‘So weird, isn’t it?’ she muses. ‘Being pregnant. Where do you reckon the baby’s head is?’
The contact is made before I can voice any objection. I can’t help but flinch. The suddenness of pale hands, cool against my stomach, the tips of her chewed purple nails brushing over my thin cotton top.
‘I … I don’t know,’ I stutter. Rachel doesn’t seem to notice my stunned reaction to her touch. She continues to stroke, back and forth, setting off nerve endings in my stretched skin.
‘It’s easy to tell,’ she continues, staring at my belly. ‘You just feel for the neck. I’ll show you.’
Rachel spreads her knees to face me head-on, and starts to probe with a finger and thumb, down at the bottom of my pelvis, as if trying to pinch the sides of the baby’s head.
‘Rachel, you’re pressing quite hard,’ I gasp. ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’
‘Of course!’ She presses harder still. ‘There it is,’ she says triumphantly. ‘There’s his head.’
I gasp again and recoil, my spine pushing against the back of the chair. In my mind’s eye I see my baby floating in utero, Rachel’s alien hand pressing through the red, glowing walls of his universe.
26 WEEKS
HELEN
Daniel and I are at the antenatal clinic, the lights down low. I have stripped from the waist down, cold jelly smeared on my belly over the red scratches of my stretch marks. I wince at the temperature. The sonographer tells me the probe is coming, that it is going to be cold. Daniel looks at me. I love you, he mouths. He squeezes my hand, and I squeeze back.
I try to be soothed by the feel of Daniel’s slim fingers in mine, try not to clench as it slides into me, this hard, alien object. We sit in silence, the low hum of the machines filling the room. There is a smell of bleach. My heart feels full of blood.
Even though I am big enough, now, to feel the baby move – a daily confirmation that he is still there, still alive – I can’t help but remember how so many of these scans have ended for us. The ripped blue squares of NHS tissue pressed into my hands to wipe my sobbing face, a sonographer wiping ultrasound gel from between my legs as I beg them in vain to check, just one more time.
But soon the room is filled with the watery thump of a heartbeat noise and a wiggly blue line darts across the screen. Daniel doesn’t say anything, but I see his chest deflate in a way that tells me he had been holding his breath. When the sonographer turns to us, I can see from the wrinkles around her eyes that she is smiling, even though a mask covers her nose and mouth.
‘Heartbeat sounds good. Baby is strong.’
It feels as if someone has opened a window. All the muscles in my body relax.
She starts to move the probe around, telling us what the pictures mean. She tells me not to lift my hips and I try not to. When she is happy, she pulls out the probe and starts to move the external ultrasound over my bump.
‘As you know, in the past we have had some … complications,’ she says. Her words are devoid of emotion, consonants sharp as scalpels. I close my eyes, but the pictures flash up anyway, of the babies that came before. The flat pods of their eyelids. The shapes of their heads. My chest heaves; the thump of my heart feels too fast, my face too hot. I feel Daniel’s grip on my hand tighten. I know how hard this is for him, too.
‘We are just being extra careful this time, OK? I’m checking for everything.’
I nod, and we both wait while she alternates between moving the probe across my belly and typing up notes.
‘Oh-kay, baby is in good position. Here, look.’
We are both entranced by the flickering screen – there he is, a real baby, with arms and legs and a tiny nose.
‘Oh my God, Helen,’ Daniel says. I can hear the smile in his voice, but I can’t tear my eyes away from the image of our son, his large, outsize head, his wriggling body that is yet to catch up. Fourteen weeks to go.
‘This is the umbilical cord, see here? And this is the placenta.’ Patches of blue and red pulsate on the screen to show the blood flow.
‘OK. Heart is good, lungs are good. Spinal cord OK. Now I’m just measuring the fluid at the back of the neck, but it’s looking very normal.’
Sometimes we catch a nose, or a hand – something human – and Daniel and I look from the screen to each other and back to the screen again, both making the same noises at once, noises somewhere between nervous laugh and an expression of wonder. Then the probe will move, and it will flicker, darkly, into something else. Something that could be human or reptile.
