How Not to Fall in Love, Actually

by Catherine Bennetto

  Helen looked sceptical. ‘Are you sure you’re not weeing?’

  ‘It’s amniotic fluid,’ I said, but doubt was settling.

  For a gross few seconds we contemplated the slow drip, drip of the undecided liquid, then we leapt into action.

  ‘I have to get to hospital.’

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Helen said, paling.

  ‘I’ll call a cab,’ said Joe.

  ‘No!’ I shouted. ‘I’m not going to have my baby in a minicab that still smells of last night’s beer and cigarettes. We can go in Helen’s car.’

  ‘I tubed,’ she said, panicky. ‘I haven’t even been home yet.’ She used both hands to exhibit her outfit.

  ‘It has to be a cab then,’ Joe said.

  ‘No! I’m not—’ Another contraction stopped me protesting any further. Joe rushed to my side and Helen got busy looking worried.

  ‘Douglas!’ She blurted, digging around in her handbag. ‘He’s hired a van to move into Jemima’s flat. He’s in Mitcham right now.’ She pulled out her phone and dialled.

  Helen bossed Douglas; Joe rubbed my back; I gasped and groaned. Then Helen packed a hospital bag and took up front-door surveillance while Joe cleaned the floor-goo and I changed out of my sodden knickers.

  ‘He’s here!’ Helen shouted.

  Joe grabbed my baby bag, helped me to the front door and flicked open a brolly. Helen flew out of the door first and into the back of what looked to be the smallest minivan in existence. Joe trundled me to the vehicle and flung open the tiny passenger door, revealing a bubble-wrap-covered passenger seat and a nervous-looking Douglas in cotton driving gloves.

  ‘Do I have to sit on this?’ I said, sitting down to the sounds of multiple plasticky pops.

  ‘Oh, ah, it was Jemima’s idea,’ Douglas said. ‘Because of the . . .’ He glanced towards my groin. ‘The, ahem, seepage.’ He adjusted his glasses with a gloved fingertip. I conveyed my disgust with a sneer. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  Joe closed the door and leapt into the seatless back with Helen. He slid shut the side door confining the four of us in the minuscule, muggy van. So cramped were we that I could feel both Helen’s and Joe’s breath on my neck. I could have touched the back window with my hand. Rain thrashed and blotched the windscreen.

  Douglas twisted in his seat. ‘You can hold onto the . . . ah . . .’ He scanned the back of the van, empty except for more bubble wrap and without anything to grip. ‘The, ah, well, just hold on.’ He noticed Helen’s low-cut dress and turned back to the steering wheel, a matronly look on his face. ‘Might I suggest that your attire is not entirely appropriate?’ he said, glancing at Helen’s cleavage in the rear-view mirror and quickly looking away.

  He lurched the van forward; the bubble wrap beneath me erupted in a symphony of miniature explosions.

  ‘I’m not taking advice from someone who wears driving gloves,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a hired van.’ Douglas flicked the windscreen wipers to hyper-swish.

  ‘I wouldn’t call this a van,’ Joe said over my continuous popping.

  ‘So?’ Helen said.

  ‘So you don’t know who’s been driving it.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Helen derided. ‘They clean it.’

  ‘You can’t say for sure.’

  Another contraction bore down; I had nowhere to lean so I writhed from left to right, moaning and popping, while Helen ridiculed Douglas for his hypochondriac propensities and Joe patted me pointlessly but sweetly on the shoulder.

  ‘Some people are a little more careful with what they touch,’ Douglas said, shuddering the van to a stop at some lights and sending Joe and Helen tumbling forward.

  My contraction eased. Helen righted herself, leant over Douglas’s shoulder and, giving him an almost anatomical view of her cleavage, licked the steering wheel, slow and slutty. Disgust set Douglas’s lips in a hard line. A few lone pops escaped. Helen crouched back, a wicked look on her face.

  ‘That’s revolting.’ Douglas used a pocket handkerchief to wipe the wheel.

  ‘I’ve licked worse.’ She winked at Joe.

  The lights turned green and we listed forward. More frantic popping.

  ‘Can you call Alex and tell her to go straight to the hospital?’ I said to Joe, clutching onto the door handle. ‘And tell her to tell Mum.’

  Joe did as instructed. Helen told Douglas he was driving like Angela Lansbury and I squirmed, grunted and popped through another contraction. We bumped along Blackshaw Road, the Sunday traffic even slower due to the rain.

