The Man Who Didn't Call

by Rosie Walsh

  I’m sharing the waiting area with an ageing man in his pyjamas, but neither of us has spoken to each other. He looks as anxious as I do. A grandfather, maybe. Like me, he can do little else but yawn, jiggle his knees and stare intermittently at the delivery-suite entrance.

  I’ve decided this must be what purgatory feels like. Perpetual postponement. Intense waiting in the key of fear minor. Nothing moving, other than the slow hands of a clock.

  Alan’s been trying to reassure me – keeps sending me articles about childbirth. Gia wants me to remind you that birth doesn’t need to be like those horror shows you see on telly , he wrote earlier. Women give birth all day long, all over the world. She says you should forget about all that over-produced drama and visualize Sarah taking long, slow breaths.

  Or something like that. I should take it seriously, but I’m too far gone.

  In desperation, I start reading the messages Sarah sent me last summer. I read the whole lot, from the day she left my barn to the day before we met on Santa Monica Beach. I read them twice, three times, trying to find something I know they can’t tell me.

  Then the delivery-suite door opens and my heart starts galloping. But it’s just a staff member, pulling on a hat, yawning, plunging her hands deep into her coat pockets. She walks past us both with barely a sideways glance, patently exhausted.

  I can’t bear it.

  I scroll back to the first message Sarah sent me, twenty minutes after we said goodbye.

  Back home , it said. I had such a wonderful time with you. Thank you, for everything. X

  I had a wonderful time, too, I write now. In fact, I had the best week of my life. I can still hardly believe it happened.

  On my way to Leicester and thinking about you , she had written, a couple of hours later.

  I was thinking about you, too , I write. And while I admit my thoughts weren’t as lovely and straightforward as yours, by that stage, I want you to know that underneath it all, I was hopelessly in love with you. That was what made it more painful than anything else – I was absolutely, totally, head over heels in love with you. I couldn’t believe you existed. I still can’t.

  Then her messages started getting worried. Hey – you OK? Did you get to Gatwick in time ?

  I swallow. It’s painful, watching her panic unfurl, knowing I could have stopped it.

  I read a few more, but then I stop, because I feel too guilty.

  You are the best and most beautiful person I have ever known , I write instead. And I knew that the first day we spent together. You fell asleep and I thought, I want to marry this woman.

  I love you, Sarah , I write. I think I’m crying. I wish I was there with you, cheering you on. I want only for you and the baby to be safe.

  I’m so sorry I haven’t been there for you. I wish I had been. I wish we could have done this together. I should have been braver. I should have trusted I’d be able to work something out with Mum. I should have stopped at nothing.

  I’m definitely crying. A tear is pooling fatly across my phone screen. I try to clean it with a dirty cuff and the whole thing goes blurry. Then another one drips down and I realize I’m in danger of actually sobbing. I stand up and start walking again. I go outside, where the air is cold as an arctic sea, but it stops the tears immediately, so I stay there. The car park is quiet now. Coppery light, leafless trees swaying in a bitter breeze.

  I send you every ounce of strength and courage I have, although I know you won’t need it. You are an extraordinary woman, Sarah Harrington. The best I know.

  My fingers are shaking. Cold knifes in through the open front of my duffel coat, but I’ve stopped caring about me.

  Please, when you’re ready, can we try again? Can we draw a line under everything – even the thing that I thought we couldn’t get past? Can we go back to the start? There’s nothing that would make me happier than being with you. You, me, this baby. A little family .

  I love you, Sarah Harrington.

  An ambulance wails, and a gust of paralysing wind punches me in the side of the face.

  I love you. I’m sorry.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Sarah

  I am rotating slowly, hovering above my life. There are hexagons and octagons, maybe ceiling tiles, or perhaps it’s just the fine detail of the thing I was leaning my forearms on earlier, that chair . . .

  There have been many tiny furniture details during this parallel time, things I have stared at so hard they’ve gone macro and taken on patterns, danced: a kaleidoscope in heaven.

