16
There are no twins in my family, apart from the ones I gave birth to sixteen years ago. Nada. So I really wasn’t expecting them, and definitely didn’t want them. When we went to the first scan, I was terrified, of course. Terrified they would tell me there was nothing there; that there was something there that shouldn’t be there; that there had been something there, but there wasn’t any more. I lay stiff as a board on the ultrasound table, Robbie holding my hand tightly, trying to pretend he wasn’t excited, because he knew how worried I was.
‘It’ll be fine,’ he murmured, rubbing my palm. ‘You’re not as old as your mother says you are.’
At thirty, in Rose’s eyes I was geriatric, delaying reproduction to do silly things like further my career.
‘I might have bad genes,’ I replied, thinking of my respective parents.
‘Then I’ll make up for them,’ he said, kissing my fingers. ‘Mine are top-notch.’
And then the moment I’d been dreading – the taut silence, as the sonographer spotted something, and moved the stick back to investigate. My heart started beating an erratic staccato, my thighs leaden as I clutched my husband’s hand and waited. I didn’t even want one baby, let alone two.
Or perhaps it wasn’t that I didn’t want one, just that I wasn’t sure I did. I felt ambivalent about the whole thing, in a way that Susie didn’t. Susie knew she didn’t want children, had known since university that she just had no biological urge and never would. My old schoolfriend Laura had three children by her early thirties, really loved being pregnant and having babies – I watched her rubbing her own bump, squeezing her newborn son’s dimpled thighs lasciviously, and wondered if I would ever feel that all-consuming urge to procreate. I wanted to feel strongly either way, rather than sitting on the fertility fence, waiting to see which way I toppled.
Of course, my mother was only too happy to stick her finger in this pie. ‘If you don’t have children, you will regret it,’ she warned me. ‘You cannot ignore Mother Nature.’ I found it ironic that my dear mama couldn’t resist the siren call of motherhood, but once her two children were born found it perfectly easy to pretend they didn’t exist. It troubled me though, the idea that if I put it off too long, the choice might be made for me, as my womb withered, and that broodiness would kick in just as the last of my eggs shuffled off.
Robbie always wanted children. He comes from a loving family of four brothers, enjoyed a riotous Swallows and Amazons childhood in the countryside, wanted to recreate it, build a swing in a big garden and watch future Hendrys kick their feet and soar as he did. Robbie’s parents are still together, still devoted. His mum isn’t a roaring narcissist and his dad never did a runner to Spain with his voluble mistress. Unsurprisingly, I had nothing I wanted to recreate, though was tentatively tempted by the idea of erasing my own childhood through my children. But what if I was a mother like my mother? That smarting combination of disinterest and disapproval, laced with faint malice? There was no room for us in Rose’s mirrored pool, and Dad was a genial but idle father, whose quest for a comfortable life outweighed all other considerations. They weren’t the best examples, but would I do any better?
Having agonized over the decision, in the end I decided to just leave it to fate and see what happened, which of course meant I got knocked up on our honeymoon (lovely spa in Heraklion, near the remains of Knossos Palace). My fertility hadn’t fallen off a cliff, it was nestling ripely in the crumbling columns of Crete. Meanwhile, Mother Nature was staring at her nails and smirking, as was my own mother.
‘Well, well, well,’ said the sonographer. ‘This is a turn-up for the books.’
In my wildest nightmares, it never occurred to me, which shows that even a prize worrier like me doesn’t go far enough. As someone who firmly believes that nothing ever works as it should, it seemed incredible to me that not only could Robbie and I reproduce with such brisk efficiency, but manage to produce two foetuses in the process. Twice as much to worry about. More than twice, because immediately my (already considerable) fears multiplied and ballooned, my addled brain a lightning rod for a gazillion scenarios that included but were not limited to: Siamese, oh God, that’s an offensive term, call it conjoined; one baby on each boob will just look ridiculous, like having a litter of puppies, one on every teat; everyone I know will gather in glee to point and advise; that double buggy in John Lewis was £1700, Robbie and I laughed at it and now look; I will definitely die in childbirth; even if I don’t die my vagina will explode; my mother will say this is all my own fault . . .
The first thing Robbie said was: ‘It will be OK.’ Which was both the best and worst thing he could have said. Best because he nobly resisted punching the air, which was what he wanted to do; worst because, in the end, it was OK, but not because anyone really helped make it that way. It was OK, but not before it was terrible and frightening and uncontrolled and exhausting and tedious and the most painful and distressing thing I have ever endured. Like boiling a frog backwards – I’m in tepid water now, but my flesh has peeled off and I will never look or feel the same again. My children give me such joy and enrichment, and the love is indescribable, galactic. But it’s a thorny, tangled, flailing thing, infused with guilt and worry and a dizzying sense of inadequacy. Moreover, the eruption of their arrival lingers like an echo.
