by Anne Enright
‘Hello, sweetheart.’
Sugar made the child jump, as well as hunger. Music made it stop, a listening stillness. I began to time my digestion: ten minutes after chocolate, a kick; fifteen minutes after pasta; half an hour after meat. I was bounced awake at five every morning and got up for a bowl of cereal – already feeding this little tyrant, getting in training for the real event. Early afternoon was a cancan, also nine o’clock at night. I went to New York and the child stayed on Irish time, which was very odd. In the middle of the day I would go back to my hotel room for a rest and a chat. My belly made peculiar company. We watched My Dinner with Andre together, and ate big handfuls of nuts.
What did I know? I knew this child liked music, but maybe all children do. I thought it was an independent type, wriggling already, as though to get away. I began to identify whatever part of its body was squirming under my hand. One day a shoulder bone scything up from the depths, another day a little jutting heel. My indifference to the world grew vast. I liked things from a distance. I was in the middle of the sweetest, quietest romance.
In our first antenatal class the midwife said, ‘Is there a pelvis over there on the floor behind you, could you pass it here?’ And when some hapless male picked up the bit of dead person they used for demonstration purposes, she said, ‘Don’t be afraid of it. It’s not a chalice.’ I thought this was very Irish. Secretly, I thought that perhaps my pelvis was a chalice. I also thought that it might be beginning to crack. She passed around a vial of amniotic fluid (of unspecified age, it would have been nice to know if it was fresh) and on the other side of the room, a woman bent forward on to her belly, in an awkward, pregnant attempt at a faint. The midwife turned to a diagram – we had to have the window opened for air. She told us about perineal massage. I had never heard of anything so peculiar and unlikely in my life. I was surrounded by strangers, half of them men and all of them catatonic with shock. It might have been the way she lay down on a mat with her legs up in the air (she was in her late fifties), or it might just have been the fact that all of us realised that there was a fundamental problem, here, of design. The hole just wasn’t big enough. And there was no escape now. I felt as though I had been watching a distant train for months and only now, when it was approaching, did I realise I was tied to the tracks.
My father says, quite wisely, that we should have been marsupials, pregnant up to six months, with the last three in a pouch. The disproportion was terrible. This could not be what nature intended, humans must be overbred. I couldn’t walk for more than twenty minutes. Everything hurt. Somehow, I blamed the bump and not the child for the obstruction in my gut and the vile acid that was pushed up into my throat. We weren’t to take antacids, because they would make us anaemic, the midwife said. I said, ‘What’s so bad about anaemia?’ thinking that it couldn’t be worse than this. I sat and surfed the Net like some terrible turnip, gagging and leaning back in my chair. My shoes didn’t fit. I became clumsy, and not just because of the weight out front – dishes dropped for no reason out of my hands. At thirty-five weeks, just like all the other women on the About.com pregnancy notice-board, I started fighting with Martin: even this was predetermined, as the hormonal conveyor belt ground on. Oh, the stupidity of it, the blankness, the senseless days and the terrible, interrupted nights. Somewhere in there, I forgot entirely that I was having a child. Nothing wonderful could come of this. I was bored to madness, and there was nothing I, or anyone else, could do about it because I had the concentration span of a gnat. A very fat gnat.
The streets, that had been full of babies in their buggies, now became full of the old and the infirm, people who couldn’t manage the step on to the bus, or who failed to reach the queue before the till closed. Was it possible that pregnancy was turning me into a nicer person? I thought of the women I knew when I was young who were pregnant all the time. I did sums: the mother of a school friend who had had twenty-two pregnancies, eleven of which had come to term. She would look up from her plate, surrounded by bottles of pills, and say, ‘Oh . . . Hello . . .’ as though trying to figure out if you had come out of her or someone else. Her husband was mad about her, you could still see it, and her children, with the exception of the eldest boys, were complete strangers.
