twat. It’s our wedding night and where is he?’ Another contraction gripped her and she subsided on to the floor, holding her bump and rocking from side to side. I was pretty sure this wasn’t the best idea.
I didn’t have to make the call, luckily. A strapping Scottish midwife strode in and got Scarlett on to the bed apparently by magic. ‘Doctor will be along in a minute,’ she said. ‘Are you the birth partner?’ I said no, Scarlett said yes. The midwife gave a prim little smile. ‘That’ll be a yes, then. Now we’ve got her on her side, you can rub her back.’ Then she was gone.
‘This is not a good idea,’ I said. ‘I’ve no bloody idea what to expect.’
‘A baby. That’s what I’m expecting.’ Scarlett gave a feeble chuckle. ‘I’m the one doing all the work, Steph. You just have to be here.’
And so I was. Because I hadn’t a clue what was going on, it’s hard to describe what happened over the next four hours. I know they gave her an epidural almost as soon as the doctor examined her. Between that and the gas and air she was sucking on, Scarlett wasn’t making much sense about anything. ‘They zone out in the second stage,’ the midwife said, as if that was an explanation. She might as well have said, ‘Cabbages dance on the moons of Jupiter,’ for all the sense it made to me. I kept stroking her back and her head and her hands and mumbling platitudes. And trying not to pay too close attention to the business end of things.
The professionals didn’t appear worried. It all seemed to be going calmly and smoothly. Until it wasn’t. The medical team didn’t flap or raise their voices. But all of a sudden there was a flurry of activity. There were more people in the room and they looked more serious, as if something had happened to make them stop coasting and pay particular attention. Scarlett seemed oblivious; she was sweating and swearing and panting and proving remarkably obedient to the midwife’s instructions.
‘What’s happening?’ I chose my words carefully. I wanted to ask what was wrong but I didn’t want to frighten Scarlett.
‘The baby’s got a big head,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s stuck in the birth canal.’
‘That’s not what’s supposed to happen, right?’
She gave me an impatient glance. ‘No. We’re going to take Scarlett through to another room, where we can carry out procedures more easily.’ As she spoke, the nurses were raising the sides of the bed and freeing the wheels from their brakes.
‘Procedures? What procedures?’
‘We’re going to try something called a ventouse,’ she said. By now, we were both following the bed down the hall.
‘What’s that?’
‘Think sink plunger. Only kinder. Have you done
‘I wasn’t expecting to be doing this,’ I said with some asperity. ‘She’s got a husband.’
The doctor tipped her head towards me and smiled. ‘You’re doing OK for a first reserve. Now keep out of our way.’
In a few moments, everything had changed. Now I was in the thick of a medical process. Scarlett wasn’t an individual any more; she was a patient. A body to be worked on. A problem to be solved. It wasn’t that anyone was unkind or careless of her. It was simply that kindness wasn’t a factor in what was happening now. There was a sense of urgency in the room that hadn’t been there before. Fear had taken up residence in the back of my throat and I felt on the verge of tears.
A few minutes in, a passing nurse said over her shoulder, ‘Things will move fast now. We have to make sure the baby’s getting enough oxygen.’
She was right. I was at the heart of a whirlwind of action. Apparently the ventouse wasn’t working. The baby was stuck fast. All at once we were on the move again. A clipboard appeared out of nowhere with a pen tied to it. The doctor put the pen in Scarlett’s hand as we headed back out into the corridor. ‘You need to give your consent,’ she said, sounding much more relaxed than anybody looked.
‘Consent for what?’ How could this be consent? Scarlett was off her head on pain relief and pain itself.
‘We need to do an emergency C-section,’ the doctor said. She looked around and snagged one of the nurses. ‘You, help Stephanie here. She needs to get gowned up and into theatre.’
‘Me?’ I yelped. ‘Surely you don’t expect—’
‘Just do it. Please,’ the doctor said as they all disappeared round a corner.
I let myself be led away. The nurse opened a cupboard and gave me a quick assessing look before yanking out a set of green scrubs. ‘What’s going on?’ I said.
‘You need to get changed. Hurry,’ she said, leading me to a cubicle. ‘They can’t get the baby out. It’s stuck. They’re going to have to do an emergency section so they can pull the baby back up the birth canal. And they have to move fast in case his oxygen supply is compromised.’
‘She’s not going to like that,’ I said, shrugging out of Scarlett’s clothes and into the scrubs, which fitted me much better. ‘She’s already been complaining about the stretch marks. She’ll be really pissed off about a scar.’ I emerged and saw the nurse’s face. ‘I’m only joking. She’s not that shallow and superficial, you know.’
My memory of what happened next is like one of those Roman mosaic pavements they excavate on
A group of people in green or blue scrubs all focused on the operating table. A green fabric screen placed across Scarlett’s chest so I wouldn’t see the blood. A voice with an edge of desperation saying, ‘There’s a lot of blood here and I can’t see where it’s coming from.’ Terror gripping my chest like the claws of a predatory bird. I imagined breaking the news to Joshu that his wedding day had ended here on a bloody operating table.
Then a midwife scurried across the room with a bloody bundle and disappeared into an anteroom. The next thing I heard was the thin cry of a baby. One of the gowned figures put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘It’s a boy. They’re just checking him out, don’t worry.’
‘What about Scarlett?’
It was hard to read him. All I could see were his eyes and eyebrows. ‘They’re doing their best. But we’re a good team. You need to focus on the baby now.’
And then the midwife put him in my arms, swaddled in a blue cellular blanket. His thick dark hair was plastered randomly over his forehead, his nose was squashed like a boxer’s and there were still traces of bloody mucus round his ears. But he was smiling. He was smiling and his eyes were open and they looked straight into mine and I was lost.
14
Scientists tell us that babies are genetically programmed to smile when they’re born. It’s a mechanism designed to save their lives. They smile, we fall in love. Because we are also programmed to be captivated by that smile. It’s nothing to do with biology. You’ll fall equally hard for the child of a complete stranger as you will for the fruit of your own loins. Think about it. It’s estimated that a quarter of all children are not the offspring of the man who thinks they’re his. And yet those fathers who persist in ignorance love their children as completely as biological parents. And it’s not only fathers. Think of those stories where children are accidentally swapped at birth and the mothers love the substitutes every bit as much as their other kids.
Which is a roundabout way of saying I bonded with Jimmy Joshu Higgins minutes after he was born. They hustled us out of the operating theatre and back into the side ward where we’d been earlier. They sat me in a chair, provided me with a bottle of formula milk and showed me how to feed him. I thought nothing of it at the time. I assumed it was standard operating procedure.
I learned differently a couple of years later, when I was telling the tale as a lure to a prospective client who had done pioneering work in treating infertility. She looked aghast. ‘Really? They got you to give him a bottle of formula?’
Baffled, I said, ‘Yes. They said he’d had a bit of a struggle being born, he’d be hungry. And he was. He polished off the whole feed.’