  ‘She says to tell you she rang Ned,’ Joe said, one hand holding the phone to his ear, the other steadying himself against the side of the van. He was so hunched over he was almost in downward dog.

  ‘What?’ I seethed, panting through the end of a particularly painful spasm.

  Joe listened on the other line.

  ‘She says he has a right to be there,’ he listened again. ‘He is the father, after all.’

  ‘He’s a cocksucking, wank-bugger cunt face,’ I spat.

  Joe blinked then spoke. ‘Emma says “he’s a cocksucking” . . . right, OK . . . yes, I will.’ He hung up. ‘She’ll meet us there.’

  Douglas bumped us into the hospital car park and pulled up outside the building, flinging his rear passengers to the floor again. Joe leapt out of the side door and helped me extricate myself from the bubble wrap while Helen gave bossy directives on where to park and Douglas made polite protests about needing to get back to Jemima to assist with the merging of their individual book collections.

  ‘Just park, OK?’ she said, climbing through the front in her too-tight, too-short dress. ‘You’re not going home to play Dewey Decimal System with your girlfriend when Emma is about to have a baby! Jemima can stick her thesaurus up . . .’ Helen’s voice was drowned out by Douglas’s gear-crunching.

  Joe hoisted the hospital bag over his shoulder and guided me through the sliding doors and across the streaky lino floor.

  This was it. I was arriving a single entity. When I left it would be with an additional and long-standing housemate. A dual entity we would be. I became shallow of breath at the thought.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  In the labour suite, atop a sturdy hospital bed with nurses coming and going, Joe patted my head with a cold cloth. It was a soothing contrast to the burning, contorting pain in the rest of my body.

  ‘When God created woman he fucked it up,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah?’ Joe gave a sympathetic smile.

  ‘Yeah. This is barbaric. Prehistoric. We should have evolved. We should be able to grow a baby in a handbag by now.’

  I remembered shooting a labour scene at my old job. It had taken twenty minutes from waters breaking to holding cute baby with reapplied lip gloss and sweaty hair miraculously dried, cascading across the actress’s shoulders in loose, attractive waves. I felt resentful mine was not a scripted labour and no one was on hand to curl my hair and hand me the quietest of the four clean babies waiting off set. A lady arrived and introduced herself as Tina the midwife. After three quick contractions and another dilation check, which had me at a mere four centimetres, I got desperate.

  ‘Can’t you just, I don’t know . . . force the cervix open?’ I said, breathless. I’d moved from lying on the bed to standing at the end, leaning forward and resting on my forearms. ‘Like with some kitchen tongs, or something?’

  Tina smiled and checked my pulse. ‘I promise I won’t complain to the midwife society. Look in your tool kit.’ I nodded towards a medical-looking bag Tina had placed in the corner of the room. ‘There’s got to be something that can open a cervix. We can grow an ear on the back of a mouse, for god’s sake; why hasn’t anyone invented something to open a fucking cervix?!’

  Joe looked on helplessly from beside the bed. Tina continued to hold my wrist and look at her watch.

  ‘We need a miniature thing.’ I wound my free hand round in a circular motion. ‘You know!’ I looked at Joe a
nd did the circular hand thing again.

  He frowned and shook his head.

  ‘The thing that goes like this’ – I wound my hand faster – ‘and lifts up a car?’

  Tina dropped my wrist, put her stethoscope in her ears and popped the chest piece under my pyjama vest, moving it round the lower part of my abdomen.

  ‘A jack?’ Joe said, his eyes darting nervously towards the midwife.

  ‘Yes! That’s it, a jack!’ I jabbed my finger in the direction of Tina’s big black bag. ‘See if she’s got a jack in her tool box! Or a—’

  ‘Now, Emma, I don’t want you to panic,’ Tina interrupted in a calm voice.

  I dropped my arm and immediately panicked.

  ‘Your baby’s heart rate has dipped, the cord could be round the neck and we need to get you to theatre.’ She removed the stethoscope from her ears and pressed a red button on the wall that said EMERGENCY.

