Alice Jolly - Dead Babies and Seaside Towns

Your absence has gone through me

like thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its color.

W.S. Merwin Separation

I see Laura often, running in a frost-glittered garden. She is two years old, a tiny flame-flicker of a child, just as her older brother Thomas was at that age. She wears a navy blue beret and her silver-blonde hair is cut bluntly and falls to just above her shoulders. Her blue wool coat is fitted at the waist and has a rounded velvet collar and large velvet-covered buttons. The frost has made her skin blue-white, her lips a smear of red, a wound that will not heal.

She dashes past me at such speed that my image of her is blurred an arm stretched forward, both feet in their T-bar, navy shoes suspended above the ground. Her legs are thin as wire and her woollen tights wrinkle at the ankle. The toe of that stretched-forward foot is pulled back towards her shin. Somewhere out of sight, other children are running as well, chasing each other, ducking and swivelling, their laughter crackling in the brittle air.

But where is she? In the garden at Mount Vernon. I know that but where exactly? Behind her a flower bed is thick with scarlet roses which bloom despite the frost. I feel sure that shes on the lawn, just below the coach house hedge, but no child could run on such steep ground. Other children will grow up, change, disappoint, amaze, but not Laura. Even if I live to be one hundred, she will still be running endlessly running past the winter roses in her navy blue beret.

It began in a house in North London, one of those toppling, red-brick terraced houses, stacked up tight against each other in the streets above Gospel Oak. We were staying with friends for the weekend and that morning we walked to a playground on the edge of Hampstead Heath. My husband, Stephen, pushed our son, two-year-old Thomas, on swings and stood beside metal-runged ladders, guiding wavering, wellington-booted feet.

It was warm for March and yet I sat on a bench shivering in two jumpers, a coat, scarves, boots and gloves. I was nearly three months pregnant with our second child. My stomach rolled and heaved, my lips were dry, my mouth tasted sour and even the wind on my face felt like an assault. I longed for time to sweep me on, past twelve weeks of pregnancy, as I knew that then the sandpaper-rawness and nagging sickness might end.

After we came back from the Heath, our friends Mark and Susan cooked us a proper Sunday lunch lamb, roast potatoes, buttery cabbage which we ate amidst the half-finished building work in their kitchen. I pushed down two plates despite the nausea. A taxi had been called to take us to the Eurostar at Waterloo Station. From there we would travel back to our home in Brussels.

As we cleared the table, Mark and Susans three children and Thomas were scurrying through the house, their feet clattering, their voices shrieking, determined to fall over the tins of paint left by the builders, smash their heads against the piles of floorboards stacked in the hall, or fall down the uncarpeted stairs. I went to help Stephen with the pushchair and the bags, then hurried to the loo and thats when I found the warning stain of blood.