There is a girl and she breathes.

She is in her mother’s arms, just born. She opens her eyes for the first time and closes them because it is too bright, even in the dim light of a night-time bedroom. She moves her hand up, stretching, not reaching for anything, and it brushes her mother’s face. There are sounds she recognises, but cannot understand yet   Laughter. Her mother’s voice. My voice - her father’s voice.

Time for her has no structure so young, but already it might seem to pass now that there are things to see and hear and there is the breast that she already moves toward, hungry without knowing yet what hunger is, thirsty, without having tasted water. We both stroke her face, run the tip of our fingers across her eyelids when they are shut and we smile when they are open. Our faces are white with exhaustion but we will never be so beautiful again, happiness smoothing out the lines and reddening our lips. The midwife busies herself in the room but it is below the level of our consciousness. We are fixed on the girl who we already know will be called Xanthe, which means yellow, or yellow haired, partly because it is a beautiful name and partly too because her mother was consumed with the colour in the last few weeks of the pregnancy, so much so that all the clothes and toys we bought are yellow and all the flowers and even the food we ate. All those things are nothing beside this girl, held tightly between us and even though her hair is darker than we thought it might be, we know it is her name. Xanthe. Yellow. She is safe in our arms, held close to us and the world ends at the borders of the bed and even that territory is half unknown because neither of us can take our eyes off the girl we have made and bought safely into the world.

And there is another girl and that girl does not breathe.

She will never breathe. She is held the same, in her mother’s arms, close to the breast, but she doesn’t open her eyes. She will never open her eyes, they will stay shut, never seeing the light of any room. Her arms are still. She does not and can never stretch or reach for anything, purposefully or by accident, not her mother’s face or her own and she will hear no sound clearly, now she is free from the muffling confines of the womb and she will never recognise her mother or her father, by voice or by smell or by touch.

There is no time for her and there never will be, no structure, no longings, no movement toward the breast. Her mother’s breasts will fill, cruelly, with milk that she will never drink, that will never nurture her, strengthen her, fortify her against disease. She will neither hunger or thirst. We both stroke her face, run the tip of our fingers across her eyelids but we cannot smile, though we can see that she was beautiful. Our own faces are white with the shock of it. They are long and blank, empty with confusion. The blood has drained to somewhere. The midwife kneels in front of us and, because she understands, her face shows the pain and grief our inability to understand keeps away from ours and we look from the girl to the midwife and in neither place do we find what we want – some hope that this is not happening.

She will be called Xanthe, this we already know. The name means yellow, or yellow haired and we know that this will be her name, but we cannot remember why and, in spite of what we thought her hair is dark, darker than either of ours was when we were born. We hold her and touch her skin, which is perfectly soft. The skin on her lip and chin has peeled away but she has a beautiful wide mouth and her nose is small and snub. She looks just like her brother, I keep saying. She looks just like her brother. But he moved and she never did.

And there is another place where there is no girl.

She is neither conceived nor born. She is neither alive or dead. When the test was taken there was no positive result and that month was marked down as a failed attempt and her parents returned to their trying. What happened next is unknown, or it is essentially the same as what happened in the places where she lived and where she died. It differs only in that she was not conceived and she was not born. This place always exists and always had existed but for us it only becomes real for a second or two, when we forget, despite ourselves, that we have lost our daughter. It must exist, because we exist in it, for a second or two, every now and then and our daughter is neither with us, nor is she buried in the place in which we have now decided that we will be buried too. She is nothing and no-one and we are two different people, living lives we can no longer recognise. And yet it must exist. We have both been there, both continue to go there, only very briefly, but for long enough that when we return there is a wrench, in our hearts, of guilt and fear and sadness.

This place is the worst place. In this place all the people we are have gone.

