by Lisa Jewell
He lifted his head slowly from his fists and stared at her through his lashes. The worst of it was that she was right. He couldn’t afford it. It was bad for his head. But it was all he had. He sighed. Leave me something, he wanted to say. You’ve taken my youth and my freedom. Leave me this. Just this. Instead he smiled at her. ‘I’ll finish this lot,’ he pointed at the box on the table, ‘and that’ll be it. OK?’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Yeah. Right. I’ll believe that when I see it. It’s not fair,’ she continued. ‘All the fucking sacrifices I’m making. My body … I mean, look at these,’ she lifted her tunic top, ‘fucking stretch-marks. Those’ll never go. I’ll have those for life, you know? Nineteen years old and my body’s already fucked. It’s all just a big game to you.’ She let the top drop. ‘Just a big game. You’re a little. Fucking. Boy.’
She uncurled herself from the depths of the sofa and then raised herself and her bump with some effort (and, Dean suspected, some added dramatic effects) from its edge. She then shuffled, in worn-out lambskin slippers and with one hand rested wearily in the small of her back, towards the bedroom which she entered, slamming the door behind her for effect.
Dean ran his hands across his shorn head and sighed again. One minute he’d been working a van job, earning in excess of £250 a week, had enough money for drinking, for weed, for anything he wanted. He had the fittest girlfriend, Sky Donnelly, sex on tap, the good life. Next minute the job had gone and Sky was pregnant and frigid and covered in stretch-marks. There was no way he was going to leave her to it, didn’t matter how much of a bitch she was to him. No way. He hadn’t been brought up like that. And besides, he’d grown up without a dad and there was no way he’d let the same thing happen to any child of his.
It was a girl. A little girl. Sky wanted to call her Isadora. Dean wanted to call her Katy, after his grandmother who’d passed away the year before. Dean knew who’d win the fight. Small but deadly, his Sky.
Isadora Katy Higgins. It didn’t exactly flow but then it was a damn sight better than half the names kids got called round here these days. There was one of his mates from the depot who’d called his twins Gucci and Prada.
Sky emerged from the bedroom five minutes later. She was dressed to go out.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘The hospital.’
‘What for?’
‘Oh, for a fucking pedicure. What do you think I’m going for?’
‘I don’t know. That’s why I asked.’
‘I’m bleeding.’
‘What!’
‘Yeah. I’m bleeding. OK?’
‘Shit. What do you think …’
‘I think I’m losing the baby, that’s what I think, and I’m not about to sit around here waiting for that to happen. You coming or what?’
Within half an hour of walking into A&E Sky and Dean were told that not only was Sky in early labour, but that her placenta was lying dangerously low and she was losing a worrying amount of blood. They were sent straight to the birth unit at Queen Charlotte’s where they were told that the baby would have to be delivered immediately.
‘But I’m only thirty weeks!’ she wailed.
‘We’ve got one of the best neonatal care units in the country here. Baby will be fine.’
‘But it’s going to be tiny!’
‘Well, yes, but we’ve had tinier. We’ve had babies born at twenty-two weeks who’ve survived and flourished.’
‘But I was a preemie. I was in hospital for weeks. And I was always behind in everything. What if she turns out backward?’
‘Listen, Sky,’ said the nurse, ‘if you don‘t deliver this baby now, you could both die. So really, we’re just going to have to take our chances. OK?’
Sky grabbed Dean’s hand and looked at him desperately. ‘Oh, shit, Dean! Oh, God, I’m scared! I’m really scared!’
Dean squeezed her hand and forced a smile through the rigor of terror constricting his face. ‘It’s going to be fine, baby. You heard what they said. It’s going to be fine.’
‘But, like, thirty weeks? She’s going to be so small. We’ll have to buy new vests and sleepsuits and everything. Oh, God, Dean. I’m not ready for this. I’m not ready!’
Dean wasn’t ready either. He had never been ready and hadn’t imagined that he ever would be. He’d been putting this moment on hold, hoping that if he didn’t think about it, it wouldn’t come, that somehow his life would just peter off into the distance, to a small grey speck. In a way it was good this was happening now. He would have got more and more nervous as the due date approached, less and less able to deal with the reality of it. And now reality had fallen on his head, like a brick. Better this than weeks of sickening anticipation.
