‘Work picked up so I had to bin it off.’
‘The computer’s running your Ipswich team now. It sold Sterling to PSG and now you’re in a relegation dogfight.’
‘Fuck’s sake, really?’
‘’Fraid so, lad.’ Sali puts a hand on his shoulder in mock-consolation, which makes Charlie feel ridiculous for having a genuine pang of sadness that the team he built up from nothing to being the best in the world has slid into decline. He deleted the game from his computer the afternoon after he found the pregnancy test and so far he hasn’t relapsed but it’s still galling to hear they’re doing badly.
‘Anyway.’ Charlie shrugs off Sali’s paw and stands up. He’s desperate to drag his moment of freedom out for as long as possible but he said he’d be back straight after football.
Charlie doesn’t know if it’s the pregnancy hormones, he hopes it is, but Naomi’s behaviour is becoming impossible. She wakes him up almost every night because she thinks she can hear things in the house. The pigeons are still roosting, they think under the rafters, and since the thing with the lame one on the front step, every time she hears them she gets het up and makes him go and knock on their window to get them to fly away. She’s been forgetting things; not been able to find stuff and then, when she does, swears she didn’t put it there. She keeps borrowing his phone and when he asks her why she looks at him like a hissing cat and says she has to ‘check something’. He’s had to have Prue on his work days while she goes and does things out of the house, ‘stuff for her’ she says, and that’s fine, he can’t argue about it anyway because she’s pregnant, but she does it at the drop of a hat, forcing him to reschedule calls and meetings and it’s pissing Rinalds off.
Things at work have started to pick up. They have a new client, an entrepreneur with an interest in video equipment, who’s really keen on the steadicam he was working on and might want to collaborate on making a whole range of movie industry equipment for smartphones – steadicams, tripods, focus-pulling equipment. Charlie had to do a Skype call with the client with Prue playing in the background earlier in the week and, typically, she had a poo explosion, a poonami, he had to deal with there and then to avoid ruining the new rug he’s bought for his office.
He’s talked to Amy about Naomi and she said that when someone’s put so much pressure on conceiving, when they finally do, it’s human nature for them to feel anxious about the baby’s well-being. And if they’re someone who already suffers from anxiety, a condition that releases too much adrenalin into the blood, their brain and body are primed for combat, so they will find danger and threat in any everyday moment. However ‘natural’ Naomi’s behaviour may be, it hasn’t stopped it being a massive pain in the arse for him.
‘Anyway, I said I’d be home.’ He dawdles before picking up his bag and jacket. Sali stands with him and they walk out, shoulder to shoulder, towards the leisure-centre car park.
SEVENTEEN
www.yourchildcare.gov.uk/kent/northkent/earlyyears
Abbey Children’s Centre – 4, Poesy Avenue, St Nicholas, WT8 4HG
The Bank of Friendship Nursery – Tivoli Park, Cliffgate, WT9 7JL
Diamond Mill Nursery – 82, Wantombe Street, Burchington, WT8 5HH
The Grove Montessori – 18, The Grove, Cinque Ports, WT11 4KD
Helter Skelter – 128 East Gate Rise, Eastgate, WT11 6GJ
Morningside Montessori – 22, Palm Crescent, WT13 7GG
Mrs P. Vieira – 38, Welwyn Avenue, WT9 6QG
Youngs Early Years Centre – 173, Tiler Street, WT8 7AW
EIGHTEEN
11 weeks
Prue sweeps her fingers across the screen of the tablet like a skilled artist making the final touches to her masterpiece. She woke up with the pallid complexion and raw-meat eyes that accompany a storming cold and she wants the world to know how terrible it is. Her world today is her mother and she’s been giving Naomi both barrels. Which is why they’re now curled up on the brown velveteen armchair in the corner of the master bedroom, and she’s being allowed to play on the iPad for far longer than her daily ten-minute allowance. The screen goes black and Naomi notes how drawn her face looks in the reflection before she scrabbles around the squishy orange cover for the lock-screen button that Prue’s accidentally pressed. The little girl squawks like the seagulls that seem to Naomi to have tripled in both number and volume recently. She reignites the screen, silencing her daughter.
