Expecting Emily

by Clare Dowling

What Mr Chapman thought was that she should be discharged right now. She didn’t need to be in hospital. She should be at home, taking it easy and waiting for labour to commence naturally.

  He should just walk out to the nurses’ station and tell Vera Mooney to send her home.

  He was her consultant, wasn’t he? He had the authority to do it! And he would stand over his decision, which was medically the right one. Her chart said so. It would back him up every inch of the way. In fact, she could have grounds for complaint if he didn’t discharge her.

  And that would be the end of the sit-in. The rest of them would fall like dominoes. The whole court action might even run out of steam. Get her home in front of the telly and away from the frontline and her cough would soon soften.

  Of course, she might refuse to go. But it was one thing to refuse to be transferred to Cork; another thing entirely to refuse to leave a hospital after she had been discharged. Taking up precious resources, beds and money when she didn’t need them. Wait until the papers got hold of that.

  It would be one great weight off Mr Chapman’s mind, one way of getting some control back in his life.

  She was waiting for his prognosis, her little heart-shaped face anxious and open. Imagine, a woman like her, thirty-seven weeks pregnant, standing up to the might of the Department of Health & Children! How could she hope to win? It was preposterous. Really, he would be doing her a favour in more ways than one.

  He wrote the word ‘discharge’ on the bottom of her chart and signed his name under it. Or at least he tried to. His hand refused to wield the pen. He was afraid that if he persisted, his hand would write something like Homer Simpson, the star of Killian’s favourite TV show which blared through the house every evening, setting Mr Chapman’s nerves on edge. It had not been on this past week, Mr Chapman suddenly thought.

  He fumbled with his pen again, and it slipped from his fingers to the floor.

  “Are you feeling all right?” Emily prompted eventually, concerned.

  Mr Chapman looked at her with dislike, sick of her concern and her sincerity, sick of her bloody morals, when he had left his behind in some locker room many years ago out of necessity and was now trying to recapture through his son.

  In a temper, he picked up the pen and drew a sharp line through the word ‘discharge’. Fine! Let her fight the fight if that’s what she wanted! Let her see that she was up against a system that was as unyielding as it was archaic! He would like to see what illusions she had left then. Oh, they had all been there, every last one of them.

  “I’m keeping you in, okay!”

  “Um, okay. Is anything wrong?”

  “Wrong? Ha!” He made an effort to lower his voice. “No. Nothing wrong. Just for observation.”

  “Okay.” She gave him a crooked little smile. “Although it would have been quite nice to go home.”

  Mr Chapman’s eyes popped. Honestly! There was no pleasing some people!

  “I’ll see you Friday,” he said grimly, and stomped out.

  She was really starting to like Mr Chapman, Emily decided. He was a stuffy old stick, granted, and she had been dreading what he might say about the sit-in and court case. But he had behaved very professionally about the whole thing. And he had been very sweet about the car business. It just went to show that once you got to know people, they were generally very nice – unless they were Creepy Crawley or Daphne or Ewan or Eamon Clancy or Nurse Christine or Gary or any number of others, of course. No, she was glad now that she had held onto her optimism despite everything.

  She reached for her mobile to ring Conor and fill him in on Chapman’s visit. After all his talk of ‘starting again’, there hadn’t been a peep out of him for a whole day. He was probably busy moving the TV and stereo and cappuccino-maker and most of their furniture into his new residence on the Cork Road. Just so long as he left the electric kettle. She would need that to make bottles for the baby, Angela had said. That’s if she didn’t get the hang of breastfeeding. It had been fairly hammered home in antenatal classes that this was the best for the baby, the implication being that women who didn’t at least try were denying their child a higher IQ. But Emily and Neasa and every other person of their generation had been reared on SMA. If you thought about it, the whole Celtic Tiger economy was built on SMA. And Soda Stream after that.

  “Hello?” Conor said.

  “I don’t know if I’m going to breastfeed,” Emily informed him loftily.

  “Emily?”

  “Of course it’s Emily. Anyway, have you any objections?” she said in a voice that defied him to have any.

  “Well, I hate to point out the obvious, but they’re your breasts.”

  “I’m glad we agree on something.”

  There was a suspicious thud in the background.

  “Are you moving the TV?” she asked.

  “What? No. I’m in the attic.”

  “What are you doing in the attic?”

  “Pottering.”

  “Nobody potters in the attic.”

  “Looking for things, then.”

  Emily looked at the phone as though it were his face. “Conor,” she said, “my trust in you has taken a severe battering. Now we can talk about starting again all we like, but if you don’t make some effort to win my trust back, then you’d better extend your lease on the Cork Road.”

