Ricochet Baby (12 page)

He has fine delicate bones and a big pulsating fontanelle and eyes that are unmistakeably blue.

The midwife eases the hospital gown away from my breast, and pushes Nathan’s head against it. He attaches himself to my
nipple
like a vigorous little suction pump. I look from one woman to the other, suddenly not knowing what to say.

‘It wasn’t meant to happen like this. Please find my husband. Did the man who brought me here leave any of my things?’

I am thinking that somebody will have to worry about my car later on but, for the moment, I need my handbag, which contains my credit cards, my library card, my tax number, my passport, my supermarket ID, our tickets for the last wine and food festival and, most important, a list of phone numbers. My bag and briefcase have been left at the desk. The staff are puzzled but courteous. They have become helpful.

Alone in the delivery room, I hear, through the wall, the voice of a very young girl whimpering like a cornered animal. Only
thirteen
, the nurses tell me. What is the world coming to? No, oh no, she says over and again. No, please stop it, please, oh no, please, I don’t want to have a baby.

But I know now that nothing on earth will stop a baby once it is ready to come. I wonder if this girl is the one who came to
antenatal
classes, but of course that girl will end up in the hospital where she was meant to go. Everything will have gone wrong, her life, her illicit fumble with a class mate (for that is how I imagine it must have been), the hopes her mother has invested in her
pathetic, pretty daughter, but at least she will be in the right place. The people surrounding her will be familiar, beloved. Not a stranger bearing a purple gun.

I feel Nathan slipping from my grasp and it would be the
easiest
thing simply to let go. Paul and I have planned a perfect birth for this baby, but Paul has not been there, is not even aware of his son’s existence. And it’s not his fault, it’s mine. I have gone to a strange place, and been delivered of a child, as the Bible would have it, among strangers, braying in the arms of a man I have never seen in my life. My elation has drained away.

Very carefully, I lower Nathan on to the bed beside me, and lie back against the pillows.

M
ARISE IS THE
first to reach Roberta. ‘Don’t tell them where I was,’ Roberta says, when Marise arrives at the delivery suite.

‘What did you think you were doing?’ Marise is no fool; there is no point in trying to hide what she has already worked out
anyway
. She had left her computer on at Josh Thwaite’s file.

‘Don’t make it worse.’

‘What will you tell them?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Okay, so what will I tell them?’

‘Anything, make something up, you’re good at that.

Marise smiles in a malicious, thoughtful way. Roberta closes her eyes.

F
OXING
, G
LASS
THINKS
, watching his daughter. He knows when
creatures
are absenting themselves from their situation. It is like dying animals, often it seems as if they have entered the realm of death while their limbs are still twitching. Not that he thinks his
daughter
is dying, not that exactly, but something has changed in her, something that frightens him. She is like a war casualty.

Edith and Glass and Fay and Milton cluster round the bed. Edith and Glass have come in a hurry, Edith’s face naked, except for the broken red veins that bloom in her cheeks when she hasn’t had time to cover them with make-up. Fay is a woman good at
carrying
things off, but her composure is badly shaken. Milton’s smile is sheepish and engaging. What was it someone down at the yards had said to Glass, after meeting Milton? He remembers. A man who interviews well and changes jobs often. He’d spat in a pen of Herefords. Top jobs, he’s a club man, mark my word. There is more to his smile than meets the eye.

His daughter’s crime is to have had her baby in the wrong place, at the wrong time. She should never have been where she was.
She
has
brought
it
on
herself.
The accusation hangs unspoken but heavy in the air.

‘It could have happened anywhere,’ Marise says. ‘You could tell by the way Roberta was prowling about that something was wrong.’

‘Then why didn’t she go home? Any …’ Paul stops himself. He had been going to say any normal person. ‘Anyone else would have gone home.’

‘She doesn’t have experience at having babies,’ says Marise, adopting the role of expert.

‘This man who delivered her baby on the back seat of his car, who is he?’ Paul asks, his voice cold.

Roberta opens her mouth as if to speak and changes her mind. Nobody except Glass notices. She wants to argue with him, he thinks, tell him it wasn’t like that, which he already knows. But she won’t.

As much as possible, with so many people crammed in the small room, Marise looks Paul up and down. ‘I wouldn’t have a clue,’ she says.

‘You must know who she was going to see.’

‘She didn’t tell me.’

‘Hadn’t she talked about any of the cases she was dealing with?’

