For once, this baby boy can’t see his papa weeping. Fast asleep, Liam looks like a tiny banana in his yellow onesie, safely strapped into a padded car seat — on the passenger side, where Lily should be. His chubby little legs are covered with the soft white blanket that his mama made for him; painstakingly, muttering and swearing under her breath, more adept at wielding power tools than knitting needles.

David needs a minute, maybe two; just a bit of time to get a grip before he has to walk into that awful building. Once he signs the document there is no going back.

Liam cries inconsolably the entire drive home from court; every one of the ninety minutes. David is so heavy with exhaustion, he doesn’t bother untangling his son from the straps under the blanket, just lifts out the entire screaming seat, carries it into the house and deposits it less gently than intended inside the cot bed. The bump startles Liam, his arms jerk upwards, eyes wide open, and his crying is replaced with brief intervals of sniffling, like little aftershocks. David swallows a lump, lifts the seat by its handle and starts to swing it gently, back and forward, careful not to hit the bars.

As always, his eyes wander to the watercolour print above the cot: Charles Rennie Mackintosh, The Lighthouse. Their first piece of art, in their first home together.

When Lily first showed it to him, she had picked up a thick black marker pen and, in what seemed like utter disrespect for her own hard work, drew a continuation of the smaller path, down from the lighthouse, across the wooden frame and onto the freshly painted wall left of the print. On this path, two stick people were holding hands. “I found out where he painted it.” Her face was glowing. “In Port Vendres in France. And one of these days, we are going to go there, find the lighthouse, and have a mad passionate kiss right underneath it. That way it will mean something to us. Whenever we look at it, we will remember being right there, to the left of the frame.” It took him far too long to notice that she had continued to draw while she was speaking. The two figures were now joined by one smaller stick person of unknown gender. Much smaller. Much much smaller, standing between them. David just stared for a while. Then he broke into a victory dance around the room, whooping with glee like a little boy.

The first symptoms were subtle: When he noticed her curves raising the duvet cover ever so slightly higher than usual. But then again, maybe the pregnancy had added some bulk? He didn’t dare mention it to her.

When Lily was trying to reach for a vase on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard, supporting herself with one hand only on the countertop, then pushing up and reaching it effortlessly, both feet off the floor. She is a strong woman, he convinced himself.

When he entered the living room to find her reading a book, clearly levitating above the sofa by several inches, her legs crossed, feet hovering above the carpet. But she jumped up to greet him and he dismissed the idea as nonsense. A trick of the light maybe.

Six weeks after the birth, it happened. They had been bickering all day, sleep-deprived and cranky, no different from other new parents. Their definitions of a clean enough house differed fundamentally, and Lily’s mum and dad had announced a visit.

“Leave it, I’ll do it later.” He tried to sound reassuring, but there was no stopping her. She ran from the table, picking up a few items, to the kitchen, putting down the items. Then into the bathroom, from there into the bedroom, checking some washing she had hung up last night, back into the living room, straightening chairs, then fluffing up sofa cushions. Why were there so many cushions? David, who had been tasked with cleaning the fireplace, noticed that she was running around at increasing speed, in smaller and smaller concentric circles.

It took him entirely by surprise when Lily accidentally stumbled and bounced off the floor — as if it were made of rubber. In an attempt to steady herself, she seemed to push off the ground with her right foot and shot upwards, narrowly missing the living room lamp. Her head hit the polystyrene tiles at such speed, she knocked right through the false ceiling. David’s instinctive giggle was choked when he heard a muffled whimpering sound. Lily’s arms spread out wide and she started to rotate, faster and faster, a bizarre spinning top. Tiny specks of blood were flung away from her fingertips, with the centrifugal force painting a grotesque red line on the walls, perfectly parallel to the wooden picture rail.

After what might have been anywhere between seconds and minutes, the spinning slowed; her arms slumped down by her sides and David realised she had lost consciousness. He felt frozen to the spot, his eyes fixed on her head, stuck in the cavity. He forced himself to blink and, with shaking knees, was finally able to climb onto a chair. At a loss to figure out where to start, he chose to inspect her neck. He could see no major injury, only a thin stream trickling down into her cleavage, feeding a growing patch of red on the front of her turquoise jumper. He could just about reach her ankle and tried to pull her down, but something forced her back up as if she were falling upwards. Only her wide shoulders stopped her from disappearing into the cavity altogether.

He had to call the emergency services three times because they kept hanging up on him. On the third attempt he suppressed his hysterical opening line ‘My wife is falling into the ceiling’ and instead exclaimed his wife had had an accident trying to change lightbulbs and was now injured and stuck on the ceiling lamp. That one worked.

By the time the first responders arrived, armed with an extendable ladder, Lily had regained consciousness. She was terrified and her muffled questions and outcries were hard to hear. David tried to calm her, but ice-cold panic froze his lips shut.

It took three weeks to get her admitted to the research centre. Twenty-one days of disbelief and ridicule. Repeated admissions to hospital resulted in immediate discharge, as her condition appeared more mythical than medical. A military facility investigated the possibility of an alien influence before referring her back to hospital. Lily’s mum and Liam cried enough for everyone, while Lily’s dad and David succumbed to tantrums, then shame. David’s mum brought cold chicken jerky dishes to every visit. One afternoon, a hospital assistant forgot to properly tighten the restraints on Lily’s wheeled stretcher during transit between hospital and ambulance, allowing her to slip out from under her blanket and float upwards into the sky. Only a nurse’s lightning-fast reflexes prevented Lily’s ascent into the outer stratosphere.

