A Special Relationship

by Douglas Kennedy

‘No way. After arranging the private room for me you’re making me feel like a “Help the Needy” case.’

  ‘Hey, I’m a sucker for good causes.’

  ‘I can’t accept it.’

  ‘Well, you’re going to have to. Because it’s my going away gift to you. Six months of Cha, twice a week. And there’s nothing you can do about it.’

  ‘Six months? You’re crazy.’

  ‘Nah – just rich,’ she said with a laugh.

  ‘I’m embarrassed.’

  ‘That’s dumb.’

  ‘I’ll have to talk it over with Tony.’

  ‘He doesn’t have to know that it’s a gift.’

  ‘I prefer being straight with him. Especially about something like this. I mean, he wasn’t exactly pleased to learn that you paid for the private room.’

  ‘Well, in my experience, “being straight” is never the shrewdest marital strategy … especially when the male ego is involved.’

  ‘Whether he accepts the gift or not, you’ve been the best friend imaginable. And you shouldn’t be leaving.’

  ‘This is the problem of being a corporate wife. Those who pay you the big bucks also dictate where you live. I think it’s what’s called a Faustian Bargain.’

  ‘You’re my one pal here.’

  ‘As I told you, that will change … eventually. And hey, I’ll always be at the end of a phone line if you need an ear to scream into … though, given that it’s me who’ll be drowning in the vanilla ice cream confines of Westchester County, it’s you who’ll be receiving the hysterical transatlantic phone calls.’

  She left town two days later. That evening, I finally got up the nerve to inform Tony about Margaret’s goodbye gift.

  ‘You cannot be serious,’ he said, sounding annoyed.

  ‘Like I said, it was her idea.’

  ‘I wish I could believe that.’

  ‘Do you actually think I’d do something as tacky as talking her into giving us a cleaner for six months.’

  ‘It’s just a little coincidental, especially after …’

  ‘I know, I know – she paid for this damn room. And you can’t stand the idea of somebody actually making my life a little easier by …’

  ‘That’s not the point – and you know it.’

  ‘Then what is the point, Tony?’

  ‘We can well afford to pay for a bloody cleaner, that’s all.’

  ‘You don’t think Margaret knows that? This was merely a gift. And yes, it was a far too generous one – which is why I said I wouldn’t accept it until I talked it over with you. Because I had a little suspicion that you’d react exactly like this.’

  Pause. He avoided my angry gaze.

  ‘What’s the cleaner’s name?’ he asked.

  I handed him the piece of paper on which Margaret had written Cha’s name and her contact number.

  ‘I’ll call her and arrange for her to start next week. At our expense.’

  I said nothing. Eventually he spoke again. ‘The editor would like me to go to The Hague tomorrow. Just a fast overnight trip to do a piece about the war crimes tribunal. I know you’re due any moment. But it’s just The Hague. Can be back here in an hour, if need be.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said tonelessly. ‘Go.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Then he changed the subject, and told me a rather entertaining story about a colleague at the paper who’d been caught fiddling his expenses. I fought the temptation to show my amusement, as I was still smarting after our little exchange … and didn’t like the fact that, once again, Tony was up to his usual ‘mollify her with humour’ tricks. When I didn’t respond to the story, he said, ‘What’s with the indignant face?’

  ‘Tony, what do you expect?’

  ‘I don’t follow you …’

  ‘Oh come on, that fight we just had …’

  ‘That wasn’t a fight. That was just an exchange of views. Anyway, it’s ancient history now.’

  ‘I just can’t bounce back the way …’

  He leaned over and kissed me.

  ‘I’ll call you from The Hague tomorrow. And remember – I’m on the mobile if …’

  After he left, I must have spent the better part of an hour replaying our little spat in my head, taking apart the argument, piece by piece. Like some post-modernist literary critic, I was trying to excavate all the subtextual implications of the fight – and wondering what its ultimate meaning might be. Granted, on one level, this dispute had again been rooted in Tony’s vanity. But what I couldn’t get out of my brain was the larger, implicit realization that I had married someone with whom I didn’t share a common language. Oh, we both spoke English. But this wasn’t simply a case of mere Anglo-American tonal differences. This was something more profound, more unset-ding – the worry that we would never find a common emotional ground between us; that we would always be strangers, thrown in together under accidental circumstances.

