Hubble Bubble

by Jane Lovering

  ‘We won’t be long. Stay here with Nicholas.’

  ‘No. I mean … ow.’

  ‘Ow?’ I looked at her. ‘Is this ouchy, or mortal pain time?’

  Cerys gave me scared eyes. ‘At the moment it’s ouchy, but I think this is it, Holly.’

  ‘Sit tight. Phones are down here but we might be able to call from Vivienne’s.’ I patted her hand. ‘You’ll be okay.’

  Kai looked at both of us. ‘What on earth are you on about?’

  We rolled our eyes at each other. ‘Your daughter is going into labour.’

  ‘What!’ He nearly skidded down the steps. ‘Now?’

  ‘Er, Kai …’ Cerys waved at her enormous belly. ‘Don’t tell me it’s come as a shock.’

  ‘But … I mean …’ Kai looked from me to Cerys, then back again. ‘I should …’ he performed a little pirouette on the spot, obviously trying to be in two places at once. ‘This … Holly, we could stay here …’

  ‘We’re going to need an ambulance.’ I was torn too. Cerys was obviously scared and in need of comforting, but she was most definitely going to be in need of obstetric assistance as well. Twins, I knew, could be awkward. ‘I’ll go to Vivienne’s, Kai, you stay here.’

  ‘You can’t go alone, it’s too dangerous. How about if I go?’

  ‘Vivienne’s not going to let some bloke she’s never met into her house. She’s not stupid.’

  We all stared at each other for a moment. Then Cerys made the decision. ‘Both of you go. It might be a false alarm, and we’re going to look totally mental if we all sit in the house and I’m still here going “ow” in three days’ time. And even if it’s not, labours take hours and Nick’s here to look after me.’ She paused, and rubbed her back. ‘Just.. Holly, you will come back, won’t you?’

  ‘We’ll both come back,’ Kai said firmly. ‘It’s Yorkshire. Bears aren’t going to eat us, you know.’

  ‘I meant … I want Holly with me. If the twins are coming, now, here, I want Holly there when they arrive.’

  ‘Gosh,’ I said, pleased. ‘All right. I’ll ask Vivienne to drive over to my place, and get straight back.’

  ‘Go and sit down,’ Kai said. ‘Don’t … I dunno, jump off any tables or anything.’

  ‘Okay, boss.’

  He nodded. ‘Still ought to hurry though.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  The cold took our breath away and the wind took it even further. Stepping out onto the track was like being punched by feathers. I put my head down and walked, Kai in front acting as a partial windbreak. He’d jabbed his hands into fists and swung them as we went, using his bodyweight to carve a way through the spiralling snow and I plodded on behind, exhausted after the first half mile. Every time I looked up there was a Kai-shaped hole in the air in front of me, I walked into it and he made a new one. Trees were down all over the place, several across the track and we had to divert through rapidly accumulating snow to get round them, and the walk began to feel endless.

  After a mile or so, he stopped and turned around, his face nothing but a nose, two eyes and a bearded chin poking through a veil of rapidly melting flakes. ‘Not far now,’ he said. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Think so,’ I gasped back. ‘You look like Frosty the Snowman.’

  ‘I’m pissing wet through. I hope this Vivienne is in, because if we’ve come this way for nothing I will be dropping your name into the next article I write on antisocial behaviour.’

  But through the trees I could see the light spilling from Vivienne’s cottage. ‘Just be careful. Vivienne is like the Wicked Witch of the West without the redeeming characteristics.’

  ‘That good?’

  ‘She’s trying to get her husband to kill himself.’

  ‘Charming.’

  ‘Literally, in her case.’ I staggered towards the front door and rapped on it firmly. There was going to be no case of anyone collapsing with hypothermia from no one hearing the knocker.

  A curtain twitched and a few seconds later Vivienne appeared in the doorway. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘’s me. And my trusty Sherpa.’

  ‘Good heavens, Holly. What on earth are you doing here?’ She was clutching the front door to her, probably to prevent the wind whipping it open, but it gave her the air of a spinster in a bath towel. ‘This weather is awful, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said through gritted teeth, ‘it is. Can we come in?’

  Vivienne held the door open and, like two polar explorers, Kai and I stomped our boots free from snow and walked in.

