The Edge of Happiness

In the mornings, she worked on the nursery. Walls she painted Sunlight Yellow. Curtains she fashioned out of a lovely soft cotton, cream with small red flowers, which she had bought years before and never used; when hung, they shirked against the open windows, before swelling with the breeze. When the wooden crib arrived, she painted it Fire Engine Red and placed it in the centre of the room. Hung above it a mobile of fat, furry bees.

In the afternoons, she walked the hill behind the house, and took in the network of fields, dotted here and there by houses and the odd copse of trees, crows flying their straight black lines across the sky, swallows drawing their more elaborate messages. She lay on the grass, and talked to the baby growing inside her.

In the evenings, she and Thomas ate together, out on the terrace. That was a beautiful summer. She prepared simple, delicious meals, like grilled trout with baked sweet potato, or chicken Provençale, salty with anchovies and olives. Thomas would drink a glass of wine with his.

‘You really do seem happy here,’ he said one evening, after they’d eaten and were still sitting outside.

‘Told you.’       

‘I’m glad.’

‘It feels –’ She paused. ‘Now, don’t laugh.’

He gave a faux-solemn nod.

‘It feels like –’

He was looking at her. He was listening.

‘A state,’ she continued in a lilting voice to show she knew how silly she sounded, ‘of grace.’

‘Hm.’   

‘I know.’ She laughed at herself.

A quick gesture with his eyes and she scraped her seat towards him, draped her legs across his lap. ‘Ever since we moved here though,’ she continued, speaking into his shoulder, ‘it’s like I’m humming with it. All day when you’re at work, and I hardly talk to anyone, it feels like everything happens perfectly, just when it’s supposed to. And I’m floating along.’

‘Hormones?’

‘Hormones! Maybe hormones. Whatever that means.’

‘Ever felt like this before?’

‘Maybe.’ She thought about it. ‘In Italy, maybe. There was a morning in Florence. You wanted to see those Dali sketches of Dante’s inferno.’

‘You sat on that square for nearly three hours on you own. Reading.’

‘And drinking those tiny cappuccinos. One after the other.’

‘We won’t be having holidays like that again for a while.’

‘I suppose not.’

He put his hand on her stomach, which had been swelling for over seven months.

‘Still on Daniel, if it’s a boy?’ she said.

‘You better believe it.’

‘Polly for a girl.’

‘Polly.’

He moved his hand back and forth slowly. Kissed the top of her head again. It was a Friday night and they had no plans that weekend. The kiss started hard and stayed that way. They had barely reached the bedroom before most of their clothes were lying on different parts of the floor.

Two months later, a baby boy was born, right on time. It was a natural birth. Everything went as it should have done. More or less anyway. She had just needed a few stitches. She barely felt them after the painkillers wore off. She was too busy being in thrall to Daniel, new perfect Daniel who slept so beautifully – in his hospital cot or on her chest or in Thomas’ arms – and who could latch on straight away like a pro when she tried to breastfeed him. She barely slept at all those two days and then when she got back home, there were visitors – her mother and Thomas’ parents, who wanted to help but who she really did not need. They all kept saying how tired she must be, but she didn’t feel tired at all. Really, she just wanted them all to leave. She wanted to get on with her new life as a mother. Establish its new routines, learn its new corners. If only she could sleep, Thomas said, but really she no longer seemed to need to. It was as though in giving birth she had somehow attained a superpower, which meant she would never feel tiredness again.

The fear began when a nurse who came to weigh Daniel said his weight gain was a bit slow. But he was a good feeder, the nurse had said, his latch was good. She was sure his weight would come on soon. For now, it was just something to keep an eye on. But this didn’t reassure Jane at all. That day, she got Thomas to go out and buy some formula, which she started feeding Daniel alongside all the breastfeeding. She bought fenugreek tablets online, which she read could increase her milk supply. Whenever he was awake and not feeding (and that was rare, even after she started giving him formula as well), she would try to coax him to latch on, because she had also read that the more he fed, the greater her supply would be. She didn’t care how raw and sore her nipples had become, or even that they sometimes bled. She barely noticed it. She even bought an electric pump, and took to pumping her breasts when he was asleep, to stimulate further milk supply. But nothing seemed to work. At least, nothing assuaged her fear that he was not thriving, even after the nurse came back and said his weight gain had improved. It was the way Daniel would writhe and cry while trying to feed from her. Like it was hopeless and he wasn’t getting anything at all. The nurse said that rest was the thing she needed. Thomas said the same thing, that she just needed to sleep. But not once did she feel like sleeping. Sleep for Jane belonged to a different, parallel world. Not the world she was in. When she wasn’t feeding or pumping or soothing or nappy changing, she would do housework. It was important Daniel was not exposed to any germs, especially if he had not gained enough weight. He wouldn’t be as able to fight an infection as another baby might. Thomas said she was overdoing it, that he could do all the housework. That that’s what he was doing already. But he was not keeping it as clean as it needed to be. Anyone could see that. She ignored him.

