Common Ground

by Rob Cowen

  When the first liquid grey light steals through the yard, it takes me by surprise. I blink and peer out at the familiar shapes forming in the silver-black – the log shed, the little flowerbed, the back gate, the trellis coiled with a climbing rose gone wild. Eastwards a hairline crack in the black has opened above the rooftops. It is fascinating thing, vanishing to a tiny point like a bronze road into another dimension. Then, from above, a muffled cry breaks the silence. It comes again, clearer now. Rosie is calling my name in a voice I’ve never heard before. I drop the mug in the sink and run, taking the stairs two at a time, but before I even reach her, I know what it means.

  For the past nine days we have had a hold-all packed and ready, stashed in the corner of the bedroom by a Moses basket, similarly primed: cleaned, blanketed and waiting for occupancy. In our ‘hospital bag’ is an array of oddities to ease the journey ahead – flannels, drinking straws, an iPod filled with relaxation music and affirmations. And, sitting on top, my tatty notebook. After a few hours the contractions have quickened in frequency but our house isn’t very far from the hospital and two phone calls later, we’re still at home. Still waiting. By ten o’clock all that remains for me to do is to make sandwiches. Mum will need her strength we’re told in the NHS leaflet, also tucked into the bag, like an invite to a party. Even so, it seems an absurdly mundane task when every six minutes, counted out carefully on the oven clock, Rosie is doubling over, gripping my arm and riding a sea-swell of internal pressure for sixty seconds, sighing, breathing, humming. I hold her, support her body and rub her back as she crests each surge, then dash back to peeling the boiled eggs and mashing them up with mayonnaise. ‘What about the smell?’ she asks, leaning on the sofa recovering her breath. ‘Won’t egg mayonnaise stink out the place?’ I point out there’ll probably be worse smells to contend with in a maternity ward and then admonish her for always worrying about others, even now, while secretly thinking how wonderful that is. But we are out of bread anyway. We both laugh. Amateurs; so excited and so frightened. After another contraction passes I dash to Sainsbury’s around the corner. The world outside the door is superficially the same – cars and traffic lights; a clear October day, born cold and growing colder – but it feels like I’m on a different frequency, a different rhythm, and numb to everything else. It’s like being caught in a tractor beam radiating from somewhere beyond, a warm, nervous energy that is pulling me steadily and unstoppably towards a place where nothing will ever be the same again. It’s only when I run to the checkout clutching a loaf that I discover I’ve left my wallet at home. ‘My wife’s about to have a baby,’ I mumble, ‘I’m sorry.’ I’m halfway out of the door when the girl on the till calls me back. Her eyes search my face for something. Honesty, perhaps. She curls stray bright-red hairs behind her ear as she checks the aisle behind me. Her purple shirt moulds around a distinct bump of her own. Five or six months, I’d guess. ‘Here,’ she says, handing me the bread. ‘Take it. Bring the money another time.’

  It’s a kind act, one that could get her into bother, and I’m touched. I read the name badge pinned to her fleece and smile. ‘Thank you, Lauren.’

  An hour later our bags are by the door, coats on top and I’m pacing the hall itching to do something. Rosie is back on the phone to the maternity ward. The contractions are getting stronger and the midwife is asking when she last definitely felt the baby. When Rosie explains it was sometime during the night I hear the voice at the other end click into a different gear: ‘OK, right. Well, you need to come in now. We’ll have to check the baby’s heartbeat.’

  There are things I remember from coming here for Rosie’s scans: the surprising hugeness of the hospital, its coraltoned brickwork and blue railings, the buddleia now gone to seed in beds by the steps, the warmth of the corridors and the smell of disinfectant. What I missed on previous visits were the two photographic portraits of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh staring down benevolently from the walls. Opposite them, so it appears like the Duke is struggling to make sense of it, a map explodes the hospital’s many floors and wings into details. It’s like a disassembled diagram from a car manual, too much to take in. I just see random words: Radiology, Cardiology, Chapel, Restaurant, X-ray. ‘It’s down here,’ says Rosie and off we squeak down the corridor, her arm on mine, pausing each time she begins to feel the pressure within to adopt our practised positions: interlocking arms and hands the way ballroom dancers do just before the music starts.

