2002 - Wake up (16 page)

The rest of Saturday afternoon, into the evening, and all through the night Lily had regular, painful contractions.

“They’re not right,” she told me. “I knew they were going to be painful, but this is the wrong pain.”

“How can you be sure?” I asked her.

“Look,” she said, holding her fingers against the front of her lower abdomen. We consulted diagrams. “It’s pushing out against my synthesis pubis. It should be pushing down against the cervix.” She grimaced as another contraction came. “It’s not right.” She closed her eyes, she looked tired.

“I’ll phone,” I said.

At 3 a.m. an on-call midwife came. She gave Lily another internal. “It’s barely one finger dilated,” she said. “If that. Why don’t you take a couple of paracetamol, get your husband here to make you a hot-water bottle, and try and get some sleep.”

It was good advice, and we took it, and Lily slept a few hours. She woke, but carried on dozing on and off through Sunday morning, until the contractions started again around noon, immediately painful, stabbing her, in the same way as they had before.

She spoke on the phone to someone, I don’t remember whether it was a doctor or a midwife, and they said to relax as much as possible and just stay with it. We had the feeling we were going round in circles. Sunday evening wasn’t too bad, and Lily got some rest, but then from midnight on she was in a lot of pain, with the same short, sharp contractions.

Lily sent me to the spare room to get some sleep. “You won’t help me if you’re exhausted,” she said.

Around the middle of Monday the contractions became longer and more regular than they had been. Another midwife, an Irishwoman, came at 3 p.m. She gave my wife an internal examination and said the cervix had thinned, it had just started to dilate.

“This has been going on since Friday night, for Christ’s sake,” I said.

“It’s not the right pain,” Lily insisted. But I could see that the midwife didn’t heed what she was saying, because she was in such control. “It’s really painful,” my wife said, but she wasn’t weeping and wailing so the midwives just thought,
This woman, she doesn’t know what pain is—but she will soon enough, God help her
.

The Irish midwife advised Lily to rest, to lie on her left side, which meant the baby’s back would be facing downwards, and gravity might encourage his head away from where it seemed to be hurting her. I took the midwife aside as she left. “Tell me,” I whispered through gritted teeth, “what the hell is going on?”

“It’s fine,” she said. “Everything is fine. You relax as well yourself.”

Lily lay on her side but the searing pain continued striking her. At 1 a.m. we called the hospital and yet another midwife turned up. Her vaginal examination revealed dilation of barely three centimetres. She stayed with us, calm as all the others. At two-thirty all of a sudden my wife’s waters broke. There was a smell like the smell of a broken egg. Over the following three and a half hours Lily had intermittently strong and weak contractions. Still that pain.

“We’ll do another examination at six,” Vicky promised. Our anticipation prickled: when the time came all three of us were eager. Vicky felt around. You could see her trying to stop herself frowning. “I’m afraid there’s no further dilation.”

We were getting desperate by now. Lily started trembling. She tried walking up and down the stairs to jog the baby loose, with little effect on anything except to tire her further, so she took a couple of paracetamol and we both went to bed, while downstairs Vicky swapped shifts with the next midwife and explained my wife’s situation. But Lily couldn’t sleep. She was still suffering stabbing pain with every useless contraction, and I could feel her shaking beside me. “I can’t stop,” she said. “I have to stop trembling. Run me a hot bath.”

I did as she asked. “It’s no good, John,” she stuttered. “We have to go to hospital. Let me have the bath, help me stop shaking, and then we’ll sort this out.”

The hot bath helped. I got tea and biscuits on a tray and Lily came downstairs, and we sat with Jenny the new midwife.

“I realise it’s not happening,” my wife said. She was still so calm, though she’d hardly slept now for eighty hours, except for sporadic dozes, and suffered a great deal of pain. I was as proud of her as I was worried.

“No, it’s not,” Jenny agreed.

“I wanted a home birth, but that’s OK,” my wife said. “Let’s go to the hospital.”

“Yes, I agree,” Jenny said. “Let’s go now.”

Jenny drove up to the hospital, we followed. At eleven, Tuesday morning, Jenny booked us into a delivery suite. An anaesthetist, in a light blue uniform that exactly matched his deep sea eyes, came and put a drip in the back of my wife’s left hand, ready for oxytocin, which induces contractions, and also for a rehydrating fluid called Hartmann’s solution. Then he inserted a neat epidural into her lower back.