Even my own much discussed, often caressed, high-focus bump was filled with someone I did not know. And perhaps never would. Pregnancy is as old-fashioned as religion, and it never ends. Every moment of my pregnancy lasted for ever. I was pregnant in the autumn, and I was pregnant in the spring. I was pregnant as summer came. I lived like a plant on the window-sill, taking its time, starting to bud. Nothing could hurry this. There was no technology for it: I was the technology – increasingly stupid, increasingly kind, a mystery to myself, to Martin, and to everyone who passed me by.
Birth
AMNIOTIC FLUID SMELLS like tea. When I say this to Martin, he says, ‘I thought that was just tea.’ Of course a hospital should smell of tea: a hospital should smell of bleach. Unit C smells of tea and a little bit of ammonia, whether human or industrial is hard to tell. There is a lot of amniotic fluid in Unit C. At least three of the women have had their waters broken that afternoon, and as the evening approaches we sit draining into strips of unbleached cotton and watching each other, jealously, for signs of pain.
There is a little something extra in there, sharp and herbal – green tea maybe, or gunpowder tea. Pregnancy smelt like grass. Sort of. It certainly smelt of something growing; a distinctive and lovely smell that belongs to that family of grass, and ironed cotton, and asparagus pee. But the smell of tea is beginning to get to me. There are pints of it. I’m like some Burco Boiler with the tap left open. It flows slowly, but it will not stop. For hours I have been waiting for it to stop, and the mess of the bed is upsetting me. It upsets the housekeeper in me and it upsets the schoolgirl in me. The sanitary pads they hand you are school-issue and all the nurses are turning into nuns.
The breaking of the waters was fine. The nurse did whatever magic makes sheets appear under you while other things are folded back, and the obstetrician did something deft with a crochet hook. There was the sense of pressure against a membrane, and then pop – a bit tougher but not much different from bursting a bubble on plastic bubble wrap. It felt quite satisfying, and the rush of hot liquid that followed made me laugh. I don’t think a lot of women laugh at this stage in Unit C, but why not? We were on our way.
After which, there is nothing to do but wait. As the afternoon wears on, the pink curtains are pulled around the beds. The ward is full of breathing; the sharp intake of breath and the groaning exhalation, as though we are all asleep, or having sex in our sleep. One woman sobs behind her curtain. From the bed beside me the submarine sound of the Doppler looking for a foetal heartbeat and endlessly failing – a sonic rip as it is pulled away, then bleeping, breathing; the sigh and rush of an unseen woman’s electronic blood.
Then there is tea. Actual tea. The men are sent out, for some reason, and the women sit around the long table in the middle of the ward. It’s a school tea. There is a woman with high blood pressure, a couple of diabetics, one barely pregnant woman who has such bad nausea she has to be put on a drip. There are at least three other women on the brink, but they stay in bed and will not eat. I am all excited and want to talk. I am very keen to compare dressing-gowns – it took me so long to find this one, and I am quite pleased with it, but when I get up after the meal, the back of it is stained a watery red. I am beginning to hate Unit C.
After tea is the football. Portugal are playing France and, when a goal is scored, the men all come out from behind the curtains to watch the replay. Then they go back in again to their groaning, sighing women. I keep the curtain open and watch Martin while he watches the game. I am keeping track of my contractions, if they are contractions. At 9.35, Martin looks at me over the back of his chair. He gives me a thumbs-up as if to say, ‘Isn’t this a blast? And there’s football on the telly!’ At 9.35 and 20 seconds I am, for the first time,
in serious pain. I am in a rage with him for missing it, and call to him quietly over the sound of the game.
A woman in a dressing-gown comes to talk to me. She is very big. I ask her if she is due tonight but she says she is not due until September, which is three months away. She is the woman from the next bed, the one with the Doppler machine. They couldn’t find the foetal heartbeat because of the fat. She stands at the end of the bed and lists her symptoms, which are many. She has come up from Tipperary. She is going to have a Caesarean at thirty-one weeks. I am trying to be sympathetic, but I think I hate her. She is weakness in the room.
