A Special Relationship

by Douglas Kennedy

  After around a minute, the chair stopped. By this point, my eyes were tightly shut. But then, the chatty orderly touched me gently on my shoulder and said, ‘We’re here, luv.’

  A part of me wanted to keep my eyes closed, and demand to be turned around and brought back to my own room. Because I wondered if I would be able to bear what I saw. But I knew I had to see him – no matter how upsetting his condition might be. So I raised my head. I took a deep breath. I opened my eyes. And …

  There he was.

  I knew he would be in an incubator – which meant that he seemed dwarfed by the plexiglas sarcophagus in which he had been placed. And I knew that there would be wires and tubes. But what shocked me was the sight of an entire network of wires and tubes running from every corner of his body – including two plastic ducts that had been pressed into his nostrils, and an oxygen meter running from his belly button. He looked alien, almost otherworldly – and so desperately assailable. But another terrible thought hit me: could that really be my son? They say that you should be swamped by unconditional love the moment you first see your child … and that the bonding process should begin immediately. But how could I bond with this minuscule stranger, currently looking like a horrific medical experiment?

  The moment such awful thoughts crossed my mind, I felt a deep abiding shame – an immediate appalling realization that, perhaps, I was incapable of maternal love. But in that same nanosecond, another voice crept into my brain, telling me to calm down.

  ‘You’re suffering from post-operative trauma,’ this rational, mollifying voice informed me.’ Your child might be gravely unwell, you’ve been pumped full of chemicals, you’ve lost significant quantities of blood… 50 everything is naturally skewed. It’s called shock – and the worst shock of all is seeing your newborn baby in such a distressing state. So you’re entitled to feel as if the world is upside down. Because, in fact, it is.’

  So I tried to calm myself down – and look again at my son, and await that torrent of attachment to wash over me. But staring into the incubator, all I felt was fear. Sheer terror – not just about whether he had suffered brain damage, but whether I would be able to cope with all this. I wanted to cry for him – and for myself. I also wanted to flee the room.

  The talkative orderly seemed to sense this, as he gently touched my shoulder and whispered, ‘Let’s get you back to your bed, luv.’

  I managed to nod – and then found myself choking back a sob.

  They brought me back down to the room. They gently lifted me back into bed, and reset my assorted bottles above me. There was a mirror on the dressing table. I picked it up. My face was the colour of ash. I tried to move my facial muscles, but found them immobile – as if they had seized up, or remained under the spell of the anaesthetics that were still coursing through my bloodstream. I looked like one of those people you see in news footage who have managed to walk away from a bomb blast – their face paralysed into a countenance of expressionless shock. I put down the mirror. I sank back down against the hard, starchy hospital pillow. I found myself thinking: this is like free-fall … I’m tumbling into a void, but I’m too astray to care.

  Then, out of nowhere, I started to cry. The crying had an almost animalistic rage to it – loud, vituperative, and unnervingly hollow. The nurse who came running must have thought I was reacting to the state of my baby – and riding the usual post-Caesarean roller coaster. But the fact of the matter was: I didn’t know what I was crying about. Because I couldn’t feel anything. My emotional world had gone numb. But I still needed to scream.

  ‘All right, all right,’ the nurse said, taking me by both hands. ‘I’m sure it was a bit of a shock, seeing your baby …’

  But I drowned her out by howling even louder … even though it hadn’t been my intention to lose it like this. I didn’t really know what I was doing – except crying for crying’s sake. And not being able to stop myself.

  ‘Sally … Sally…’

  I ignored the nurse, pushing away her hands, curling up into a foetal position, clutching a pillow next to my face, and biting it in an attempt to stifle the howls. But though the pillow muffled the sound, it didn’t end the crying. The nurse put a steadying hand on my shoulder, using her free hand to speak into the walkie-talkie she usually kept strapped to her belt. When she finished, she said, ‘Just hold on – help should be here in a moment.’

  The help was another nurse, pushing a trolley laden down with medical paraphernalia. She was accompanied by the doctor on duty. The nurse who had been keeping the bedside watch spoke quickly to her colleagues. The doctor picked up my chart, scanned it, spoke to the nurses again, then left. After a moment, I felt a hand raising the left sleeve of my nightgown, as the first nurse said, ‘The doctor thinks this might help you relax a bit, Sally.’

