Which was ridiculous, Neasa assured herself. Gary loved her for herself, just as she loved him for himself. She supposed she would have to go. Gary would be less tense if they were out in the open.
Emily winced and clutched her belly.
“Jesus Christ!” Neasa stood, flapping. “Will I call a nurse?”
“No, no, it’s just a preparatory contraction. There. It’s gone now.”
How could Emily be so calm? When a big lump of a baby was going to force its way out through a very small place in the near future?
“Are you not nervous at all?”
“Yes.”
“Take whatever they’ll give you,” Neasa advised.
“It’s not so much about the labour.” Emily looked at her. “I don’t think I’m going to be a very good mother.”
“Oh, Emily.”
“No, I’m not just saying it.”
“But they sleep all the time,” Neasa said reassuringly. “And then you just have to feed them and change their nappies occasionally. It’s a piece of cake.”
Emily didn’t look convinced.
“I’ll even help,” Neasa offered generously. Just so long as she wasn’t left alone with it. She wouldn’t know what to do if it started crying or something.
“I just don’t feel ready,” Emily said.
Neasa resisted the urge to point out that it was a bit late in the day for that.
“I feel like the baby’s going to look at me and expect me to be brilliant and capable and know everything and I don’t know anything.”
“Um, yes, I can see how you might feel that way,” Neasa said, who didn’t. “But the baby will love you anyway, Emily.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because you’re its mother! It won’t be able to help loving you, even if you’re a totally crap mother!”
“And that’s supposed to be good enough?”
Neasa was raging. That Conor again! Imagine having an affair on Emily, and then turning around and putting notions in her head that she was going to be a terrible mother!
“Emily, you are going to be fine. Trust me. You have loads and loads to give a baby.”
“We’ll see,” Emily said.
Neasa clearly didn’t understand. Emily wasn’t sure she did either. But she had this sudden fear that she was not yet a grown-up. Not really. How could she be entrusted with a helpless infant when she wasn’t a proper adult herself?
She felt that Conor, this afternoon, had inadvertently shone a spotlight into her soul and illuminated some nasty, mould-covered part of her that had been left festering for years. This mouldy thing, far from lying forgotten and benign, had actually been very busy undermining all her efforts, and laughing in the face of her hard work. It played jokes on her when it came to partnerships and promotions, and would occasionally tease her when she lay in bed at night wondering why things weren’t as great as they looked on the surface.
She had thought it was merely her capacity to accept. It was much more sinister than that. It was putting her own needs last. And it had spread its tentacles into every single aspect of her life, blighting it.
Her stomach churned and jarred, mixing with her heartburn, and she burped.
“Excuse me.”
She felt a bit better now.
“That’s disgusting,” Neasa said.
“One of the joys of being pregnant,” Emily said. “You’ll know all about it some day.”
“I will in my swiss. Oh, here,” she said, rummaging in her bag and taking out the Health Board letter. “This came today. I didn’t know you were writing to Health Boards.” This was said a bit accusingly.
“Yes, well, I just sent it in. No point in it lying around here.”
The letter thanked Emily for her concern, assured her that it was aware of the community’s upset, but regretfully informed her that there was no other course of action open to them at this time.
“They don’t even mention the petition,” Emily said.
“Actually, they do. Up there under ‘subject matter’,” Neasa pointed out helpfully. “They’ve probably filed it away in a deep dark drawer.” She might as well have added, “Under Earnest but Useless Efforts”.
She tossed the letter into the bin by Emily’s bed as though it were not worth the paper it was written on. The action annoyed Emily.
“At least I tried.”
“Well, yes, of course you did,” Neasa said, with no great conviction.
“What do you expect me to do? Go out there in my dressing-gown and march up and down with the nurses?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting all defensive for,” Neasa huffed. “You’ve done your bit. Leave it at that. I would.”
“You wouldn’t have bothered doing a petition in the first place,” Emily pointed out.
“Of course I wouldn’t. Those kinds of things never get results,” Neasa said, inadvertently annoying Emily more. Emily knew now that Neasa had not really been surprised that Emily had been passed over for the partnership at work. She’d been outraged all right, but only because Emily was her friend, not because she’d believed there had been a miscarriage of justice.
Emily felt very small and insignificant and powerless now. She did not particularly like herself.
“You know, Neasa, I’m tired. I might go for a bit of a sleep.”
“Me too. Oh, not here. I’m going home. I’ve a bit of a head on me. They can take half a day’s holiday off me if they want.”
“Things that bad at the office?”