  ‘Who knows anyone?’ Sandy said to me during our phone call that evening. But when I admitted that I was beginning to find Tony increasingly hard to fathom, she said, ‘Well, look at me. I always considered Dean to be a nice, stable, slightly dull guy. But I bought into his decent dullness because I thought: at least I’ll be able to count on him. He’ll always be there for me. And when I met him, that was exactly what I was looking for. What happens? After ten years of staid decency and three kids, he decides he hates everything about our staid secure suburban life. So he meets the Nature Girl of his dreams – a fucking park ranger in Maine – and runs off to live with her in some cabin in Baxter State Park. If he now sees the kids four times a year, it’s an event. So, hey, at least you realize you’re already dealing with a difficult guy. Which, from where I sit, is something of an advantage. But I’m telling you stuff you already know.’

  Maybe she was right. Maybe I just needed to let everything settle down, and enter the realm of acceptance and other optimistic clichés. As in look on the bright side, forget your troubles, keep your chin up … that sort of dumb, sanguine thing.

  Over and over again, I repeated these Pollyanna-ish mantras. Over-and-over again, I kept trying to put on a happy face. Until fatigue finally forced me to turn off the light. As I drifted off into a thinly veneered sleep, one strange thought kept rattling around my brain: I am nowhere.

  Then another thought seized me: Why is everything so soggy?

  At that moment, I jolted back into consciousness. In the initial few seconds afterwards, I absently thought: 50 that’s what they call a wet dream. Then I squinted in the direction of the window and noticed that it was light outside. I glanced at the bedside clock and saw that it read: 6.48 am. Then an earlier thought replayed itself in my head:

  Why is everything so soggy?

  I sat up, suddenly very awake. I frantically pulled off the duvet. The bed was completely drenched.

  My waters had broken.

  Five

  I DIDN’T PANIC. I didn’t succumb to trepidation or startled surprise. I just reached for the call-button. Then I picked up the phone and dialled Tony’s mobile. It was busy, so I phoned his direct line at the paper and left a fast message on his voice mail.

  ‘Hi, it’s me,’ I said, still sounding calm. ‘It’s happening … so please get yourself to the Mattingly as soon as you get back to London. This is definitely it.’

  As I put down the receiver, a midwife showed up. She took one look at the sodden bedclothes and reached for the phone. Two orderlies arrived shortly thereafter. They raised up the sides of my bed, unlocked its wheels, and pushed me out of the room, negotiating a variety of corridors before landing me in the baby unit. En route, I began to feel an ever-magnifying spasm. By the time the doors swung behind me, the pain had intensified to such an extent that I felt as if some alien was gripping my innards with his knobbly fist, determined to show me new frontiers in agony. A midwife was on the scene immediately – a diminutive woman of Asian origin. She grabbed a packet of surgical gloves from a nearby trolley, ripped them open, pulled
them on, and informed me that she was going to do a quick inspection of my cervix. Though I’m certain she was attempting to be as gentle as possible, her gloved fingers still felt like highly sharpened claws. I reacted accordingly.

  ‘You are experiencing severe discomfort, yes?’ she asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘I will have a doctor see you as soon as …’

  ‘Is the baby all right?’

  ‘I’m sure everything is …’

  There was another maniacal spasm. I reacted loudly then asked, ‘Can I have an epidural now?’

  ‘Until the doctor has examined …’

  ‘Please…’

  She patted my shoulder and said, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  But ten godawful minutes passed until she returned with a porter … by which time I felt so tortured that I would have signed a document admitting to be the cause of everything from the French Revolution to global warming.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I asked, my voice raw and loud.

  ‘Calm yourself, please,’ she said. ‘We had three other women waiting before you for ultrasound.’

  ‘I don’t want ultrasound. I want an epidural.’

