She closed the door. Tina waited for another contraction to pass, unzipped her bag, rummaged and said, ‘OK, I’m too hot, and I’m going to get changed.’
There was a rustling of clothing.
‘You can look now. Chocolate?’
‘Wouldn’t mind,’ said Natalie, taking a square.
Tina perched on the bed. She was wearing a loose white nightie with a frilled neckline and buttons down the front: the sort of thing a voluptuous virgin might wear as a B-movie Dracula pressed his fangs to her neck.
‘What do you think?’ Tina said, posing with hand on hip. ‘Demure, but rather fetching, I thought.’
But an hour later Tina was not so cocky. She begged one of them to ring the bell, and when the midwife appeared Tina grabbed at her arm and pleaded: ‘Help me . . . Help me . . .’
The midwife gently but firmly detached Tina’s hand, went off and returned with a syringe, which she sank into Tina’s backside.
‘There, that should give you some relief,’ she said. ‘In a couple of hours, when it wears off, we can see about getting you an epidural. Ring the bell if you feel the head.’ And then she left again.
Watching Tina moaning and contorting on the bed as if an invisible corkscrew had been driven through her and was being mercilessly twisted, Natalie was struck
by the impassable gulf between witnessing pain and suffering it. Tina was in her own private hell, and she could not share it; and Tina had anyway turned away from both of them and withdrawn into the struggle.
The sight of Tina, who had always been so self-possessed, writhing like a clubbed seal was shocking, and also a little shaming, but it was compelling too. The carefully maintained carapace of Tina’s social mask had disappeared. Here was a woman for whom words were currency, reduced to wordlessness; groaning as if she’d been bludgeoned and left for dead by the side of the road, yet with no wounds, no blood, no bruises to show for it – not yet, at any rate.
‘Oh God! Help me! I can feel something, I think it’s the head,’ Tina cried out. ‘Ring the bell!’
Lucy rang and kept on ringing until the midwife reappeared and thrust her hand up Tina’s nightie like a vet inspecting a cow.
‘You’re nearly fully dilated,’ she said. ‘Don’t push yet. I’m going to see what they want us to do. We might have to deliver the baby here.’ She used the phone mounted on the wall to call for instructions.
‘I told you you’d pop it out in a couple of hours,’ Lucy said to Tina. ‘Speedy Gonzales!’
A faint glimmer of something close to a smile crossed Tina’s face before it and her body contorted again.
The midwife hung up and turned to Tina. ‘They want you in a delivery suite,’ she said. ‘The porters are coming to take you down.’
And so Natalie found herself running alongside Lucy behind Tina screaming on a trolley, panting past the
horrified face of a dressing-gowned mother-to-be on the stairwell, and so down in the lift into a windowless room with a muted frieze of peach and aqua flowers bordering the ceiling, a frieze at which Natalie found herself staring as Tina, screaming now like a reluctant sacrifice, was dumped on to another bed, examined, and instructed not to push until the baby’s heartbeat had been checked. A belt was strapped round Tina’s belly. It picked up nothing. A new, apparently senior midwife struggled and shoved between Tina’s legs like a removal man trying to get a particularly bulky sofa through a door.
Natalie didn’t know what to do with herself, but didn’t want to get in the way, so stood back a little, feeling like a spare part, and worse than useless. They all seemed to be in a panic . . . where the hell was this going to end? Would Tina suddenly be wheeled off to theatre? Surely, if your body had done its job and sped through to the transition stage without so much as a prostaglandin pessary, you’d earned the right to escape being cut?
But Lucy had somehow found a space by the head of the bed, between the various bits of alarming monitoring equipment, and was leaning forward, saying something over and over again, a little mantra, six words in the face of potential disaster: ‘It’s going to be all right.’
‘I’ve done it, I’ve clipped the monitor on to your baby’s head,’ the senior midwife said. She waited for a moment and watched a display.
‘OK, I’ve got the heartbeat.’ She pulled the stem of the monitor free. ‘You can push now. Don’t scream. Push.’
A doctor bustled in and Tina cried out, ‘Help me! Help me!’ and the doctor said, ‘Yes, I think we will help you,’ and selected a pair of scissors and cut Tina open. Natalie didn’t look but she couldn’t help but hear the sound of metal snipping flesh, and then it was tuned out by a high electric buzzing gathering force, and she glimpsed Tina’s face purpling and heard Lucy scream, ‘
Push!