  I didn’t say anything – because I was still biting the pillow. But then came the sharp jab of a needle, followed by a warming sensation cascading through my veins.

  Then the plug was pulled, and the lights went out.

  When I returned to terra firma, I didn’t suffer the same convulsive shock that accompanied my re-awakening after the delivery. No, this was a slower fade-in – accompanied by a Sahara-dry mouth and the sort of mental murk that made me wonder if I had woken up in a land of cotton wool. The first thing I noticed was a small decanter of water by the side of the bed. I lifted it and drained it in around ten seconds. Then I felt a huge urgent need to pee. But my scars and my tubes were restricting my movements, so I reached for the button and summoned the nurse.

  Only this time it was a different nurse – a thin, beaky woman in her mid-forties with an Ulster accent and a manner that could be kindly described as severe. Her name plate read: Dowling.

  ‘Yes?’ she asked.

  ‘I need to go to the bathroom.’

  ‘How badly?’

  ‘Very badly.’

  She heaved a small, but telling sigh of distaste, reached under the bed, pulled out a white tin enamel bedpan, and said, ‘Lift up your bottom.’

  I tried to do as instructed, but couldn’t even summon the strength for this simple task.

  ‘I think you’re going to have to help me.’

  Another small, disgruntled sigh. She pulled back the bedclothes. She inserted her hand under my bottom and forced it upwards, then pulled back my nightgown and shoved the bedpan underneath me.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘get on with it.’

  But it was impossible to ‘get on with it’ in my current position – as I felt like someone who had been put into a kinky sexual posture. Anyway, who the hell can pee lying down?

  ‘You have to help me up,’ I said.

  ‘You’re a lot of work, aren’t you?’ she said.

  I wanted to shout something back at her, but the fog was too pervasive to permit me to engage in an argument. Also, I couldn’t hold my bladder for much longer.

  ‘All right then,’ she said wearily, gripping my shoulder and pushing me upwards. She braced me in that position as I finally let go. The urine felt warm beneath me, and possessed a chemical stench that was so strong the nurse immediately wrinkled her nose in disgust.

  ‘What’ve you been drinking?’ she said, without the slightest hint of irony. But then a voice behind her asked, ‘Do you always talk to patients like that?’

  Tony.

  I could see him looking me over – taking in not just my awkward astride-a-bedpan position, but also my anaemic complexion, shell-shocked eyes, and general distrait condition. He gave me a small half-smile and a quick nod of the head, but then turned his attention back to the nurse. Like any petty tyrant, she was suddenly defensive and cowed when caught in the act.

  ‘Really, I meant no offence.’

  ‘Yes you did,’ he said, making a point of staring long and hard at her nameplate. ‘I saw how rough you were with her.’

  The woman’s face fell. She turned to me and said, ‘I’m really sorry. I’m having a bad day, and I didn’t mean to take it ou
t on …’

  Tony cut her off.

  ‘Just remove the bedpan and leave us.’

  She did as ordered, then gently lowered me back against the pillows, and tucked the blankets in.

  ‘Can I get you anything now?’ she asked nervously.

  ‘No – but I would like the name of your supervisor,’ Tony said.

  She hurried off, looking genuinely scared.

  ‘So how did you enjoy the play, Mrs Lincoln?’ he asked me. He kissed me on the head. ‘And how’s our boy doing?’

  ‘Poorly’ I said.

  ‘That’s not what they told me last night.’

  ‘You were here last night?’

  ‘Yes – while you were sleeping. The nurse said you’d been …’

  ‘A little unstable, perhaps? Or maybe she said something really English and understated. Like, “your wife’s gone totally ga-ga”.’

  ‘Is that what you think, Sally?’

  ‘Oh, don’t give me that fucking rational tone-of-voice, Anthony!

  I could see him tense – not just because of my illogical temper, but also because I was now suddenly crying.

  ‘Would you like me to come back later?’ he asked quietly.

  I shook my head. I took a deep breath. I managed to curb the tears. I said, ‘So you were here last night?’

