people left with their donations, and every so often he’d have to stop. “Keep going Pete and Maddie and little Theo, we’re all thinking of you,” “You’ll come through this stronger than ever,” or even just “Such a great thing you’re doing,” all reduced him to tears, or at least to manly silence. It had been one of the things I’d first liked about him—that he wasn’t afraid to cry in front of me—but since Theo’s birth, his emotions seemed to have become a gushing tap, while mine had gone in the other direction.
When I looked through the donations later, I noticed there was a pledge of ten pounds from Bronagh. Still doing the great work I see Pete! she’d written. He hadn’t read that one out.
Sometimes, feeding Theo in the middle of the night, I’d Skype my parents. It was strange to see them having lunch on the sun terrace while I was shut up in a dark bedroom in London, the streetlights turning the curtains sickly yellow. On one occasion, I put Theo down in his cot before I called them, only for him to start wailing a few minutes later. “Hang on,” I said to my mother wearily. “I’ll just go and get him.”
Then I heard my father’s voice, off camera. “She’s spoiling that baby. Tell her, Carol. You have to let them cry, or they never learn not to.”
I waited for her to say something, to explain that it wasn’t like that these days, but she didn’t. I stopped Skyping them after that.
I was getting hardly any sleep. “Sleep when the baby sleeps,” people said. But what if I couldn’t sleep? I felt compelled to be Theo’s monitor, to check on him every few minutes. When I lay down, my brain raced; when I got up, the fog descended again and I could barely function.
Pete left for Scotland at the end of July. It was a cool, settled summer—perfect cycling weather. And although cycling from Edinburgh to London sounded arduous, I knew it wasn’t, not really. The route followed car-free cycle paths and old railway lines most of the way, and the group had a coach with a trailer that met them every afternoon and took them and the bikes to a hotel. They were planning to cycle about five hours a day, with every fourth day off. I didn’t blame them for making it as pleasant as possible, but I did get annoyed by the endless self-congratulatory updates on social media. After all, if you could stop to take a group selfie with a whole gang of other grinning young men in cycle helmets and Lycra every time you came to a nice view, you weren’t exactly doing the Tour de France. So pretty soon I stopped attending to what they were up to and retreated into my own private hell.
I felt as though I had to be doing something every moment. Sterilizing bottles. Washing babygrows. Cleaning the house. Checking the baby. Did I turn on the sterilizer? Did I turn off the washing machine? Was Theo breathing? I was shaking and fighting nausea, a captive animal pacing up and down, full of unfocused dread. Without Pete, there was no one to make me eat, no one to interrupt my inner monologue. The stream of thoughts in my head got louder and shoutier. What had begun as my own internal voice became an intrusive, deafening authority figure. I even gave it a name: the doctor. What if you let the baby get dirty? the doctor yelled at me. What if you let the baby suffocate? What if you drop the baby on the floor and smash open his head? I was too afraid to go for walks in case a car hit Theo’s stroller. I became obsessed with watching him, but I stopped touching him in case I did something bad to him. My heart raced constantly and I was short of breath. When the health visitor came, I demanded to know if she thought Theo’s eyes were crossed, and if so, whether that meant he had brain damage. She looked at me strangely and I heard her thoughts as clearly as if she’d spoken them out loud. This woman is a useless mother. After that, the health visitor joined the doctors in the chorus of voices all shouting at me that I was doing a terrible job.