Expecting Emily

by Clare Dowling

  “That’s bad, isn’t it?” Emily remembered reading up on the condition, but there were so many things that could go wrong during pregnancy that she couldn’t remember the exact details.

  The nurse seemed to cheer up for the first time. “Oh yes. Convulsions and a coma, usually.”

  Oh, how Emily wished she were in Cork, in a nice bright hospital with low beds and lockers that worked, away from this mean, cheerless cow.

  Nurse Mooney was nearly finished with the chart now.

  “Have you any other children?”

  “No.”

  “Is this your first pregnancy?”

  “No.”

  The nurse looked up at her. “What was the history of that, please?”

  “I had a miscarriage at twelve weeks,” Emily said. She had been due to come to Martha’s for the first scan on that Thursday.

  The nurse filled this in carefully. “Any complications or problems after that?”

  “No.” Just one of those things.

  The nurse snapped the top back on her pen loudly and stood. “I’ll get one of the girls to bring you up a cup of tea.”

  “That’d be nice.”

  “Mr Chapman appears not to have left any notes for you in Cork, or at least the staff down there can’t find them,” the nurse said, that tightening of her mouth back again. “They’re going to page him and ring me back.”

  “Thank you.”

  “He’ll probably just prescribe bed-rest, which is usual in a case like this. In the meantime, if you’d do a sample for me” – she slapped a plastic container down on the table at the bottom of the bed – “we’ll check it for signs of uric acid. But a house doctor will be around later anyway to examine you.”

  She looked at Emily’s chart one last time then back at Emily.

  “You’re not by any chance Liz Clancy’s sister? You look very alike.”

  “I am!” Emily was delighted that they had finally found common ground. “She had all her five boys here.”

  “Yes. I was here for every single one,” the nurse said grimly and left.

  Emily rang Conor’s mobile three times from her own mobile, even though there were stern signs up all over the place not to use mobile phones. Maybe it wasn’t so bad if it were mobile to mobile, she reasoned. Anyhow, the concert must be running over because all she got was the answering service. She didn’t want to leave a message. No matter what way she worded it, it would sound like a panic situation.

  The house doctor had been around and had told her more or less what the nurse had. Bed-rest, sleep, and monitoring of her blood pressure and urine. Mr Chapman apparently had ordered the same. They had found his notes. Emily would be transferred to Cork in the morning and she would see him then.

  The curtains were still pulled over. Relatives kept coming and going in the next cubicle at a steady pace, paying no heed at all to the hours set for visiting time. The telly blared some American sitcom and canned laughter exploded into the ward from time to time, jarring Emily’s nerves. She lay in bed on her left side, as the doctor had advised. Apparently it helped the flow of blood to the placenta.

  Nobody knew she was here. Not a single soul. She was tempted to use her mobile again, but what was the point? It was nearly half past ten – what could Liz or Neasa or her mother do? Anyway, she didn’t really want to see any of them.

  She rubbed her tummy and wanted nobody but Conor. He always made her feel safe. He would stroke her hair and tell her that Chapman was only covering his ass in case she sued, that it was all a storm in a teacup. She’d be out tomorrow, just wait and see.

  She turned over in the bed carefully and picked up Conor’s concert programme. There would be a photo of him in it; they always printed little photos of the orchestra.

  There he was, page seven, his hair a bit longer maybe, but otherwise looking exactly like a plain-clothes garda, stern but compassionate. Billy Middlemiss, the fat cellist, was on one side of him; Ffion Rivera, the first violinist, on the other. That was her stage name, of course. Everybody else just called her Mary Murphy.

  Mary had her violin in the picture. And Billy Middlemiss was holding his cello. You could see the top of it. Conor had obviously been playing the piano when the photo was taken because his arms were held out from his body. But they hadn’t been able to fit the piano into the picture so he looked like he was levitating.

  Emily smiled fondly. Her eye travelled down to the tour dates. Italy. Then France, before going over to Germany for the final weekend, the 3rd and 4th of September it said here. She had driven up to Dublin airport to collect him when he’d arrived back from Germany on that Sunday night. It would have been the 5th. But no. The 3rd was a Thursday. It said so here. And the 4th was a Friday, the last concert date. She must have collected him on Saturday.

  She hadn’t. She’d had the whole weekend to herself, she remembered it. Indeed, she would never forget it. She’d gone for a pregnancy test in the Well Woman Clinic in Cork on Friday and it was positive. She didn’t want to tell Conor on the phone; the news was too precious, especially after the miscarriage. Saturday and Sunday had crawled by until six o’clock on Sunday evening when his flight came in.

  The programme was wrong. Probably a misprint.

  She had a sudden memory of Conor coming through arrivals on his own. No Billy Middlemiss dragging his cello, none of the other thirty members of the orchestra.

  No one, in fact, except Ffion Rivera. She had waved quickly over at Emily and gone out another way. She hadn’t waved at Conor, nor he at her. She hadn’t looked at him at all.