‘It’ll be fine,’ he said again. ‘Honestly. I’ll ask my mum to get some new stuff for the baby.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about clothes for the baby,’ the nurse interjected. ‘She’ll be here for quite a few weeks while we get her nice and strong. We have clothes here and by the time you take her home she’ll fit into all the lovely things you’ve bought for her.’
Dean thought about that. The baby was about to be born, but it was going to stay here. Other people would be looking after it. He’d still be able to go home and have a smoke and an unbroken night’s sleep. This was all starting to feel weirdly manageable. Sky wouldn’t be pregnant any more; there’d be ten fewer weeks of her being a bitch. Ten weeks when she would probably be here at the hospital all the time. And all the while he’d be getting to know his new baby girl in stages, slowly, not all at once. She would seep into his life, bit by bit, not just gatecrash it.
He smiled. ‘It’s going to be fine,’ he said, and he really meant it.
‘They’re going to cut me open, Dean! They’re going to cut my belly open. Shit! I’ll never have a flat stomach again. Oh, God. I haven’t called my mum … How long have I got?’ she asked the nurse.
‘They’re getting surgery ready for you now. And the anaesthetist’s on his way. Your baby should be here within the hour.’
‘Dean! Shit! Give me my phone. Give it to me!’
‘Where is it?’
‘It’s in my pocket. Of my coat. There. No, there. The other one! The other one, you spaz. Fuck!’ She snatched the phone from his hand and dialled her mother’s number. ‘Mum! I’m in hospital! I’m in labour! I’m bleeding. Yeah. And they’re going to take the baby out. No. A C-section. Yeah. Dean’s here, yeah. Are you coming, Mum? Are you coming now? Please come now, Mum. I’m so scared. Oh, God, the anaesthetist’s here. They’re going to inject me. Hurry up, Mum. Hurry up!’
Sky was crying. Dean felt oddly moved by the sight of the tears glistening on his girlfriend’s cheeks. Sky never cried. Not even when her stepdad died. Not even when there were really sad stories on The X Factor. She was hard and unsentimental. She passed her phone back to him and then turned and stared desperately at the wall to her left. The midwife clasped her forearm and smiled sympathetically. ‘Everyone here is the best. The best people. You’re safe here. Trust me.’
Sky turned and smiled wanly at the midwife. It was her ‘yeah, right’ smile, the one she used on Dean all the time.
‘Are you going to call your mum?’
Dean blinked.
‘She’ll want to know, Dean. This is her first grandchild, I might die. You need to tell her.’
He raised his eyebrows and stuck out his bottom lip. ‘I guess so,’ he said, feeling the inside pocket of his jacket for his phone. His mum’s number went through to voicemail and he left her a message. ‘Mum, it’s me, give us a call, OK?’
He slipped the phone back into his pocket and noticed that Sky was looking at him aghast. ‘Give us a call? Give us a call?’
‘Yeah? What?’
She pursed her lips and shook her head. ‘You’re a fucking moron, Dean. Could you not have said something, you know, relevant? Like maybe where you were. Or what was happening. Or that I was fucking dying? Jesus!’
Sky rolled her eyes and then grimaced.
Dean got to his feet and clutched her hand. ‘You OK?’ he said.
‘Yeah, yeah, just a twinge. A thing. A contraction, you know.’
Dean squeezed her hand and wondered what he should say or do to help. Everything felt potentially hazardous. But then saying and doing nothing felt even more dangerous. ‘Can I get you anything?’ he asked, thinking it felt like a reasonably safe call.
‘Yeah. A normal placenta and another ten weeks to grow this baby.’ She threw him her ‘you total wanker’ smile, folded her arms across her belly and turned away from him.
The anaesthetist arrived, an Asian man with a goatee beard and trendy shoes. He curled Sky into a foetal ball and injected her back. Dean couldn’t watch. He was squeamish about needles, in particular needles that went into your actual spine. Sky made a total fuss about it but then, for a few moments afterwards, she was calm.