I want to write a life for my daughter. She never lived, so I want to write a life for her – one book a year, for every year until she is eighteen and then, well, her life is her own. Perhaps I will change my mind and continue past the age of her maturity, overstep the bounds, but that is my intention now. I want to write about the things we hoped for her before she was born, her wonderful life, the life that we were going to try and give her, the life that we would give her if we were the parents we wanted to be – loving, strong, committed, indefatigable, wealthy enough to provide her with whatever opportunity she could use. That isn’t so bad is it? Or is it every child’s nightmare, the controlling parent run wild, dictating every detail of their lives, not seeing where wish fulfilment and the borders of the child’s individuality clash. But what choice have I got? I want her to live. To have lived. To continue to have lived, whatever confusion of tenses could express my desire that she was living on into the future despite the fact that we buried her only a few days ago. It was one of the first things I thought. Not the first, not by a long way, obviously not, but it was one of the first. It makes sense. A life is like a story and stories can be written, I call my self a writer, shouldn’t I be able to write her a life? Mustn’t I do it? I think I must.

There are problems though. Obviously there are problems. No-one lives alone. I would like to write her life but we are all going to have to be in there too. Me, her father, Emma, her mother, Elliot her brother. Can I write these people? Do I have the right? Do I have the ability. I don’t know. I’m going to do it anyway – the world is like that now, no question has a good answer, one that closes the gap, fills in the lack of knowledge. No one knows why our daughter died. It’s just one of those things. That was the best anyone has managed. The consultant apologised, but that was essentially what she said too. It is a failure of medical science, she said, that we will probably never know why your daughter was born dead, at full term, showing no signs of distress, perfectly developed weighing eight pounds and three ounces with a head circumference of thirty seven centimetres. Exactly the same, down to the ounce and to the centimetre, as her brother, who is sleeping beside his mother as I type here in the corner of the room when I ought to be getting some sleep. The ridiculous thing is, I no longer need it. I’m getting too much sleep, acclimatised as I am to expecting a new and wakeful baby, familiar already through her brother’s restless nights. Now he sleeps with us, so we can check to see if he is breathing when we wake in the night and his slow dreaming breaths lull us back to sleep whether we feel we can or not.

I’m getting off the point. I will try and write her life. Perhaps it won’t come to much, for the first year, more a catalogue of how her death is effecting us, but as the years go past I hope to get more of a feel for her and how we would have reacted to her.

The midwife has gone.

For the first time we look at the clock beside the bed – it is three fifteen in the morning. We are both hovering on the edge of sleep but this beautiful thing will not let go of us. It is impossible not to look at her. She looks so much like her brother, but delicate, fragile. We don’t know whether it is because we know him and his bold fearlessness but she looks quieter, more peaceful. More thoughtful, even though we recognise so many of the same features, particularly around the mouth, which she opens and closes in what is barely a yawn. She has stopped feeding and now opens her eyes which are utterly black, for seconds at a time, and her head moves left to right and right to left with every breath. I have to blink almost constantly because I am too close to see her clearly, but I can’t move back. Emma holds her and I am happy to let her, because she deserves it. She has worked so hard to bring this girl to us, today, through the labour and for months. I can see pride in her, in the set of her mouth as she looks at her daughter, at our daughter and I feel pride as I look at them both and feel it in myself, for the small effort I could add, holding her through the contractions, calling for the midwife, dealing with practicalities and then running back to her when the next contraction came. We are all proud but most of all we are in love, already, with our daughter. Xanthe.

            Her top lip overlaps her bottom one, just like her brother’s does and it is puckered in the exact same way, as if an invisible hand is squeezing the two sides together, but her mouth is longer, wider. Her nose is very small and curved and meets her brow in a half circle that we both find ourselves stroking, one after the other with the tip of our little fingers and when she opens her eyes we move them a little guiltily away, worried we have disturbed her but when they are closed again we are back there, ruffling the almost non-existently fine hair between her eyebrows. Her hair really is dark. Emma thought it might have been wet and I thought it was a trick of the light but it really is dark. Brown with a shadow of redness. Chestnut, like a conker. I worry if xanthe is the right name but I don’t say anything, because, really, I know that it is and I know that Emma is thinking the same thing and deciding not to say anything too. If I’m wrong, then she’ll say something soon enough. But I don’t think I am.

