Flesh and Blood

by Stephen McGann

  At that point our plans went west, in more ways than one. I landed a job in a theatrical touring version of the cowboy musical Calamity Jane, playing Wild Bill Hickok. We were in no financial position for me to turn it down, and so we carefully planned our baby attempts for those weeks when I’d be playing theatres in the southeast of England – close enough to commute from home. When the curtain came down, I’d whizz back in my car to continue my night’s work. Members of the cast, aware of my efforts, would encourage my hurried exit from the theatre with cries of ‘Break a leg!’ and ‘Yee hah!’

  Once again, we were successful almost immediately. It was now late spring. I had a free week on the tour and the builders had started dismantling our bathroom at home, so we’d decided to escape to a rented house in Norfolk for a few days to avoid the mess and mayhem. Heidi performed another pregnancy test while we were there – and it was positive! As the weeks rolled by, things felt better. Different to last time. More secure. Our confidence slowly grew. This pregnancy felt like it was going to last. We were going to be parents.

  We walked along those wide, pool-strewn coastal estuaries as the Norfolk breeze blew and our child grew as a tiny foetus in my wife’s womb. It would one day grow to become my son Dominic – a talented philosophy undergraduate who now grapples with the deepest questions of existence in his studies. It’s a source of childish amusement for me to answer Dom’s deepest metaphysical ponderings with a simple theatrical fact. Regardless of the high-minded reasoning he employs to interrogate the nature of his reality, he wouldn’t be here at all if Calamity Jane hadn’t played a convenient week in Woking. So take that, Descartes.

  The early pregnancy felt unreal. Heidi didn’t get sick, and didn’t start to show for six months. We’d watch the calendar nervously as the weeks ticked by – each week a new milestone, each week closer to the time that we knew the baby would be safe. I remember that first ultrasound scan in June; the faded ghost of movement glistening like interference on an old black-and-white television screen. The assistant pointed out the baby’s tiny fingers moving and flexing on cue. ‘It’s a right little performer, this one!’ the assistant said. I thought about my own performance career – the petty struggles and disappointments. Not if I can help it, I thought. My child was now a real thing I could see. I wanted its life to be as free from anxiety and as fully flexed as those little fingers. He remained an ‘it’ for now. We didn’t want to know the baby’s sex until we were properly introduced at the end of the year. If we got that far.

  We took a holiday in Menorca in the summer, and by the time we returned Heidi had really started to show. I’d listen to her tummy and hear the sound of bubbling movement through water. It was easy to imbue our anonymous submariner with all sorts of human characteristics. ‘Ooh, look!’ we’d say. ‘It’s kicking because it likes this music!’ We must have known that our child’s movements were most likely random and instinctive. Yet we’d begun that process of narrating our as-yet-unborn child into full humanhood by ascribing motivation to the baby’s embryonic mind. Narrative is the privilege of the living.

  At twenty-nine weeks, Heidi started getting some mild but unsettling labour-like pains when she walked short distances. The doctor advised complete rest, as some women can go into premature labour following these warning shots. There were still three weeks to go before the magic thirty-two-week mark when a baby is considered pretty safe, even if premature. We watched the calendar nervously until the milestone was passed. We were told the baby was likely to be early, which would place the birth comfortably in mid-December – yet as Christmas approached, nothing. Heidi grew bigger and bigger. We banished all seasonal relatives, hunkered down and prepared for a Christmas on our own with the hospital suitcase packed. Then, on Christmas Eve night, some contractions. A Christmas baby? Heidi got herself ready, and I looked for a suitable bright star in the sky. But it was a false alarm. My child possessed a seasonal sense of humour.

