Go to Sleep

by Helen Walsh

  Music starts up in the flat next door; around me life bores on, oblivious. The contraction intensifies, but still I hold on. Flashing white pain rips down my spine, arching me, forcing my belly to the floor; my shoulder blades clench together. The briefest of moments where I’m able to draw breath – and then the cold-kill resumes. I crawl across the floor, growling and tearing at my hair. Dizziness edged with pin-dot lights punch from behind my forehead, sharp and tingling and I’m failing here, passing out from an onslaught of pain that goes on and on and on, dragging my heart down through my womb; then just as I’m surrendering to the hopeless horror of it, it rolls me over, spits on me, walks off. I throw my face up and scream, unable to comprehend this awful, awesome thing.

  I lie there in the aftermath, giddy with gratitude. And this time, while I still have the chance, I do it. There is someone who can help me with all this – and yes, Nursey, it is a man. I call Dad, praying and praying that he answers.

  12

  And he does. Dad answers, as he always does, with the same question delivered in the same way that’s been irking me since I was fifteen. A joyful, ‘Rache?’ Followed by a drop in tone, and a reflexive, concerned, ‘Are you okay?’

  And this time I can indulge him. I’m not okay. He can take over, please, be a dad to me. I tell him, without melodrama, that I am about to give birth any moment.

  ‘Darling? Listen carefully. I’m on my way. Okay?’

  He said I, not We. He definitely said I.

  ‘I’m coming right now. But listen to me, angel, right. Get yourself comfortable. Yeah? And keep the phone right there. I’m going to call you an ambulance and then I’m going to get in my car and I’ll call right back and we’ll stay on the line right the way through. Okay? Now, stay calm, honey. We can do this.’

  We? Who does he mean by ‘we’? Me and him, or him and her? Oh please, please, please don’t let Dad bring Jan! He phones back as the next contraction is striking. Before I can even say ‘hello’ I have to fling the receiver across the room, frenzied from the needle-hot stabbing in my anus. The contraction ends almost as swiftly as it burst through, and in the silence that follows I hear my Dad’s voice through the perforations of the phone. I crawl towards it, grab it.

  ‘Daaaaaaaaad!’

  ‘The ambulance is on its way. I’m going to get in my car now. Okay? That’s what I’m going to do . . . Rachel?’

  But he’s no longer calm, he’s no longer sure. There’s panic in his voice.

  ‘No! Don’t leave me!’

  ‘Rachel. Oh, darling – listen to me. What position are you in?’ I can hear her in the background feeding him his lines. ‘Are you sat down or lying down?’

  ‘Noooooooo! Please, noooooooo! It’s coming. Help!’

  And now here she is.

  ‘Rachel, listen.’

  No! Not now. Please put Dad back on.

  ‘Are you able to remove your pants? Take them off, take everything off.’

  Her voice is so assured, so cemented with authority that it’s all I can do to cling to its commands as it booms through the pain. ‘Rachel. Lie down and remove your pants.’

  I don’t speak, just obey. I lie down in front of the full-length mirror, tug off my tracksuit bottoms and my knickers come with them. My contractions are murdering me now, one scorching into another, no space between them. I can no longer fight the urge to push. I prop myself up on my elbows, and the mirror is already steaming up from the heat of me. Another blast of pressure.

  ‘Fuuuuuuuuuck!’

  ‘Pant, Rachel! Breathe! Pant. Don’t push – not just yet!’

  ‘Arrgggggggggh! No, no, no! It’s too much . . . I can’t fight it any more. I. Can. Not. Bear it.’

  ‘Rachel. Hold on. Your dad will be there any second.’

  ‘Help! Help me!’

  The pain balloons up inside me, bloats me right out to splitting point, slices me in two. Sweat slides down my face, cools the scorching heat of my cheeks. My chest aches horribly, collapsing in on itself – all of me is melting, going under, giving in. My organs are turning to liquid, as though they’re being trampled on. I’m shutting down here, slowly snuffing myself out. I struggle to catch my breath. I try to scream as the next shaft of pain strikes, but nothing comes out.