From the beginning – or at least, from the moment the sonographer waved her wand – I wanted a caesarean. I wanted drugs, and medical intervention, and as much certainty and control as a woman in my position could expect. Major abdominal surgery terrified me – but not as much as the alternative. For once my terror made me assertive, and when my mother said ‘What rot, Mother Nature knows best,’ I was able to retort that in this case I knew best, and Mother Nature was going to have to step aside. But my consultant had other ideas; he said – and I quote – that giving birth naturally would be ‘a doddle’, and that my recovery time would be much quicker, which would be helpful looking after two babies. He was so sure of himself, of his expertise, of his unassailable right to say how things would be, that I didn’t feel like I had any choice but to acquiesce. When I reported back to the midwife, I saw her hesitate, just for a second, before ticking the box. Neither the mother nor the midwife questioned the man.
I tried so hard – NCT, hypnotherapy, breathing exercises, breastfeeding classes where we practised with a crocheted tit, seventeen books on planning for parenthood and forty-seven cups of raspberry leaf tea. I bought an internal massage tool that claimed to stretch your perineal muscles and prevent tearing. It was a sort of balloon that inflated inside you, gradually increasing its size, tenderizing your vaginal walls like steak. I would sit in the bathroom blowing myself up while I read the birthing guru Sheila Kitzinger describing the wondrous euphoria of delivery, how babies eased and crept their way out. We watched endless DVDs: a woman with the smooth, enraptured face of a nun explaining how she had an orgasm during a contraction; another dreadlocked free spirit next to a pool, playing the guitar with her patronising partner during the early stages of labour – I hope during the later stages she smashed it against the smug git’s head. Still, I ploughed on, trying to dismiss the dark thoughts that would surely condemn me to a difficult birth. Everyone kept telling me that it was all in the mind, that if only I could approach the process positively then it would be a walk in the park. I just wanted everyone to be pleased with me, tell me I did well, give me a pat on the head.
I went into labour on a mild midsummer night, and we hastily packed up the car and headed to the hospital. The first signs that it wasn’t going to be a breeze came early. On arrival, the midwife refused to let us in because she thought I was lying about having twins, even though I was so enormous I could barely walk. ‘People will say anything,’ she sniffed, as I groaned through a contraction on my hands and knees.
When we finally got into the labour ward, there was a brief moment of levity when Robbie tried the gas and air, and then everything rapidly went downhill. After all the consultant’s assurances, it turned out no one really knew anything, no one was in charge, and certainly no one was thinking positive thoughts. My memories of those eighty-six hours are mainly brief, violent pulses – wheelchairs, gurneys, tight faces and averted eyes, hastily inserted shunts, shunted from one room to another, being left alone, being surrounded, and then a long, excruciating moment of silence as the epidural was administered: ‘Stay perfectly still, or this could paralyse you.’ After hunching, immobile through the spasms with a big needle in my spine, I thought the rest of it would be the doddle I’d been promised, but the drugs didn’t work, they just made it all worse, giving everything a nightmarish hallucinatory hue.
It’s not helpful to describe the pain, but I’m going to. It’s like the tightening of a winch, but the winch is inside you, screwing all your organs and muscles to a pitch where you can’t think or breathe or bear it for a second longer – no, you will absolutely die if this continues, but it’s carrying on, tighter and tighter, a scaffold of agony and panic and primal fear and utter torment and – release. For a few seconds, there’s a delirious pause, and then it starts up again, hoisting you higher and higher with each vicious turn of the spool. In hypnotherapy, they call them surges, or waves, which is supposed to be empowering, but a better word would be lacerations, each one ripping you apart a little more. And then there’s a stage – the mundanely termed ‘transition phase’ – where it’s just one giant swirling mess of racking pain that goes on forever; there’s a dimension in time and space where I’m still there, writhing and gripping and lowing for all eternity. And then the most tremendous pressure hammering down on you, the most savage insistence, unbearable, no, no, push, push, push, no, I can’t, push, push – wait . . . Now, push, push, pusssshhhhh, no, wait again . . . One more push . . . NOW. The actual moment of birth is a spiteful blooming sting, the venom of all the world’s wasps erupting in your vagina, as every sinew in your body explodes, atoms of residual burns showering around you like the tail-end of a firework.
Now imagine doing that twice, in quick succession.
In the event, I didn’t. After sustaining a third-degree tear giving birth to Ethan, I was whisked into emergency surgery for Hazel, who refused to breathe for the first two minutes, probably in protest at her treatment. Luckily, I’d started to haemorrhage by that point, so wasn’t available to fret myself into a fit about her. Not a great time for Robbie, who ended up being given a beta blocker – for once, he was as worried as I was.
