About five minutes after the midwife had left she summoned up the energy to get out of bed. Her legs felt weak as she steadied herself by the side of her bed, and she was sore from the birth; but she took a couple of tentative steps towards the chair over which her wet clothes had been laid. She took off her stained hospital robes, and with difficulty pulled on the still damp jeans and T-shirt, which were clammy and cold on her skin. Gingerly, she stepped towards the door and out into the corridor.
It was almost midnight, but the maternity ward was still buzzing with activity. Mums in labour walked up and down the corridor, some of them pushing drip stands along with them. Harassed hospital workers rushed in and out of rooms. Nobody paid any attention to a young girl walking unobtrusively past the reception desk and out of the main body of the hospital.
It was a relief for Hayley when she saw that the rain had stopped. If she’d had the money, she would have taken a bus home, but she didn’t, so there was nothing for it but to walk. It took an hour and a half to get back to the estate, and by the time she got home, her mum and dad were fast asleep. She crept silently into the bathroom, where she removed her clothes before moistening some tissue and using it to wipe away the stubborn streaks of blood from her inner thigh. Then she rolled her clothes up into a little ball, returned to her room, climbed into bed and pulled the blankets tightly around her.
As she lay there, waiting for sleep to come, Hayley felt as though a part of her had been torn away. She felt a desperate, gaping emptiness. She felt as though she was no longer whole. Her body ached for the little girl she had only glimpsed for a matter of seconds.
Yet what else could she have done? Bring her back here, to this place? At least now her child had a chance – a chance of life in the hands of the kind doctors, and a chance of happiness in the hands of whoever she ended up with.
A chance of happiness. If she could give her little girl that, then perhaps she wasn’t so worthless. It wasn’t much to cling on to, but it was something.
A chance of happiness.
The words echoed around Hayley’s head as she lay there in her little bed until eventually, overcome with exhaustion and emotion, she slipped into a troubled, dream-filled sleep.
It was a bit more than half an hour after she’d left Hayley that Charity returned to the girl’s room. She didn’t know why, but somehow she wasn’t surprised to see that she was no longer there.
She felt a pang. On some level, she had hoped that maybe she had been getting through to the girl, but now she realised how thoughtless she had been to leave her alone. If anyone needed help, company and security, it was the frightened little thing who had given birth in that room less than an hour ago. She sighed.
There were procedures in place for this kind of event. Charity immediately informed hospital security what had happened; then the police were called. There would be statements and interviews in due course, but Charity knew it would all be in vain – the girl had not given any information about herself, not even her name. The midwife found herself wondering whether she had come into the hospital intending to abandon her child, but she soon brushed away that thought. Chances were that the girl didn’t even know herself. Chances were that she was too scared even to get her childish thoughts together.
Charity did everything that was required of her in a kind of daze. Her shift was supposed to end at midnight, but it was past two o’clock by the time it was all done. Even then, tired though she was, she didn’t leave for home. There was something she wanted to do first. She slipped down to the shop on the ground floor. It was empty, apart from the bored, pimply young man behind the counter. Charity couldn’t afford much, so she chose the smallest toy she could – a little pink and blue teddy bear, not much bigger than her hand. She paid for it, and then headed back to the maternity suite.
It was never easy going into the Special Care Baby Unit, but tonight’s trip was more difficult than most. She walked into the observation room and saw them lined up, those fragile little bundles of life. There were seven of them tonight, all lying in their sterile incubators, their stillness giving no clue to the desperate struggle each of them was making for their very existence.
The little girl the midwife had delivered lay at the end of the row. She was the smallest of them all, and she lay so still that had it not been for the regular pinging of the heart monitor by her side, you might never have known she was alive. A feeding tube had been inserted into her impossibly tiny nose, and a little oxygen mask covered her face. The baby was bathed in the glow of ultra-violet light to prevent jaundice.
How long Charity stood and stared at the child she could not have said. Eventually, though, she was awakened from her dream-like state by a voice.
‘You should go home.’
She turned around. One of the doctors was standing just by her, a quietly spoken Asian man by the name of Sunil, whom she had always found to be very friendly.
‘I just wanted to see how she was getting on,’ she said quietly.
Sunil nodded and gave a sad little smile. ‘Too early to say.’ Charity was pleased that he didn’t offer any platitudes – they both knew that the baby’s life hung in the balance, and it would have been disrespectful of him to pretend that wasn’t the case.
‘Is this the one?’ he asked. ‘The one whose mother left?’
The midwife nodded.
‘Did you deliver her?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered.
‘Well then,’ Sunil continued, ‘as her mother is not here to give her a name, I think she should be named after the person whose hands brought her into the world, don’t you?’
The midwife blinked, and was surprised to feel tears in her eyes. She turned back to the incubator. ‘Charity,’ she breathed, and then shook her head. No. It wasn’t right. ‘I don’t think so,’ she told the doctor. ‘This little girl will need enough charity in her life as it is.’
The doctor shrugged. ‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘But she needs a name. I think you should choose it.’
Charity’s eyes misted over. ‘I was pregnant once,’ she said. ‘Oh, I lost the child. But that didn’t stop me giving it a name.’ She smiled. ‘Dani. That’s what we’ll call her.’
Sunil put his hand on her shoulder, and then left the observation room. The midwife knew that she too should leave soon, but she allowed herself a couple more minutes with the little girl. It didn’t seem right just to leave her. On a whim, she stepped out of the observation room and, checking to see that no one was watching, walked into the Special Care ward itself and up to the little girl’s Perspex cot. She lay the soft toy she had bought on the clear cover – no doubt it would be removed by a doctor, but she didn’t know what else to do with it. It lay there as floppy and seemingly lifeless as the baby herself.
‘Just get through this, my little love,’ she found herself whispering to the child. ‘Just get through this. Nothing you’ll ever have to do in your life will be nearly as hard if you can just get through this.’
She drew a deep breath and did her best to steady the emotion that was suddenly threatening to overcome her.
‘Keep fighting, little Dani,’ she breathed.
She did her best to smile at the baby, who didn’t even know she was there; then she turned and left the ward, closing the door quietly behind her.
Twelve years later
Dani Sinclair heard the bell go for morning break. All around her, her classmates scuffed their chairs back and started talking. The teacher at the front of the class – Mr Wynn – called out something, but it was lost in the hubbub of noise as everyone