Naomi has a banging headache that pulses like a bassline, vibrations of pain widening out in her head, forcing her to close her right eye, as if, if she didn’t, the pain would escape from it wrenching her frontal lobe out with it.
The sound of a circular saw grinds below her. The builders have been making progress. The walls and ceilings of all the rooms on the first floor are finished and now the carpenter is cutting pieces for the skirting boards and architraves. She’s come up here with Prue to hide from him. He’s a talker and something about the things he says – this morning he described himself as a pagan, for example – and the way he looks at her, she finds disquieting. He’s friendly but she’s convinced he hates women. He tenses the muscles in his hands if she gives him instructions and he uses phrases like ‘happy wife, happy life’ and she’s heard him saying to Charlie ‘whatever you do, make sure she thinks it’s her idea’. The strain of the saw, the eternal thumping hammers, the dentistry hiss and thunk of the nail-gun, the fucking seabirds. This is the soundtrack to their life away from the stresses of the big city.
‘Mummay!’ Prue flips the iPad up and the corner clots into Naomi’s cheekbone.
‘Ow!’ she says too abruptly, shocking Prue. Her little lip begins to curl so Naomi gives her her make-up bag to head off another bout of high-pitched howling. The sawing stops.
Naomi needs a moment, one moment, where she can hear nothing, do nothing and think of nothing. She closes her eyes and doesn’t even flinch when her eyebrow pencil-sharpener cracks open and she feels the shavings drop into her lap. She could just go to sleep.
Crackle, pop.
Her eyes spring open at the sound. She looks on Charlie’s bedside table expecting the little green light on his digital radio to be on but it’s lifeless. The same sound again. A short hiss of static. She shifts Prue, who’s trying to pull the cap off her eyebrow pencil now, on to the seat of the armchair and goes over to the radiator. It’s cold so it can’t have been the pipes or the hot-water tank. The saw starts up again and she hits her hip with frustration. Perhaps it was something outside. Maybe she mistook the sound of a car passing, the wind on the next-door neighbour’s fence. The saw stops whinnying and she sits straight-backed on the edge of the bed and closes her eyes.
The sound again. She glances around the room, bird-like, trying to place it. It could be downstairs, Lenny, but— The pop happens again and she’s up, walking away from the bed towards the window. She stands there for some time. It didn’t come from outside. Prue hops off the chair and saunters over to Naomi. ‘Mummay.’
‘Shhh.’ Naomi extends her arms out as if they were antenna as Prue takes hold of her pyjama bottoms. Naomi holds her breath. A wheezy old diesel van thrums past the house.
‘Mummay.’
‘Please, sweetheart, quiet.’ The little girl does as she’s told. Naomi sways her head, like someone looking for a mobile phone signal, willing the sound to show itself and there it is, a dull fuzz now, almost imperceptible and maybe it is coming from downstairs but it sounds so close, she cranes her ear down and—
‘Mummay! Mummay! Mummy. Look, Mummy!’
‘Shut up! Shut up! Just shut up, can’t you shut up!’ Naomi shouts into her little girl’s face. Prue’s cheeks fold in on themselves and the tears begin to pour out of her, huge globules of anguish, and it’s only then that Naomi notices that she’s drawn eyebrow pencil all over her forehead and she wanted her mother to see. The shame feels like a shard of glass in her throat. She enwraps her daughter in her arms and whispers ‘sorries’ into her ear. The noise she heard
, the meaningless sound, is forgotten. Prue starts saying sorry to her now and Naomi’s tears wet Prue’s yellow, cotton cardigan. She stands up with her, holding her head into the crook of her neck, bouncing her up and down with her like she did when she was a few days old. The long sneer of the saw downstairs crows again.
NINETEEN
http://www.umich.edu/hgg/articles/HGG177829/
Cortisol levels and very early pregnancy loss in humans
Raman S. Chanderpaul,*†‡§ Sally R. Leech,¶ Francine McLaverty,†|| Juan B. Exteberria,‡ Artur Farnerud†††Author information Article notes Copyright and License information
This article has been cited by others in the HGG
Abstract:
Maternal stress is commonly cited as being a potential determining factor in spontaneous abortion.
