annoyed with myself (the phone still hasn’t turned up), and I’ll try to settle to some knitting or tidying, but very often I just sit or lie looking at the ceiling. My back aches constantly.
I miss Ron. He has told Silva he’ll be here any day, but still he doesn’t come. She feeds me in the middle of the day now, big, hot platefuls of spaghetti with tomato sauce, or macaroni and cheese, and I eat from boredom, not knowing where I have room to put so much food. Afterward I’m even more sleepy. When I’ve rested, I often feel bloated and itchy, so I’ll go out and stand on the freezing damp concrete for a few moments to breathe in cool air and look at the river. The scent of pine from the forest has turned brackish, and every day the sky is full of geese, circling in wide, fluttering arrows, preparing to migrate. If it’s not raining, I drag a chair to the doorway and sit and watch them for a while, wretchedly sluggish, wondering if even after the birth my distended, straining body will ever feel or look like mine again. But my feet are always freezing, and it’s too cold to stay there, even wrapped up, and anyway soon Silva complains I’m letting cold air in, or blocking her way.
Ron went back to sleeping every night in the mobile unit with the other men. His reappearance went without comment because neither his presence to begin with nor his many later absences had been noticed particularly; the unit was a place where the men went just to sleep, and there was a high turnover as shift patterns became more complex.
In the canteen a squabble erupted over all the extra men Jackson the cook was now expected to cater for; he stormed out and was replaced by a young man called O’Dowd, who went through his workday saying as little as possible. His sullenness spread, somehow, or maybe it was just a deeper concentration now that the end of the project was in sight, or maybe it was simple fatigue that had set in among the men. In any case, there was less banter, and that suited Ron. He felt some of the old talent return to him, acquired after his release from prison, of concentrating only on what was in front of him, on the immediate task in hand, no matter how trivial. He made himself notice frivolous details: the tiny
He couldn’t stop himself sending Annabel messages every day to tell her he’d come as soon as she wanted him to. Only occasional, meaninglessly breezy answers came back. He called her a number of times, but she never picked up. He tried Silva several times also, and she answered once. Her reassurance that all was well was terse. He wasn’t wanted. He decided to go on forcing the small things to absorb him, immersing himself in a private world deliberately shrunk to leave little room for hurt.
Do you remember Anna’s birth? I never saw you so scared, before or since. I can still see your face, and I can hear her first squeezed-out, mewly cry. I hardly remember the pain.
I’m watching Annabel carefully, but not in the way she thinks. She can’t think, actually. She’s lost the power of thought. She’s had only three contractions and it’s nearly two hours since the first one, but she’s been fretting and hefting herself around as if she’s got a bucking bull in there. Weeping, now.
“Try him again! Why isn’t he answering? He promised, oh, he promised,” she wails.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “Don’t worry, you’ve got hours and hours yet. I’m sure he’s still busy and can’t pick up his voice mails, that’s all. He must be busy at the bridge. It reopened today, you know.”
She does, of course, know. We watched it all from here. The bridge reopened at noon, and traffic has been streaming along it for four hours. Now the afternoon is fading and the bridge lights sparkle in strings in the sky across the river. Headlamps are gleaming through the dusk, and again the constant groan of traffic is in the air. The last time I heard that I was in the trailer, lying with your arm around me, and Anna asleep between us.
I’m making a show of timing the contractions. Thirty minutes. I’ll keep her thinking they’re at thirty minutes even as they gradually crowd together and come at her every twenty-five, twenty. I don’t want her to panic. We have to spin this out for hours. I do want the child born alive, and her alive to see it.
“Why not go and make sure all your things are together?” I say. “It helps if you move around. I’ll make a cup of tea and try Ron again.”
She has packed and repacked her overnight bag a number of times already, but at least doing that occupies her. She gnaws her bottom lip, nods, and hauls herself to her feet.
In the kitchen I put on the kettle, and while she wanders around picking things up and putting them down, I stand in the doorway and say loudly, with the phone at my ear, “Hi, Ron, me again. You got my other messages? It’s coming, she’s started, it’s all going fine. But will you get here as quick as possible? Can you call me back? We’re okay, but we need you here now. She really needs to be in hospital soon, okay? Call me back, okay? Soon as possible!”
Annabel appears from her room, looking brave. She pulls in a long, deep breath and lets it out slowly. She thinks I dialed Ron’s number before I spoke.
“He’ll be on his way the minute he hears that,” she says, trying to keep her voice smooth. “Won’t he, Silva? Nothing to be worried about. Is there? And it’s all going fine! It takes hours, doesn’t it?” She glances at the door. “I heard something! I heard the boat! I’m sure it’s him, go down and see! Go and wave, make him hurry!”
I pretend excitement. “Maybe you’re right! Quick, come on!”
We go outside. While she dances at the doorway on her bare feet, I run down to the jetty and scan the water. There’s a heavy drizzle falling, and the river and sky are the same gray. Of course it’s not the boat. It was probably a truck on the bridge. I haven’t spoken to Ron for days and days. I’ve replied to maybe one in ten of the messages he sends to Annabel’s phone. Anyway, he thinks the baby’s not due for another two weeks.
But for several minutes I wait there gazing across, allowing her to think it might be him. Of course it’s cruel. But she deserves cruelty. Don’t you know what she did to you and Anna? I walk back to the cabin shaking my head. Oh dear, it wasn’t the boat.
Out here in the fading light, her face is blotchy. She’s shivering and sweating and trying very hard not to cry again. Naturally I’m moved by her distress, but I resist the wish to take her in my arms by remembering exactly why it is she’s in all this trouble. Why she is in even more trouble than she understands yet. Of course it’s cruel, but has she not been cruel, is she not being cruel even now? She let her husband believe her dead in the river, she lets him go on believing it. Every day since the bridge went down she makes him suffer for the loss of her, as I suffer my loss of you. What is happening, what is about to happen, are what she deserves.
We drink our tea. I make another pretense of calling Ron, and we wait by the light of the stove. Then the contractions stop. We wait. She shifts about, complains of backache, of gas, goes to pee. We wait, for an hour, and still no more contractions. Then she goes to lie down. When she gets up, it’s quite dark. She announces she is hungry and starts foraging in the kitchen. She comes back with a plate of crackers and cheese and, for God’s sake, beetroot.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
I shake my head and turn away from the sound of crunching and the sight of her tongue licking crumbs from the corners of her mouth. She is joking now while she shoves the food in and chews. Her gusts of laughter smell of vinegar. She says the baby was just practicing, keeping her on her toes, she’s heard this can happen several times, up to three weeks before the birth. I have to agree this is possible, and then I find I have nothing more to say. The thought of this not being her time depresses me unbearably. I sit staring at the stove with my arms tight around myself. I have no taste for what I must do, I simply want to get it over with. If it becomes any more drawn-out than this, I am afraid I may be unable to go through with it.
She slumps back to the kitchen with her empty plate, and it’s when she is calling out to me to let Ron know it was a false alarm that she has another contraction, one that stops her breath in her throat and produces a long, quiet moan. I wait, pretending I haven’t heard. After a quarter of an hour, she reappears.
There’s a look on her face now that wasn’t there before, a steadiness. She is going into battle. When the next contraction comes, nineteen minutes later, she’s ready for it, and for the next one, another nineteen minutes later. In between, she walks up and down and gibbers on about Ron, will he bring her some shoes when he comes, because without them how will she get to the jetty? After another hour and three more contractions, I tell her it’s time to forget about him. He must have lost his phone or something. The contractions are getting stronger, and we must handle this ourselves. I remind her about the little white boat. I tell her we’ll take it downriver, keeping close
