek and for a few seconds there was peace. It was such simple joy to feel the grip of a miniature hand around your thumb.

‘Are they breathing?’ said Patrick.

A sudden panic.

‘Of course they are.’ Were they? They both stared hard at the boys’ chests but it was difficult to tell. She tickled them in turn until they cried, voices twining together, so similar to each other, the two sounds in parallel like twisting strands of DNA.

‘Yes, they’re breathing.’

They laughed nervously, relieved, as if they’d come close to something unspeakable but not close enough to say what it was. The ground was shifting under them. What would life look like, now?

The anaesthetist came and poked Lauren in the swollen ankles with a pointy white plastic stick. She dangled her legs so he could test her reflexes with the hammer end. She could feel it fine. It was a relief to be paraplegic no longer.

‘You should be able to get up now,’ he said. ‘The nurse will come along soon to remove your catheter.’

She’d miss that catheter. For months she’d been up seven or eight times in the night to empty her oppressed bladder. She quite liked not having to think about it – not being at the mercy of yet another uncontrollable bodily function.

‘When can I go home?’ She was sweating in the dry heat, the skin on her lower limbs stretched shiny with the swelling. Why was the heating even on in the summer? The hottest summer Sheffield had seen for forty years. Apart from anything else, what a waste of money.

The anaesthetist looked at her notes.

‘Well, I can safely discharge you once you’ve moved your bowels.’

‘Moved my—’

‘Bowels?’ The doctor smiled indulgently at her.

She’d understood, but the term was unfamiliar. Not much mention of bowels in her former life sculpting moulds for garden ornaments. No one ever ordered bowels cast in concrete with a fountain attachment for their garden pond.

Though the talk was of catheters and bowels, she bathed in the doctor’s easy confident manner and was sad when he went away again, leaving her trapped in her little family unit, her perfect four. Patrick made a little whistling sound at Lauren as she gazed moonily at the doctor’s retreating back.

‘What?’ she said.

‘I thought you went for tall men.’

She laughed darkly. She was thinking of that moment again, when the needle went in and the pain went away and the anaesthetist carved a place for himself in her heart, made of gratitude and respect and a little bit of girlish adoration.

‘You should have a walk around now, check that everything’s working fine.’

The nurse had taken out the catheter only ten minutes before and Lauren felt slightly aggrieved by the abruptness of the suggestion – one moment a bed-bound dependent, the next dragged out and forced to march around, quick smart hup-two-three. She hadn’t used her legs at all in twenty hours. They needed time to think about it. No part of Lauren liked being expected to perform at short notice.

She planted her two fat bare feet onto the cool vinyl floor, feeling the many specks of grit on its surface. The nurse gestured to Patrick to take the other arm.

‘Oh Jesus,’ said Patrick as he helped her stand up.

She twisted to see. A puddle of blood on the white sheet almost the width of the bed, a red sun. Oh, thought Lauren, it’s just like the Japanese flag. And then she felt it, rivulets down the inside of her legs, pooling on the floor, red and black and hot like the fear.

After the birth, Lauren was convinced that nothing could be as awful. But towards the end, when they’d decided forceps would be needed, the worst of it had been performed behind a screen of drapery and anaesthetic. She’d not seen or felt the whole of it, not even a significant percentage of it. Where was the lovely anaesthetist now, now that she had a further stranger, a medical person (who could actually be anyone at all, some goon off the street in a costume and how would she even know) inserting a whole hand into her and squeezing her womb until it stopped bleeding? One blue-gloved hand (‘Gloves, Mr Symons?’ ‘Do you have Large?’ Oh God.) on the inside, one pushing down from the top and nearly disappearing into the spongy mass of stomach flesh created by the absence of the babies.

‘Just try to breathe,’ said the person (a doctor, she hoped). An older man this time. ‘This shouldn’t hurt too much. Tell me if you really need me to stop.’

‘I really need you to stop.’