Both sets of grandparents were trying to help out as much as possible, but everyone agreed that Liam needed one stable caregiver, and that was now his father. David used his HR savvy to take on paternity leave. He worked at a major insurance firm, and his colleagues were more than supportive, especially when he brought in little Liam for a visit. Handing in a sick note for Lily was more complex, considering no one could legally agree whether levitation constituted a sickness. A particularly execrable clerk argued that she had in fact developed superpowers. David got very good at taking deep breaths.

He visited his wife at the research centre five times a week. Suit jacket and tie disappeared early on. Gradually, long-sleeved shirts gave way to hoodies with traces of dried baby-spew trailing down his back. His wild, freedom-loving wife was held in a cell with cushioned walls and ceilings. At least they had stopped tethering her to the ground. Her ankles and wrists had been bruised badly during that phase, despite the careful use of padded restraints. At first, they had used soundproofing tiles – with soft peaks, made of foam. But, since sitting or lying on the ceiling had become new normality, she asked for them to be replaced with flat cushions. At least the spinning never reoccurred.

The guard at the door stopped checking David’s ID and simply pressed the door buzzer with a grunt of recognition. Increasingly, Liam was left with one of his grandmothers. The facility was not set up for infants. Four months old, he was able to grab anything in reach and put it into his mouth. He was already able to roll from his back to his tummy, proudly holding up his head. Other times, he would lie on the floor, intensely staring at his mama up on the ceiling and stretch his arms out to her, crying to be held. They tried it a few times, using baby carrier slings, but on several occasions, she nearly dropped him. The risk was just too great, and watching her little boy there, crying for her, unable to do anything to console him, was upsetting Lily too much. One afternoon he walked in on her trying to break through the ceiling. She had ripped off all cushioning and was clawing at the plaster underneath with bleeding fingernails.

“Just let me go,” she sobbed, “you would all be better off without me anyway. I can’t do this anymore.” That’s when they started sedating her.

David recorded every nappy change, every mealtime, every smile on his mobile. Once Lily was her old self again, he would help return every single moment that was stolen from her.

Finally, they had a diagnosis. Inverted Gravity Disorder. One of the assistants had uncovered a piece of research that suggested as many as one in a thousand women experienced this condition within 8 weeks after giving birth. She had explained it to Lily and David but might as well have spoken Aramaic. The head physicist did not do much better. Worse, he insisted on speaking to David alone.

“You’ve probably heard of the stress-energy-momentum-tensor?” Not a promising start. “Well, let me put it this way. In order to achieve gravity, mass-energy, pressure, momentum and stresses have to balance each other in a perfect system. Now, a body’s mass comes from the kinetic energy of the quarks and the binding energy of the gluons. Quarks form protons, which are positively charged. Fascinatingly, when your wife gave birth, the oxytocin, released in the process, started a chain reaction, in which…”

David’s mind started to drift. Why was this kept a secret? Why was there not more literature? Why was there no cure? With each question, he could feel the pressure in his neck rising.

Increasingly, the medication confused Lily’s mind. More often than not, David was greeted with indifference. She made excuses for not recognising him: it was the perspective from up there, the strange angle, the artificial light — all had agreed that windows would be too great a risk. She spent days sleeping, curled up on the ceiling.

That’s when the head physicist told him about the option to obtain a court order. He explained that, while Lily was no longer able to state her wishes, a surrogate consenter was able to make decisions based on the patient’s known views in the past.

David stares at the lighthouse print as if it might deliver the answers, like the hidden clues in an escape room. Images of Lily start to form, enduring experiments on her body, day after day, some of them cruel and undignified. He pictures her face: lips pressed together, a fierce determination to get back to her son, to her home, to herself. David strokes Liam’s warm little head in the cot. Then he picks up his mobile and calls the head physicist.

His throat is dry, and he pours himself a cup of water. They will tell him when they finished the treatment. None of this is in his control anymore. She will return to him, or she will leave them forever. The thought is eerily comforting.

“Daddy!”, Liam crows, he has found another shell in the dirt. How do seashells find their way up here? It’s not like they can fly. The thought makes him smile and shiver at once. Hard to believe his baby boy is two already — still wobbly on his chubby little legs but refusing to be strapped down in his buggy. David is not fazed by the fact that the lighthouse is nothing like the painting. Clearly, Mackintosh used a tiny bit of artistic licence, that’s only to be expected. The walls are grey and flaky, more concrete than lime paint, rust coloured stains running down the steep sea-facing wall — graffitied over with two giant white Ls. David assumes this might refer to Llibertat Països Catalans, a common slogan in this area. The second L ends in an abrupt downward line. He chooses to believe this rebel ran out of paint. In the dark, the lighthouse safely guides ships from the emerald sea into a small deep-water port, filled with commercial, fishing and leisure vessels. His stomach begins to rumble at the thought of another visit to Le Poisson Rouge, one of the many seafood restaurants selling the daily catch fresh from the boats. His mind wanders to grilled catfish, baguette, a bottle of red, pressed from the Mourvèdre grapes of the surrounding hills.

“Daddy, Daddy, look! A ship!” He is startled for a moment. That’s not just some ship. A majestic three-masted barque glides into the port, a vision straight out of a pirate movie. For a moment, he fears he might have lost touch with reality. He grabs his son and lifts him high onto his shoulders.

Further down the path, he can see Lily, seeking refuge in a rare patch of shade. Despite the heat, she is wearing a pair of knee-high Doc Martens and the weight slows her down. She looks up at her husband and son and smiles, waving with one hand, covering her eyes against the sun with the other. A sudden breeze makes her thin cotton skirt billow out like a welcoming flag.

Lily shouts something but the sound of crashing waves, formed in the wake of the barque, drowns out her voice. “That’s okay,” he mouths, knowing she can’t hear him, “you can always tell us later.” And then, with a smile, “See you soon, sugar dumpling.”

***

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