Sometimes, at night, in the bursts of time when Daniel slept, she would walk through the rooms of the house at night trying to see if there was anything she missed. After that, if Daniel was still asleep, she might wander out into the garden, coming back inside to sit down on the couch only when the pain from the stitched-up wound inside her became too much. If Daniel was still asleep then, she would take him out of his cot anyway, and feed him on the couch. Sometimes then it would feel like she watching the scene, rather than being in it. That there was Jane and Daniel, on the couch, and then there was she, outside and looking in, feeling nothing.

One morning, her husband walked in to find her sitting there, and for a moment she did not recognise this tall, broad man. It lasted only a moment. When it passed, she told him about the caterpillars eating the herbs in the garden. There were hundreds of them, she said. Then she told him how the man next door had left his porch light on all night. How he had left it on every night that week and how, only yesterday, she had seen him looking strangely at her when she was in the front garden.

Thomas stared at her. ‘Have you been up all night?’

‘Not all night,’ she said.

‘You need to rest,’ he said.

‘I’m fine,’ she told him. ‘I’m not even tired.’

‘I could ring work,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Take an extra leave day?’ It was his first day back at work. Two weeks after Daniel had been born.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Why would you do that?’

By the time he got home that evening, the house was as clean as usual, dinner was ready, and Daniel was sleeping peacefully in the Moses basket. And somehow Jane knew that, somewhere in the house, a camera had been installed. She had felt it on her all day. Now, by the way he was looking at her, she knew it was Thomas who had put it there.

‘Jesus,’ he said. He was really staring at her. At her body.

She looked down and noticed the small stain on her dress.

‘Is it – normal?’ he asked. ‘At this stage, I mean.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It looks like a lot. Of blood, I mean.’

‘It’s the stitches,’ she said. ‘It think something’s happened to them.’ She had realised she was hurting.

‘Jesus,’ said Thomas. ‘How did you not notice?’

She shook her head.

‘We’re going to the hospital. The last thing you want is an infection.’

On the way, he pulled into a petrol station.

‘It’s nearly empty.’ He turned to her. ‘You want anything? Water?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll get water. Two seconds, okay?’

As soon as he was inside the petrol station, she got out of the car. She opened the back seat, took out Daniel, who was asleep. Then she knocked on the passenger seat window of the car in front of theirs. A teenage boy was sitting there.

‘Get out of the car,’ she said.

The teenager looked alarmed but he didn’t do anything.

‘Get out,’ she said. ‘I need this car. It’s an emergency.’ She opened his door.

‘Mum,’ shouted the boy, trying to close the door. He was strong. ‘Mum.’ And then he put his hand on the horn and kept it there.

‘This child is in danger,’ she shouted over the din. ‘Just get out.’

But then Thomas was coming out of the station. He was running towards her.

A narrow path bordered the road. She reached it and kept walking.

‘You keep away,’ she shouted back at Thomas.                        

A lorry roared past. It blared its horn, a warning to her. She held Daniel tight against her chest. He was awake now, and nuzzling into her, already trying to latch on, to feed.

‘Jane.’ Her husband was beside her, his arm on her shoulder. ‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’

She shook his hand off but he put it back.

‘Get away from me,’ she told him. ‘I know about the camera.’ She flashed him a look. ‘You won’t take him away from me.’

A car passed. She put out her hand. She would hitch to the nearest city. She had her credit cards.

‘Call an ambulance,’ Thomas shouted back towards the station. ‘Jane, I don’t know what to do. Please. Give me Daniel.’