The person/doctor did not stop. A nurse gave her nitrous oxide. Lauren bit down on the mouthpiece and spoke through her teeth, ‘Please stop.’

‘Just relax if you can. I need to carry on applying pressure for a few minutes longer. The bleeding has nearly stopped. Breathe slowly. Try to relax your legs.’ He was grunting with the effort.

‘Oh,’ said the nurse, as a sharp pain distracted Lauren momentarily, a hot feeling of flesh unzipping around the man’s forearm. ‘We’ll have to do those stitches again.’

‘Please—’ Her voice caught in a sob, but there was no energy for crying. ‘Please. I can’t. It really hurts.’ The hand inside her shifted horribly. She cried out.

‘Just a minute longer.’

And she kept the terrible silence for as long as she could, unable to fight or fly, a strange man’s hands compressing parts of her body that she would never see or feel with her own. Not just in her but through her, further inside than felt natural, or right. She was a pulsating piece of meat full of inconvenient nerve endings and un-cauterised vessels. No intrigue here, no mystery, no power. She’d been deconstructed by nature, and then by man, then nature again, and finally by man – the two forces tossing her hand over hand, back and forth like volleyball. Where was Lauren in this maelstrom of awfulness? Where was the person she had previously thought herself to be? Intelligent, funny, in control, that Lauren. She’d been hiding as best she could, sheltering in the back of her psyche somewhere, allowing the least evolved part of her instinctive self to be the thing that was present in this trauma. Disassociation, the word like a mantra within her silence as the older man withdrew his hand with exaggerated carefulness, the nurse took away her gas and air and inserted a needle for a drip in the back of a hand so pale she barely recognised it as her own. She was flaccid, weak, beaten. She was all shock and pain and sorrow.

Patrick was waiting, trying to comfort the screaming twins by poking his pinkie fingers in their mouths.

‘You scared me for a minute there,’ he said, his voice only decipherable over the din because of its low register.

She couldn’t think with the crying – the interference caused her mind to fill with white noise. She made an effort to form a sentence, her language processors struggling uphill in the wind against her reptilian brain.

‘You were just afraid I’d leave you alone with these two.’

He looked at her. His eyes were glazed in a film of tears. ‘Well, yeah,’ he said, ‘that too,’ and he kissed her.

Immediately a midwife started to arrange pillows, propping her up so she could feed the babies.

‘You should feed as much as you can now,’ she said. ‘It helps your uterus to contract.’

Feed as much as you can, she thought. As opposed to the meagre efforts I’ve been making so far.

As the midwife stuffed a tender nipple into the mouth of one twin and then the other, Patrick turned away. He shuffled around looking for change for the vending machine and headed off to get them both a cup of tea. By the time he came back and sat down, the midwife had left. He picked up a magazine but didn’t open it. His hands were shaking.

‘It’s six o’clock,’ he said.

‘Right,’ said Lauren.

‘I should go, before I get kicked out.’

‘I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if you stayed for a while.’

‘OK.’ He breathed in loudly through his nose. She waited for what he would say next. ‘But I’ve got to get to the shops, and everything.’

She wanted him to take her home and look after her. He’d done that once, early on. Only the second time Lauren had gone to his flat. In the night she’d started having terrible stomach pain, food poisoning most probably, from a bad takeaway. The next day he’d boldly insisted she stay with him until she was better. She didn’t want to stay – it was early days and they were still being polite, seeking to impress each other. Neither had yet heard the other fart. For a week she vomited near-constantly and her bowels had never moved faster. If this doesn’t put him off, she’d thought, and it hadn’t. He set up a bed for himself on the couch and tended to her every need. He did it all without complaint, and yet even then there’d been signs that he wasn’t a natural caregiver. She heard him, unable to prevent himself from gagging on the smell when he entered the bathroom after her, twice or three times that week. Also, he cooked with a certain undisguised reluctance (always did, she would discover), huffing when required to alter anything at all during the process. It didn’t really matter then because she ate almost nothing that week anyway. And it meant she loved him all the more, for doing what he did, making such an effort to override his natural inclinations. It proved without question that he loved her.

