telepathy I could summon you to help us.
And as I dragged her, step by step, down the stairs, trying to get away from burning heat and raging flames and smoke, I thought of love. I held onto it. And it was cool and clear and quiet.
Maybe there was telepathy between us, because at that moment you must have been in your meeting with the BBC commissioning editors about the follow-up to your ‘Hostile Environments’ series. You’d done hot, steamy jungles and blazing, arid deserts, and you want the next series to be in the contrasting frozen wilds of Antarctica. So maybe it was you who helped me envisage a silent, white acreage of love as I dragged Jenny down the stairs.
But before I reached the bottom, something hit me, throwing me forwards, and everything went dark.
As I lost consciousness I talked to you.
I said, ‘
An unborn baby doesn’t need air at all, did you know that?’
I thought you probably didn’t. When I was pregnant with Jenny I found out everything I could, but you were too impatient for her to arrive to bother with her prologue. So you don’t know that an unborn baby, swimming around in amniotic fluid, can’t take a breath or she would drown. There aren’t any temporary gills so that she can swim, fish-like, until birth. No, the baby gets her oxygen from the umbilical cord attached to her mother. I felt like an oxygen supply attached to a tiny, intrepid diver.
But the moment she was born, the oxygen supply wascut off and she entered the new element of air. There was a moment of silence, a precipitous second, as if she stood on the edge of life, deciding. In the old days they used to slap the baby to hear the reassuring yell of lungs filled with air. Nowadays they look closely to see the minute rise of a baby-soft chest, and listen to the whispering – in and out – to know that life in the new medium of air has begun.
And then I cried and you cheered – actually cheered! – and the baby equipment trolley was wheeled out, no need for that now. A normal delivery. A healthy infant. To join all the billions of others on the planet who breathe, in and out, without thinking about it.
The next day your sister sent me a bouquet of roses with gypsophila, known as ‘baby’s breath’, sprays of pretty white flowers. But a newborn baby’s breath is finer than a single parachute from a blown dandelion clock.
You told me once that when you lose consciousness the last of the senses to go is hearing.
In the darkness I thought I heard Jenny take a dandelion-clock breath.
3
I told you already what happened when I woke up – that I was trapped under the hull of a vast ship wrecked on the ocean floor.
That I slipped out of the wrecked ship of my body into the inky black ocean and swam upwards towards the daylight.
That I saw the body part of ‘me’ in a hospital bed.
That I felt afraid and, as I felt fear, I remembered.
Blistering heat and raging flames and suffocating smoke.
Jenny.
I ran from the room to find her. Do you think I should have tried to go back into my body? But what if I was trapped, uselessly, inside again, but this time couldn’t get out? How would I find her then?
In the burning school, I had searched for her in darkness and smoke. Now I was in brightly lit white corridors but the desperation to find her was the same. Panicking, I forgot about the me in the hospital bed and I went upto a doctor, asking where she was: ‘
Jennifer Covey
.
Seventeen years old. My daughter. She was in a fire
.’ The doctor turned away. I went after him, shouting, ‘
Where’s my daughter?
’ He still walked away from me.
I interrupted two nurses. ‘
Where’s my daughter? She was in a fire. Jenny Covey.
’
They carried on talking to each other.
Again and again I was ignored.
I started screaming, loud as I could, screaming the house down, but everyone around me was deaf and blind.
Then I remembered that it was me who was mute and invisible.
No one would help me find her.
I ran down a
And as I dragged her, step by step, down the stairs, trying to get away from burning heat and raging flames and smoke, I thought of love. I held onto it. And it was cool and clear and quiet.
Maybe there was telepathy between us, because at that moment you must have been in your meeting with the BBC commissioning editors about the follow-up to your ‘Hostile Environments’ series. You’d done hot, steamy jungles and blazing, arid deserts, and you want the next series to be in the contrasting frozen wilds of Antarctica. So maybe it was you who helped me envisage a silent, white acreage of love as I dragged Jenny down the stairs.
But before I reached the bottom, something hit me, throwing me forwards, and everything went dark.
As I lost consciousness I talked to you.
I said, ‘
An unborn baby doesn’t need air at all, did you know that?’
I thought you probably didn’t. When I was pregnant with Jenny I found out everything I could, but you were too impatient for her to arrive to bother with her prologue. So you don’t know that an unborn baby, swimming around in amniotic fluid, can’t take a breath or she would drown. There aren’t any temporary gills so that she can swim, fish-like, until birth. No, the baby gets her oxygen from the umbilical cord attached to her mother. I felt like an oxygen supply attached to a tiny, intrepid diver.
But the moment she was born, the oxygen supply wascut off and she entered the new element of air. There was a moment of silence, a precipitous second, as if she stood on the edge of life, deciding. In the old days they used to slap the baby to hear the reassuring yell of lungs filled with air. Nowadays they look closely to see the minute rise of a baby-soft chest, and listen to the whispering – in and out – to know that life in the new medium of air has begun.
And then I cried and you cheered – actually cheered! – and the baby equipment trolley was wheeled out, no need for that now. A normal delivery. A healthy infant. To join all the billions of others on the planet who breathe, in and out, without thinking about it.
The next day your sister sent me a bouquet of roses with gypsophila, known as ‘baby’s breath’, sprays of pretty white flowers. But a newborn baby’s breath is finer than a single parachute from a blown dandelion clock.
You told me once that when you lose consciousness the last of the senses to go is hearing.
In the darkness I thought I heard Jenny take a dandelion-clock breath.
3
I told you already what happened when I woke up – that I was trapped under the hull of a vast ship wrecked on the ocean floor.
That I slipped out of the wrecked ship of my body into the inky black ocean and swam upwards towards the daylight.
That I saw the body part of ‘me’ in a hospital bed.
That I felt afraid and, as I felt fear, I remembered.
Blistering heat and raging flames and suffocating smoke.
Jenny.
I ran from the room to find her. Do you think I should have tried to go back into my body? But what if I was trapped, uselessly, inside again, but this time couldn’t get out? How would I find her then?
In the burning school, I had searched for her in darkness and smoke. Now I was in brightly lit white corridors but the desperation to find her was the same. Panicking, I forgot about the me in the hospital bed and I went upto a doctor, asking where she was: ‘
Jennifer Covey
.
Seventeen years old. My daughter. She was in a fire
.’ The doctor turned away. I went after him, shouting, ‘
Where’s my daughter?
’ He still walked away from me.
I interrupted two nurses. ‘
Where’s my daughter? She was in a fire. Jenny Covey.
’
They carried on talking to each other.
Again and again I was ignored.
I started screaming, loud as I could, screaming the house down, but everyone around me was deaf and blind.
Then I remembered that it was me who was mute and invisible.
No one would help me find her.
I ran down a
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