Mum and I have a talk about babysitting. It’s not like she won’t do any, but she reckons one night a week (and not Friday!) is all she’s ‘prepared to do’—and it always has to be the same night unless we make it another by special arrangement! And if I move out, all babysitting has to be done by special arrangement, and I have to bring the baby to her. I mean, she’s got it all worked out even before she’s seen the baby—I think that’s the only way she can bring herself to be so cold about it. When it’s born she’ll be different—aren’t grandparents always crazy about their grandchildren? Anyway, the whole thing makes me really angry, that she feels she has to get me to agree to this system, instead of just taking things day by day, seeing how they develop. And I have to sit there, ‘Yes Mum, yes Mum,’ with hardly any say in it at all.
‘She’s just trying to hang onto her own life, you know,’ says Pug that night. ‘She doesn’t want to spend all her spare time at home looking after a baby, any more than you do.’
‘Yeah, but somehow I thought she’d get more involved than she says she will. It’s like she’s pushing us all away from her, just when we had the chance to get close.’
‘Oh, bullshit.’
‘Stop laughing at me! What do you mean, bullshit?’
‘How does dumping the baby on your mum and goin’ off partying make you close?’
‘It’s not that. It’s setting all these rules. It’s like … I don’t know, a boarding-house or something. Or school.’
‘Oh, bullshit! Bullshit!’
‘Stop laughing!’ I turn away and lie on the very edge of the bed, stewing, embarrassed. He follows me, puts his arms around me even though I try to fling him off. ‘Get away!’
He stops laughing. ‘Hey. Hey. Mel. Ssh.’ He holds me until I’m still. ‘Listen. You listening?’
‘Yes,’ I say sulkily.
‘Your mum’s being so good about all this, we should both be down on our knees kissing her bloody feet, not hassling her to look after our kid. Christ, what are you worryin’ about this for, now? Forget it. Look, she won’t mind, if it’s an emergency, if we’re really goin’ crazy, she won’t mind bending those rules. It’s just now, she’s scared like you are, don’t you reckon? ’Cause nobody knows what it’s gunna be like with that baby being out here with us. And, shit, the lady’s had enough stuff to cope with this year already, hey?’
‘Did you know it’s very sexist to call a woman a “lady”?’
‘What?’
‘You’re supposed to call a woman (as opposed to a man) a woman, not a lady, as opposed to a gentleman. You’re not supposed to put women on a pedestal like that.’
His grip relaxes. I turn back to find him gazing at me with an expression of immense patience, like a kindly grandpa. ‘Like, am I just talkin’ to myself here, mate? ’Cause if I am, you know, I’ll just …’
‘Oh, Dino, sometimes I really enjoy you.’ I push my face in under his chin.
He sighs. His voice buzzes against my eyelids. ‘Well, I don’t know what the fuck you’re on about half the time, but I enjoy you too. All right?’
‘All right.’ I surface and look at him, almost sick with happiness. ‘Fine by me.’
He laughs through his nose. ‘You are such a dickhead sometimes,’ he says in his rustiest voice, the one where you can hear the squeak of the kid’s voice through the rasp of the man’s. ‘Come down here, willya?’
‘In Lucy,’ Dr. Lovejoy said, ‘notice that the birth process was somewhat more difficult. Her birth canal was broad but constricted from front to back. Her infant’s cranium could pass through only if it was first turned sideways and then tilted.’
Human birth is even more complex, according to Dr. Lovejoy. ‘The much larger brain in the human infant demands a rounder birth canal. Even with the rounder birth canal, the human birth process is complex and traumatic, requiring a second rotation of the fetal cranium within the birth canal.’
I’m struck down by the flu. There’s nothing like being eight and a half months pregnant and horribly sick—I honestly want to die. Worst flu I’ve ever had. It starts with feeling sick in the stomach and hurting all over, inside and out—feels as if even the baby is hurting! That goes on for twenty-four hours and then a horrible cold comes on, thick and poisonous so I can hardly breathe. I thought I felt stupid before, but now I spend my days slumped around the house with my mouth open to breathe, completely blobbed out. I’m cramming in vitamins but they make no difference at all. And I have to keep away from Pug because he’s got a fight on Friday night. Another reason to be miserable.
