by Zoe Deleuil
‘Your bed is ready,’ said Paul.
I handed the baby to him, and saw something close to fear cross his face as he took him from me.
‘He won’t bite you, Paul,’ I joked, but he didn’t laugh.
I went to bed in Rachel’s room and burrowed under the thick feather quilt, but the sleep I had finally been offered didn’t come. The weight of all those feathers seemed to press down on me, suffocating me, the spidery printed flowers filled my eyes, and Rachel’s perfume was like a presence in the bed. I turned over again and again as weird repetitive fever dreams played in my head, until Paul came in at three. He stared at his phone as I fed the baby, then took him from me and went back to bed.
It was harder to breathe now, as if my lungs were somehow packed solid and there was no room for air to enter. I longed to surrender back into sleep, but then I remembered the baby’s confused stare and his grave fascination as he’d watched me cough. Too confused and uneasy to sleep, I reached for my laptop to google difficulty breathing. A few minutes of scrolling convinced me I was close to death, so I called the NHS helpline, talking quietly so I didn’t disturb Paul and the baby. The woman listened to me for a few minutes and put me through to the ambulance service, where a man asked me loudly if I was having chest pains, then sent around a paramedic on a motorbike and said that an ambulance would be on its way as soon as possible.
Paul appeared in our doorway as I tried to find a position that would allow more air into my lungs.
‘What is it?’
‘An ambulance is coming.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘I don’t know. I rang them as I couldn’t breathe properly and they asked me some questions and then said they would send someone. I’m just so short of breath.’
A few minutes later the paramedic arrived, a small, muscly man with a shaved head, who began pulling things out of his bag while asking questions and looking around the bedroom.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I woke up and I couldn’t breathe properly.’
‘Got your Strepsils, I see.’ He nodded over at my bedside table, and the over-the-counter painkillers Paul had got for me last night. ‘And your Panadol.’
His dry tone suggested I was being a drama queen, and maybe he was right. Why was he even here? Everything was fine, apart from my breathing, and I felt ashamed for wasting taxpayer money. I wanted to explain that I’d called the NHS helpline and unwittingly set off a full-scale emergency response by saying I was having chest pains, but I didn’t have the energy for it.
‘Any mental health issues?’
‘No.’
‘Did you think of going to your GP today?’
‘I didn’t feel this bad earlier. I called NHS Direct and they called you.’
‘They always do,’ he said shortly.
He checked my heart rate, and then my oxygen.
‘Your sats are very low – your oxygen levels.’
‘That’s why I called the NHS helpline. I woke up and I couldn’t breathe properly.’
‘They shouldn’t be that low. I’ll check again,’ he said, fitting the clamp back onto my finger.
As he did that, I vomited water all over the carpet. Paul came in and put the baby on the bed so he could clean up the mess, and I saw the paramedic’s expression change from mild irritation to dismay.
‘How old is the baby?’
‘Five weeks, almost.’
His face softened. ‘Bless.’
I patted the baby back to sleep, then leaned on the bedhead, sitting up as straight as I could to let more air into my lungs. The doorbell rang again and I could hear Paul talking to the paramedics, thinking guiltily that we could have got a taxi to the hospital, except that I had been too confused and panicked to call one.
The paramedics were kind, telling me not to worry about calling them, chatting to Paul in the back of the ambulance as they drove to the hospital. They gave me oxygen and when we arrived they wheeled me straight through to a cubicle, Paul following us with the baby in his arms.
‘I might draw this curtain,’ the paramedic said as he prepared to leave. ‘There’s another ambulance coming in now and you really don’t want to see what’s in it.’
Through the thin curtain, we could hear the screaming and groaning of a young man’s voice, cursing the staff who were yelling back at him, trying to reason with him, before another clear, carrying male voice interrupted everyone and explained to the patient that he was to be given a sedative. Soon it was quiet again, apart from the terse voices of the staff.
Despite the harsh fluorescent light of the hospital, there was a certain safety in being there, in knowing I was back in a public place, where people with professional training and clear heads could work out what needed to happen next. The baby was asleep again on the bed next to me. I was hooked up to an oxygen supply and finally I felt like I could put his worried face out of my mind. He had somehow told me to come here, and he was right. Strangely, I felt less anxious than I had in days. Was it the relief of finally giving in, handing myself over to the local authorities and admitting, I can’t do this, sorry? Was it being given a cubicle and a hospital gown and the promise of sleep and someone else to take care of the baby? I felt almost euphoric. Paul, sitting in a chair opposite me, staring at me in disbelief, did not look euphoric. He looked like he wanted to drag us all out of here, back to Cromwell Tower. He looked like he was hoping to wake up.
15
We were in our brightly lit cubicle for what felt like hours, as new staff arrived for the morning shift and I told the story again and again of not being able to breathe properly to various doctors and nurses and even a lady who came in and brought me a cup of tea and turned the lights down. People took blood and swabbed my throat and gave me pills to swallow and put a drip in my arm and finally a man appeared who seemed to be in charge. He had wire-rimmed glasses and friendly blue eyes and I recognised his clear, authoritative voice from earlier on, when we’d arrived. As well as the cough, I’d started vomiting again into a cardboard bowl, and he observed this with an unfazed shake of his head, as if it was a somewhat unfortunate development, but nothing he couldn’t handle.
