The nurses’ station seemed deserted, but as she crept by she heard the low mumblings of someone on the phone. The desk around the station was at chest height, and all Hope could see was the top of someone’s head, who was clearly deep in conversation. Never had Hope been so pleased with the purchase of a pair of trainers. The particular ones she was wearing had been on sale in a Nike shop in Carnaby Street a month prior. She was passing by with no intention and pretty much no budget to go shopping, but they were in the window, these Air Max 270 Flyknits, brazenly daring her to buy them, and tempting her with a third-of-the-original-price tag combined with their irresistible air-soles and ultra-breathable orange uppers. She was a goner. Instantly in love with them. She adored them for so many reasons, but she didn’t know the true depth of the love until now, when they were the perfect get-away vehicle because they were … s … i … l … e … n … t. Only her breath and the airstream she was creating in her wake would give her away. With that in her mind, alchemy in her soul and prayers in her heart, Hope wondrously became
as small as a mouse
as thin as paper
as fast as light
as invisible as vapour
as breathless as a dead baby
and somehow … somehow … all the gods and wizards of kindness and fortune conspired to help her reach the ward door unnoticed. She burst through, and as it flapped shut behind her, the phone-busy nurse looked up, too late to see her, and too distracted to try.
At that precise moment, an early-shift midwife emerged from a room near the station, and started to make her way back down the corridor towards Anna and Julius’s room. She yawned and peered through the same window in the door that Hope had looked through just moments before. She saw a sleeping exhausted father, a sleeping exhausted mother, and she saw the very end of the bassinet where the blanket was bunched up in such a way that it looked just like a perfectly safe sleeping baby’s covered feet. Reassured, she made the most giant career-threatening error of her life. She moved away, to get on with her day.
Hope decided to avoid the lift just in case the baby made a noise, so she headed for the stairs and cursed the fact that the maternity ward was on the eighth floor. She knew she had to get into the basement garage and she wasn’t sure this stairwell would go all the way down. Would she have to divert back into the main body of the hospital to find the exit to the underground parking?
As she descended, it was clear that the hospital was kicking into the top gear of a fresh day, as one, then four, then eleven and more members of hospital staff arrived on to the stairs at various floors, rushing up and down to their jobs. Some greeted her with a quick ‘Morning!’, most took the stairs three at a time, and absolutely none genuinely looked at her. Although she worked in this hospital, the sheer size of it meant that the staff count was in the thousands. Nobody really knew her, and she realized that she didn’t even know the building very well, because she typically stuck to the floors where she had always been assigned, and to the service lifts accessing those couple of floors. She was a stranger on these stairs.
Hope had to be careful not to slip because she was going so fast. She could hear the faintest sound of the baby responding to the jiggling of the bag, but no one else would hear it against the thunder of footfall on concrete steps.
When she reached ground level, Hope noticed a side door off the main stairwell, indicating ‘Parking’. She slipped through the door. It wasn’t easy to manoeuvre with the awkwardness of all she was carrying, but she managed it.
The stairs down to the garage were different to the ones above. They were narrower, darker and had that unmistakeable putrid uriney stench. This deeply offended her. Nothing in her hospital should smell like this. The stairs weren’t the most common route to the parking area, the big lifts in the main concourse were; but, nevertheless, some folk would be using them. Hope muttered to herself as she moved along, ‘For God’s sake. This isn’t a nightclub. It’s a hospital. Who gets out of a car to visit someone and thinks, Oh I know, I’ll just have a quick wee on these stairs …? There are tons of loos a minute away inside the building! I mean, honestly, who does that?’
Hope was glad her baby was cocooned away inside the bag, protected from the rancid pee particles she might inhale. Hope didn’t want this awful stink to be in her baby’s memory as a sensory souvenir of her first day on this earth. If she could, Hope would ensure that the little one breathed only good clean air. Maybe one day, at the seaside even …?
For now, the only mission was to safely get her home. Hope was a parent now; she was focused in a way hitherto unknown to her. This was what she was on earth for, to love and protect, she absolutely knew she was going to be supremely good at it, but … first things first. She had to get her baby back to the flat, safe and sound. She had to remain calm and clever and quick-witted.
Down, down two flights of revolting stairs, through a big blue door, and into the gloom of the car park. More fumes. Exhaust fumes. Even more perilous than pee. There was no doubt that the absolute best way to transport a baby was in a bag; it was brilliant for so
