Bob casts his eyes downward and sighs. He signals to the doorman. Okay. Just her, there.’
A door is unlocked and Simone pushes through.
She’s not the only one.
Nick has been working his way up the row, helplessly drawn to the burgeoning belly that is Katie. He’s come too close to be separated now. Is it her luminous skin? The lush weight of her hair? The bounty of her breasts? Or her general attitude of ripeness? It is impossible to rationalize, even for Nick, a young man prone to living in his head. Suddenly, instinct has caught him by the jugular, and he’s damned if he’s going to lose her now. He jumps the queue. He slides through the door, inches behind Simone.
Unfortunately, inspired by his lead, so do another four thousand.
Rachel and Aisling, dilly-dallying in Home Accessories, cast one look back over their shoulders, drop their fold-up chairs and make a dash for higher ground. ‘It’s a bloody rat-trap in here!’ shouts Aisling on the run.
‘We’ve got this far, haven’t we?’ shouts Rachel. ‘And we’re not leaving without that bed!’
In spite of her eight-month girth, Katie overtakes the couple, panicking at the thought of a run on meatballs. She is followed – blindly, recklessly – by Nick, who is followed in turn by Simone. Simone is slow to catch up, but quick to spot the new object of her affections. Already she fancies Nick, because she has divined, in the heat of his pursuit, that here is Katie’s boyfriend-to-be.
All five – Simone, Nick, Rachel, Aisling and Katie – are only moments ahead of the moving wall of Ikea devotees.
Rachel, ever the midwife, gets hold of Nick’s elbow as he overtakes her. ‘Is she your partner?’ she says sternly, nodding ahead to Katie.
‘Yes,’ he declares, his own lie taking him by surprise. ‘Yes, she is.’
‘Well, get her home pronto, young man. This is no place.’
‘No… Of course. I will.’
‘Come on, Rachel’ yells Aisling.
But Rachel’s phone is vibrating in her pocket. She flips it open, plugs her ear with a finger and breaks into a run again. ‘Right now?’ she shouts. She looks at Aisling, wide-eyed.
‘Your overdue lady,’ pants Aisling.
‘My overdue lady,’ pants Rachel.
‘I’m coming with you.’
‘No, I’m going back for the shuttle. You take the car.’ She stops, takes hold of Aisling’s hand and presses it in hers. ‘The bed. You’re getting us the bed if it’s the last thing you do.’ Then Rachel turns and walks like a virgin sacrifice into the oncoming crowd.
Nick catches up with Katie at the door of the Food Hall. ‘Listen to me. You don’t know me, but you shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe. I’m getting you out of here, okay?’ and in that singular moment, Oli, her ex-sperm donor, is history.
‘But my meatballs,’ Katie breathes. ‘I need meatballs.’
‘We so do,’ breathes Simone.
Suddenly, fleetingly, Nick understands what it is to be that thing he has never been: a man of action. He jumps the foodhall queue and commandeers a takeaway for two.
‘And the cot!’ cries Katie, her mouth poised to receive the first meatball from her plastic fork. ‘What will I do without a cot?’
They storm Children’s Furniture, where Imelda, still sheltering beneath her bed-tent, peeks out and smiles. ‘How far along are you, love?’
‘Eight months,’ says Katie, licking jelly off her thumb.
Nick grabs an Ikea pad and pencil. He scribbles down the warehouse location numbers, and onwards the three run, like contestants in some terrible reality-TV game, ‘Shop or Drop’.
It is in the Self-Service Warehouse that Katie suddenly fears she will.
‘Oh my God!’ she cries.
‘Oh my God!’ agrees Simone.
Katie pants, planting her hands on her knees. ‘I need the toilet.’
‘The toilet,’ says Simone.
‘The meatballs,’ explains Katie.
‘The meatballs,’ nods Simone.
Katie whispers something in Simone’s ear.
‘And she’s wet herself,’ Simone announces to Nick.
‘Simone!’
‘She’s having the baby,’ says Nick. His gut churns.
‘I am not having the baby!’ barks Katie.
‘We’ve another month to go,’ Simone informs him, smugly.