“Worse. Everybody’s working so hard, there’s no crack at all,” Neasa complained. And she had promised Gary a romantic dinner tonight. She would have to wax and shave everything, paint her nails and touch up her false tan. She sighed. Men had it so easy.
Nurse Christine Clarke came in as Emily was nodding off. She was covering for the day girls who were marching outside, and hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. Her blonde curls drooped sadly.
“Emily, are you not packed?”
“What?”
“The ambulance is waiting to take you to Cork. I thought somebody would have told you.”
“No,” Emily said, sighing as she sat up.
“They don’t actually have a bed for you in an antenatal ward,” Christine said apologetically. “But you’ll be moved at the first opportunity.”
“And where exactly are they putting me in the meantime?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to check when you get down there. Probably in a general ward or something. You don’t mind, do you?”
It was the last straw. The very final straw, in fact.
“Yes, I do bloody mind!” she exploded. “I’m a pregnant woman. I’m not going to be stashed in a corridor while they wait for someone to die before a bed becomes free!”
Christine burst into tears, her fatigue getting the better of her.
“I’m sorry,” Emily said miserably.
Christine turned and left, still sobbing. Emily buried her head in her hands. The nurses here were so kind and nice; they didn’t deserve to be shouted at. Well, Christine was a bit of a tit, but it wasn’t her fault Cork had no beds free in the antenatal wards. Neasa always said that it was a sign of a very weak person when they were nasty to people who couldn’t be nasty back. Not that that had ever stopped her.
Vera Mooney arrived in, in her civvies. Her nose was pink from walking up and down outside.
Emily sank down further into her dressing-gown. “Vera, I’m very sorry – is Christine all right?”
“Oh, fine. What’s the problem? You don’t want to go to a general ward?”
It seemed very small and mean now, and Emily felt like she was disrupting everybody’s plans. But she was going to stick to her guns this time.
“I’d just rather not be moved around all the time, that’s all,” she said apologetically. “Especially in a strange place.”
“Quite right too,” Vera said. “So will I send Liam and Joe away?”
It would be
Liam and Joe. They were probably eating egg sandwiches and bitching about her right now.
“It’s up to you, Emily. I’m sure they’ll have an appropriate bed free tomorrow.”
Emily was relieved. A day wouldn’t make any difference to anybody, would it?
“I’ll wait if that’s okay,” she decided.
Vera went and Emily snuggled down in her safe, familiar bed and slept for four hours solid.
Conor was still sitting in the visitors’ room. He saw little touches here and there that had Emily written all over them: fresh flowers in a vase, for example, left behind by some patient. The out-dated and crumpled magazines on the three-legged coffee table were arranged attractively, and two mismatched cushions had found their way onto the threadbare chairs. Give her another couple of weeks and she’d have repainted the entire hospital in a nice warm peach and added dado rails.
The house was wilting without her. Oh, everything was clean and tidy – he made sure of that. But the place had a stale, unlived-in feeling, like the heart of it was missing. Even the dogs – his dogs – looked at him accusingly, wondering how he had managed to mislay Emily. They’d been lucky to get any dinner at all that day.
He could not believe he had lost control like that, and said all those things. He could not remember the last time he had raised his voice. It always seemed to him such a weak thing to do, to go spilling feelings and emotions, giving away some percentage and diminishing your own position in the process.
It had been the shock of the discovery that she had never really been happy. Well, maybe not never. But from early on, much earlier than the miscarriage which he’d thought was the root of all their problems. Or liked to think, anyway. It was such a neat thing to pin it all on, like those disappointed looks in the years before had counted for nothing. But nobody likes to admit that their deepest, unspoken fears were true all along – that really, he wasn’t enough for her and never had been.
He thought again about that big handsome man at the wedding. He remembered his laugh, a booming, merry noise that had rang out across the bar. He remembered the look on Emily’s face as she had watched the man.
He remembered also the look on Pauline’s face when, meeting her for the first time as Emily’s new boyfriend, Conor had tried to explain that he was a musician. Further intense questioning had forced him to admit that he was a pianist, to be precise. It seemed futile to explain to her that his real interest lay in the area of composition. He might as well have told her that he hoped to land on the moon.
Emily had assured him afterwards that Pauline’s reaction didn’t matter to her. And Conor had thought that it didn’t matter to him either, but he remembered his sense of pleasure, of victory, the day he won a position with the orchestra. Emily was not now engaged to some hippy musician, but to a concert pianist. Take that, Pauline. Emily had been pleased too. Pleased and proud, and he had basked in it.
He promised himself back then that he would not lose sight of his ambition; that he would continue to write his own music. And he did, initially. But gradually his time and belief was whittled away until he stopped altogether. And he didn’t want to do anything to rock the boat. He didn’t want to do a single thing that might put Emily off him.
