I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death

I have never found it difficult to abandon a group, to go against the alpha male or female. I have never much cared for gangs, for social tribes, for fitting in. I have known since I was very young that the in-crowd isn’t my crowd; they are not my people.

Something of its liminal nature, its space between land and sea, seems to draw them, especially at night.

The doctor there will ask me what medication I was given and, when I tell her, she’ll blanch.

“What?” I will say. “What’s wrong?”

“Those are only used here for…” She stops her-self.

“For what?” I ask.

“Well…” she frowns at her screen “…horses.”

I stare at her. Then I laugh.

The doctor shrugs. “They worked, I guess. I mean, you’re still here.”

We all, I think, know these statistics, or at least have a vague sense of them. We know miscarriage is out there, at our backs, pursuing us, like Andrew Marvell’s wingéd chariot.

It’s why you’re not supposed to tell people you’re pregnant until you’ve passed the magic twelve-week point, until you come out of hospital clutching a monochrome sonogram picture. Only then can you inform your friends, your in-laws, your employers; only then can you go out and buy wire-less bras and stretchy tops; only then can you leave your antenatal vitamin bottles lying about the house with impunity; only then will you start getting calls from relatives, suggesting old family names, insisting that the daily drinking of Guinness is crucial for breastfeeding, offering knitted matinee jackets, stiff with age.

I had not known, until that moment, what a lonely experience it is to be in danger, in the middle of a room full of people who are frantically working to save your life.

I join the British Council library, scrabbling together the necessary forms and photocopies and proofs of address. I tread the carpet along the rows of Fiction A–Z and think: I can read whatever I want. The realisation arrives like a gale, lashing past me, almost making me stagger.

No more courses, no more curricula, no more exams for me.

They are, all of them, waiting because that is what teenagers who grow up in seaside towns do. They wait. For something to end, for something to begin.

If, as a child, you are struck or hit, you will never forget that sense of your own powerlessness and vulnerability, of how a situation can turn from benign to brutal in the blink of an eye, in the space of a breath.

I am not frightened: I say this to myself, over the oceanic roar of my pulse.

The couple from London, who seem wonderingly, enviably perfect—they hold manicured hands over dinner, they take laughing walks at dusk, they show me photos of their wedding—have a room steeped in sadness, in hope, in grief. Ovulation kits clutter their bathroom shelves. Fertility drugs are stacked on their nightstands. These I don’t touch, as if to impart the message, I didn’t see this, I am not aware, I know nothing.