  Isobel was sitting on the sofa. ‘Hello,’ she said, somewhat nasally. ‘Did we have the same thought?’ I watched her eyes widen as she looked Kai over. Due to the fact that his jeans were soaked and clinging to his legs and he’d unbuttoned his coat to reveal an equally wet shirt, I wondered if she thought all her wishes had come true at once.

  ‘This is Kai. Kai, Isobel and Vivienne.’

  Everyone shook hands. ‘I came to make sure Vivienne was all right, alone out here in a storm like this,’ Isobel said. ‘And even the Isuzu didn’t like the hill much.’

  ‘Is your phone working? Kai’s daughter is in labour. Twins. We need an ambulance. Oh, and a guy in handcuffs needs letting out.’

  Two sets of eyes went moon-sized. ‘Golly,’ said Isobel faintly. ‘That spell is really working for you, Holly, isn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

  We checked Vivienne’s landline, all the mobiles and even her broadband link. All down.

  ‘Shit,’ Kai screwed his eyes shut. ‘Cerys.’

  ‘I’ll go.’ Isobel stood up. An otherwise invisible cat slunk away from under the sofa. ‘It’ll take too long to drive right round the outside of the woods to pick your daughter up, but the Isuzu should be able to get back to Malton, if I take it steady. I can get to the hospital and at least send a midwife out to you.’

  ‘That would be great,’ he gave her the smile at full wattage and I watched her notice his eyes.

  ‘And, could you go round to my place, please? There’s …’ I coughed. ‘There’s a bloke, um. He’s, well. He’s … Aiden, nice guy but, um. Naked. Handcuffed to my bed. Probably a bit annoyed, by now. Could you, um …’

  ‘I can’t make up my mind whether you hate me or like me very, very much.’ Isobel pocketed my keys. ‘Tell me where your house is.’

  I gave her my address and she started putting her coat back on. ‘Vivienne? Do you want to come with me? You could stay with my mum and dad. They’ve gone all “Blitz Spirit” and all the neighbours are round playing charades.’

  Vivienne shook her head. ‘I’ll stay here. This will all be over soon. Besides, I’m waiting for news.’

  Isobel raised her eyebrows at me. ‘What sort of news?’

  Vivienne gave a secret smile. ‘Yesterday a friend rang. My husband … ex-husband’s company has gone into receivership. He’s bankrupt.’ Her tone suddenly ran up the gleeful scale. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’

  ‘We’d better get back,’ Kai sounded a bit affronted by Vivienne’s viciousness. Maybe he thought she’d start on him next. ‘My daughter, you know.’

  ‘She must be awfully young,’ Vivienne looked at him with her head on one side. ‘Is … you know, is the father on the scene?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s building them a Stickle-brick house, and as soon as he’s potty trained they’ll all live together in it.’

  ‘Holly …’ Kai poked me with his elbow. ‘We’ll be off then.’

  ‘I’d better go too.’ Isobel pulled her knitted coat from under a cat. ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right, Vivienne?’

  While they were making their farewells, and after I’d instructed Isobel to put my keys back through my letterbox once she’d released Aiden, Kai and I dragged our damp coats on again and started out into the snow. It was even harder this time because we were walking into the wind and it found every presoaked crevice and dug its nails in.

  ‘Come on Holly.’ Kai stopped to let me catch up
.

  ‘Oh sorry, am I holding you up?’ I panted. ‘That’ll be on account of me being normal sized and you having legs that can step over fallen trees.’

  ‘I’m worried about Cerys.’ The wind boomed and roared like a train passing three yards away and the rest of his sentence got lost.

  ‘First babies take ages to arrive. And second ones too, if you ask my mum; I think she wanted to put me off ever having any of my own. Apparently she nearly split in two.’

  ‘Yes, well, Cerys isn’t an amoeba.’ Kai set off again. ‘And if Isobel can’t get through to the hospital …’

  ‘Don’t worry, I bet you Cerys’ll still be in early labour this time tomorrow.’ I tried to copy his easy jump over a snowdrift but landed unceremoniously half in it. Snow seeped into my underwear. ‘It might not even be labour, she might just have indigestion.’

  ‘I knew I should have sent her back to Peterborough,’ Kai groaned. ‘I don’t have any baby stuff.’

  I rolled my eyes at him, although he probably didn’t notice because my eyebrows had icicles, and plodded on.