Shoppers are pouring into the warehouse, hundreds by the minute. Merchandise is flying from the shelves. Arguments are spreading from aisle to aisle, with the relentless rhythm of a Mexican wave. Over the public-announcement system, Manager John Monaghan is begging his customers to remain calm.
In the opposite aisle, through the crowd, Nick spots the head of the friend of the woman who told him to get Katie home. She’s a woman too, thinks Nick. Women are hard-wired with the facts.
Aisling is on the verge of lowering the last Noresund lacquered-steel bed frame on to her flatbed trolley when Nick appears, as white-faced and stricken as a father-to-be.
‘Do you mind if I borrow that trolley?’ he asks. ‘We seem to have an emergency situation on our hands…’
She looks at Nick. She looks at the flatpack. She looks at Nick again.
‘Better luck next time, sweetheart,’ says a burly shopper as he walks away with her bed frame.
By the time she and Nick make it back through the crowd, Katie is in the seismic grip of her second contraction. She sits down on the edge of the trolley, groaning. ‘Three minutes apart,’ says Nick, checking his watch.
Aisling’s lips twitch.
‘I want the toilet!’ Katie sobs.
‘She wants the toilet!’ sobs Simone. ‘Can you walk, K?’
Aisling pulls out her phone and dials 999. ‘An ambulance, please.’
It’s five long minutes and a contraction later before she is connected. ‘ETA: ninety minutes, if you’re lucky,’ says the controller. ‘The North Circular’s blocked in your direction. And we’ve got other Ikea calls. A stabbing. Someone else with chest pains. Crush injuries. We’ll get to you as soon as we can.’
‘Two minutes,’ reports Nick as Katie doubles up again. ‘Those last two were only two minutes apart.’
Katie moans.
Simone moans more.
Five miles away, Rachel is measuring a dilated cervix. ‘Can you see the crown, Ash?’ she mutters into her headset.
‘How do I bloody know if you can see the crown?’
‘Look.’
Aisling lowers the phone. Her eyes squeeze shut. ‘Nick, listen to me. You are going to clear this aisle immediately. Simone, you are going to look at Katie and you are going to tell me if you can see the head.’
‘See the head where?’
‘There. Where do you think?’
Simone swallows and gets down on the floor. She spreads Katie’s legs, peeks under her pink thong, and surfaces at last. ‘No head but… there’s a mega big bulge that just isn’t natural if you ask me.’
Katie starts to howl.
‘That is the head, silly girl!’ Aisling turns away from the mother-to-be and mumbles into the phone. ‘Does that mean it’s going to be premature?’
‘No, she’s okay. She’s past the twenty-eighth week.’
‘But it’s too quick for the first, isn’t it? Something’s wrong.’
‘Nobody’s a textbook, Ash. She’s young, healthy. Chances are she’s perfectly fine.’
‘I need the toiiii-let!’ screams Katie.
‘If she wants to push,’ instructs Rachel, ‘get her to pant.’
‘She wants the toilet.’
‘Do not let her go to the toilet. Get her on to one of their beds and ring me again. She’s about to have an Ikea home birth.’
At the far edge of any chaotic system – new order.
It takes only a moment for Aisling to remember who she is: a senior staff nurse who has frequently seen off Death. She summons all her brusque authority and hijacks the nearby service lift. Nick wheels Katie inside. Simone squeezes
in before the doors rattle shut.
They are returned to the main display area where the crowd has, thankfully, thinned. The front line in the consumer battle has shifted to the warehouse downstairs. Aisling issues shopping lists to Nick and Simone. Then she surveys Bedrooms.
Noresund bed frame: £129. Storfors sprung mattress: £140.
How lucky, she thinks, that they encourage you to try out their furniture in store.
When Simone and Nick return with the plunder, she pulls off the Alvine Blommig bedspread (£35) and smoothes out the Sannie shower curtain (£9, machine washable). She helps Katie to sit at the edge of the bed with her hips hanging off and her knees apart. She covers her with a bath towel (Saxan, £4.90). She positions the work lamp (Morker, £3).
‘Now what?’ she says to the phone wedged in her neck.
Katie is crying. Nick is chewing his knuckles.
‘Get the father to talk to her and to keep talking to her. Tell him to keep her head cool with a damp tea towel or something. Where’s her friend?’