A porter arrived, accompanied by an air of harried tiredness, and I left Paul and the baby to be wheeled down a long corridor towards the radiology room – a dark, spooky chamber where I was positioned and then left alone while the radiographer moved into a small elevated room somewhere behind me. I was cold and barefoot and dressed only in a gown, now officially a patient in a wheelchair, barely dressed because I’d had to take off my underwire bra for the X-ray. The radiographer wheeled me outside again, parked me in the waiting area and drew a curtain around me while she called the porter to come and take me back to A&E. A minute later, another uniformed person peered behind the curtain, looked irritated to see me parked there and, with a click of her tongue, whipped the curtain open again.
Now I was in full view of the waiting room of the hospital’s busy morning outpatient clinic. And then I was vomiting again into my cardboard bowl, my balled-up bra on my lap and a paper mask around my neck tangling with the oxygen tubes coming out of my nose. God knew what state my hair was in.
Back in A&E, the doctor told us he had looked at my X-ray.
‘Your lungs – you can’t go home with oxygen that low. We’ll have to find you a bed.’
I closed my eyes in relief.
‘She has to stay in? Why?’ Paul seemed suddenly angry, furious even. I only ever saw him these days in the soft light of the apartment. Here, suddenly, he looked rougher. More real. Hazily I remembered seeing that same expression on his face the night he’d found me in the Soho club.
Careful, Paul, I wanted to say. Calm down. The simmering tension made the cubicle feel even smaller, and I thought of the hospital security guards that were no doubt only a phone call away.
The doctor gave him a fixed, practised smile. ‘Because she has pneumonia. And she needs to be on oxygen and to be kept under observati
on.’
‘I really don’t feel well, Paul,’ I said.
He looked at me. ‘I know. You don’t look well either. Your eyes are so red.’
‘It looks like the flu,’ said the doctor. ‘But you should have been vaccinated as you were pregnant. Didn’t you get a letter?’
I thought of my old house in Finsbury Park, and all the letters that used to pile up at the front door from everyone who had lived there over the years. ‘I don’t think so. Maybe it went to my old address. So who will look after the baby if I’m in here?’
The doctor looked troubled. ‘We do need to work out what to do about the baby. I’ve already spoken to the postnatal ward manager to see if you and the baby can stay there, but she has said that’s not possible due to the risk of flu infection. So we need to get you into a side room, we’re just waiting for one to be free. Give us a little more time.’
He considered Paul for a moment. ‘Is there anyone who can help you? Family, perhaps?’
You, I wanted to say to the doctor. You’re so in control, so adult. Can’t we take you home?
‘I’ll work something out,’ Paul said.
I fed the baby, with a vague awareness that he wasn’t getting much milk, probably because I hadn’t been eating or drinking myself. He was totally oblivious to the fact that he was back in a hospital again, and he looked so tiny and bright and beautiful as he looked around, blinking at the doctor. Everything in the room was blurry apart from him, and as I looked at him, struggling to breathe, I felt a strange elation, as if I’d been drinking champagne instead of tap water. Was there a staff party going on outside the cubicle, I wondered, or was this what it felt like to drown?
The doctor disappeared again and the baby sank into his deep morning sleep. ‘You should probably go now,’ I told Paul. ‘You need to buy him formula. And a bottle. I don’t know what’s going to happen here, but if I’m not allowed to keep him with me, he’ll need milk. He’ll sleep for an hour or so, you’ve got a bit of time.’
‘But surely he should stay with you. Where do I go?’ Paul looked terrified by the sudden responsibility of keeping the baby alive.
‘Tesco will have some. The big one on Morning Lane. Or Boots. Honestly, go now. I’ll be okay. When he wakes up he’ll want it straight away.’ I felt myself leaving the situation and falling irresistibly towards sleep as Paul left with the baby held against his chest, almost hidden under his jacket. It was a guilty relief to have them gone, taking with them the anxiety of the last few weeks, when I had held or carried or slept beside the baby without a break.
The harried porter returned to take me to my room. He must have been told to get me there quickly to reduce the risk of infection, because he took off down a long hallway with impressive speed, past a blur of people lying in beds parked up against the walls. He moved so fast that I got motion sickness and started vomiting again into my little cardboard bowl, which prompted him to speed up even more. We must have made quite a spectacle.
A quiet room, a bed with clean white sheets. Another doctor, another nurse. And then silence. Relieved of all duties, I plummeted instantly into a silent void of sleep. At some indefinite point I became aware of a cluster of doctors standing by my bed, their voices indistinct, their bodies a white-coated huddle that was almost indistinguishable from the wall behind them as they prodded me, asking me questions and writing down my vague answers.
The next time I woke it was dark outside, and Paul was back in the room. He was sitting next to me, and when I looked around for the baby I saw the car capsule parked by the door.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Worse than childbirth.’
