*
At the door, there was Patrick again.
‘Everything OK?’ she said, tersely.
‘Everything’s fine in here,’ he said. ‘You just worry about yourself.’
She nodded. Grim-faced, thought Patrick. She looked drawn and pale, as if she was shocked all over again. He wanted to hold her, but she looked somehow contained by her state, distinct and apart from him. He couldn’t understand her, so he smiled at her, said, ‘Let me know as soon as you need me,’ and she nodded and turned away. And he went inside and didn’t know what to do. There was Calumn, expectant and uncertain. His son, holding a cup of juice and waiting for his father to reassure him.
‘Sweetie, drink your juice,’ said Patrick.
‘Uuughaughhhhh,’ said Calumn.
‘I agree. That’s absolutely true, but you should still drink it.’
‘Bhaltabish.’
‘Yes, that’s quite right. Your point is well made. Now let’s have a swig. Can Daddy have some juice?’ And Calumn offered him the cup with a baby swing of his arm.
‘I can make dinner,’ said Brigid’s mother, in the background. She was hovering, in that way she had. ‘Let me help.’
‘Well, if you don’t mind, that would be great,’ said Patrick. ‘Then I could go and give Brigid some support.’
‘Of course. I made some pasta sauce. It just needs heating up. And there’s homemade bread, and soup.’
‘Well that sounds perfect. Of course, have whatever you’d like yourself. There’s white wine in the fridge. Open some red if you’d prefer it.’
‘What about you and Brigid?’
‘I’ll ask Brigid what she wants, if she wants to eat. Don’t worry about me, I’ll eat later.’
‘You should keep your strength up.’
‘Really, I’m fine.’
‘OK little Calumn my darling, we’re going to have a lovely dinner, aren’t we, aren’t we going to have a delicious scrummy dinner?’ said Brigid’s mother.
‘Neaaaar,’ said Calumn, shaking his head.
*
A mixed blessing, thought Patrick, grabbing a handful of peanuts from a bag in the cupboard. Hiding them from Calumn, who coveted foods he couldn’t have. Yes, Brigid’s mother could make dinner and maybe even put Calumn to bed. But later, what would they do later? Surely she wouldn’t stay to the end? The final gore? Last time Brigid refused even to tell her mother she was in labour. She refused to tell anyone. ‘Our private affair.’ Her private pain. Now her mother was here, in the kitchen. Helpful, of course. Irreproachably helpful. It was unfortunate, but he didn’t want her there. With her, he had to play the part, the courteous son-in-law. It was quite impossible to relax with her; she was so determinedly remote herself. Remote from him, not from Calumn, and certainly not from Brigid. It was just with him she was so formal and polite. Perhaps he had just never tested her, and she, too, had been trapped in her guise. But he shook his head, because he didn’t want to think about her.
*
In the garden he stood in front of his wife, and she placed her hands on her hips and leaned forward, so her head was almost touching his chest. He recognised this as a sort of reconciliation. She needed him, however hopeless he was, it was that sort of weary acknowledgement.
‘How bad is it?’ he said, putting his arms around her.
‘Quite bad. It’ll get worse.’
‘How often do they come?’
‘Quite often. But not so I need to count.’
‘Let me know when you want to count.’
‘I will.’
‘I love you. You’re doing brilliantly.’
She didn’t reply. Her face was twisted and he thought another contraction must be starting. She lowered her head and breathed. She breathed like an asthmatic, gasping for air.
*
For a minute they stood, Brigid drawing in air and Patrick trying to think what it must be like for her. A deep pain in the centre of your body. He had been in pain in his life, but he had no real recollection of it. He once broke his leg skiing and he told everyone that the pain had been monstrous, as if something was gouging a hole in his thigh. Yet he remembered only the words he had used to describe it, not the pain itself. His body had rejected the real memory of the pain, as soon as he recovered. Just as you couldn’t really remember the precise sensation of sexual ecstasy, once it had passed. You knew you had enjoyed it, acutely, just as you had acutely despised intense pain. But all the real sensation was gone, there was something you couldn’t quite regain.
