Sarah Clement writes short- and long-form narrative nonfiction as well as autobiographical short stories. She has won a London Writers Award and a Creative Future Literary Award and her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize. Sarah’s writing centres on the complexities of our inner lives, mining her own experiences and informed by her background in academic research psychology. On the Goldsmiths MA she is working on a book that blends family memoir with sociocultural history. The book is called Lostling: The Story of Stillbirth and the Search for an Intangible Brother. Its maternity theme is a return to Sarah’s earlier research interests when she wrote The Caesarean Experience (Harper Collins) and edited Psychological Perspectives on Pregnancy and Childbirth (Churchill Livingstone). The opening of Lostling is presented here.
Email: sarahclementwriter@gmail.com
Website: www.sarahclement.co.uk
X: @sarahclemwrites
Lostling
The Story of Stillbirth and the Search for an Intangible Brother
Part I Traces
The dead are the imagination of the living.
John Berger 1984
How does one write a story about an encounter with nothing?
Saidiya Hartman 2021
The pottery baby stands in the crook of his mother’s arm, on one leg about to step into nothingness or some great adventure of his own. It is 1971 and I am eight. This baby on the sitting room shelf keeps catching my eye, like a hook. I look at it in secret. The baby is wearing yellow. It makes me think of sunbeams. His mother is in green and has a halo. The air is sticky when I try to look away, like when you pull a teaspoon out of treacle. The baby has no face. His mother has no face either. Just smooth blank ovals where faces should be.
*
Half a century has passed. The pottery Madonna and Child now sits on the mantelpiece in my own front room, next to the desk where I write. A small, treasured relic.
My captivation with the pottery baby began in my childhood home in Exeter, though I’m almost certain it had been on a shelf in our previous house in Loughborough. When we moved to Exeter it was 1970 and I was seven – a coincidence of sevens that seemed, then, magical and important. Mum and Dad would play the soundtrack from the musical Hair, and the opening song would swirl round our sitting room, declaring the Age of Aquarius had dawned. To me, this new decade was an entirely new age. Mum had changed after the house move, becoming almost the opposite of her former self.
I have two photographs which encapsulate the change in Mum. The first is a black and white six-by-four photo of her at a party. 1965 is written on the back. She looks beautiful and sad, her hair short, jet black and slightly Lisa Minelli. She wears a black shift dress, a necklace wrapped three times round her neck, her legs crossed one over the other, her arms crossed too, gripping her wine glass so tightly her knuckles are pale.
In the other photo from the early 1970’s she is wearing a loose patterned smock-top and wide, faded jeans, kneeling back on her heels, head back with a blissed-out smile, her hair now chestnut and tumbling over her shoulders. The photo was taken in an Ashram on the North Devon coast. Mum had become a yoga teacher.
Mum began spending weekends at the Ashram, driving there in her grey Mini. The Ashram members followed a melange of ideas from all the counterculture gurus of the day: RD Laing, Arthur Janov, Bagwan Shree Rajneesh, and L. Ron Hubbard. They, and Mum, aimed to rid themselves of all the sad, bad, frightening things that had ever happened to them. These things that weighed them down like heavy armour, made them ill, and stopped them living life fully and being alive. One of the steps in this quest was to speak of the sad, bad, frightening things. To rupture the silence.
Was it this new quest that led Mum to speak of the tiny-huge thing? Was it something about me, being eight by then and old enough? Me being the family listener? Or was it simply the accumulation of time, like an underground stream bubbling up through the earth?
*
Mum sips tea in the big leather chair in the sitting room, the chair with the brass studs round the edges, holding it together. I’m sitting on the floor nearby, close, so Mum can’t say I’m being distant, but not too close.
Mum looks at me as if she’s just remembered I’m there. She returns to her tea-sipping.
‘I had a baby before I had Matthew,’ she says.
The startle of it takes away my words.
Out of nowhere the baby begins to appear, right here in our sitting room. Like when a conjuror unwraps an empty hankie and a dove flutters out.
