Expecting Emily

by Clare Dowling

  “I don’t want to go to Cork.”

  “Of course it would be nice to have our babies here, but I don’t suppose we’ve much choice,” Emily said.

  “Tiernan can’t drive,” Maggie blurted. “Well, he can, but he’s been banned.” She didn’t elaborate on why. “I’ll never see him when they move me to Cork!”

  “There are buses and trains, Maggie – he hasn’t been banned from those too, has he?”

  “We don’t think so,” Maggie said doubtfully, leaving Emily to wonder further what Tiernan had done. “When I get an attack, he’s the only one who can calm me down.” And she started breathing very fast.

  “Now relax, Maggie,” Emily said sternly. “You’ve rakes of relatives. Can’t one of them drive him down?”

  “Oh, they’re always visiting all right, but they’re not dependable,” Maggie said darkly.

  Cathy and Petra arrived later, having heard the news about Trish. Cathy brought a two-litre bottle of Coke and a family bar of Cadbury’s chocolate.

  “Tuck in, girls,” she encouraged. “Once you start breast-feeding, the fat will fall off you.”

  Petra glowered. Lies, damned lies. She’d put on a stone for every child she’d had, despite breast-feeding every last one of them until they were a year old.

  “I suppose that’s the end of the bridge tournament,” Cathy said. No one was sorry.

  Cathy and Petra were much more sanguine about Trish’s labour than Emily and Maggie, the first-time mothers. They dispensed advice liberally.

  “You see, nobody tells you what labour is really like,” Cathy said candidly, and proceeded to do so in gory and bloody detail. Maggie’s face got whiter and whiter as Cathy talked about membranes tearing and placentas that wouldn’t come out, but mostly about the excruciating, horrifying pain of it all.

  “They don’t want to frighten you, you see,” she finished up cheerfully. “They fill you with shite about how it’s just like bad period pains. Well, if I had periods like that I’d shoot myself. No, girls, don’t be fooled by that kind of talk. I was fooled on my first one. And do you know something? I was raging that nobody had told me what it was really going to be like.”

  Emily tried to lighten the mood for the sake of poor Maggie. “Maybe it’s a conspiracy.”

  “I’m inclined to think so,” Cathy said seriously. “Because if girls and women were told how bad it really was, then there’s no way they’d get pregnant. And the human race would die out.”

  She had obviously given this a lot of thought.

  “So I’ve decided that I’m not colluding in the conspiracy any more,” she declared. “I’m not telling other women that labour is grand, that it’ll all be worth it when you look at the little fecker’s face. Well, girls, don’t be fooled by that either.” She looked at them darkly. “I often think that children aren’t worth the bother at all. And I don’t mind saying it either.”

  “So why did you have two of them so?” Emily felt she had to ask.

  “My husband wanted four, and two was the compromise,” Cathy said evenly. “I’ve done my bit now and that’s that.”

  “You might soften and have another in a year’s time,” Emily joked her.

  “I don’t think so. I’m sending him for the snip next month,” Cathy said, and roared with laughter. Everyone else laughed too. But nobody doubted that she was serious about this as well.

  “You’d have thought we’d have had news by now,” Maggie said, desperate to get onto less bloody ground. She must review her birth plan at the first opportunity. “She’s been gone nearly two hours.”

  “All in good time,” Petra said, and she and Cathy exchanged knowing looks.

  There was still no news after another hour. Cathy and Petra gave up and went back to Elizabeth’s Ward. Maggie stayed perched on Emily’s bed, her little pixie face anxious.

  “Maybe her placenta got stuck,” she said.

  “Don’t believe everything Cathy tells you,” Emily advised.

  “It wasn’t fair to frighten us like that!” Maggie said. “Now I won’t be able to sleep a wink!”

  “It probably won’t be as bad as she says,” Emily said, trying to sound authoritative. “Anyway, it’s different for every woman.”

  “I don’t know,” Maggie said doubtfully.

  “Look on the bright side,” Emily cajoled. “At least we’ve been warned. And now we can prepare ourselves better for the big day, right?”

  “You’re right,” Maggie said, looking greatly cheered. She reached over and rummaged in her locker. She took out her birth plan, her red pen and went to work, her brow furrowed in concentration.

  “What are you doing, Maggie?”

  “I’m asking for more drugs during the labour. You know, in case the epidural doesn’t work.”

  “Oh, Maggie.”

  “I heard a story once about a woman who had an epidural,” Maggie said darkly. “And only her left leg went numb. She didn’t get back the use of it for six months.”

  “Who tells you these things, Maggie?” Emily said impatiently.

  “Supposing that happens to me? What use is a numb leg to anybody in labour?”

  “It won’t happen,” Emily said with a sigh.

  “I just don’t want to leave anything up to chance, that’s all,” Maggie insisted, turning a page in the crumpled birth plan. “You know, I think I might get Tiernan to type this up.”