  The tawny owl has flown from the walls of the Antenatal Clinic along with the rest of the menagerie of animals. Other signs have replaced it: more tinselly adverts for baby photographers and a poster-paint globe cupped in a human hand. Heal the World, it instructs in rainbow letters tacked above. In a small room off to the side, Rosie sits up on a bed as a cardiotocograph asserts the vivacity of our baby’s life via twitching needle and a jagged mountain range drawn along a roll of graph paper. Half an hour later and satisfied with the topography, the midwife beams at us: ‘All good. You can probably go home now, to be honest.’ She lifts up the half-watch clipped to her pocket. ‘Baby could be hours away yet.’ But we don’t go home. Instead, we’re moved up a flight of stairs to an empty observation bay. It is a peachy room in every sense, filled with clean beds, each with a pay-for-TV monitor suspended on an arm above it. The screensavers flick in sync between live news and adverts. After another contraction passes, we take the bed by the window. A horse chestnut folds its rusty leaves up against the glass. Beyond it, over a security fence, a few dog walkers and runners are crossing a thick, flat swathe of green edged with trees. It’s a view and a half. You can see a long way from here, a long way back.

  The maternity wing overlooks the Stray, the 200-acre horseshoe of common ground created in a famous gesture during the land enclosures in 1778. This wasn’t to be ‘common’ in the sense understood before the acts were passed; it wasn’t to sustain the landless or dispossessed poor. The Stray’s limited grazing rights or ‘Cattlegates’ were strictly for those copyholders recognised as previously holding tenancy over the ground, and of the fifty cattlegates allocated, the devisees of baronet Sir Thomas Ingilby received twelve. Rather, the Stray was a gesture to appease the new and emerging class of landowners concerned that the privatisation of the mineral springs here would damage the wider area’s reputation as a burgeoning English Spa. Responding to their petitions, the King (through his title ‘Duchy of Lancaster’) bequeathed them the land with the promise it would remain open common where all and sundry could enjoy free and unfettered access to the medicinal waters for ever, without being subject to the payment of any acknowledgment whatsoever for the same, or liable to any action of trespass, or other suit, molestation, or disturbance whatsoever, in respect thereof. Protected by law, this gift set in stone the future of the rural hamlets of High and Low Harrogate as well as the older township they fell under: Bilton-with-Harrogate. It created the environment whereby a grand resort could rise and flourish, attracting visitors to its wide avenues and tree-lined parks, its hostelries and assembly rooms. And, importantly, the unique concentration of springs set amid this rolling curve of public green. Those were different times. With the spa industry drying up for good in the 1930s, the Stray now finds itself tussling with the legacy – Harrogate is a tourist hotspot, residential jewel and conference venue that requires space more than it does springs. Zoom out and you see these 200 acres surrounded. Hemmed and threaded with roads, the Stray is now encroached from every direction, squeezed by the fine, imposing architecture of the ‘old’ town on one side and, on the other, the density of streets, houses, churches and schools that form its southerly suburbs.

  I open the window as far as it will go. About three inches. With no one here to be offended, we eat our egg mayonnaise sandwiches and then conduct laps of the room, arm in arm, returning after each to rest and take in the vista of grass and trees. Dutifully, Rosie plugs in her iPod and closes her eyes. Through her earphones I can hear the faint sound of hypnobirthing affirmations.
An American woman with a voice like silk: The colour violet causes the mind to vibrate; all of nature is in tune with violet. Go deeper. You are a vehicle of nature. In tune with nature. Go even deeper. Now envisage yourself in a soft, green mist. Just as the earth springs forth life so too will your body …

  Sitting beside her on the bed, looking through the window, I can just about make out a small, hexagonal stone building, an elegant pump room constructed in the nineteenth century over one of the Stray’s famous iron or chalybeate wells. It is shut up now like an abandoned lighthouse in a sea of grass, an oddly ornate distraction for those idling in traffic. A toppled turret. Nothing more. A dead king’s wishes about free water carry little weight these days. Every spring in Harrogate is under lock and key. I’m not sure what that implies – perhaps they need to be for their own protection – but walking here sometimes after heavy rain I’ve found patches where those ancient iron and sulphur waters have leached back up through the boggy grass, pooling and puddling again in the Stray’s dips and muddy corners. Birds flock to these mineral lagoons just as they have for millennia, before every stone, brick and human story was laid down here. To see that scene enduring among the queues of cars restores me in some small way.

  Rosie’s waters break at 3:30 p.m., halfway through another loop of the room. A different midwife, Jean – a short, kind-faced woman with glasses and grey hair dyed to blond – arrives with paper towels, checks her watch and makes a note. I’d no idea it was so late. Time has become an elastic concept outside the precise clockwork of the contractions, arriving now every four minutes, and for forty intense seconds. ‘You’re three centimetres dilated, too,’ Jean says, peeling off a rubber glove. ‘So I think we should move you to the labour ward.’ She smiles at me. ‘Let’s call it a free upgrade.’