Before this study there was very little physiological evidence for this proposition. The lack of evidence can be put down to a paucity of research on maternal stress during various gestational periods. We examined the link between miscarriage and levels of maternal urinary cortisol levels at week 8, week 12, week 16 and week 20.
Results:
Rate of Miscarriage
Normal Cortisol Levels Increased Cortisol Levels
Week 8 31% 88%
Week 12 25% 73%
Week 16 23% 69%
Week 20 16% 56%
Discussion:
The high rate of miscarriage in human reproduction has led experts to describe it as ‘inefficient’ and therefore entirely paradoxical in evolutionary terms. However, evolutionary scientists have put forward that the spontaneous abortion of foetuses that are unhealthy, defective, substandard or are born into potentially imperfect birth environment can be reproductively advantageous. The above results, which imply that higher cortisol levels increase the chance of spontaneous abortion, should be considered to support this hypothesis. Imperfect birth environment can be understood as conditions in which the newborn has less chance of surviving i.e. war, widespread disease, famine. Miscarriage in these types of dangerous environments ends pregnancies with diminished chances of success, freeing up the valuable resources of health, nutrition, strength and physical dexterity to be used on a woman’s own survival and for their already existing offspring, which could be crucial during a period of conflict.
TWENTY
Naomi’s thumbnail shoves the cuticle on her other thumb up into the flesh. A muscle in her forearm spasms. The living room is glacial and the rain in the clogged gutter on the side of the house creates a repetitive splash cymbal outside. She feels sick. Prue, face still puffy with her cold, sits on the floorboards playing with some miniature zoo animals. The mid-wife, Lillian, sits down on the marked beige sofa. Naomi never thought she’d look back on her and Charlie’s aborted attempt to conceive on that sofa as a ‘simpler time’. She hovers above the older woman in a way that might make someone seated tell her that she’s making them nervous. But not Lillian. Lillian’s unpacking things from her bag with the precision of a surgeon. A pack of tissues, a notebook, a pen. It’s difficult to age her. Her skin is firm, legs toned and youthful but she has the manner of someone who has seen everything and all that the world has to show neither pleases nor disappoints her. This is a woman who has seen more tears, more pain, more joy, more anguish, more wonder than a hundred people see in their lifetimes. And more death.
‘You’re feeling very sick, yes?’ she asks before extracting one of the tissues and dabbing at her nose.
‘That’s right, yeah.’
‘Not much you can do about that, to be honest. You can go to the doctor and get some anti-nausea medication but—’
‘I don’t want to take medication.’ Naomi crosses her arms. After shouting at Prue she called her midwife and said she needed to see her today. She didn’t have any slots but Naomi pleaded with her and she said she’d pop in on her lunch break.
Lillian leans back in the sofa and looks up at the ceiling. She could be admiring the coving. Naomi’s skin feels riddled with flies, the pricking heat puckering around her chest, but Lillian’s silence tells her she needs to get on with it. She’d already told Naomi that the midwife-led unit at the Kent Hospital Trust is both understaffed and oversubscribed. ‘No matter how bad the world gets, people always want to have more babies,’ she had said.
Naomi spots a stream of canary-green snot running under Prue’s nose so she kneels down and pinches it between thumb and forefinger, making Prue veer her head away. Lillian dips into her packet and hands Naomi a tissue for her to wipe her fingers on. Prue goes back to trying to jam a toy zebra into a small wooden cage.
‘Is there any way of knowing when the baby was conceived?’ Naomi asks. The midwife leans forward and puts the pen and notepad down next to her. ‘An exact date. I need to know. I like to know things, details like that.’ Naomi pulls at a pill of wool on her shoulder before clutching her hands together, aware of the edginess radiating from her.
‘We go from the first day of your last period.’
‘I know, I know that, but is there a way, a test? Is there some way of telling exactly what day, date the baby was conceived?’ Lillian’s brows crease together. She knows Naomi has a problem. She knows she doesn’t just want ‘details’.
