Dot (18 page)

‘Breathe through it,’ Tony said, ‘sharp, shallow breaths.’

But Alice pushed him away and all he could do was watch the sweat gathering on her brow, dropping in tiny rivers down her face. In the end he couldn’t bear it any longer and took her back to the bed, which was comforting in the fact that it was, at least, a destination.

‘Shall I get you something to eat? Maybe some chocolate?’

Alice nodded. ‘And a drink please.’

It was a relief to walk away for a moment, like diving into cool water on a hot day and for a minute the realisation that he could keep on walking swept through Tony. The food kiosk was only just inside the main hospital doors and he watched people swinging easily through them. At the last minute he bought a packet of fags and a tube of mints and went to stand in the sharp night air, which rushed around him after the heat of the hospital. He hadn’t smoked in ages, since he’d moved in with Alice really, and the nicotine marauded through his blood, flicking that switch in his brain so that his shoulders relaxed and his breathing deepened. If he never met the baby, he found himself thinking … but of course he would never do anything like that. He ground the butt of the cigarette into the tarmac and popped a mint into his mouth before going back inside.

Alice was leaning over the side of the bed, her face red and contorted, her hands grabbing for something that wasn’t there. Tony immediately went to her and stroked the hair off her face, whispering nothings into her ear. He put a hand on her stomach and it felt hard and mean.

‘You’ve got to stop fighting them,’ he said after the pain had subsided and she was lying breathless, her head flung against the pillow. He handed her pieces of chocolate, which she ate slowly. ‘That’s what those breathing exercises were all about. Your body’s going to do this whatever and if you tense your muscles it’ll hurt more.’ Tony wasn’t sure that Alice had heard but he didn’t repeat himself.

The next round of pain came quickly. Alice grabbed on to Tony’s hand and wept. ‘Oh God, it hurts so much.’ He soothed her and they settled into a pattern. He asked her a few times if she wanted to walk again, but she didn’t, so all he could do was hand her sips of drink and tiny squares of chocolate. The clock ticked on but the night remained stubbornly immobile. Tony began looking at the clock and wondering which number would deliver them a baby, which seemed an absurd and unlikely thought. As so many other people rested and slept they were here doing this, something that would change their lives for ever. They had only been in the hospital for three hours, a period of time which could float past him and disappear down a hole most days, but which he had now lived through experiencing every second, aware of every pulse from his heart.

‘I’m going to be sick,’ Alice said and he stood up, panicked, rushing from the bed to find a nurse who chuckled at his worry and handed him some cardboard bowls.

‘Don’t you want to check her?’ he asked.

‘Someone will be in shortly,’ she answered. ‘Don’t worry, it’s all perfectly normal.’

It didn’t seem normal to hold your wife’s head as she retched brown bile into something which, if painted, could pass as a clown’s hat. Tony felt annoyed by Miriam and wondered why she hadn’t written that he would feel scared and helpless in the ‘fathers’ story’ chapter. There had even been photos of men physically supporting their wives as babies slipped from their bodies. As Alice retched next to him he was sure he remembered reading, just a few nights before, that it was a mystical event. She was writhing again, clutching his hand so hard he thought she might break it, her voice whimpering and far away. ‘Tony please,’ she was saying, ‘I can’t do this, please help me.’

He knelt down so that their faces were level and tried to make her look at him, but her eyes flickered away, her face a jangle of pain. He didn’t recognise her and it scared him to think of her lost to him, even her strangeness was something and he knew he would miss it. Tony ran into the corridor again and stopped another midwife. ‘Please, my wife really is in agony. Can someone come and see her?’

The woman clicked her teeth. ‘We’re very busy tonight. Childbirth does hurt.’

Her presumption annoyed him. ‘I know. I’m not stupid. I have read the books. But her contractions are really close together now.’

The woman sighed, no doubt cursing her luck that she had been walking past at that moment. ‘OK,’ she said, following Tony back into the room.

Alice was off the bed now, leaning over it and gripping on to the sheets.

