Ginny had a Caesarean with Radley, and her only comment on the procedure was that she was glad she had lots of drugs and make sure you drink lots of water after because you do not want to get constipated. She did not elaborate on why and I was too polite to ask.
I have not yet put any thought into where and how I am going to have the baby. I mean, I obviously can’t go to the hospital, so I am planning to have the baby in the Hobbit House, but I will surely need supplies other than towels and hot water to do so.
But where do I get the supplies from? I am not going to chance going to the hospital to get them, so will a GP surgery have them? And what supplies do I need exactly?
I have made important changes to my life and the person I am. I have taken responsibility for me, my baby, and my animals. I have found us a home and food and water and safety. I am slowly accepting my past and believing that I can have a future. But the chaos and uncertainty of giving birth and having a tiny baby in this world without anything I recognise as normal in it? I am not sure I can.
It still feels like it is too much to think about.
It feels like it is something that I will think about tomorrow … or the next day.
I may have decided I would ignore the impending birth of my baby for a while, but my baby had other ideas.
I didn’t feel any pain or any lessening of movement or cramps. It was an ordinary morning and I had woken up in an ordinary way and gone for a wee before going out to feed the girls.
There was blood in my knickers.
Just a smear.
A smear of bright, red blood.
I was almost too scared to wipe between my legs. Too scared to find out if something was really wrong.
There was another smear on the tissue when I did finally wipe.
I went straight to the sink and drank a glass of cold water – my now trusted technique to get the baby to kick. I felt a lazy bump to one side of my belly and almost cried with relief.
I went back and lay in bed for, what I thought, was about an hour.
I shouted at Lucky when he tried to jump up on the bed with me.
There was another smear when I next went to the loo, and another an hour(ish) later.
I drank more water and got more kicks, but my heart was still beating out of my chest.
I was nine months pregnant, I was so close, please Lord, don’t take this from me now.
With the amount of water I had drunk the baby was now wriggling around, kicking and jabbing me in my tummy and back. I have never been so happy to feel that movement.
The bleeding had stopped by the time evening came, but I stayed in bed the next day as well, just to be sure.
When I eventually got out of bed I moved slowly and carefully and sat down to perform chores where I could.
It was a wakeup call.
This was happening.
I was having a baby.
I might die giving birth to the baby. I might die after I had given birth to the baby. But the baby was coming, and ignoring that fact would not stop labour from happening.
I went baby shopping.
I’m not going to bore you with the details of the crazy amount of stuff I collected but, having put it off for so long, I definitely went over the top and got far too much stuff.
I have had to wrestle the mattress from the mezzanine down onto the lower floor (the stairs to the mezzanine were getting to be a bit of a squeeze anyway) and have stored all the stuff I got on the mezzanine level.
It just about fits.
The most surprising thing about my shopping trip wasn’t the huge amount of random crap that I brought home and will never use, it was me.
I haven’t seen myself in a full-length mirror for, well, as long as I can remember.
I haven’t seen myself pregnant.
I am huge.
I was wearing a ‘funny’ man’s Christmas shirt that I got from the garden centre in size XXXL. The buttons at the front were straining. As usual I hadn’t bothered with trousers.
I stripped the shirt off, fascinated by the sight of my hugely extended belly. The skin on it looks like it could rip apart at any moment, it is stretched to capacity, bulging and ready to burst. When the baby moves you can see it from the outside; my stomach ripples, disconcertingly similar to the scene in Alien.
In contrast, the rest of me is thin. Much thinner than I have ever been. Not skinny, just minus the extraneous fat layer that my beloved processed food had always bestowed upon my bones. And, despite my judicious application of sunscreen, I am tanned. Very deeply tanned. I am also hairy. I no longer bother to shave anywhere, so my armpit hair is luxuriously long and silky. My leg hair seems to have stalled at about two centimetres long and is more like a blond fur that coats my legs.
The short, tufty, home-cut hair on my head is a strange mix of mousey with grey and blond streaking. I move closer to the mirror. My face is covered in freckles and there are white bleached laughter lines at the corners of my eyes. My eyes are clear and bright and happy.
I look happy.
Maybe I am happy.
Nothing about how I look says that I am the last person alive on earth, that I am about to give birth to a baby alone, in the backwoods of Norfolk.
If I didn’t know me, I would say I was a happy, contented person.
I think maybe, finally, I am becoming a happy and contented person.
There have been moments before when I thought I was happy and contented. When James and I first got together, when we moved in, got married, when I was pregnant last time.
There was even a point when I thought I might be happy and contented with Harry, that he would be the one who could make my life complete.
But then Ginny gave birth and three weeks later I met Radley for the first time.
Ginny was on maternity leave, so met me for lunch during the week. It was just the two of us and Radley.
It was a beautiful late summer day and we sat outside in the shade.
