Five

Jess looked hopefully at the man blocking her way onto the bus.

It had been something of a performance to get Jacob out of the buggy and to fold it down ready for travel. These modern buses were supposed to make it easy for people with strollers, but there was still never enough room to wheel a buggy on board, not on this route anyway. And for some reason she just didn’t get it like other women seemed to. She saw other moms snap their babies in and out of slings in seconds while it still took her several flustered minutes to work out what went where, with her fingers losing any dexterity and even working up an anxious sweat. And as for the buggy, whatever pedal she pushed or kicked or handle she pulled it never seemed to be the right one, she could never get it to fold right down and click neatly into place like it should.

The other people at the bus stop had ignored her as she struggled to flatten the contraption with Jacob tucked under one arm. Nobody offered to help. Now she had to contend with the man who stood between her and the bus door.

“Excuse me.” Jess’s voice wobbled treacherously as she extended the buggy toward him with an aching arm. “Excuse me, can you help me, please?”

The man looked down his nose at her and crossed his arms.

“I’m not a porter, love,” he said, managing to make her feel as if she was somehow insulting him by asking for his help.

“I didn’t think you were,” Jess said, her voice taut as she attempted to fling the buggy onto the ramp. “I did think you might be a person with an ounce of human decency who might see how difficult it is for me to manage. I was obviously wrong.”

She climbed awkwardly onto the bus, the muscles in her arms aching as she finally managed to clamber past the man. He did not move a single inch to make her life easier and muttered, “Stupid bitch,” under his breath as she passed.

Jess shoved the buggy into a space behind a seat and made her way down the bus. Jacob began to cry. He was probably hungry, Jess thought, feeling instantly anxious. She had read that if a young baby went too long without fluid it could become dangerously dehydrated in no time. She ran her forefinger gently over the soft spot on his forehead to check if it was sunken, but as she felt the slight depression beneath her fingertips she wasn’t sure what constituted sunken, which hiked up her anxiety level even further.

“Nearly home,” she whispered in Jacob’s ear as she looked around for a seat and found none. None of the seated passengers would look at her. A man who was also standing, his leg in a cast, smiled sympathetically at her.

“If I had a seat I’d offer it to you, love,” he said with a shrug.

Jess smiled back at him and held on tight, bracing her legs as the bus lurched forward and swayed her and Jacob dangerously off balance.

It was only a few stops, she told herself. Hardly anything really. It would have been easier to walk it, except that after visiting Meg she just felt so utterly tired with the effort of talking and smiling that she thought she’d get the bus home. Now she wished she hadn’t. The experience was hurting her from the inside out.

Somehow before when she used to commute to her job in human resources in the West End, back before Jacob had been born, the hardness of the people around her just rolled off her like raindrops off glass. She never noticed the implicit unkindness and disrespect that everyone showed to everyone else. She supposed she had been just as bad, locked so tightly in her own little bubble that she barely noticed the other humans around her. But since Jacob had arrived in her life, all her outer protective shell had been peeled painfully away and suddenly she was vulnerable to every ounce of cruelty or indifference, no matter how slight. And the fact that these people on the bus would not offer her and her baby a seat almost brought her to tears. Jess knew that they were just ordinary people on an ordinary London bus. But if these people could be so hard and unfeeling, then what about the next terrorist to get on the next Underground train or bus? Or what about Iran? Iran was developing nuclear weapons. North Korea already had them.

All at once the world had become a terrifying place to live in, with danger lurking in every shadow. Worst of all, Jess felt as if she was barely equipped to be a mother, let alone to protect her child from the horrifyingly violent and unfeeling world into which she had brought him.

She wanted to be able to just love and enjoy him like his father did. She wanted her relationship with Jacob to be that perfect and that simple; but every single moment of their time together was interwoven with fear. Even when she was laughing, just as she had at Meg’s earlier that morning, she felt as if it was merely a fragile front to cover up the truth. No one there knew that her stomach was knotted in a constant contraction of anxiety brought about by an unshakable conviction that somehow, somewhere, something would go terribly wrong.