*
He was kissing Brigid’s forehead as she stood there, trying to protect her. The silence extended around them, until she sighed deeply and said, ‘That was a bad one.’
‘It’s very wet in the garden,’ he said.
‘It is wet,’ she said.
‘Do you like it?’
‘I did but it’s getting a bit cold now.’
He took her arm and began to lead her along. She was elephantine and fragile, a great round egg cracking open.
*
They both went inside and Brigid kissed Calumn as she passed him. ‘Darling boy,’ she said. He raised his hands to her, he wanted her to hold him. She kissed him as he sat in his high chair, her mother spooning food into his little mouth. He babbled into her ear. ‘Eeeerrrrugggcscckkkbelowbleoble.’
‘I know sweetie, I know,’ she whispered. ‘Mummy loves you. What delicious food you have! What a lovely dinner!’ And she nodded towards the bits of pasta, laid out before him. It was bad, she thought. She was being stretched, drawn out on a rack. She pulled her hand away from her son’s clutching fingers, because she could feel a contraction rising. She kissed him again, ‘Mummy loves you, darling boy,’ and turned away. She was forced to ignore his protests, the way he held out his arms to her. Trying to bring her back. In the living room she sat on a rocking chair. Patrick had put Bach on the iPod, hoping it would calm her. Brigid was aiming to focus on the soft arpeggios, and perhaps as she focused the music calmed her a little. Not enough really; she needed much more than Bach.
*
In the background she could hear Calumn and her mother, Calumn still whining a little, not entirely placated, and she remembered how it had been with Calumn, how finally after all the false alarms she had fallen ill, a horrible stomach virus which made her feverish, and she had been stricken with anxiety because she assumed this would hurt the baby. So she agreed to everything, when they said she must be induced. They took her into the hospital and controlled the contractions with a chemical drip, oxytocin she thought it was, so when they wanted them stronger they poured more oxytocin into her, and when that became too much to bear they stuck a needle deep into her spine and numbed her entirely. Chemicals were flushed through her system, and her body was subdued by them, her responses dulled. And there was a graph beside her, constantly monitoring the baby’s heart rate – she could hear the scrape of a pen on paper, and something beeping regularly, a falsetto pulse – she was rigged up to lots of machines, and the midwife told her she had done the right thing, ‘for you and baby’, she said.
*
Perhaps that was true, even though she was numb and powerless. She had to grab her legs to move them at all. When she wanted to piss, she had to be helped onto a bedpan, and then she barely squatted, could hardly keep herself in position, as she tried to eke out some piss. She was moved – briskly, practically – from side to side by the midwife, and some doctors came and peered inside her. She couldn’t feel their hands at all. They broke the membranes with a hook, ‘a big bag of membranes, hanging down’, they told her, and she couldn’t imagine what it must look like. When the membranes broke, the bed was soaked. So much fluid – the midwife had to change all the sheets, drop them in a sodden pile onto a trolley. She only felt the dampness when it reached her lower legs. The rest of her body was unfeeling, unknowing. Even so, she didn’t think of it as a bad birth. She wasn’t traumatised. She didn’t really understand when friends talked about being d
isappointed by their birthing experience, as if they had hoped for something else. Everything had been managed, and she had been flooded with chemicals, and all the machines had whirred and beeped efficiently and in very little time, her baby had come. She didn’t even know he was coming, she was still pretending to be pushing. The first she knew about him was when they landed him on her belly – a great – it seemed to her – wet thing, his mouth wide open in a scream. ‘Fine set of lungs,’ said someone – a nurse, or maybe the midwife. ‘A beautiful big boy,’ said another.
