by Ryan Casey
“What’s your name again?” the nurse asked, staring at her clipboard.
Ashley brushed his hand through his greasy hair. “Ashley. Ashley Chester. Look, if you can just tell me where my girlfriend is, that would be a great help.”
The nurse’s eyes seemed to widen on something. Fixed on a certain spot on the page. Then, she looked back at Ashley as if she’d just seen a ghost.
“What’s wrong?” Ashley asked. His skin started to burn. The mumbles and the chatter of the surrounding patients blurred around him. “It’s not Grace, is it? She’s—she’s okay, right?”
The nurse looked back at her clipboard again, as if she was just checking to see whatever it was she had seen was perfectly correct. Then, she looked back at Ashley with her wide, regretful eyes.
“You’re probably going to want to follow me, Mr. Chester,” the nurse said. “And you can bring that bracelet with you.”
The nurse turned around without looking at Ashley directly again. Started pacing off towards the exit of Ward 19.
“Where is she?” Ashley called. “What’s wrong with her?”
The nurse stopped. She looked at the floor. Then, she turned around.
“She’s…Congratulations,” she said. Her bottom lip was shaking. “Your girlfriend is…She’s having her baby.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Ashley paced along the hospital corridors. He followed the nurse, up steps, down steps, through ward after ward after ward, each of them blurring into the background as the noise of the nurse’s last words echoed around his head.
“Your girlfriend is having her baby…”
His heart pounded as he stepped onto another brightly lit ward. He smelled disinfectant, so strong, stinging the back of his nostrils and making him want to leave—to go home. Grace, she was five months pregnant apparently. Just yesterday, they’d all found out she was five months pregnant.
And now, she was giving birth. Four months prematurely. Was that even possible? How was it even possible?
“Mr. Chester?”
Ashley stumbled into something in front of him. The words sounded muffled. He looked to see that the dark-eyed, dark-skinned nurse was standing right in his way, blocking his entrance to the doorway on her left. His heart pounded. His head spun. He tasted Hubba Bubba in his mouth.
She’d fallen.
She’d died.
This wasn’t real. He was going to wake up and he was going to find out it was all a dream.
“Mr. Chester, are you with me?” the nurse asked.
Ashley cleared his throat. Rubbed his shaky hand against his unshaven, stubbly cheek. “Yes. Yes.”
“Good,” the nurse said, sternly. “Now you need to stay calm if you’re going to come in here. You need to remember and be aware that your girlfriend is giving birth, and believe me, that’s not an easy feat no matter what you men might think.”
Ashley nodded. Then he shook his head. And nodded again. “She’s…Yes, but…she’s only five months pregnant. Yesterday, the doctor said she was five months pregnant.”
The nurse scanned Ashley’s face. She shook her head, then pointed at the doorway. “You go in that room and tell me that woman lying on the bed is only five months pregnant.”
Ashley held his breath as the woman kept her arm pointed through the doorway. He felt his heart pounding. He was going to be a dad. Having kids was something he and Grace had never really got round to discussing in their time together. And fuck—these weren’t his kids. They couldn’t be. The timeline didn’t add up.
But if they weren’t his, whose were they?
He kept his breath held in and his fingernails tightened into his palm as he turned the corner of the doorway.
When he saw her on the bed, he had to blink a few times just to truly get his head around what he was seeing.
Grace was lying on the white sheets of a bed. Her mum and dad were standing at the side of her, her dad without his tie and with his top button undone, her mum with tears rolling down her cheeks.
But Grace. She was tensing her teeth into her lips. Her head looked a weird shade of purple, like the colour Ashley’s old primary school friend Gaz used to go when he accidentally ate a nut. She was straining. Groaning. Holding on to the metal handles at the side of the bed as a dark-haired doctor peered in between her legs.
But there was something else. Something spread across the bed. It made Ashley feel nauseous just seeing it. Made his mouth tang of Lancashire Hot Pot for some reason, which always made his stomach weak. His head spun.
