“It’s terrible.”
“I know,” said Jessica, clucking.
“No, no, you don’t. I mean it’s really terrible.”
“You need to relax and breathe over it,” Jessica advised, and Emily wanted to hit her very hard. “I’m going to ring Mr Chapman,” Jessica added. “Let him know how you’re doing.”
Emily was shocked. “It’s ten past four! I don’t want you getting him out of bed!”
But Jessica was gone. It was a relief really to be spared her relentless cheer. Emily was left on the flat of her back looking up at the ceiling again. There was a big crack running across it and one of the bulbs in the fluorescent lights flickered ominously. A part of Emily still couldn’t believe that this was happening.
Conor would be here very shortly. He was probably in the car right now, driving down dark country roads. Would he break the speed limit for this one? She suspected he might. Well, he needn’t expect a big warm welcome from her.
She wondered was the baby all right. She had not felt it kick or move at all in the past hour. Could it possibly be asleep? In the midst of all this madness?
“Please be all right,” she said, cradling her tummy and crying again, a little bit.
“Emily?” The whisper came from the door. And there was Maggie, in her nightdress and bare feet, peeking in. “I woke up and you were gone!”
“Maggie!” Thank God – someone nice. “Come in, stay with me for a bit.”
“I’m not supposed to be down here at all,” Maggie hissed, but skipped in all the same and huddled by the side of Emily’s bed, round-eyed. “Are you all right?”
“I’ve been better.”
Maggie squeezed her hand. Emily clung on to her, thankful for the support.
“Talk about timing,” said Emily. “With the court case tomorrow and everything.”
“I know,” Maggie said. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you might be able to hang on . . .?”
“No chance at all.”
“I didn’t tell the others you were gone into labour,” Maggie confided. “I didn’t want morale plummeting.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to take over the campaign, Maggie,” Emily instructed. “Just until I’m back on my feet.”
Maggie looked delighted at her new position of responsibility. “I’ll do the best I can,” she said bravely.
Emily shifted on the bed uncomfortably. The weight of the baby pressing down on her stomach was making her nauseous.
“Is it awful?” Maggie wanted to know in trepidation.
Emily looked at her worried little face. No sense in giving her a heart attack. “Easy peasy,” she bluffed.
“Oh good,” Maggie said with relief. “I knew that Cathy one was exaggerating. No pain threshold, that was her problem.” She reached into her dressinggown pocket. “I brought you down a damp facecloth. It’s not clean, but at least it’s cool.”
“Lovely,” Emily said, as Maggie laid it on her forehead. It didn’t help at all, but she didn’t want to offend her.
Maggie took something else from her dressinggown pocket. “And here’s my birth plan.”
“What?”
“Well, you didn’t do one in the end, did you?”
“Um, no.”
“So you can work off mine,” Maggie said generously, spreading the five densely-written pages along the side of the bed. “Where do you want to start? The foot massage or maybe I could light some aromatherapy candles for you?”
“No candles, thanks anyway, Maggie. We don’t want to set the fire alarms off and have to vacate the building.”
“That’s true,” Maggie said reluctantly. “We’ll play some music instead. I brought you down the tape Tiernan made especially for me. It’s ocean sounds. He managed to get the Atlantic and the Irish Sea, isn’t he marvellous?”
“Marvellous,” Emily echoed weakly, as she felt another contraction come to life inside her. Surely it hadn’t been that long since the last one? But it didn’t matter. It was on its way and there was not a damned thing Emily could do about it. She gritted her teeth and cursed the universe.
Maggie was fiddling with an ancient tape machine in the corner. “Imagine, you’re finally going to have your baby, Emily! Isn’t it incredible?”
“Yes,” Emily managed, as the pain spread out inexorably from the centre of her, eating her up.
“Have you thought of any names?” Maggie demanded.
“No . . .”
“You’re hopeless, Emily! Anyway, never mind, because guess what else I brought down for you?” She reached into her bottomless dressinggown pocket again. “My baby-name book! Let’s start with A, will we? Girls first. Abigail, Adi, Agnes – imagine, Agnes! – Ailish, Amanda . . .”
Emily did not hear any more. She was in the throes of the horrible monster now. She tried to relax, to breathe above the pain like Jessica had told her to. And it didn’t bloody work. She felt her fingernails sink into the palms of her hands as her whole body felt like it was mangling itself. Surely something was wrong? Surely human beings could not live through this kind of pain? Just when she thought she could not bear it any more, the agony began to subside, slowly. She floated back to planet earth again and her vision cleared. Maggie must be on to B’s by now.
Maggie was not. Her eyes were like saucers and her face white as she stared at Emily. “Golly,” she whispered.
