by Morag Joss
In a state of amazed exhaustion they lay together through the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. The bedroom was freezing. Under the covers, they could believe themselves just about warm enough if they did not move. Lying face to face, they laughed because their noses, when they touched, were both so cold. Above them the dog barked, and feet pounded. They dozed. Hours passed and they watched darkness come, the time of day an irrelevance. Then Michael wanted her again, and afterwards Steph fell asleep while Michael lay looking at the ceiling, trying to place himself in this new, re-ordered scheme of things. From his bare past, which already he was thinking of in the way that a freed man thinks of prison, it was like stepping through an archway. It almost eclipsed the finding of his mother but was also part of the same thing, marking the beginning of his life as a person who had other people. He turned and looked at Steph’s face. Her eyes, so large, seemed smaller when she was asleep. The eyelids were thin-skinned and bluish and reminded Michael of a baby bird. Her lips had relaxed and seemed fuller. They were still wet. His eyes wandered down to the swell of her stomach over the duvet, the line of her splayed legs. He placed a hand gently on her and let it climb her curve, barely touching. He could hardly bear the distance her sleeping put between them, but he would not dream of waking her. There was no hurry. They had each other. And soon there would be a baby, and all of them, they would all belong to one another. A voice in his head declared it.
When Steph woke she looked even more tired than before, and she had a headache. When she told Michael that she had eaten hardly anything since he had left the house, he went into the kitchen, where he found her frankfurter spaghetti in a coagulated mess. He brought her tea and biscuits, feeling slight consternation because he was out of aspirin. Then Steph said she wanted a bath, so he switched on the immersion heater. It only produced enough water for one bath, so he washed in cold water and got dressed. Later he returned to the bathroom and ran a bath for her, fetching a clean towel and placing an old one on the floor. It had occurred to him that the wet floor might be dangerous. What if she were to slip while he was out? He explained all this solemnly, warning her to be very careful and to step onto the towel on the floor, while Steph lay propped up on his pillows and drank her tea, listening and nodding, rather stunned. Michael could have laughed aloud with the pleasure of spoiling her. He still had not told her about Jean, and she had not asked. Things had happened too quickly, and even now he was in a hurry to get her the aspirin. Suddenly he was so busy, life was so full.
‘You’re nice and cheerful, anyway,’ Steph said, looking over her mug of tea.
‘Yeah, well, and I reckon you are too,’ he said. ‘Cat that’s got the cream, that’s you.’ She laughed.
He came back with paracetamol, which the pharmacist had told him was better than aspirin for pregnant women, and two or three carrier bags of food including a chicken and a bottle of wine. He found Steph sitting on the sofa in front of the fire, barefoot, dressed in pyjamas and one of his sweaters, combing out her hair, which dangled in wet loops over the towel round her shoulders. She looked up almost shyly because she had planned for him to notice her hair. She wanted him to think it was nice when it was newly washed.
‘You warm enough there like that?’ Michael asked. Steph smiled and nodded, turned her head and continued combing, while he watched.
They said little else for a while, and their silence lapped generously to the edges of the room and enclosed them.
Then Steph said, ‘It’s like a little church in here.’ It was true. The small room was dark but for the fire, the fairy lights and the candles. Michael stretched himself out on the floor in front of the fire, and said he knew what she meant.
He had seen a chapel like that, once. He had been persuaded to go to Spain for a week, years ago, with three other lads who drank in the pub where he was working. On the first night they had gone round the bars and the other three had brought girls back to the apartment, all of them so drunk they paired off and then, Michael told Steph as she slowly pulled the comb through her hair, ‘they just screwed all over the place, right in front of each other, four of them in the bedroom, two in the main room. I didn’t know where to look.’ He had spent the night on the concrete balcony and woken the next day with mosquito bites on his lips and eyes. The others, when they surfaced in the afternoon, thought it hilarious. Michael had hardly seen them after that. He spent the week alone, disfigured and miserable, keeping different hours. He couldn’t face the pool or the beach so instead he took buses inland, alighting in hill villages and walking about in the heat to the silent bafflement of old people and children who watched him from sitting places in the shade. To get out of the sun he would buy soft drinks at cafйs that had only two or four white plastic chairs and an umbrella, or he went into churches. He liked the brick floors, dusty here and there with sprinklings of fallen plaster, the green stains in the joins where a little damp seeped between whitewashed walls, and the peeling Madonnas in their painted, fairground colours. He knew that these places were in poor taste, mawkish and out-of-the-way, and that the country saints they elevated were obscure, but it had seemed to him that the plastic chrysanthemums, the tinsel and the coloured lights somehow made them precious, contained, intricate.
‘If it’s like a church in here, that makes us a couple of saints,’ he said.
‘Sinners more like,’ Steph said, with satisfaction.
They grew comfortable. One of the candles burned down. Steph could not lay her hands on the matches to light a new one and Michael found them in her pyjama breast pocket, or pretended to. He set about roasting the chicken, and when Steph suggested they bake potatoes at the same time since the oven was already on, he thought her brilliant. He opened the wine and between them they finished the bottle. Soon afterwards the gas ran out again. Michael had spent the last of his money on the food, so they went to bed. They lay while Michael stroked her bump, and asked her what it felt like to be pregnant. Did she want a boy or a girl? He kissed the bump. Did she talk to the baby?