  Jean fetches a wheelchair as I pack up our stuff. I have that same punched-gut tension as you feel the moments before stepping on a stage – that edginess. And it won’t go. Rosie is pushed down the corridor past idle equipment and boxy incubation chambers, but I don’t think she’s taking any of it in. Her eyes are becoming more focused after each wave, as though she is staring inwards at something I can neither see nor hear. Past rows of drawers and a bright reception desk, we’re shown into a room with a single, high, mechanical bed in its centre and a bathroom to one side. Jean and a nurse move automatically through the space, opening drawers and preparing equipment as they ask questions and strap a blood pressure monitor on Rosie’s arm: Do you want some water? Would you like to try a bath? Polite as ever, Rosie answers each – No, thank you and Yes, please – then succumbs again, folding over the bed, interlocking hands with mine and releasing a long humming breath deep into the hospital sheet.

  I’ve never heard of it before, but midwives rely on a kind of data record designed to draw order from the process of birth. It has a name – Partogram. It makes the details of labour, such as dilation, the baby’s heart rate and the mother’s vital signs visible and measurable so that any variations can be identified and investigated. Jean explains that she is starting one and then wires Rosie up accordingly. After handing her a little paper cup with pills in, I watch her write: Paracetamol (1gm) and codeine phosphate (60mg) taken – declines further analgesia.

  Perhaps they’ve dimmed the lights or it’s growing darker through the window but the monitor recording the baby’s heart rate glows a bright orange and for a while I can’t take my eyes off it. I stare at those digits, thinking of what’s behind them: the life nosing its way out of its dark world, a fluid-lunged thing beginning to haul itself ashore through the breakers. The bath next door fills, cools and is run out again. We mean to reach it but after an hour of trying Rosie is back on the bed contorting with the tides inside. Together we wrestle the pull and the pain, locking our fingers, gripping, straining, stretching, and it dawns on me that I’m holding on to her as much as she is to me. Our heads pressed together, I’m whispering words of encouragement, knowing she’s only hearing tones. And in between the crests of the contractions, Jean is talking her down, a trainer in our corner – calm, calm, you’re doing great – as Rosie drags deep from the gas and air. And then it surges again and she cries against the inevitability of it, before channelling, breathing and bracing. Jean lifts her voice, coaxing the animal in her: ‘OK, NOW PUSH THIS TIME. PUSH NOW. SHOUT IF YOU WANT TO. BUT PUSH. That’s brilliant.’ Except I’m seeing something else: each time Rosie pushes those orange digits on the monitor plummet. Jean glances at them too and makes hurried notes. Decelerations, they call these; the baby’s heart rate is swooping low with every uterine contraction before swinging back up again as it subsides. It’s difficult to watch; a necessity to bestowing life that seems to come close to ending it every time. Come on. Come on – I’m willing it – come on, little thing. Another hour or more with Rosie, head-down, rolling into the waves every two minutes and for a minute, but no further progress. It seems a futile torture and I can see she’s tiring with every exertion; her face is red, exhausted and soaking with sweat. But baby has to come now – that’s what Jean is saying. Baby has to come. By 6 p.m. it is concerning enough that she asks another midwife to send for the duty doctor.

  A tall man in smart trousers, blue shirt and a white coat breezes in, smiles and introduces himself with a warm Nigerian lilt. He checks the Partogram and quietly confers with Jean. I hear words passed between them – vertex, presenting, crowning. Then he nods and asks in a sudden calm, loud tone, like a headmaster: ‘Why don’t we have this baby now, Rosemary? You know you can, don’t you? You know you will do it. You just have to push now, Rosemary. When it comes … NOW.’ Suddenly there are three of us willing her – Yes! Yes! That’s it – as the current drags her down again. She pushes back against the pillows, eyes shut, biting her lips. And the noise she’s making now is a soul-noise, an animal noise. I press my head into hers again, my arm around her shoulder, and I’m rocking and whispering all the reassuring words I can think of. Any spell to conjure this life from her and end the pain. I feel the sinews of her straining neck and her iron strength and hear the juddering, bellowing of deep, desperate lungs. She calls out again, a long howl, which resolves into a sharp series of exhalations, each a moan or a ‘hooo’. A commotion as Jean and the doctor cheer and lean forwards and suddenly something else is with us: a slick, bruise-coloured, blood-cowled form that Jean attends to quickly but gently. She wipes it, clears its face and then lays it shivering and unfolding on Rosie’s chest. ‘It’s a boy. A little boy,’ says Rosie and then, ‘Thomas. Thomas.’ And I’m face to face with a life that has fought its way to this beginning, all the way from nothing, from eternity. Thomas who, had things been different, might never have been, but now squeaks in his mother’s arms as some hitherto unrealised part of my brain counts each of his strengthening breaths. And with every one I’m becoming more lightheaded. My heart is thumping in my chest. This brew of emotions is strong; old waters are bubbling up through the grass. Instincts. There are words they use in the books, words like ‘wonder’, but all are insufficient to relay the hugeness of the shift, the acute brightness and sensitivity like your head’s been thrust through a door into a different room, as if it’s you that’s just been born. And your mouth is asking ‘Is he OK?’ once, twice, because you feel useless and you can’t hear properly and because you’re too scared to do anything but ask that dumb question and look. In fact, that’s what the books should tell you: that you can’t stop looking and that, from here on, there will be no end to your fascination. How you are seeing in the present tense and differently, more like the way a hawk sees: every lash, pore, patch of skin and every shaking, stretching limb, every fingernail and toe; the small exactness of the lips and those welded-shut eyes scowling open and rolling towards the light. But you’re not seeing with the fury of a predator identifying weakness; it’s the attentiveness of adoration. You’re thinking, Careful! Be careful, as though he is made of thin glass. The books should explain that this brings as much terror as euphoria and how you mig
ht not realise you have tears looping down to your jaw until the doctor tells you; how even the soft hospital blanket they place around his innocent little form can seem like a desecration of perfection.