Looking back on the day his first baby was born, Dean could hardly remember anything after Sky was taken into surgery. Everything started going really fast. Sky’s mum Rose pitched up at some point and immediately acted like nobody had been doing anything right until she arrived. His mum had called and said she wouldn’t be able to make it for at least a couple of hours because she was in Brighton. He was too shell-shocked even to ask her what the hell she was doing there. He had a photo of himself that Sky’s mum had taken, wearing a green tunic and trousers and a matching green hat. What do they call that? Scrubs. Yes, scrubs. At some point someone had put him in scrubs. Or maybe he’d put himself in scrubs, he couldn’t remember. And then a nurse told him he could go into theatre and he remembered very clearly thinking, Shit, no time for a quick smoke, thinking how much better seeing your kid being born would be after a smoke. And then the next thing he knew, she was out. Isadora. There. Like a skinned lamb. All loose skin and blue veins and feet and hands the size of thumbnails. He barely had a chance to look at her face. She was stolen away and put under a light like an alien abduction and then someone came and passed her under their noses, very, very quickly, long enough for Dean to see wide-spaced eyes and a big mouth and dark hair that grew low on her brow. And in that brief moment, his daughter glanced at him with a look of such intense intelligence and knowing that Dean’s breath caught and he felt as small and inconsequential as a fruit-fly.
Sky looked at him desperately as the baby was taken away again. ‘Is she all right?’ she cried. ‘Is she OK?’
‘She looks fantastic,’ said a nurse, ‘just taking her away now, just to be sure. But she looks fantastic. Really strong.’
‘I want my mum. Where’s my mum?’
‘She’s outside, waiting.’
‘Can I see her? I want to see her.’
‘You can see her when we’ve finished putting you back together. OK?’
‘Dean, go and tell her,’ Sky pleaded. ‘Go and tell her the baby’s here. She’ll be freaking out otherwise.’
Dean did as he was told. The world seemed to have been torn into fragments and was whirling around his head. He couldn’t get a grip on anything. He remembered Sky’s mum jumping to her feet when she saw him, grabbing his forearms, almost shouting at him: ‘Is it OK? Are they OK?’
Then he remembered people streaming out of the delivery room and a lot of shouting. He stood and watched, transfixed almost, somehow not putting facts together in his mind. They were shouting about somebody else, he told himself, maybe there was a door to another room off Sky’s room.
‘What’s going on?’ said Sky’s mum to the next person to walk urgently past them.
The person looked at Sky’s mum for a split second, said nothing and carried on walking.
Dean’s mouth felt dry. He licked his lips. He could feel fear pulsing from Sky’s mum like radiation. The more she panicked, the more Dean withdrew inside himself. If he didn’t say anything and he didn’t do anything then everything would be cool.
‘How can you just stand there doing nothing? That’s your woman in there! Find out what the fuck’s going on!’
Eventually someone emerged and told them that Sky was haemorrhaging, that she had lost a dangerous amount of blood and that they were having trouble locating her blood type, but that they would begin a transfusion the moment they’d managed to locate some.
Still Dean felt it, a sense of calm resignation, that there was nothing he could do, that people were doing what needed to be done, that very soon he could go home. The thought crossed his mind, once again, that he would like to slip out for a smoke, but with Sky’s mother there, stressing and fretting, he knew he would not be allowed to. It felt to Dean as if he suddenly existed in three different dimensions. Part of him was here, cool and calm, yet two other parts of him, his child, her mother, had been unstitched and put away somewhere out of sight. Every time he tried to give over some thought to one of them, the other demanded his attention, and then he’d be back in his own head, wanting a spliff. Sky, baby, spliff, boing boing boing.
And then, some time later, maybe an hour, maybe less, a doctor appeared and stood in front of Dean and Sky’s mother, and Sky’s mother immediately began to wail, ‘No, no, not my baby, not my baby girl, no, no, no,’ and nobody used the word dead, but Dean knew that she was.
Sky was gone.
His pretty, stroppy girl was gone.
Sky’s mother wouldn’t touch him. It was as if he’d killed Sky. And maybe he had. He’d got her pregnant. If she hadn’t been pregnant, she’d still have been alive.
