Taken. Rosie Lewis

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СКАЧАТЬ running low on batteries. If I placed my hand flat on her tummy her insides trembled against my palm, something that caused my heart to lurch.

      The emergency doctor suspected that reflux was partly responsible for her frequent vomiting and prescribed Infant Gaviscon, an antacid in powder form that was to be added to her formula milk. The thickened feed was more likely to stay down, so he said, but he told me that I shouldn’t expect her symptoms to disappear overnight.

      He explained that Megan’s system was overwrought and advised swaddling her tightly and handling her as little as possible. The less stimulation the better, he recommended, but it wasn’t advice that sat easily with either of us. In truth, there were a handful of occasions in that first testing week when I felt I would go mad if I didn’t have a few moments to myself. Almost at the end of my tether, I tried placing her firmly in her cot and walking away, but I didn’t get far. After a few minutes of pacing the hall, trying to block out the noise, her hoarse screams always drew me back. At least when she was in my arms I felt I was doing something to alleviate her discomfort, and when I picked her up her small body would sag in relief, though she often continued to fret.

      Our nights were worse, each a feat of endurance sliced into short, disorientating segments where I got little and Megan got poor-quality sleep. If I tucked her up in her crib she bellowed with a desperation that seemed, in those disconcerting early morning hours, life threatening in its intensity. On more than one occasion, gripped by unadulterated fear, I called the on-duty midwives at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital to make sure I wasn’t ignoring dangerous symptoms that needed urgent medical care – I’m still grateful for their unending patience and generous reassurances.

      My mother, a woman capable of giving the researchers at GCHQ a run for their money, scoured online forums on Mumsnet and Netmums in search of a solution, producing and printing off a detailed list of suggestions for me to try. I worked my way through all of them, and then varying combinations of each, though nothing worked better than a good old-fashioned cuddle.

      After the first few nights I got used to snatching a few moments of sleep sitting upright, with Megan’s contorting tummy pressed against my chest and her lips quivering against my neck. She still fretted, but it was a soothed, soft whimper rather than a full-on assault on the ears.

      As the days went on and the last of the methadone wore off, her cries escalated to shrill, agonising screams. She loved her dummy, sucking on it with furious gusto, but even that didn’t stop her crying. Whenever she was out of my arms she grew frantic; in her pram and car seat, strapped in the sloped seat of a supermarket trolley. Sweeping around the shops at speed, I tossed whatever I needed quickly into the trolley with barely more than a glance and then raced into the street again, desperate to offer her the comfort of a hug.

      In desperation I bought one of those all-singing, all-dancing bouncy chairs, the ones that some mothers swore by, their newborns whiling away many a contented hour swinging to and fro. Megan was having none of it though, not even for two minutes while I attempted a solo visit to the bathroom.

      One of my most successful purchases was a baby sling, and for much of the day I kept Megan strapped close to my chest as I pottered around. After a few hours my shoulders felt like they didn’t belong to me, but at least my arms were free to get on with other essential tasks, like eating.

      There were days when the tiredness didn’t affect me much, and others when my mind was so vague that even making up Megan’s bottles seemed like a cryptic puzzle that was beyond me. I can remember standing at the kitchen worktop on at least two occasions and losing count as I scooped the powdered formula milk into carefully measured amounts of boiled water, so that I had to tip the rogue mixture away, sterilise all six bottles and start all over again.

      Apart from all the crying, her cleft meant that feeding seemed to take for ever. With barely two hours in between bottles, day trips were not as easy as they might have been, especially as she was frequently sick afterwards. Our health visitor reassured me that, while it may have seemed as if Megan brought up the entire feed, enough probably stayed inside to nourish her.

      I had always loved the school holidays but I was glad that Emily and Jamie were both tied up with their own projects during the first couple of weeks of the summer break – Emily had taken a voluntary job at our local hospital, lining up songs for the DJ running the children’s radio channel, and Jamie had started working towards his Duke of Edinburgh Award. If he wasn’t on the football pitch practising new skills, he was at his friend’s house, learning riffs on an electric guitar. When they were home they didn’t seem to mind Megan fretting as I worried they might, always offering to take a turn in walking her around.

      There were some rare peaceful moments as well. Sometimes during the late evening the cramps relaxed their grip on Megan and she would stare around at us in wonder, as if seeing us for the first time. Emily and Jamie delighted in those times, whispering softly as they dipped their faces to her neck, nuzzling her gently with their chins. Whenever she was out of her room, which wasn’t much during Megan’s early weeks, Zadie would watch her with quiet intensity, an anguished look on her face. I wondered again whether she felt pushed out, but when I tried to include her or even spoke about Megan, she would lose colour in her face and fly back to her room. I considered the possibility that Zadie was disturbed by Megan’s cleft, but she loved to watch those graphic fly-on-the-wall medical documentaries that made my stomach flip over, so I knew she wasn’t squeamish like me.

      Anyway, Zadie had seemed unsettled by the mere idea of a baby in the house, even before the placement had begun.

      When Megan had been with us for about five days my mum kindly offered to babysit so that I could take the older children out on their own. We decided to go to the cinema and then on for a meal, and it was lovely to spend some uninterrupted time with them all, but strangely surreal as well. Every so often a mild panic gripped me; that sudden sense that something was amiss. When the film was over I called Mum, who assured me in an insistent (if slightly strained) voice that all was fine, but I could hear Megan’s cries in the background and, though I’d been longing for a break from the regime of pacing and feeding, I felt a strong urge to get back to her.

      It was late when we finally got home and I was pleased to see that Megan had stopped crying. Stretched out on the sofa in one of her cramp-free moments, she was staring up at Mum’s face with avid fascination, her shallow breaths racing with intrigue as Mum clucked and cooed. Suddenly she made a funny whistling noise and we all laughed, Emily and Jamie crouching on the floor to join in the fun. It probably didn’t help much towards establishing a day-time/night-time routine, but I went along with the fun and games anyway, aware that this baby’s charms were already drawing all of us in.

       Chapter Six

      A week after Megan’s arrival, something happened that arrested our long summer days and, for a while at least, turned them upside down. After an early-morning self-harming incident and a high-speed trip to Accident and Emergency in an ambulance, I was astounded to discover that Zadie was several months pregnant.

      Deep down I had known that something was wrong – the feeling had dogged me for weeks – but the news still came as a huge shock, particularly as Zadie was the last teenager I would ever have suspected of engaging in risky behaviour. Devout and introverted, she had struggled to maintain eye contact when she first arrived, and, until recently, had barely spoken above a whisper.

      The shock was marginally cushioned by the confirmation that Zadie had been several months pregnant when she arrived (the part of me concerned with holding on to a job I loved relieved that it hadn’t happened while she was in my care), but she was so young and vulnerable that it was difficult to imagine her sneaking off to meet someone СКАЧАТЬ