Hard Pushed

by Leah Hazard

  ‘Come with me,’ I said, and I nodded towards one of the department’s single side rooms, where the woman could have the still, peaceful sanctuary she clearly needed. As we walked to the room, Madge passed in the other direction, a cardboard pot of urine in her hand.

  ‘I’m going to be off the floor for a little while,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Whatever,’ she drawled as she strode on towards the sluice, the little pot sloshing precariously as she walked. ‘Do what you gotta do.’

  As Madge disappeared down the corridor, I ushered my new patient into the room and closed the door gently behind us. She flinched as it clicked shut, and I smiled to try and put her at ease.

  ‘You can wait here,’ I said, and I patted the starched white sheets on the bed. ‘It’s OK. I have to organise a few things for you now, but I will be back. I promise.’

  She looked at me questioningly, uncomprehendingly. How could I let her know that I would return and that I would try to help her? Suddenly, I remembered that my mobile phone was in the side pocket of my navy-blue cargo trousers. I fished it out and tapped on the app I used sometimes when a labourer pitched up at the desk, crying out in a foreign language with no official translator to hand.

  English to Mandarin, I typed, and then, Are you in pain?

  I held out my phone to the woman. She peered at the screen, seemed to recognise the familiar characters of the translation, and shook her head. She looked back at me expectantly; there was something she was waiting for me to ask.

  Are you bleeding? I typed.

  Again, a shake of the head.

  I was satisfied that this wasn’t a medical emergency, but still, the woman had locked her eyes onto mine in expectation. I turned back to the phone and typed, Are you hungry?

  A wave of recognition, and then relief, passed over her face. She nodded.

  I will bring food, I typed, and again, I could see her relax. And I will get an interpreter. She nodded again, quicker this time, and pointed to the phone, waving her finger towards the screen for emphasis. She had something to tell me; that much was clear.

  I turned towards the door, then stopped and turned back. I tapped again on my phone, and extended it to the woman one last time. You will be safe here. The worried twist of her mouth softened into a wide smile, and she sat back onto the clean sheets behind her.

  I began to compile a mental to-do list as I walked to the desk. Tess, one of the unit’s auxiliaries, was peering at her clipboard, wondering why the waiting room was full of twice as many women as there were names on her list.

  ‘Tess, could you bring a tray of tea, biscuits and whatever sandwiches we’ve got to the lady in the side room?’

  She arched an eyebrow. ‘Feeding a football team, are we?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘she’s just – she’s just really hungry.’

  ‘Vegetarian? Halal? Coeliac?’ droned Tess, going through our patients’ most commonly expressed dietary restrictions. ‘Because I think all we’ve got is corned beef. If it’s even in date.’

  My own stomach rumbled as if in sympathy with the woman who was waiting to be fed a few metres away. The fire alarm meant that we had all missed our breakfast break, and the way the day was going, we probably wouldn’t see lunch until at least late afternoon, when every patient had been assessed and dispatched to the appropriate corner of the hospital. I wondered if my patient was still sitting on the bed, or pacing the floor. Perhaps she had even left already while my back was turned, slipping out the door and away from the department as silently as she’d crept in. I pictured her shivering outside under the cold January sun; sitting at a bus shelter, unnoticed by commuters huffing and tutting about the delayed service; walking down a dark street, the last of the dry winter leaves crunching beneath her flip-flops.

  ‘Whatever we’ve got, Tess,’ I said. ‘And lots of it.’

  Next on the list: I needed to contact the interpreting service, to unlock the secrets of this woman’s folded paper and give her the help she needed, but the phone wouldn’t stop ringing long enough for me to make an outgoing call.

  ‘Triage, Midwife Hazard, how can I help you?’ I said quickly.

  ‘What it is, is, I’m going to Tenerife next Sunday and I wanted to ask if a spray tan would hurt my baby, because I’ve googled it and …’

  ‘Please call back.’ The phone rang again the second the handset hit the receiver.

  ‘Triage. Hello.’

  ‘So, my hairdresser saw this thing online about pre-eclampsia, and my left pinky toe looks a bit swollen this morning, so …’

  ‘Please call back!’ Again, I slammed the phone down, immediately lifting it back up to dial the number before it had a chance to ring again.

