He is shaking, and obviously confused, but is also looking up at me with such trust that my heart breaks a tiny bit. I know he is probably somebody else’s dog, and I know I’ll need to try and get him back to them, but right now it’s hard to imagine ever being able to say goodbye.
I carefully lather up the shampoo, and shield his little face with my hands as I rinse him, and he stands patiently throughout – scared but stoic. He might not look like much, but he has the heart of a warrior, I decide.
The water turns pretty grim pretty quickly, and I make a mental note to remember to give the bath a good scrub later – this might be a dog-friendly place, but nobody likes a bad houseguest.
I carry him through to the main room wrapped in one of Lottie’s old towels, and sit on the carpet with him, rubbing him gently until he is mainly dry. Even then, I stay sitting with him for a few minutes more, before deciding that it is my turn for the detox.
Predictably enough, he follows me through, and looks on in interest as I start the shower. I’m not used to having an audience when I’m naked, but he seems to want to be near me, and I don’t like the thought of shutting him in the other room in case he becomes distressed. This dog, I realise as I luxuriate in hot water and lime-scented bodywash, has turned me into a complete wuss.
Once I’m done, I wrap myself in a towel – soft, fluffy, white, yummy – turban up my hair, and crash out on the bed. Predictably, he jumps up to join me, and luckily because it was so predictable, I’ve already popped one of the dog blankets on top of the covers so he doesn’t get them wet or dirty.
I yawn, and stretch out, and enjoy that moment – the moment when you’ve been really busy, when you’re tired, and you finally get to lie still and switch off. I am cool and clean and comfortable, and I have spent most of the last 24 hours as the opposite. It really has been the weirdest of days, but I can’t complain about how it’s ending.
I’ve been charging up my phone, and when I pick it up from the cabinet next to me, I see a miraculous bar or two flickering in and out. Looks like Connie was right – this is definitely the place to be for phone service.
For some reason, as soon as I find that I have a patchy wi-fi connection, I start looking up dog breeds. Now he’s dried off, I can see that with a trim, he might be something other than a weresheep. I flick through the pictures, and eventually decide that the one he most resembles is a Bedlington – not 100%, but close enough. And they do, actually, look a bit like little sheep.
“Larry the Lamb,” I say, stroking his head, “that’s what I’ll call you. For now at least.”
He doesn’t object, and we lie contentedly together for a while longer. I’m turning over so many things in my mind – the past, the present, the future. Friends I used to have, lovers I have left behind, a different life where everything took another path. Larry, in the meantime, is sniffing his own arse.
I try to look up local garages, but the signal chooses that moment to drop out again. I’m pretty sure that if Connie was here, she’d tell me it was some kind of sign. I get up, get dressed in blessedly clean clothes, and pace around the room. I inspect the little knick-knacks, and look at the books on the shelves, enjoying the feel of the thick carpet beneath my bare feet.
I dry my hair, rearrange the sunflowers, and eat a piece of shortbread. And then, when I have done as many meaningless things as I possibly can, I do what I always knew I was going to do in the end. I take my purse out of my bag, and I sit on the bed, and I get out the picture.
It’s one of several copies, but the one I always keep with me. The one that lives in my heart.
I unfold it, stroke the creases down, and gaze at the black and white image. This is something I do every night, and have done for a very long time now. Sometimes it makes me smile, sometimes it makes me cry, sometimes it is the only thing that makes me feel anything at all. It is part of my ritual, something I have always clung to, taken comfort from – even when it has hurt.
“This,” I say quietly to Larry, “is my baby. I didn’t know I was pregnant when I started working in the hospital, but when I found out, my friend who was a sonographer said we’d keep a close eye on her, make sure she was doing okay. Well, we didn’t know she was a girl then – we found that out a bit later. We were going to call her Elizabeth. Lizzie. She’d have been three this year, and I think she’d have loved you…and this beach, this place. I think she’d have been blonde and chubby and she would have laughed a lot. I wish, more than anything in the whole world, that I’d ever been able to meet her, but that wasn’t meant to be. Or maybe it was, and I just messed it all up. I don’t know. Anyway. Night night, lovely Lizzie…”
I place a gentle kiss on the picture, the scan photo that was the closest I ever got to my baby girl, and put it back in my purse. Always close, always on my mind, always very real but also impossible. A dream of a thing.