  Tina got me up on the bed. Nurses arrived, fixed sticky tabs to my stomach and hooked me up to machines with blippy noises and moving lines. They checked last names, addresses and emergency next of kin, which Joe confirmed with solemnity. A doctor arrived at my bedside with a clipboard and an emergency caesarean consent form. I took the clipboard he offered and flicked through the pages. Internal bleeding, infection, necessary hysterectomy, bowel obstruction, lung collapse (Christ! How high up were they going to slice?), injury to baby, injury to other organs, heart attack, stroke, fatal blood clot, fatal scar rupture, permanent colostomy bag, infertility, risk of death of mother, risk of death of baby.

  ‘Sounds great.’ I scrawled my name illegibly and was wheeled out of the room amid a flurry of nurses and machines.

  Trotting behind my quick-moving bed, Joe phoned Alex.

  ‘She’s in traffic round Clapham Common,’ he said, sliding his phone into his jeans pocket. ‘I don’t think she’s going to make it.’

  ‘Shit.’

  We arrived at some double doors with a sign that said OPERATING THEATRE 9 – NO GENERAL ADMITTANCE. My team of nurses and machines trundled through the doors. Joe stayed in the hall.

  ‘Joe?!’

  ‘Next of kin or birth partners only,’ a nurse said from the head of the bed, a note of urgency to her voice. ‘Are you the father, sir?’

  Joe looked back at the waiting nurse, his face unreadable. I willed him to say he was. Alex was not going to make it. I was scared.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’ He rushed through the doors to my bedside and grabbed my hand.

  ‘Don’t go down the ugly end,’ I warned.

  ‘I have no such intention.’

  The operating theatre buzzed with bodies in blue. Joe was taken aside and made to don a paper hat and smock. Masked strangers manoeuvred me, lifting me from the wheelie bed to a narrower, higher one in the middle of the room. I writhed and twisted through a contraction while nurses pressed my back or allowed me to grip their hands, then wept as the pain subsided. A kind-faced lady with square white teeth arrived, her face mask hung round her neck. She introduced herself as Lizzie the Obstetrician.

  ‘You’re going to be holding your baby very soon but right now I need you to sit up and stay as still as you possibly can while our anaesthetist puts a needle in your back.’

  ‘How still?

  Lizzie the big-toothed doctor told me that I had to stay as still as possible even if I was having a contraction or I could end up paralysed. How very frank our Lizzie was. She smiled her big-toothed smile and told me if I could do it all pain would be gone.

  ‘Gone?’ I rasped.

  Another contraction started. The room waited. I gripped Joe’s shoulders and sobbed into his chest. I didn’t think I could take any more. If I could stay still long enough for the stranger in a smock to stick a needle in my spine I would be pain free. Stay fecking still? She may as well have asked me to swim to Australia and bring back a wombat. Or ask my mother to wear a tracksuit. The contraction subsided.

  ‘I’m ready,’ I gasped.

  Somebody swabbed my lower spine with a chemical coolness. There was a tiny pinch as the needle pierced the skin. Almost instantly a chilled weightlessness drifted down my spine. As it moved it took away the pain. Like a cleansing, cooling tide.

  ‘It’s out,’ the anaesthetist said.

  The room soared into action. Joe stepped out of the way but kept his eyes on mine. The drugs spread swiftly and in seconds my body stopped feeling solid from the chest down. Like after my boobs I was nothing but a floating spirit. Or the bottom half of the Marchesa silk-chiffon dress Mum wore to a society wedding last year and told me would be mine if only I lost a little weight around the hips. It felt as if I’d been in pain my whole life and was experiencing comfort for the first time. It was euphoric, and without the fierce ripping sensation of labour I became very, very tired. I closed my eyes and allowed the people to fuss round me. This must be what taking heroin was like, I thought. It’s loooovely. When I opened my eyes I was on my back and a sheet, much like a set of stage curtains, had been placed across my stomach, blocking my legs from view. It was like a teeny-tiny play would be taking place on my stomach. I hoped Simon Pegg was in it. A little Simon Pegg in round-framed glasses . . . I fought against exhaustion, hoping the play would begin soon. A wooden bang-clatter had the entire room looking towards the open door where a young orderly stood, a look of accomplishment on his enthusiastic face.

  ‘The father’s here,’ he said.

  The masked strangers looked at the orderly. Then at Joe. Then at me. Ned’s freckled face appeared at the small window in the other set of doors behind the orderly.

  ‘Emma!’

  Lizzie looked back at me and gave a non-judgemental shrug. ‘Send him in.’