It had started at conception. Jess had longed to be pregnant again but feared it, too, because it filled her with the promise of hope and loss in equal parts. She had been pregnant twice before. The first baby had been lost before the end of the first trimester. It had broken her heart, but eventually she had been able to accept it. But the second, her little girl, was stillborn nearly six months into the pregnancy.

Even now Jess could not bear to think of that gray morning in the delivery suite, with the rain rushing against the window and the faded frieze of bunny rabbits painted around the ceiling. It was the knowing that made it unbearable, the knowledge that every contraction that wracked her body wasn’t bringing a new life into the world. Knowing that she was delivering a dead baby, a little girl who had somehow died in the womb. In her womb.

Between the waves of physical pain Jess could hear the cries of other children somewhere on the ward. She would always remember the laughter and joy of a family ringing off the walls in the corridor outside, and wanting to scream for them to shut up. But all she could do was to stay as quiet as she could with Lee at her side, holding her hand, telling her she was so brave and how much he loved her, brushing away his tears between reassurances.

What Jess found almost unbearable was that the baby had died without her even noticing her passing. That she hadn’t even been able to do that much for her child, to reach inside and try to say good-bye. She felt that she should have known her baby was terribly sick, but instead she might have been asleep or shopping or sitting on the Tube reading the paper when it happened. It seemed such a banal way to lose a child.

It was no one’s fault, the doctors told them; sometimes tragedies just happen, but that didn’t comfort Jess at all. She always felt it should have been someone’s fault—and if it was anybody’s it had to be hers.

Lee had wanted them to stop after they lost the second baby. He said that the doctors had told him there was plenty of time to wait and try again in a year or two. That there was no reason why Jess shouldn’t carry a baby full term and deliver a healthy child. But Jess had not been able to wait. She told Lee she wanted to try again straightaway. That had been hard for him to understand.

“It would be like putting my life on hold,” she had tried to explain to him one morning. “Like the next year, or two years would be just treading water waiting for…what? There’s never going to be a magic time when we know for sure everything will be all right. And I’m still going to be scared, Lee. I’m still going to be terrified even then. I need to try again now.”

Lee had sat on their sofa, his head bowed over his knee. “The thing is,” he said eventually, still staring hard at the floor, “I don’t think I’m ready, Jess. I’m still grieving, I’m still missing…her. I…I don’t think it’s right to just…replace her.”

Those last two words had almost been the end of them. It would have been the end of them if either one had had enough strength to survive without the other. But neither one had. They’d clung on to each other despite everything, and less than a year later Jess discovered she was pregnant for the third time.

When she told Lee, he didn’t hug her or smile, he just looked at her for a long time saying nothing at all until eventually he rested the back of his cool hand against the heat of her cheek and said, “It will be all right.”

They didn’t tell anyone about the baby until Jess was three months gone. She gave up work straightaway, forfeiting any rights she had to maternity leave. Lee said it would be a struggle but they’d manage, and that her health and well-being was what counted. She knew what he really meant was that he’d do anything to stop her from freaking out.

At the twenty-week scan Jess felt as if she was being taken to an execution. She lay on the hospital table completely drained of color with her eyes brimming with unshed tears. When the technician told her the scan was fine, she could hardly believe it. In fact, she didn’t believe it.

While Lee’s tension seemed to lift then and finally give way to happiness, Jess’s fears bound themselves even more tightly around her. The doctors, her and Lee’s parents, even Lee commanded her to stop fretting so much. She herself was sure that once the baby was in her arms where she could see him and hold him, she would stop worrying. Then at last all the fears and ghosts of the past would be put to rest.

But she was wrong.

From the second the midwife put him in her arms, there was a whole new world of worry. Jess was scared that he didn’t feed enough. She was worried that he slept for too long, or that he didn’t sleep enough. That he didn’t seem to poo as much as the book said he should or that he had too many wet nappies. Stupid things that when she asked the maternity nurse or doctor about made them smile and look at her as if she was slightly mad.

“It’s normal,” the doctor would say.

“He’s perfectly healthy,” the nurse would say.

“It will be all right,” Lee would tell her.

And she’d know that they were right and they had to be right; but she still couldn’t shake off this terrible feeling that somehow, somewhere, something was going to go terribly wrong.