‘A baby boy,’ says Mum. ‘He died just before he was born.’
‘Oh.’
I sit stone-still. A giant silence fills the room. Mum looks in my direction but sees right through me. The invisible rays from her eyes pass through the wall behind me, through the house next door and the rest of the houses in our cul-de-sac, on into infinity. The Rolling Stones song ‘2000 Light Years’ seeps through the ceiling from Dad’s art studio upstairs.
The baby is there, hovering invisibly in the air. After I don’t know how long, Mum stands and disappears upstairs. The invisible baby disappears too. But not quite.
Somewhere, it lingers.
*
Now, decades after it was made, I take the pottery Madonna and Child off my mantelpiece and turn it upside down. There is no name, nor any initials, on the bottom to indicate its maker. I am almost certain Dad made it. The mother’s and baby’s hands have no separate fingers, like the hands of the pieces in the big pottery chess set Dad made in Loughborough. I remember going to the pottery studio at the college where Dad taught student art teachers. The Kings and Queens in their crowns and gowns and the knights in their chainmail and helmets, all with mitten-like hands, waited to be fired in the roaring kiln.
Like Mum, Dad said very little about the lost baby. Or maybe he did: through this piece of pottery he made. Or probably made. So many things about the baby are hidden and uncertain. Sixty-three years on from the birth and death of my never-known brother, I am trying to untangle all this.
*
It’s night now. The cuddly toys sit on the eiderdown in their groups – the dogs, the bears, and the jungle animals – keeping watch in the darkness. Wide awake still, I start to think of the baby Mum told me about the other day. Even the idea of him is slippery. A baby who was and wasn’t. Does a baby like that count? Are there three of us – Matthew, me, and Rachel – like we always thought? Or four of us?
The baby is real and unreal. Like Jesus. I think of Sunday school songs, Jesus wanting us for a sunbeam, and dying for all the children of the world. But the baby who died would be more like the baby Jesus, the one in ‘Away in a Manger’, laying down his sweet head, no crying he makes.
Born and dead are opposite words. What does it mean to be both?
*
One day, I’m at home and alone with Mum again.
‘Stillborn,’ says Mum. ‘That’s what they call it.’
She’s saying it as if it’s a usual thing to talk about, but there are little cracks in her voice.
I listen, intently, to the unfolding story.
*
Mum’s words are etched into my memory but are unanchored. Did Mum explain the word stillborn that day in the sitting room when she first told me about the baby? Or did this part of her sparse story come a little later? Where was I when this phrase was spoken? When Mum told me more details, was it in one narrative chunk, or two, or three? Were elements of the tale repeated? Am I retelling the nuggets of the story in the order it was told? I don’t know.
Trauma and grief exist outside of time. In her stillbirth memoir, The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch explains: ‘I remember things in retinal flashes without order … It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations … All the events of my life swim in and out between each other without chronology.’
In her essay, Time Lived, Without its Flow, Denise Riley writes of the ‘curious sense of being pulled right outside of time’ in the years after the sudden death of her adult son. When the child’s life stops, says Riley, ‘it freezes the parents’ time too. They are unable to ‘move on’ because ‘there is no medium through which to move any more.’
Perhaps Mum has passed a slither of disrupted time on to me.
*
Still, adjective:
Staying in the same position, not moving.
For small chunks of my childhood, Mum does not move. She sits motionless, in the big leather chair or on the floor, her legs in a knot she calls The Lotus. Almost in a trance, she gazes out of the window, as if she is waiting for someone to come home.
*
A dead child’s stillness finds an echo in its mother. In Denise Riley’s poem, ‘A Part Song’, rooted in her grief for her adult son who died suddenly, she uses images of startling, sudden stillness:
The sloping gull arrests its curl
The glassy sea is hardened waves
In ‘Stillborn Elegy’ by Traci Brimhall, the poem’s narrator describes the stillness that entered her life after her daughter’s stillbirth as: ‘the stillness inside the burnt piano’.
In writing this book, can I raise a tune from the ashes of the piano?