The first time I see him in four days is when he comes down the aisle with Jimmy. I don’t like the look of him—he just doesn’t have his usual glow.
He fights badly, moves heavily, takes a lot of punishment. I’m nearly crying watching him coming back round after round. After the third round he’s just defending himself, and sometimes not even very well. We have five rounds of Klaus Hupper getting cockier and cockier, bulldozing Pug up against the ropes, opening the cut beside his eye again. This is at Kingsford, too. Although there’s a big bunch of Pug’s supporters in the crowd, most people are on Hupper’s side. So they all think he’s in terrific form and Pug’s just crumbling in the face of his skill, whereas anyone who knows Pug can tell something’s wrong with him.
In the end Hupper wins on points, though the win is so obvious that his fans start cheering as soon as the last bell goes. Jimmy’s there to catch Pug when his legs give way two seconds after the bell. He holds him up, getting blood all over the shoulder of his shirt, until Pug comes to enough to be helped to his corner. It’s lovely to see those guys being so gentle and motherly with him, towelling him down, making him have a drink.
When we get back to the change-room Pug smiles at me and shakes his head. ‘Feel shockin’. Even the bits that didn’t get hit.’
‘You done good, Dino, you done good,’ says Jimmy, making him sit down. ‘Never touched the canvas once.’
‘Felt like lyin’ down and goin’ to sleep on the bloody canvas!’ He sounds stuffed up, and there are big dark rings under his eyes.
‘I’m off my face,’ he complains in the car on the way home. We compare notes and figure out we must have the same bug.
I decide to stay over at Pug’s place. He goes straight to bed while I potter about. I have a shower. I put all the magazines in a neat pile and all the socks and undies and dusty T-shirts in a garbage bag for the laundromat. I’ve never tidied up a single thing over at Pug’s place before, but I find myself obeying some kind of compulsion, unable to stop once I’ve started.
He’s sprawled all over the bed and I don’t want to wake him up to move over, so for a while I sit and just look at him in the combined moon- and streetlight. His face is a mess, as bad as it can be without bones being broken—warped out of shape with swellings around his mouth and right eye, where the blood teems, repairing squelched cells, rinsing away the broken bits. I touch his face and feel the heat of the work; he’s too far down in sleep to react.
A little pain goes whispering under my belly, like lightning through a thundercloud. It’s different from all other twinges and pressures of pregnancy. It’s like the very edge of a period pain, nine months unfamiliar.
I sit listening, and five minutes later there’s another one, and then (it seems like a miracle every time) every five minutes after that. It’s ready already.
I make Pug move over, and I lie down, because all the books say you should try and get some sleep early on and save your energy, but of course I’m too excited and have to keep checking the contractions by my watch. They’re so regular—I can tell myself, You’ll have another one in one minute, and exactly sixty seconds later there’s that little pain-whisper. It’s really exciting being the only one awake and knowing. I lie there arguing with myself whether to wake Pug up—he’s said he wants to know as soon as it starts, but he’s sick and looks terrible and really would be better off sleeping. So I creep about, going to the toilet
about fifty times, coming back to bed to count and doze and try not to panic.
Nothing more happens all night, just those regular, lightning-like pains. At about five, when the sky’s getting light, one of them wakes me up, a proper cramp this time. I stare at the ceiling, alarmed, waiting for a catastrophically bad one, but the next few are weaker.
At six-thirty I touch Pug’s shoulder. He opens his eyes, closes them again and says ‘Y’okay? You’ve been up and down like a bloody yo-yo all night.’
‘It’s started.’
He opens his eyes (the right one only opens about halfway, it’s so swollen) and stares at me. ‘What, already? But you’re not due!’
‘They said any time two weeks before or two weeks after the due date.’
‘Will it be okay?’ He sits up.
‘Beats me, but it’s coming whether it’s okay or not.’
He starts pulling on his clothes. ‘Great, maybe they’ll have a spare bed I can use in Intensive Care.’
‘You look like a bomb blew up in your face.’
‘That’s how I feel, too. You look okay, but. How’s your cold?’
‘Not bothering me. I’ve got more important things to think about.’
