Lizzie’s Baby

21Oct09

Published in Sein and Werden and performed at Short Fuse Leicester 20 October 2009.

Lizzie’s Baby 

Even though it was all of ten paces from her room to the baby’s room, Audra felt as if she were running uphill though shoulder-high water against the current.  The baby was crying with high-pitched insistency.  Audra stumbled, scrabbled back, not knowing whether the current had got stronger or how the water’s consistency had somehow become that of treacle.  She struggled to breathe.  Found struggling to keep on her feet too much.

          “Sweetheart, I’m coming!” she mentally yelled.  One final push.

          The baby’s room door burst open, as if the current had suddenly reversed.  Audra gasped, fighting for her breath.  Then collapsed on the carpet, sobbing.

          It wasn’t her white cot in the bedroom.  It was an old, heavy Victorian one draped with hand-crocheted blankets.

          Just before Audra covered her face with her hands, she caught a glimpse of her picture on the floor, the frame still broken where Nick’s shoulder had knocked against it.  She curled into foetal ball.  The baby’s crying had stopped.

          Not daring to look, Audra stretched out a hand towards the cot, crawling towards it.  Her hand met with nothing.  She dropped it to the carpet and felt damp where an ice cube had melted.  Nick had said it would help the carpet pile spring back into shape.  Audra curled into the place where she’d expected to find the cot.

***

The weak winter sunlight managed to force a warm glow inside Audra’s closed eyelids.  She didn’t bother opening her eyes.  She knew shafts of sun were probing past the gaps in her curtains, highlighting numerous dust motes, the scattered sketch pads and the almost overflowing ash tray.  She’d promised to give up, but the New Year was still over a month away and she needed the mellowness to fall asleep.

          Before opening her eyes, she stretched her limbs and ran a hand over her flat stomach.  So flat now it was concave, showing off her hip bones. 

          Of course the first thing she saw was the print of Millias’s “Ophelia” and the first thing she said was “poor Lizzie”, as automatic as saying “bless you!” on hearing a sneeze.  Nick, who’d bought the print as an anniversary present, had been amazed to learn the model, Lizzie Siddall, was also an artist.  He’d thought that was somehow incestuous.  Audra had made a mental note never to buy a guitar or take up lyric-writing.

          Nick: the reason she had a completely immaculate, unused bedroom, a dusty spare room where Sarah had to replace the picture that Nick had knocked to the floor, a tip of a lounge and sketches everywhere.  Time to tidy up, Audra told herself.  Nick was due back after touring.

          She dusted the lounge and hesitated outside the door of the spare room, rubbing the duster over the handle.  Then decided against going in.

          After vacuuming, she began running a bath.  She propped some of the sketches against the empty shelving in her bookcases.  She studied them.  Not bad, she thought.  Pen and ink or pencilled sketches of Nick onstage with or without an audience, with or without the other band members, plus a couple of him in rehearsal and one of him sitting at her dressing table scribbling a lyric, all from memory.  Like Lizzie, she preferred sketching to painting.  Nick would never sit still long enough to model for her.  He certainly would not have stayed in bath water slowly going numb because the heating lamps had gone out.

          After her bath, Audra dragged a brush through her hair, the blonde streaks that Sarah had helped with over-powered the natural, pale copper underneath.  She smudged some metallic blue eyeshadow over her eyelids, added kohl, but only put mascara on her upper eyelashes to try and draw attention away from her crows’-feet.  She chose the bottle-green dress.  It looked baggy, but she couldn’t fix that in a matter of hours.

          When the doorbell rang, she let Sarah in.

          “Wow, you’ve cleaned up!  Let’s have a look at you.”

          Audra stood, watching Sarah dash round the flat, her neat figure in slimming black with scarlet highlights in her jet black hair.

          “Well, a little on the bony side, but you’ve got a bit of colour in your cheeks today.”  Sarah hesitated in front of the spare room door.

          Audra shrugged.  “I guess it’s about time I faced it, isn’t it?”