By twelve-thirty Lily announced that the epidural was working, which meant she was no longer troubled by the peculiar agony of her contractions. At last. A breakthrough. Jenny told us to try and sleep. I closed my eyes in the plastic armchair and sank straight into bottomless dreams. My insane wife didn’t sleep at all.

At two, Jenny added the oxytocin drip, and the afternoon slipped and bobbed along, with Jenny adjusting the oxytocin intake to optimise contractions: those hours have disappeared into a black hole of time. At six, Jenny gave Lily a vaginal examination and announced that there was full dilation. To say I was relieved would be something of an understatement.

“We’ll start delivery in one hour,” Jenny said.

We were relaxed and confident. I felt so sorry for Lily. She’d planned a birth in which she would be in control, walking around the house, swaying her hips to music she liked. Here she was virtually strapped down, with an epidural stuck into her spine, an oxytocin drip feeding into her hand, and monitors attached to her belly that measured muscular movement i.e. the contractions of her uterus, and showed them on a screen. While a further device measured the baby’s heartbeat, indicated on a second screen.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I feel stronger, free of that pain. I feel I’ll be able to do whatever I need to.”

We watched the build-up of contractions on the monitor and at seven Lily started pushing with them, expecting like the midwife a quick third stage, and the imminent emergence of our child. Every five minutes or so we’d see the line on the screen start jumping and I’d say to my wife, “Now!” and she pushed the way she’d been preparing for, exerting all her might.

Nothing happened. Time went by. At eight o’clock Vicky, the midwife from the night before, came on shift and joined us. Jenny could have left but she said no, she’d stay with us. On her own time. Vicky was good, she encouraged Lily to go for it, and my wife was pushing brilliantly, three times with every contraction. Jenny and now Vicky felt around inside her; they could feel the baby’s head, they couldn’t work out why it wasn’t coming around the pubic bone and out. I looked too. I could see the top of the baby’s head, and I could see that Lily’s pushing, despite what must have been her exhaustion, was exerting tremendous force. But the baby just wouldn’t, couldn’t, emerge.

At eight forty-five Jenny said, very calmly, “I think I’ll just go and have a chat with a doctor.”

I realised Jenny had been keeping an eye on the screen that monitored the baby’s heartbeat, watching out for signs of foetal distress. I didn’t have any idea that it was also being watched by doctors on a matching screen in a central office in the middle of the delivery suites. Jenny came back with a male doctor. I think he was Dutch. He examined my wife, and, also very calmly, suggested he use a ventouse, a vacuum extractor, to help the baby out.

Lily agreed, and then, all of a sudden, everything changed: our quiet room was invaded by doctors in masks, nurses pushing trolleys, orderlies carrying equipment. Leads, wires, everywhere. Someone stepped forward and removed the end of the bed and stirrups were clicked into place, and my wife’s feet strapped into them. We’d been plunged into the centre of a medical emergency.

A semi-circle of medics grouped themselves around the end of my wife’s bed. Two doctors. A paediatrician with a trolley bearing an infra-red lamp over a tiny cot. An anaesthetist. A nurse. One of our midwives.

I stood on one side of the bed by my wife’s left shoulder, Jenny by her right.

The Dutch doctor injected an anaesthetic into my wife’s perineum, and he emptied her bladder with a catheter tube. An assistant then started up the vacuum of the ventouse machine, and the doctor attached the end, which looked like a sink plunger, to the baby’s visible head.

Encouraged by all, my wife pushed in time to the monitors’ urgings. She gave it her all, and so did the Dutch doctor, pulling for all his worth on the ventouse. The baby’s head began to emerge. The doctor grunted, Lily groaned. Like ringside fans, the rest of us cheered them on. Suddenly the suction on the baby’s head snapped loose, the doctor staggered backwards across the room and the baby disappeared back inside where it’d clearly decided it was going to stay.

The doctor picked himself up. Everyone regrouped. The vacuum machine was started up again, the doc attached his toilet plunger, we all watched the screen, the lines started jumping.

“Now!” we cried. “Push!” and my obedient, plucky wife pushed, and the doctor pulled. The baby’s head came out, there it was, crowning, no doubt about it…Another inch! Come on!…When—plop!—again the ventouse came off, the doctor threw himself backwards, the baby retreated.