  My limbs fall heavily, my elbows quickly giving way, my neck and shoulders slapping the ground, my body too tired now, too heavy. I’m hot and cold and weary and I want to just slip under, and I’m frightened for my baby but I’m grateful for the reprieve. I pass out.

  A fresh jet of pain snaps me back, propelling me to push before I know where I am. When it subsides I prop myself up again, exhausted, and breathe, breathe, breathe. I’m here. Still just me. I can hear a voice, barking anxiously from somewhere behind my head. I fumble out for the phone but my fingers can only dance wildly across the floor, unable to respond to my commands.

  Another heave, another blitzkrieg of pain and then I think I see it, a flash of black hair slicing the hot red oval between my thighs. It seems to suck back inside me, then there it is again, more of it this time. I push harder, so hard that the veins on my forehead throb and my heart gets driven back down through my ribcage.

  There’s a soft slurping sound as this tiny, shrink-wrapped thing slithers out on a sea of jelly. There are two screams – mine, demented, and then baby’s. My elbows are buckling beneath the strain of holding me up and I have to lie back down and claw back some strength before I’m able to lift the wrinkled body – a boy, I now see; a beautiful boy, and darker, even darker than I’d imagined – from between my legs and on to my chest. The slits of his eyes jab out at the world from between swollen folds of skin, as though he’s been in a fight. His little mouth opens, seeking, already demanding; his lungs quickly swelling with the injustice of being dragged from the warmth of his lair. I lift up my jumper, tug down my bra and offer him my breast, some vague crumb of recall making me lift the umbilical cord above the mite’s heart. Here he is then. Here’s my Bean. We made it.

  Ambulance lights suddenly strafe the window. I can hear them pounding the stairs. Did they break down the door? It sounds like a whole army, but there’s just two of them, stood in my living room, shocked, relieved, emotional.

  A small crowd of people has gathered outside and as I’m wheeled out, my son cleaned up now and wrapped in a brilliant white cotton blanket, blue strobes eerily lighting up his battered face, they spontaneously cheer and clap; some of them are crying, all of us haphazardly thrown together for one binding moment by the miracle of new life. Dad arrives, smiling, distressed. Embarrassed.

  THE BIG BANG

  13

  As I’m wheeled from the ambulance into the recovery suite, my perfect little man lying prostrate and naked upon my chest, his tiny blind mouth fumbling around my nipple as he tries and fails and tries again to latch on, this is what I am thinking:

  All my life I’ve heard women – my Mum, Faye, the teenage mums from The Gordon – speak about the agony of childbirth. But until I became pregnant I’d never really picked it apart. ‘It’s murder, but you soon forget’ was one gem of hand-me-down wisdom; that wonderfully perfumed ‘you’ with all its promise of mothers’ union, of belonging. And I fantasised. Even as I sat there in the NCT classes, I fantasised; listening to the course leader reel off the different options of pain relief as though she were reeling off the specials on a lunchtime menu, I would not allow myself to dwell on the reality. The pain. Or to respond to that looming and devastating finale that would smash wide open all those months of feverish fantasising.

  Throughout my pregnancy the Truth sat in exile, banished to the loneliest peripheries of my consciousness. Occasionally, in the dead still of the night, it would steal up on me unbidden and yank me from my slumber, delivering a cattle prod to the chest that would force me wide awake, flummoxed by this dreadful equation, namely: how can it be possible for this hillock of weight, a mass so immense that it knocks me off balance, be compressed and parcelled through that slender tun
nel? What will it feel like? How will I withstand the burning and tearing of this transgression – this obscene violation? The thought would have me clenching my thighs reflexively, groaning and sucking at air. But I could always surpass myself; always conjure ever more lurid and morbid eventualities. What if my baby becomes stuck? How, oh how, will its head get through? And what if its brain is starved of oxygen? Would it be, you know . . . normal? Might it be . . . damaged? Deformed? How would I feel? Disappointed? Cheated? Would I love it as much? As though sensing the threat of rejection, my Bean would squirm and thrash against the walls of its cell. But with daylight came calm and clarity. I would touch my sleeping Bean and be able to push these fears far, far away. Somehow I’d get through.