  Finally, in the early hours of the twenty-ninth, the real thing. Heidi took a relaxing bath, and I did a little aimless manful pacing. We drove to the hospital in Cambridge through a white-frosted early morning. The midwife examined Heidi and declared her well dilated and in ‘established labour’. She spent the time between her infrequent contractions pacing the small, hot room and moving slowly into the primeval self-absorption of a woman in labour; reducing her world by degrees into the confines of the room, and then deeper into her own body. It was inspiring to watch. My life’s companion had retreated somewhere I could never go – somewhere that those female ancestors had visited before her – a place of ancient pain and, before medicine could blunt nature’s brute mathematics, a place of frequent death. I began to comprehend the fitting redundancy of a man in all of this. The pomp and assumptions of my gender are valueless in life’s most crucial moment. We’re as useful as we can be useful to the women we love. No other contribution is necessary. It’s an education in humility I’m still grateful for.

  The first stage of labour dragged. Three hours went by and Heidi was still no further on. The midwife suggested that she should artificially break Heidi’s waters to ‘speed things along a bit’.

  It did rather more than that. The moment Heidi’s waters were broken, things moved very fast. Within minutes she was fully dilated and the midwife was urging her not to push straight away. From a slightly-too-leisurely labour, things developed into a medical situation – not a crisis, but something from which an orderly control had been lost. Medics began to appear beside the bed, and I was pushed further to the side, my redundancy more obvious by the minute as Heidi lost awareness of her surroundings in the new waves of pain assaulting her.

  Soon there was another problem to occupy me. The rapidity of the labour into the second ‘push’ stage had not allowed the baby’s head to fully engage in the correct position. Its head was tilted towards one shoulder – known as asynclitic – placing it out of correct alignment. Also, the body was in what’s known as right occiput transverse – meaning that it was facing Heidi’s left side rather than aligned with the birth canal. The foetal heart monitor began to show that the baby’s heart rate was dropping abnormally. I saw the concerned professional looks exchanged between the assembled medics even as their words continued calm and reassuring. The baby was becoming stressed. They needed to get it out. A young obstetrician brandished forceps and my wife was cut open. Things moved in a blur of gowns and scrubs – barked instructions punctuated by Heidi’s animal cries. The forceps were clamped to my child’s skull, and Heidi can still remember the obstetrician’s focused brute force as she tugged and tugged to pull the infant’s twisted body free and out into the world.

  Time stood still in the cacophony. And then a single adult voice was heard – professional relief devoid of emotion.

  ‘It’s out.’

  There was no cry. Wasn’t there supposed to be a cry?

  I caught a blurred glimpse of blue-coloured flesh – like a little dolphin – as the staff huddled around the newborn and carried it to the resuscitaire to clear its throat of mucus. A bustling silence.

  Seconds went by. And then at last I heard it. Not a full cry. More of a slow, bruised groan.

  Heidi’s look of relief and joy cut through the agony and delirium. The midwife carried the little groaning thing over to me so I could announce its gender. I saw its face for the first time. Red and bruised from the grappling tugs of forceps – grimacing with pain and the glare of lights.

  A boy. I had a son.

  We’d chosen two possible boy’s names. Patrick and Dominic. Heidi couldn’t see his face, so asked me which one he most looked like. ‘Dominic,’ I said, resolutely. ‘Definitely Dominic.’ It’s possibly the only major family decision Heidi has ever entrusted to me, and I think she still regrets it. But my son seems very happy with his name.

  Heidi had to be whisked away to be stitched up, so I was surprised to find myself alone in a recovery room with my new child. Dominic. The ‘it’ now had a name. The name no
w had a real face and eyes and tiny fingers. Full humanity. Dominic lay wrapped in blankets on the bed while I sat beside him in a chair. It seems astonishing to me now, but I didn’t pick him up in that room. Not once. In truth I was too nervous. It was like I’d been given a delicate instrument to handle with no instructions for operation. I sat really close to him and lightly stroked his battered face. The forceps had left him looking like a prize fighter after a bout. Every ten seconds or so he’d make a sad groan.

  ‘There, there, son,’ I said.