  Happy times. Positive images. Things that will stimulate oxytocin. That’s what I’m meant to be thinking about. I play happy times on the screen in front of my brow bone. There is the fat little pony that belonged to the woman who lived in that house beyond Tommy’s—

  Pain . A roaring waterfall of it. But: I trust my body, I repeat, because that’s what I was told to do. I trust my body. It’s bringing my baby to me.

  There is Hugo, Tommy’s cat, the funny one that didn’t drink enough water in the summer.

  The midwife is doing something to my abdomen again. Tightening straps. Since I moved into this room they’ve been monitoring my baby’s heart with a device that looks like a laboratory experiment. One sensor for your contractions, one for baby , she reminds me, catching my expression. I nod, and try to take myself back to happy memories.

  There is a child called Hannah; she is twelve years old. She wears a sling; her eye is swollen and green, her skin pockmarked with cuts and bruises. Her best friend is dead and she hates me.

  No, this isn’t happy. I search through layers of pain and exhaustion for something better. I breathe in for four, out for six. Or was it eight? Trust your body , they said at the classes. Trust your body. Trust the process of labour.

  But I’ve gone into some sort of tunnel, and it’s so deep I don’t quite know where I am. I think there are drugs. That’s right: there was an injection in my thigh, and there’s the thing near my mouth. I clamp around it and breathe in sweet stories as I start to climb another mountain. It’s floating – someone tries to take it away, so I hold on hard.

  There is a room full of medical equipment, and that same girl, Hannah, only she’s different now: she’s my sister again, but she’s a woman with a family and a career. She’s my birthing partner. She’s been having counselling because she doesn’t like herself very much. She says she was awful to me.

  But she wasn’t awful. She was never awful. Hannah is in the bank of good memories getting me through this tunnel. I breathe in the wonder I felt in my heart the first time I saw her, when she turned up at Mum and Dad’s house on the morning of Granddad’s funeral. How she held herself stiffly in front of me and then crumpled forward, and the other-worldly joy when I hugged my sister for the first time in nearly two decades.

  More shapes and patterns; a moving scrapbook. I am only half aware of the people in the room, the things they’re doing to my body, the gentle commands.

  I remember a cafe in Stroud, Hannah and I on our first date together as adults. The silences, the nervous laughter. The apologies, from both of us, and the sight of my father crying when I told him that Hannah had invited me round to her house to meet her family.

  But . . . my baby. Where’s my baby?

  The sea falls in on itself, again and again, and a cuckoo sings its two notes into a dusky wood. Eddie is laughing. They’re examining me again now. People, lots of them, looking at a screen that’s printing out jagged lines . . .

  Where is my baby?

  My baby. My baby that I made with Eddie.

  Eddie. I loved him so much.

  Eddie. That’s the name Hannah’s telling me. She’s telling me about Eddie. She says he’s outside. She looks shocked, amazed, but now I have to listen to a doctor, who takes the tube from me and starts talking slowly and clearly. ‘I’m afraid we can’t wait any longer . . .’ she says. ‘We need to get this baby out: you’re still not fully dilated . . . the foetal blood sample indicates .
. . oxygen . . . heart rate . . . Sarah, do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘Eddie?’ I ask. ‘Outside?’ But there are more words from the medical people and then the bed-chair thing starts moving; it’s leaving this room.

  The tunnel is fading. There are ceiling tiles. Hannah’s voice is close to my ear. ‘You agreed to have to have a caesarean,’ she’s telling me. ‘The baby’s struggling. But don’t worry, Sarah, this happens a lot. You’re going straight to surgery and the baby’ll be out in minutes. Everything’ll be fine . . .’

  I ask her about Eddie, because it might just have been one of the stories from the kaleidoscopic tunnel. I am so tired.

  Not enough oxygen ?

  But it’s a real fact, not a tunnel fact: Eddie is waiting for me. He’s outside. He’s been messaging my phone; he says he loves me. ‘And he keeps saying he’s sorry,’ Hannah tells me. She is astounded. ‘Eddie Wallace,’ she mutters, as someone takes her by the elbow and tells her she will need to put on a surgical gown. ‘Father of your child. I mean, what?’