  ‘That’s right. I arrived just before eleven – direct from the airport. And I went straight up to see you. But they told me—’

  ‘—that I’d been sedated for excessive crying?’

  ’—that you’d been having a hard time of it, so they’d given you something to help you sleep.’

  ‘So you were here at eleven?’

  ‘That’s what I said before. Twice in fact.’

  ‘But why weren’t you here before then?’

  ‘Because I was in the bloody Hague, as you bloody well know. Now can we talk about more important things … like Jack.’

  ‘Who’s Jack?’

  He looked at me, wide-eyed.

  ‘Our son.’

  ‘I didn’t realize he’d been given a name yet.’

  ‘We talked about this four months ago.’

  ‘No, we didn’t.’

  ‘That weekend in Brighton, when we were walking along the promenade …’

  I suddenly remembered the conversation. We’d gone down to Brighton for a ‘get-away-from-it-all weekend’ (Tony’s words), during which it rained non-stop and Tony got hit with mild food poisoning after eating some suspect oysters in some overpriced seafood joint, and I kept thinking that this seaside town was an intriguing mixture of the chic and the tatty – which was probably why the English liked it so much. But before Tony started regurgitating his guts out in our freebie suite at The Grand, we did take a brief, soggy walk along the seafront, during which he mentioned that Jack would be a fine name if the baby turned out to be a boy. To which I said (and I remember this precisely): ‘Yeah, Jack’s not bad at all.’

  But that wasn’t meant to be interpreted as tacit approval for the name Jack.

  ‘All I said was—’

  ’—that you liked the name Jack. Which I took as your approval. Sorry.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. I mean, it’s not like it’s legal and binding as yet.’

  Tony shifted uneasily on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I went down to Chelsea Town Hall this morning and got the forms to register him. Jack Edward Hobbs … Edward for my father, of course.’

  I looked at him, appalled.

  ‘You had no right. No fucking right …’

  ‘Keep your voice down.’

  ‘Don’t tell me to keep my voice down when you …’

  ‘Can’t we get back to the subject of Jack?’

  ‘He’s not Jack. Understand? I refuse to let him be called Jack …’

  ‘Sally, his name’s not legal until you co-sign the registration form. So will you please … ?’

  ‘What? Be reasonable? Act like a stiff-upper-lip anal Brit when my son is upstairs, dying …’

  ‘He is not dying.’

  ‘He is dying – and I don’t care. You get that? I don’t care.’

  At which point I fell back against the pillows, pulled the covers over my head, and fell into another of my extended crying jags. Like yesterday’s crying jag, it was punctuated by a dreadful hollowness. A nurse was on the scene within moments. I could hear a lot of rapid-fire whispering … and phrases like, ‘we’ve seen this sort of thing before’, ‘often happens after a difficult delivery’, ‘poor thing must be under such terrible strain’ and (worst of all), ‘she’ll be right as rain in a few days’.

  Though the covers were over my head, I retreated back to my foetal position, once again biting deeply into the pillow in an attempt to stifle my screams. Like last night, I also didn’t struggle when I felt a firm hand hold my shoulder while someone else turned back the bedclothes, rolled up my sleeve, and pricked my arm with a hypodermic.

  Only this time, I didn’t get despatched to never-never land. No, this time I seemed to be placed in a state of otherworldly immobility. I felt as if I was suspended directly above this room, looking down on the comings and goings of patients and medical staff. I had the benign disinterest of an accidental tourist who had somehow managed to end up in this curious quartier, and would certainly prefer to be elsewhere, but had imbibed so much cheap French fizz that she was paralytically incapable of knowing the time of day, and so she was perfectly happy to keep floating overhead. Neither sleeping nor fully conscious …just there.

  I remained in this narcotic, blissed-out state until the following morning – when hard shafts of sunlight streaked through the windows, and my brain was as shadowy as a film noir, and I felt curiously rested, even though I didn’t know if I had slept.

  In fact, for the first ten seconds of consciousness, I luxuriated in that state of nowheresville, where there is no such thing as a past or a present … let alone a future.

  Then the world crashed in on me. I scrambled for the call bell. The same tight-faced Northern Irish nurse was on duty – only now, after Tony’s dressing-down, she was sweetness itself.