  As it happened, I was one hundred per cent wrong about the indigestion thing. When we finally struggled back to the Old Lodge, Nicholas was hovering in the hallway. He’d obviously had his face pressed to the front window waiting to catch sight of us, there was a big smeary mark where he’d been blowing on the glass.

  ‘Cerys is …’ he said, and then performed a complicated mime which seemed to indicate that she was struggling to lift a very heavy weight. ‘In her room.’

  All three of us dashed up the stairs. Kai and I stripped off soggy outer layers as we went.

  ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Cerys was crouching on her bed, knees drawn up to her belly. ‘Is the ambulance coming?’

  Kai and I looked at each other. ‘Yes,’ I said firmly, before he could do the fatherly thing and tell her the truth. After all, it wasn’t a lie, more of a time-dependent falsehood. ‘How are you doing?’

  Nicholas rubbed the bit of her back he could reach, as she rolled and gyrated her hips. ‘She keeps making really weird noises.’

  As he finished speaking we got a practical demonstration, as Cerys rose suddenly onto all fours and let out a huge groan, which went on far longer than I would have thought she had breath for. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, collapsing back onto the bed again. ‘I thought there would be pethidine. Or morphine. Instead I’m going to give birth in a house where there isn’t even any aspirin.’

  ‘The doctor is on his way,’ I crossed my fingers behind my back. ‘Make yourself comfortable and he’ll be here before anything happens.’ I started eating her glucose tablets. I was going to need all my energy, and some of someone else’s.

  ‘Comfortable!’ Cerys gave an outbreathed kkkkrrrrrrrrr kind of noise. ‘I haven’t been able to make myself comfortable since June.’ Then she did the rising groan noise again, which went on even longer this time. I looked at her bedside clock.

  ‘That was only a minute or so.’

  ‘What?’ Kai was looking a bit helpless and lost.

  ‘Between contractions. I’ve got a feeling …’

  ‘Fuck the ambulance,’ shouted Cerys suddenly. ‘I want to push!’

  I stared. Nicholas bolted for the door. ‘We have to boil water,’ he said, grabbing Kai by the shoulder. ‘Boiling water. I just watched an episode of Tracy Beaker with birth in, and that’s what they had to do.’

  ‘When Cerys was born, they told us to boil scissors? And string?’

  ‘I’m having twins, Kai, not a fucking parcel,’ Cerys said, between gritted teeth.

  ‘For the … you know, cord and stuff …’

  ‘Look … just go and boil everything you can find, all right?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ Cerys had hold of my hand. ‘Holly, please don’t leave me. I can’t do this, I can’t …’ She suddenly broke off and her eyes bulged. ‘Oh God, oh God …’

  ‘Right. Looks like all those hours spent watching Call the Midwife might have been useful after all. You two, get shifting.’

  The two men went through that bedroom door so fast that there were scorch marks on the frame. I heard them rush down the stairs, Kai saying, ‘and I remember there being a phenomenal amount of newspaper involved,’ and then Cerys was gripping my hand so tightly that I heard the little bones begin to grind.

  ‘Holly, they’re coming,’ she whispered and suddenly she was panting and heaving like a bogged horse, and all I could do was hold her hand and, when it came to it, run round to the other end, catch the first baby as it slid out onto the bed. Fortunately she was so astonished by this that I could take thirty seconds to dash down the stairs, collect the newly-boiled scissors and string, sustaining third-degree burns in the process, and rush back to tie and cut the cord.

  And then I stood, with a blood-and-mucus-covered baby in my arms, splattered with seven kinds of gore, and laughed. ‘It’s a boy.’

  ‘I know that,’ Cerys gave me a preoccupied smile. ‘He’s … oh, no, not again …’ and there was more pulling and pushing and sweating and his sister joined us.

  I cleared the babies’ mouths and noses. They were both breathing, becoming a more healthy colour and had started to unscrew their faces enough to cry. ‘They’re fine,’ I said, passing them to their mother, who was staring at them as though she couldn’t believe it. ‘Fine. Healthy.’

  ‘Big.’

  ‘Well, they look a good six pounds each, maybe a bit more.’

  ‘From this end they both weighed at least as much as a sack of potatoes.’ Cerys relaxed back onto the pillow. ‘And were covered in barbed wire.’