  ‘Interpreting Services, do you need telephone or face-to-face?’

  ‘Face-to-face, please.’

  ‘Which language, and for when?’

  ‘Mandarin. As soon as possible, please.’

  I could hear fingers rattling across a keyboard on the other end of the line, and snatches of a radio advertisement for holidays in the sun. I drummed my own fingers on the desk. Through the doorway to the treatment room, I could see Madge wafting a green-tinged sanitary pad in front of Betty’s face; Betty’s nose wrinkled in disgust and she play-punched Madge’s shoulder.

  ‘I have Mandarin for you, ma’am. There’s an interpreter finishing with another woman in Outpatients – will I ask her to come round?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I sighed with relief.

  I ran from the desk before the phone could ring again. In the side room, the woman was sitting cross-legged on the bed. She had kicked her flip-flops onto the floor, and the soles of her feet were black and creased with dirt. Tess had set a red plastic hospital tray in front of her, and in the brief time that I had been at the desk, the woman must have eaten everything she had been given. Two empty sandwich packets sat on the tray, along with four empty biscuit wrappers, an empty Lucozade bottle, and a squat hospital teacup that held only the thinnest dregs of murky liquid. The woman looked slightly dazed after this feast; she leaned back against the stiff white pillows and closed her eyes while her fingers drew lazy circles over the arc of her belly.

  I was clearing the tray to a trolley against the wall when the door opened behind me. The woman gave a start and regarded the intruder with sidelong suspicion. It was May, an elegant Chinese lady, her hair neatly lacquered into a smooth bob, her burgundy velvet blazer carefully coordinated with her bag and shoes. I had met May before, with other patients: she was efficient, articulate and discreet, and I was glad of her presence. She nodded to me and introduced herself to the woman in Mandarin; the woman responded in a rush of words, her tone urgent, her hands gesticulating wildly. She withdrew the folded paper from the pocket of her sweatpants, and began to open it out again, her voice rising as she did so.

  May listened carefully, then turned to me. ‘She says she has a story to tell you. She wants you to sit, and to listen.’

  Maybe I should tell her to wait, I thought. Maybe I should examine her first – listen to her baby, check her blood pressure – before she launches into a story that could tie me up for the rest of the day. I could hear the muffled sounds of footsteps and conversation beyond the closed door, and I knew all too well how busy Madge and Betty would be with the other patients, but something about the insistence in this woman’s voice made my own words catch in my throat. May drew up a chair and sat beside the bed, and I followed in silent obedience. The woman smoothed her paper out on the bed in front of her, as if preparing to read from a holy scroll. She took a long, deep breath, rolled her shoulders back, and began to speak. As she did so, May cocked her head to the side, listening intently, then relayed the words to me in English as the tale unfolded:

  ‘“My name is Pei Hsuan Liu,”’ May began. ‘“I have carried this story for a very long time, in very …”’ Here, the woman’s voice cracked, and May hesitated before continuing. ‘“In very difficult circumstances.”’ Pei Hsuan looked
down at her paper and drew breath again. ‘“I am from Fujian province. My mother and father had a duck farm; it was small, but the ducks were the finest for many miles around, and we did well. Even when my sister was born, my parents still bought me warm clothes and good books for school. I was clever; I wanted to be a teacher. But our luck was bad, and two years ago, on the twelfth of December, my mother died suddenly. My father took it very hard. He drank. He stopped working. He stayed in bed. My sister and I tried to tend the farm and do our school work, but it was too much. We struggled through the winter until the eighteenth of March last year, when a man we did not know was waiting for us outside our school. He said our father had paid him many yuan to send us to the UK, where we could have a better life, and become wealthy.”’