’ and the red ball of baby hurtled out into the doctor’s hands. Minutes later the great steak of the placenta was held up for inspection and that was it, the final straw, the buzzing was a swarm, an approaching whiteout, and in the end it was a relief to yield and go under.
Coming to was much more painful than being out. Natalie was down on the floor, someone was leaning over her, and everything was bright and loud and brutal. She got to her feet and the midwife hustled her back down the corridor to the waiting room and told her to keep her head between her knees till she felt better.
It was some time before she felt sure enough of herself to straighten up and make her way out. She had to explain herself to the woman at the reception desk, which was mortifying, though she could hardly make more of a chump of herself than she already had. The woman shook her head in amused contempt, told Natalie the delivery suite number and buzzed her through.
She knocked gently at the door, heard nothing, knocked harder. Thought she heard ‘Come in.’ Pushed the door open, a little way at first, then wider.
Tina was sitting propped up, pale and stunned, with
Lucy perched on the end of the bed. It was dim and quiet, and Natalie couldn’t see anybody else.
‘Where’s the baby?’ she asked.
Tina gestured towards the far side of the bed. ‘He’s asleep. Come and have a look.’
Natalie shut the door behind her and went to see. The baby was lying in one of those awful hospital cots that Matilda had refused to settle in for the duration of Natalie’s three sleepless nights on the post-natal ward – a cabinet on wheels with a thin mattress on top and a clear plastic rim.
But, just as Tina had said, he really was sound asleep. A red triangle of face – two lines for eyes, a small flat nose – was just about visible between his little white hat and the sheet he’d been swaddled in.
‘He’s gorgeous,’ Natalie said. ‘Congratulations.’
‘He looks like his dad,’ Tina said.
‘I’m so sorry about what happened,’ Natalie told her.
‘What, that you passed out at the sight of my placenta? Honestly, I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t have minded being unconscious myself.’
‘I was worse than Richard,’ Natalie said. ‘At least he didn’t pass out.’
‘You did fine,’ Lucy said. ‘You got us here, which is more than I could have done. If I’d tried to drive I’d have probably got myself arrested, and I don’t think we’d have had much luck getting a taxi at two a.m. on New Year’s Day.’
‘So how are you feeling?’ Natalie asked Tina.
‘Compared to an hour ago, absolutely bloody fantastic,’ Tina said.
Natalie noticed, on the stand that had been pushed down to the end of the bed, an empty cup of tea and a plate with some cold-looking toast.
‘You seem so calm,’ she said. ‘I can’t get over it. It’s like it was all in a day’s work, and now you’re sitting there having your tea break. I have to hand it to you. No gas and air. No epidural. No nothing.’
But maybe an epidural wouldn’t have been such a bad thing. Had she been deluded in her disappointment over the way her own labour had turned out? Perhaps there wasn’t really any right way for a birth to go . . . or maybe any and every way was right, as long as nothing went permanently, unfixably wrong.
There was a knock on the door and the midwife walked in.
‘They’re ready for you on the ward now,’ she said.
Tina swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Natalie saw that the white nightie was splashed with red at the hem.
‘You’d better put something on your feet,’ the midwife said.
Natalie fished a pair of espadrilles and a dressing-gown out of Tina’s bag and Tina put them on. Then she shouldered the bag and Lucy picked up the car seat. The midwife led the way, pushing the baby, followed by Tina, who shuffled along with Natalie and Lucy behind her.
Despite their slow progress, it struck Natalie as a triumphal procession. It was a victory over something – over what, she wasn’t quite sure; biology, perhaps, or birth, or death?? that Tina, bloodied but no longer bowed, was back on her feet.
At the entrance to the dark ward the midwife said, ‘No visitors allowed at this time, I’m afraid, so it’s time to say goodbye.’
Tina turned to Lucy and Natalie and said, ‘Thank you. I’m not planning on getting him christened, but if I did, you two would definitely be the godmothers.’
‘We’re honoured,’ Lucy said.
Tina flashed them a smile of relief so intense it was not far off elation.
‘Happy New Year! I think this beats the millennium.’
Then she allowed the midwife to usher her and the baby on to the ward.
A moment later, a newborn – maybe Tina’s? – started crying.
‘When they stitched her up she couldn’t stop shaking,’ Lucy said. ‘I think she might have been in shock. If they’d sent her home, you and I would have ended up delivering that baby.’