‘All fine. Baby is perfect,’ the sonographer says. Her voice is still muffled by the mask. I close my eyes, saving her words for later, like coins in a purse. There is nothing wrong with him. Nothing. He is perfect.
She takes the probe again, gently moves it down towards my hip. The screen is filled with a hand.
‘Ah, see? Baby is waving.’
I look at Daniel, smiling at his mesmerised expression. He squeezes my hand again but doesn’t take his eyes off the screen. The image of the baby is reflected in his glasses, two lit squares of black and blue.
She flicks the lights on and hands me some tissues. ‘All done for today. I’ll make a picture for you to take home.’
As I turn to look at Daniel again, I see that he is still staring at the screen. His entire face is wet with tears.
‘Oh, Daniel,’ I say, half laughing. ‘You’re worse than me.’
He does not seem to hear me, though. His eyes are locked on the freeze-frame of the baby’s waving hand. When the sonographer switches the screen off, and the image is gone, he continues to stare at the grey square of the monitor.
‘Daniel? Is something wrong?’
Daniel drops his head into his hands, his shoulders shaking. I put my arm around him. The sonographer is back, standing in front of us, apparently unsure what to do. She snaps her blue plastic gloves off, first one, then the other. I see her glance at the clock. She has other couples to see.
‘Daniel? Come on, we need to go.’
I stroke his back, try to drop my head, meet his eye. But no matter what I do, he can’t seem to stop.
GREENWICH PARK
In Greenwich Park, there are old doorways. He noticed them the first time he came here. Even in the moonlight, they stay in shadow. He walks through the park at night, past the line of bent trees, twisted over to one side by the wind on the hill. His shadow is long, looping over the tarmac paths that criss-cross the lawns. She makes him hunt her, her hot blood smell.
She likes doorways. Alleyways. Walls wet with ivy wet with rain. The backs of churches. Once even a graveyard, the stones lined up against the path. Dark, cold, secret places where she is the only warm thing. She grips him, tightly. They move quickly, on all fours, or against walls. They bite, scratch, claw at each other’s wrists. When she finishes, she gasps, like she is drowning, and in that moment, he feels that he is not old or young or rich or poor or even himself, really. He is just here, awake in the dark, an animal, and alive.
Does he want to get caught? Does she? He is not sure. God knows what she wants. Mainly he just wants this feeling, this feeling like he is falling, like he might die if he lands but in the falling he is alive, to his fingertips.
He wonders sometimes what he would do without it. How he would exist. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how he would breathe without this, without knowing it is coming.
27 WEEKS
HELEN
It hadn’t mattered so much when we were both at work. But now that I’ve had to give up, and I’m stuck at home, I’m finding my patience with the building work is slowly unravelling, like a fraying hem. With every new misery, another thread comes loose.
The work was Daniel’s big idea. I wasn’t convinced we needed it at first – to me, the house is beautiful as it is. It has a huge garden, which Mummy loved and filled with flowers – foxgloves, delphiniums, rambling roses. Upstairs there are five big, light-filled bedrooms, perfect for us and the three children I hope
we’ll have one day. Admittedly, the bathroom on the ground floor is a bit old-fashioned, as is having the kitchen, larder, dining room and living rooms all separate and comparatively small – but they are always like that in homes as old as this one. It had never bothered me before, and anyway, you can’t just knock through walls – not in a Grade II listed house.
Eventually, though, Daniel convinced me that once we had a family, we would want a big, modern living area: open plan, for the children to run around, with light flooding in from above. Daniel knew that the English Heritage people wouldn’t let us change the old house, or stick a modern extension on the back. But they loved the idea of his ‘underground courtyard’ – a huge, free-flowing living and dining space built around an ultra-modern kitchen with an island – especially since it will be almost invisible from the ground, save for the old patio becoming a huge skylight window. To one side of the main ‘courtyard’ will be a wine cellar and laundry room; to the other, a study for Daniel. A new staircase will lead up our old cellar steps, with a landing where the bathroom used to be.