The erosion of enthusiasm for self-sacrifice can happen fast in those for whom it’s an effort to start with. It can be like dropping off a cliff: I care, I care, I care, I don’t care; for how long exactly are you planning to be ill? Patrick must have used up all his caring that week. When she was ill in the early months of pregnancy, he’d seemed more irritated than sympathetic. She found ways of coping. She would list all his good points, in between retches.

He fidgeted in his seat for a few more seconds, then looked at his phone and got up. He kissed all three of them on the head and said he loved them, the new names sounding less strange now but still out of place somehow. ‘Bye-bye Riley, I love you. Bye-bye Morgan, I love you. Bye-bye Mummy, I love you.’ The word Mummy jarred. It took a moment before she realised he meant her.

Patrick walked the short distance to the corner of the bay, turned and gave a weary wave.

‘See you in the morning,’ he said.

He earns enough so I don’t have to work, she thought. My mother liked him, when she was alive. He’s funny. He’s got lots of friends. He’s really good looking, in my opinion.

With a son on each breast she watched the tendrils of steam diminish as her tea went cold in its brown plastic cup on the bedside table. The sun sank beyond the car park but the electric lights held back the darkness. Home seemed like a different country, one to which she might never return.

Chapter 4

Night fell outside, and the babies seemed to know it: they were awake.

‘Sleep when they sleep,’ the nurse had said, Patrick had said, her mother-in-law had said many times when she was pregnant. Sleep when they sleep: neat, and as far as unsolicited advice went, sensible enough. I would do that, she thought, if I could, but they were asleep all day in between crying and being fed. Now they were awake and she wanted to watch them discovering themselves and each other and the edges of their little world but her eyelids were heavy, her head throbbed. If she closed her eyes she knew she’d be dragged under in an instant. She felt she should be awake for them, that she was duty-bound. This and the pain helped to keep her conscious at first. Her nipples were torn and raw, and the pain in her uterus was dulled only slightly by the co-codamol she had recklessly taken despite the implied threat of further confinement (‘Are you sure? It might make you constipated, flower’).

Coos and snuffles turned into cries and she fed them, both together for the first time without the midwife’s help, managing to balance one while positioning the other with one hand. Riley, the smaller of the two, seemed to find it harder to get started and she had to reach around Morgan and slip her little finger between him and the nipple, repositioning him twice before he was able to feed. She wasn’t watching the clock. Hours started stretching out into lifetimes when she did that. Feeding time went on and she thought it might go on all night but then they each dropped off the breast, asleep, like ripened plums from a branch, and she set them down. The moment both twins were in the cot she let her eyes shut and her brain shut down and her body melted into the bed. She entered a kind of sleep in which she was poised, a part of her remaining on high alert, jerking her out at the slightest snuffle. A meagre kind of rest, but all she could afford.

And then she woke when there was no sound: why was there no sound? Had she done something wrong, were they suffocating? Were they breathing, had they died? She placed a hand on each baby and waited for the rise and fall, the sound of air being drawn in, a sign of life. Under the harsh light, under her two hands they breathed, they moved, they lived.

Lauren’s heart slowed by degrees. She thought of all the people that would be heartbroken if she let them die. Her gran, his mother, his father and hers. Patrick’s sister Ruthie and the cousins, Sonny and Daisy. The funeral, how she did not want to go through that or watch Patrick go through it. Was this the love, this fear of them dying? Perhaps it was. She lay with her eyes open, unable to stop a series of appalling ideas from flashing in her mind. Dropping them on their heads on the hospital floor. Crashing the car with them in it. A plastic nappy bag on the face, obscuring the airways in seconds while her back was turned. These things were so easy, so quick, and they actually happened, they were real. She was right to be scared. She looked at the babies, fixing them in her memory, their personalities emerging already – Riley frowning in his sleep, dissatisfied with something. Morgan, abandoned to it, relaxed and satiated. I will never forget this, she thought.

