‘I know I’m not the best mother, Dot. But you do feel able to tell me things, don’t you? I mean, you wouldn’t go through something like that alone, would you?’
The question seemed absurd. They never said anything to each other and yet Dot realised she probably would tell her mother if she got pregnant. She might even tell her grandmother. Something important stretched between them, like a spider’s web. Ask her! Dot screamed at herself. Do it now, do it now! But the moments sped past as quickly as the fields. They left the past behind and sped into the future, always, always avoiding the present.
‘What’s she like?’ asked Alice. ‘The baby.’
‘Gorgeous.’
‘Has she got a name yet?’
‘Rose. Rose Dorothy.’
‘Oh Dot, that’s lovely.’
Dot rubbed her finger into the worn material of her jeans, soft and giving.
‘Things will get back to normal now,’ her mother was saying.
‘Don’t be silly, Mum. Everything will change.’
Alice looked over at this, her expression earnest. ‘Well yes, babies do change things. But normally for the better. I meant you’ll get the old Mavis back.’
‘Did I change things for the better for you?’ asked Dot, the effort of speech filling her up.
Her mother laughed. ‘Of course you did. What a question.’
‘But you were only a couple of years older than Mavis is now when you had me. I must have been a mistake.’
They were on the outskirts of Druith now. ‘You weren’t a mistake, Dot, more a happy accident and I never regretted it for a single second. You must know that.’
‘Yes, but it must have been hard bringing me up alone.’
‘It was hard.’ Her mother’s voice was shaking and Dot could hear how carefully she was choosing her words, as if she was stepping over ice. ‘But I wasn’t alone, Clarice was around and so were you. So are you.’
It is always impossible to imagine life without ourselves in it and Dot failed to do so at that moment. But she could hear the love in her mother’s voice and she felt a sense of – what? – gratitude, luck, good fortune? They were unfamiliar words to apply to herself.
Her mother turned the car into their drive and they both saw Clarice standing looking out of the dining room window, concern wrinkling her features, a smile only appearing as she saw them both in the car.
14 … Arrival
Considering how prepared Tony was for the birth, he still felt like he made a fool of himself when it came to it. When Alice woke him with the news that her waters had broken in the depth of a night which would never reach complete darkness, he sat up and said, ‘Hang on, I’ll get my spanner.’ He had no idea what he’d been thinking; he wouldn’t be able to fix a leak even if he had a spanner.
She looked young and scared, standing over him, her stomach so absurdly huge in front of her that it seemed impossible a baby could emerge without ripping her in two. He’d made her pack a bag a week before, just as Miriam Stoppard advised, and he was pleased at his forethought, telling her now to get dressed, he’d go and start the car. Except his limbs didn’t appear to be connected to his brain any more and simple tasks like turning his trousers the right way took what felt like hours. In the end, though, it was lucky that he hadn’t gone on ahead because she needed to lean on him while they went down the stairs, walking as gingerly as if they were on the side of a mountain.
‘Should we leave a note for your mum?’ Tony asked when they reached the front door, but Alice shook her head and gripped his shoulder more tightly.
The car was surprisingly cold, but Alice was sweating, her hands white as she held on to the sides of her seat. Tony tried to put the seatbelt across her but she pushed him away as if she was burnt and he knew better than to argue.
Cartertown General seemed too far; he could see the route in his mind and knew all the twists and turns of the road, but still willed some of them to have disappeared overnight so they could get there quicker. Alice moaned next to him.
‘How far apart are they?’
‘I don’t know.’
Tony felt a surge of irritation with his wife for not reading one word of all the books on childbirth he’d bought and put on her bedside table; he’d even marked some passages with pieces of paper. He wondered if she really knew what a contraction was.
‘Well, when did they start?’
‘About an hour before I woke you.’
‘You know what’s happening, right?’
‘Yes. No. Not exactly.’
‘Your cervix is opening to let the baby out. You have to get to ten centimetres before the baby can be born. So it’s nothing to worry about, the pain.’