His own mother arrived an hour after Sky died and Dean sat and let her hold him for a while, while Sky’s mum shouted at people and screamed. Dean had not done anything physical yet. He had not cried or shouted or fainted or hit anyone or thrown anything. He had not, as far as he could recollect, even spoken. He hadn’t needed to. Sky’s mum had been doing all the speaking that needed to be done.
A nurse they had not seen before came to them after a few minutes and Dean’s mum released him from her embrace.
‘The baby’s doing well,’ she said, ‘would you like to come and see her?’ The question was directed at Dean. He nodded. He did want to see her. He wanted to get away from this. His mum came with him but Sky’s mum did not want to leave her daughter.
‘I’ll come later,’ she said, ‘take a picture for me. Give her a kiss. Oh, God.’
His mum held his hand as they walked down the corridor behind the nurse. Dean could feel his head reordering itself as they walked away from the mess of grief towards a blander landscape. ‘She’s a bit tangled up,’ the nurse explained with a smile, ‘lots of tubes and things, nothing to be scared of, though. She’s very strong, she won’t have to stay in long.’
‘Will we be able to hold her?’ asked his mum.
‘Possibly. You’ll have to speak to the nurse on duty.’
They had to scrub their hands clean in a low metal sink and go through two sets of security doors and then they were in a small sunny room filled with incubators.
Dean looked around. The scenario was otherworldly. Eight babies the size of puppies wired up to flashing machinery.
‘There she is,’ said the nurse, ‘your little girl.’
Dean inhaled. She was on his far right. She was wearing a knitted white hat that was too big for her, and a gigantic nappy. Her legs emerged from the cavernous nappy splayed out like a supermarket chicken with the string cut off. Her arms were spread out and she looked for all the world as though she were sunbathing.
‘She’s beautiful,’ said his mum. ‘Oh, Dean, she’s just beautiful.’
Dean glanced down into the box. She was sleeping. Her fingers furled and unfurled in her sleep. With her wide mouth and far-apart eyes she looked a bit like a Muppet, like her face would divide in half when she opened her mouth. She looked just like him. Just exactly like him.
‘She looks like you, doesn’t she?’ said his mum.
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nbsp; Dean nodded. ‘Can I touch her?’ he asked the nurse.
‘Yes, you can.’
‘I’ll be gentle,’ he said, wanting to say it before she said it, before she made him feel like a big brute.
He stroked the palm of the baby’s hand with a fingertip. Her skin was warm and so fine and translucent it felt almost like nothing. ‘She’s so small,’ he murmured.
‘Just under four pounds,’ said the nurse. ‘A good weight. For her weeks. What are you going to call her?’
Dean stared at the baby and moved his fingertip to her cheeks. They were covered in a minky down. Part-Muppet, part-werewolf.
‘Isadora,’ he said. ‘Isadora Katy.’
The nurse smiled. ‘That’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘Had you already decided,’ she continued, ‘before, well …?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s what Sky wanted.’
‘Ah,’ said the nurse, ‘that’s good. Good that you’d already decided. Can we put that on her notes, then? Can we write it down? I-S-A-D-O-R-A? And K-A-T-Y? Higgins? Lovely. Great. I’ll leave you to it then, OK?’
His mum pulled a chair over for him to sit on and they sat together for a few minutes, staring at the baby. Dean was glad that Sky’s mum wasn’t here. She’d have been talking. Dean’s mum was like him, quiet, contemplative.
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ she said eventually. ‘She’s got all of you in her. All of your Dean-ness. It’s all in there. Like ingredients in a cake.’
Dean nodded. He hadn’t expected it. Hadn’t expected his baby to look like him. The whole pregnancy had been about Sky. Everything was always about Sky. It was her body, her baby, her pregnancy, her life, her flat, her world. Dean had just assumed that his daughter would be Sky in miniature. And there she was, four pounds nothing of him. Sky would have been gutted. She’d even said it: ‘I hope this girl doesn’t look like you, Dean, she’ll be spending her whole life plucking her fucking eyebrows. And wailing at the moon.’
But his features sat well on her, tiny and undercooked as she was. She was pretty.
Another nurse joined them and smiled. ‘Beautiful little thing,’ she said. And then she turned to Dean and she said, ‘I’m so so sorry for your loss.’