When Ginny arrived she was a crazy fireball of contradictions; three weeks post-birth she was exhausted and joyful, teary, and filled with wonder, slumped and shuffling after her Caesarean, but walking on air. She had no make-up on, her hair hadn’t been styled in weeks, her nails were ragged, and breast milk had leaked through her bra onto her dress, but she looked fucking radiant.
I had freshly blow-dried hair, perfect nails, a full face of make-up and was wearing a new Zara dress in readiness for seeing Harry later; I felt grey and haggard next to her.
She appeared in a flurry of pram and bags and baby. Radley was crying.
‘She needs feeding but I’ll wet myself if I don’t go for a wee. Here, hold her for a sec.’
And, shoving a bawling bundle of blankets at me, she was gone.
I looked down.
A tiny, angry face with eyes screwed shut in pure rage peeped from the blankets. The noise was horrendous, and faces were beginning to turn my way.
I didn’t know what to do. I shushed Radley, jiggled her, awkwardly tried putting her on my shoulder. The noise increased.
In desperation I stuck the knuckle of my forefinger into her screeching mouth the way I had seen people do on TV. The effect was instant.
She shut up and sucked on my finger.
Her entire body relaxed, face uncrumpling, legs stopped kicking. Then she opened her tiny, scrunched eyes and looked at me.
Deep, dark brown pools stared up, and she saw me.
She really saw me.
I held my breath, expecting another scream.
Instead, she smiled. Some might say it was gas, but I know it was a smile.
And, just like that, I knew I would never be happy and contented with Harry.
I was pretending again, pretending to Harry, pretending to be the person he wanted to try and make him happy. Even worse, I was pretending to myself. I wasn’t happy, this wasn’t me, I wasn’t …
‘Hey!’
I was yanked from my thoughts back into the real world. I looked
up.
It was James. He was smiling down at me.
For the first time in weeks.
‘Hi. Wow. Er, what are you doing here? I thought you were working?’
He wasn’t smiling at me. He was smiling at Radley.
‘My meeting was cancelled and I obviously haven’t met the little one yet so I thought I’d pop down and see if you were still here. She’s gorgeous.’
Laughter. Ginny was back. She reached for Radley.
‘She really is! Here, have a hold.’
Ginny passed Radley over. James had three nephews, so was far more experienced in holding newborns than I. He took her and immediately started that side-to-side rocking people who know how to comfort babies do instinctively.
‘Nice moves.’ Ginny smiled.
She turned to me.
‘You didn’t do too bad for your first time either.’
Shit.
I’d told James that I had already been to see Ginny and Radley when I went out with Harry the previous week.
James paused in his rocking.
‘I thought you said you saw her last week?’
My mind was blank. I looked at Ginny, eyes wide with panic.
Radley started to cry again and Ginny reached calmly for her.
‘She did! But Radley was fast asleep and I don’t like to disturb her when she’s sleeping ’cause it doesn’t happen often.’
She laughed, James laughed, I tried to stop my heart from beating out of my chest.
‘Right, I’ll get some drinks.’
James went to the bar and Ginny started breastfeeding.
She looked at me.
‘Someone else?’
I gave the briefest of nods, not trusting myself to say anything in case everything came blurting out.
‘You’re not happy with James.’
It was a statement not a question.
She looked down at Radley, and then up at me steadily.
‘Sometimes it doesn’t matter who else you’re with, if you’re not happy with yourself.’
She held my gaze until I felt tears pricking at my eyes and I had to look down at my hands.
I tried to make a joke of it.
‘When did you get all wise?’
Ginny smiled down at Radley again.
‘They come with a handbook.’
She reached across the table and held my hand.
Then James came back with the drinks.
I was not a happy or contented person then and I am not a happy or contented person now.
I am fucked.
I have just finished reading:
Better Birth: The Ultimate Guide to Childbirth from Home Births to Hospitals
The Positive Birth Book: A New Approach to Pregnancy, Birth and the Early Weeks
Your Baby, Your Birth: Hypnobirthing Skills For Every Birth
Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering: The Wisdom and Science of Gentle Choices in Pregnancy, Birth and Parenting
Your Pregnancy Week by Week: What to Expect from Conception to Birth
Happy Birth Day: How to Have the Best Possible Pregnancy and Birth
and I am completely and utterly fucked.
This is not me. I am not gentle or nurturing or relaxed or positive.
I cry and panic and find new situations very unsettling.
I do not cope well with blood. I spent two days in bed for a ‘smear of blood’ last week. If I have a heavy period I have been known to feel faint.
I am not good at planning nor, on the other hand, am I willing to go with the flow. I nearly had a panic attack three days ago because I thought I’d run out of salt.
I am not able to cope with pain on my own. I sprained my ankle once and couldn’t walk for a week – James had to carry me to the bathroom for the first two days.
I am not calm and measured. I spent the first month after 6DM getting high rather than looking for survivors.
I DO NOT WANT TO GIVE BIRTH DRUG-FREE! I was drunk and/or high for the first three months that this baby was in me, and I think it only fair that I should get to be in the same state when it leaves.