Alice didn’t reply and Tony wondered if he had overstepped the mark, but it was hard to tell with Alice, she might simply not be interested. The next time she sucked in her breath was at least ten minutes, maybe twelve, by Tony’s reckoning. They probably shouldn’t be going to the hospital yet, but he couldn’t bear the thought of putting her through the journey when they were only five minutes apart.
The hospital was bright and busy, a little oasis in the darkness of his worry. Tony held Alice’s bag and handed over her notes and answered all the questions the midwives put to her. They were finally shown into a room which held six beds, two with curtains drawn around them and the rest empty.
‘Settle yourself in,’ the midwife said, ‘I’ll be back in a minute to give you an exam.’ She drew the curtains neatly round the bed as she left, flicking them into shape.
Alice looked at Tony, desperate and lost. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you need to get your nightie back on and lie on the bed. She’s going to want to see how many centimetres you are. You know, like we learnt in the antenatal classes.’ He wasn’t sure that Alice had absorbed any information in the classes he’d dutifully made her attend, even though he’d rather have spent time licking paint off a wall. Towards the end Tony had begun to wonder if the jolly woman was trying to frighten them all, if she enjoyed belabouring them with the inevitability of their reality. At least Alice hadn’t wanted to swap numbers with the other smiling couples at the end and, for that at least, he’d felt grateful.
The midwife came back, snapping menacing-looking rubber gloves over her hands. She was reading the notes in her hand. ‘So, you’re Alice and Tony Marks, right? And you’re term plus eleven. Your pregnancy looks like it’s been perfectly normal. Is that right?’
‘Yes,’ said Tony. ‘Her contractions are about ten minutes apart.’
‘OK. Well, my name’s Sally. Now, Alice, could you lie on your back and let your legs drop open. I need to feel how many centimetres you are and then we’ll go from there.’
Tony worried that Alice might cry; she seemed too delicate to endure any of this and he held on to her hand, making her look only at him as Sally rooted around in her body as if she was looking for something at the bottom of a bag. Sally’s face gave nothing away and with every passing second Tony worried that she’d found something wrong, that any moment an alarm would sound and Alice would be whisked away from him to a doctor with a sharp knife.
Sally stood up, snapping the rubber gloves in the other direction. ‘You’re between two and three,’ she said, dropping the gloves into a bin.
Tony was distracted by the thought of what happened to the gloves. Were they really thrown away after such a short life and if so how many pairs of gloves did that mean the hospital needed – all hospitals needed? He imagined the world drowning in rubber gloves smeared with women’s insides.
‘If you can I’d go for a walk, get something to eat,’ the midwife continued. ‘You’re in the early stages; I wouldn’t have thought your baby will be born in the next ten or so hours.’
She left after that and Tony realised Alice was crying. ‘Ten hours?’ she repeated. ‘I can’t do this for ten hours. What does she mean walk about?’
Tony thought it might be a blessing that Alice was clueless. ‘Some people think you ha
ve to move around to make the labour quicker, it’s in Miriam Stoppard’s New Pregnancy and Birth. And you need to eat to keep up your strength.’ Alice whimpered but Tony pulled her up, linking his arm to hers and taking her into the corridor where they took small jagged steps to nowhere. Every so often Alice stopped and leant into the wall, biting her lip and moaning softly, her eyes scrunched shut.
‘Breathe through it,’ Tony said, ‘sharp, shallow breaths.’
But Alice pushed him away and all he could do was watch the sweat gathering on her brow, dropping in tiny rivers down her face. In the end he couldn’t bear it any longer and took her back to the bed, which was comforting in the fact that it was, at least, a destination.
‘Shall I get you something to eat? Maybe some chocolate?’
Alice nodded. ‘And a drink please.’
It was a relief to walk away for a moment, like diving into cool water on a hot day and for a minute the realisation that he could keep on walking swept through Tony. The food kiosk was only just inside the main hospital doors and he watched people swinging easily through them. At the last minute he bought a packet of fags and a tube of mints and went to stand in the sharp night air, which rushed around him after the heat of the hospital. He hadn’t smoked in ages, since he’d moved in with Alice really, and the nicotine marauded through his blood, flicking that switch in his brain so that his shoulders relaxed and his breathing deepened. If he never met the baby, he found himself thinking … but of course he would never do anything like that. He ground the butt of the cigarette into the tarmac and popped a mint into his mouth before going back inside.