  But I was whisked straight away into the ultrasound suite, where my belly was coated with gel and two large pads applied to the surface of the skin. A large fleshy man in a white jacket came into the room. Beneath the jacket he was wearing a check Viyella shirt and a knit tie. His feet were shod with green wellington boots. Take away the white jacket and he could have passed for a member of the rural squirearchy. Except for the fact that the boots were splattered with blood.

  ‘I’m Mr Kerr,’ he said crisply. ‘I’m Mr Hughes’s locum today. In a spot of bother, are we?’

  But suddenly he was interrupted by the ultrasound technician who said that sentence you never want to hear a medical technician say to a doctor, ‘I think you should see this, sir.’

  Mr Kerr looked at the screen, his eyes grew momentarily wide, then he turned away and calmly sprang into action. He spoke rapidly to a nurse – and, much to my horror, I heard him utter the words: ‘Baby Resuscitator.’

  ‘What is going on?’ I asked.

  Mr Kerr approached me and said, ‘I need to examine you right now. This might be a bit uncomfortable.’

  He inserted his fingers into me and began to press and probe. I was about to demand information about what the hell was going on, but another rush of pain made me scream with extremity.

  ‘I’ll have the anaesthetist here in a jiffy,’ Mr Kerr said. ‘Because we need to perform an emergency Caesarean.’

  Before I could react to that, he explained that the ultrasound had shown that the umbilical cord might be around the baby’s neck.

  ‘Will the baby die?’ I said, interrupting him.

  ‘The foetal monitor is showing a steady heartbeat. However, we need to move fast, because …’

  But he didn’t get to finish that sentence, as the doors swung open and two orderlies with carts came rushing in. The first was pulled up next to me. Then a small Indian woman in a white coat arrived and walked over to the bed. ‘I’m Dr Chaterjee, the anaesthetist’, she said. ‘Relief is on the way.’

  She swabbed the top of my left hand with a cotton ball. ‘Little prick now,’ she said, as she inserted a needle into the top of my hand. ‘Now start counting backwards from ten.’

  I did as instructed, muttering ‘Ten, nine, eig …’

  And then the world went black.

  It’s strange, being chemically removed from life for a spell. You don’t dream under anaesthetic, nor are you even notionally aware of the passage of time. You’ve entered the realm of nothingness, where all thoughts, fears, worries cannot invade your psyche. Unlike that easily permeable state called sleep, you’re being kept in suspended chemical animation. Which – after the agonizing trauma of the past hour – suited me just fine.

  Until I woke up.

  It took me a moment or two to realize where I was – especially as my first view of the world was a pair of glowing fluorescent tubes, lodged above me. My eyes were half-glued together, making everything seem bleary, obscure. More tellingly, my head was shrouded in a freakish fog – which made all voices seem leaden, oppressive, and also left me wondering (for the first few minutes of consciousness) where the hell I was. Gradually, the jigsaw pieces began to fall into place: hospital, ward, bed, sore head, sore body, baby …

  ‘Nurse!’ I yelled, scrambling for the button by the side of the bed. As I did so, I realized that I had tubes coming out of both arms, while the lower half of my body was still numb.

  ‘Nurse!’

  After a few moments, a dainty Afro-Caribbean woman arrived by my bedside.

  ‘Welcome back,’ she said.

  ‘My baby?’

  ‘A boy. Eight pounds, two ounces. Congratulations.’

  ‘Can I see him now?’

  ‘He’s in the Intensive Care Unit. It’s just a routine thing, after a complicated delivery.’

  ‘I want to see him. Now.’ And then I added, ‘Please.’

  The nurse looked at me carefully.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  She returned a few minutes later.

  ‘Mr Kerr is coming to see you.’

  ‘Do I get to see my baby?’

  ‘Talk to Mr Kerr.’

  He arrived just then. Same white jacket, same shirt, same wellington boots – only this time bloodier than before … no doubt, thanks to me.

  ‘How are you feeling now?’

  ‘Tell me about my son?’

  ‘Quite a straightforward Caesarean … And the cord around his neck wasn’t as tight as I feared. So, all in all …’

  ‘Then why is he in Intensive Care?’

