About all the faking.
About the toxic marriage.
About her own weakness in not leaving.
About all her lost opportunities.
About all the ‘I told you so’s’ from her family and friends that she hadn’t cared to hear.
Somehow the pushing and the pain and the clamour gave her a massive sense of relief. This, at least, was real. She couldn’t at that moment distinguish anything else that was. Certainly not Julius. He was a big fat fake, but this wasn’t. This was truly happening, gulping her up and spitting her out to deal with it. A raw, real thing was happening. Right now.
She pushed. She tore. She sobbed.
She pushed again. She gasped for air because she’d forgotten to breathe.
One last gut-wrenching, eye-bulging effort, and the baby was out. The midwife immediately placed the sticky brown bundle of arms and legs on to her mother’s pale skin, high up above her breasts, near Anna’s neck. Her eyes were tightly closed and her hands tightly clasped below her chin; there was a furrowed expression on her little face. Florence was here at last. Furious, but here.
Anna looked up to see where Julius was. She couldn’t see him anywhere. Seriously? Had he really left the room at this critical moment …? Sarah indicated to Anna to look in the corner of the room. There he was. Big proud Julius the father, the seed-giver, the root, the origin, the man, was crumpled in a heap on the floor. He had fainted.
Sarah looked Anna squarely in the eyes and, with her assured Irish breeziness, she said, ‘Well, you’ve got yourself a proper soppy bollock of an eejit there, haven’t cha?’
Anna had to agree, but here, with her wriggly little new daughter on her chest, skin to skin, brown to white, she had someone else to concentrate on. Florence was immediately an astonishing bright light and she utterly eclipsed Julius from the very first moment.
He mattered oh so much less all of a sudden.
Florence was all.
Instantly.
All.
The circumstances of her birth were not Florence’s fault. All she did was come to be. She couldn’t know that she’d been born into such a volatile situation. All she knew was that there was a big close-up moony-pink sweaty face looking at her, making satisfying cooing noises and laughing. She knew that she was warm, and she knew that EVERYTHING was different. The light, the noise, the air on her, around her. It unnerved her a bit and she made a screechy noise which hurt her tiny throat, which made her make more of the screechy noise, which hurt her throat … Something tugged her belly …
Sarah tried to physically haul the dopey Julius up, so that he could welcome his little daughter. ‘C’mon, mister man, let’s have you upright, eh?’
‘Umm, yeah.’ Julius stretched and yawned. ‘Could do with a cuppa.’
‘Could ya? Perhaps after you’ve acknowledged the miracle that’s happened over here …?’ She nudged him towards the mother and infant on the bed.
Anna and Florence.
Julius peered at the baby, finally realizing what had happened. For him, what had happened was that he had missed the photo/film opportunity of his first child’s birth, dammit.
What had actually happened was a wonder: a beautiful and unique girl was born …
For her, for Florence, what happened was that a large brown face came too close to her … and then disappeared out of view to the side … as Julius fainted again. This time, it wasn’t the gore that overwhelmed him, it was the thudding realization of the huge responsibility.
(Soppy bollock.)
Hope is too lost in the business of birth to notice a miniscule, hardly perceptible change in Fatu’s otherwise calm demeanour.
Her body was shaking now, and she was doing all she could to control her breathing and bring this baby into the world with the least possible stress. To do that, Hope had to take herself inside for now, into her own huge interior where she could centre her thoughts and be elsewhere from the pain. She wanted to be in charge at this critical moment, she wanted to drive it. She was whispering little comforting mantras to herself.
‘Let her have my strong back.
‘Let her have his crazy beautiful eyes.
‘Let her have my sister’s curls …’
And on …
She was imbuing the little life with all the good stuff. She was making wishes. She was cherishing a future …
But the ever-alert Quiet Isaac was hyper-present. He watched every move Fatu made with the vigilance of a hawk. He searched every flicker of expression on her face for a clue. He felt it in the deepest place he had, he knew something had changed: it was no longer going along the same path, this labour …
He saw the worry in Fatu’s eyes when they met his briefly … a stinging, still pause … and then, from that alarming moment on, everything that happened was a blur, a chaotic jumble.
Hope snapped out of her deep focus very quickly when the tempo of the room changed. The volume, the light, the whole atmosphere altered. It was suddenly urgent. Hope felt her teeth tighten. What was wrong?
The calm was gone.
The panic was palpable. However controlled they were all pretending to be, she felt it rising in her; she knew she’d caught it.
What? What? What was it?
Please let them all return to the moment before when it was right. Not this. This is wrong.
‘What’s happening?’ Hope gasped. A question she really didn’t want the answer to. Her eyes darted between Fatu and Isaac, and she knew there was fear. Slices of it.
‘I’m just going to call in the consultant and one of the senior midwives. Nothing to fret about. I just think Baby is a bit … worried …’
With that, Fatu pressed a button by the bed. Very quickly the room was fuller of people. Sarah had left Anna and Julius’s room and raced down the corridor. The words were a jumble to Hope; she heard snatches of hurried sentences, as everyone was talking to each other, but no one was really addressing
