I had to find my daughter.
I forced my aching body up and went over to my grandmother. ‘Granny,’ I said. ‘Someone has taken my daughter, and you need to help me. We have to call the hospital. And the police. Straight away.’
Until that moment I’d thought Granny was my ally, but she looked me in the eye and said, ‘Emily, there hasn’t been a mix-up, and nobody has taken your daughter. This is your son, Charlie, and you had him on Friday. I was there when they got him out and he hasn’t been out of my sight since. I think we need to see a doctor, just to make sure you’re OK.’
The midwife was out in the hallway, on the phone to someone. Everything was imploding. The crab with the signal-red spots and bristled claws was in our garden, and Dad was on the phone to the midwife, telling her this baby was not biologically mine.
‘Granny . . .’
‘Yes. I’m here. Talk to me, my love.’
Her betrayal was worse than anything I could have imagined. I couldn’t meet her eye.
‘You’re a liar,’ I whispered, although she seemed not to hear me. ‘A born liar.’
The baby was wailing, Granny was saying my name, and there was a man nearby, I think the postman who used to deliver letters to me and Dad when I was tiny, back at the beginning of the eighties when they still wore peaked hats like Postman Pat.
I was twenty years old, my baby had been stolen and I had no one on my side.
The midwife left and I gave in and fed the baby because how could I not? He felt wrong and my breasts wept to feed another baby when my own was missing.
The midwife had somehow concealed a surveillance camera in the carriage clock on Granny’s mantelpiece. There was another above the door, and I suspected a whole suite of them in the kitchen. Hundreds of secret lenses swivelled back and forth as I paced the house.
The sky darkened further as the sun began to sink on the day, on me. Granny’s house was full of flowers and sweet cotton bibs and knitted socks. There was a breast pump, but I couldn’t remember going out that afternoon to buy one and Granny said it had been there all along.
A GP came round in the early evening. She told me she was calling the community mental health team, so I called 999 and told them a group of people in Hampstead had stolen my baby and were now trying to pretend I was having a psychiatric crisis. I don’t remember what they said to me.
The sky was maroon-streaked and the camera in the Edwardian clock was watching me. Granny was feeding Charlie with a bottle, which he didn’t seem to mind. I implored her to stop this conspiracy but she just told me she loved me, and then we both cried.
The people who came round that night didn’t have my daughter. It was two women, a social worker and a psychiatrist, they said, and they were there to carry out a Mental Health Act assessment. One of them smelled as if she’d just finished a cigarette. I said I had to go to the toilet but really my plan was to climb up to the roof terrace and try to find a way down via our neighbour’s house, which was covered in scaffolding.
Or maybe not the scaffolding? If I couldn’t get my daughter back, did I want to live? I could just step off the roof into the black arms of the evening. It would be quick. This lovely boy, Charlie, would be back to his mother in no time, and – and . . .
Someone grabbed my foot as it disappeared up the ladder to the roof hatch. There was a baby crying downstairs.
A depthless dark broke over me as I sat in a room that looked like Granny’s kitchen and answered questions. I had lost my baby. They were all in on it.
People talked to other people, somebody else came to speak to me, something about the Mental Health Act.
Eventually I said I’d go to this hospital for mad mothers they kept going on about, but only if they let me bring my real baby.
Later, or perhaps the next day, they sent the crazy ambulance.