The red. The red colouring all over the otherwise white bedsheets.
Grace was bleeding.
Heavily. Very heavily.
It was at that moment, stood there and staring at his girlfriend, that he realised somebody was patting him on the back. They were saying things too. Words he couldn’t comprehend. Words he didn’t understand. But instead of trying to understand them, he just walked over towards Grace’s side. Walked towards her, his knees weak. He could smell the stench of metal in the air. There was that much blood that its strong, unmistakable odour just wouldn’t leave his nostrils.
As he got closer to Grace, who had sweat dripping down her ever-reddening, gasping face, and who still hadn’t looked at Ashley, Ashley noticed a lump in her lower belly. This made his stomach tingle. A lump, just like real pregnant women had, but only usually of this size towards the end of their pregnancy. But this lump, it hadn’t been there yesterday. Or had it? Had he just not noticed it? No. He’d touched Grace’s bare belly. He’d touched it, felt for any early signs of life in there as they lay together in the darkness last night. She’d been normal. She’d just been Grace.
Grace’s eyes did glance at Ashley now. Only briefly, but long enough for Ashley to realise she’d acknowledged him. Ashley smiled at her. It’s all he could think to do. Smile at her and mutter a few words of reassurance.
But he couldn’t say anything. Nothing would leave his mouth. He feared if he did open his mouth and start to speak, he’d say all the wrong things. All the irrelevant things.
He went and stood beside Mr. and Mrs. Wisdom. They didn’t seem to acknowledge his presence whatsoever, so focused and fixated on the show in front of them, just another shock in a week of serious, serious shocks.
The doctors buzzed around Grace, saying things to her, saying all kinds of words and comments of reassurance and solidarity that were just jumbled up in Ashley’s mind. A male nurse rushed over with a few white towels and placed them underneath Grace’s legs.
Immediately, these fresh towels were drenched with deep red blood.
It was right in that moment—that moment where the blood oozed out of Grace’s body and soaked the towels—that Ashley felt the exact feeling he’d felt when he’d lost Grace the first time. That punch in the gut. That feeling of a tidal wave smacking you in the face and crushing every bone in your body as it pushed you back to shore. He was losing her again. He’d got her back, and he was losing her again.
But something else bugged him even more than the fact that Grace was screaming with agony, blood flooding from her body and drying around her inner thighs. And that was his priorities. His cynicism since her return. His scrutinising of her return. All this shit about Saturn, the hexagons. Grace had just been traumatised. Something truly traumatic had happened to her almost a year ago and she was suffering from it. But he just couldn’t buy it. He just couldn’t bring himself to buy it.
Another tidal wave smacked into his face when he thought of where he’d been when Grace must’ve started going through the agony she was going through now. He’d been at Susan’s. Fuck. He felt a tear roll down his cheek. He’d actually been at his old fuckbuddy’s when Grace started with this agony. Right after she’d collapsed, he’d gone to Susan’s for just a morsel of information about any of that astronomical, spiritual shit she had. And she’d fed him shit, of course she had. She’d fed him shit and he’d lapped it right up and now here he was
, watching Grace bleed out pint after pint of blood.
Watching Grace die, again.
He might not have fucked Susan, but for going to see her rather than supporting his girlfriend in the immediate aftermath of her collapse, he might as well have done.
“Holy…I can see a head. Come on now, Grace. Push. Come on.”
These words, amongst the other incomprehensible ones, did catch Ashley’s attention. The doctors looked stunned, wide-eyed and panicked as they “umm-ed” and “ahh-ed” and scurried forwards and backwards, but they’d said they’d seen a head. Grace was giving birth. She could do this. She could.
Ashley shot past Mr. and Mrs. Wisdom and crouched down at Grace’s side. He placed his hand on top of hers as she clutched as hard as she could onto the metal bars at her side, groaning and gasping with pain.
“It’s okay, Grace,” Ashley said, moving his palm around her sweat-drenched, boiling hot hand. “Come on, now. You can do this. You’re tough. You can do this.”