  Eddie says he loves me. My child is in trouble.

  Then the doctors all just sort of cave in on me, all talking, and I have to listen.

  Chapter Fifty

  Eddie

  I sit bolt upright: the door to the delivery suite is opening. I realize I must have been sleeping. I feel terrible. And I’m freezing, shivering all over. Why didn’t I take a hat, or some gloves? Why didn’t I plan this properly? Why have I messed everything up, from the moment Sarah left my barn back in June?

  ‘Is there an Eddie Wallace here?’ asks the woman standing in the doorway. She’s wearing scrubs.

  ‘Yes! That’s me!’

  She pauses, then nods over at the lifts, where we can talk without my waiting-area companion hearing. He’d fallen asleep, too, but now he’s watching me with jealous eyes.

  Arrows of fear circulate my body like the science videos they showed us at school, and I walk far too slowly. The woman in scrubs waits for me, her arms folded, and I realize she’s looking at the floor.

  I realize quickly that I don’t like that.

  I realize even more quickly that if she gives me bad news, my life will never be the same again.

  And so, for the first few seconds, I can’t hear what she’s saying, because I’m absolutely deafened by fear.

  ‘It’s a boy,’ she repeats, when she realizes I haven’t taken anything in. She starts to smile. ‘Sarah gave birth to a beautiful baby boy about an hour ago. We’re doing a few tests at the moment, on Mum and baby, but Sarah asked me to tell you that it’s a boy and he should be absolutely fine.’

  I stare at her in sheer astonishment. ‘A boy? A boy? Sarah’s OK? She’s had a boy?’

  She smiles. ‘She’s very tired, but she’s OK. She did really well.’

  ‘And she wanted you to tell me? She knows I was here?’

  She nods. ‘She knew you were here. She found out just as we took her in for a C-section. Her sister told her. And your son’s lovely, Eddie. An absolutely gorgeous little thing.’

  I fold forward on myself, and a sob of wonder, of joy, of relief, of amazement, of a million things I could never name tumbles out of me. It sounds like laughter. It could well be laughter. I cover my face with my hands and cry.

  The woman puts a hand on my back. ‘Congratulations,’ she says, somewhere above me. I can hear her smile. ‘Congratulations, Eddie.’

  Eventually I manage to straighten up. She is turning to leave. It defies belief that she’s off to bring more lives into being. That this miracle is commonplace for her.

  A boy! My boy!

  ‘Sarah’s recovering in her room, and she’ll need to stay a few days on the postnatal ward. I’m afraid you won’t be able to come in tonight, but visiting hours on the ward start at two p.m.,’ she says. ‘Although, of course, it’ll be up to Sarah.’

  I nod stupidly, joyously. ‘Thank you,’ I whisper, as she starts to walk away. ‘Thank you so much. Please tell her I love her. I’m so proud of her. I . . .’

  I haven’t cried like this since the day they told me my little sister was dead. But that was the worst moment of my life, and this is the best .

  After a long while I stagger outside, where the wind has dropped, and a thin grey is beginning to filter through the night sky. It’s silent, save for the sound of my tears and sniffs. Not so much as a distant car engine, just me and this towering, dizzying news. ‘I’m a father,’ I whisper, into the nothingness of pre-dawn. ‘I have a little boy.’

  And I repeat this several times, because I don’t have any other words. I lean against the cold wall of the Women’s Centre and try to recalibrate my vision of the universe, so it can include this miracle, but it’s impossible: I can’t imagine. I can’t compute. I can’t believe. I can’t do anything.

  A lone car enters the car park, makes slowly for a disabled space opposite me. Life goes on. The world is waking. The world contains my son. This is all his. This air, this dawn, this crying man whom he might one day call Dad.

  Then my pocket buzzes and I see Sarah’s name, and the word ‘Message’, and I’m off again, crying uncontrollably, before I’ve even read the thing.

  He’s beautiful , she’s written. He’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

  I watch, breathless, as she writes another message.

  He looks like you.

  Please come and meet our boy tomorrow.