  A son. I’m a father. A parent. I was going to know this little prize fighter for the rest of my life. He’d be someone I’d love beyond all things. I knew this already. Yet sitting there felt … strange. That little bundle of bruises and fingers looking up at me seemed so unfamiliar. Who is he? Who, now, was I?

  My brother Paul gave me what I still think is the most useful advice any parent ever bestowed on me. He said:

  Meeting your child for the first time is like meeting any other human being. They’re not just a projection of yourself – they’re a brand-new individual, with all of their own unique likes and characteristics. Some parents say the instant you meet your new baby it’s like you’ve known them all your life. Well good for them! But for the rest of us I suspect it’s a bit more like real life. Don’t be surprised if your kid feels like a stranger to you at the start – they are! But you’re a stranger to them too. Imagine if I told you that a stranger was about to walk into the room that you’d know and love for the rest of your life. What would you do on that first meeting? You wouldn’t sit there worrying about how little you knew about them – you’d start to get to know each other!

  Love isn’t pre-written, just like a family isn’t pure genetics. It’s the thrill of discovering a common new joy in lives beyond our own experience. Something found, not something always known. Eventually Heidi was wheeled into the room to join us. Our new family was united at last. She looked askance at me through her exhaustion.

  ‘Haven’t you picked him up, yet?’

  ‘We’ve just been getting to know each other,’ I said.

  Over the next days and weeks, Heidi and I got to know our beautiful new son a whole lot more. We took him home to our new house, and placed him in the Moses basket at the bottom of our bed, listening for his hungry snuffles in the night. We’d lie with him between us in the evenings – exhausted and ecstatic – not quite able to believe that the doctors had allowed such a complex creature to leave the hospital in our amateur custody. His bruises quickly faded, and his little body began to put on healthy weight. We learned how to bathe him together – an operation that resembled a tricky bomb disposal in the hands of new recruits, but gradually became second nature. There was, however, one task I felt eminently qualified to do alone. I went to register my new son’s birth.

  In those days, the picturesque local register office was housed on the first floor of a small timber-framed building on Saffron Walden’s medieval high street. I was greeted by a charming but formidable registrar of middle years and eminent heritage, who looked at my casual attire over half-rimmed spectacles as she filled in the details on the register. I recalled that last visit I’d made to the register office, to certify my dad’s death. That vast municipal edifice in Liverpool, ringing with the sound of heels on stone and the flattened vowels of overworked northern public servants. Now here I was in a tiny building older than the United States, opposite a woman whose family my ancestors would have been pleased to clean for. I shared a quiet smile with my father.

  ‘Place of birth?’ the lady asked.

  ‘Cambridge,’ I said.

  Cambridge. Centuries-old seat of learning on the edge of the English Fens. What a lovely place to begin one’s journey as a McGann. This would be my child’s first piece of primary data. He was being written into existence as a citizen of the state. He now had a beginning to his story. A future narrative.

  The registrar stopped writing and looked up. She gave me a particularly stern glance over her glasses as she asked, ‘And what is the name that you would like your child to go through life with?’ Her emphasis amused me. She’d clearly had to endure frequent birth registrations by parents who chose outlandish names for their offspring, and she wished me to know she didn’t approve. I told her Dominic’s full name, and she seemed relieved. I must say I can sympathise. A name doesn’t belong to those who do the naming. Like any fine ambassador, it should bring honour to the post without attracting unnecessary attention to itself.

  When everything was in order I signed the register. Just like I’d signed for my father’s death. Just like I’d signed for my marriage to Heidi. My genealogical journey through documentary time had now achieved a full cycle. A birth – a marriage – a death. Each one a key moment in my own family narrative. Each one bearing my spidery, scrawled signature. Another breadcrumb for the trail. Another turn of the cog.

  In the following months we watched our son thrive and grow. We heard his garbled sounds begin to coalesce into vowels and consonants. We saw his first smile, and heard his first full-throated chuckle – surely the greatest sound nature has ever created. By his first Christmas and birthday he’d begun to attempt his first baby steps – wobbling across our living room in pyjamas as his relatives cooed and cheered, the lavish toys of an only child scattered all around.

