by Matt Rudd
William’s Progress
Matt Rudd
Another Horror Story
To Freddie and Felix
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
JANUARY
FEBRUARY
MARCH
APRIL
MAY
JUNE
JULY
AUGUST
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
NOVEMBER
DECEMBER
Acknowledgements
Also by Matt Rudd
Copyright
About the Publisher
JANUARY
‘Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.’
SAM LEVENSON
Tuesday 1 January
I am a father.
I have a son.
My son is alive.
My wife is alive.
My son and my wife are both alive.
I am alive.
We are all alive. Happy new year.
I am a father. Right now. As of forty-three minutes ago. For forty-three minutes, I have been a father.
It must have been the cold air hitting me when I stepped out of the maternity ward. Not just the cold air, of course. I am perfectly capable, under normal circumstances, of not fainting in the face of cold air. There were other contributing factors, too. Lack of food, for instance. I hadn’t eaten for forty-six hours. You lose your appetite when your wife is groaning at you and the midwives are barking at you and no one’s dilating quickly enough and everything’s going wrong. For forty-six hours.
The only sustenance I’d had during the whole debacle was a gulped whisky during the small hours of the first night of the two-night labour when it was only me and Isabel (and the bump). The whisky was purely medicinal. We’d been ‘in labour’ for a good eighteen hours by then and I needed something to stiffen my resolve and prevent me from running, screaming, from the house. What a huge mistake that was. Running, screaming, from the house would have been a far more sensible course of action than staying for the full Reservoir Dogs experience. Isabel and the bump would have managed fine without me.
Lack of sleep: that’s another of the extenuating circumstances leading to my fainting in a bush next to the ambulance bay. I have never stayed up for forty-six hours in my life. Hardened SAS men give up sensitive military secrets if they are kept awake for that long. But I’m not a hardened SAS man, and I wasn’t allowed to sleep. Or I might have been allowed, but I never dared ask: one doesn’t want to appear unsupportive during these (many) hours of need.
As it turns out, the first eighteen of the forty-six hours, the ones in the run-up to the whisky, weren’t actual labour. They were only pre-labour, a sort of softening-up phase God threw in so that everyone would be completely exhausted gibbering wrecks by the time the proper labour began.
I didn’t enjoy the pre-labour. I’m pretty sure Isabel didn’t, either. She was having are-you-sure-this-isn’t-the-actual-labour contractions every fifteen minutes or so. And when I say contractions, I mean proper on-all-fours, groaning and screeching and spitting like the possessed girl in The Exorcist. With me, frantic, helpless, stroking her lower back like they encouraged in the prenatal classes. And her saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ and me saying, ‘It’s okay, darling. Swearing is a good release. They said that in the NCT class.’ And her saying, ‘Okay, well stop fucking tickling my back or I’ll fucking kill you,’ and me saying, ‘Yes, darling’. And then her head spinning around 360 degrees.
That was the pre-labour. Eighteen hours, punctuated only by a midwife coming round and saying, ‘Well done, dear,’ before leaving again. And me, about halfway through, saying, ‘Are you sure you want to stick with the whole home-birth plan, because we could go to hospital like everyone else? They have nice monitors and tubes and drugs there and stuff.’
And then the whisky. Thank God for the whisky. For a minute, a beautifully precious minute, peace and quiet. Nerves settling. The clock saying 1.30 a.m. and me wondering whether I could sneak in forty winks since we all seemed to be relaxing into this whole giving-birth thing.
No. Oh no. The moment of tranquillity evaporated as soon as Isabel gave out a real, proper, blood-curdling scream. It was a new noise altogether, a noise that, if you heard it in the distance while you were sitting in a safari truck halfway through a night drive in the Okavango Delta, would prompt you to immediately ask the ranger to drive you back to the camp. It was a noise that would chill a man to the very core, make him drop to his knees and pray, even though he doesn’t believe in God, to make this all stop happening.
MY PRAYER
Dear Lord,
If you can get us through this thing, this terrifying thing, I promise never, ever to have unprotected sex with my wife or anyone else ever again. I promise to give my life to you and spend my days wandering the world preaching your gospel. Without shoes on and everything. Make the next few hours pass as quickly and painlessly as possible, oh, Mighty One, and I shall never, ever be a twat again, I really, really promise. And I’ll bring up the bump in the Christian faith, rather than encouraging him down a more logical humanist path. I promise.
Amen
…and that was it: the start – only the start – of the ‘real labour’. All systems go. ‘This is Houston, you are cleared for liftoff,’ I said to Isabel in an attempt to sound excited and positive.
‘If you say anything else that makes me feel like a space shuttle, I will kill you,’ she replied. ‘Now call the midwife back and tell her to get round.’
The midwife arrived. Four centimetres dilated, she said. Only four? Six whole centimetres to go. Six! Jesus. I mean, blimey. Sorry, God. I started another prayer, but the midwife interrupted, telling me to make myself useful by pumping up the birthing pool. Yes, of course, the birthing pool. Must pump up the birthing pool.
