Collected Stories

by Peter Carey

  When I arrived at the hospital with the heavy bags of cassette-players and rosemary oil, I saw a dark-bearded, neat man in a suit sitting out by the landing. This was the hypnotherapist who had arrived to help you come into the world. He was serious, impatient, eager to start. He wanted to start in the pathology ward, but in the end he helped carry the cassette-player, Thermoses, sandwiches, massage oil, sponges, paper pants, apple juice, frozen orange blocks, rolling pin, cold packs, and even water down to the labour ward where — on a stainless-steel stand eight feet high — the sisters were already hanging the bag of oxytocin which would ensure this day was your birthday.

  It was a pretty room, by the taste of the time. As I write it is still that time, and I still think it pretty. All the surfaces were hospital surfaces — easy to clean — laminexes, vinyls, materials with a hard shininess, but with colours that were soft pinks and blues and an effect that was unexpectedly pleasant, even sophisticated.

  The bed was one of those complicated stainless-steel machines which seem so cold and impersonal until you realize all the clever things it can do. In the wall there were sockets with labels like “Oxygen”. The cupboards were filled with paper-wrapped sterile “objects”. There was, in short, a seriousness about the room, and when we plugged in the cassette-player we took care to make sure we were not using a socket that might be required for something more important.

  The hypnotherapist left me to handle the unpacking of the bags. He explained his business to the obstetrician. She told him that eight hours would be a good, fast labour. The hypnotherapist said he and Alison were aiming for three. I don’t know what the doctor thought, but I thought there was not a hope in hell.

  When the oxytocin drip had been put into my darling’s arm, when the water-clear hormone was entering her veins, one drip every ten seconds (you could hear the machine click when a drip was released), when these pure chemical messages were being delivered to her body, the hypnotherapist attempted to send other messages of a less easily assayable quality.

  I tell you the truth: I did not care for this hypnotherapist, this pushy, over-eager fellow taking up all this room in the labour ward. He sat on the right-hand side of the bed. I sat on the left. He made me feel useless. He said: “You are going to have a good labour, a fast labour, a fast labour like the one you have already visualized.” Your mother’s eyes were closed. She had such large, soft lids, such tender and vulnerable coverings of skin. Inside the pink light of the womb, your eyelids were the same. Did you hear the messages your mother was sending to her body and to you? The hypnotherapist said: “After just three hours you are going to deliver a baby, a good, strong, healthy baby. It will be an easy birth, an effortless birth. It will last three hours and you will not tear.” On the door the sisters had tacked a sign reading: QUIETPLEASEHYPNOTHERAPYINPROGRESS. “You are going to be so relaxed, and in a moment you are going to be even more relaxed, more relaxed than you have ever been before. You are feeling yourself going deeper and deeper and when you come to, you will be in a state of waking hypnosis and you will respond to the trigger-words Peter will give you during your labour, words which will make you, once again, so relaxed.”

  My trigger-words were to be “Breathe” and “Relax”.

  The hypnotherapist gave me his phone number and asked me to call when you were born. But for the moment you had not felt the effects of the oxytocin on your world and you could not yet have suspected the adventures the day would have in store for you.

  You still sounded like the ocean, like soldiers marching across a bridge, like short-wave radio.

  On Tuesday nights through the previous winter we had gone to classes in a building where the lifts were always sticking. We had walked up the stairs to a room where pregnant women and their partners had rehearsed birth with dolls, had watched hours of videotapes of exhausted women in labour. We had practised all the different sorts of breathing. We had learned of the different positions for giving birth: the squat, the supported squat, the squat supported by a seated partner. We knew the positions for first and second stage, for a backache labour, and so on, and so on. We learned birth was a complicated, exhausting and difficult process. We worried we would forget the methodology of breathing. And yet now the time was here we both felt confident, even though nothing would be like it had been in the birth classes. Your mother was connected to the oxytocin drip which meant she could not get up and walk around. It meant it was difficult for her to “belly dance” or do most of the things we had spent so many evenings learning about.

  In the classes they tell you that the contractions will start far apart, that you should go to hospital only when they are ten minutes apart: short bursts of pain, but long rests in between. During this period your mother could expect to walk around, to listen to music, to enjoy a massage. However, your birth was not to be like this. This was not because of you. It was because of the oxytocin. It had a fast, intense effect, like a double Scotch when you’re expecting a beer. There were not to be any ten-minute rests, and from the time the labour started it was, almost immediately, fast and furious, with a one-minute contraction followed by no more than two minutes of rest.

  If there had been time to be frightened, I think I would have been frightened. Your mother was in the grip of pains she could not escape from. She squatted on a bean bag. It was as if her insides were all tangled, and tugged in a battle to the death. Blood ran from her. Fluid like egg-white. I did not know what anything was. I was a man who had wandered onto a battlefield. The blood was bright with oxygen. I wiped your mother’s brow. She panted. Huh-huh-huh-huh. I ministered to her with sponge and water. I could not take her pain for her. I could do nothing but measure the duration of the pain. I had a little red stop-watch you will one day find abandoned in a dusty drawer. (Later your mother asked me what I had felt during labour. I thought only: I must count the seconds of the contraction; I must help Alison breathe, now, now, now; I must get that sponge — there is time to make the water in the sponge cool — now I can remove that bowl and cover it. Perhaps I can reach the bottle of Evian water. God, I’m so thirsty. What did I think during the labour? I thought: When this contraction is over I will get to that Evian bottle.)