  It looked like Dominic would be our only child. The window of fertility had closed as quickly as it had opened, like the specialist had predicted. But we felt blessed. Medicine had gifted us a single new narrative, and we knew how fortunate we’d been. We’ve never wished for more. In any previous age the medical problems we’d had would have been undetected and untreatable. It’s impossible to tell the history of a family without a tribute to the great matriarch of medicine – a mother whose mercy spares so many of us to thrive when we would have failed, or live when we would have stayed ungrown. It’s the dragonfly of hope that flutters free from Pandora’s box of grim maladies.

  By the end of February, Dominic was beginning to scamper around with such resolution that we felt it was time to buy him his first proper pair of shoes. So one bright Saturday afternoon we put him in the car and took him to Cambridge.

  It was a lovely day. You could feel spring around the corner. We went to the city’s shopping mall where we knew there was a reputable childen’s shoe shop. Dominic was mercifully well-behaved. He had his little feet measured, and we purchased a lovely pair of blue lace-ups for him. Afterwards Heidi and I strolled around the shops with Dom in his buggy, enjoying the perfection of the moment. A family in frozen time. Health like mercy. Happiness like the delicate filigree on the dragonfly’s wing.

  In less than seventy-two hours from this perfect moment, my wife would be close to death.

  TESTIMONY

  When we got back from shopping that Saturday evening, Heidi had a dinner engagement in a friend’s house across the road. I agreed to stay in with Dom. She got back at about half past ten, and we had an early night, knowing that our young charge would have us up early the next morning.

  As Heidi lay there, she began to feel the first stirrings of stomach pain:

  I remember thinking, ‘I must have eaten something that disagreed with me.’ I went to the toilet and I was sick. I suddenly began to feel quite ill, so I went into the spare room in order not to disturb you if I was sick again in the night.

  Heidi started to retch constantly. Then the stomach pains grew worse – the worst pains Heidi could remember – coming on like contraction waves throughout the night between each bout of retching. By Sunday morning, Heidi was moaning with the pain. I got up with Dominic, and told her to stay in bed to sleep it off:

  I still thought it was food poisoning at that point. But then I started to vomit huge quantities of bile. I didn’t have nausea any more. The greenish bile started to turn darker and darker and the waves of pain were becoming unbearable. I went up and down the landing on all fours because the pain of it was so terrible. It was like I was trying
to crawl away from it.

  Looking back, it seems inconceivable that we still thought it was food poisoning on that Sunday morning, and didn’t immediately realise it was something much worse. I still shudder at my own carelessness – my willingness to believe that her pains were awful, but not untoward. Yet there was no precedent for what was happening. We were young and our new life simply couldn’t imagine any horror so sudden or so severe. We were wrapped in the dragonfly’s wings. Or so we thought.

  By lunchtime things hadn’t improved. I called the locum doctor out to the house. He arrived in the afternoon. When he asked what the problem was, we gave him the only explanation we could think of. Food poisoning:

  He examined me, and confirmed that it was food poisoning. He went along with our diagnosis for what we believed was happening. He gave me a single Valium tablet and two paracetamol. He said, ‘Have one paracetamol every four hours, and by tomorrow you’ll feel better.’

  It was a serious misdiagnosis. If he’d listened carefully to Heidi’s intestines he’d have detected no sound of activity – a sign of serious malfunction. It was an oversight we’d later overlook in light of the medical efforts that followed. An overworked locum, forced to draw hasty conclusions from the information provided by a patient who didn’t wish to make a fuss.

  By the evening of Sunday it was obvious the paracetamol wasn’t going to do the trick. The pains had actually become less extreme – but the vomiting of bile continued. And the pains had now been replaced by fever:

  I had a feverish night with episodes of vomiting bile. I was back in our bed, but I was drifting in and out of consciousness. By the Monday morning, I … I’d just never felt so ill in my life.