“Sorry,” Emily said, feeling somehow that she had let Maggie down.
“Maybe you’re just not relaxing properly,” Maggie ventured.
“I’m trying to.”
“You’re not doing your breathing right, either.”
“I am.”
“No – sorry, Emily, but with all due respect you haven’t even been practising.” Maggie looked quite annoyed now. “You can’t expect to go into these things unprepared, you know.”
Emily wasn’t sure where this was coming from. “Maggie, shut up.”
“I will not shut up! You didn’t even do out a birth plan!”
“I didn’t want a birth plan.”
“Oh, you didn’t want one! Of course you didn’t. Not like the rest of us mere mortals!”
“What?”
A dam inside Maggie seemed to burst, and she looked at Emily with a mixture of anger and resentment. “We’re not all like you, Emily. Able to do it all – the big law career, the baby, filing court cases and staging sit-ins in our spare time. If anything goes wrong for you, you always have something else to fall back on. I don’t!”
All this sounded very insulting. For two pins now she would tell Maggie to fuck off. “Nobody’s stopping you doing other things, Maggie.”
“But that’s just it! I don’t want do anything else!” Maggie cried. “I’ve never wanted to do anything except have babies.” She looked very defensive. “Oh, I went to college. I even worked for a while. Went after the promotions and the company car, because you do, don’t you? But what was the point? I’m not an achiever; I’m not brave; I can’t change the bloody world; not like you.”
This seemed to Emily to be way off the mark. “I never wanted to change the world either! If you must know, mostly I am terrified and horrified.”
Maggie dismissed this with a flick of her hand. “And I endured it, you know, those awful dinner parties when people would ask you what you do, and the little embarrassed silence when you tell them you don’t have a job. No kids and no job! What is she, lazy, or just stupid? And Wendy over there with three kids and she running Coca-Cola! But I didn’t care that they wrote me off. Because I was waiting, you see, for the baby. That was my career, that was my purpose in life –”
“If you’d excuse me for a minute please, Maggie, I’m about to have a contraction.”
“Oh, sorry, fire ahead.”
Maggie retreated as Emily went into a black hole again. Emily held on to her sanity by focussing on Conor’s book The Pregnant Father, and how it had warned its readers to be prepared for foul language and mindless accusations d
uring labour. But surely these were supposed to come from her?
When the contraction was over she clawed her way back up the bed a bit. Maggie took up immediately where she had left off, looking a little annoyed at the interruption.
“And then it happened, I got pregnant, and everything started to make sense. I thought, here is something that I’m going to be brilliant at. Here, at last, is something that only I can do! And look at me! I can’t even go into labour on time!”
“Oh, Maggie.”
“I know,” Maggie said without rancour. “And look at you, ten days early.”
She said this as though she had something to be jealous about! As if Emily were the be-all and end-all! Emily wouldn’t feel quite so annoyed if she didn’t feel so tired and, well, hungry.
“Get the birth snacks out of my labour bag,” she bluntly told Maggie.
“I’m not hungry.”
“For me, Maggie.”
Maggie was shocked. “You can’t eat! You’re in labour!”
“I know, but I’m mad, me,” Emily said loudly.
“No,” Maggie said, firmly.
“I’ll have to get them myself then,” Emily said, lunging for her labour bag and extracting a bag of cheese and onion Tayto earmarked for Conor.
Maggie moved with surprising speed and wrestled them from her. “You might have to have emergency surgery! I’m sorry, but I can’t let you eat!”
“Give them back!” Emily was furious now.
“It’s for your own good!” Maggie said stubbornly. “I’d expect you to do the same for me.”
“If you do not give them to me I’ll . . . I’ll . . . oh, just give them to me!” Honestly! Who would have thought being in labour entailed all this? She’d thought she would only be required to do a bit of puffing and pushing – not defend herself against all kinds of horrible allegations of competence and bravery and taking control of her own life. Maggie had some nerve!
She flung herself back against the pillows and glared at Maggie. “I’m not what you think I am, you know!”
“Sure, whatever, don’t get yourself excited,” Maggie said patronisingly – as though she hadn’t started all this in the first place!
“I mean it, Maggie!”
“Of course you do. Will I wet your facecloth again?”
Emily gave up. Why was she fighting it anyway? Why all the defensiveness? Everything Maggie had accused her of being was, well, good. Was it so impossible to believe that everything she had gone through had changed her for the better? She might have a way to go yet, but why not take credit for a damned good start?
“Maybe I will have a damp facecloth after all,” she conceded with dignity.
“Good for you,” Maggie said, contrite now. “Emily, I’m sorry for having a go at you. It’s the last thing you need right now.”
“Your timing could be better.”