          Sarah waited.

          “I mean, Nick’s not coming back here, is he?  I’ve frightened him away.”

          “Did he say that?”

          Audra shook her head.  “He’s not been in touch.”

          “Then you shouldn’t assume.”

          “Has he said anything to you?” Audra tried to keep the desperation out of her voice but she knew Sarah would have heard it.

          Sarah shook her head.  “He told John the subject was off-limits.  He needed time to think.”  She opened the door.  “You’ve not touched in here,” her tone was gentle.

          “Couldn’t face it.  I still hear…” Audra let her voice trail off.

          Sarah closed the door.  “Come on, Nick needed some space.  It did affect him too.”

          Audra nodded.  “I don’t suppose I helped.  But… it was so real…”

          “I think the problem was that for him the baby was conceptual but not real.  He saw you getting fatter, but couldn’t see or hold the baby.  But for you it was real.  You could feel it move.  I guess, he felt, naturally, you’d feel as if you had a bereavement, but expected you to bounce back quicker, somehow.  You hearing baby’s cries scared him.”

          Scared me too, thought Audra.

          “Last chance to back out: are you coming tonight nor not?”

          Audra nodded.  A noisy bar full of fans welcoming the band back from their national tour, then a loud gig followed by that awkward moment when she’d find out whether Nick was still talking to her was the last place she wanted to be.  But she followed Sarah.

 ***

During the gig, Audra lurked near the back of the venue, focusing on appreciating how six months of touring had tightened the band’s sound, how Nick didn’t let his stage fright show and that his shoulder-length hair was now creeping half-way down his back.  Otherwise little had changed: still as tall and skinny as ever.  ‘Neo-raphaelite’ was the phrase one journalist tried to coin for the band but it was too multi-syllabic to catch on.  After the second encore, she made her way backstage, nearly hesitating when she heard laughter from a shared joke.

          “Hi,” said Nick, spotting her.

          “Hi,” she said and watched him for a reaction.

          He looked her up and down, avoiding her gaze.  “Is the offer of a coffee open?”

          She nodded, noting his tone was friendly rather than harsh but also that he’d not said anything about where he was staying.

          Nick picked his rucksack up, muttered something to the guitarist and walked out of the bar.  Audra followed.  She found them a cab.  Audra listened to his account of the tour as they got back to the flat.  She wasn’t sure if it was hers or theirs.

          “You’ve done some more sketches,” Nick commented.  He’d dropped his rucksack next to the sofa while Audra made coffee.  “Need your expertise to upload photos from the tour.  Some of the images might need manipulating.”

          Audra fixed a smile on her face and handed him a coffee.  She sank into the sofa.

          He was still studying the sketches.  “Is there a way of uploading these on the site?”

          “Yeah.  Like I do with the photos.”

          He turned towards the door to the spare room.  She watched him open it, look round and close it again.  “You’ve re-hung the sketch.”

          “Sarah did.  She got it re-framed too.”  Another thing I couldn’t face, she reminded herself.

          Finally Nick sat beside her, stretching his arm along the back of the sofa.  “You look thinner than ever.  Has Sarah been looking after you?”

          Audra nodded.  Sarah would look after her – as she would Sarah – even if Nick hadn’t asked.  “I have been eating.  But not as much.”  Her, “And you’ve no idea how many calories nightmares feed on,” was left unsaid.  She was looking at the concern in his eyes.  No trace of the anger that had been there before.  He couldn’t have been more supportive when their son had been stillborn, but he’d wanted to get rid of the cot before she was ready.  In the argument, he’d knocked her sketch of their son off the wall.

          “I’m sorry.” 

          Up close she could see the thick layer of concealer under his eyes.

          “It was a stupid argument.  I said things I shouldn’t have said.  Worse, I didn’t apologise before I went.”

          Audra stood up.  “I still hear a baby crying sometimes.  I go to the door but can’t open it.”

          “Why don’t I stay in there tonight?”