  Somewhere in the middle of this, in these three hours in this room whose only view was a blank screen of frosted glass, I helped your mother climb onto the bed. She was on all fours. In this position she could reach the gas mask. It was nitrous oxide, laughing gas. It did not stop the pain, but it made it less important. For the gas to work your mother had to anticipate the contraction, breathing in gas before it arrived. The sister came and showed me how I could feel the contraction coming with my hand. But I couldn’t. We used the stop-watch, but the contractions were not regularly spaced, and sometimes we anticipated them and sometimes not. When we did not get it right, your mother took the full brunt of the pain. She had her face close to the mattress. I sat on the chair beside. My face was close to hers. I held the watch where she could see it. I held her wrist. I can still see the red of her face, the wideness of her eyes as they bulged at the enormous size of the pains that racked her.

  Sisters came and went. They had to see how wide the cervix was. At first it was only two centimetres, not nearly enough room for you to come out. An hour later they announced it was four centimetres. It had to get to nine centimetres before we could even think of you being born. There had to be room for your head (which we had been told was big — well, we were told wrong, weren’t we?) and your shoulders to slip through. It felt to your mother that this labour would go on for eight or twelve or twenty hours. That she should endure this intensity of pain for this time was unthinkable. It was like running a hundred-metre race which was stretching to ten miles. She wanted an epidural — a pain blocker.

  But when the sister heard this she said: “Oh do try to hang on. You’re doing so well.”

  I went to the sister, like a shop steward.

  I said: “My wife wants an epidural, so can you please arrange it?”


  The sister agreed to fetch the anaesthetist, but there was between us — I admit it now — a silent conspiracy: for although I had pressed the point and she had agreed it was your mother’s right, we both believed (I, for my part, on her advice) that if your mother could endure a little longer she could have the birth she wanted — without an epidural.

  The anaesthetist came and went. The pain was at its worst. A midwife came and inspected your mother. She said: “Ten centimetres.”

  She said: “Your baby is about to be born.”

  We kissed, your mother and I. We kissed with soft, passionate lips as we did the day we lay on a bed at Lovett Bay and conceived you. That day the grass outside the window was a brilliant green beneath the vibrant petals of fallen jacaranda.

  Outside the penumbra of our consciousness trolleys were wheeled. Sterile bags were cut open. The contractions did not stop, of course.

  The obstetrician had not arrived. She was in a car, driving fast towards the hospital.

  I heard a midwife say: “Who can deliver in this position?” (It was still unusual, as I learned at that instant, for women to deliver their babies on all fours.)

  Someone left the room. Someone entered. Your mother was pressing the gas mask so hard against her face it was making deep indentations on her skin. Her eyes bulged huge.

  Someone said: “Well get her, otherwise I’ll have to deliver it myself.”

  The door opened. Bushfire came in.

  Bushfire was Aboriginal. She was about fifty years old. She was compact and taciturn like a farmer. She had a face that folded in on itself and let out its feelings slowly, selectively. It was a face to trust, and trust especially at this moment when I looked up to see Bushfire coming through the door in a green gown. She came in a rush, her hands out to have gloves put on.

  There was another contraction. I heard the latex snap around Bushfire’s wrists. She said: “There it is. I can see your baby’s head.” It was you. The tip of you, the top of you. You were a new country, a planet, a star seen for the first time. I was not looking at Bushfire. I was looking at your mother. She was all alight with love and pain.

  “Push,” said Bushfire.

  Your mother pushed. It was you she was pushing, you that put that look of luminous love on her face, you that made the veins on her forehead bulge and her skin go red.

  Then — it seems such a short time later — Bushfire said: “Your baby’s head is born.”

  And then, so quickly in retrospect, but one can no more recall it accurately than one can recall exactly how one made love on a bed when the jacaranda petals were lying like jewels on the grass outside. Soon. Soon we heard you. Soon you slipped out of your mother. Soon, exactly three hours after the labour had begun, you came slithering out not having hurt her, not even having grazed her. You slipped out, as slippery as a little fish, and we heard you cry. Your cry was so much lighter and thinner than I might have expected. I do not mean that it was weak or frail, but that your first cry had a timbre unlike anything I had expected. The joy we felt. Your mother and I kissed again, at that moment.

  “My little baby,” she said. We were crying with happiness. “My little baby.”

  I turned to look. I saw you. Skin. Blue-white, shiny-wet.

  I said: “It’s a boy.”

  “Look at me,” your mother said. I turned to her. I kissed her. I was crying, just crying with happiness that you were there.

  The room you were born in was quiet, not full of noise and clattering. This is how we wanted it for you. So you could come into the world gently and that you should — as you were now — be put onto your mother’s stomach. They wrapped you up. I said: “Couldn’t he feel his mother’s skin?” They unwrapped you so you could have your skin against hers.

  And there you were. It was you. You had a face, the face we had never known. You were so calm. You did not cry or fret. You had big eyes like your mother’s. And yet when I looked at you first I saw not your mother and me, but your two grandfathers, your mother’s father, my father; and, as my father, whom I loved a great deal, had died the year before, I was moved to see that here, in you, he was alive.

  Look at the photographs in the album that we took at this time. Look at your mother and how alive she is, how clear her eyes are, how all the red pain has just slipped off her face and left the unmistakable visage of a young woman in love.

  We bathed you (I don’t know whether this was before or after) in warm water and you accepted this gravely, swimming instinctively.

  I held you (I think this must be before), and you were warm and slippery. You had not been bathed when I held you. The obstetrician gave you to me so she could examine your mother. She said: “Here.”

  I held you against me. I knew then that your mother would not die. I thought: “It’s fine, it’s all right.” I held you against my breast. You smelled of lovemaking.