by Neal Doran
The couple looked at each other again, out of ideas. The receptionist said ‘name’ without looking up from her paperwork, and it took them a moment to realise she was talking to them.
‘James Winfield,’ said James.
‘The mother’s name,’ said the receptionist, shifting her focus to her computer screen.
‘The same,’ said Rebecca.
‘And that was?’ said the receptionist.
‘Winfield’ said Rebecca.
‘First name?’ said the receptionist.
‘Many Winfields in today?’ muttered James.
‘Rebecca,’ said Rebecca.
‘Take a seat please,’ said the receptionist.
‘I guess we’re in the right place,’ said Rebecca as they took a seat.
‘You feeling OK?’ asked James, a hand on her knee.
‘Fine, yeah.’
‘Showtime!’
Rebecca looked around the waiting room which was, even before nine o’clock, quite crowded. Studded across the plastic seats were couples reading their copies of Metro from opposite ends, occasionally swapping a few words, shrugs or nods over celebrity gossip. The women in their pyjamas and dressing gowns were obviously inmates – in-patients, she corrected herself – and were more grouped together and chatty. The women sitting on their own, she couldn’t help but wonder if they were independent or abandoned. It was a bit like being on the train, Rebecca thought, surrounded by people she’d never be with otherwise; wondering what station they’d be getting off at based on what they were wearing or how they were acting. Everybody here had the same destination though.
‘They don’t, by the way,’ said James.
‘What?’
‘Sell porn in the shop. Closest was a picture of Carol Vorderman looking a bit frisky on the front of a puzzles magazine. News hasn’t reached the NHS that the sudoku fad ended five years ago.’
Rebecca smiled awkwardly at the woman sitting next to her as her husband discussed the availability of pornography. The other woman, who was probably nearly ten years younger than Rebecca but seemed much more experienced because her belly was twice the size, asked if it was their first time at the obstetrics unit. It wasn’t hers, but she agreed the place was quite tricky to find the first time.
Rebecca asked the other woman, Leanne, if ‘they’ hauled her in here a lot. Today, she was apparently talking to strangers as if they were both naughty children at the headmistress’s office. It sounded like Leanne had visited quite a few times, and Rebecca clammed up because she suspected it was unlikely to be because everything was going splendidly well. Instead she just smiled in a way she hoped put across sisterly support, without making too many assumptions about her condition, that didn’t look too gloomy or too cheerful, and that wouldn’t encourage further chit-chat. She was conscious that it was a lot to ask of a smile.
‘Kam sends his best,’ James said, playing with his BlackBerry.
‘You’re supposed to turn those things off in here!’ Rebecca said, eyes darting nervously towards the receptionist.
‘Yep, yep… Just checking in, then I’m all yours,’ he promised. ‘Good of him to drop a line to see how I’m doing and if there’s any news. Surprised he remembered to be honest.’
James thumbed in a quick response: ‘We’re great. Exciting times!! We’ll send pictures!’ and pocketed the phone.
‘Can’t believe we’re going to actually see them,’ he said.
‘Touch wood,’ said Rebecca.
Despite what James had said about her sleeping for half the day, she’d had a restless night. She was planning to tell work the news today, and would become, in the eyes of the partners, one of those women who said they wanted a career, but then had a baby instead. Where that thought had come from at 3am, she didn’t really know. It seemed odd in a couple of ways – firstly in that a small-to-middling local law firm doing run-of-the-mill work for small-to-middling run-of-the-mill local businesses was hardly a brutal corporate environment where you were valued solely on the hundreds of hours you billed a week. And secondly that she’d certainly never said she wanted a career.
When she’d started with the firm she’d actually been worried it was too big for her ambitions, with half a dozen partners, twice as many associates and a handful of trainees. But she also knew that anything smaller ran the risk of her standing out too much, and probably having to really sign on to nurturing the firm’s future, and ultimately being responsible directly for the livelihoods of everyone you worked with. Anything much bigger and, well, you were getting into the world of constantly long hours, having to brag about achievements to get ahead, and competitive power dressing.
So she signed up for the middle path, at a place where the only major drawback was that her dad was vaguely known as a local bigwig. She had hoped she’d learn to do something useful, but that work wouldn’t take over her life and, in those days before Sky+, wouldn’t mess too much with her viewing schedules. It also meant that, if she did wake up one morning with a sudden urge to have the sort of career her dad, and probably her mum, wanted her to, she’d be somewhere where just a little effort to grow as a fish could make her more of a presence in the pond.
The other thing keeping her awake had been that she’d not been able to put behind her the thought that maybe there was something wrong with the pregnancy (she was still wary of even thinking the word baby). The midwife’s visit when she couldn’t find a heartbeat was playing on her mind still, even though she’d had all the assurances it was normal, and there was no evidence that anything more was amiss. She worried about getting bad news, how devastating it would be for James, and weird and horrible for her. She imagined it like an old-fashioned magic trick where a conjurer got you to hold somebody’s watch then covered it with a silk handkerchief and, without you feeling a thing, later whipped the hankie away to show you weren’t holding anything at all.
