And Baby Makes Two

quilt. Plus, Les would be back soon. When I finally talked to him I wanted the baby to have a name. So she was real to him. So I could say, “I called her ——. What do you think?”

I bit into my orange cream. “What about Anastasia?”

Anne shook her head. “Too Disney.” She poked through the chocolates.

“Martina?”

I liked the sound of the “a” at the end. In my name it made me sound like a bar of soap, but in other names it made them sound foreign and romantic.

“Martina’s nice,” said Ellen.

“How about Simone?” asked Anne. “I’ve always liked Simone. It’s classy.”

“Simona…” I muttered. And then it hit me. Just like that. I snapped my fingers. “I’ve got it!” I cried. “It’s perfect!”

“Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” urged Ellen. “What is it?”

“Shinola!” I don’t know where I heard it, but now that I’d remembered it, I loved it. It was unusual and exotic. Shinola Spiggs wasn’t brilliant, but Spiggs wouldn’t be her last name forever. Soon her name would be Craft. Shinola Craft. Or maybe Shinola Craft-Spiggs. A double-barrelled name can be a help.

Ellen frowned. “Shinola? I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before.”

“It almost sounds African,” said Anne.

It didn’t sound African to me. But it did sound like it would mean something nice like “beautiful morning” or “graceful princess” in whatever language it was.

“Perhaps you should try it out on your boyfriend when he rings.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I’ll do.”

*  *  *

My mum and Charley came around seven. They brought me a Big Mac and large fries, an apple pie and a chocolate milkshake. But no postcards except the one from Shanee.

Charley made a fool of himself gurgling at the baby, who decided to take a break from crying to gaze at him blindly. While I ate, the Spiggs yammered on about all the things I’d done when I was a baby. I was too tired to care. After they left I watched some telly till they turned the lights out.

Everything changed when the lights went out. If the ward was like a party in the day, at night it was like a party after everyone’s gone home and left you with the washing-up.

Maybe it was the star balloons Sam’s husband brought her that floated over her bed. I’d never thought about being an astronaut or anything like that, but all of a sudden I felt like I was drifting through space all by myself.

Space was cold and scary. It wasn’t like in films. There weren’t any stations where Han Solo and Chewbacca hung out. Or colonies where a starship might stop. There was just space. I thought about the postcard Hilary didn’t bring me from home. What if I never found anywhere to land? What if I just floated like this forever with no one to bring me flowers or balloons?

I almost started crying, but then I had another thought. It wasn’t that Les was ignoring me. It was that he was protecting me. If he had written and Hilary had seen his card she’d want to know who he was. She’d put two and two together and come up with Dad. Thank God he’d had enough sense to be careful. It made me feel better.

I went back to drifting through space.

There were all sorts of dangers out in space I’d never thought of before. I’d made all sorts of plans for me and the baby. And Les. I knew what our house looked like, and how we’d decorate our Christmas tree – stuff like that. But I hadn’t made any plans for what happened if those things didn’t happen.

The baby woke up. She was kind of whimpering.

I picked her up how they’d shown me.

“Shhh,” I whispered. “You’ll wake everyone up.”

She stopped whimpering and let out a scream that nearly made me deaf in one ear.

I rang for the nurse.

“It’s not really time for another feed,” said the nurse. “See if you can get her back to sleep.”

I couldn’t get her back to sleep. The more I tried, the louder she howled.

The nurse brought a bottle.

The baby didn’t want the bottle.

“Well, it’s a strange new world to her, isn’t it?” said the nurse.

To both of us, I felt like saying.

As soon as the nurse took her, she shut up.

“Maybe she doesn’t like me,” I whispered.

“Don’t be silly.” The nurse jiggled my baby in her arms. “Of course she likes you. You’re her mum.”

“I don’t like my mum.”

The nurse smiled at Shinola. “You want to go back to mummy now, don’t you?”

The baby started howling again.

“You see?” I said. “I told you.”

The nurse laughed. “I’ll just take her to the nursery. See if I can get her back to sleep.”

It was after she disappeared that I got really depressed. Everybody else was sleeping peacefully. Why shouldn’t they be? They all had homes with fathers to go back to. When they woke up in the morning their babies’ dads would all be there with fruit and messages from their friends and probably a stack of post.

I wished I’d asked Hilary to bring Mr Ted to the hospital. I could’ve told her it was for the baby. Mr Ted always slept with me, unless Les stayed the night. I really missed him. I sort of bunched up my pillow and pretended I was hugging a bald teddy bear with only one eye, but it wasn’t the same.

That’s when I started to cry. Just a little at first, but then I really started sobbing. All these thoughts were sort of rushing at my head. There were so many that I didn’t know what any of them were. Plus, I didn’t want to know. There was something really scary trying to ram itself through my brain. But I wasn’t going to let it in.

I tried to sing “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” in my head but I couldn’t. I stopped thinking about anything and just let myself cry.

The nurse came back with the baby, but when she saw the state I was in she took her back to the nursery. Then she brought me a cup of tea.

“Feeling better?” she asked as I sipped.

I nodded.

“Almost everybody gets a little blue after they’ve had a baby,” she told me. “It’s the hormones.”

“Really?” I snuffled into a tissue. “That’s all?”

She fluffed up my pillows.

“That’s all,” she said cheerfully. She straightened out my blankets. “Once you get home and settled with your baby you’ll be as right as rain.”

She was one of the older nurses. She was always nice and very calm.

“You think so?”

She took my cup.

“I know so.”

I decided to believe her.

Motherhood

Being at home after the hospital was worse than going back to school after the summer holidays; a big disappointment. The Spiggs gave me a couple of days to recover, but after that she made it pretty clear that she expected me to do everything myself.

“I’m not your private nurse, Lana,” she informed me. “The party’s over. Time to join the real world.”