‘Don’t you know about the Privacy Act?’ Marise produces a nail file from her handbag, and begins to shape her nails with
elaborate
care.

‘This is a little different,’ Paul snaps.

In a way, he is speaking for each of them. They are all trying to picture this stranger who has taken over the role of father, and disappeared now, like an odd mirage, a flicker in their collective imagination.

Roberta is looking for the stranger too, Glass thinks. He is shocked by the realisation, but he can tell that it is true. Paul, standing beside her, looking foolish and embarrassed, when he might have been proud, is not who she wants. He wonders where Paul was; it has taken hours for his parents to track him down. Glass tries to ignore the sharpness of the voices and the tension in the air, and concentrates on the baby. He sees perfection, the child smooth and unmarked from his rapid transit into the world, but perhaps that is what all grandparents see. The child is fairer than he had expected, but he can’t see himself in the little sleeping face.

‘So who do you think he looks like?’ Edith asks, bending over the bassinet. Her voice is thickened like lemon honey, a dangerous sign, her eyelids swollen.

‘Oh, he’s Paul’s double,’ says Fay, ‘and he’s always looked like his father, right from the start.’

‘Shall I hold him?,’ Edith says. ‘I am his grandmother.’

‘Be careful,’ says Paul.

‘I’ll lift him,’ Fay says smoothly. This is how Fay gets to be the first grandmother to hold the baby. She and Milton stand side by side, smiling and comparing the shape of his face with both of their own.

‘He’s a dear wee man,’ says Fay, relinquishing him to Edith.

‘Just a few more minutes,’ says a nurse, putting her head round the door. ‘Mum and Dad need some time to get to know their new baby. And mother needs a rest by the look of things.’

Edith broods over the baby. ‘Not a Nichols,’ she says, with
satisfaction
. ‘So what’s his name?’

‘Paul shifts uncomfortably. ‘The nurse says she’s going to call him Nathan.’

‘Darling, I thought you’d chosen Adrian,’ Fay says.

Paul shrugs uncomfortably. ‘Whatever.’

Edith stands up, her voice calm and crisp, as if she has
suddenly
woken refreshed from a nap. ‘Nathan. Excellent. A gift from God. Old Testament.’

‘Really,’ Fay murmurs, ‘must we always bring religion into it?’

‘Jewish, isn’t it?’ murmurs Milton. ‘I hadn’t realised.’ He has continued to hover like a good public servant.

‘We’re not.’ Glass stops himself, astonished at how easily he is drawn into taking sides in what is, after all, only sniper fire. But this knowledge, too, horrifies him, because it tells him that, in the space of a few minutes, battle lines have developed between these civilised and ordinary families.

‘Well, as long as you’ve got it decided for the birth notice.’ This, from Fay.

‘We don’t need a birth notice,’ says Roberta, opening her eyes.

‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ says Fay, as if Roberta has been part of the conversation all along. ‘My friends at work are dying to know all about it. You have to have a birth notice.’

‘I don’t,’ says Roberta. ‘People put such stupid rot in the papers.’

‘We’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, Roberta,’ Paul blurts.

There is another of those unpleasant silences.

‘We don’t have to put in any details,’ says Paul, compounding the embarrassment.

‘I’m sorry to bring it up,’ says Fay, ‘but we are booked in for Fiji this week. Should I cancel my bookings?’

‘We’ve paid for them,’ says Milton.

‘Do Bernard and Orla know about the baby?’ Roberta asks Glass, without answering her in-laws.

‘Yes,’ says Edith, too quickly.

‘What did they say? Are they pleased?’

‘Why don’t we let Roberta have a rest?’ Marise encourages them. As she takes the baby from Edith’s unresisting arms, he curls his fingers around her thumb, looking for his mother. Marise’s face is fierce with concentration as she lays Nathan down in his bassinet. She, Fay and Milton prepare to leave.

‘You go too, Paul,’ says Roberta.

‘For God’s sake, Roberta.’

‘I need some sleep. They won’t keep me in here for long.’

‘We were entitled to two weeks by law when I had you children,’ Edith says.

‘It all depended,’ says Fay.

‘Depended on what?’ Milton asks.

Fay shakes her head as if she’s forgotten where she is and bites her lip.

They move towards the exit sign but Glass hangs back. ‘I’ll catch you up,’ he tells them. Paul hesitates before he picks up his jacket and walks out. Later, Roberta will think that this was when things were decided between them.

Glass takes her hand in his.