  Emily carefully put the programme down and lay quietly on her left side. Maggie’s visitors eventually left. The woman across the way asked if anybody minded whether she turned the television off. Emily didn’t reply. Her mind was in a different place.

  Her mobile rang, startling her. It was Conor, sounding the same as always.

  “Where are you? I’ve been phoning home all evening. Emily?”

  “Yes, yes. You see, there’s been a bit of a development.”

  “Well, what?” He was a bit impatient. Emily knew that he expected her to say that Liz had called in the throes of some new crisis and that Emily had dutifully gone over.

  “I’m actually in hospital.”

  “What?”

  She told him about Mr Chapman, the pre-eclampsia, St Martha’s.

  “Jesus Christ. Are you all right?”

  “Fine, fine.”

  “You sound a bit funny.”

  “Do I? I’m in a ward. It’s hard to talk.”

  “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes,” Conor promised.

  “No, it’s too late. And you’ll be tired after the drive up.” Emily wanted to go to sleep too. She felt exhausted.

  “I’m coming in.”

  “They won’t let you, Conor. It’s a quarter to eleven.”

  He was silent. “In the morning then. First thing.”

  “Sure, fine.”

  “Emily?” She heard his concern over the phone, his love for her. “Just . . . sleep well.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You too.”

  Nurse V Mooney came by, pushing a drugs trolley. Emily wondered whether she ran the place single-handed.

  “Everybody all right here?” she called.

  “Have you got any sleeping tablets?” Emily asked. She wasn’t able to drop off; it was the strange bed and the worry about the baby.

  “I’m sorry. You’re not down for sleeping tablets. You’ll have to consult Mr Chapman in the morning.”

  “Oh.”

  The nurse looked cannily at Emily and came over. Emily tensed for another invasion of some part of her. But the nurse just switched the light off over the bed and poured a glass of water from the jug on the locker.

  “Listen,” she said quietly, “it’s perfectly natural to be worried about something like this. But you’ll be absolutely fine. Bed-rest and sleep. That’ll sort you out.”

  She pulled up the covers over Emily a
s though she were a baby herself and tucked her in.

  Hospital wards are the natural enemies of bed-rest and sleep. The whole night long people came and went in Emily’s ward, toilets flushed, babies bawled in the distance, phones rang, nurses talked at the tops of their voices and at one point someone, somewhere, screamed. Emily had bolted up wildly in the bed, wondering if it had been her.

  It had all taken on a rather surreal air sometime around half past four. Visions in white would appear at the bottom of Emily’s bed and loom over her. They had Mary Murphy’s face and one of them even started playing the violin. Quite well, too. Emily surfaced only to find yet another nurse checking her chart.

  Emily got up quietly and negotiated the leap from the bed to the floor. The nurses at the station outside were eating Roses from five different boxes. “He’s such a fucking pisshead and he’s not even a real DJ, did you know that? Oh, Emily, are you feeling all right?”

  “Terrific, thanks.” She went on her way, moving through the dim warm corridors in her bare feet, aimless and dislocated. The wards were dark and quiet on either side of her, but she could see shapes moving around inside slowly: someone picking up a baby, someone else just drifting up and down. It was all like some kind of benign horror movie.

  She moved on slowly, past doors that said Staff Only, Kitchen Staff Only, Private, No Entry. She looked in vain for one that said Okay, Come On In. But there was no refuge for Emily tonight.

  “Make way, please!”

  Emily whirled around to see a wheelchair coming towards her at speed out of the darkness. A woman lay prostrate in it, her huge belly heaving. Her eyes were closed and her skin white. She looked to Emily like she was dying.

  A porter pushed the wheelchair. A midwife ran beside it.

  “Breathe, Martina. That’s it!” she shouted enthusiastically, as though she were an Olympic swimming coach. “I didn’t hear you breathe!”

  Emily saw the whites of Martina’s eyes as the wheelchair flashed past and through big double doors at the bottom of the corridor: Delivery Ward – Authorised Personnel Only.

  Emily, stricken, hurried down and pressed her nose to the glass at the top of the door. It was bright inside, fluorescent lights everywhere. There was no sign of poor, pitiful Martina. Something had obviously gone terribly wrong for her. Emily made sure to stand to one side because surgeons, consultants and possibly resuscitation staff were bound to be on the scene in seconds.

  But nobody came. And inside the delivery ward, midwives and doctors hung around in small, cheerful clumps. There was no panic. A doctor said something and everybody laughed.

  Emily was confused. What about Martina? What right had they to go on laughing and behaving normally at a time like this? Didn’t they realise that there was a woman not thirty yards from them on another planet with pain? Did they not care?

  Emily, ludicrously, found that she was crying bitter tears for Martina. She wanted to march in there and take Martina’s hand, protect her, curl up on the bed beside her and tell her that everything would be all right. God Almighty, what kind of a sick world was it when the woman didn’t even have a friend or relative or anybody at all who understood her at a time like this? And where was the wretched husband or boyfriend? Probably conveniently fainted back in the ward.