He wondered now whether he had tried too hard at the beginning. Had she got the whiff of a desperate soul, a man so in need of her that he would do anything to keep her? And he had thought he’d masked his feelings so well behind his veneer of cool reserve.
And he was still doing it to this day. He was much better at it now, of course, after years of practice. You’d be hard pushed to know whether a heart was beating at all underneath the urbane exterior. And he got away with this kind of behaviour, this kind of withdrawal, because he could. Emily’s niggling and nagging and disappointed looks were quite easy to ignore. She wasn’t one to push herself forward, and he had taken advantage of that. Preyed on it, even. All that shit she took from Crawley & Co. The liberties Liz and Pious Pauline took. Emily swallowed it all because she was good and kind and she always thought of others before herself. It had been easy to offer her less than the best.
Conor had never thought of himself as innately selfish but realised with a shock that he was sounding perilously like it.
And now there was a baby on the way. It would not be so easy to offer it less than the best. As the time grew closer and closer when he would hold his baby daughter or son in his arms, Conor felt more panicked. He had up to now vaguely thought that Emily would cope for both of them. She was so warm and so giving; she would be able to do it for him too, wouldn’t she?
But the grim reality of visitation weekends was rearing its head. Conor might find himself quite alone with a baby, a child. And no Emily to help him, except to say to the child when she collected it on a Sunday night, “Don’t mind your Da. He loves you really. He’s just not great at showing it.”
Nurse Christine Clarke went out onto the picket-line in a foul mood. To make matters worse, it was raining and she had no umbrella. Her mascara streaked down her cheeks sadly. Nobody bothered to tell her.
“That high and mighty cow won’t go,” she said venomously to Karen.
“What high and mighty cow?”
“Emily Collins. Gave me loads of grief just because there was no bed free in antenatal in Cork. Refuses to go until they find her a proper bed.”
How Christine wished that St Martha’s would close and be bloody done with it! She was going on two weeks’ holidays to Ibiza before she started in Limerick, and had bought several little string bikinis in anticipation. She fully intended to give nurses an even worse reputation than they already had.
“Those private patients, they think the health service belongs to them,”Karen said in commiseration. “Here, Darren, did you hear that Emily Collins is refusing to go to Cork?”
Darren told Alice from Jude’s Ward. He got a bit mixed up about the bed situation.
“What, she wants to bring her own bed with her?” Alice asked. This was a new one.
Darren wasn’t really sure, but he didn’t let on. Some of the girls could act very superior, like he wasn’t a proper nurse just because he was a man. Oh, the sexist stories he could tell. “It’s nothing to do with beds,” he said loftily. “She just won’t go.”
When Alice told Bernie, she didn’t mention anything about beds.
“She was behind that petition, you know,” Bernie said, excited. “She must be upping the anti.”
Alice was still a bit doubtful. “You’d never think it to look at her.”
“Isn’t she Liz Clancy’s sister?”
“What?” Alice hadn’t known this.
“Oh yes,” Bernie said grimly. “Hard as nails, that lot. I wouldn’t mess with any of them.”
Tanya from Casualty had been biding her time. “She’s a solicitor too. Did you know that?”
“What?” The girls didn’t.
“Crawley Dunne & O’Reilly. They’d buy and sell your mother. She’d know all the tricks.”
Bernie was nearly tearful. “Isn’t she great? We always said this campaign would go nowhere until the patients got off their arses and did something.”
The bed issue was by now totally forgotten, and Christine Clarke, the only one who knew exactly what had happened, left the picket-lines and went home. Vera Mooney had already gone ages.
“What has the board of management said?” Geraldine from catering wondered.
It transpired that they didn’t know and a great wave of excitement swept through the picket-lines.
“This’ll rock the boat,” Alice declared, delighted, as someone went off to make an anonymous call to the local radio station.
Emily heard them before she saw them.
“Robbie! Where did you get that syringe? Give it to me this instant.”
In they trooped, Tommy, Robbie, Mikey and Bobby, with Liz bringing up the rear in case one of them tried to escape. Willy was strapped to Liz’s front as usual. He didn’t seem to have grown or pr
ogressed at all in a month and Emily wondered whether that sling might be constricting him.
“Hi, Emily.”
“Hello,” Emily said. She felt better after her sleep.
“Not disturbing you or anything?”
“Not really,” Emily said, watching as her beans on toast went cold. “Hi, boys!”
They stood in a semicircle at the bottom of her bed and looked at her with a mixture of fascination and horror.
“Are you going to die?” Bobby eventually asked.
Expecting Emily Page 21