Alice was leaning over the side of the bed, her face red and contorted, her hands grabbing for something that wasn’t there. Tony immediately went to her and stroked the hair off her face, whispering nothings into her ear. He put a hand on her stomach and it felt hard and mean.
‘You’ve got to stop fighting them,’ he said after the pain had subsided and she was lying breathless, her head flung against the pillow. He handed her pieces of chocolate, which she ate slowly. ‘That’s what those breathing exercises were all about. Your body’s going to do this whatever and if you tense your muscles it’ll hurt more.’ Tony wasn’t sure that Alice had heard but he didn’t repeat himself.
The next round of pain came quickly. Alice grabbed on to Tony’s hand and wept. ‘Oh God, it hurts so much.’ He soothed her and they settled into a pattern. He asked her a few times if she wanted to walk again, but she didn’t, so all he could do was hand her sips of drink and tiny squares of chocolate. The clock ticked on but the night remained stubbornly immobile. Tony began looking at the clock and wondering which number would deliver them a baby, which seemed an absurd and unlikely thought. As so many other people rested and slept they were here doing this, something that would change their lives for ever. They had only been in the hospital for three hours, a period of time which could float past him and disappear down a hole most days, but which he had now lived through experiencing every second, aware of every pulse from his heart.
‘I’m going to be sick,’ Alice said and he stood up, panicked, rushing from the bed to find a nurse who chuckled at his worry and handed him some cardboard bowls.
‘Don’t you want to check her?’ he asked.
‘Someone will be in shortly,’ she answered. ‘Don’t worry, it’s all perfectly normal.’
It didn’t seem normal to hold your wife’s head as she retched brown bile into something which, if painted, could pass as a clown’s hat. Tony felt annoyed by Miriam and wondered why she hadn’t written that he would feel scared and helpless in the ‘fathers’ story’ chapter. There had even been photos of men physically supporting their wives as babies slipped from their bodies. As Alice retched next to him he was sure he remembered reading, just a few nights before, that it was a mystical event. She was writhing again, clutching his hand so hard he thought she might break it, her voice whimpering and far away. ‘Tony please,’ she was saying, ‘I can’t do this, please help me.’
He knelt down so that their faces were level and tried to make her look at him, but her eyes flickered away, her face a jangle of pain. He didn’t recognise her and it scared him to think of her lost to him, even her strangeness was something and he knew he would miss it. Tony ran into the corridor again and stopped another midwife. ‘Please, my wife really is in agony. Can someone come and see her?’
The woman clicked her teeth. ‘We’re very busy tonight. Childbirth does hurt.’
Her presumption annoyed him. ‘I know. I’m not stupid. I have read the books. But her contractions are really close together now.’
The woman sighed, no doubt cursing her luck that she had been walking past at that moment. ‘OK,’ she said, following Tony back into the room.
Alice was off the bed now, leaning over it and gripping on to the sheets.
‘We’ll let this one pass then I’ll examine her,’ said the midwife, snapping on yet more plastic gloves. ‘My name’s Dora.’
‘Tony and Alice,’ answered Tony. Alice’s body was releasing her for a minute.
‘Do you think you could lie back, Alice, so we can see what’s going on?’ said Dora in a voice that left no room for compromise. Alice only whimpered.
Dora pushed Tony out of the way, her hand strong on Alice’s back. ‘Now, now. Is it really bad?’ Alice moved her head imperceptibly. ‘I’m sorry but I do need to examine you.’ Dora checked the chart by the bed. ‘You were between two and three, three hours ago.’ Alice didn’t answer; instead her body stiffened and her hands turned white with the pressure of gripping. ‘OK, love, breathe through it,’ Dora said. ‘They’re pretty close together. As soon as this one’s over I’m going to examine you standing up.’