But then, when passageways had been cleared, skin sponged down, blood clotted, perineum sewn, prick tests passed . . . there was a sense that . . . why the fuss? It was all worth it, wasn’t it? You’re alive, you have two healthy babies, no room to complain. So, naturally, I didn’t. Didn’t want to rock the boat by speaking out. Besides, I suspect there would have been nothing more than a dismissive shrug from that consultant. You’re just left to get on with it, lick your wounds in private.
My mother didn’t come to the hospital because they make her feel ‘icky’ but when we got home, she deigned to visit, looked at my pale, wan face and said ‘Goodness me, anyone would think you were ill. Buck up, no one wants to see a misery-guts.’ Because of course twins made her livid. The waters of her pool had been rippled by me doing something that everyone else thought was unusual, special. She bashed aside the balloons, shifted the baskets of muffins off the kitchen table to the floor and told me about the horrors of laying her new patio, while I sat on a ring cushion with my itching stitches and dry mouth.
But when she’d gone, and I was left, with these miraculous tiny babies who had once been foetuses caught by the sonographer’s wand, I looked into their little alien faces and allowed myself a tiny, fleeting moment of positivity: yes, this was going to be tough and sometimes unrewarding and mind-numbingly tiring and baffling and, in many ways, utterly awful, but I wouldn’t ever be as bad as her, and it wouldn’t be as bad as what came before, and in the end . . . in the end, it would be OK. More than OK. Sometimes it would be wonderful – worth every last twinge.
17
‘Well, well, well,’ I say. ‘This is a turn-up for the books.’
Hazel doesn’t notice me, and I watch her for a while, interested to see this zealous streak of activism I’d hitherto been unaware of in my daughter. It seems to take the form of her lounging against the square’s central plinth, a placard under her arm, while scrolling on her phone, frowning at something and tossing back her hair. Hazel’s hair is possibly her chief concern in life, and she spends a great deal of her time and my money making sure it pulls focus. I must admit, it is nice hair – it’s my hair, if mine were any good. A lush, rich brown, with all the thickness of youth. She’s grown it nearly to her waist, spends hours brushing it, conditioning it, smoothing it, buffing it like a racehorse. If only Hazel was as dedicated to her school work as she is to her grooming regime, she’d be gunning for Oxbridge. As it is, she’s an indifferent scholar who I suspect is on the lookout for a rich husband. As a mother, I hope I am not like my mother, but sometimes wonder if my daughter is going to be a wife in the mould of Rose Ashton. Decorative, self-obsessed, dissatisfied.
At other times though, I berate myself for such unmotherly thoughts. Hazel can be great fun, and she’s funny – a dry, withering wit that makes me think there is a brain under that barnet. I can deal with a vain child but not with a humourless one. And to be fair, she does have plenty to be vain about – in addition to the fairy-tale version of my locks, she has Robbie’s elegant frame and my mother’s much-vaunted cheekbones. Although I enjoy attractive people very much, and (to a certain extent) relish my own daughter’s beauty, I worry that good-looking folk don’t bother to develop a personality because they don’t need one. Having said that, Hazel is a vegetarian, which I’ve always thought was a good sign, and, in light of today’s turn of events, a sign of things to come.
‘Hazel Hendry!’
At the sound of her name, she whirls around in alarm, the placard dropping to the ground. It says ‘THE WRONG AMAZON IS BURNING’, which is rich given the amount of bilge from the right one that comes through our letterbox addressed to her. Only the other day she bought a silk pillow slip which is an absolute bugger to wash.
‘What are you doing here?’ She stumbles over her billboard, picking it up and holding it in front of herself like a shield.
‘You’ve stolen my script,’ I reply genially. ‘I am a working adult who’s left the office on important business. You’re a schoolgirl roaming the streets.’
‘I’m on study leave.’
‘Then why aren’t you studying? You’re supposed to be getting an education.’
She grimaces. ‘This is an education. It is my future.’ Which is a good point, but it’s parroted, like she heard someone else saying it.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Before I read you the riot act, I’ll give you a chance. Imagine I’m a tetchy pensioner who objects to you snarling up his square. Change my mind.’
My daughter gapes at me, her wooden message slack in her hand. ‘What?’
‘You obviously feel very strongly about this, to take time out. Outline the issues. Wow me with your powers of persuasion. Turn me green.’
‘Erm . . .’ She swallows. ‘They’re . . . ripping up forests . . . and the orangutan has nowhere to go.’
‘Is that a Christmas advert you saw in 2018?’ She hangs her head. ‘You’re going to have to do better than that, love. Why don’t you tell me about the Paris Agreement, or what we should do about plastic in the ocean, or where the people of Tuvalu are going to go?’