They are taking us in the ambulance. I don’t know why or what for. Emma is staring forward and her eyes are blank. I don’t know why we are going to the hospital and I don’t know what for. She is dead. Xanthe is dead. The ambulance paramedic is sitting across from me and she looks uncomfortable. She has nothing to do. She should be busy, taking pulses or setting up equipment. She wants to be active and in control, radioing the hospital for instructions, or applying medicine. She has no role here. Why are we going to the hospital? What are they going to do there? For something to do, she takes Emma’s blood pressure. It’s fine.

            Xanthe is in my arms. I run the back of my finger over her cheek. She is still warm and her skin is smooth, except where it has come away at the lip and chin. Those parts are going darker, redder, as time passes, but if I narrow my eyes, or when tears come, which they do without warning, I have to force myself not to imagine she’s alive. She could so easily be alive. She should be alive. Everyone thinks so, everyone says so. No-one has any idea why. When I ask them why they shake their heads and touch me, on the hand, or on the shoulder. No one understands it.

She’s wrapped in a blanket. She doesn’t move at all. The bumping of the ambulance shakes her, but she doesn’t make movements for herself. If I move her in my arms sometimes her head becomes misshapen. The bones don’t mesh. They overlap. I touch her head, her hair. When I look at Emma her eyes are blank. She looks back but we don’t see each other. There is something in the way.

I reach for Xanthe’s hand and when I put my finger where her’s seem to grip, it feels like she is holding on, but when I move my hand away she makes no effort to hold on. I do this ten or twenty times and still we are in the ambulance. There is silence because no-one has anything to say. This goes on forever and then we are at the hospital.

Perhaps we are still waiting for her to be born. This is more sensible. It’s not that she was never conceived, it’s just that we are still waiting for her to be born. Nine months is a long time, it seems like forever. The waiting is ingrained in us after all that time so perhaps this is what has happened, we have become trapped in a lifetime of waiting. It is ridiculous, but it is less ridiculous than imagining that our daughter has died for no reason. Sometimes, when we wake up, or if we are distracted, it is possible to think she was just never born, that the labour will begin any time. When Elliot distracts us, with his play or a new word and for a little while we smile or are amazed, before we come back to our senses, it is possible to mistake ourselves into believing that Emma is still pregnant and that we have regressed into the pregnancy. Emma’s belly is still big, so that someone might ask, “when’s it due?” and we are people to, who might be fooled or deceived, and we want to believe this has not happened and somewhere there is something that wants us to believe it, in our minds and we imagine, for no more than a second, and only imagine - it is not a delusion, it is not pathological - we imagine that she is now eight months pregnant and that the baby will be born soon and the transition between that state of thinking and the reality of things as they are, as they can only be, the reality of a dead child who will not move or breath and only become colder and more dead, the transition between those two states makes us despair.  It drags us into a world we do not wish to inhabit and yet it is the only world. And, more than that, it is the only world where Xanthe exists at all.

I’m finding it hard to write. You won’t notice because of the way things appear on a page, but days go by between my writing one sentence and the next and that is because I can’t find the motivation to write. There is guilt, but apart from that there is nothing. I am usually driven to write. Last year I wrote the best part of four books - something approaching a quarter of a million words. For no real reason other than that I enjoyed it and I was trying to make a career of it. No reason at all that makes any sense to me now. Trivia. I have a real reason now and I find it hard to sit down and do it. I only write because I promised myself that I would and that I don’t let Xanthe’s death be the end of everything for me, and for all of us, as a family. I only do anything for that reason. It is the most important reason I can imagine for doing anything and I can’t bring myself to do it. It has been a month since she was born and three weeks since she was buried. She cannot be an end to everything good. What kind of legacy is that for someone? Her only legacy, because she never drew a breath. She never did anything that she could take credit for. It is up to us, her people, the ones that survive her to provide something for her to be remembered by and not just a plaque on her grave. I promised I would write for her. I promised Emma and I promised her, silently by her graveside, wondering if she could hear thoughts better than words, knowing that she couldn’t but hoping that she could. It is something I have to do. Still, I find it hard to write.