They were asleep. Sleep when they sleep. And she wanted to watch them to make sure they kept breathing but she clicked off like a light.

She dreamed of the bird and the cat again and awoke drenched in sweat and dread. How long had she slept? Impossible to know. The curtain between her bed and the next had been drawn across once more. This time there was no mistake: there was a woman in the next cubicle. The lamp inside was lit; she could see a silhouette on the curtain, long thin shadows stretched out to the ceiling. A creaky voice began to sing an unfamiliar song.

As she was a-walking her father’s walk aye-o

As she was a-walking her father’s walk,

She saw two pretty babes playing the ball

Lay me down me dilly dilly downwards

Down by the greenwood side-o

And the woman had two babies, Lauren was sure. There, the sound of two together, both cooing and grunting, as if they were singing along with the strange lullaby.

She said pretty babes if you was mine aye-o

She said pretty babes if you was mine

I’d dress you up in silken fine

Lay me down me dilly dilly downwards

Down by the greenwood side-o

Lauren felt an urge to visit the toilet, a sudden pressure on her bladder strong enough for her to answer it with a movement a bit too fast for her body. She swung her legs out of bed. Her knees buckled as she stood, but she held herself up with both hands on the bed rails. She perched there, testing herself. She could walk; she was just a bit unsteady. There was no sunburst of blood on the sheet. The muscles in her pelvic floor, cut and torn and sewn up, held her in place for now and she took her hands from the bed, allowing her feet to take their burden back. She checked the babies, still breathing, feather breaths on her cheek. Blood rushed from her head to serve her limbs and she waited for the feeling to pass, the floor to cease shifting under her like the deck of a sea vessel.

The clock read 4.17. The windows, black mirrors.

She took a penknife long and sharp aye-o

She took a penknife long and sharp,

And pierced the two pretty babes to the heart

Lay me down me dilly dilly downwards

Down by the greenwood side-o

Maybe Lauren would ask her to stop. The singing might wake Mrs Gooch. Plus, it was a horrible song, the words were creepy and the tune was weird, sort of sad and angry. She’d been pleased, initially, when she’d realised there was another woman on the ward with twins but she wasn’t sure she could be friends with someone who had no consideration for others.

The curtain had been pulled all the way around the cubicle, boxing it in. There was a gap of a few centimetres at one corner and Lauren widened it, peering through. The lamp was angled at her face, she was caught in the glare. She held a hand up to shield her eyes.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. The woman did not respond, kept humming the strange old tune. She tried again, a bit louder. ‘Excuse me?’

There was no hospital bed. The woman was sitting in the chair, the same as the one of pale green vinyl next to her own bed, next to all the beds on the ward. The scene was too small for the cubicle – without the bed there seemed too much floor space. The distance between Lauren and the woman was as wide as a river. The woman was leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and a large basket between her bare feet, feet dirty enough to stand out black against the floor. Rags from the woman’s dress were long fingers trailing against those feet, against the floor, forming a fringe over the basket. The glare from the angled lamp meant that Lauren couldn’t see the babies in the basket but she could hear them, ragged phlegmy breaths and two – definitely two – high-pitched voices murmuring. She took a step inside the cubicle, moving to get a better look, more from curiosity than anything else because she could see at once that this woman shouldn’t be there. She must be homeless. She wore several layers of clothing, as if she were cold even though it was oven-hot in the hospital. But when Lauren stepped closer she began to shiver. She was at once aware of the thinness of her hospital gown, cold air surrounding her, whispering around her exposed legs and entering the gown from below so that she wrapped her arms across herself to stop it. There must have been an air-conditioning outlet right there above them. It was a damp cold and there was a muddy, fishy smell which must have been coming from the homeless woman. Lauren sensed that she had been noticed, she knew it, but the woman hadn’t moved at all, not a millimetre. She was singing again.