Do you know what an episiotomy is? If you don’t, then take my advice and don’t ever bother finding out.
I know what an episiotomy is. I know that they are often necessary if the baby’s head is stuck. I have all the graphic and gory details about something that is normally performed by a trained professional after they have administered drugs to stop the pain of performing the episiotomy on their labouring victim.
I don’t have a trained professional. I don’t have pain-numbing drugs. I don’t even have a sharp knife to perform the episiotomy with if I need one.
I may very well have to cut the fleshy bit between my vagina and my anus using a butter knife while I am high on nothing stronger than paracetamol.
I don’t even know if I am allowed to take paracetamol.
I feel like the lead in an American high school abstinence PSA; I had sex and now I have to face the consequences, which will be ripping my vagina in two without painkillers.
No. Sorry. Not doing it.
The baby will just have to stay in me.
The abstinence PSA would have been very proud of me because I didn’t have sex with Harry. Not for the whole time we were seeing each other.
I wanted to. There were multiple times when I really, really wanted to. We often ended up in bed together doing ‘everything but’, and I knew that a lawyer would find very little difference between his fingers being inside me and his penis.
But there was a difference to me.
Every time I thought of having sex with Harry I thought about having sex with James at Soho Farmhouse.
I thought about how it wasn’t just sex with James at Soho Farmhouse. It was a physical and emotional act, something so all-encompassing that I felt like my mind, heart and body orgasmed all at the same time. I had learnt that there was a difference between normal sex and sex with someone you loved; they could both end in orgasm, but only one of them ended in total satisfaction.
With Harry it would just be normal sex. I didn’t love him.
Harry never forced me. Not once. He never made me feel uncomfortable or that I owed him in some way for all the places he took me, the money he spent on me.
I told myself that he was probably getting it elsewhere so didn’t care that much.
But now I think it was because he was actually a nice person and willing to wait until the time was right for both of us.
Just one of the many ways that Harry Boyle turned out to be a much nicer person than me.
Meeting Radley was the beginning of the end of my relationship with Harry.
A tiny baby.
A tiny baby that just knew, by instinct, that she could be who she liked and do what she wanted and the world would still revolve around her. She wasn’t going to pretend. If she was sad she would cry, if she was hungry she would scream until she got fed, when she was tired she would sleep, and when she was happy she would smile. She made it all seem so simple.
By the time the first 6DM victim was sneezing in Andover, I had been seeing Harry for nearly six months, and the cracks in my carefully curated new version of me were beginning to show.
The physical effort of continuing to be Harry’s ideal was exhausting. I let things slide. I no longer had weekly waxes and blow-dries. No longer carefully reapplied lipstick for every meeting we would be in together, no longer carried lacy thongs in my handbag to change out of my comfy M&S panties into when we met after work.
I was mentally shattered with hiding who I really was. I wanted to talk about something real, about my envy of Ginny, how desperately I missed and wanted to make up with Xav, how my mum was getting older and I was no closer to finding the happiness she so longed for me to have. I wanted to be honest about why I didn’t want to go for drinks on the 52nd floor of the Shard, why I preferred to walk everywhere rather than get on the underground.
But I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t be honest wi
th Harry. I couldn’t tell him that everything he knew about me was a lie.
I couldn’t tell Harry that when I was with him I was once more moulding myself into the person I thought I needed to be to ensure someone else’s happiness and not my own. That I was so desperate for him to love me that I’d changed myself into the person I thought he would want.
I couldn’t tell him that I’d wasted the last ten years doing exactly the same thing with James.
A three-week-old baby might be able to be honest, but I wasn’t.
INSERT: ITEM #6294/1
Dictaphone Recording (Tape 1 / Recording 2)
(Transcribed)
(The same woman’s voice again, speaking into the Dictaphone.)
Hello? Hello? I need to check this thing is still working. It’s me. Is this working?
(Dictaphone is turned on and off.)
It’s still working.
(Sobs.)
I … I need to speak to someone.
I’m scared.
I wish there was someone to talk to.
I need help.
I just want to talk to someone. I just need someone to tell me it’s going to be okay.
I’m so alone.
(Sound of crying for some time.)
Something terrible has happened.
Recording ends.
Late August 2024
My baby was due in two or three weeks.
Having read the birthing books I now knew that I needed to go to the hospital and get things for the birth, but every time I thought about writing a list of what I might need, I would start to feel sick and sweaty and I suddenly found myself with something much more urgent to do.
I am not stupid, I realised that I was not panicking about writing a list.
I was panicking about the hospital.
I hadn’t been near one since my failed attempt to get Susan Palmers’ statins (I hadn’t thought about Susan Palmers in weeks.)
I only stood by the doors then.
The idea of actually having to enter the building and see the chaos and mess and tragedy within made my skin crawl.
I hadn’t seen a dead body for nearly four months. What would they look like now? What would they smell like? What would 1,000 of them that have been sealed inside a hospital for nine months smell like?
Last One at the Party Page 28