  ‘Good morning there, Ms Goodchild. You seemed to be sleeping awfully well. And have you seen what’s arrived while you were sleeping?’

  It took a moment or so for my eyes to focus on the three large floral arrangements that adorned various corners of the room. The nurse gathered up the gift cards and handed them to me. One bouquet from the editor of the Chronicle. One from Tony’s team on the Foreign pages. One from Margaret and Alexander.

  ‘They’re beautiful, aren’t they?’ Nurse Dowling said.

  I stared at the arrangements, having absolutely no opinion about them whatsoever. They were flowers, that’s all.

  ‘Could I get you a cup of tea now?’ Nurse Dowling asked. ‘Perhaps a little breakfast?’

  ‘Any idea how my son is doing?’

  ‘I don’t honestly know, but I could find out straight away for you.’

  ‘That would be very kind. And if I could … uh …’

  Nurse Dowling knew exactly what I was talking about. Approaching the bed, she removed the bedpan from the cabinet in the side table, helped me straddle it, and removed it after I filled it with yet another half-gallon of malodorous urine.

  ‘God, what a stink,’ I said as Nurse Dowling settled me back on the pillows.

  ‘The drugs do that,’ she said. ‘But once you’re off them, you’ll lose that bad smell. How do the stitches feel today?’

  ‘The pain’s still there.’

  ‘That’ll take at least a week to go away. Meantime, why don’t I bring you a basin of water, so you can freshen up and brush your teeth?’

  Talk about five-star service. I thanked the nurse, and asked her again if she could find out how Jack was doing.

  ‘Oh, you’ve already chosen a name for him,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Jack Edwar
d.’

  ‘Good strong name,’ she said. ‘And I’ll be right back with the tea and any news of Jack.’

  Jack. Jack. Jack.

  Suddenly I felt the worst wave of shame imaginable.

  ‘He is dying – and I don’t care. You get that? I don’t care.’

  How could I have said that? Had I so completely lost it that I actually expressed indifference about whether or not my son lived? Instead of making excuses for myself – telling myself it was all post-operative stress, and an out-of-body reaction to all the drugs they’d been pumping into me – I immediately began to engage in a serious course of self-flagellation. I was unfit to be a mother, a wife, a member of the human race. I had jettisoned all that was important to me – my newborn child and my husband – through one deranged outbreak of rage. I deserved everything bad that would now happen to me.

  But, most of all, yesterday’s bizarre, out-of-kilter rage had vanished. All I could now think was: I need to be with Jack.

  Nurse Dowling returned with a breakfast tray and some news.

  ‘I gather your little one’s doing just fine. They’re really pleased with the progress he’s making, and he can probably be moved out of ICU in a couple of days.’

  ‘Can I see him this morning?’

  ‘No problem.’

  I picked at my breakfast – largely because whatever appetite I had was tempered by an equally urgent need to speak with Tony. I wanted to utter a vast mea culpa for my insane behaviour yesterday, to beg his forgiveness, and also tell him that he and Jack were the best things that had ever happened to me. And, of course, I’ll sign the registration document naming him Jack Edward. Because … because … be …

  Oh fuck, not this …

  The crying had started again. Another extended bout of loud, insufferable keening. Come on, knock it off, I told myself. But as I quickly discovered, this was an absurd idea because I fell apart once more. Only this time I was cognizant enough of this sudden breakdown to be genuinely spooked by it. Especially as I worried that the medical staff might start writing me off as mentally askew, and worthy of more intensive chemical treatment. So I stuffed the pillow back into my mouth, clutched it against me like a life preserver, and started counting backwards from one hundred inside my head, telling myself that I had to have myself under control by the time I reached zero. But during this countdown, I could feel my voice growing louder and louder – even though I wasn’t speaking at all. The strain against my eyes became intolerable. There was such compression behind them that I was certain they’d explode out of my head at any moment. But just when I thought I was about to let go entirely Nurse Dowling showed up accompanied by the orderly. I felt her hand against my shoulder, calling my name, asking me what was wrong. When I couldn’t answer, I heard her turn to the orderly and mention something about getting the unit sister. At which point I had just reached the number thirty-nine, and suddenly heard myself shout, ‘Thirty-nine!’