BIRTHING POOL: INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE
1. Important: make sure you unpack the birthing pool and inflate it prior to use to ensure that you are familiar with the equipment and there are no faults. Aquasqueeze Ltd will not offer a refund if any pool malfunctions are only discovered during the birthing procedure.
(Frankly, it was a miracle I even read the instructions on the day, let alone prior to use. I mean, seriously, as if it’s necessary to have a trial run of a glorified paddling pool.)
2. Plug in pump.
3. Pump.
Why didn’t I do a trial run for the paddling pool? It’s childbirth, for goodness’ sake. You don’t muck about with childbirth. But it was one of several things I hadn’t done. I hadn’t read any of the baby books Isabel had asked me to read. I hadn’t got in an awful lot of lie-ins. I hadn’t painted the bathroom, the horrible old bathroom with its horrible old paint. I had painted the nursery, but badly. The birthing pool was the least of my worries. Except, it wasn’t.
It took forty minutes to inflate the pool, during which time the foot pump and I fell out on several occasions. I twisted one ankle and had room spin twice. Shouldn’t have had the whisky. It took another ninety minutes to fill the pool with water using a complicated, improvised, ever-so-slightly panicky siphoning system I devised with the garden hose, a colander, a plastic bag and the bath. Why hadn’t I worked this all out earlier? Idiot, idiot, idiot.
The leak was discovered at approximately 0400 hours, long after the helpline at Aquasqueeze Ltd had closed. Mind you, they were probably closed for the entirety of the Christmas period, anyway. That’s the trend these days, isn’t it? No one’s going to turn up for work at a birthing pool company on New Year’s Eve, even though it’s a Monday. Even though people still might be giving birth. That would be far too much to
expect, now wouldn’t it?
Only once the pool was full did the pressure begin to force water through the until-then-unnoticeable tear right at the base. From then on, it was like a crack in a dam in a 1970s disaster movie. It got bigger and bigger and bigger. I was already too tired and dehydrated to cry proper tears, and Isabel and the midwife were too busy doing grim things in the front room to notice.
I put a finger over the hole and looked around the dining room. Why we had decided that Isabel should give birth in the dining room and not somewhere one might find the necessary equipment to mend a leak, I have no idea. Next time, we’re doing it in the garden shed. Plenty of appropriate mending equipment in there. Back in the dining room, all I could reach was masking tape. Masking tape is porous, but it bought me enough time to find the Sellotape. Which bought me enough time to explain to Isabel, between contractions, that the pool was ready, but that she couldn’t bounce around in it or anything because, well, it was a touch, erm, faulty, darling…
She didn’t like this idea.
‘I told you we should check the effing pool out before I—bbleeeaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhh’.
There are at least some advantages to regular strong contractions. You can only get shouted at for the ever-decreasing periods in between.
7 a.m. Six centimetres dilated. Could it go any slower?
10 a.m. Seven centimetres. But maybe still six because things are getting a bit swollen down there.
‘Keep going, darling, you’re doing wonderfully,’ I told her, while reflecting that God really could pick up a bit more support if he answered the odd agnostic’s desperate prayer every now and again.
By midday, we were on to our third midwife and the pool was starting to sag. Sellotape can only go so far.
By 4 p.m., I had given up trying to keep the water in the sagging pool at a comfortable temperature because Isabel was now roaming around the house like an injured animal. Absolutely no point sitting in the dining room with a thermometer and a kettle when your wife is in a dark corner of the bedroom growling at anyone who tries to offer her a biscuit. And then it was 10 p.m., and the two latest midwives had decided that she was eight centimetres, but Isabel had had enough.
‘I’ve had enough,’ she said quietly and I had to look away because I didn’t want her to see how frightened I was.
So we went to the hospital…her in an ambulance with blue flashing lights and everything, me following in the Skoda without blue flashing lights, the baby bag, a change of clothes or anything. Idiot.
Drugs, gas and air, epidurals, something that sounded like Sanatogen, more slow progress, baby in distress, mother in distress, me shaking my fist at bloody non-existent God for the ridiculous, stupid, impossible nature of childbirth. And then, suddenly, at 5 a.m., I hear the phrase ‘fetal distress’. Isabel is barely conscious. The bump is in trouble.
‘We have to get this baby out. You’ve been going long enough, dear,’ said a no-nonsense midwife with arms like beanbags. And Isabel burst into tears of sheer exhaustion and resignation.
I can’t remember much about the Caesarean, except that it was quick and there were slurping noises like when you’re at the dentist and the assistant sticks the vacuum cleaner down the back of your mouth and you try to keep it away from your epiglottis because you were already very close to gagging but she’s not paying attention because it’s almost lunch and she’s bored, and, oops, a little bit of breakfast has come up and now the dentist doesn’t like you, which is annoying because it wasn’t your fault, it was the bored assistant’s.
At the point of incision, Isabel had to tell me to stop squeezing her hand so hard because it was hurting. Then the doctor made a joke and I made a joke and Isabel had to tell us all to stop joking. ‘Gallows humour,’ I said and immediately regretted it. Three or four seconds or minutes or hours later, there was a piercing, gurgly scream from behind the turquoise curtain: our boy, beautiful, grumpy from all his efforts to escape Isabel. My turn to burst into tears.
