‘Where’s Daddy?’ Oli asked as he looked up from the colouring book he’d found.
‘He’s gone to the car to get something. He won’t be long. Shall we draw a picture for him?’
Oli picked up some crayons as I jiggled Lucy, happy to feel her in my arms again, and waited for Andrew to come onto the ward. But as I watched him walk up to the first bed I suddenly realised that I might have made a mistake. Would Hannah recognise her father? She was an intelligent child, advanced beyond her years in many ways after being diagnosed with dyspraxia when she was two and a half. The condition was a bit like dyslexia but affected movement and coordination. It meant that Hannah had been late learning to walk and dress herself, but her language, as if in compensation, had developed quickly and she was also very sensitive to other people’s emotions. Hannah could say ‘octopus’ before her first birthday and have long conversations about the plants in the garden by the time she was four. When my granny had fallen over one day while they were out for a walk she’d even calmly insisted to a passer-by that she could look after her.
But it was too late to do anything now because Andrew was walking up to Hannah’s bed and all I could do was hope that she didn’t recognise him as he chuckled, ‘Ho, ho, ho’.
‘Father Christmas!’ Oli squealed as he jumped up.
I got up with Lucy as Andrew sat down on the chair beside Hannah’s bed and Oli climbed onto his knee, listing the presents he wanted while Lucy sat in my arms, refusing to go anywhere near the strange man in red. When Andrew had finished with Oli, he turned to Hannah and held out his left hand towards her. She looked at him silently and I held my breath.
Very slowly, she lifted her right arm and pushed her hand into the space between the bed and chair where her father’s was waiting for hers. Their fingers met in mid-air.
‘You’re being a very good little girl,’ Andrew said softly.
Hannah’s mouth curved into a tiny smile as she looked at Father Christmas and I knew this one piece of magic was still safe for her.
It was New Year’s Eve 1999 – millennium night – and after two weeks in hospital the intensive phase of Hannah’s first cycle of chemotherapy drugs had ended a few days before. But while I could hear people getting ready to celebrate outside on the streets of Birmingham, inside the hospital everything was quiet as Hannah lay almost unconscious. Two mornings ago the nurses had noticed her vital statistics weren’t normal when they did her usual observations – her pulse was rising, her blood pressure and oxygen saturation were dropping. The doctors knew immediately that Hannah’s heart was struggling and a cardiologist who’d seen her had told me she might be suffering a temporary side effect of the chemo. She’d been put on new medication but Hannah was still dangerously ill and was now on morphine to control her pain.
As the soft thud of music from outside weaved through our hushed world, I thought of all the people getting ready to see in midnight and wished Hannah could be among them, ruddy faced and smiling. Then I thought of Andrew and the children at home and sadness filled me that we wouldn’t be celebrating this milestone together as a family. Instead we were far apart and Hannah was lying still on the bed with her eyes closed, barely conscious, oblivious to the nasal canula running underneath her nose to give her oxygen, the feeding tube running up it or the central line attached to her chest. Three sticky electrode pads were attached to a heart monitor which beeped softly and a SATS probe on her finger constantly checked her oxygen levels.
All I could do was pray as I sat beside her, willing her back to consciousness. I felt angry and disappointed. How could this be happening to Hannah when she already had so much else to fight? After the hustle and bustle, the rush of emergency when we had first arrived in hospital, the silence now felt overwhelming and all the questions I had been asked since that day rolled in a constant stream through my mind.
There had been so many of them. Did I breastfeed? What type of bottled milk did I use? Did I warm it in the microwave? None are proven links to leukaemia, but as I searched for a reason why Hannah was now even sicker I focused on the questions I’d been asked and why. Surely I should have been able to stop the unseen enemy which had sneaked into our life? I must have made some mistake and allowed it in. Hannah was my child. My job was to protect her.
The questions almost consumed me – my mind going back and forth as I looked back on our life and tried to pinpoint where I’d gone wrong. I remembered how I’d only breastfed Hannah for a couple of weeks after she was born because I’d gone back to work. I hadn’t had a choice about it, but now I wondered if I’d harmed her in some unthinking way at the very beginning of her life.
I’d longed to be a mother when I’d met Andrew eight years before. I was twenty-five and knew I was ready to fall in love and start my own family after returning from a year travelling in Australia. I’d been brought up by my grandmother after my mother had died when I was five, and although my childhood had been strict but loving, the loss had implanted in me a need to create the bustling family life I hadn’t had. My childhood was one of such stillness and routine that I craved a big, messy family full of life and laughter.
I’d met Andrew in a village pub where he’d stood out a mile in his suit. Quiet and kind, he was a big man who made me feel safe and when I got home after our first date, I told my grandmother I was going to marry him – even if he didn’t know it yet. I proposed four months later but Andrew refused because it was too soon and I was being typically impetuous. So we waited another year to get engaged and I was over the moon when we started trying for a baby.
But two years had passed and I hadn’t fallen pregnant. No one could explain why, and I felt hopelessness seep into me for the first time in my life as the months turned into years. Feeling more and more overwhelmed, I gave up my job and stayed in bed for weeks until realising I couldn’t lie there forever. So I forced myself back out into the world, where I got a job on a production line at a cake factory – repetitive, undemanding work that I didn’t need to worry about – and told myself I would fall pregnant when the time was right. Two months later I did, and was overjoyed. My family was finally starting and I knew I’d do anything to protect it.
So when Andrew had been made redundant weeks before Hannah was born I had found a job to support us and returned to work when she was just three and a half weeks old. But leaving her was even worse than I had anticipated because I was soon sent to a conference in Canada by the pharmaceutical company I was working for. I ached every day for Hannah, who was being looked after by Andrew and my grandmother, and was overjoyed when he found a new job. It meant I could go home again and I’d stayed there ever since – first with Hannah, then Oli and Lucy – concentrating on our family life and working part-time as a nurse to help pay the bills.
But now, as I thought back to those few weeks of her life and tried to make sense of what was happening, I wondered if leaving Hannah was just the first mistake I’d made without even knowing it.
The world closed down to just Hannah and me – she and I in a silent bubble together as we fought her illness, travelling a path that seemed to get darker and darker. Three days into the New Year she was transferred into the high dependency unit – a halfway house between the oncology wards and intensive care.
Semi-conscious and still on morphine, we lived in half-darkness, blinds closed and wave sounds playing softly to soothe Hannah. Various different types of therapy were offered to children by aromatherapists and reflexologists who came onto the ward. But all they could do for Hannah was give her crystals – pebble-smooth stones that we put in the palms of her hands as she lay in bed hardly moving.
We were closer to the edge of darkness than ever before, and for the first time the word ‘die’ whispered around the edges of my thoughts. Before now I’d