The whole project is a dream for Daniel, and I don’t want to keep punishing him for it. I have seen the way he cringes when he sees me bending to wipe dust off the expensive new carrycot in the hallway, or haul kettles of hot water upstairs for a bath because they’ve had to turn the water off. But as I get bigger and heavier, the pile-up of small miseries gets harder and harder to bear. The hideous layer of filth over everything. The constant unsettling presence of strangers in our home. The head-splitting sound of drills. Sometimes I even hear it in my dreams. Then, I wake up to find the noise was real, that it has started again.
When I told Daniel I was worried about being stuck at home alone for weeks on end because of my early maternity leave, he’d rolled his eyes at first. ‘Oh, come on, Helen,’ he laughed, through a mouthful of toast. ‘It’ll be great! Watch daytime TV and eat biscuits.’
Then when he looked up and saw my face, he stopped eating. Reached out, put his hand on top of mine. ‘Oh, love, I’m sorry. I’ll have a word with the builders, OK? Make sure they keep the noise and mess under control.’
But there is little evidence of that happening. On the day of the next antenatal class, I arrive with yet another headache from the drilling. It is so intense that it feels as if it is pressing against the sides of my brain, the insides of my eyes. I arrive at the pub early, slump down at a table by the door to catch my breath.
‘Helen! You’re here!’
It’s Rachel, standing at the bar. She is wearing a short denim dress which is clearly not designed as maternity wear, the buttons straining over her bump. Her feet are clad in lime-green flip-flops. She walks over to the table and sits down next to me, without asking first. She is holding two glasses of orange juice in her hands. Up close, I can see she has slightly misapplied the blusher on her cheeks. It gives her face a lopsided appearance, like a badly hung painting.
‘Finally got you that juice you asked for, ha! Only a week late. Look, I’m having one too. Being good. Don’t worry, I promise I haven’t spiked it!’
I smile awkwardly and take the drink. ‘Thanks, that’s really kind,’ I say. The glass feels sticky, as if she has been holding it for a while.
‘How’s things, anyway, hon? How’s it all going with the mega-basement?’ Rachel leans in towards me, resting on her elbows, sincerity etched on her face. It is almost as if she has been genuinely looking forward to receiving an update on the progress of our extension. When I don’t reply, her smile wilts a little.
‘What’s up?’ she asks, cocking her head to one side. ‘Why is Daniel not here again?’
I look down at the juice, then at Rachel, and to my horror I feel my throat tightening in the face of her kindness, the sting of tears in my eyes.
‘Helen?’ She frowns. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’m sorry … It’s just … it’s just …’
There is no stopping it. I’m a trembling mess of sobs, my face hot and wet in my hands. I’m causing a scene, but I can’t seem to calm down.
I don’t think I’d realised until now how upset I was about Daniel. At first, he tried to blame work. He’d been left holding the fort with a project that was at risk of falling apart – Rory having announced that he and Serena were going on an impromptu holiday, a ‘babymoon’, they called it. He was struggling to get out at eight at the moment, let alone in time for the classes at six.
‘I’ll read the books,’ Daniel had said. He was avoiding eye contact. ‘I promise, I’ll learn it all. Do we really need the classes?’
That’s when it had dawned on me. He didn’t want to come to the classes at all.
‘Is this really about work?’
I’d looked at Daniel, still not meeting my eye, fiddling with his watch. And I’d thought then about what the counsellor had told us, about us grieving at different rates. How she had made me understand that his grief was not less, but different. I couldn’t understand this, for a long time. My grief is raw and bloody, tearful and surfacing often. It is kinetic, feverish, greedy. It makes me impatient, makes me clutch at hope, at progress, at the anticipation of the new baby, the expectation of healing. Daniel’s is the opposite. A sort of paralysis of the heart. It makes him withdraw. Makes him terrified to hope, to plan, to believe in the future.