  ‘I’ll call the boys up,’ I headed for the door but she stopped me.

  ‘Can I … you know, could you help me sort of clean up a bit first? Kai not so much, but Nicholas – I don’t want the first time he sees me non-preggers to be this kind of outtake from Saving Private Ryan.’

  So I helped her get sorted, changed the bed, and used the mysterious newspaper to wrap and dispose of the placentas, rushing up and down to the kitchen past the two men, who glued themselves to the wall whenever I ran past, like teenagers caught in a slasher flick. Eventually Cerys was what she considered presentable, and the babies were wrapped in two clean towels. Their faces poked out of the bundles looking slightly surprised and a bit aggrieved at having arrived in such a precipitate fashion.

  Then I left her to show the babies off to her father, while Nick and I made lots of tea, so as not to waste the rest of the boiling water.

  ‘You’re shaking,’ he observed.

  ‘It was scary.’ Then Kai came downstairs. I took one look at his face and pushed a mug into Nicholas’s hand. ‘You take her up some tea. Find out if she’s got any names yet.’

  As soon as Nicholas left the room, Kai started to cry. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, closed his eyes and let the tears roll down his face, unchecked.

  ‘Hey.’ I put my arms around him and gave him a hug. ‘Kai.’

  A trembling breath. ‘Oh God, Holly.’

  ‘It’s okay. Everything’s fine, mother and babies doing well.’ I fought the urge to join in. The full shock had worn off now and left me weak.

  ‘I have to meet her now. I have to know … Cerys is up there …’ his voice faded and he scrubbed the back of a hand across his eyes. ‘I have to know if my mother felt any of that for me. Because, if she did, and she still gave me up …Why? If she felt one-tenth of what Cerys is going through, then how could she have done it, what was going on that was so terrible that she couldn’t keep her baby? And four hours old. The blood wasn’t even dry.’

  He collapsed onto a stool at the table and cupped his face in his hands.

  ‘She must have had her reasons.’

  Yellow eyes fixed mine. ‘Maybe that’s what I need. Reasons. Or, I guess, it may be excuses – everyone thinks they’re doing things for the right reasons, don’t they?’ A look that maybe meant more than the words said. ‘It’s this uncertai
nty I can’t deal with. Either she wanted me but couldn’t keep me, or she never wanted me in the first place – and seeing my daughter, up there, her face … even though those babies are, what, five minutes old? Cerys would kill for them already. How could …’ a small, choked cough, ‘how could she leave me?’

  ‘Then get in touch. Ask her.’

  He shook his head and dark hair curtained his face briefly. ‘I’m so fucking scared.’

  ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ I touched his shoulder. ‘Honestly. Hasn’t the worst already been done to you?’

  ‘She could tell me she was glad to give me up. That I was some bastard’s bastard, that she never wanted to be reminded of him and certainly not by having to bring up his child.’

  ‘You read the letter. Did that sound to you like a woman who was glad to have given you up? Because it sounded to me like she’s tortured herself every day since you were born for the choice she made. And, yes, I saw Cerys when the twins were born, I was there, looking in her face when she saw them for the first time and I’ll tell you this, the woman who gave you up? She hurt, Kai. And if you can stop her hurting, just by seeing her one time …’

  ‘You’re right.’ He rubbed his face. ‘No, you’re right, of course you are. I’m being a coward.’ He laughed a thin laugh. ‘Stupid. When I think of some of the things I’ve done … and this is such a small thing.’ He was very pale, or maybe that was the light bleaching the colour from his skin and eyes. I still felt flushed and pink from the trek through the snow and the subsequent events. ‘Such a small thing,’ he repeated.

  There was a cacophony of feet on wooden stairs and Nicholas launched himself into the kitchen. ‘Zac and Freya. The twins. Zac and Freya, Cerys says.’

  ‘You’re a grandad,’ I said quietly to Kai under the sound of Nicholas extolling the twins’ virtues. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Yeah, I am, aren’t I?’ He made a clear effort to pull himself together. ‘Sod tea, who wants champagne?’

  ‘You have champagne in the house?’ I grinned at him.

  ‘Always, Holly, always.’

  ‘Posh git.’

  ‘Well, I never know when I might win another award. Get the glasses, Nicholas.’