  Ned shuffled in, struggling into his paper smock and tripping over his untied laces. He was as wide-eyed and jittery as a baby rabbit.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, arriving at the bedside and glancing warily up at Joe, then to Joe’s hand in mine. His eyes darted round the room and he adjusted his paper shower cap.

  ‘Ned, Joe; Joe, Ned.’ I made a blasé, drug-foggy gesture with my free hand.

  ‘Hi,’ Joe said.

  ‘Hi, yeah, hi.’ Ned nodded copiously.

  A nurse with magnificently sculpted eyebrows glared at the three of us like we were guests on Trisha who were going to erupt into a paternity scuffle and went back to her activities behind the curtain.

  ‘OK, you ready, Emma?’ Lizzie the Obstetrician said.

  I nodded. The room got busy. I glanced at Joe, who was resolutely keeping his eyes on my face. Ned, on the other hand, standing next to Joe with his smock falling off his narrow shoulder, had a view of the other side of the curtain and was showing signs of alarm. I felt myself losing my purchase on consciousness. The last thing I remembered was Ned’s eyes widening and a huge gulp sliding down his thin, freckly throat as Obstetrician Lizzie said, ‘Making the incision.’

  I don’t know how much later I awoke; it could have been many minutes, it literally could have been the second after I’d shut my eyes, but I came to with the weird sensation of my lower body being pushed and pulled with vigorous bumps and jerks. As if my stomach was a washing machine and a pair of trainers was on spin cycle. A horrible sucking noise sounded, Ned went a little green around the gills and Obstetrician Lizzie announced, ‘She’s out.’

  She?

  It’s a girl? I have a girl baby?

  Why are they all rushing? Joe was saying something but his voice sounded like he was on the shore of a lake and I was at the bottom, floating around in my Marchesa dress. I thought I might have asked if she was OK, but I also might not have. The deep wrench of the unconscious dragged. My last sight was of Joe’s evaluating stare and Ned, pale and terrified, gaping at the end of the bed, his arms hanging by his sides.

  And then nothing.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  What felt like half a second later, I sensed myself rising from the soundless, blank place of nothingness to the unmistakable tang of public
hospital. Except for the hum of the air-conditioning and medical machinery, there was so sound.

  My baby!

  I opened my eyes. I wasn’t in theatre any more. I was in a quiet room, tucked tightly into stiff sheets in a half-upright bed. I scanned the room. Ned stood motionless against a wall like someone had taken out his batteries. He was pale. He was stunned. He was a shade prior to catatonic. On a plastic chair against the opposite wall, gazing down at a tiny bundled shape, sat Joe.

  ‘Joe.’ My mouth was dry and tacky.

  His head shot up, he grinned and eased himself out of the chair. Ned looked up from whatever was so fascinating on the floor.

  ‘Is she OK?’ I said.

  ‘She’s perfect.’ Joe smiled, reaching the side of my bed.

  I was uneasy about being disconnected from my baby and wanted to close this airy new gap between us. I tugged my arms free, mentally scanning my body for any horrific pain and finding nothing worse than thirst. Joe lowered the petite bundle into my outstretched arms, cupping her wobbly head with his palm and I caught sight of my daughter for the first time. My stomach swirled with devotion despite the fact that she was pink and blotchy and had remnants of something that looked like it had slid off the top of a hot bagel. Some kind of jam and cream cheese mixture. She lay still, her inconceivably tiny eyelashes clumped together resting on inconceivably tiny cheeks.

  ‘She’s amazing,’ I breathed. I looked over to Ned, but he’d gone back to studying the floor. My heart splintered a fraction. ‘How long was I out for?’

  ‘About twenty minutes,’ Joe said.

  ‘And you held her the whole time?’

  Joe shot a discreet look to Ned, still inert but watching with guarded eyes. ‘Yep.’ He offered Ned a kind smile then turned back to me. ‘We’ve discussed gardening and social economics, the importance of team sports and the meaning of life. Which we both agreed was gardening.’

  I giggled and stared at my daughter’s face, drinking in the absolute realness of her. She was a true and present person. A very, very small one. I pulled the blanket away and studied her froggy little legs. An ankle band labelled her ‘Baby Girl George’. She was so tiny and perfect I couldn’t believe I’d made her. And got to take her home and be in charge of her. And dress her in whatever I wanted.