‘I never met Josh Thwaite before, Dad. The man who came with me to the hospital.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ says Glass.

‘But it’s true.’

‘I know,’ says Glass.

‘Dad,’ says Roberta. ‘I don’t want this baby. He’s nothing but trouble.’

Glass feels himself go cold and quiet inside. He has to find a nurse, get something to settle his daughter down. Their proximity to each other feels dangerous and mad. He doesn’t want to know her secrets. The trouble is, he knows her, sees in her his own divided self.

‘You don’t mean that,’ he says. ‘You’ll love him.’

‘I do,’ says Roberta. ‘That’s not the point.’

‘Paul will get over this.’

‘I’m frightened,’ she says.’

Sometimes we have to learn to do the things we’re most scared of.’ He is seeing her, of course, up in space, looking down.

‘Then what happens?’

He puts her hand carefully under the cover and straightens the sheet, desperate to reassure her.

‘You can pretend you’re not scared,’ he says. ‘It’s a start.’

I
NSTEAD OF GOING
home, the next morning Roberta and Nathan are transferred by ambulance to the hospital in town.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ Roberta asks. The birth has been so swift, she feels so fit, that she expects to be sent home the next day.

‘Nothing,’ says Mr Maitland, smoothly. ‘You’re in very good health.’

‘Mr Maitland wants to keep an eye on you,’ says a nurse when she enquires further. ‘Just for observation.’

Paul travels in the ambulance with Roberta. He arrives, ready for the journey, looking quiet and apologetic.

‘We’ll have to arrange to get my car back,’ says Roberta, for something to say.

‘It was parked in our driveway with the keys under the mat when I got home last night,’ Paul tells her.

‘Well, that settles that.’

‘Um, I did find the guy.’

‘You what?’

‘The hospital gave me his name.’

‘You didn’t go and see him?’

‘Well, of course I did.’

‘He wasn’t very friendly,’ Paul says, holding her hand as they trundle at a sedate pace down the motorway. She has always thought that you would travel fast in an ambulance, with flashing lights and a siren. Though, come to think of it, she has had enough of that lately.

‘I could have told you that,’ Roberta says.

‘You didn’t, though. You didn’t tell me anything about him.’

She doesn’t reply. It seems pointless explaining to Paul how obnoxious his behaviour had been the previous day

‘Don’t hold it against me,’ Paul says. ‘It was a shock for me. I can see that you weren’t yourself, everybody’s reminded me that your hormones were out of kilter. I guess something just clicked in your brain when you went into labour.’

‘Well, thank you,’ she says. ‘It’s good to get a diagnosis.’

‘I just wanted to put things right with that guy. Let him know we were grateful.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

She is mortified by her mental picture of Paul turning up on Josh’s doorstep. And, worse in a way, what Paul will have made of the circumstances.

‘I could see he was on the bones of his backside. I offered him a hundred bucks.’

‘No!’

‘Okay, bad move. Day full of bad moves. Let’s just start again, shall we? We’ve got the rest of our lives. We’ve got our baby.’

‘I’m sorry, Paul,’ Roberta says, and she is. She is full of
contrition
and a longing to put things right, to return to some distant time when it seemed that they had perfect understanding. ‘I’m truly sorry about all this.’

‘Oh, hon.’ He puts his arm around her as nearly as he is able, because they are strapped sideways on the bench in the back of the ambulance. She knows that he is pleased with this admission of impropriety; people don’t say sorry unless they must. He hopes his pleasure is secret, but she knows better.

‘This has been a hideous experience for you. Let’s just put it behind us,’ he says, magnanimous.

‘I
CAN’T BELIEVE
she’d do that,’ Prudence says. ‘I mean, it’s really
irre sponsible
.’

‘I still can’t understand it, either,’ agrees Paul. They are eating asparagus rolls in Kirkcaldie and Stains’ tearooms. It’s Fay’s
birthday
tomorrow, and Paul hasn’t had a clue what to buy her before she leaves for her holiday. He is grateful that Prudence has offered to help. They have settled for a perfume which Prudence
remembers
Fay has always liked, and then a cup of coffee and a snack seemed in order.

‘It seems quite, well, um, if you don’t mind me saying so, pretty odd.’

‘I know, don’t spell it out to me.’

‘But the baby is all right?’ says Prudence.

‘Oh yeah, he’s a neat little guy,’ Paul says. ‘Kind of cute.’

‘I guess babies always are.’

‘No really, Prue, he’s nice. Quite smooth, you know, not all scrunched up like some of them are.