Tony didn’t know how Dora knew the exact moment the contraction had finished, but she was quick and concerned. She stood up and looked at Tony. ‘Your wife is just about ready to give birth. We need to move her to a labour room. Get her on to the bed. I’ll be back in a second.’
‘But how, I mean, that’s too quick, isn’t it?’ said Tony, his mind feeling like a blender, scrapping all the useful information it had ever stored.
Dora laughed. ‘Try telling that to the baby. There’s no rule book, you know.’
‘Are you coming in?’ someone was asking him and he looked down and somehow Alice was on the bed and it was being wheeled away from him.
‘Yes, of course,’ he said, tripping over himself as he followed them down corridors and into another room.
‘Is there a pressure in your bottom?’ Dora was saying as she pushed Alice’s legs into the air. ‘Push into that. Well done, that’s right.’ Another midwife was holding a wet cloth against Alice’s forehead, whilst a young girl busied herself on the other side of the room. Tony stood against a wall, his coat draped over his arm, Alice’s bag in his hand. He felt as if he was underwater and that he couldn’t breathe. ‘Push,’ women shouted all around him whilst Alice screamed. Shouldn’t he get someone? Didn’t a doctor need to be present? Hold your wife’s hand, Miriam Stoppard advised, tell her she’s wonderful, she’ll need your support. But Tony was stuck to the wall, fear flattening him like a coward. ‘That’s it,’ Dora said, ‘one more now.’ Alice made a noise from somewhere deep inside her and then there was an instant of total silence, broken by the screams of a baby. ‘Congratulations, Alice,’ Dora said, handing her something which Tony understood to be a baby. It lay on her chest, as shocked as the rest of them.
Dora came over to Tony. ‘Congratulations,’ she said, ‘your wife was amazing.’ She nudged him in the arm. ‘Why don’t you put down your stuff and go and meet your baby?’
So Tony did as he was told, and all the while the water was filling his ears and his lungs so that he thought it likely he would faint before he reached the bed. Alice smiled up at him and she looked as if time had travelled across her face and punched her in the eyes. He could see tiny broken veins splattered across her nose and cheeks like freckles and her hair
was as wet as if she had been swimming. He remembered their beach and his body tingled.
‘Let’s weigh her then,’ Dora said, taking the tiny being from Alice’s chest. The baby cried at the intrusion and Tony followed it with his eyes, only hearing the words seconds after they’d been spoken.
‘A girl?’
‘That’s normally the first question most dads ask.’ Dora chuckled. She put the baby on to the scales. ‘Seven pounds three. Now I think this baby needs a feed.’
The other midwife helped Alice to sit up and then both women bent over her as the baby, now wrapped in a blanket, was placed into her arms. The air vibrated as the baby nestled into her breast, its tiny eyes shut, its rosebud mouth closing convincingly over the nipple. Alice stared down at her and the midwives started to tidy up, making Tony notice the oceans of blood on the bed and the floor. ‘You’ll need a few stitches,’ Dora was saying, ‘I’ll get them done now.’ Tony sat down heavily in the chair next to the bed which held his wife and daughter and for a second felt unworthy of even breathing the same air as the people who brought life into the world.
Alice rolled her head to the side and smiled at him. ‘Are you happy she’s a girl?’
‘Of course. Are you?’
‘I didn’t mind,’ she answered, which Tony thought was probably true. Secretly he’d hoped for a son, but now the baby was here he could see that it didn’t matter. Alice winced as Dora sewed her up.
‘I can’t believe how amazing you were,’ said Tony. ‘I lost it when we got in here.’
She laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t notice.’
‘Were you scared? What were you thinking about?’
‘I can’t remember. Actually I can, but it’s so strange. At one point I thought about, you know, how sometimes you see beetles lying on their backs with their legs waggling in the air?’ Tony nodded. ‘Well, I’m never leaving one like that again.’ He laughed. ‘And then I thought about my mother. I thought about her doing all this and it seemed impossible.’ She shook her head as if ridding herself of the thought.
Dot Page 14