And then I’d thought about how he’d spent all weekend putting flat-pack nursery furniture together, crawling around the house on his hands and knees covering all the plug sockets, getting the baby monitor we’d bought working. How he’d gone, without complaint, to the post office to collect the huge breastfeeding pillow I’d ordered, and arrived home with a packet of prawn cocktail crisps after I told him I’d been craving them.
But for me, this is all part of it. Sitting in a circle and talking about the opening of the pelvis, like all first-time parents do. I want to be able to tell funny stories about it, like other mums. And Daniel just doesn’t seem to understand the impact it has, having to do everything connected with the baby on my own because he can’t face it.
Rachel has been an enthusiastic listener, her eyes wide open, her head nodding like a toy dog.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, shaking my head, searching for a tissue in my bag. ‘I feel ridiculous getting so upset.’
‘Not at all,’ Rachel says. ‘I’d be annoyed too.’ She passes me a napkin from underneath the glass of juice. It’s rough and papery and sticky from the juice, but I take it gratefully.
As I blow my nose, two of the other mothers arrive with their partners, heading for the stairs. When they see my tear-stained face, they avert their gaze, quicken their step. I feel the colour rising to my cheeks. Rachel places a hand on my arm. ‘You sure you don’t want me to spike that drink?’ I laugh, wiping my eyes. It’s been a while since I really laughed.
Rachel smiles. ‘Come on,’ she says, gesturing to the stairs at the back of the pub. ‘We’ll miss all the fun.’
The class starts. Sonia tells us to prepare for a ‘breathing exercise’ with our partner, and I am surprised to find myself intensely relieved that Rachel is here. The exercise involves me kneeling on all fours on the wooden floor, one of Sonia’s grubby tie-dye cushions under my knees. Meanwhile Rachel has to rub my back and encourage me to inhale and exhale through the ‘surges’ – the word Sonia uses when she is talking about the agonising pains for which we all know we are destined.
Sonia is weaving between us, hands splayed, wrists rotating, spinning some tale about waves on a shore, something about a ribbon around our uterus unravelling. The other women on all fours crane their necks to hear. Her voice is mostly drowned out by Rachel’s commentary.
‘You are smashing it, Helen!’ Rachel cries. She slaps her hands down on her thighs. ‘You’ve got this. You’re all over it. Push, Helen! Push! Oh God, I can see the head!’ She roars with laughter. One of the other women actually tuts.
By the time the class concludes – with a surreal Playmobil demonstration of a Caesarean section –
it occurs to me how grateful I have been for Rachel’s companionship. I find myself admiring her. She is so upbeat about it all. Would I be so cheerful, in her situation? Although she hasn’t said so explicitly, it’s clear there is no father in the picture. And she is so young. I wouldn’t have the strength to do all this on my own. I mean, he might have been a bit useless lately, but I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have Daniel.
Rachel is standing up, pulling a jacket on over her bump. ‘Pub?’ she says brightly. ‘I mean, I know we’re already at the pub so … drink downstairs?’ She giggles. ‘We can go crazy and have another juice. Our vitamin levels will be through the roof!’
I glance at the clock. It’s 8 p.m. Daniel will be home soon. But I look at Rachel’s face, and somehow it seems a bit unfriendly to say so. Especially for someone who, presumably, has no one waiting for her at home.
I shrug, return her smile. ‘Why not?’
GREENWICH PARK
Under the shade of the plane tree, the girl pulls the envelope from her bag, inspects the contents.
He keeps watching, through the glass. He wants to keep watching until he is sure she is gone, until she is nothing more than a speck, a tiny pixel, drowned in the canvas of his view. Only then will his fists unclench, his pulse slow down.
He feels better when he is outside, on the Thames path. There is a breeze from the river. A briny smell, the grey-green swell, the black eyes of seabirds, floating lumps of foam and rubbish. The railings on the Thames wall are hot to the touch.
He turns away from the water, heads towards the park. He hears the gulls scream behind him as they fight over scraps.
That had better be it, he thinks to himself. That had better be the end of it. Somehow, though, he knows it is not. That it is just the beginning.
28 WEEKS
Greenwich Park Page 3
