Dot (Araminta Hall)

won’t even be able to get a birth certificate or have a grave.’ Her hand slackened so Alice stepped backwards.
    ‘Sandra, listen …’
    Sandra was crying again and the nurse had returned with some pills in a tiny plastic cup, which she swallowed greedily before lying down and turning her back on Alice.
    Alice waited in the corridor for the nurse to finish with the other women and stopped her as she came out. ‘What happened to my friend’s baby?’
    The nurse shook her head. ‘It died, I’m afraid.’
    ‘I know. He died. But what happened to his body?’
    ‘She was only twenty-two weeks gone, so we’d have disposed of him.’
    ‘Disposed?’
    The nurse shifted her weight on her overworked feet. ‘He wasn’t viable. It was a horrid accident, but your friend will be fine.’
    Alice cried all the way home in the car, her tears blurring her vision so that she kept having to pull over to stop herself from crashing. People’s lives seemed to her like a litany of tragedies; they all lurched from one calamity to the next, each obliterating the one before in its awfulness. And every tragedy is personal; your own is so hard to bear because it belongs only to you. Alice understood why Sandra had told her about the baby, because sometimes even one other person sharing in your grief makes it more bearable, makes it less likely that you’re going to jump out of the next open window. People cross the road to avoid you when you have been knocked down because they are clinging so desperately to their own fragile all-rightness, which could be shattered at any minute. Really, Alice thought as she pulled up in front of her house, life is a terrifying balancing act. She remembered the tightrope walkers in the circus with their spangly costumes and safety net.

16 … Waiting
    It was absurd how long it took to do anything with a newborn. Days would go by and Mavis would be pleased if she’d got dressed and brushed her teeth. Her mum was helping her loads because she seemed to have an incessant desire to hold Rose or take her for walks or make Mavis milk-producing meals. But still time had slowed to a near halt whilst also accelerating way beyond the proverbial speed of light. It was not a dilemma Mavis felt she had enough brain power to pursue. For now being was enough. Mavis found simply existing with her baby was like stepping into a new world, that hours could pass just watching Rose sleep or holding her chubby fingers or smoothing her shock of red hair. She’d call her mum in from the kitchen and they’d both wonder at this tiny new life, smiling at each other because they didn’t need to speak. Even her dad seemed charmed. He hadn’t smoked in the house since Rose had come home and he always washed his hands after every cigarette, which did seem to be lessening in frequency. He would bring in a cup of tea for them all after dinner and they’d sit round the telly and the night before Mavis had even heard her parents laughing after she’d gone up to bed. There was a completeness and a cosiness to it all that made life feel like a rolling moment of warmth and delight.
    Nearly a month after her birth, Rose woke Mavis at around seven, hungry and wet, and Mavis spent the next hour or so changing and feeding her daughter, watching her earnest face as she sucked on her distended breast. She tried calling Dot before she went downstairs to wish her luck, but her mobile was off so she left a message. By the time she got into the kitchen the sun was hot and her mother was washing up at the sink, the back doors open on to the garden, in a way they never used to be. Mavis asked if she’d mind holding Rose while she had a bath, knowing that there was nothing her mother liked better than to be alone with her granddaughter. She would even stop cleaning for her and that wasn’t something Mavis could ever remember her doing before. In fact, if she remembered anything from her childhood it was her mother telling her that she would come when she’d finished cleaning, except that the cleaning never ended: dust always resettled, plates were used, floors needed hoovering, surfaces wiping. It used to make Mavis furious that her mother couldn’t see the futility of what she was doing and in the end she stopped asking for anything.
    She ran the bath hot and dripped some lavender oil into it. She had stopped bleeding now but the stitches were still sore and her breasts only felt normal when she confounded gravity by lying in water.