‘You’re meant to,’ he said. ‘I read it somewhere. You’re meant to talk to it.’
‘That’s plants,’ Steph said sleepily. ‘Anyway, I do sometimes. Hello, baby!’ she whispered, to prove it. ‘Why don’t you talk to it, Michael? Say hello. ’Cause if it’s a boy,’ she added nervously, ‘I was thinking of Michael.’
Michael turned to her and tried to see from her face if she were serious. But the flickering light from the silent television was dancing over her features and he could not tell. ‘You mean calling it Michael?’
Steph nodded. ‘So you’d better get to know it, it ought to know who it’s named after. Or it could be Michaela, if it’s a girl.’ She pronounced it Michael-ah.
‘Michael-ah,’ he repeated.
‘Talk to it, go on. Tell it something nice.’
He kissed the bump again and stroked it, and when his lips brushed the taut skin of her stomach and he felt the ridges of her stretch marks on his mouth he was aghast at the intimacy of it. He whispered something that Steph could not hear, and she realised she was not meant to. She could not fight sleep any longer. Seeing her settle down, Michael switched the television off. As she was letting her eyes close, she remembered with a shock that she had not heard a word from Michael about his mother.
‘Your mum! You never said! Was it all right, then? Seeing her? I can’t believe you never said. She is your mum, isn’t she? What was it like?’
Michael smiled in the dark. He too was almost asleep. ‘Oh, oh yeah, it was great. She’s my mum all right. It was great. You wait till you meet her. I’ll tell you tomorrow. Plenty of time tomorrow.’
* * *
Steph woke because the baby had just kicked her much harder than usual. It was not painful, exactly. She lay awake until it happened again. It was somehow serious, not in the least playful. This one must be a boy, definitely a footballer. She needed to pee anyway, and she got up, feeling an ache in her back. The baby moved again when she was on
her way back to bed and she groaned softly, with surprise rather than pain. In bed she lay and nearly fell asleep again. A little later, she was not sure how long but perhaps half an hour, another kick came, along with a bigger surprise. Was it possible? Steph stared into the dark and tried to remember what giving birth had really been like last time. But she couldn’t; it was too long ago and she had been so young, practically somebody else. It was as if it were something dramatic and mildly scandalous that she had been told about, or seen in a film. But even as her mind was trying to keep it from her, her body was digging into old memories asleep in the blood, kicking nerves and muscles awake. These were contractions, not kicks. That last one had been stronger, more like a clamp seizing her round the middle than the baby’s foot knocking her from inside. She waited. Twenty minutes later came the next one, the same grabbing and wringing of her body, not painful yet but with the threat of ferocity to come. The struggle to expel was beginning. Still, she had done this before. It would be ages yet, hours and hours. Time enough she hoped, biting her lip, to get Michael used to the idea. It was surely a bit early though, she thought, trying to count back. She had thought she had at least another six weeks or so, judging by her size and what she could recall of the goings-on with Jace. But whether it was coming early or whether she’d just got the dates wrong, she had to get Michael used to the idea not just that she was having it, but that she was having it now, and she was having it here- at home, or the nearest she had to one. Steph suddenly felt her confidence fail, because after what had happened today, getting Michael to go along with that might be more difficult than if he had stayed as he was at the beginning, tolerant but careless of her. But he was turning out to be so kind. If that thing with the towel on the bathroom floor was a sign of how careful he was going to be with her and the baby, he might panic and drag her off to Casualty.
She had to smile at the picture that made, Michael with his eyes wild and everybody thinking he was the worried father. But it would not happen that way, because she would just refuse. She was not going to hospital. Once she explained to Michael why she had to have it here it would be all right, she reassured herself, feeling for a moment oddly powerful. There was something about having a baby that stopped other things mattering too much. She would get her way. Then the thought of Michael drew her mind back to the memory of him inside her, just a few hours ago, and she found this was easily the nicest thing to think about while she waited for the next contraction. Actually, wasn’t it supposed to bring on labour? Steph was suddenly sure now that it did. Once at the clinic, when she was pregnant with Stacey, another woman in the waiting room had said how fed up she was, overdue and still waiting, and somebody else said, you go home and have a nice time with your boyfriend, that’ll bring it on, never fails. Another grab of her belly that this time reached right round to her back interrupted her thoughts. Michael stirred, turned over and stretched out an arm for her.
‘Michael?’ Her moment of calm faith evaporated. Her heart was beginning to beat now with the same fear she had felt when Michael had failed to come home. Perhaps it wouldn’t be Michael’s care and concern that would land her in hospital. Perhaps she was just wrong again and he would turn out to be the same as the others. It would be nothing unusual if he didn’t want to stick around; in fact it would be a bloody miracle if he did. Now he had had sex with her, he would probably just dump her at the hospital to go through it alone, and they’d take the baby away before she even saw it properly. Or he might just leave her here again. He’d leave her and go straight back off to his mother. It was almost a certainty that he wouldn’t stay. People didn’t. Her stomach felt another grip, longer and more aggressive.
