I shouted at Granny, I will never forgive you, and she was crying, which was understandable given what she’d done, although she was saying, ‘I can’t lose another one, please, I can’t lose another one,’ which didn’t make any sense because it was my baby who had been stolen, not hers.
Chapter Forty
North London & UCLH NHS Foundation Mental Health Trust Mother and Baby Unit, Camden
I lay on the bed and monitored the faces at my door; bodies in uniform watching. In a chair right next to the bed, Charlie was being bottle-fed by a woman with a lanyard round her neck. His actual mother, perhaps? This place was horrifying. Doors were locked, everywhere, but the door to my own room remained resolutely open and there was no lock at all on my bathroom door. There were spy cameras and babies crying.
Another woman, who’d greeted me at the front door, came in at that moment. She told me for the second time her name was Shazia – as if I cared! – and talked to me about tranquilisers. She told me I needed a night’s ‘protected sleep’。
‘It’s this child who needs protecting,’ I said. ‘He’s been stolen from his mother; he’s less than a week old. Someone else has my baby. Do you know if the police are involved yet? No? Well, either way I’m not willing to zonk out on pills. I don’t think you understand how awful the last few days have been . . .’
‘I do understand,’ she said, and in spite of myself I liked her voice. ‘I do understand, Emily, because it’s my job to look after women in your situation. I know you’re afraid, and I know you’re angry, and above all I know this is not where you want to be.’
When I refused the drugs she said she’d come back in half an hour.
I cuddled Charlie for a while, because he was lovely, and I was afraid of this place, but I cried for her – my girl, whose name – whose name was . . .
Had they drugged me already?
I asked the woman in the chair where my grandmother was, and she seemed surprised, because apparently I’d said I didn’t want Granny anywhere me. In the end she agreed Granny could come tomorrow morning. ‘We need to assess you properly first,’ she said. She, too, had a nice voice. I suppose they were accustomed to making women feel safe before swapping their babies around and pretending we’d all gone mad.
As the day came to an end I felt so afraid I realised I had to be either dead or unconscious if I were to survive another minute. I gave in to Shazia’s pills. ‘Just rest,’ she said. She had hair like black satin. ‘Charlie’s fine. He’s going to be in the nursery tonight. He’s taken beautifully to the bottle.’
I floated on a slack tide.
They kept me in that barely-conscious space for days, but insisted it had been less than twelve hours, that it was now Saturday lunchtime. I had been admitted the night before.
Shazia handed me Charlie and it came to me that I loved him with a force almost indistinguishable from pain, but by mid-afternoon the black sky had rolled back in and I cried for my daughter.
I don’t know how long it took me to balance. I know only that as the days passed I stopped thinking about a daughter and began to accept as fact the things they told me: postpartum psychosis, delusions, mania, euphoria, mood swings. There was a lot of pain and mess. Nobody could explain why it had happened to me.
When I stopped being so busy doing everything but nothing, I began to talk to the other women in the unit. There were eight of us in total. Three seldom left their rooms; the rest of us spent most of our time in the lounge, trying to make sense of what was happening to us.
Things sharpened, then lost focus, but the food was always disgusting.
In the room next door was Darya. She loved her daughter desperately but could not find any reason to live. One day there was a commotion from her room; people shouting and running. After that she was shadowed by nursing assistants all day. Her husband would visit and I’d hear them talking in Russian, and he would start crying the moment he left her room.