When I have a contraction I lurch out of bed, endlessly convinced that I have to go to the toilet – endlessly, stupidly convinced, every five minutes, that there is a crap I have to take, new and surprising as the first crap Adam took on his second day in the world. This journey to the toilet full of obstacles, the first one being Martin, whose patience is endless and whose feet are huge. When I get into the cubicle at the end of the ward, I sit uselessly on the toilet, try to mop up the mess, and listen to the woman on the other side of the partition, who is louder than me, and who doesn’t seem to bother going back to her bed any more.
This has been happening, on and off, for a week. There is nothing inside me by way of food; there hasn’t been for days. I am in what Americans call pre-labour, what the Irish are too macho to call anything at all. ‘If you can talk through it, then it’s not a contraction,’ my obstetrician said when I came in a week ago, convinced that I was on my way. This week, she says, she will induce me because my blood pressure is up; but it may be simple charity. Ten days ago I wanted a natural birth, now I want a general anaesthetic. Fuck aromatherapy, I would do anything to make this stop – up to, and including, putting my head in the road, with my belly up on the kerb.
A woman answers her mobile, ‘No, Ma, nothing yet. Stop calling! Nothing yet.’ Pain overtakes the woman two beds down and the curtains are drawn. When they are pulled back, you can tell she is delighted. Oh, this is it. This must be it. Oh, oh, I’m going to have a baby. Then more pain – agony, it looks like. ‘Oh, good girl! Good girl!’ shouts the midwife, as the man collects her things and she is helped out of the Ante-Room to Hell that is Unit C. I am jealous, but I wish her well. The room is full of miracles waiting to happen, whether months or hours away. Another bed is empty – the woman on the other side of the toilet partition, is she in labour too? ‘She went out, anyway,’ says Martin. ‘Hanging on to the wall.’
It is a theatre of pain. It is a pain competition (and I am losing). Martin says that Beckett would have loved Unit C. We wonder whether this is the worst place we have ever been, but decide that the prize still goes to the bus station in Nasca, the time we went to Peru and didn’t bring any jumpers. All the paper pants I brought have torn and I sit knickerless on the unbleached sheet, which I have rolled up into a huge wad under me. My bump has shrunk a little, and gone slack. When I put my hand on it, there is the baby; very close now under the skin. I just know it is a girl. I feel her shoulder and an arm. For some reason I think of a skinned rabbit. I wonder are her eyes open, and if she is waiting, like me. I have loved this child in a drowsy sort of way, but now I feel a big want in me for her, for this particular baby – the one that I am touching through my skin. ‘Oh, when will I see you?’ I say.
This could be the phrase of the night, but instead it is a song that repeats in my head. ‘What sends her home hanging on to the wall? Boozin’! Bloody well boo-oozin’.’ I stop getting out of bed every five minutes and start breathing, the way they told us to in the antenatal class. I count backwards from five when the pain hits, and then from five again. Was I in labour yet? Was this enough pain? ‘If you can talk, then it’s not labour.’ So I try to keep talking, but by 11.00 the lights are switched off, I am lurching into sleep between my (non-)contractions for three or five minutes at a time, and Martin is nodding off in the chair.
My cervix has to do five things: it has to come forward, it has to shorten, it has to soften, it has to thin out, it has to open. A week earlier the obstetrician recited this list and told me that it had already done three of them. In the reaches of the night I try to remember which ones I have left to do, but I can’t recall the order they come in, and there is always, as I press my counting fingers into the sheet, one that I have forgotten. My cervix, my cervix. Is it soft but not short? Is it soft and thin, but not yet forward? Is it short and hard, but open anyway? I have no sense that this is not a list but a sequence. I have lost my grasp of cause and effect. My cervix, my cervix: it will open as the clouds open, to let the sun come shining through. It will open like the iris of an eye, like the iris when you open the back of a camera. I could see it thinning; the tiny veins stretching and breaking. I could see it opening like something out of Alien. I could see it open as simply as a door that you don’t know you’ve opened, until you are halfway across the room. I could see all this, but my cervix stayed shut.