‘Michael? Oh, Michael!’ she yelped, and burst into tears.
***
But not quite as soon as that. Not at half past three in the morning of the following day. But even though I was surprised, I felt no fear at the sound of the van coming into the courtyard. I knew it would be him, somehow, and anything happening at half past three in the morning is enough in itself to suggest a crisis. I remember I pulled on my dressing gown, went down to the door and opened it a matter of seconds after Michael had banged on it, and one look at his face confirmed that it was a crisis. He looked worse than she did, in the time-honoured way of panicking fathers. And she was a funny little thing! She even managed a smile and a handshake, and a ‘pleased to meet you’, like a child dutifully displaying her party manners, though she was stooped over and holding her stomach, and there was a pinched look about her little face. The eyes were huge. Her legs were buckling under the weight of Michael’s jacket and all the blankets he’d put round her. He hadn’t had a clue what to do for her, and keeping her warm was all he had managed to come up with, apart from the important thing of bringing her here, of course. Bringing her home.
The minute I saw her in the light of the hall I knew what was happening. The poor thing’s manners gave out just then and she made the most extraordinary grunting noise, followed by something like an animal lowing. Then she had a fit of simple crying that was girlish and frightened. I saw then the wet stain on the front of her clothes under her stomach. Even though I had never been in such a situation in my life I was quite calm, at that stage at any rate. I thought quickly. She was well wrapped up but still perished, and Michael was shivering with cold and fear. He could hardly speak at first but I managed to get it out of him that the van heater did not work, and that he’d had trouble finding the house again in the dark and in such a state of nerves. Then she piped up that she’d started about four hours ago. I remember I said something soothing about how he had done exactly the right thing and that everything would be all right now that they were here, and I could see he believed me. In fact they both did. Steph looked so grateful I could see she needed some older and kindhearted person to say that everything would be all right. Well, it seemed I was to be that person, and so I took her in my arms and said it again, and then I believed it too.
She couldn’t really stay on her feet. She needed to find a place to lie down, or squat on all fours or however they do it nowadays (I’d read articles and gathered it had all changed). Not their bedroom though, it would be too cold. The heating was off for the night and not due to come on until seven o’clock and it didn’t seem like the moment to go fussing with the timer. Besides which I doubted if she could manage the stairs. I took them into the kitchen and she immediately lay down in front of the Aga and started gasping. Michael and I stared at each other.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ I said, and he looked relieved.
‘Yes! Yes, that’s what you do, isn’t it? Hot water, you always need hot water, don’t you?’ Actually I hadn’t a clue what people delivering babies were supposed to need hot water for. I’d been thinking of a cup of tea to calm us all down. But obviously Steph couldn’t go on lying on that hard flagstone floor, so I sent Michael upstairs for some pillows and bedding. He was pleased to be given something to do and so then I made the tea after all. Steph was glad of it, and so was he, so it was the right thing after all. Then I left them together and went upstairs to put some clothes on. I felt I was dressing to go into a kind of battle. It seemed a shame that I hadn’t got old clothes suitable for the occasion, such as people keep for messy jobs around the house. I knew I’d never get the marks out.
In what seemed no time at all Steph stopped being cold and warmed up. She moaned and rocked and pulled herself nearly upright when the pains got hold of her, in fact she got terribly hot. When the contractions came, her mouth stretched in an awful grin of effort; her lips cracked with the dryness and her cheeks grew bright red. It was terribly hard work. She was in a lot of pain and it was awful, just watching the pains gradually get longer and longer and the times between them grow shorter. She sweated until her hair was soaked. Michael dabbed her face with a cold cloth and did not once leave her side. She would tell him to rub her back, or she would take hold of his arm with both hands and squeeze tight, hissing and wearing that grin, and
all I could do was stand there. I felt so helpless and ignorant. I had no idea how much worse it was going to get, and so I felt frightened too, but tried to hide it. I brought down more bedding, and some towels, thinking we’d be bound to need them at some point. I made more tea, but Steph sicked hers up a short time later. After about an hour and a half I couldn’t bear it any more and got very upset myself. Even though I knew it was out of the question, I said we should get her to a hospital. I was too distressed by the pain she was in to think straight, of course. Because bringing an ambulance or a doctor down here (Michael was in no fit state to drive) and letting strangers in might have risked everything that was important. Who knows where meddling by the authorities might have ended up. There would have been all the business of addresses and names and it would have all got back to the agency and the owners somehow. Not that I had thought all this out at the time. I just wanted the best for her, I wanted something to be done about the shrieking. I wasn’t thinking straight, so thank goodness Michael was. It was Michael who said it was too late for that, and then Steph herself got even more upset and yelled and swore she would not move from here. So on it went, for another two and a half hours. By this time she was writhing, and bawling for somebody to help her, and very soon after that she screamed that it was coming.