‘You and your husband, you made plans to have this baby?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Were you monitoring your basal body temperature?’ Lillian asks, holding her pen at each end.
‘No. We used the test strips.’
‘The ones that detect the surge in LH?’ Naomi nods. Lillian can tell she is a woman that has done her research so doesn’t mince her midwifery jargon.
‘So you know when you ovulate in your cycle.’
‘What if I can’t be sure about when my period started?’
‘You have one of those phone thingies that you write it in. You and your husband both have it, I saw.’ Naomi can’t explain the mix-up. She’s been back through her text messages, her WhatsApps, Facebook and Instagram to try to decipher when her period started but they’ve revealed nothing. In the early days of their trying to conceive she would text Charlie to tell him the bad news, that her period had come, but the last three or four months she’s been so upset a text hasn’t been enough and she’s had to call him, even leaving work once to go and tell him in person a few months ago. With her most recent period, she was so resigned to its arrival that she waited until the evening to tell him. She remembered the conversation but, having checked her diary, she hasn’t been able to put an exact day on it and, even if she could ask him, the exact date is something Charlie’s unlikely to be able to help her with.
‘There isn’t a test that can be done?’ Naomi asks, biting her lower lip. ‘There must be a test to find out when exactly the child was conceived, people must need to know. It can’t be that hard, can it?’ Naomi stares at her thumbnail, unable to face the judgement Lillian might have on her face. She looks out of the window at the cascade of water from the broken gutter on to the muddy scrub of their back garden. Lillian shifts herself on to the floor, making a slight sigh of discomfort as she comes to rest on her haunches. Prue’s on her side, staring at the undercarriage of a plastic buffalo. Lillian takes one of her little wrists and tickles it tenderly. The little girl glances up but doesn’t move, her body mellowing under the older woman’s touch. She speaks in a low murmur to Naomi, all the while brushing Prue’s wrist with her narrow fingers.
‘All this phones and tests and plans. All brand new. Everyone needs to know everything about everything straight away these days. You know, people used to just make babies. And the truth is that no one knows how the miracle happens. And it is a miracle.’ Naomi’s about to interject but before she can Lillian has grabbed one of her hands and shows her her own ragged fingernails. ‘But this? All this? This craziness you are doing to yourself. You think I don’t see the bags under your eyes? I can’t see the blood around every single fingernail you have and where else? All of this, this is hurting th
at little miracle you have inside you. So when? You asking when? It doesn’t matter.’ Naomi pulls her hands away from Lillian and stands up.
‘Thanks for coming by,’ Naomi says, brushing dust-mice off her jeans and walking towards the door. The midwife leans down to Prue and blows into her ear making the toddler ‘ha’ in delight. Lillian gets up using the edge of the sofa as scaffolding, collects her things together and walks past Naomi into the hallway. She opens the front door as she shifts her long arms into her black, puffa coat, the rain-soaked horizon behind her a Turner painting, purple with rage.
‘I’ve been asked the same before. Women who are in the same situation as you.’ She locks eyes with Naomi. She knows exactly why she’s asking her when the baby was conceived. There’s no judgement in the midwife’s face but her knowing still makes Naomi feel like a fallen woman from a bygone age. There’s a relief in someone else knowing, even if neither of them can say it, even though it flushes shame up the back of her throat, it makes her feel calmer. Lillian steps back down the craggy floorboards towards her.
‘There is no way to know exactly what hour, what day you conceived. One day here, one day there. No way. There is a test you can do after the baby is born, to find out, but you know that.’ Naomi kicks at a bit of ragged underlay on the floor. ‘You have a beautiful daughter. You have a good enough husband,’ Naomi gives her a dubious eyebrow, ‘he came with you to see me. That is better than most. Look at this house, big enough for twenty children.’ Naomi nods her head involuntarily. Lillian puts one of those magical hands on her upper arm and stills her. ‘Knowing everything, maybe it’s not so important?’ She squeezes Naomi’s elbow and then shoulders her way out of the doorframe and into the stark, grey outdoors.
Happy Ever After Page 12