‘Does he cry a lot?’

‘Wait till he gets home and I’ll let you know.’

‘Ah me,’ says Prudence with a dramatic little sigh. ‘Some are born to responsibility, Paul.’ She gathers her handbag up with a
display
of organising its contents and checking her diary. ‘The rest of us just have a good time. I really should be getting back to work.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you were in a rush.’

‘Mistakes happen, Paul,’ says Prudence. ‘That’s the way it is, people just make mistakes.’

‘So that’s it?’

‘We’re both pretty busy, I guess. Spot you, Paul.’

He watches Prudence’s neat little bottom disappearing through kitchenware.

P
AUL BRINGS FRESH
fruit and flowers every day, which add to the growing profusion of floral arrangements around her bed. The obligatory birth notice appeared the very next day after Nathan’s birth. Roberta hadn’t realised she knew so many people, but when she begins to count up her family, all aunts and uncles and cousins, they are, well, countless. At first, the nurses lift Nathan into her arms every time they pass. She notices they don’t do this with the other women, for whom it is assumed that feeding comes naturally. As Mr Maitland has instructed, she is being watched.

‘Your milk’s coming in well,’ says one of the nurses,
encouragingly
. But she doesn’t need encouragement. Nathan’s lips around her nipple give her an odd sensation; she thinks of cows letting down their milk when the cups are put on, and supposes this must be the same. The milk is drawn as if from a deep well and it
surprises
her how distinctly she can chart its course. She has never believed that people can feel blood coursing through their veins, but milk seems different, a separate force, as tangible as the
movements
of a baby before it is born. Sometimes she looks in disbelief at Nathan’s shock of hair lying in her hand, as she manoeuvres him on to a swollen breast. He is so complete, so ready to launch
himself
into life.

Between feeds and bathing and changing Nathan, she shows him to visitors bearing gifts which she unwraps and exclaims over.
There are blue stretch-and-grows and blue booties, blue mittens and blue matinee jackets, bundles and bundles of Treasures (which Paul says are environmentally unfriendly and they should use only in an emergency; at the rate she is accumulating them it looks as though they are set for a lifetime of crisis), Buzzy Bees, Bunnykin plates and mugs, a nappy changing board, vouchers for baby shops from people who believe that they already have just about
everything
. Edith brings a silver spoon. ‘You couldn’t exactly say he had an auspicious start,’ she says, ‘a bit like Jesus born in a manger, really. I thought we could give him a silver spoon and pretend he was born with it in his mouth.’

‘Gee, thanks, Mum,’ says Roberta. She guesses that Edith is waiting for her to say more, but she doesn’t.

An arrangement of flowers arrives with a card from Bernard and Orla, although she has heard that Orla has gone away. It is an overly extravagant bunch of flowers with little chocolate bars piled inside the cellophane wrappings. The wrappers have things like ‘I Love You’ and ‘You’re So Cute’ printed on them.
I’ll
see
you
soon
as
I
can,
Bernard has written on the card,
but
you
know
what
it’s
like
with
cows,
and
all,
and she does know. Now that Orla’s gone — done a vanishing act, as her mother puts it — Glass can’t come to see Roberta either because he has to work in the
cowshed
.

Marise brings still more flowers, a designer composition of sunflowers and willow branches and snapdragons, jewel colours wrapped up in brilliant layers of tissue, turquoise and magenta and gold. There is something anarchical about them; they make Roberta feel strong and dazzling, and at the same time they are so beautiful that she is transported back into that endless mythical summer of childhood, before she believed anything could go wrong in her life.

A card comes from Helen, she of the gloomy pronouncements and the burnished, well-to-do husband, saying how lovely to have it over earlier than expected.

A lumpy envelope, delivered to the hospital and not sent through the mail, also arrives. It contains a lucky charm bracelet, hung with a crooked star and a water bearer, the Aquarius symbol, which, she realises for the first time, is Nathan’s. There is no card. She can’t think who has sent her this, perhaps one of the very young women from work …

On the evening of the second day, she is joined in the ward by Michelle, who had been due to have her baby before Roberta. She and Sandy, of the pink and green lounging suit, have a
daughter
. Sandy buys her spectacular presents: a porcelain music box shaped like the Madonna that plays ‘Ave Maria’, and a fourteen-carat gold eternity ring studded with sapphires and diamonds, with hooped earrings to match. Roberta pretends to be asleep when he comes to visit. When he has left, Michelle stretches out her chubby little hand bearing the new ring.

