Playing Nice

   “I hadn’t realized you missed your nursie groupies so much.” Even as I said it, I wondered at the venom in my voice. What was happening to me?

“Anyway, the dads are thinking of cycling all the way from Edinburgh to London,” Pete went on after a moment. “It’s an opportunity to show our appreciation to the hospital for saving our kids, and do something practical for them at the same time.”

Put like that, how could I refuse? “What about work? I thought you’d used up all your holiday.”

“They’ve offered to convert the time we spent in the hospital to compassionate leave. They’re right behind this. The editor’s already pledged two hundred quid, so everyone else should chip in at least twenty. I’ve been doing some calculations and I reckon I could raise over a grand.”

“Well, that sounds like it’s sorted, then,” I said bitterly. Which was stupid of me, I knew. I could feel myself turning into one of those people who seize any opportunity to make a barbed remark, even when it meant forgoing the chance to tell my partner what I really felt.

So instead of I don’t think I can cope without you, I just said, “Send me a postcard from Scotland, won’t you?”

 

* * *

 

—

PETE THREW HIMSELF INTO preparing for the ride. He assembled a bike from parts he hunted down on eBay. He and the other dads met up for several practice rides, all of which seemed to end with them in the pub, slapping one another on the back and telling one another how much their calf muscles ached and how heroic they were.

I was jealous. I didn’t have a group like that, or any group for that matter. The prenatal classes I’d booked started three months before my due date, so of course I’d missed those. There was a support group for mothers of preemies, run by people who’d been through it themselves, but I was still burying my head in the sand and the thought of getting together with other NICU veterans and endlessly rehashing the experience repelled me. I wasn’t dwelling on the past like them! I was looking forward! Before Theo, my social life had revolved around my job—the hardworking, hard-partying world of advertising. Going on shoots meant long hours on location, often abroad—it wasn’t unusual for the call time to be five A.M. or even earlier, but I always had enough energy for drinks in the hotel bar at the end of the day, and the wrap parties after the last day of filming were legendary. I’d made some deep, even intense friendships, but no one in that world really had time for a chat or a coffee with a new mum—they might say they did, and schedule something, but there was always some crisis or other that meant it had to be postponed. And it was an iron rule of advertising that a lunch or coffee rescheduled more than once was never going to happen. After that, it made you look desperate to pursue it. People said it took a village to raise a child, but I didn’t even have a cul-de-sac.

   Pete set a goal of twelve hundred pounds on JustGiving and started emailing colleagues. Within a week he’d reached two thousand pounds. He read me some of the comments people left with their donations, and every so often he’d have to stop. “Keep going Pete and Maddie and little Theo, we’re all thinking of you,” “You’ll come through this stronger than ever,” or even just “Such a great thing you’re doing,” all reduced him to tears, or at least to manly silence. It had been one of the things I’d first liked about him—that he wasn’t afraid to cry in front of me—but since Theo’s birth, his emotions seemed to have become a gushing tap, while mine had gone in the other direction.

When I looked through the donations later, I noticed there was a pledge of ten pounds from Bronagh. Still doing the great work I see Pete! she’d written. He hadn’t read that one out.

Sometimes, feeding Theo in the middle of the night, I’d Skype my parents. It was strange to see them having lunch on the sun terrace while I was shut up in a dark bedroom in London, the streetlights turning the curtains sickly yellow. On one occasion, I put Theo down in his cot before I called them, only for him to start wailing a few minutes later. “Hang on,” I said to my mother wearily. “I’ll just go and get him.”

   Then I heard my father’s voice, off camera. “She’s spoiling that baby. Tell her, Carol. You have to let them cry, or they never learn not to.”

I waited for her to say something, to explain that it wasn’t like that these days, but she didn’t. I stopped Skyping them after that.

I was getting hardly any sleep. “Sleep when the baby sleeps,” people said. But what if I couldn’t sleep? I felt compelled to be Theo’s monitor, to check on him every few minutes. When I lay down, my brain raced; when I got up, the fog descended again and I could barely function.

Pete left for Scotland at the end of July. It was a cool, settled summer—perfect cycling weather. And although cycling from Edinburgh to London sounded arduous, I knew it wasn’t, not really. The route followed car-free cycle paths and old railway lines most of the way, and the group had a coach with a trailer that met them every afternoon and took them and the bikes to a hotel. They were planning to cycle about five hours a day, with every fourth day off. I didn’t blame them for making it as pleasant as possible, but I did get annoyed by the endless self-congratulatory updates on social media. After all, if you could stop to take a group selfie with a whole gang of other grinning young men in cycle helmets and Lycra every time you came to a nice view, you weren’t exactly doing the Tour de France. So pretty soon I stopped attending to what they were up to and retreated into my own private hell.

I felt as though I had to be doing something every moment. Sterilizing bottles. Washing babygrows. Cleaning the house. Checking the baby. Did I turn on the sterilizer? Did I turn off the washing machine? Was Theo breathing? I was shaking and fighting nausea, a captive animal pacing up and down, full of unfocused dread. Without Pete, there was no one to make me eat, no one to interrupt my inner monologue. The stream of thoughts in my head got louder and shoutier. What had begun as my own internal voice became an intrusive, deafening authority figure. I even gave it a name: the doctor. What if you let the baby get dirty? the doctor yelled at me. What if you let the baby suffocate? What if you drop the baby on the floor and smash open his head? I was too afraid to go for walks in case a car hit Theo’s stroller. I became obsessed with watching him, but I stopped touching him in case I did something bad to him. My heart raced constantly and I was short of breath. When the health visitor came, I demanded to know if she thought Theo’s eyes were crossed, and if so, whether that meant he had brain damage. She looked at me strangely and I heard her thoughts as clearly as if she’d spoken them out loud. This woman is a useless mother. After that, the health visitor joined the doctors in the chorus of voices all shouting at me that I was doing a terrible job.

   And that’s when the doctors started spying on me.

Later, the psychiatrist spent a lot of time trying to unpick whether I’d been experiencing actual hallucinations, or simply delusions. It mattered for the treatment, apparently. Had I actually seen the doctors on the TV or the screen of my phone, telling me, Not like that, you’re doing it all wrong, or had I merely believed they were in there? Both, I decided. Why else would I have hurled one of Theo’s full nappies at the TV to shut it up? Why else would I have flung my iPhone at the wall? In any case, it was a relief not to have to worry about Pete’s increasingly concerned texts—U still angry with me? Pls call—but then the bits from the broken phone must have gotten inside the wall because the doctors started using it as a big screen to project their messages on instead. I worked out that if I turned the microwave on to the maximum setting, the radio waves spun out by the revolving turntable would block the messages and give me some relief, and they did.