For the Record by Nataliya Deleva
It wasn’t my baby crying and yet his screams were making me feel dizzy. He was lying in his cot next to bright yellow wallpaper, his little face turning red. I looked around – the room was bigger than my entire rented flat in which I lived with seven strangers. The furniture seemed expensive and well arranged just like a magazine cover photo. It felt as though items were decorated to be looked at, not to be used or enjoyed. The high ceilings and the mirror opposite the garden entrance made the room appear even more spacious. The sound of the tea cups clinking startled me and I turned around.
“How do you take your tea?” she asked.
There she was: the mother. Her body frame was delicate but the bump that remained from her pregnancy still showed underneath a long, flowery dress. A vague scent of expensive shampoo mingled with the smell of stained breast milk and tickled my nose. Her face seemed sad; no, tired. She talked to me but her gaze never met my eyes. She smiled politely as if playing an act, one that she'd performed many times before, but all I could see were the deep dark circles under her eyes that no makeup could conceal.
“Milk, two sugars; thank you, madam,” I replied and quickly pulled my long black hair into a low bun, as appearance means so much to the mothers, I had learned.
She neared the baby and gave him a dummy. The cry stopped and a sucking sound took over. I observed the baby and the mother while the void inside my stomach grew bigger and bigger.
Madam poured the milk into a miniature china cup which she placed on a miniature plate and handed it over to me, demonstrating her exquisite taste while most probably doubting my ability to appreciate it. The cup clinked against the plate and, despite her efforts, exposed her shaking hands. She must be really exhausted, I thought, like most new mothers. She offered me a seat at the dining table, and I followed her with quiet steps.
“Did you find us OK?”
“Sure, madam, it’s a nice, big house you have,” and I thought, “It’s the biggest house in the neighbourhood, how could one miss it anyway!”
I used to clean a house on the same street, my Lord Justice. That was seven years ago when I arrived to the country. And before you all criticise me, any job is good if it pays the bills. But I’m not a cleaner anymore; I look after babies these days. She asked me if I had kids of my own and I quickly replied, “No, madam”.
That was the only thing I lied about.
I almost became a mother once. I was twenty back then: young, naïve, broke. Finding a job wasn’t easy. It’s hard for everyone without a good education or previous experience, but much harder for someone like me. People never trust me. I knew what they were thinking – that I would lie or steal from them. That’s something we all, Romany, get to know before learning to write our names. People in my home country made me feel like garbage. Sometimes your own folks look at you as though you’re a foreigner; they judge you instantly by the shade of your skin.
A guy I knew back home who sometimes hooked me with clients, to keep them company and stuff, asked me if I wanted to earn some extra money.
“What do I need to do?” I grinned.
He told me about this couple in between sips of cognac and cigarette puffs. “They’re British,” he said “and very rich”. The lady couldn’t get pregnant, so they wanted someone else to get pregnant instead and carry the baby for nine months. You see, my Lord, these things are normal, or that’s what I was told. It was good money, in British pounds and all. I was a bit scared at first but not about the getting pregnant part which, to my surprise, didn’t happen the way I thought it would, but instead I was taken to a hospital to implant the sperm. The procedure was not pleasant, but I didn’t complain once.
A few weeks later I was back in the hospital and the doctors told me the miracle had happened. I was about to become a mother. No, I thought, I’m here for the deal; I’m not going to be anyone’s mother. I feared I wouldn’t have money to eat and keep myself healthy, and so, would miscarriage and lose both the baby and the money. But I was wrong. You see, if a couple chooses you to carry their baby, your womb becomes priceless.
They offered me half the money the moment I agreed. Then asked to see me every week on Skype – gave me a mobile phone and all, paid the bills, asked if I needed more money to get myself fruits and veggies and meat. I’ve never eaten that much meat in my entire life, I’m telling you. The lady was gentle. The husband sat by her side but never said a word. I couldn’t understand what she was saying but my friend who connected us, was always there with me to translate. He never missed an opportunity to make me have sex with him afterwards, for finding the couple. This means, every week after the Skype call, in my own bed, dressed, my mind disconnected from the body. I was worried about the baby – what if he hurt him, but he said not to bother, the baby would be fine.
I gave birth to a healthy baby boy. It was 1st May, a big celebration, Labour Day. What an irony, no? They took him away the minute he cried his lungs out. Didn’t let me hold him or smell him. But he opened his eyes like a little mouse, and we locked gazes for just a second. My child. I cried for days afterwards, while my breasts were swollen and leaking, while the bump was still showing under my dress. I stopped eating and drinking. All I could think of was my baby, his feathery dark hair the same colour as mine.
