Birmingham Friends by Annie Murray

for your advice. I’m sorry to have put you in such a difficult position.’ She glanced distractedly at a half sheet of paper she was holding. ‘I’ll do something as soon as I can. Next week.’
    With a strange gentleness my parents closed the door behind her and Mummy turned and leaned wearily against it. She looked unusually vulnerable, standing there like that in those hairpins, her emotion all clenched up inside.
    In a high voice she said, ‘Heavens above.’
    My father shook his head sadly. ‘Sometimes I wonder if the middle classes don’t have it worse. All this business of keeping up appearances.’
    ‘Thank goodness we’ve not had that to contend with.’ Mummy sounded close to tears. Daddy went over to her and took her in his arms and she leaned against him, both of them standing in silence.
    Unused to witnessing such intimacy, William and I avoided looking at each other. As our parents moved apart, the two of us shot into our bedrooms.
    *  *  *
    OLIVIA
    Before she had me, Mummy gave birth to her first baby at home. I know because she told me, early on sometime. Though she very seldom spoke to me of her feelings, there was no one else she could confide in, only her little girl. Who was too young. She couldn’t seem to let things out gently. Her words were like shards of glass coughed up from her throat. She was in labour for five days, and the baby, who would have been my elder brother, was born blue and without breath. They had to stitch her up inside, tight like a hessian sack.
    So when she was expecting me she chose to go to hospital. She waited for me, settled on stiff white sheets. Although I was small I wouldn’t come out. She lay on her labour bed for four days with her feet up in leather stirrups while the doctors tried to decide what to do. The pains were mild at first. Then her body pressed down tighter and tighter and she was in agony back and front but they wouldn’t let her move. She cried out, ‘My baby’s dead.’ One of the nurses slapped her and said, ‘Pull yourself together.’ They wouldn’t let her eat.
    On the third day when they unstrapped her legs she tried to jump out of a window. The next day they cut me out by Caesarean section and by a miracle I was still alive. They told her one of my hands was tightly gripping the umbilical cord. They instructed her not to have ‘relations’ with Daddy for four months after. She swore never to let him touch her again. She didn’t quite manage that.

    Usually she is sitting in the drawing room. She hasn’t been well these last weeks. She seems exhausted and her face is white.
    ‘What bad luck to be off colour while the weather’s so good,’ Daddy jokes. ‘Poor old girl. At least you’ve got Olivia home to keep you company.’
    Dawson eyes her knowingly. Later I realize you can never fool Dawson.
    I come skipping down Chantry Road from my piano lesson at Mrs Weiss’s cosy house, wearing my little leather sandals and a silk frock. I’ve had a lovely afternoon and I want to tell Mummy about it. I run inside, leaving Dawson to pull the door closed by its cold iron knob.
    ‘Mummy? Mummy?’
    My feet thud up the stairs and Dawson looks up at me from the hall with her dark, handsome eyes. ‘You should leave her to sleep, Olivia,’ she calls, but there’s a smile in her voice. Along the dark corridor, shadowy after the brilliant day outside and the more so because their bedroom door is closed. My feet slip on the red carpet.
    ‘Mummy?’ I knock. There is silence. Softly I turn the handle and push the door open. I stand in the doorway unable to move.
    The bed has turned red. Even her hair is soaked almost to the roots as she lies askew across the covers, her eyes closed. Her face is chalk white, the cheeks drawn in tight. She still has a satin slipper on one foot.
    I cross the room. By her feet is the deep blue and white chamber pot, full to overflowing with blood. Next to it on the floor something long and sharp, streaked