  The air in the delivery ward was thick and warm and quiet. Nobody was around now except for a nurse at the station and she was busy filling in notes. Emily drifted past as though she had every right to be there. The nurse didn’t look up.

  The first two cubicled delivery rooms were empty. In the third, a woman and a man walked up and down slowly, him rubbing her back. They looked very intense. Emily felt a bit like a voyeur as she stood on tiptoes to look over the glass at them. She moved on.

  The door to the next delivery room was shut tight. The glass on this one was too high to see over. Voices came from inside, low and calm. Emily heard moans. Martina. Her heart constricted in sympathy. She put her hand on the door.

  “Hello?” The nurse from the station was bearing down on Emily, curious and wary.

  “I’m looking for Martina,” Emily told her politely.

  “This is a restricted area.”

  “Yes, but I’m looking for Martina.”

  The nurse cocked her head to one side. “Why?”

  “I’m a friend of hers,” Emily informed her. “And she’s in there all on her own.”

  “She’s not, you know. There’re plenty of people in there with her.”

  “Will she be all right?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t discuss patient information.”

  Emily was surer than ever now that something had gone terribly wrong for Martina. Fresh tears cascaded down her face.

  “I’m very sorry,” she said.

  “That’s all right.” The nurse must think that Emily was a very close friend indeed of Martina’s. They might even have planned their pregnancies together. “I’ll tell her you called by, okay?” she assured Emily. “Now I’m going to have to ask you to go back to your own ward.”

  She kindly escorted Emily to the double doors and went back to her station. Emily half expected her to whip out a walkie-talkie and murmur, “Psycho in Delivery, can we have security please?” But the nurse just took a chocolate from a box of Roses and went back to her notes. The wonder of it was that none of the staff was fat. It must be something to do with night shifts and botched-up metabolism. It would be interesting to see whether any of the day staff was fat. There could be a whole new diet book in this one, Emily thought. Eat all you like between the hours of midnight and 6am.

  “You’ve certainly cheered up.” Nurse V Mooney swished by. “Now, back to bed with you.”

  “I’ll go in my own good time,” Emily said pleasantly and turned a corner.

  Back down the dim, warm corridors. Emily bit back more tears and felt very unsure about everything. She didn’t even know how to get back to her own ward from here. She felt she was halfway between normality and utter insanity and feared that if her mind went down a particular road then the balance might just be tipped. Best not to think at all, just keep on walking. Eventually morning would be here.

  At last she approached a door that was open. Bright, welcoming light spilled out, and spirited chatter, along with the unmistakable stench of cigarette smoke.

  Emily went in and sat down. Two women in their dressing-gowns were perched on hard plastic seats, both puffing furiously.

  “Couldn’t sleep either?” the one in pink said sympathetically.

  “No. It’s very noisy.”

  “It’s desperate, isn’t it?” the one in the blue said. She was heavily pregnant. “Get your hubby to bring in some earplugs. Want a cigarette?”

  “I don’t smoke,” Emily said regretfully.

  The woman tensed, expecting Emily to look at her judgmentally. Emily couldn’t give a hoot if she jumped off the top of the building. Now they were wondering what the hell she was doing in the smokers’ room. Their room. Emily sat there defiantly and tried not to breathe in.

  “When are you due?” she politely asked the woman in pink, eyeing her big belly.

  The woman looked at her. “I had my baby yesterday.”

  Just when Emily thought that nothing else could happen that day. But then the woman threw back her big head and guffawed. “Jesus Christ! And there was me thinking that I was tiny!”

  The woman in blue laughed too. So did Emily, after a moment. She laughed harder and harder. Then she was the only one laughing. She screeched to a silence, her mouth still open in a silent bray.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Oh yes,” Emily said vigorously. “I’m in for pre-eclampsia. I was passed over for a partnership in work today and I’ve just discovered my husband might have been unfaithful. Maybe he still is, who knows.”

  The woman in pink looked at the woman in blue.

  “She’s a ticket, isn’t she?” And they both guffawed heartily again. They liked her now, her supposed humour had
broken down that difficult barrier between smokers and non-smokers, and she was one of theirs.

  “Cathy,” said the one in blue.

  “Petra,” said the one in pink.

  “I’m Emily,” Emily said, not at all sure.

  “Seriously, girl, what are you in for? You’re not due, are you?”

  “No, no. Just observation.”

  “Who is it, O’Mara? Dunphy?”

  “Chapman,” Emily said, feeling a bit irreverent at dropping the ‘Mr’.

  “Chapman!” Cathy said. “Don’t get me started.” Before Emily could, she was off. “He had my sister in and out to Cork three times on her last one! He won’t come up and see you here, you know. Too far a journey for him in his big Mercedes.”