  A small silence. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I didn’t tell you because, well, it’s stupid.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “I’m looking for that music score.”

  “What music score?”

  “Um, the one I wrote myself.”

  “I see.”

  “Tried to write. It’s not as though I finished it or anything. I just thought of it yesterday and . . . well, I decided to look for it. That’s all. Anyway, I can’t find it, so it doesn’t matter.”

  “Have you looked in that box over by the water tank?” Emily enquired eventually.

  “The box the stereo came in?”

  “No, the foot-spa box.”

  “I didn’t know we had a foot-spa.”

  “We don’t – oh, look, it doesn’t matter. Just try it.”

  She heard him picking his way carefully across the attic beams. They’d never got around to laying down a floor. She hoped he wouldn’t put his foot through the ceiling of the baby’s room. Now she heard him opening the box.

  “It’s full of birthday cards. My God, Emily, from when you were twelve!”

  Emily maintained a dignified silence. Conor kept nothing. He even threw out The Sunday Times on a Monday morning, when there was reading in it for the whole week.

  “There’s my bicycle light!” he marvelled. “I’ve been looking for that for years!”

  Emily did not know how his bicycle light had ended up in the attic and she wasn’t about to get into it now. He said nothing for a minute.

  “Conor?” she asked impatiently.

  “Sorry, Emily . . .” He seemed very preoccupied.

  “What have you found now?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Anyway, here it is. The music score.”

  “I told you,” she said, quietly triumphant. You see, there were advantages to being married to someone like her after all.

  She could hear pages turning. He would be wearing his funny I’m-in-music-mode expression. Well, this time she wouldn’t be excluded.

  “What did you want it for?” she asked.

  “I just had this idea that I might, you know, finish it.” He sounded embarrassed again.

  Emily thought back to the time when Conor used to compose music. Somehow he never seemed to get anywhere with it. Then the steady job with the orchestra came along and he stopped writing altogether.

  “And why don’t you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know . . . I don’t even know why I’m digging this stuff out.”

  Maggie drifted past with her Kittensoft toilet roll. Emily turned away. Somehow this seemed very intimate.

  “I su
ppose like yourself, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about everything really,” Conor eventually said. “And maybe I was stuck in a rut with the orchestra.”

  Mary Murphy popped unbidden into Emily’s mind, brandishing her violin victoriously. Emily took the violin, broke it smartly over her knee, and handed it back. Now go away, Mary.

  “I thought you liked the orchestra,” she said.

  “I did. But maybe I’m tired of playing other people’s music.”

  She could hear him sitting down. She too lay back on the pillow.

  “Finish a piece then,” she said.

  “It’s not as simple as that, Emily. I mean, I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if any of it’s any good.”

  “It is good. It’s great.”

  “Yeh.” He was brushing her off.

  “What, just because I’m not a music buff doesn’t mean I can’t tell good from bad.”

  “Emily, you like Country & Western.”

  “You’ve just never listened to the lyrics,” she said huffily. “And I’ve heard your music. I know it’s good.”

  “When have you heard it?”

  She didn’t want to tell him about standing outside the living-room door on Saturday mornings while he practised. On some Saturdays he wouldn’t practise at all; he would play something she had never heard before, with frequent stops in the middle, and she would know it was his own stuff.

  “You’re right, Conor.I haven’t listened to it because you’ve never played it for me,” she said instead.

  “You never asked,” he said back.

  “My mistake.”

  “Mine too.”

  There was a funny little silence now. Conor eventually cleared his throat.

  “All the baby’s things are in that box, Emily.”

  “What?” She wanted to make him say it, to acknowledge it.

  “The first baby’s things.” A beat. “Our first baby.”

  “Yes. I wanted to put them away before this baby arrived. There’s not much.”

  Just a few Babygros bought in the hot excitement of that first pregnancy, a cuddly toy, and pair of tiny white socks that had made her heart feel all funny.

  “I didn’t want to use them for this baby. It didn’t seem fair to it, like it was being forced to carry baggage that had nothing to do with it. But it didn’t seem fair to our first baby to put its things away in the attic like so much rubbish, like it never even existed. And it did, Conor.”

  She wondered was he holding those things now. She thought he might be.

  “I thought it would be better if I were strong,” he said eventually. “Or at least looked to be strong. I thought it wouldn’t be much help if I went to pieces too. It didn’t work, did it?”

  “No. For either of us.”

  “Emily? Are you all right?”

  “Yes, fine.” She was probably better than him right now. “What are you going to do now?”

  She was half-hoping that he would say that he would jump into the car and come and see her.

