Song: Who Needs You - Queen
An: some of the Queen songs mentioned in this chapter hadn't been recorded in 1971 and probably wouldn't have been written until the late 1970's, but let's just ignore that little inaccuracy. Enjoy!
December, 1971
She paced frantically up and down the hospital corridor, waves of despair and hopelessness washing over her in a thick tide. She just wished she could do something, anything, to help the small child contained in the hospital crib, instead of just standing there, pathetically, as doctors and nurses more skilled than herself rushed to save her daughters life.
They were caring for Lola now, not Victoria; they were doing the one thing that she was put on this earth to do.
The worst is over, she tried to remind herself, even the doctors had said that. Bronchitis was not unusual in a child Lola's age, especially one exposed to mould and damp like Lola had been in their squalid, one bedroom apartment. The disease rarely proved fatal, and besides, Victoria had caught it early.
Still, as she gazed at her fragile, beautiful baby girl through the thick glass sheet of the hospital window, she couldn't help but feel as though she had failed her. Her mind raced over the events of the past few days, unbidden, and the memories alone were enough to bring tears to her eyes.
I'm so sorry Lola baby, I really am. I'll sort this all out, I'll make it better, I promise. I'm sorry that sometimes I get sad and you don't know why, but I'm gonna make that better. I promise you, when you get out of here baby, we will be the most happy little family in the world, just the two of us.
Victoria was ashamed of the way she had acted this past week, ashamed of how weak she had been. It was the kind of shame that could eat a person away from the inside if left unchecked. She hadn't done anything bad, nothing that remotely equated to her being a bad mother, but she didn't see it that way. To her, her grief and her depression, both normal reactions to the things she had experienced, had put her daughter in danger. Her trouble mind couldn't compute the possibility that her depression and Lola's illness just happened to coincide with each other, a mere coincidence; it had to be her fault.
She had been through a lot this week, that much she could admit. On Monday, she had received a phone call from Giles to inform her that her father had passed and her mother, still distraught over her young pregnancy, had banned her from attending the funeral. Tuesday brought with it the Eviction notice, after Victoria had once again failed to pay rent. By Wednesday, her nerves were already shot; the wound was inexplicably worsened by the attempted robbery of the flat. She had managed to prevent the robbers from going into the bedroom, where Lola was sleeping (not a difficult task because the state of the flat quickly alerted the robbers to the likelihood that Victoria had nothing of any real value), but her efforts had left her with a broken nose. By Thursday, she was completely broken, a shell of her former self. She spent the majority of her day crying as she attended to Lola, still managing to fulfill her motherly duties perfectly despite her emotional state. She almost made it through the day without an emotional breakdown.
But then the night inevitably came, and with it, all those memories she wished to repress. Flashbacks of her childhood played in her mind, of her father, so loving and attentive back then, whose last words to her had been "you stupid little whore". Chris' ghost lingered with her, almost taunting her, that even dead, he had remained their parents favourite. And Lola started crying, and wouldn't stop. It wasn't the soft cry she would emit when she was hungry or tired; this was the loudest Victoria had ever heard her baby cry. She tried everything possible, she fed her, she burped her, she held her close, but nothing worked. Normally, Victoria had all the patience in the world when it came to that beautiful baby in the crib, but that night, already on the verge of collapse, she just couldn't cope. She'd endured almost an entire year of being forced to cope by herself.