‘Really?’
‘Everything is aching.’
‘I wonder where you picked it up.’ He looked at me for a moment. ‘Well, I got the baby formula. I had to walk out of here and down to Tesco with him wrapped up under my jacket. People were looking at me, really staring. I think they thought I’d kidnapped him or something. It was horrible.’
‘Oh no. Did he take the bottle?’
‘Yeah, once he got used to it he was fine. And I spoke to Rachel. She’s coming back in the morning, to look after him when I’m at work.’
‘She doesn’t have to rush back, does she? She only left yesterday.’
‘She needs to be here. I spoke to the doctor before, and he said I can’t bring the baby in again for now, but if Rachel’s at home I can still visit you and go to work. We can’t risk him getting sick.’
‘So he said the baby can’t come in at all?’
‘Not after tonight. I only brought him in because I didn’t have anywhere to leave him. But Rachel will be back tomorrow so I can go to work. The team leader has been leaving me messages all day. Oh, I’ve got a bag for you. Some clothes. Your phone. It was completely dead so I charged it for you. Your Strepsils.’
I laughed under my oxygen mask.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I don’t know. Strepsils.’
He looked blank. ‘What’s so funny about that?’
‘I don’t know. Last night you were buying Strepsils and tonight I’m in here. It’s not funny. It’s just weird. I’ve never been sick like this before.’
He didn’t seem to hear me, and his eyes were glazed as if he was caught up in some memory.
‘You should have seen the way people stared at me, when I was outside, carrying the baby. I had to put him in my jacket because I didn’t have the pram, and I thought someone was going to call the police.’ He looked hunted, and I realised my own panic about taking the baby out, my fear that everyone was staring at me, was perhaps normal.
‘People are obsessed with newborns,’ I told him, lifting my mask off for a moment. ‘I’ll have to tell you about some of my weird encounters … once I can breathe properly. It must have some evolutionary purpose, for strangers to be so tuned in to them. They mean well.’
‘I guess so. Look, I should probably head off. I don’t want him to be in here for too long.’ He got up, kissed my forehead, then walked to the door, lifted the baby capsule, and was gone.
Maybe it was the blank uninterrupted sleep, or the sterile whiteness of this quiet room, but something felt different. Even though my body felt like its own cells were poisoning it from within, and my lungs were twin cauldrons of infection, there was a small part of me that was alert, detached from this situation, making decisions with newfound clarity. It had started last night, with the baby’s worried expression. It was the realisation that no-one was going to do this motherhood thing for me, that I was more or less on my own, and I had to start directing things, rather than allowing myself to be pulled along like some aimless jellyfish. And I had to take better care of myself, if I was going to take care of him. Maybe part of that was focusing on the small wins, and not the areas where I felt like I was failing. When I got out of here things would be different.
I closed my eyes, and when I woke up a new nurse was in the room, a dreadlocked man who introduced himself as Justice as he took my temperature.
‘So you have a baby?’ he asked me. ‘How old is he?’
‘Five weeks.’
‘And is he a good baby?’
‘He’s getting better,’ I said, remembering my new resolution to be more positive, and Justice threw back his head and laughed. After a moment I laughed too.
‘You need to stay awake now,’ he told me. ‘You have slept all day. You need to be sleeping at night. I will make you tea and toast.’
The room was dimly lit and looked out over another bare courtyard, like the one outside the postnatal ward, equally grey and sparse. And now it was as if I hadn’t had the baby at all. I’d longed for a night’s sleep, and here it was, in this bare room with the snores of eight cardiac patients outside my door, but I couldn’t stop thinking about him. He was so far away, high up in the concrete tower of the Barbican like some kidnapped prince in an urban fairytale, and he wouldn’t know what had happened to me, and no-one would be able to tell him.
All I wanted was to pick him up, to settle him across my front and feel his weight, to stroke his feet and lay my hand over the warm curve of his back, but I couldn’t because he was out there in the world and I was in here, attached to this bed with tubes. Even if I tried, I didn’t have the strength to get up, let alone find my way out of here.
It had always struck me as weird that in this grand sprawling city there was a small rectangular space I returned to every night to sleep, high above the rain-slicked, unpredictable streets, and that wherever Paul might have been on any particular day, he landed there, too. The Barbican may not have been homely, but it was as secure and solid as a vault. And now night had come and I wasn’t tucked up in my private corner of the city, but in this vast hospital with its long corridors and unlocked doors and the unfamiliar sounds of sleeping strangers, shivering with cold and sleepless with anxiety.
My phone rang, an unfamiliar sound because I hadn’t bothered to use it lately. It was Rachel.
She talked over my hello.
‘Paul told me. How are you?’
‘Not great. And I don’t know how long I’ll be in here for.’
She was silent for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was breaking with emotion. ‘Look, I’m going to come straight back and help Paul while you’re away. He said he needs to keep working, so I can get dinner ready and look after the baby.’
‘Paul mentioned it. It’s probably a good idea.’
‘And are you sure it will be okay? I will take care of the baby, don’t worry about that.’
‘I know you will. It’s good you can come back.’