  Nurse V Mooney came in later and went to Trish’s bed. She took Trish’s washbag from her locker.

  Maggie bounced up in excitement. “Did she have her baby?”

  “She did,” Nurse Mooney said without looking at them. Emily watched as the nurse pulled out Trish’s suitcase from under the bed and started to pack her things into it quickly.

  “Is she all right?” she asked.

  “She is,” Nurse Mooney said. “We’re just moving her to a post-natal ward.”

  “Can we go down to see her?” Maggie asked. “Just for a minute?”

  “No, she’s exhausted, and her husband is in with her.”

  Maggie was indefatigable. “Is it a boy or a girl?”

  Nurse Mooney looked tired. “A boy. Look, the baby died, girls. So don’t be sneaking off down to see her. She’s very upset.”

  She saw their faces and came over. “It’s very rare these days, but it does happen. There was nothing anybody could do. Now don’t be worrying that anything is going to go wrong with your own. It won’t.”

  Later, Emily and Maggie dragged Maggie’s locker into the middle of the ward and pushed their beds together. Maggie said she didn’t want to sleep on her own. Then they pulled the curtains around on Trish’s bed because they couldn’t bear to see it empty. They got into bed side-by-side. They did not pay any heed to Nurse Mooney’s advice not to worry. They were only in this place because something had already gone wrong.

  Emily lay awake in the dark and knew that Trish too was lying awake in the dark, in the room they’d put her on her own, where there would be no other pregnant women or babies to upset her further. She would be fretting because the baby had been a mistake, convinced that it had sensed that it was not wanted in the first place. She would be going over and over possible things she had done wrong. She would be searching for someone to blame but there would be no one. She would be in shock, that numb half-awareness that the thing you dread most has actually happened. “Emily?” Maggie turned over in the dark. “Are you crying?”

  “No, no,” Emily said. How could she explain that she was not crying for Trish but for herself?

  “It’s all right,” Maggie said. “I’m crying too.”

  And she curled into Emily’s back for protection.

  They hadn’t even told anybody that Emily was pregnant that first time. Bad luck, they’d declared. They would wait until they’d passed the three-month mark; they would hold off until they got the first scan. When Emily lost the baby, there was no sympathy or support because nobody knew. Emily and Conor only had each other.
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  Conor had not really accepted that the baby had existed in the first place, Emily believed. There was no little scan picture, and Emily hadn’t even had a bulge. His sorrow was a private and closed affair.

  Emily in turn had felt that her depression and sadness was unwarranted, that she was being over-emotional and dramatic. Eventually she learned to hide her grief. Eventually she learned to deny her own feelings.

  Maggie had fallen asleep. Emily lay there letting the honest tears fall and she felt very high up on the hospital bed, like she was floating, free.

  Part Two

  “Morning, Emily.”

  “Oh, hi, Maureen. Don’t tell me that rasher is for me.”

  “It is. And I done you a sausage as well.”

  “You’re an angel!”

  “Only don’t let Maggie see. She’d be foaming at the mouth.”

  “Of course I won’t,” Emily assured her. Maggie was on a strict diet supervised by a nutritionist. Apparently animal fats exacerbated her asthma.

  “Slip it into a butty,” Maureen advised. “And tell her the smell is in her imagination. Most things are anyway.”

  Maureen didn’t have much truck with Maggie’s breathlessness and wheezing. But then Maureen managed to smoke forty cigarettes a day without a bother in the world.

  “Any luck on that job?” Emily asked.

  “No, but I’ve got an interview with that other crowd you were telling me about. Are you sure it’s all right to use your name?”

  “Absolutely. I did some work for them last year. They owe me one.”

  “I’ll get some severance pay from here. I suppose that’ll keep me going for a while,” Maureen said optimistically.

  Emily ate her rasher as she watched Maureen plonk down a big pot of tea and some toast onto the table under the television. There was only Maggie and Emily left in Brenda’s Ward now. They were officially the longest serving patients in the hospital and the catering girls had taken them to their hearts – well, Emily anyway – slipping her chocolate biscuits and extra cups of sweetened tea when the nurses weren’t looking. Emily reciprocated by helping them set up for breakfast at six every morning. Now that the baby had dropped in readiness for the birth, it was lying firmly against her bladder and she was up most of the night running to the loo. That’s when she wasn’t sitting up fighting heartburn. Who would have thought, looking at those glossy pictures of smiling, placid women with tanned, swelling bumps, that the reality was so uncomfortable and distinctly lacking in dignity?

  “Right. I’d better go feed the other animals in the zoo,” Maureen said, and off she went, cackling as though she’d made a great joke.

  Maureen did such a useful job, Emily often thought, keeping everybody in the hospital alive with Weetabix and fish pies. Not that her fish pies were anything to write home about – Emily had once found a whole fish head on the end of her fork, complete with staring eyes – but what Maureen did was essential. Not like selling hilly farmland and crumbling old houses, and passing them off on the public as ‘prime grazing lands’ and ‘stunning period havens’. In the office, Emily had been particularly good at overlooking a property’s bad points and finding superlatives for its few miserable assets. But there was nothing surprising about that really.