          “What!” Audra turned to face him.

          “If that’s what it will take to convince you, I’m prepared to do it.  I don’t want to leave you, but I do want you to get through this.”  He spread his arms, palms up.

          “You’ll do this?”

          He nodded.

          “Then, yes.”

          He stood and pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her.  “She lost a baby too,” he whispered.  Audra knew he was talking about Lizzie Siddall.  “Dante was a bastard to her.  I don’t want to do that to you.”

          Audra watched Nick spread out a sleeping bag, admiring the ordinariness of his movements.  He kissed her goodnight.  She left him and stretched out on her side of the double bed, ears strained but she couldn’t hear anything except a faint rumble of traffic and the occasional siren.

 ***

Audra sensed herself running uphill, towards a baby’s high-pitched, insistent cry.  She reached the baby’s room and scrabbled at the door, her fingers too clammy to grip.  She stopped trying.  Her breaths heaved.  Her lungs felt as if her rib bones had taken on an impossible rigidity and she would never take in enough air.  Snatching shallow breaths, she stopped.  She made herself count to ten.

          She got as far as five when she tried the door again.  This time it opened.  The heavy Victorian cot was there.  Audra hurried towards it.  She picked the bundle of hand-made blankets up.  The baby still cried.  Mentally Audra was shouting “Shut up, shut up,” at it.  Physically she stuck her little finger in the baby’s mouth.

          It suckled.  The noise stopped.  Audra felt relief sweep through her.  The crying had drowned out her thoughts.  She looked at the baby.  The red blotches on its cheeks were fading to pink.  It had green eyes.  The moonlight revealed strands of dark, coppery hair.

          “Nick!” she shouted, dropping the baby.  Shaking uncontrollably, Audra woke to find herself sitting bolt upright in bed, dripping with sweat.  She forced herself to concentrate, straining her ears for any sound beyond the distant city traffic.

          Hearing nothing, she got up.  Her shaking had eased.  She hesitated outside her bedroom door, then moved towards the room where Nick was sleeping.  The door was ajar.  She pushed it open.  Then clamped a hand across her mouth.

          Audra bit her finger as well for good measure.  In front of her was her mirror image, the woman who’d lain in a tub of cooling water, risking hypothermia as she dare not move to tell the painter the heating lamps had gone out.  The woman was cooing, leaning over the old fashioned cot.  She looked up.  Audra saw her green eyes reflected back at her.  With trepidation, Audra moved closer to the cot.  The woman was cooing and rocking the cot again.  Audra remembered that Lizzie Siddall had rocked an empty cot, often repeatedly asking visitors to be quiet so as not to wake the baby.

          Audra saw a bundle of blankets.  She reached down, intending to ease them back so she could see the baby’s face.  She felt nothing.  She looked.  There was blank space where a face should have been.  Audra let out a long sigh.  She’d briefly wondered if she’d see Nick, bundled up and stolen from her.  Audra picked the bundle up.

          “He’s asleep now,” she murmured to the woman.

          The woman smiled and straightened.  She moved closer to Audra.  Audra stood her ground.  The woman bent and kissed the bundle.

          Audra moved back towards the door.  The other woman seemed to be fading, the room growing darker as if cloud had covered the moon.  Audra looked at the walls.  Her sketch was still there.

          The bundle fell to the floor.  Audra bent to pick it up.  She could hear breathing now, the regular rise and fall of someone sleeping.  When she looked up, the cot and the woman had gone.  Nick was curled in his sleeping bag.  She picked up the blanket from where it had fallen at her feet and folded it neatly.  She left the room, quietly pulling the door to as she went.

          Audra, still carrying the blanket, looked up at her print of Ophelia.  “You let it happen,” she murmured.  “You let yourself grow cold.  You let him suppress you.  Well, it’s over now.”

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Tags: Emma Lee stories, Ghost Story, John Millias, Lizzie Siddall, Lizzie's Baby, Ophelia, Pre-Raphaelites