*
Now Brigid was rocking herself in the living room. She had been determined this time to experience the birth – this phrase she and her friends bandied around, meaning to experience it with a minimum of interventions, or chemicals. This time she wanted to stay at home, to avoid the bleeping and lights and the midwives moving her body around. She wanted to be active, to control the pain herself. She had all these phrases in her head, and she wondered if they would help. She was trapped between two forms of fear; she feared pain, of course, but then she was afraid of those long days and nights in hospital – once you were in there, you had to stay, and more and more things happened to you – and she thought perhaps it was better to endure the finite horrible pain of labour if that meant she escaped all the stitches and scars and bruising which last time made her limp for weeks. Last time the really insidious pain had come after labour, when the drugs left her system and her body finally realised what had happened to it. She was in agony for weeks, and then it took months before she felt anything like normal again. Perhaps this would be better; she hoped it would be better. Pregnancy was an exercise in optimism; having children was an eager assertion of optimism against all the dangers inherent in life, the tragedy which lurked constantly, at the edge of joy. So now she was trying to sustain this perilous optimism, clinging to a sense that things should be well.
*
She was swinging backwards and forwards, trying to focus her mind on this repetitive motion. When Patrick came in and said, ‘What would you like?’ she said she wanted a hot-water bottle and her TENS machine. Before, the rain had helped but now she needed warmth around her lower body; she wanted to be wrapped in warmth. He made her take off her clothes, and dressed her in things he had found in her labour bag. Even as he pulled a sweatshirt over her belly, she felt another contraction rising within her, this questioning, insistent pain. Her body was signalling to her, in these surges. Had she been more instinctive, she might have understood them better. They were becoming more regular and she thought she should time them. ‘Can you get me my phone?’ she said to Patrick, who was gathering up her wet things. When he gave it to her, she fiddled around to find the stopwatch setting, and pressed Go. She kept her eyes on the seconds passing, as the pain gripped her. It was like a crocodile, tumbling her in a death roll. It had trapped her, it was her. There was no escape, until these pains forced out the child. The seconds were moving, time was passing, and still the pain rolled through her, and she saw a minute had elapsed. Then she pressed Stop.
*
‘Every five minutes, lasting a minute,’ she said to Patrick when he came back. He was fixing pads on her back, for the TENS machine. She was wired up to a little box; it was something about an electrical pulse which clouded the brain. The brain couldn’t recognise the real pain beneath the prickling discomfort caused by the TENS machine. It was better to be pricked by a thousand tiny needles, that was what it felt like, this electronic buzzing on her back, than to feel the pure delving stab of her contractions. Voluntarily, she pricked herself, it was strange. It was counter-intuitive, but this dancing of needles on her back started to help. Underneath, she could feel the pain, as another contraction surged and broke. She timed it again. ‘Another one the same,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps a little shorter.’
‘I’ll time them too,’ said Patrick. ‘You just tell me when they start.’
*
It was a different enterprise altogether. A nervous experiment. They were amateurs at this; Patrick with his stopwatch, timing her to the finish. Perhaps they could stay like this until the baby came, she thought. It was consoling to be at home. Around her, the ordinary objects of their existence. The corner of the room, filled with toys. Some plastic trucks. A pile of wooden bricks. A drum and a xylophone. Her mother had tidied, of course. She had stacked things in her own way, so everything looked slightly different from usual. There were books on the coffee table; Brigid couldn’t imagine she’d ever read them. It seemed impossible that she, in this immense pain-filled body, had once sat quietly. Yesterday, though she could barely remember it, she had been sitting in this room, in relative comfort, drinking a cup of tea, smiling at her son as he pushed a plastic truck around. It seemed impossible that she had been sitting there with a book and flicking through the pages, idly and as if she had infinite time. Now she was being seared by the minutes and seconds. She had four minutes to recover. To breathe deeply. She thought she should try to focus on something, a point in the room – the glare of the lights above her, halogen bulbs twinkling from the ceiling. She stared at a point and watched light fill it and dissolve when she blinked, then fill it again. The pain sounded its first notes. She said, ‘Start now.’ A minute of pain. It was possible to endure. And then she was busy with the TENS machine and the rocking chair, feeling the warmth at the base of her spine from the hot-water bottle, and the crackling of electricity on her back. Patrick was staring at the phone. He looked crazy, like a workaholic, unable to take his eyes off the job. For a moment she tried to focus on that, but this thought too was dispersed by the mounting severity of the pain. There was a blank, filled only with pain and her desperate attempts to neutralise it, until finally it receded again. Dwindled and died. ‘Stop,’ she said.