  Then, at some point while I’m distracted and staring, a different animal steals into the room. Jean has not ceased in her attendance of Rosie, her care necessary because the placenta didn’t birth properly. The cord came away in her hand (1820 hrs Valementous insertion – the Partogram records), but I presume this must be a fairly common occurrence. No one seems too concerned. There are a couple of injections before the doctor is called back to perform another summoning and deftly removes the placenta. Right, I think, that must be that. ‘You’ll be fine now,’ Jean confirms as she pops out of the door, ‘so I’ll leave you alone for a bit.’ And then it’s just the three of us wrapped up in each other, lulled into a beautiful calm until, weirdly, Rosie stops speaking to Thomas. Then altogether. Even making those soft, low mammal sounds has become too taxing for her. ‘Are you OK?’ She smiles, and then blinks wearily down at the boy. I kiss her forehead and notice how pale it has become. Fatigue. The lights. Must be. The garish strips have been flicked on above us. She closes her eyes and shuffles position, as if going to sleep. Her long, brown hair falls in twists across her face and arms; peat streams coursing through snowy moor. She’s too pale. I frown. Then I hear the splash of water on stone. I take a step back and see blood spreading across the linoleum.

  I must be shouting because Jean and a nurse run in exactly as another splatter spills sickeningly onto the floor. They both cry out ‘Oh!’ at the bright, scarlet pool. It is the movie blood of veins, arteries and haemorrhages. Panic hits me like a slap and I stroke Rosie’s head: ‘What is it, sweetheart? What’s wrong?’ But she won’t – or can’t – respond. Her arm goes limp and slides from Thomas, leaving him washed up on her breast. As the nurse slams the red alarm button over the bed, Jean scoops the baby up in a single movement and hands him to me. Then the doctor bursts in and suddenly I feel like I’m falling backwards or that the bed and its attendants are drifting away, the way a loosened boat slips from harbour. And now I see it and feel it, that wild animal that crept into the corner while my guard was down. I sense its size and shape; nature’s other side, the chaotic antithesis of the hypno-birthing affirmations; this vicious twin of glorious creation and I’m thinking, You cruel fucking thing, to give and take in the same gesture, to open the heart and sharpen the senses, then do this. Leaning over her, the doctor is asking firmly and loudly: ‘Rosemary? Rosemary?’ And I want to yell at him – Stop talking and DO something – but they are trying, and I see that too. Drips are wheeled to the head of the bed; saline and bloods quickly plumbed into the back of her hands. There are more injections. Her blood pressure flashes on a monitor (88/50). Jean lays paper towels on the floor so nobody will slip. But I’m still slipping, further back to the window and to the darkness outside, struggling with the unfathomable weight of this baby staring up at me with its deep dark-blue eyes. ‘It’s OK,’ I whisper with my lips touching his forehead. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’ But I’m not talking to Thomas; I’m haggling with that presence staring indifferently at me from the bed. Please. Not this. Not this. Of course, there’s no arrangement you can make, no matter how hard you beg. It just glares back asking if I remember what being animal really means. And as Rosie lies there passed out, her blood darkening the paper towels, I realise I do. I’m afraid like I’ve never been before. The animal terror. ‘Learn to fear,’ advises J. A. Baker in his dark, apocalyptic book The Peregrine: ‘To share fear is the greatest bond of all.’ And I feel it now more deeply than I thought possible. Fear, the spark that ignites the flight of deer; that freezes the hare in its form; that fuels the owl’s defence of its nest; that makes the fox caught in wire tear off its claws trying to escape. Enough, I say into Thomas’s soft skin. I’ve seen enough. Please stop.