How long can this malarkey continue? I wondered. They’re going to have to cut her open. Maybe the kid’s weirdly malformed and there’s an aberrational part of its unfortunate body hooked up in there. They warned us that was possible. What’s it going through, anyway? When the hell are they going to decide to perform a Caesarian?

They started the palaver again though, went through it all, the same cries of encouragement, the same pushing and pulling. This time, the suction held, but even so the Dutch doctor didn’t seem able to pull the child out, when suddenly my wife made a great grunting roar and pushed her baby’s head clear out, and then the rest of its body slithered free.
Spontaneous vaginal delivery
, as the notes would confirm. The doctor made to pass him to the paediatrician, but Jenny assessed that he was OK and like a rugby player she intercepted, grabbed the baby and put him straight on to Lily’s tummy.

Lily was done in. She was dazed. The medics administered syntometrine and pulled the placenta out, and they gave her a few stitches. I sat with her and hugged her and the baby, who was all dopey. His head smelled like honey and piss. John Junior had joined us.

“T DON’Tknow,” I told the doctor, “I always seem to have J. a sore throat nowadays.”

“You think it’s something in the air?”

“Me? I have no idea. Yes, maybe. What, do you think there is?”

“I don’t know either. People say so, but I’m not qualified to comment. Your son, is he beginning to speak?”

“My son?” I laughed. “No, of course not. Well, he’s making noises, yes. Burbles. Squeaks. But not words. Perhaps one could say he’s finding his voice.”

“And you’re losing yours.”

“What? You think?” I shook my head. “No.”

“Tell me more,” the doctor said. “Tell me about the constipation.”

“Yes.” I shifted uneasily in my seat. “Yes. Sometimes I do get the urge to defecate, well, I have that lovely ache in the arse, I don’t know where it is exactly, you tell me, Doctor, and I make my way to the toilet. Only for the promised relief to, I don’t know, retreat. No, to evaporate. Yes, for the putative stool to reveal itself as so much hot air. As wind, the sound of its expulsion amplified by the toilet bowl, which with its water is apparently a perfectly constructed acoustic instrument: a sardonic echo chamber. Mocking me.”

The doctor frowned. “Do you think you’re being a little, shall we say, melodramatic?”

“There’s another thing.”

“Yes?”

“God. Yes. I’m embarrassed. Sometimes when I have had a shit it seems I can’t clean myself. However much I wipe. I miss something. Roll off more pieces of tissue paper. Spinning the toilet-roll holder like a mouse in a cage. You know the places in the world where they don’t use paper? They use water. They think what we do is unclean. They’re right. I use more paper, enough to clog the U-bend. But a second flush and away it goes. All that soggy wadded mess of tissue, hurtling along the enduring drains.”

The doctor sat there, placid, impassive as ever.

I shook my head. “Crazy,” I said. “I remind myself of my mother. For fuck’s sake.”

Y
ou know, everything is speeding up. Yes, except for my digestion, which is slowing down. Very funny. The last time I was in Berlin I had this taxi driver. He drove with one hand glued to the gearstick, the other alternately wrenching the steering wheel and fist-shaking at other cars. He was the most aggressive driver I’ve ever been driven by, and anyone who’s been a passenger in my brother’s Jaguar would appreciate what a tribute that is. This German punched the steering wheel, cursed, gave the finger to lorries and motorbikers.

At pedestrians he yelled (I translate), “Get off za fucking pavement you shithound!” as he mounted the kerb in order to gain a few seconds. This lunatic tail-gated the car in front of him, jumped traffic lights, cut across lanes, beeping and snarling all the while. And I, sat in the back, was an irrelevant, if enthralled, witness. His passengers were less people than batons he picked up in a never-ending relay; an endless race through the traffic, a race he never wins for he is thwarted at every turn by incompetent fools.

§

A couple of weeks after John J. was born everyone came over to our place. We thought we’d do without a christening. We don’t want godparents. Poor Lily. No immediate family of her own left, mobbed by the Sharpe menagerie.

“What you want mate’s a Compaq iPAQ pocket PC,” Greg was informing Bill.

“I don’t need games, mind.”

“Who does?”

“One or two, maybe.”

Lily and I sat on the sofa with John J. on our laps and let my family pay homage. “He’s beautiful, John,” said Melody. “I’m so pleased.”