She throwed the babes a long ways off aye-o

She throwed the babes a long ways off

The more she throwed them the blood dripped off

Lay me down me dilly dilly downwards

Down by the green-

‘Listen, I don’t mean to be rude but can you stop singing, please? You’re going to wake everyone up.’

The woman stopped singing with a sharp intake of breath. She raised her eyes from the basket. Lauren heard a high whining sound, another layer of hum but getting louder. It came from nowhere but inside her own ears. Run, it told her, leave, go, now. But her feet were rooted. Heavy as lead.

It took a long time for the woman’s eyes to meet hers and when the moment finally came Lauren had to blink away cold sweat to see her. She was young, perhaps eight or ten years younger than Lauren, but her eyes seemed ancient. She had hair that had formed itself into clumps, the kind of hair, a bit like Lauren’s, that would do that if you didn’t constantly brush it. The woman’s face was grimy, and when she opened her mouth to speak the illusion of a rather dirty youth who could even be beautiful if given a good scrubbing was destroyed. She seemed to have no teeth and a tongue that darted darkly between full but painfully cracked lips. There was something about the way the woman eyeballed her. What did she want?

‘You’ve twin babies,’ said the woman.

‘Yes.’ The word had tripped out, travelling in a cough. Lauren wanted it back.

‘Ye-es,’ the woman drew the word out lengthily, ‘twin babies. Just like mine, only yours are charmed.’

Lauren couldn’t think what to say. She knew she was staring, open-mouthed at the woman but she couldn’t not.

‘Mine are charmed too,’ said the woman, ‘but it’s not the same. Mine have a dark charm. A curse. You are the lucky ones, you and yours. We had nothing, and even then we were stolen from.’

She must have had a terrible time, this woman. And those poor little mites in the basket, what kind of life would they have? There were people who could help her, charities dealing in this kind of thing. She must be able to access something, at least get some new clothes. The long dirty hair hanging in dog’s tails each side of her face was doubtless crawling with infestation. It wasn’t healthy.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Lauren, ‘shall I see if I can get someone to help you?’

The woman stood up and took a few steps around the basket, towards Lauren. The muddy smell became stronger and the air, colder. It seemed to come out of this woman, the cold. There was an odour of rotting vegetation stirred up with the mud and the fish. Lauren wanted to look into the basket but the woman was standing in the way. Closer now, she lowered her voice, breathy, hissing.

‘There’s no one can help me. Not now. There was a time but that time passed, and now there’s more than time in between me and helping.’

The woman moved slightly and Lauren could see that the basket was full of rags, a nest of thick grey swaddling and she couldn’t see a face, not even a hand or a foot. She hoped the woman’s babies could breathe in there.

‘Maybe social services could find you somewhere to stay,’ said Lauren. ‘You can’t be alone with no help, it’s not right.’

‘I’ve been alone. I’ll be alone. What’s the difference?’

‘But the babies.’

They both looked at the basket. The bundle was shifting, folding in the shadows. One of Lauren’s boys sneezed from behind the curtain and she was unrooted.

‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to go, my baby.’

She leapt away from the woman, out of the cubicle, into the dry heat.

‘Your baby,’ said the woman. And she lunged, crossing the space between them in an instant. A bony hand gripped Lauren’s wrist and she tried to pull it free but she was jerked bodily back inside the curtain walls. They struggled, but the woman was stronger.

‘Let’s deal,’ hissed the horrible woman, bringing her face up close to Lauren. ‘What’s fair, after all? We had everything taken, you had everything given. Let’s change one for another.’

‘What?’

‘Give me one of yours. I’ll take care of it. You have one of mine, treat it like your own. One of mine at least would get a life for himself, a taste of something easy. What’s fair?’

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