  And then the final one: I love you too.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Sarah

  It’s 2 June. Another 2 June on the Broad Ride: my twentieth, I realize, as I try to pull my hair into an elastic band. There’s a stiff breeze today, pushing clouds quickly across the sky, combing and whipping them into tight whorls. The breeze snatches at strands of my hair, dancing them away out of reach.

  I think of the year when it rained so hard the nettles bent flat, and the year when my hat was lifted off by a rampaging wind. I think about last year, when it was so hot that the air around me compressed and even the birds were silent, dead-feathered in their trees. That was the year I met Eddie, and this began.

  Eddie. My Eddie. Even though I’m exhausted, sleep-deprived beyond all reckoning, I smile. I smile hopelessly, and my stomach zips and zooms.

  This is still happening to me, a whole year after I ran into him on the village green. He says it happens to him, too, and I know he’s telling the truth because I can see it right there in his face. Sometimes I wonder if it’s an after-effect of the battle we had to find and keep each other. Mostly, though, I think it’s because this is how it should feel.

  As if sensing the swell of his mother’s heart, Alex snuffles, burrowing tighter into my chest. He’s still fast asleep, in spite of the number of people who have prodded and cooed at him in the last hour. I circle my arms around him, wrapped tight in my Stroud-issue sling, and kiss his warm little head, over and over. Having him on me – even when I’m so tired I would happily sleep in a dog bowl – is like turning on a light. I had no idea I could love anything, or anyone, so much.

  The day after Alex was born, when Eddie walked into my room holding a toy squirrel, his hands shaking, his face white with terror, I knew we’d make it. I handed him his son and he stared at him in utter amazement, wept uncontrollably and called Alex ‘Bruiser’. Later, when a nurse prized Alex away from Eddie, he looked at me for a few moments and then told me he loved me. No matter what happened, he said, he was mine if I’d have him.

  So he came back to Mum and Dad’s with me when I was free to go home. We moved back to his barn a few weeks later. (He made a cot. A cot! He hung Mouse from the top.) And although his mother refused to talk about me, even though she took to calling him throughout the day, even though I had completely run out of money, and Eddie’s roof had sprung a leak, and I got mastitis and felt dreadful, I was the happiest I’d ever been. We didn’t get out of bed that first morning. We just lay there, with our son, feeding him, cuddling, drifting in and out of sleep
, kissing, changing nappies and smiling.

  At first Eddie answered two, maybe three of his mother’s calls each day, although it soon dwindled to one. It was hard for him. ‘Impossibly hard,’ he said, having woken one morning to three missed calls. ‘Night calls are the worst.’ His hands shook as he called her back, sitting up in bed as I fed Alex in a chair, and he went round there soon after. She was ‘ OK’, he said, on his return. ‘Just a bad night. But she’s had a bad night at least once a month for two decades, and she’s survived. I’ve got to trust more.’

  Even after years of tortured imaginings about the misery of the Wallace family, the extent of Eddie’s responsibilities towards his mother have still come as a shock to me. But when he apologized for the number of phone calls, for the number of visits he still made to her, I told him he mustn’t. Of all the women on earth, I pointed out, I was surely the best placed to understand.

  I understand, too, that something even bigger than his mother’s illness has happened to Eddie, and that’s parenthood. Parenthood, and all the indescribable instincts and emotions over which it reigns. Alex arrived into Eddie’s life, tiny, warm, looking like he was solving the mysteries of the world, and without saying so much as a word to his father – without so much as lifting a finger – he changed the landscape of Eddie’s responsibilities forever.

  When his mum phones now, he’ll just cancel the call, message her later, but mostly his attention is on Alex. On me. ‘I just have to pray that Mum will be OK,’ he said one day. ‘That what I can still give her is enough. Because I can’t give her more, Sarah. I won’t. This little man, he needs me. He’s the one I have to keep alive now.’

  Still. I know it hurts him that his mum hasn’t turned up today. I knew she wouldn’t turn up; he knew she wouldn’t turn up – she’s met Alex six times in three months, each time insisting that only Eddie be present – but the slump of his shoulders when we had to start without her broke my heart.