At 2.30 a.m. I give in and Martin goes off to ask for some Pethidine. I know I will only be allowed two doses of this stuff, so it had better last a long time. I want to save the second for the birth, but in my heart of hearts I know I’m on my way to an epidural now. I don’t know why I wanted to do without one, I suppose it was that Irishwoman machismo again. Mná na hEireann. MNÁ na hEireann. FIVE four three two . . . one. Fiiiive four three two one. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
Once I give in and start to whimper, the (non-)contractions are unbearable. The Pethidine does not come. At 3 a.m. there is a shrieking from down the corridor, and I realise how close we are to the labour ward. The noise is ghastly, Victorian: it tears through the hospital dark. Someone is really giving it soprano. I think nothing of it. I do not wonder if the woman is mad, or if the baby has died, but that is what I wonder as I write this now.
Footsteps approach but they are not for me, they are for the woman from Tipperary who has started crying, with a great expenditure of snot, in the bed next door. The nurse comforts her. ‘I’m just frikened,’ the woman says. ‘She just frikened me.’ I want to shout that it’s all right for her, she’s going to have a fucking Caesarean, but it has been forty-five minutes since I realised that I could not do this any more, that the pain I had been riding was about to ride over me, and I needed something to get me back on top, or I would be destroyed by it, I would go under – in some spiritual and very real sense, I would die.
The footsteps go away again. They do not return. I look at Martin who is listening, as I am listening, and he disappears silently through the curtain. At 3.30 a.m., I get the Pethidine.
After this, I do not count through the (non-)contractions, or try to manage my breathing. I moan, with my mouth a little open. I low. I almost enjoy it. I sleep all the time now, between times. I have given in. I have untied my little boat and gone floating downstream.
At 5.00 a.m. a new woman comes along and tells Martin he must go home. There follows a complicated and slow conversation as I stand up to her (we are, after all, back in school). I say that I need him here, and she smiles, ‘What for? What do you need him for?’ (For saving me from women like you, Missus.) In the end, she tells us that there are mattresses he can sleep on in a room down the hall. Oh. Why didn’t she say so? Maybe she’s mad. It’s 5 a.m., I’m tripping on Pethidine, at the raw end of a sleepless week, and this woman is a little old-fashioned, in a mad sort of way. Wow. We kiss. He goes. From now on, I stay under, not even opening my eyes when the pain comes.
I think I low through breakfast. They promise me a bed in the labour ward at 10.30, so I can stop lowing and start screaming, but that doesn’t seem to be happening really. I am sitting up and smiling for the ward round, which is nice, but I am afraid that they will notice that the contractions are fading, and I’ll have to start all over again, somehow. Then the contractions come back again, and by now my body is all out of Pethidine. I spend the minutes after 10.30 amused by my rage; astonished by how bad I feel. Are these the worst hundred seconds I
have ever been through? How about the next hundred seconds – let’s give them a go.
At 12.00, I nip into the cubicle for one last contraction, and we are out of Unit C. The whole ward lifts as we leave, wishing us well – another one on her way. I realise I have been lowing all night, keeping these women from sleep.
The room on the labour ward is extremely posh, with its own bathroom and a high-tech bed. I like the look of the midwife; she is the kind of woman you’d want to go for a few pints with. She is tired. She asks if I have a birth plan and I say I want to do everything as naturally as possible. She says, ‘Well, you’ve made a good start, anyway,’ which I think is possibly sarcastic, given the crochet hook, and the Pethidine, and the oxytocin drip they’ve just ordered up. Martin goes back to pack up our stuff, and I start to talk. She keeps a half-ironic silence. For months, I had the idea that if I could do a bit of research, get a bit of chat out of the midwife, then that would take my mind off things – what is the worst thing that anyone ever said? or the weirdest? – but she won’t play ball. I run out of natter and have a little cry. She says, ‘Are you all right?’ I say, ‘I just didn’t think I would ever get this far, that’s all.’ And I feel her soften behind me.
I don’t remember everything that followed, but I do remember the white, fresh light. I also remember the feelings in the room. I could sense a shift in mood, or intention, in the women who tended me, with great clarity. It was like being in a painting. Every smile mattered; the way people were arranged in the space, the gestures they made.