And that was forty-three minutes ago. Now I am lying in a bush and an old lady is prodding me with her Zimmer frame and I’m laughing and crying at the same time.
I phone the families. They are equally pleased that we are all alive.
Isabel’s dad says, ‘Bloody home births. Bloody ridiculous. This isn’t the Crimean War.’ And I have to explain, not for the first time, that these days women are empowered to make choices and that Isabel didn’t want to give birth in hospital. He points out that she did in the end. I point out that he’s right and I don’t care…the main thing is that everyone’s alive and he is now a grandfather.
‘A grandfather? Yes, I suppose I am,’ he replies more warmly. ‘About time, too. I was beginning to think Isabel was past it. Everyone leaves it so late these days. I mean, in my day, you got married and you got on with it. None of this work–life balance nonsense. As slow as a giant panda, but you got there in the end. Well done, my boy.’
I then have the same conversation with Dad before he puts on Mum, who is immediately hysterical and then tells me her birth story, which I’ve heard a thousand times before and don’t want to hear this morning. Not now that I have my own which is just as gory.
‘I have to go, Mum. I need to check on Isabel and the bump.’
‘You can’t call him “the bump” any more. Doesn’t he have a name? Please tell me you’ve decided on a name. Please tell me it’s not something trendy.’
‘Not quite. But you’ll be the first to know.’
THE HORROR OF NAMING A CHILD
There is much responsibility attached to having a baby. This much we know. But by far the worst aspect of it is giving the child a name, particularly if it’s a girl. Every girl’s name that Isabel thought was sweet was a porn name. Chloe. Jessica. Ella. We may as well just call her Pamela. Or Paris.
‘What about Sarah?’ Isabel had suggested, reasonably.
‘No, I snogged a girl called Sarah. We were only fourteen and she let me touch her breast. Not appropriate.’
‘What about Susannah?’
‘Everyone snogged Susannah.’
‘Maybe you could give me a list of girls’ names that have no sexual connotations for you.’
‘Okay, Beatrice.’ Because Isabel isn’t the only one who can make reasonable suggestions.
‘Beatrice?!’
‘Yes, or Bea for short.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
This went on for months and all we agreed on was that we shouldn’t go for an ‘interesting name’, like Apple, Moon Unit or Prince Michael II. You are not, as the axiom goes, more interesting because your children have interesting names.
‘What about Electra?’ she suggested while we were failing to choose a pram at John Lewis.
‘Are you making these preposterous suggestions simply so I have to say no a lot so that when I make sensible suggestions in return – like Mildred – and you say no, you don’t appear unreasonable?’
‘Electra was my grandmother’s name.’
I only realised she was joking when we got back to the car. You can lose your sense of humour with the whole girls’ names fandango.
On boys’ names, we had narrowed it down to thirty. My favourite was George, but because her favourite was Albert, which is French and makes me think of pierced foreskins, I had to agree that we would cancel out favourites. Next was my Kit (after the car in Knight Rider, thereby guaranteeing my unborn child a life of success and coolness of which I could only ever have dreamed), knocked out by her Finbar. Neo and Ralph went the same way, but for a long time we found common ground on Elijah.
‘Elijah,’ I had announced proudly to Johnson in the pub. ‘Elijah Walker.’
He’d looked at me coldly, looked at his pint forlornly and said, ‘Poor kid. Poor, poor kid, with his poncey parents and his ridiculous name that will follow him through life ruining any chance he ever had of not being judged. Another pint?’
That left us with deadlock, so we decided to put t
he whole terrible matter on hold until nearer the time. And then we got nearer the time and were no closer to resolution. Then the time came and went. And now we are the proud owners of an unnamed child and the grandparents are appalled.
Back in the ward, Isabel is sleeping. So is Bump. Ahhh, they are so sweet. Look at him with his little head. His tiny little head. Is it too little? It looks very small. So do his arms. His arms are too short. Oh, God, a short-armed son. Didn’t Hitler go off the rails because of his short arms? I can’t remember. I’m so tired.
‘Darling, you’re hurting my stomach.’
‘What? Who? How? Oh, God. I’m sorry.’ I had nodded off on the chair and slumped forward on to the recently dissected stomach of my wife. ‘I’m so, so, so, so, so sorry. Are you okay? Should I get the doctor? Shall I press that emergency button?’
‘It’s fine. I’m fine. Look at your beautiful son’.
And there he is, looking straight at me. Possibly. Hard to tell, though. He has a glazed expression. He looks a bit dopey. Oh, God, is he simple? Will he still be living with us when he is forty, in an anorak, untouched by women, untroubled by a career, enthused by nothing but trains and their sequential numbering system. Oh, God.
He hiccups and there is a flicker of alertness. No, it’s fine. Everything is fine. And we are all alive. ‘I love you, darling. Happy new year.’
‘Darling? Darling? DARLING!’
‘What? What happened?’
‘You fell on my stomach again.’
‘Oh, God. I’m so, so, so, so—’
‘Why don’t you go home, have a rest, get the bag of things I told you not to forget last night and come back? Bump and I will be fine.’