  But I’m thinking now that all these women, the aunts, friends, second- and third-time mothers, must be part of some sisterly conspiracy to safeguard the human race because had I known anything of this barbarity, had they even hinted at its brutality, then I would never have gone near this. Yes, my perfect little man, breaking my heart again and again as you continue in your pitiful struggle to draw succour – you might not be here right now, had I had any inkling. It’s murder but you soon forget. How can you forget something like that – a pain so violent one would willingly accept death as an alternative?

  Right up until my contractions I’d wanted to own that pain, or so I thought. I’d wanted to feel and breathe every pulse of it, I’d wanted it served neat. Why? Because this was the labour of my firstborn; because I was me. Rachel: tough, independent, feisty. Fuck, but I hated being called feisty! I wasn’t. I was foolish. Above all, I thought I wanted to feel the inflections of childbirth because for all I knew, I knew nothing of real life. I certainly did not know pain. Until now I’d thought pain was the moment they sat me down to tell me Mum was dying. Finding out they’d known for months; Mum even longer. Losing my father, too – losing him to his grief was pain. Losing him to Jan, pain all over again. And losing Ruben. Thoughts of Ruben always cut me deep. But pain is none of these things. Real pain is childbirth. And I have come through it.

  * * *

  Joe – Joseph Ishmael Massey – will not stop crying, has not stopped crying since we were wheeled on to the ward. When was that? This morning? Most of the babies looked half drugged, blissed out, their mothers snoring passionately, everyone dead to the world. Joe wakes the entire ward, his cries shrill enough to drill through to even the deepest of sleepers. Later, when his fury finally wore him out, the snoring chorus struck up again and I was finally able to slip away, slip under, the midwifes set about their rounds, rousing the mothers I’d slept for fifteen minutes; being dragged out of it was worse than being made to stay awake. More pain. Dull, deadly pain, the sleepless suck of bruised eyeballs and tired-out mind. Overshadowing the blind swell of love I should feel for my baby is a horrible stagnant nimbus that threatens to envelop and suffocate us both.

  Across the other side of the ward a young black girl sleeps. She is so beautiful, her eyelashes grazing her cheekbones as she rests. Her baby is sick. It is delivered to her at feeding times, then taken away. In between she recuperates, she sleeps. Oh, how I would do anything, give anything to be able to sleep. Somewhere along the jagged course of this morning I feel her standing over me, watching us. I could barely force open my eyes but I knew she was there, touching Joe.

  I sit up and try to feed. The silence of the ward slays me. Those other babies, they’re barely hours old and already they’re sleeping through. How can that be? Joe fusses and thrashes. Beyond the veils of fatigue I’m aware of a puzzle of discomfort, niggling, needling me everywhere. My nipples are stinging raw from his puckering, helpless mouth seeking and probing, the slurp of his little lips followed by a piteous whimper of sorrow then a howl each time he comes up dry. It’s suck, slurp, whimper, howl, suck, slurp, whimper, howl, his slit, puffy eyes somehow pleading with me, please feed me – and I just can’t take it any more.

  For his sake, I buzz the midwife and ask her for a ‘topup’ – a slug of formula to supplement my meagre drizzle of milk.

  ‘We don’t really recommend it,’ she begins.

  Across the ward the black girl eyes me, coldly.

  ‘I know you don’t,’ I plead, barely able to hold my eyelids open against the weight of exhaustion. I feel useless. Inadequate. The one woman on the ward who is always the exception, always asking for something else. I know this is what they think. ‘Please, please look at my baby . . . he’s starving, look at him! It’s not fair on him.’

  She snorts as though to say ‘you mean it’s not fair on you’, and she huffs away. Another myth lanced – the jovial, worldly, reassuring midwife. They all hate me. They hate my baby. Grudgingly, she returns with the sleep-inducing stodge, administered through a tiny cup with no teat so that he won’t then reject the bluntness of the real thing. The midwife tuts and shakes her head as she bustles away.

  ‘How dare you judge us, you bitch!’ I shriek. I can feel my eyes popping out of their sockets, bulging with fatigue. I am so angry. She doesn’t even turn around. ‘You fucking turned us away! You sent me out on to the streets to have my baby. D’you wonder I’m fucking up?’