  ‘Standard post-operative care – especially for a newborn after a difficult delivery. We did have to immediately ventilate him after birth …’

  ‘Ventilate?’

  ‘Give him oxygen. He did arrive a little floppy, though he responded well to the ventilation …’

  ‘So the cord around the neck might have caused brain damage?’

  ‘As I said before, I was pleased to discover that the cord hadn’t wound itself firmly around your son’s neck. But we’ve already run an ultrasound to make certain there was no blood on the brain …’

  ‘Was there?’

  ‘No, it was completely negative. More to the point, his APGAR scores were completely normal.’

  ‘His what?’ I asked.

  ‘APGAR is a sort of checklist we run on every newborn child, gauging things like their pulse, reflexes, respiration, and overall appearance. As I said, your son easily scored within the normal range. And in a day or so, we will run an EEG and an MRI, just to make certain that everything in the neurological department is working properly. But, at this point, I would try not to worry about such things.’

  Oh please…

  ‘I need to see him.’

  ‘Of course. But you do realize that his initial appearance may upset you. Paediatric ICUs are not the easiest of places, after all.’

  ‘I’ll handle that.’

  ‘All right then. But do understand, you will have to take things very easy for the next week or so. You’ve just had a major operation.’

  He turned and started walking away. But then he wheeled back and said, ‘Oh, by the way – congratulations. Any sign of the father yet?’

  ‘Didn’t he ring the hospital?’ I asked the nurse.

  ‘Not that I’ve heard,’ she said. ‘But I’ll check with my colleagues. And if you write down his number, I’ll call him again.’

  I looked at the clock on the wall. Six-fifteen.

  ‘Couldn’t I try to call him?’ I asked.

  But as I said this, two orderlies showed up, wheelchair in tow. This one was custom-built to accommodate a patient who was wired to assorted drips, as it featured a frame from which plasma and saline bottles could be suspended.

  ‘Let me phone him for you,’ the nurs
e said. ‘These fellows are going to need the chair back soon. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Always big demand for our best wheelchairs,’ one of the orderlies said, adding, ‘Come on, luv. Let’s bring you up to see your baby.’

  The nurse handed me a pad and a pen. I scribbled down Tony’s work number, his mobile, and our home phone. She promised me she’d leave messages on all three numbers if she couldn’t reach him directly. Then the orderlies went to work on moving me from the bed to the chair. I had expected to have been unplugged from my varying tubes – and then forced to endure having the lines reinserted into my veins. But the guys – both of whom looked like members of a wrestling tag-team – couldn’t have been more dexterous when it came to lifting me off the bed and into the chair, while simultaneously keeping me attached to my assorted tubes. As soon as I was seated, a combination of exhaustion and post-operative shock seized me. My head swam, the world became vertiginous, my stomach convulsed. But after an attack of the dry heaves, all I was left with was a foul taste in my mouth and runny eyes.

  The nurse used a large cotton pad to clean up my face.

  ‘You sure you want to do this right now?’ she asked me.

  I nodded. The nurse shrugged, and motioned for the guys to take me on my way.

  They pushed me through the maternity ward, passing half a dozen women, all with babies by their bedsides in little adjacent cribs. Then we entered a long corridor until we reached a service elevator. When the door opened, I saw that we had company – an elderly woman in a gurney, wired for sound to sundry monitors and feed bags, her breathing a near-death rattle. Our eyes met for a moment – and I could see her panic, her terror. All I could think was: a life ending, a life beginning. If, that is, my son was going to pull through.

  The elevator rose two floors. The doors opened, and we were directly in front of a set of double-doors, by which was a sign: Paediatric ICU. The chattier of the two orderlies leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘If I was you, luv I’d keep my eyes down until we get up alongside your baby. Take it from me, it can be a bit distressing in there.’

  I followed his advice, and gazed downwards as we crept through the ward. Though I wasn’t looking upwards, what struck me immediately was the pervasive deep blue light of the ICU (as I later learned, it was to aid those babies suffering from jaundice). Then there was the absence of all human voices … the only sound provided by the electronic beeps of medical equipment; the steady metronomic rhythm a reassuring reminder of a small functioning heart.