Read The Child for Free Online Page B

taken Felix from her arms.
    ‘I mean, there was absolutely no reason why—’
    ‘What are you driving at?’ She was getting really angry.
    ‘You didn’t smoke during your pregnancy, Felix wasn’t too warmly clad – he was wearing a sleepsuit that prevented him from lying on his tummy, and—’
    ‘I’d better hang up now.’
    It defeated Sophie why he should wake her up in order to list the potential causes of cot death, or sudden infant death syndrome. Although some forty per cent of all cases of infant mortality were embraced by this mysterious collective term, its causes were largely unidentified. Which wasn’t really surprising, given that every inexplicable death of an apparently healthy child was assigned to this dread category.
    ‘Wait, please! Just answer one question.’
    ‘Well, what is it?’ Sophie caught sight of herself in the hall mirror and winced at the expression on her face. She detected a mixture of sorrow, despair and fatigue.
    ‘I know you’ve hated me ever since it happened.’
    ‘Are you running a temperature?’ she asked. It wasn’t just his slurred speech. He sounded as if he had a bad cold.
    ‘No, I’m fine. All I need is an answer.’
    ‘Damn you, Robert! Look, I just don’t understand what you’re getting at.’ Having spat out the first words in a fury, she strove to moderate her voice for fear of waking Patrick and the twins.
    ‘He wasn’t breathing – in fact he’d stiffened a little by the time you finally opened the bathroom door.’
    The phone went silent for a moment or two.
    ‘The question is, why weren’t you sure even so? Why, in spite of everything, did you believe that Felix was still alive?’
    Sophie lowered the phone and let her arm hang limp at her side. Her tiredness had given way to the sort of torpor that normally overcame her only after taking sleeping pills. At the same time, she felt as if she’d just caught a burglar rifling through her underwear.
And that’s just what’s happened
, she thought as she made slowly for the children’s bedroom. Robert’s phone call had broken into her world and wrenched open a drawer in her psyche – one she had laboriously striven to nail shut with the help of her new husband, the wonderful twins and a qualified psychoanalyst.
    She opened the door with bated breath. Frieda had kicked her bedclothes to the foot of the bed and was sleeping peacefully with her arm around a cuddly penguin. Natalie’s little chest, too, was rising and falling at regular intervals. During the first critical year after the twins’ birth, Sophie had set the alarm clock to go off every two hours and looked in on them. Now she did that only when waking them at night for a pee. The paralysing fear she used to feel had been replaced by a loving routine.
    Or had been until just now. Until Robert called.
    ‘Why did you believe Felix was still alive?’
    The soft mattress yielded beneath her as she perched on the edge of Natalie’s bed and brushed the dream-damp hair off her brow.
    ‘There are times when I still believe it,’ she whispered. Then she kissed her daughter gently on the forehead and started to weep.

The Quest
    Just as we have thousands of dreams in our present life, so our present life is only one among thousands which we have entered from another, more real life, and to which, after death, we shall return.
    Leo Tolstoy
    Every person brings something new into the world; something inexistent heretofore, something primal and unique.
    Martin Buber
    Birthmarks and birth defects are proof of people’s recurrent lives on earth.
    Ian Stevenson

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    Perhaps it was because he was overtired. Perhaps the collision occurred because, instead of looking where he was going, he was watching the DVD unfold once more in his mind’s eye.
    He wouldn’t have dared to watch it again last night. Not all of it, at least. He had no desire for another sight of Felix in his death throes. That was why he had skipped to the shots of the birthday