  She just ignores me. Everyone keeps their heads down. There is a long drone of silence and after a while I start to wonder if I’m even here at all. Joe slurps and guzzles, enthusiastically draining his formula.

  Belly full, hunger slaked, Joe sleeps. He is at peace, but I’m now too wired to join him, too irked by the injustices I’ve suffered, the staff and the other mothers on the ward always looking over, taking note, passing comment. I think about getting up, going for a shower while I’ve the chance, but I can barely raise a finger. I’m drunk with fatigue, drifting in and out of this grainy half-life, yet hyper alert to Joe’s every inflection; each little shudder, snort and bleat prodding me to remain alert, reminding me of who I am now.

  A woman appears by my side. She’s different, she’s smiling. She’s nice. How Mum and I used to hoot over ‘nice’. How delirious I am with gratitude now nice has come to my bedside.

  ‘Hello, Mum!’

  She’s almost fanatic in her enthusiasm. Even to me, as punch-drunk as I am, her smile seems manic.

  ‘Name?’ she says. She has a clipboard. That smile again. ‘Don’t you even stir, darling – I can get all that from this –’ She lifts my notes from the end of the bed, diligently scribbles on her form. ‘Okay, Rachel. Email address?’

  On autopilot, I give it.

  ‘Father’s occupation?’ she asks.

  ‘Erm, he’s a professor, a professor of Tropical Medicine.’

  She lets out a low whistle, gives one approving nod of the head.

  ‘And he didn’t let you go private, hey?’

  Belatedly it dawns on me what she’s asking.

  ‘Oh, Joe’s daddy. Right.’

  On cue, he wakes – his baleful, fitful sobbing piercing through the doldrums of the ward like a mosquito’s whine in the dead of night; drill, drill, dry staccato drill.

  I try to ignore him. ‘Sorry, I thought you were asking me what my father . . .’

  Joe cries louder, his tiny larynx rattling with rage. Clipboard Woman looks panicked.

  ‘Never mind that, hon.’ She places the clipboard with a half-filled form under my nose. I can see my name and home address, a bit more scribble and a perforated line at the bottom where she’s marked a big, looping X. ‘Just sign here for your starter pack, and I’m out of your hair.’

  ‘Starter pack?’

  She smiles, and this time it’s nasty, impatient. Her head moves from side to side as she speaks, but her hair remains frozen in place.

  ‘Your nappies, wipes, buds, shampoos, all your creams and cotton wool balls . . . everything you’re going to need in that first week, all here.’ She leans down and produces a transparent sack, full of baby stuff. ‘There’s even something for Mum in there!’ She attempts a wink.

  I must be staring back as though no one were there. She holds the pen a
n inch from my chin. Joe howls, his furious little face screwed up fist-small, crimson with rage. ‘Just your paw-mark honey,’ she says, ‘then I’m gone.’

  I sign and, in spite of Joe’s insistent cries, I’m gone too. I don’t know what just happened here. I’m nowhere.

  *

  And now in no time at all, the light outside is falling and the dinner plates are being cleared away – my tray is untouched, my appetite deadened by the dread lack of sleep. I am nothing. Nothingness. What can they do, if I just fall away, here? They’ll have to feed Joe themselves, somehow. I’m going, so ready to let go now, slide deeply and heavily into sleep’s layered veils. I slip beneath the covers, my eyelids drooping slowly. So gorgeous is the numbness of complete surrender I smile at the thought of it and, in the blink of a heartbeat, I’m fast, fast asleep.

  Seconds later I’m dragged back to consciousness by the clamour of visitors. I try to drift back down but a nagging presence at the foot of the bed pulls me up and out. I prise open an eye, scoping around for clues. A beaming face gradually flickers into focus. Dad. And Jan. Have they nothing better to do? I squeeze my fists tight beneath the covers, quelling the urge to lash out. Instead, I burst into tears but manage to turn my fit into laughter. Dad’s crying too, now.

  ‘Hello, Mummy!’ he smiles. ‘You’re back with us now, I see. We’ve already been twice but you were well and truly out of it.’

  Jan comes closer, proffers flowers, a huge gay sprawl of blooms. I do them proud, smell them, hold them away from myself so I can properly appreciate them.