  “I don’t know. I suppose finish up here and start moving my things out.”

  “So you’re still moving out.” She felt a bit flat.

  “Emily, you’re much better at all this stuff than me.” She knew what he meant, not that she would agree with him. She was just farther down the line. “I don’t want to rush in there and get it wrong.”

  “Okay. If that’s what you want.”

  They said goodbye and Emily hung up and she felt less angry, less bewildered than she had in weeks.

  The outcome of the court application came via an unusual source.

  “I hear on the radio that you won,” Eamon Clancy said, his jolly red face not in the slightest bit jolly today. “Again.”

  “Just the once,” Emily clarified. “It’s only the first stage of a long, drawn-out procedure.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t, Eamon.”

  He waved a sheet of paper in her face. “What’s the meaning of this?”

  “What is it, Eamon?” she asked calmly. A vein throbbed wildly in his forehead and she was afraid it might burst. Still, he was in the right place.

  “It’s a demand for maintenance!” Eamon shouted.

  People seemed to come into this hospital and shout at her a lot, Emily had noticed. Her advanced pregnancy didn’t seem to put them off at all. To stop any more hysterics, she whipped the piece of paper from him and perused it.

  “It’s a demand for maintenance.”

  “I know it is. I just said it is!” He looked at her maliciously. “You’ve some nerve. But you were always like that. So superior, with your fancy job and your fancy piano-playing husband, looking down on the rest of us, like builders are the scum of the earth or something!” He waited for her contradict him and was eventually forced to move on. “And now you’re drawing up maintenance demands against me!”

  “It’s actually Liz who wants the money, Eamon. Not me personally. I just looked after the paperwork. In fact, I didn’t even do that, for obvious reasons. I believe Phil in the office handled it in the end.”

  “Well, here’s what I think of your maintenance demand!” And he tore it in half, something he had obviously been anticipating most of the day.

  “Oh stop it,” Emily said, tired of him now. “How do you think Liz is supposed to feed and clothe those boys?”

  “She can do it for less than three hundred and fifty pounds a week!”

  “Eamon, those boys go through five packets of cornflakes a week.”

  “Don’t talk to me about cornflakes,” Eamon said grimly. “Don’t talk to me about twenty-five litres of milk! Or ten pounds of bananas, two big bags of potatoes, twenty-one yoghurts – but Mikey has decided he likes yoghurts again, so that’ll go up to twenty-eight a week now!”

  “Twenty-eight yoghurts a week?” Emily was shocked.

  “Not to mention the sixty-three nappies a week Willy and Mikey go through between them,” Eamon went on heatedly. “And the seven night-nappies Bobby still needs. Do you know how much a nappy costs?”

  “Ten pence?”

  “Ten pence!”

  “Um, fifteen, then.”

  “Twenty-five pence apiece! That’s what a nappy costs, unless you go for those own-brand ones – and to be honest I wouldn’t advise you to because they’re not as good and you only end up forking out at the other end for detergent to wash soiled clothes.”

  “Ah, thanks, I’ll bear that in mind.”

  “Anyway, don’t you be telling me how much it costs to rear a child, because I know,” he said, hitching up his jeans belligerently. Like most other builders, the waistband periodically slid down to settle somewhere around his knees. Emily wondered whether there was a special store that only builders shopped in.

  “Sorry, Eamon, I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “Don’t try and tell me only women really know about rearing children!”

  “Yes, you’ve made your point.”

  Satisfied that he had, he went on, “Hasn’t the cost of them five fellas been on my mind ever since the business got into trouble? What was I supposed to do. Throw up my hands and say, ‘Ah well, it didn’t work out. Sure we’ll have to make do on the dole?’ And they roaring and shouting for fuckin’ Teletubby videos and trips to McDonald’s and I’m supposed to tell them that I can’t afford it?” He took a few quick breaths. “I couldn’t tell her – Liz. Jesus Christ, how do you tell your wife that you can’t support your family any more?”

  Emily felt uncomfortable in the face of his emotion. Eamon, the hard man. “You’re going to have to involve her. Make decisions together.”

  “Give up on the business, you mean.”

  “That’s a matter for the two of you.”

  She didn’t want to be dispensing advice to Eamon, as though she were a raging success in the marital department herself.

  “Can’t you talk to her or something?” Eamon asked.

  “No. I can’t.”


  “As her solicitor. You could advise her –”

  “No! Do your own dirty work, Eamon!” She moved on swiftly before he got all testy again. “Anyway, I’m delighted you called around.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes, I was wondering what kind of a price you could do me to lay an attic floor?”

  “What?”

  “Our attic floor at home. I’m looking for an estimate.”