But nagging just outside her thoughts was the idea that if it wasn’t working out it would make life a lot easier. It was just a silly, middle of the night thought, but it wouldn’t shift. The idea that she could even have a thought like that worried her. She’d shifted uncomfortably in the bed, tugging the covers around her shoulders while sticking her leg out from under the duvet, then doing the opposite. She’d turned to face James, but couldn’t settle pressed up against a slab of his naked mole-marked back. Tiptoeing around the idea, she rationalised that they’d not had a lot of time to prepare for the news, and that was coming out as nervousness.
It didn’t mean anything. She wanted this to happen. She didn’t want everything to just go back to how it had been. It wouldn’t work like that anyway. And with all the people looking forward to it now it was too late to do anything else in any case. Not that she wanted to do anything else – she couldn’t even contemplate the alternatives.
But the thought wouldn’t go away. She thought about waking up James, getting a hug and telling him why she couldn’t sleep, but she couldn’t do that. Couldn’t let him know she was even thinking about thinking what she wasn’t even thinking really. If she put it like that he’d think she was mad for a start, and either way she suspected he’d take Bompalomp’s side on everything from now on anyway.
‘Rebecca Winfield?’ said a voice, pulling her out of her reflections.
Chapter 14
Rebecca and James bustled to their feet as if they were getting the call that their flight was boarding on a budget airline when a member of staff in a dark blue uniform called out her name.
‘Follow me, please,’ she said with a quick smile and a trace of a Northern Ireland accent. As they walked to the office Rebecca spotted a few couples looking up at them, the husbands looking irritable and leaning over to speak to their wives, probably to point out that they had been there first. She gave a guilty smile which she hoped conveyed to the room that she could understand the injustice, but she didn’t make the system.
In the examination room the woman got them to sit down and then introduced hersel
f as Sandra the Sonographer. Rebecca began to feel like she was in an educational children’s show. Maybe Dorothy the Doctor would be in soon. Sandra began setting up equipment, washing her hands and briskly getting things ordered and organised while she’d been explaining to them what she was going to do, but she’d been smiley and chatty too, while she was doing it. She’d been patient with James while he told her everything he’d learned about scans from the internet as if it might be news to her. She was shortish, fiftyish, with rectangular metal glassed on a rounding face, and a practical short but soft haircut, and Rebecca felt nothing but reassured by her calm friendliness.
‘If you’d just pop yourself up here now, Rebecca, we’ll get a look at this wee thing.’
Handing James the handbag she’d been nervously clutching, she clambered onto the examination table. Although the head end of the table was angled like a sun lounger, lying back she could see nothing but ceiling, so she strained forward slightly, her head levitating awkwardly above the vinyl, to see what was going on in the room. Sandra was preparing what looked like a supermarket barcode scanner attached to a 1980s computer monitor, and grabbed a squeezy bottle of gel.
‘If you could just lift up your top a bit and pop open your trousers for me.’
This was going to be the year for dropping your drawers in public thought Rebecca. A bitter joke about her dad flashed through her mind, but she tried to concentrate on what was going on. Getting distracted was easy as Sandra approached and tucked some paper towel into the top of her knickers, adjusting them down slightly in the process.
She made a mental note to buy some more Veet.
The room went quiet except for some gentle humming of the latest number one single from Sandra. James stretched out and held Rebecca’s hand, although she had to let go as the contortions involved in linking fingers while lying flat and keeping propped up to see what was going on were too tricky.
Rebecca watched as the sonographer took an adhesive backing off a large flimsy-looking circular pad with a gentle rip. Her heart beating fast she looked over at James, who grinned nervously back.
‘Just lie back now,’ said Sandra.
Then the noise filled the room, a gentle ‘wokka wok wokka’ from the machine that was racing at a rapid beat. Rebecca’s breath caught slightly as she tried to breathe in normally.
‘That’s the heartbeat,’ said Sandra casually, ‘sounds good and strong.’
James stood up next to his wife and stretched his hand out to her again.
‘Sounds like they’re…’ he started, but he couldn’t say what it sounded like. It was like nothing he’d experienced before.
‘First time you’ve heard that, is it?’
The couple babbled and nodded happily that it was.
‘Lovely sound. If you just lie back now, the gel might feel a wee bit chilly, I’ll swing the monitor around for you to see in a sec.’
The sound from the heartbeat monitor stopped, but Rebecca could still hear the sound of it in her head.
The check-out scanner Rebecca had seen earlier was pressed into her belly a little more firmly than Rebecca expected, but not in a rough way.
‘I’ll just take a few measurements here, on the spine and circumference of the skull and we’ll get ye a proper look.’
James leaned around and could glimpse the screen, blurry grey with blue and red lines, like primitive computer game graphics, stretching across it in diagonals and circles. While Sandra was working away she’d been lightly humming, but then she stopped. And then she tutted and went quiet.
Rebecca gripped on to James’s hand a little more tightly. They kept smiling, but the smiles were a bit more forced, and the mumbly chatting stopped. James watched what the sonographer was doing more closely. Sandra fussed with the monitor, applied a bit more gel to Rebecca’s belly and kept working. Don’t let anything be wrong, thought Rebecca to herself. Please, don’t let anything be wrong. Guilt and fear seeped through her body.