*
‘A minute, after five minutes,’ said Patrick.
‘Quite regular then.’
‘Do you think they’re strong enough to get the midwife?’
‘They said only call the midwife when you’re not coping with the pain.’
‘Do you think you’re coping?’
‘Do you think I’m coping?’
‘I don’t know. It has to be your call.’
*
From the kitchen, there was a wail, an escalating cry from Calumn. Thwarted or genuinely upset, Brigid couldn’t tell. The wail was too muffled, and there was the sound of Bach above it.
‘What’s going on with Calumn?’ she said. In the intervals between the contractions she was comfortable. During those intervals she could hardly accept that she would soon have to bow her head again, that the pain would once more come to ransack her body and she would be able to think only of the TENS machine in her hand and the prickling on her back, and how many seconds more until she was released.
‘Shall I go and check?’ said Patrick.
‘Yes.’
*
So Patrick went out, as the cries became more desperate. She heard his voice in the kitchen. The higher pitch he adopted with Calumn. He was an affectionate, patient man. Her friends told her so, and she knew it anyway. He tried hard, though Calumn usually wanted her, would even push his father away when she approached. She knew that hurt Patrick, but it had been going on for so long now, it seemed impossible to change. She couldn’t remember when it had started, because at first they had been allies, equally shell-shocked and excited, taking turns to rock Calumn when he cried, changing nappies, laughing together about the debris and chaos of it all. Slowly things had shifted. They needed money, one of them had to work fulltime. Brigid could claim maternity pay, so she stayed with Calumn, while Patrick trudged back to the office. He had been sad about it, she knew; he called her up, wanting news from home. Gradually Brigid became the one who consoled Calumn, who woke with him, fed him, bathed him; the one who was always there. When Calumn was ill, when he was feverish at night and could not settle, it was Brigid who went to him. Patrick tried to help, but Calumn wouldn’t stop crying until Brigid came. And because he
worked on the other side of London, because they could not afford to move, Patrick could never take Calumn to the crèche. So Brigid drove there two mornings a week, watched Calumn cry inconsolably in the arms of his ‘key carer’, then she dragged herself away and went home. Often she was in tears in the car. When she got back she had three hours to work and she sat there determinedly at her desk but really her work suffered and she was inefficient, slowed by a sense of heaviness and mental fog. She knew things weren’t easy for Patrick either. He was hardly having a luxury time of it, commuting in London and sitting out the hours in his office. Sometimes she longed to trade places with him, and yet she knew he envied her, on the days when he returned and found her and Calumn huddled together over a book, content in their enclosed world. Another relentless rising pain and she could hear Patrick’s high-pitched comforting voice, though she couldn’t distinguish the words. The crying stopped. She imagined him holding their son, stroking his hair. The pain and breathe breathe breathe. The TENS machine buzzing at her back. The buzzing was superficial, but somehow it heated her belly. It heated her through and slightly assuaged a pain she felt mostly at the front of her body. She thought of her confused brain, tricked by this electrical buzzing. Then she breathed more easily as the pain crashed and dwindled again. Patrick was constantly loving and patient with his son. She should be more grateful and praise him. With the second child, she would be more realistic. She was taking three months off. She would try not to work at all during this time. She would simply enjoy her children. Patrick would go back to work after two weeks, and she would get to know her new baby, and help Calumn to adjust.
The Birth of Love Page 16