Everything, everything, everything seemed to be happening fast. It was all so different now.
She let her head rest back on the hard rim of the bath, and she could feel the coolness of it on the back of her skull, even through all the thick, wet curls.
Gradually, the water stopped sloshing about and, along with her slow and steady recovering breath, it became calm.
All of her senses were staggeringly alert.
Touch: the warm water slightly tickled her skin at the edges where it met her. The mix of the heat beneath the surface and the immediate nip of the colder air above was curious. She could feel her pores reacting. Those that had been lulled into opening below the water versus those that were closing quicksharp in the shivery crisp air above, causing goose bumps. She moved ever so slightly to tease the skin on the very edges.
Smell: the bubble bath was Matey, for children. The familiar gentle soapy aroma was heaven, and no other bathtime fragrance triggered all the happy memories like this. She’d not been without the jaunty sailor bottle on the side of the bath for her whole eighteen years. It promised that not only was it hypoallergenic, but that each bath was going to be an actual adventure. She loved it.
Hear: in the distance, she could hear Lee on his beloved PlayStation committing mass genocide in his efforts to rid the virtual world of mutant baddies. In the near, she could hear the tap dripping in the basin, and her own steady breath in the damp air.
Taste: ever since she’d realized she was pregnant, she’d craved toffees. Cadbury chocolate éclair toffees. Lee supplied her regularly with many crinkly new purple packets and it was rare that she didn’t have one in her mouth. She’d swallowed the latest one minutes before her breath-holding challenge, but she could still taste the remnants stuck in her teeth. Little sweetie jewels to mine with her tongue.
See: as she looked around the bathroom, her eyes were drawn to the bright green fluffy towelling dressing gown on the back of the door. Her mother’s. In her mind’s eye, she sees her mother wearing it. She loves the image. Then Minnie looks down along her clammy body, at her silky brown skin, flawless apart from a few stretch marks on her swollen breasts and her tight extended stomach. Past the hills of her bosoms is the mountain of her belly, and she can see nothing between or beyond. This is her baby landscape.
This is my body, Minnie thought. It belongs to me and to no one else. This is my baby, Bean. She lives in me, and I’m the container for her. Everything she is, all of her, is contained in me right here. We are part of each other. I’m her mother, and all of my future happiness will be in her happiness. Oh God, please let her be happy. Let me be a good mum. Like my mum.
She looked back at the green dressing gown. Her beautiful mum. How had she felt when SHE was six and a half months pregnant with Minnie? Had she lain in a bath like this, wondering these same things?
She wished she could ask her now.
But she couldn’t. Not right now.
She COULD feel close to her though. A bit …
Minnie broke the stillness of the water, and pulled herself up and out of the bath, tugging the plug out with her toes on the way. She carefully stepped out on to the bathmat and reached out for the green dressing gown. It hardly fitted around her big belly, but it was big enough to gather her in and comfort her. As her mother had always done.
Minnie stood still as she allowed herself to drip on to the mat and realize that this home she lived in was not really a home without her mother.
Home is people, not a place.
Home is somewhere distance isn’t. And she felt homesick. In her own home.
Back to the Start
Hope was not keen to hold the baby again, however much the midwives encouraged her to ‘take as much time as she wanted’.
Fatu took her little body from Quiet Isaac, who was now gently sobbing.
Hope watched him. She felt so very sorry for him; it was a terrible sight to see, the lovely man so utterly bereft. He had no resources to deal with this sudden trauma. He had never known shock like it.
She felt very separate from him. They were ordinarily so close, their thoughts and feelings in tandem, sharing absolutely everything. He was sitting right next to her, but that wasn’t where he was at all. He was worlds away in his own vortex of loss; he was unreachable.
Hope was hyper-aware of what was happening in the room. She knew someone was sewing her up. She knew the baby was over on a table, being put into a tiny yellow Babygro. She knew the senior midwife, Sarah, was writing out some kind of form. She knew the doctor was signing it. She knew all this because among the low buzz of activity in the room, kind people were telling her what they were doing. She watched it all. She heard it all, but Hope, like Isaac, was elsewhere.
Because detachment was familiar territory for Hope.
She had learnt very young that there is a way to be somewhere else if you don’t like what’s happening around you in that moment. She became a skilled traveller to that somewhere else inside her head, where she was always much happier. She knew