“Come on, Grace,” a woman said, somewhere to Ashley’s right. “Come on! That’s it. You’re doing it. You’re—you’re not bleeding anymore. Come on!”
Ashley squeezed his girlfriend’s hand as she gripped that metal bar. He squeezed and stared her in her bloodshot eyes as she pushed and pushed and pushed, the vein on her right temple bulging.
“Come on,” he said quietly, as the sounds of the room bounced around him with his complete focus and attention on Grace. “Come on.”
Grace looked Ashley in the eye. She looked him right in his eyes for a few seconds. But the blueness wasn’t there. The brightness her eyes usually had. There was a deadness to them. A detachment.
The same as when she’d had her “seizures.”
Then, she cocked her neck back and let out a piercing scream.
Ashley could only focus on Grace’s cocked-back neck as she screamed and screamed. He didn’t notice what else was going on around him. He felt things—the splashing of something warm on his face, the smell of more strong metal and something sour. But all he could do was hold on to Grace’s hand as she kept her head cocked back and screamed.
Then, she just stopped. The screams stopped. Every muscle in her body loosened. Her grip on the metal bar receded.
Ashley’s consciousness returned to the room. He could hear rustling around him. Less panic. Less chaos. He could hear whimpering too. Mrs. Wisdom? A nurse?
Was Grace gone?
He got his answer a moment later when she tilted her head forward again. Her hair clung to her sweat-covered cheeks. Her face wasn’t purple anymore. She looked right at Ashley with her deep, blue eyes. She looked at him with confusion, and then she looked at something else directly opposite her.
“What…” Grace said. “What…?”
Ashley turned around. He realised the room had gone silent. At the foot of the bed, he could see a doctor covered in blood. His green gloves were bloody. His white outfit was bloody, too.
“What happened?” Ashley asked, his throat rough, the words feeling as if they were being spoken through him rather than spoken by him.
“I’m really, really sorry Miss Wisdom,” the doctor said, looking from Ashley to Grace then back again. “Your children. Your three babies. They…None of them made it.”
TWENTY-SIX
The warmth of the light of spring pushing its way through the slightly open blind was enough to wake Ashley Chester up feeling relatively relaxed.
He didn’t open his eyes even though he knew he was awake. Not at first. Instead, he reached over to his left-hand side. Reached out, just to check that the events of the previous three weeks hadn’t just been a crazy dream. He checked every morning, just in case. He imagined he’d check every morning for the rest of his life.
He felt the warmth of Grace’s bare skin against his fingers. His already relaxed body loosened even more upon this. And sure—the scars and marks on her back were still there, but he was growing used to these. They were just a part of Grace now. A part of who she was.
He turned over onto his left and pulled himself closer to the heat of his girlfriend. She tucked herself into him slightly, not saying a word, the pair of them just enjoying a moment of perfect silence. He buried his nose into the back of her neck. Sniffed at her hair, which still faintly smelled like the passion-flower shampoo she’d started using lately, sweet and soothing. He held himself there for a few seconds, feeling his heart beat against her back.
It had been exactly two weeks since Grace lost her children in the hospital. Two weeks since that horrible, horrible day, with all the blood, all the shouting and screaming. Two weeks since their lives, which had already done enough changing since Grace’s return, took another twist.
Ashley brushed his fingers down Grace’s smooth forearm. It had also been two weeks since that last incident of weird behaviour from Grace. After staying in hospital for four days following her stillbirths, Grace had returned home to her parents’ place, where all of them confided in each other and pulled close. But for the last five days, Grace had come back to the flat. She’d come home. She was acting more rational again. None of those earlier ramblings about reptiles and hexagons. Not even a hint of any of those conspiracy theories that Susan was trying to feed him. Just Grace. Grace being herself again. Affected, traumatised, but herself.
Ashley felt Grace shuffling around underneath his grip. He did open his eyes now, as much as he tried to savour waking up with his assumed-dead girlfriend back beside him. Sometimes as he opened his eyes, he knotted in the stomach. Expected to see her eyes rolled back in her head, saliva dribbling down her chin.