“It’s all this waiting around for the baby to come,” Maggie confessed miserably. “I feel sometimes I’m going mad. It’s just getting on top of me, that’s all.”
“That’s okay, Maggie.” Emily could afford to be magnanimous now. Maggie had pointed out some useful facts, after all.
“What’s going on here?” Jessica was back, and not pleased to find Maggie in situ, a torn bag of crisps in one hand and a dripping facecloth in the other. “This is a restricted area.”
Maggie and Emily looked at each other, co-conspirators again.
“I’m Emily’s birth partner,” Maggie loftily informed Jessica. “Until Conor arrives.”
Jessica, despite appearances, was no fool. “Patients are not allowed to choose other patients as their birth partners. For a variety of reasons.”
“It’s my fault,” Emily simpered. “I asked Maggie to bring me down a tape of ocean sounds.”
“She did,” Maggie lied vigorously.
“Right . . .” Jessica said reluctantly. “Now, off to bed with you.”
Maggie nipped up to the head of the bed. “You’ll let us know, won’t you, Emily? How it goes?”
“Of course I will.”
“Good luck,” Maggie said tearfully, squeezing her hand. “Oh, and do you mind if I keep these crisps? I’m starving.”
“Out,” Jessica ordered, before hospital management got wind of this.
With Maggie gone, Jessica was back to her buoyant self, and she wasted no time in switching on machines and monitors, and producing a big black belt-like thing. It was an electronic foetal monitor, which she now strapped around Emily’s midriff.
“Great,” Jessica sang. “Now we’re all set!”
Emily felt anything but set as another contraction began its vicious, insidious assault on her insides.
“Breathe, Emily,” Jessica reminded her, and did a few enthusiastic puffs to keep her company. “That’s it!”
Emily looked at her with dull eyes. “Do you ever have a bad day?”
Jessica just made another note on Emily’s chart. “Why are you so angry, Emily?”
Before she could retort, Emily was sucked into the vortex of pain again. When she opened her eyes a little while later, Conor was standing at the end of the bed.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hello,” she said hoarsely.
They regarded each other in silence for a moment; her sweaty and grim-faced, him trying to look calm and collected but wearing mismatched socks. His eyes darted from the monitors and wires and back to her again. He looked pale.
“Where’s Jessica?” Emily asked eventually.
“She went to get some ice.”
“Ice?”
“Apparently you wanted some in your birth plan.”
“That’s not my birth plan. It’s Maggie’s . . . oh, it doesn’t matter.” Briefly she wondered what Maggie had intended to do with ice. “You don’t have to stand all the way down there, Conor. I’m not going to start biting.”
“I know that. I just didn’t want to crowd you.” He reluctantly advanced a few steps and maintained a careful distance at the head of the bed, throwing another look at the monitors and tubes.
“How are you?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It’s not so bad at the moment, but then again, I’m not having a contraction at the moment.”
“Would you like me to rub your back?” he offered, not sounding all that enthusiastic.
“No. I couldn’t bear it, to be honest.” She felt that if anybody touched her now she would scream.
“Okay . . . would it help if I did the breathing with you when the contractions happen?”
“I don’t think so,” Emily said, her irritation growing. He was quoting The Pregnant Father, chapter and verse. And he might look a bit more excited about the whole thing! Sneakily, he had worked his way back to the bottom of the bed again.
“Eh, right,” he said. “Do you want me to talk you through it? You know, give you encouragement –”
“Tell me I’m opening up like a fucking flower?”
He seemed at a loss. “I don’t know what you want me to do, Emily.”
“Have you no imagination, Conor? Have you no idea what I might need?” Here came another contraction. She felt it building up inside her like a small volcano. “Or maybe you like waiting around for my orders, seeing as I’m the one in the saddle in our marriage, apparently!”
The last thing she saw was his confused face before she shut her eyes tight and went to battle with the contraction. It was a tough one, closing around her belly and chest like a vice, squeezing the breath from her lungs. She fancied that it was trying to kill her. Well, it wouldn’t. She hung on grimly until it eventually ran out of energy and was forced to subside. Strike one to her.
“Let’s go for a walk, will we?” Conor said, when it was finally over. “Up and down the corridors.”
He had obviously given himself a little pep-talk while she had been in the throes. Get with it, man! At least look as though you want to be here!
“I don’t want to,” Emily said baldly.
“You did when we talked about this at antenatal classes. I distinctly remember you telling me that you wanted to walk.”
“You would remember that, wouldn’t you, Conor? Isn’t that just typical of you?”
He ignored this. “Let’s go.”
“I can’t! Are you blind? I’m hooked up to that monitor!”
He gave the monitor another wary look as Jessica came back in. “That thing isn’t keeping her alive, is it?”
Expecting Emily Page 35