I kept dreaming about him night after night. In my dreams, I was holding him tight while walking up a mountain. Just before reaching the top, I tripped and dropped him off the cliff. For a split second he looked right at me, then the darkness engulfed him and his screams sliced the air while he was falling down into the abyss. I woke up in tears, sweating, panting. The dream repeated itself so often I started to believe it happened for real, and the life I had was the one I was hallucinating.
I was examining new mothers on the street, pushing their babies in the nice prams, deprived from sleep but looking happy. When does a woman become a mother anyway? Is it the moment she gets pregnant, is it when she gives birth or when she looks after her child? Or is it the moment she recognises her baby’s cry?
A few months later, depressed, devastated by the loss and slowly disappearing from the face of the Earth, I decided to go look for my boy. I was desperate to find him. With the money I got from the couple, I bought a plane ticket and on a cold February morning arrived at the Stansted Airport. I had no place to go, no food to eat. I hid in a Tesco carpark for a while, ate expired food the store threw away in the big black bins and slept on a cupboard bed I had made from boxes. After a few weeks, a guy from the staff caught me. But I got lucky – he didn’t call the police, he didn’t even tell his manager. Instead, he wrote down an address of a cleaning company, and gave me a shelter in his garden shed, secretly, where I stayed for a few of months until I could afford to rent a proper room.
During the day, I used to wander the streets of London, frantically searching for my baby boy. I would stare at people’s faces in a hope to see the couple that took him away. I kept searching day after day, month after month, year after year. I would sit on a bench near a playground and observe the children playing, the hubbub, the joyful laughter. When a child cried, I would close my eyes and listen. But it was never him.
He is seven now. I imagine the way he must be looking in his sleek school uniform. I wonder if he likes singing like I used to, what toys he likes playing with, what he’s dreaming about. Please, my Lord, don’t look at me like that! I might be ill from pain and suffering, but I’m not insane. It’s a mothering thing. Those of you in the Jury, who are mothers, would understand.
I cleaned people’s homes for a year. One day, a client asked me if I could look after her toddler for half an hour while she popped to the shop. She must have noticed me playing with him from time to time, in between hovering and mopping the floors, the toddler laughing at the silly faces I was pulling at him. I agreed and when she came back and saw her child happy and smiling, she asked me to come every day to babysit. I agreed. She was a kind lady, and I much preferred playing with the child than cleaning people’s toilets. Over the next three years, she helped me learn English, she paid for my evening classes to become a teaching assistant, she even invited me to the child’s birthday parties. I stayed with them until the boy started school.
I then babysit two girls, one and three, for another couple of years before seeing the advert for a stay-in nanny, and applied right away. Who wouldn’t want to live in a big fancy house and be around the baby day and night? Madam invited me for an interview and that’s how we met. So, I said, “No, madam, I never had a child of my own but I’ve cared for three small children in the last five years.” I gave her the references I kept in my pocket. She seemed satisfied or maybe too tired to keep looking for a nanny. I started the very next morning.
She would spend most of the day in her room, and I would care for the baby boy all the time. I would feed him, change his nappies, soothe his cries. But there was something disturbing in the way he stared at me. The resemblance with my baby was astonishing. I felt as if my long lost child was looking at me from his face, blaming me for betraying him and giving him away for money. My anxiety and depression came back. I felt scared and non-present at the same time. It was as though I was possessed.
I planned it for two weeks.
When the day came, I took the baby in the pram and went for a walk. I kept walking even when the mother called, even when the darkness settled over the streets, until we boarded a train and left the city. You know the rest, my Lord Justice.
For the record, I confess I took the baby away but I’m not a thief. My Lord, Jury, I plead not guilty. I just wanted things to be fair, fair for us all. I wanted to repair something I broke all those years ago. Madam was tired and she didn’t know how to care for a baby. The boy needed love and affection. More than he needed food and dry nappies. And, the baby looked like my little angel – same gray eyes, same pointy chin, same shabby fingers. But it wasn’t just that. You see, a mother can recognize her baby by the cry. Well, my Lord, it was my baby’s cry. All I wanted was to bring him back to me.
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Nataliya Deleva's debut novel Four Minutes was originally published in Bulgaria (Janet 45, 2017), where the book was awarded Best Debut Novel and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year (2018). It has since been translated into German (eta Verlag, 2018), English (Open Letter Books, 2021) and Polish (Wydawnictwo EZOP, 2021). Nataliya’s second novel Arrival, written in English, is forthcoming in the UK from The Indigo Press in 2022.