‘You mean you would.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop putting yourself down,’ Lucy said. ‘It takes guts to face up to something you’re afraid of. It’s a hell of a business, isn’t it? And that’s what it’s like when it works. Anyway, I don’t know about you, but I’m just about ready to get out of here. It’s so stuffy! I’ve got the most appalling headache.’
Natalie hesitated, and then decided to be brave. She had avoided inviting people round to her house for months. During the day it was all right, but not when Richard was there. But she had to at least make the offer, and Lucy could make of it what she wanted.
‘Do you want to stay over at mine?’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’ll have much luck getting a cab.’
‘Are you sure? I don’t want to intrude.’
‘No, you’re very welcome,’ Natalie said, and realized this was true. ‘As long as you don’t mind the sofa. And a bit of a weird atmosphere. Richard’s been sleeping in the guest room.’
‘Natalie,’ Lucy said, ‘you look white as a sheet. Are you OK to drive?’
Natalie nodded. She didn’t quite trust herself to speak; she thought she might cry.
As they made their way to the lift she found herself humming: ‘Once in royal David’s city, Stood a lowly cattle shed, Where a mother laid her baby, In a manger for His bed . . .’ and she noticed for the first time that the hospital had Christmas decorations – shining paper streamers, purple, silver and gold, in the shape of Chinese lanterns, gleaming in the artificial light – and some of them were still up.
SOMETIME DURING WILLIAM’S
first morning on earth, Tina checked her phone and saw a message from Dan:
How are you? Would love to see you and William as soon as you’re ready
. She replied,
All well. Come soon – but not just yet. Will let you know
.
Despite the inevitable ambivalence he felt about becoming a father, Dan was desperate to see his son. She would have been touched by this, if she hadn’t already been feeling so overwhelmed.
She wasn’t allowed to use her phone on the ward, but she also wasn’t allowed to take the baby anywhere else. One of the midwives had agreed to keep an eye on William as long as she was quick, and she had nipped into the corridor outside. But she had to wait for what felt like ages before someone responded to the buzzer and let her back in to the ward, and the midwife who was supposedly keeping tabs on William was nowhere to be found. He’d woken up and was crying – again.
She’d had some idea of what to expect – the tiredness, the discomfort, the crying – but she hadn’t realized that William’s thin, keening wail would panic her like nothing else. Nor had she expected to find his face so endlessly fascinating that watching him would distract her from sleeping – not that there had been much opportunity for that so far.
It had been about five in the morning by the time she said goodbye to Natalie and Lucy and was installed on the ward with William. Every time she’d drifted off, somebody else’s baby had started wailing, and then it had been seven o’clock, the ward lights had gone on, and a succession of people had felt entitled to fling aside the curtain and burst into her cubicle.
The lady who filled up the water jugs, the one who brought round and collected the lunch menus, the pert little researcher who’d left her a questionnaire to fill in about pain . . . probably all very necessary and useful in their way, just not what she needed right then and there. If only they would all just leave her alone – but at the same time she was terrified of being left alone with this tiny baby’s life literally in her hands.
She had been told she would be discharged that day, but just as the hospital had been reluctant to admit her, it was slow to let her go; and even though she was scared of going home with a child she had next to no idea how to care for, she didn’t want to linger any longer than was necessary in the Hades of the postnatal ward, and chafed at having to wait round for her paperwork to be signed off so she could escape.
She toyed with the idea of getting a taxi home; her
friends had done their bit, and she sure as hell didn’t want her parents to show up and collect her, as if she was a shamed child being released from a correctional facility. Dan would come like a shot if she called him, but he had drawn the short straw, the New Year’s Day Bank Holiday shift, and was working. She didn’t want him to have to come up with a pretext in order to leave the office and collect her; she didn’t want to oblige him to come to the rescue.
But in the end, she decided she couldn’t face the prospect of lugging everything to the lifts, and down to the taxi rank, and she suspected she might get short shrift from the staff if she asked for someone to carry some of her stuff. It was quite a haul: her bag, William, the car seat, and the strange plastic bag of promotional gubbins that all new mothers apparently got, which it seemed rude to refuse. Probably she could manage it, but her stitches were going to pull with every step, and things she would normally not think twice about had become insurmountable challenges; even going to the toilet was a big deal.