I was pregnant when the pandemic started, without even knowing it, and at that stage nobody knew much about what was going on. All we understood was that it was bad, that it was killing people, that everyone in the NHS needed to play their part. I went back to hospital work, and back to long hours, and back to spending what felt like days on end on my feet.
I know, better than most people, how common miscarriages are – I know the stats, I know the signs, I know the risk factors, and I know the human face of that pain. I’ve helped countless patients through it. I know it is something that can happen to any woman, no matter how healthy her lifestyle or how wise her choices – it is not something that you can blame someone for, even though they often blame themselves.
If I was my own doctor, I’d tell myself all of those things. I’d tell myself that it wasn’t my fault, that these things happen, that there is no reason that it will happen again. That I hadn’t contributed to that terrible loss.
But it’s far easier to be logical when you’re talking about someone else’s pain, someone else’s suffering. When it’s someone else’s body who has betrayed them. When it happened to me, none of that made any sense any more – and I did blame myself.
I blamed my work, I blamed the Government, I blamed the universe. But mostly I blamed myself – I shouldn’t have gone back there, no matter how much I was needed. I should have stayed at home and rested, and been careful, and taken better care of the precious life I was growing inside my own body.
Mark never said any of those things to me, but I always suspected he was thinking them. It was his loss too, and I know it cut deep. Despite all of that, he never criticised, never said those words that I’m sure were bubbling beneath the surface. He didn’t blame me out loud, but I did it all for him – assumed that I knew what he was thinking, thought I could feel the anger he must be suppressing.
I might have been imagining it. I might have been wrong about all of it – but every now and then, when I was getting ready for work in the aftermath, I’d see a look on his face. A look that said he didn’t understand. We had enough money; I didn’t need to work – I could have stayed at home. He never asked me to do that, but I convinced myself that’s what he thought.
Looking back now, I see that’s when we started to lose each other. He was too good a man to show his frustration when I was suffering – if he couldn’t say what was eating away at him, he said nothing at all. We both stayed quiet. We retreated into our own little worlds, our own shells, our own cocoons of grief. We got on with life – at least on the surface. I think, though, that a part of us died when we lost Lizzie. On the surface, our relationship survived – but underneath, it was made of fragile honeycomb, hollow, just waiting to be snapped into pieces.
I suppose that’s why it was so easy to leave him, and so easy for him to bring another woman into our home. Why it’s so easy for us to now have civilised conversations about finances and our separate futures now – because in reality, we’d been living separate futures for a long time. The other stuff was just us playing catch-up to what neither of us had wanted to face.
And now, I am here, sitting in a perfectly pastel room with a weresheep, wondering what to do next – not just right now, but longer term.
I can’t live like this forever. I can’t wander aimlessly through the next decades. I’m not hurting for cash, but I will need to work at some point, I’ll need to settle, to build some stability for myself. I have no idea if I’ll ever be able to practice again, or if I’ll become a teacher or a bus driver or a barmaid. Probably not a dog groomer, I decide, looking at Larry’s overflowing fur.
I feel like I am perfectly poised between a thousand different destinies, and have no idea what path I will take. It’s like a game of blind man’s buff – I’ve been blindfolded and spun around until I’m dizzy, and now I am stumbling around in the dark, trying to find a way forward. It’s all very confusing.
“Well,” I say to the dog, “it’s not like I have to make my mind up now, is it? I don’t have a deadline. For now, all I need to do is get through the night. And yes, I can see what you’re thinking – it’s half past nine, and you need a wee, and I need a drink. Do you think I should go downstairs and see if the handsomest man in the world is still around? You do? Oh, okay then…if you insist.”