We walk to Stanmore, and on the way I have to stop and think about a couple of these pains that hold on for longer and are quite crampy. Pug watches me closely, then when the pain stops he goes into an imitation of Fiona’s assistant at the classes. ‘What’s she say? “Visualise.” Visualise a flower opening, Mel—“slowly, slowly, all the petals. Helps your”—what’s it called, where the head comes through?’
‘The cervix.’ I’m laughing.
‘Yeah. Helps the cervix open. Go on, Mel, visualise a flower.’
‘A flower. This is muscle! These muscles’ve been holding this baby up for eight and a half months! This is going to take some work.’ I have a flash of fear then.
Pug can tell. ‘We’ll be at your Mum’s soon.’ He takes my hand.
The morning goes past in a flash—I can’t believe it when Mum says, ‘How about some lunch, then?’ and it’s twelve-thirty! By this stage I have to stop doing anything but breathing at the very top of each contraction, even though they’re still exactly five minutes apart. ‘I’m going to have to start making a noise soon,’ I warn them. Mum rings the birth centre and we go through all the revolting business of getting there, which means three super-strength contractions (in five minutes) and my waters breaking all over the towels as I kneel on the car floor in the back, leaning on the back seat with Pug holding my hands and saying, ‘Sounds just like Fiona said it would. You must be doing everything right.’ I’m embarrassed at having yelled out and leaked everywhere, and so angry I could slap him, except that I’m too terrified of the next contraction. It’s okay for him, it’s happening outside his body.
When we get to the hospital they help me in. I’m so glad to see Lois, the midwife—I feel like telling her to send Mum and Pug away! But once we get into the suite I just don’t get the time. Lois does an internal examination, which brings on another pain, and tells us that I’m three centimetres dilated—a measly three centimetres after a night and half a day! I’m so pissed off and so scared of how much worse it might get!
All afternoon (it lasts forever, but it’s over in a few seconds) the contractions go on, getting harder, stronger all the time. It’s like a nightmare where I’m standing looking up a cliff face, knowing that a huge chunk of it is going to come loose and fall on top of me. Then I see it coming loose and all the rocks come thundering down and I feel them crushing me and burying me, but none of them just kindly knocks me out—I have to feel each one thudding into me. Then it eases off—but there I am again, at the bottom of the cliff, looking up and knowing that that rock-face is going to give way again.
I get into the rhythm of it. To save my body from screaming chaos, I have to. I’m kneeling beside the bed on some thin mats and I work out that I can just get through each one by hanging onto Pug’s and Mum’s hands as hard as I can and yelling ‘A-a-a-a-ah!’ on and on at the top of my voice—some of the pain disappears out my mouth then. Knowing that doesn’t make me feel any better, though. I can’t believe I got myself into this.
At about five o’clock everything stops dead. Lois tells me I’m fully dilated. I didn’t even feel her examine me—in between roaring I’m half-asleep, stupid, and the far end of my body doesn’t seem to belong to me any more. They have to lift me around to face the room in the squatting position I chose (like a gift from a catalogue) during the birth classes, way back when, in the life before I was in labour. ‘You’re all set now, Mel,’ Lois says very clearly, as if to a deaf person. ‘So if you feel like pushing, go right ahead.’
‘God, who’s got the energy to push?’ I say, rolling my eyes at Pug.
‘You have, mate. Somewhere in there. Don’t worry. It’ll come.’
And it does, the very next contraction, which is just huge. I can feel it coming a long way off (‘Oh God, oh God,’ I hear myself whimpering), and I get a good grip on Pug and Mum’s arms. My throat closes off and I feel—little baby, I feel your head start to move down inside me. Before the contraction is even properly finished I have to tell them all, ‘I felt the head moving!’ All of a sudden I see the point of it all—it’s as if I’d forgotten there was a baby right up until that moment. Now I’m incandescent with excitement—it’s only a matter of minutes till we see, after all those months!
‘Yes, we’ve got a head here.’ Lois produces a mirror from nowhere and, God!, there you are: I’m gaping open a little to show a wrinkled piece of grey skin with dark streaks of wet hair on it. ‘Fuck me dead!’ whispers Pug, squeezing my hand very suddenly—I think he’s going through the same realisation as me. Mum runs her hands through my wet hair, lifting it dripping off my neck. ‘Nearly there, you soldier, you!’