‘She’s just coming now, with water from the food hall. Nick, get over here. Talk to Katie.’
‘And no doctor has responded to the public announcement?’
‘Rache, you can’t even hear the public announcements.’
‘Okay, you’re ready.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘They practically deliver themselves, remember?’
‘I need drugs!’ sobs Katie. ‘My birth plan says yes to every drug!’
‘And we wanted a water birth!’ wails Simone as she enters the scene, sloshing.
‘Oh my God!’ Aisling splutters. ‘The head’s really coming now.’
‘See? What did I tell you? Get in there, Ash. Support it as soon as you can.’
‘I’m going to die!’ howls Katie. ‘Simone, I never guessed I was going to die tonight!’
‘Nick,’ says Aisling, looking up, ‘what did I tell you to do?’
Nick climbs on to the bed, edging close. ‘Katie?’
‘Where’s the… the’ – she gulps breath – ‘doctor?!’
‘She’s a nurse. This woman is a nurse.’
‘Yeah,’ says Simone from the other side of Katie’s legs. ‘She works with, like, dying people.’
Katie screams.
‘Oh my God,’ says Aisling.
‘What? What’s wrong?’ says Rachel in her ear.
‘The head. It’s going crooked, towards her… her thigh.’
‘Not a problem. Where’s the cord?’
‘I don’t know – I can’t see it. Simone, hold this bloody phone to my ear while I –’
Katie’s eyes are swelling shut with her tears. ‘I’m going to die!’
Nick grabs her hand. ‘Katie? Katie, listen to me. Hold my hand, right? As hard as you like. No, don’t look down there. Over here. I want you to look over here. At me. Can you do that for me?’
She’s up on her elbows, her chin wedged tight against her windpipe.
He stacks pillows high to support her back. ‘Okay. Here’s the deal. You’re going to look at me, Katie, and I’m going to look right back at you. The whole time. Got it?’
‘I want to go home!’
‘What colour are my eyes?’
She blinks back her tears, sniffs and focuses slowly. ‘They’re bloodshot.’
‘Good girl. My eyes are bloodshot, and yours, yours are blue. Blue like… like those little spring flowers.’
‘Which ones?’
‘Forget-me-nots. Yeah? And whatever is going on down there, I’m right here. You’re looking at me, I’m not going anywhere and you’re not dying. Got it?’
Quietly, so only he can hear. ‘Got it.’
Across town, Rachel adjusts her Bluetooth. ‘And the cord’s definitely not around the neck, Ash?’
‘No, it’s – oh my God, there’s a shoulder…’
‘Keep supporting the head, Ash. But don’t pull.’
‘And another…’
‘Okay, the rest of the body’s going to come quickly now.’
‘And it’s been so dull up to now.’
‘Hold on’ cos they’re slippery.’
‘You’re telling me? Christ, it’s coming…’
‘Hips?’
‘For sure.’
‘Bum’
‘Oh my God…’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I can’t believe I’m doing this. Give me the death rattle any day. Oh my God, oh my God…’
‘You’ve got it?’
‘I’ve… Jesus.’
‘Ash, you there?’
‘I’ve –’
‘What’s going on?’
‘I’ve –’
‘Talk to me, Ash.’
‘–got it.’
‘You star!’
‘How does it look?’
‘Um. Not pretty.’
‘Beneath the blood and that waxy stuff, it will be slightly bluish. That’s okay.’
‘Do I slap it?’
‘No one does that any more.’
‘Child abuse?’
‘Unnecessary. Wrap it in a towel, then get it by its ankles.’
‘Hey, I’m getting good at this.’
‘Raise it so that its hips are slightly higher than its head.’
‘Okay…’
‘Which will allow its nose and mouth to drain, so it should’ – a cry breaks through Ikea Bedrooms – ‘cry almost immediately. Well done, Ash. You’re brilliant. How’s the mother?’
‘Oh my God… ‘Aisling shakes herself and recalls the view beyond the birth canal. ‘Katie, how are you?’
Katie is purple, dazed and hot. She hasn’t yet released Nick’s fingers from the deadlock of her grip. ‘Is it okay?’