Or expected the scales. The hexagonal scales on her back.
Year of the reptile.
But now, she didn’t have her eyes rolled back. Instead, her blue eyes were looking right at him. She smiled at him, touched his neck with her cool fingers and pressed her lips against him for a sour but oh-so-amazing morning kiss.
“Good morning to you too,” Ashley said, as Grace pulled away from him.
She closed her eyes again. Tucked her head underneath his chin.
“You alright?”
“I’m good,” she said. “Just…just thinking. You?”
Ashley pulled himself away slightly so he could get a good look at Grace’s face again. Her eyes were looking down to the bottom of the white bedsheets. She wasn’t smiling, not anymore.
“What’s wrong, Grace? Is it…If it’s about the children, I know—”
“It’s not the children.” She paused. Sighed. Took a few seconds, which Ashley allowed her. Obviously, getting over the death of the three mystery children during childbirth was difficult. Heart-wrenching. And with what Susan had said about Saturn and its birth of three children to sacrifice one…Yeah, he did think about it sometimes. But that was just a myth. The reality was, Grace was better. She was just a grieving mother who had no idea what had happened to her. Even the media were starting to back off and believe that.
“Well if you want to talk, you know you can,” Ashley said. He brushed her fine hair out of her eyes and down the side of her cheeks, which were freckling a little, just like they always seemed to when summer was approaching.
Grace took another few seconds. Opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. “It’s…It’s just the date. 18th of April. It’s…It’s two days. Two days until the first…the first anniversary.”
Grace didn’t have to elaborate. Just with those words alone, Ashley’s insides tensed up. He held her tightly. The 20th of April would mark the first anniversary of the Preston sinkholes. Those five sinkholes that came from nowhere to rattle the city. Those five sinkholes that took the lives of one hundred and fourteen poor folks.
The first anniversary of Grace’s death.
Grace’s fingernails ticked Ashley’s chest, returning him to the room and out of his thoughts. “It’s…It’s just I wonder sometimes. Like, did this really happen to me? And if it did, th
en why am I here? How am I here? Why are—are all the other one hundred and thirteen still buried under the ground and I’m here with no memory of it whatsoever?”
Ashley sighed. He kissed Grace’s head, which tasted of perspiration. “None of us know. I asked those questions a lot in the first days too. But you’re here. That’s the main thing, eh?” He touched her chin and moved her head up slowly so her beaming blue eyes would stare into his once again. “You’re here. You survived, whether it was a miracle or whatever. But you survived. You’re here.”
Grace sighed. She smiled again.
“Now what do you say to a fry-up?” Ashley asked. He pinched Grace’s rather pointy nose.
“Idiot,” she said, slapping his arm playfully. “But I’d love one.”
Ashley moved back in towards Grace’s neck and sniffed at her hair again. “Only when you’ve had a shower, though. Sweaty Betty.”
She punched him on his back again, giggling and kissing Ashley as he pulled away and hopped over towards the studio flat kitchen worktop wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.
There was still a surreality to Grace’s presence that hit Ashley in full force several times a day. Just little things, like now—seeing a teaspoon used to stir a cup of tea, left on the side of the kitchen worktop. Or the strands of her long blonde hair that congealed their way around the edge of the shower plughole. Little things that used to get on his nerves that just reminded him in no uncertain terms that Grace was back. And he’d missed her. Every little bit of her, flaws and all.
“I was thinking we could go down to Lytham today,” Grace called from the bed as Ashley clicked on the hob and placed a black frying pan on top of it to warm up. “Go for a walk in the sand dunes like we used to. Ask Lynn if she’ll let us take Tyke for a walk, too.”
Ashley did the best smile he could. He liked the idea of a walk on the beach with Grace. Tyke, who was Grace’s friend’s Border terrier, on the other hand, could get stuffed, the yappy little mutt. “Sure,” he said. Whatever pleased her most.