‘Is everything…?’
Sandra didn’t answer straight away.
But then she did.
‘Yes, yes everything looking super. Some of these machines, they’re getting old and temperamental. But aren’t we all? Now let me show you.’
Sandra showed them the scan, talking them through the light and shade; the spine, the head, the heart. She was talking about measurements and technical details that Rebecca was only half listening to as she stared at the screen. Rebecca forgot that thirty seconds ago she’d started bracing for bad news. She’s pregnant. There’s a baby. There was no space in her head for her doubts and her worries at that moment, just a feeling of wonder and joy. It wasn’t just too many ready meals and the start of an ulcer that had her looking and feeling like she did, it was Bompalomp. In the flesh. In her belly. Or womb or whatever would be the grown-up way of putting it. She watched James as he bounced along excitedly to everything Sandra was saying, his biggest, most boyish grin on his face.
‘Everything is fine as far as we can tell at this stage. It’s still early days, but you’re doing a great job.’
‘Can you tell what the sex is?’ asked James.
‘It’s too early to get a confident answer really. And we tend not to say at this early stage. Some people are a bit picky about the gender around here.’
Rebecca’s radar for casual racism pinged slightly, but she chose to ignore it.
‘Would you like a picture?’
James and Rebecca bounced back into the waiting room chirpily thanking Sandra. They sounded rowdy against the library hush of their surroundings, and giggled and grinned to themselves as they took the volume down on their excitement.
At the desk on the way out the receptionist surprised them with a warm smile and a cheerful reminder that the details of their next appointment would be in the post. James noticed there was a large tin jar on the desk, like the one they’d have in a coffee shop for tipping the baristas, with a note about charitable donations and that a suggested contribution to cover the costs of scan photos was a quid. Elated, he slid in a tenner.
Putting her arm through James’s and burrowing into his coat, Rebecca waved the scan picture in her hand like it was a Polaroid. It was lovely to have, but with its blurry patches of black and grey it didn’t mean as much as the sound of the heartbeat had. Wokka-wokka-wok-wokka.
‘They’re not expecting us at work yet, let’s get to Starbucks for a coffee,’ she suggested to James.
As they double-backed on themselves to try another corridor that might lead to the exit, James habitually grabbed his phone out of his pocket in response to the vibrating alert for a new message. He only had time to scan the top line, but it suddenly hit him why his friend Kam had been emailing to ask how he was doing earlier. And it wasn’t because of Bompalomp.
‘I can see the meeting’s over now. So did you dodge the chop again this time or what?’
‘Sure,’ he said, turning to kiss Rebecca on the top of her head, ‘let’s get a cinnamon bun too.’
Chapter 15
That had been simpler than expected, Rebecca thought to herself, sitting back down at her desk. For something that she’d been worrying about for a while, her boss’s reaction made telling the world she was pregnant seem a little easier. It was different from telling a couple of friends, family, or the trained professionals who deal with the stuff every day – if they’re talking about you, they have to do it discreetly when you’re not around.
This was the kind of news that made you the centre of attention among a group of people that you wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable being the centre of attention with. Rebecca couldn’t help feeling that the natural response to her saying she was pregnant would be ‘who do you think you are?’ It felt like a demand for special treatment. She was thirty, but being pregnant seemed like it was something that was a bit too grown up.
She was fairly certain her boss, Stuart, had had tears in his eyes at one point though – once she started babbling about providing a first
grandchild when he’d asked if her parents were very excited about the news. She’d shown him the scan photo for some reason, like she needed to provide evidence or something, and talked about her mum already planning babysitting, and her dad putting the baby down for Lord’s membership. She hadn’t taken into account the old rumours that went around the office, which had come from Stuart having a son who was in his early twenties and who he used to talk about incessantly, and then stopped mentioning entirely. Nobody really knew why. Or at least nobody knew that Rebecca could ask. She didn’t think he’d died or anything that terrible, but something had gone on.
But anyway, he’d given her a hug, which had been awkward, and she’d said how much she loved working at Lakeworths, and what a role model he’d been for her, which was even more awkward. She thought it probably surprised him as much as it surprised her. So after he shuffled back around to his side of the desk, and she started doing her nervous tummy rub, they agreed on getting HR to sort out any details, and moved onto safer territory – planning permission for a change of use at the site of an old bingo hall.
When Rebecca came out of the office, the real interrogation had started, with Josh, the overly-keen trainee who sat outside Stuart’s office.
‘What did he want to see you for?’ he asked as if the only reason she could have had to go in was because she was in trouble.
‘I wanted to tell him where things were with the Ambassador and the appeal against the PP11.d form and the application of the zoning bylaws under the LCAA and UR legislation.’
‘Yeah of course. Sounds about right,’ he said as if he knew what she was talking about. Which, if true, would have been more than she did.
She couldn’t believe how annoyed she could get by somebody else’s misplaced confidence. And Josh had always got to her because of the way he obviously thought he was good-looking enough to push the boundaries of the office dress code, coming in just the wrong side of dishevelled. She did the only thing she could think of to try and rattle his assuredness.