  Here, Pei Hsuan let out a sharp, bitter laugh. May paused, and then took up the story as Pei Hsuan continued:

  ‘“We did not believe that even our father, who was sad and sick, would have made this plan to send us away, and we fought, but the man was strong. He took us in his car and we drove for many hours, until it was dark and we reached a house we had never seen before. There were other girls there, and in the morning, we were all given fake passports and told that we would be flying to London. I cried, but the man beat me, and when he said he would beat my sister too, I stopped. Six of us were driven to the airport and put on a flight. We were terrified of the aeroplane, and we had been told not to speak until we landed. It was …”’ Pei Hsuan paused, and May paused, until a shadow passed over Pei Hsuan’s face and she resumed. ‘“It was a difficult journey.”’

  ‘“In London,”’ she continued, ‘“we were again taken to a house where there were many girls, some from China, even from Fujian, some from Nigeria, Vietnam, Iraq. We worked for a woman called Fan, and we worked …”’ Again, that shadow across her face like a cloud. ‘“We worked very hard, with many men. I did not believe that men could do such things, and I cried every night for what my sister and I had to do, but Fan would beat us every time we complained, and tell us that our father had sent us away because we were worthless. Eventually, I had no more tears, but my sister cried and fought every night. It was hard for her. She was only a child.”’ May’s voice broke and she became silent while Pei Hsuan rattled on in Mandarin. May listened, head still to the side, eyes widening, until she seemed to remember her role as interpreter, and she picked up the story again in English.

  ‘“I am seventeen, but my sister was only thirteen,”’ May whispered. We looked at each other. Pei Hsuan carried on, and May resumed.

  ‘“My sister fought every night, and every night she was beaten, and every time, the beatings got worse, and Fan said that she would kill her if she did not behave. On the sixth of June, it was very hot, and I worked very hard. By the morning, I had been with eight men, and when I finished, my sister was gone. I have not seen her since then. I begged Fan to tell me where she was taken, and I promised to work so hard that I would pay for her to come back. Fan made me work twice as hard, but my sister never returned, and by September, I realised that my belly was growing. By December, the men stopped wanting me, and Fan told me she would get rid of me like she had got rid of my sister. On the seventh of January, I was taken from my bed and put in a van, again with other girls. There were no windows, and we were very cold, and after many hours, some of the girls began to say that we would die. At last we stopped. It was in your city. The driver opened the doors and asked which one of us was the one with the baby. He threw me out of the van, and drove away. And I have walked. I have walked and walked, and I have found you.”’

  May folded her hands in her lap and waited for me to reply, but I was speechless. Of course, I knew about human trafficking. It wasn’t uncommon for us to have our suspicions about how women in our care had been treated, or to look after patients who were putting their lives together with the help of numerous agencies after surviving an ordeal similar to the one Pei Hsuan had described. But this was the first time that a woman had been thrown out of the back of a van and had landed in my lap, so to speak. For Pei Hsuan, I was the first point of contact. I was it.

  ‘Pei Hsuan,’ I began. She looked at me expectantly. Her features seemed softer now that she had unburdened herself, and although the sandwiches and biscuits hadn’t filled the hollows in her cheeks, I could see her now for the scared seventeen-year-old she really was. I decided to begin with the basics. ‘What you’ve been through is horrible, but you’re in a place now where people will help you. I can begin to do that, but first, would you like me to listen to your baby?’

  Her jaw tightened again, and she spoke in Mandarin. ‘“I don’t want this baby,”’ May translated. ‘“This baby has many fathers, and all of them are evil.”’

  May and I exchanged glances. It would be hard enough to find Pei Hsuan the emergency help she needed, but even harder to address the medical and moral complexities of sustaining a pregnancy that was unwanted, yet too far progressed to terminate.

  ‘It will take me a little while to organise the help that you need today,’ I began, as May relayed my words. ‘I need to make some phone calls, but while I do that, the doctor will do a quick scan, and talk things over. May will stay with you so you can tell us all what you need.’ I moved towards the door, then turned back to the miserable figure sitting cross-legged on the bed. ‘I promise you, as long as you’re in this building, you’re safe.’ I waited to make sure that May had translated this last message, and then I let the door close softly behind me.

  Stepping back into the waiting room was like being teleported onto the floor of a stock exchange in the middle of a trading frenzy. The department was still full, but in the time that I had been sitting with Pei Hsuan, the old faces had been replaced with new ones, no less irate or impatient than the last. Couples were arguing above the clatter of the phones and gesticulating angrily towards the treatment area, where every bed was occupied. Soraya was having a heated debate with Madge at the desk, and I braced myself for the crossfire.