‘Everything is fine.’
‘A boy or a girl?’
Aisling blinks. She lifts a corner of the towel. ‘A boy.’ She studies him for a moment, then smiles at the couple. ‘And, if I’m any judge, I’d say he looks like his daddy…’
Rachel is talking in her ear. ‘So everyone’s okay?’
‘Unbelievably, yes.’
‘One last question, Ash, then I’m needed again here.’ She lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘What about the bed?
Aisling surveys the aftermath with a cool eye. She decides she’d recommend the Sannie shower curtain to anyone. ‘Sorted,’ she says.
Nick records the time of birth with his Ikea pad and pencil. Katie looks down, beholding the baby on her tummy. Simone slumps, exhausted, in a Gunghult rocking chair.
From beneath her bed-tent in Children’s Furniture, Imelda hears the cry of a newborn and, emboldened by old instinct, follows the sound, half asleep, to the small group hovering around the dream bed. It’s one-fifteen. The store was forcibly shut for business a half-hour ago. The paramedics are on their way to cut the cord. Ikea Security, who caught the last ten minutes of the drama on an in-store security camera, have drawn protectively close. Store manager, John Monaghan – who was in early discussions with Bob about a management vacancy – has been alerted. He and Bob are taking the stairs two at a time, eager to check on mother, child and Imelda.
Nick will prove an excellent father, unusually able to cope with little sleep. Katie will be pregnant again within eighteen months, as both she and Nick discover their mutual passion for procreation. They will name their firstborn Ingvar, after Ikea’s founder.
Ingvar will not be quite like other children. Born into the chaotic night of 10 February 2005, he will labour under a certain confusion. He will struggle to learn how to tie his shoes. His limited eye-hand-and-foot coordination will make tree-climbing difficult and swimming lessons near fatal. He will be slow to pick up the natural rhythm and tones of his mother tongue, so many of his teachers will initially think Swedish his first language.
Yet he will try hard to tell his mother about the fluid dynamics he sees in the drip of the bathroom tap. He will look overhead to the movements of migrating birds and predict the subtlest
of gestures within the flock. On weekends, he will show his father the bifurcating beauty of ancient branch and root systems in Lea Valley Park. At the age of ten, he will impress his music teacher with an uncanny intuition for the sacred music of Bach.
Ingvar, in short, will have a genius for complexity.
Years later, at Aylward Comprehensive, he will draw for Allan, his geography teacher, their receding native woodland in bright, dizzying fractals. He will be the first of Allan’s pupils to feel, with him, the secret tug of the earth’s buzzing core. At night, he will dream dreams he won’t remember of the strange attractors of its magnetic fields. And, on Sundays, as he pushes his mother’s Ikea flatbed trolley through the Edmonton store where he first drew breath, he will hear it, in spite of the press of shoppers; in spite of the 300,000-square-foot of box-store. He will hear it: the mute cadences of the earth’s secret flux. Of the world unfolding, minutely.
Where there is milk, where there is honey
Come. Simon says come.
I nearly said it. Then she would have had to come. If I said it once, if I said it again. But something in her face said it could not be said. It told me she would have turned me away.
I wanted us to be there, we two, where the lights go on and on. Where there is milk, where there is honey.
That day time was crashing so fast it was hard to stop my feet; hard to stand still in the toppling tide of up-ramps and down-ramps. But I did. I stopped short, gripping the edge of her desk. She thought it was like any other time when I stopped in front of Nursie Station B. I’d always stop and stare. I’d just have to say it once and say it again.
‘Simon says, have a p-p-pleasant day, Pinkie.’ That’s what I called her.
‘Thank you, Simon.’
‘Simon s-s-says.’
‘Well, I’ll certainly try, Simon.’
I stood staring. A food cart bumped along between us. Cabbage and broccoli steam puffed out like a fart you could see. ‘I know where there’s more food.’
‘Mmm?’ She was looking at papers on her desk.
‘In the Superstore.’
‘Very good, Simon. Well said.’
‘I say a lot m-m-more than that.’
‘I’m sure you do.’
‘In my head, I say it smooth. Simon s-says it once. Then Simon says it again and I c-c-can do it.’
Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction Page 13