‘You’re not taking him from me. Don’t touch me.’

‘Okay, okay. Please just stop walking for a minute. Jane, for God’s sake.’

None of the passing cars stopped. For a while, it was just her walking with Daniel in her arms, Thomas close behind her, asking her to please stop. Then a siren sounded and Jane began to run. The siren stopped. But there were other footsteps now, along with Thomas’s. An arm around her waist, and then a sharp pain in her thigh, like she’d been bitten.

She woke in a small hospital bedroom, her limbs too heavy to move. In a chair beside her bed, sat Thomas. He was holding Daniel. He was staring at her. He pressed a button and a nurse came in, shutting the door behind her.

‘Awake. Good. How are you feeling, love? She’s probably still a bit zonked.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Jane. ‘I just want my child.’

Thomas looked at the nurse, then passed Daniel to Jane. He wriggled in her arms. He scrunched his face up and began to cry. He nuzzled her breast, his mouth opening and shutting like a fish. She tried to feed him but he got agitated, twisting his little body, trying, as usual, to get more milk than her body could produce.

‘Do you have the formula?’ she said to Thomas. She couldn’t even look at him.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll feed him, don’t worry.’ There was a look then, between Thomas and the nurse. They thought she didn’t see it but she did.

The next day, they moved her to a mother and baby ward, so that she could be with her baby while she was being treated. Jane agreed to staying on in the hospital because she knew if she didn’t they would take her baby off her forever. And when the psychiatrist came to see her, she knew better than to tell him what she really thought.

‘How are you feeling today?’ he asked her. He was a large man with a tired face.

‘Fine,’ she said.              

‘Do you know what happened yesterday?’ He held her gaze.

‘I just got a fright,’ she said. She shook her head. ‘It was nothing.’

‘A fright. Can you remember what frightened you?’

Jane looked at her hands.

‘Do you know where you are, Jane?’

‘Hospital.’

‘That’s right. We’re going to keep you here for a while until we find out what medicine will help.’ He studied her a moment. ‘We think you have something called postpartum psychosis. Have you ever heard of it?’

Jane looked out the window. A plastic bag was being whipped about in the air.

‘Most people haven’t. Look, it’s serious, I won’t lie, but I want you to remember two things okay? It’s temporary, and it’s treatable. Jane, can you look at me for a second?’ He kept his gaze on her until she looked back.

‘This must be frightening, but it’ll pass. Okay? It will pass. Do you understand?’

She gave him a curt nod.

‘Okay,’ he said again, and left.

She was in that place for days, weeks. Every morning and every evening, a nurse gave her pills and stood by her bed until Jane swallowed them. Sometimes the shape or colour of them changed but the way Jane felt never did. Or if it did change, it was only to intensify, so that she found when she spoke, her words came out all jumbled up. This did not stop her talking. It became impossible, not to speak about the dangers. But no one would believe anything she said. Or else they would not admit what they knew. When she told the nurse and Thomas that their neighbour wanted to burn down their house, they said it was not true. When she told Thomas about the camera in the door of her room, he just shook his head.

She could not hold her baby anymore. She could not feed him. The pills they gave her would kill him. That was what they wanted. Everything was always too dangerous. Something terrible was going to happen and everyone was pretending they didn’t know what she was talking about. One thing the drugs did do was make her sleep but the worst part was always waking up, her thoughts already fighting with the sluggishness, taking off against it.

One morning, a patient in another room began to scream. Jane watched the two nurses run down the hall and then she ran out of the ward. She ran down a flight of stairs, then another one. She got to an open window. She climbed onto the sill and looked up and down the corridor. She was alone. No one was going to stop her. She stepped out onto the ledge. She looked down. Three storeys, concrete ground below. She didn’t know. Was this the answer? Was this what she was supposed to do? It felt as though it was.

Then hands, gripping her ankles. Urgent voices. An arm around her waist and the bite of a needle again. This time when she woke, Thomas was sitting by her bed. He looked like he’d been beaten. Already the thoughts were starting to gather and swirl inside her, even as she struggled to remember what had happened.

‘What?’ she said to him. ‘What?’

‘It has to end, Jane. The drugs aren’t working fast enough.’