  ‘Soraya,’ I began. She and Madge both glared at me as the phones rang incessantly behind them. ‘I have a seventeen-year-old prim of unknown gestation who’s been trafficked into this country and had no antenatal care.’ Soraya raised one perfectly threaded eyebrow. ‘Could you scan her quickly while I make a few calls? She has nowhere to live, no money, nothing.’

  ‘What are we today, the Red Cross?’ Madge snapped. ‘Seriously, Hazard, one patient all morning? It’s like the Battle of the fecking Somme out here.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She had a fair point. There was work to be done – a department full of women in pain and distress – and Pei Hsuan had been tying me up. At the same time, I knew I couldn’t do a cursory examination and toss her back out the door. Not for the first time, I thought of my own relatives who had arrived on foreign shores with little more than the clothes on their backs, and of the nameless strangers who must have helped them. For Pei Hsuan, I was one of those strangers, and I had made a promise. ‘I’ll make these calls, and then I can start seeing somebody else.’

  ‘Halle-bloody-lujah,’ Madge replied, and she lumbered off to the treatment area while Soraya headed for Pei Hsuan in the side room. The desk was mine, if only the phones would stop ringing.

  Contrary to the opinion held by some of my colleagues, I am not actually a one-woman refugee camp, and my knowledge of resources for women with absolutely nothing was, well, similarly scant. It was now early afternoon, and it was Friday, and I knew that if I didn’t expand my knowledge of the system within the next few hours, Pei Hsuan would remain in homeless, hungry limbo all weekend, or she might even decide to disappear back into the crowd in which she’d arrived.

  Within the next hectic hour, I’d made a volley of calls back and forth to every local charity for refugees and asylum seekers, been put through to three different branches of the Home Office, listened to the soothing tones of hold music while the hurricane of Triage swirled around me, and finally managed to speak to someone who could o
pen a case for Pei Hsuan and organise emergency accommodation for her in a hostel across town.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ I said to the faceless helper on the other end of the phone. One by one, I was adding to Pei Hsuan’s team of supporters; a small but growing counterbalance to the abusers she had known. ‘That’s amazing. Do you have any idea how we can get transport for this lady? I wish I could put her in a taxi, but the hospital doesn’t have funds for this kind of thing.’

  ‘We’ll send a driver from … let me see …’ She hesitated, and then named a private contractor. ‘He’ll have a job number. Should be with you by four o’clock if you can keep your patient until then.’

  My heart dropped. The company she had named was a government subcontractor that had been assigned a number of previously state-run services, from prisons and detention centres to hostels and hospitals, and it had been in the news recently for all manner of alleged mistreatment and neglect of the vulnerable migrants in its care. But even beyond these allegations, there was one word in the Home Office official’s reply that filled me with dread: ‘he’. Even after listening to Pei Hsuan’s story, and promising to help, and even in spite of my subtle sense of kinship with this girl from the other side of the world, it would all come down to one thing: I would be just another stranger passing my human cargo into the hands of an unknown man.

  ‘That’s … that’s fine,’ I said to the woman on the phone. ‘I’ll keep an eye out for him.’

  I replaced the phone in its receiver, only for it to ring again immediately. And again, and again. The afternoon wore on in this way, the department teeming with women, the phone ringing, the staff bobbing and weaving through it all like battle-zone stretcher-bearers dodging the whip and zing of enemy bullets. While Pei Hsuan (and what, Soraya told me, appeared to be a thirty-week fetus) waited in the side room, I did my best to carry on with my normal working day. I saw two bleeding women, a rupture of membranes, a preterm labourer, four reduced movements, and a woman who had fainted in the Outpatients waiting room, which was even more tightly packed than the one in Triage. By the time a sandy-haired man in a blue bomber jacket approached the desk at half past four, I had almost managed to push Pei Hsuan to a corner of my mind, but when he presented me with his corporate ID badge, she sprang back to the forefront with whiplash speed.