‘Did your husband buy you some jewellery?’ she asks.

‘Yes,’ Roberta lies. ‘he gave me this.’ She shows Michelle the charm bracelet, without letting her linger over it.

O
N THE THIRD
day after Nathan’s birth, Roberta begins to cry. It starts as quiet weeping, which she hopes other people won’t notice. Especially, she doesn’t want Michelle to notice. When she has been crying for a few minutes, something worse overtakes her, a dark wretchedness, which emerges as sobbing she can’t control.

Staff come running to her side.

Third day blues. It will pass, they say.

A nurse sits on the bed, the curtains drawn around them. She is a well-scrubbed young woman, ingrained with antiseptic. She has not long finished smoking a cigarette. ‘Heaps of new mothers cry like this. It’s hormonal. Didn’t they tell you about this at
antenatal
?’

Roberta stares in disbelief at the curtains. Nobody else shares her despair. Michelle and she have been to the same lectures, but she is not howling like this. And yes, she does remember being told that this could happen, but it was hard to imagine then what it might be like. She would be so pleased and happy when her baby was born that sorrow like this would be impossible.

The nurse is patient and kind, eager to explain in the best textbook way. ‘When you’re pregnant you have a really high
hormonal
output. When you go into labour your oestrogen and
progesterone
levels are fifty times higher than before you got pregnant. So then, when you have the baby, they drop right back to where they were before. It’s enough to make anybody cry, like drug
withdrawal
.’

Roberta is grateful that she is being treated like a real person who can understand and follow this, and she stops crying long enough to ask the nurse if this has ever happened to her.

‘No way, thanks, babies aren’t for me.’ She laughs, but not unkindly. Her fingernails are bitten.

‘I know I should be happy,’ Roberta says. She wants to explain the dark mood which has overtaken her, but it’s impossible. She thinks of what her father has told her. I must believe that I am happy, she tells herself — if I believe, it will come true. Nathan lies asleep beside her, unconscious of how his unscheduled
appearance
, his existence, have made her body feel as if it’s hit a solid object, and turned her head into something resembling the
contents
of a scrambled computer.

There is concern in the way that the nurse looks at her. ‘I’m going to get your doctor,’ she says.

‘Oh, he mightn’t like to be disturbed.’

‘We’ll take a chance on that.’

‘You said this was just normal.’

‘I was forgetting,’ she says, with a tactful hesitation. Roberta knows they are back at the episode of Nathan’s birth; it points to the possibility of her being unhinged. Women who have babies in the street are unreliable. They may be mad. She can tell that the
stories
around her are multiplying.

‘I’m not suicidal,’ she says. ‘You won’t find me hanging from the shower rail.’

‘I still think he should come.’

And crotchety Mr Maitland does come, rubbing his hands together with a sound like chamois leather on the side of a damp car.

‘Well, my dear,’ he says. His attitude is friendlier. He can’t have made much money out of her, not even his delivery fee, Roberta thinks. Perhaps he can add this to the bill.

Mr Maitland scratches his index finger back and forth over his upper lip. Whatever he thinks, it demands his deepest
concentration
. ‘I think that you would be better off at home.’

‘Thank you,’ Roberta whispers. She wants to get away from the hospital, away from all this normality and cheerfulness, and women who have perfected the process of childbirth.

‘Good, that’s settled. It might be an idea if you had a few sleeping tablets to help you through the first few nights. Mothers need sleep.’

Although Roberta’s instincts are against this suggestion, it has a certain appeal. She realises she is so tired that she cannot think. The last sleep she remembers having is a strange deep slumber after Nathan’s birth.

‘What if I don’t hear Nathan wake up when I go home?’

‘That’s what husbands are for,’ he says, with a return of the fatherly smiles he gave her when she had first begun attending him. ‘You’re lucky you have a husband.’

T
HE HOUSE IS
clean and bright when they get home, everything in its place. The sea is blue and shiny, the pot plants in the courtyard have been kept watered; they glow with summer flowers.

‘Welcome home, hon,’ says Paul. He is carrying Nathan as if he were a dish of eggs.

They stand by the window, still awkward with each other, not knowing what to say.

‘What do you think?’ Roberta says.

‘I think it’s time he and I got to know each other.’ Nathan opens his sleepy eyes and, if she hadn’t known better, Roberta would have sworn he looked at Paul like a kid who’s just seen a rock star.