He wouldn’t say anything else until the psychiatrist arrived. It was the same one as before, the one with the tired face. Sitting beside Thomas, he told her they wanted to try a different therapeutic approach. Called electroconvulsive therapy. It has a bad reputation, he said, but it can be very effective. We tend to get a much quicker response than we do with anti-depressants, or other medication, he said. And it’s completely painless. The only side effect was memory loss, and that is usually temporary.

‘I really think it’s your best option,’ he said, handing her a leaflet.

Jane looked at Thomas.

‘For Daniel,’ he said. ‘He needs you. Please, Jane. I think it will help.’

It happened six times, the passing out and waking up to ache and nausea and not knowing anything. Slowly, her mind began to quieten. She stopped believing there was a camera in the door, or that their neighbour wanted to burn their house down. The feeling of some awful danger began to lose its grip. Memories were lost but most of them flitted back, old and new, in the days and weeks that followed.

For a long time, the guilt grew inside her, knotting up her stomach when she looked at Daniel and making it hard to breathe. But there was help. Her mother came and stayed with them, and there was a cleaner Thomas had taken on when she was in hospital. By then, Daniel was sleeping through most nights, so she did too. She started seeing a counsellor every Thursday, a white-haired woman who mostly just listened to Jane and who, when she said kind things, Jane believed.

One evening at the end of the autumn, Jane and Thomas went for a walk. It was the first time she passed their garden gate since the hospital. A hemline of orange where the sun had been was giving way to a darkening blue.

‘Maybe it was selfish of me,’ he said, after they’d been walking awhile. ‘Bringing you all the way out here, me going to work every day. You spent too much time on your own.’

‘But I wanted it,’ she said. ‘I was happy.’

Back in the city, Jane joined a mother and baby group. She told them all, when they were introducing themselves and telling their stories, that she had had postnatal psychosis, but none of them ever asked her about it afterwards. And she got it, why they hadn’t. What was there to say about it? Why dwell on something so negative? After that, she never brought it up if she could help it.

About a year later, she finally stopped taking the medication. She and Thomas began discussing the idea of her returning to work part-time. She got in touch with the library where she used to work. Once the guilt had abated (it never left entirely), and she had more or less recovered, all the delight returned. When he smiled at her or talked gobbledygook at her or even when he found it hilarious to bite her, or pull her hair or earrings, or when he was just sleeping, making his little sleep noises. She found him a good local crèche and that autumn, for three mornings a week, she started back in the library, on a part-time, temporary position. She would walk to the crèche, leave Daniel there, always with a tug of pain, and catch a bus to work. To her relief, she found she could perform her duties there without any huge difficulty. Sometimes, there was even a quiet kind of enjoyment. And then afterwards she got to walk through the doors of the crèche and breathe in her new favourite smell – a mixture of vegetable soup and nappy cream. Take him in her arms.

Life stayed tiring. There was no denying that. The mornings seemed to come around so quickly. Sometimes she felt as though she could sleep for a year. All mothers feel tired, of course, when their children are babies. She knew that. But she also knew that her tiredness contained an extra layer, borne out of her unwanted knowledge. That Jane’s mind could break away from Jane, if it wanted to. That if Jane’s mind ever did that again, it would want to win, just like it wanted to win the first time.

Even though she had known the answer, she still asked the psychiatrist at her last outpatient appointment with him. Yes, he had confirmed. It could come back, especially if she had another child, something she and Thomas had started to talk about. But we’ll be prepared, he said, if that happens. You know better than I do that it can be survived.

That evening, one of the lost memories presented itself. A sunny square in Italy, reading for three hours straight while drinking too much coffee. Simply because she wanted to and because she could.

A desire rose inside her then – to warn her past self. But warn her of what? That woman was from a different world. Jane and not Jane. None of what had happened had anything to do with her.

The thing to do with that Jane was to let her go.

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None of Us Will Be Okay is available now from Broken Sleep Books. You can order a copy here.

Liza Costello lives in the Irish midlands. Her poems, essays and stories have appeared in various magazines and newspapers, and have been broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1. She came first in the Dromineer Literary Festival Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for both the Patrick Kavanagh Award for an unpublished collection of poetry and the Francis MacManus Short Story Award. She has also written two novels.