  There was Vera now, bustling up to the nurses’ station and taking out her pen. She would record the night’s happenings, who had been poorly and who had not. In a minute she would come around to do blood-pressure readings and take temperatures in her calm, unflappable way. Vera Mooney and Maureen would be able to look their Maker in the eye and say that they had used the talents he had given them to the best of their abilities.

  The most Emily would be able to stand over was a handful of glossy sales brochures, and say that she had used her talents to fill the coffers of Crawley Dunne & O’Reilly. And not one of the partners had made the five-mile drive from Paulstown to visit her in three long weeks. Except for Gary, of course. For the entire visit, he had held himself as though he were an official ambassador.

  “Place isn’t the same without you, Emily. In fact, it’s a shambles.”

  Big, fat lies. Neasa had told her that Creepy Crawley had calmly divided out Emily’s unfinished files to everyone else. They took it in turns to make the coffee. Nobody had yet discovered the wire in the photocopier that only Emily knew how to jiggle to make the damned thing work, but someone had found that if you kicked it, it worked just as well.

  Emily found it chilling how dispensable she really was. And so very hurtful. She had never viewed her place in the world before with such clear eyes, and found it so wanting.

  Not that she had ambitions towards brain surgery or running soup kitchens. And someone had to sell land, after all. It was a well-paid job and many envied it.

  But, oh, those migraines she would get on Friday nights. That ache she would have in her cheeks from smiling like an idiot all day long. And that heavy feeling on Sunday evenings, knowing that another week was starting where she would beaver away in her office, patting herself on the back for working through lunch. As if anybody cared. As if anybody even noticed.

  She had thought herself so full of possibilities once. It was a long time ago, admittedly, and much of it could be attributed to teenage hormones. But sitting in a steamed-up classroom while a teacher droned on, Emily would stare out the window at the hockey pitch and wish that she could be done with school and get out there and start her life. She could do anything she wanted, be anybody she cared to be. And she would go home that evening and diligently do her homework, as if this were her passage, her entrance ticket to all the world held.

  Even then she had not broken the rules.

  “Do you ever wonder sometimes what she’s thinking?” Karen said out at the nurses’ station.

  Vera Mooney said nothing but she watched Emily Collins through the door very carefully. She wanted to be sure that Emily was not becoming institutionalised. Oh, laugh if you like, but Vera had seen it happen to others, and in a very short time too. They frantically did crosswords and watched Sky News, but eventually the boredom got them down, and the sheer frustration of having no control over their own lives. The outside world receded on them very quickly and visitors would suffer through an exact account of what they’d eaten for tea, and what they had chosen for tomorrow’s tea, and the snoring patterns of the other occupants of the ward. It was worse for pregnant women. The endless waiting often drove them mad.

  Emily Collins was waiting all right. For what, Vera wasn’t sure. It was like she was doing a gigantic multiplication sum in her head, one that occupied her wholly and endlessly. Vera rather hoped that she solved it before the baby arrived.

  Vera, like Emily, was running out of time. St Jude’s Ward had closed yesterday. It meant that Bernie and Yvonne and the rest were free to do picket duty, but it was another nail in the coffin. They had no hope now. All they could do was give one last dying kick.

  “Have you written up the notes for Mr Dunphy?” she enquired of Karen.

  “Um, no.”

  “Well, do it then.” Just because the hospital was closing on Monday week did not mean they should slack off.

  Vera went into Brenda’s Ward and sat on the end of Emily’s bed. Emily was cleaning out her make-up bag, running a cotton bud around the rims of tubes and powders.

  “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” she told Vera cheerfully. “It’s not as though I ever put any on in here.”

  “It’s the nesting instinct,” Vera said wisely. “If you were at home, you’d be defrosting the fridge or spring-cleaning cupboards that you hadn’t opened in years. Most women go mad cleaning just before they’re about to give birth.”

  “And you did it twice,” Emily said, marvelling.

  Emily already knew that Vera had two girls. She knew a lot of things about Vera that Vera had never intended to tell her. She had a way about her that had you spilling your guts.

  “Any more pains?” Vera asked, strapping a pressure cuff on E
mily.

  “They were pretty bad earlier,” Emily admitted. She was getting preparatory contractions thick and fast now. Some of them really hurt, and Emily wished that Cathy had not told her that they were child’s play compared to the real thing. Emily had been practising her breathing techniques recently, and then remembered that Cathy had told her that she’d be lucky if she were able to breathe at all.

  “Well, only three weeks to go now,” Vera said. She looked at the dial on the pressure cuff. “You’d want to think about getting that baby bag sent in.”

  The words were carefully chosen. The husband’s absence had been noted up and down the floor. There had been only two visits in three weeks. Something was up there all right, but it was not Vera Mooney’s place to speculate.