Somehow during the next push I manage to keep my eyes on the mirror and I see your head ease out. It turns as it eases, and I can feel the turning inside me, the full stretch of myself making way for you.
‘Look, it’s got your eyebrows,’ I joke hoarsely to Pug. What a cool customer I am, after all that roaring.
And here I am, half-delivered of a baby, as I’ve never been able to imagine I’d be. A face at both ends, like a Queen on a playing card. Your eyes are closed, your nose is blunt, your mouth all bunched up and cross-looking.
‘Now just gently push the shoulders out, Mel, with the next contraction.’
Well, I do, but not just the shoulders come out. The whole baby slithers out in a rush, Lois neatly catching it and laying it on the padding between my feet.
‘A girl!’ says Pug, as if it was the last thing he’d expected to see!
I’m totally amazed, staring and staring. Her head was whitish grey, but as soon as she’s out she starts flushing pink, all over, very quickly. She opens her mouth and there are gums in there, and a tongue as fine as a kitten’s. Out of her throat on her first breath comes a tentative cry, a voice never heard in the world before. From her navel the live multicoloured umbilical rope spirals back up to my insides, to that beautifully positioned placenta.
‘You could pick her up,’ says Lois, and I do, astonished that I’m allowed to, that she’s mine. She’s so hot and damp and rubbery, but not slippery at all. Her arms shoot out and her fingers spread in surprise, even though I’m as gentle as I can be. She stops squeaking and opens her eyes—oh, eyes!
Pug is—everything is on his face that you and your new mother could hope for (except for the bruises). He looks wrecked, sick, unshaven—heaps worse for wear than I feel! His hands are fists at his mouth, and he’s staring at you as if he’s terrified you’ll evaporate in front of his eyes. Tears run, ignored, down his face into the stubble.
‘Come here,’ I say, and he crawls over and sits with his head on my shoulder, gazing at you, touching your hair, your ears, your hands and feet, swearing in a shaky voice. All the time you frown at him in a really outraged way, but you don’t mak
e a fuss. Above me your grandmother blows her nose and says, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, she’s so lovely.’
You are such a marvellous little body, and somehow a personality, too, filling all the space in the room like a wind, making us all glow.
One last contraction approaches, nothing like as strong as the ones that brought you, and Lois is there with a metal dish to catch the placenta as it shlooshes out, wonderfully soft after your hard head. The umbilical cord is blanched-looking now, no longer beating.
‘Here, Dino.’ Lois hands him a pair of surgical scissors. Then she clamps off the cord near your belly and invites him to cut.
‘Oh, God.’ He sounds mildly hysterical, but he does it. And there you are, with that enormous yellow toggle hanging off your tiny belly full of such complicated workings—including the workings for growing a baby, a tiny uterus like a pear tomato tucked away for future use. Have one, won’t you? Whatever age, I don’t mind. Because I want you to know what I feel, that the whole meaning of my life arrived in this birthing room, that I saw the point, seeing you, that I knew. I couldn’t feel less like crying; I couldn’t feel sturdier or happier or less embarrassed about my body than when they help me unfold it and lift it limb by limb onto the bed, puffy and saggy and bruised and leaking blood. Such good work it’s done, such a prize it’s delivered, just the way Mum said. What a system! Who worked this one out? Call them in here! I want to congratulate them!
She was born at 6.45 p.m. They let me stay in the birth centre overnight, which is great because Pug can stay too. The three of us sleep together on the double bed, the baby between us. In the middle of the night she starts wriggling in a slow, underwater kind of way and giving creaky little cries, so I sit up and give her her first breastfeed with the help of Joella, the midwife on duty. The baby falls back to sleep after a few minutes of feeding, but Pug and I are both wide awake by then, and we start talking. We go through all the names we’d been considering, but none of them seems right for this creature, the newness, the ours-ness of her. Then Pug, muttering to her in Italian, drops the word ‘bella’, and we decide that Bella is about as right as we’ll ever get.
The Best Thing Page 16