‘We’ll let this one pass then I’ll examine her,’ said the midwife, snapping on yet more plastic gloves. ‘My name’s Dora.’

‘Tony and Alice,’ answered Tony. Alice’s body was releasing her for a minute.

‘Do you think you could lie back, Alice, so we can see what’s going on?’ said Dora in a voice that left no room for compromise. Alice only whimpered.

Dora pushed Tony out of the way, her hand strong on Alice’s back. ‘Now, now. Is it really bad?’ Alice moved her head imperceptibly. ‘I’m sorry but I do need to examine you.’ Dora checked the chart by the bed. ‘You were between two and three, three hours ago.’ Alice didn’t answer; instead her body stiffened and her hands turned white with the pressure of gripping. ‘OK, love, breathe through it,’ Dora said. ‘They’re pretty close together. As soon as this one’s over I’m going to examine you standing up.’

Tony didn’t know how Dora knew the exact moment the contraction had finished, but she was quick and concerned. She stood up and looked at Tony. ‘Your wife is just about ready to give birth. We need to move her to a labour room. Get her on to the bed. I’ll be back in a second.’

‘But how, I mean, that’s too quick, isn’t it?’ said Tony, his mind feeling like a blender, scrapping all the useful information it had ever stored.

Dora laughed. ‘Try telling that to the baby. There’s no rule book, you know.’

‘Are you coming in?’ someone was asking him and he looked down and somehow Alice was on the bed and it was being wheeled away from him.

‘Yes, of course,’ he said, tripping over himself as he followed them down corridors and into another room.

‘Is there a pressure in your bottom?’ Dora was saying as she pushed Alice’s legs into the air. ‘Push into that. Well done, that’s right.’ Another midwife was holding a wet cloth against Alice’s forehead, whilst a young girl busied herself on the other side of the room. Tony stood against a wall, his coat draped over his arm, Alice’s bag in his hand. He felt as if he was underwater and that he couldn’t breathe. ‘Push,’ women shouted all around him whilst Alice screamed. Shouldn’t he get someone? Didn’t a doctor need to be present? Hold your wife’s hand, Miriam Stoppard advised, tell her she’s wonderful, she’ll need your support. But Tony was stuck to the wall, fear flattening him like a coward. ‘That’s it,’ Dora said, ‘one more now.’ Alice made a noise from somewhere deep inside her and then there was an instant of total silence, broken by the screams of a baby. ‘Congratulations, Alice,’ Dora said, handing her something which Tony understood to be a baby. It lay on her chest, as shocked as the rest of them.

Dora came over to Tony. ‘Congratulations,’ she said, ‘your wife was amazing.’ She nudged him in the arm. ‘Why don’t you put down your stuff and go and meet your baby?’

So Tony did as he was told, and all the while the water was filling his ears and his lungs so that he thought it likely he would faint before he reached the bed. Alice smiled up at him and she looked as if time had travelled across her face and punched her in the eyes. He could see tiny broken veins splattered across her nose and cheeks like freckles and her hair was as wet as if she had been swimming. He remembered their beach and his body tingled.

‘Let’s weigh her then,’ Dora said, taking the tiny being from Alice’s chest. The baby cried at the intrusion and Tony followed it with his eyes, only hearing the words seconds after they’d been spoken.

‘A girl?’

‘That’s normally the first question most dads ask.’ Dora chuckled. She put the baby on to the scales. ‘Seven pounds three. Now I think this baby needs a feed.’

The other midwife helped Alice to sit up and then both women bent over her as the baby, now wrapped in a blanket, was placed into her arms. The air vibrated as the baby nestled into her breast, its tiny eyes shut, its rosebud mouth closing convincingly over the nipple. Alice stared down at her and the midwives started to tidy up, making Tony notice the oceans of blood on the bed and the floor. ‘You’ll need a few stitches,’ Dora was saying, ‘I’ll get them done now.’ Tony sat down heavily in the chair next to the bed which held his wife and daughter and for a second felt unworthy of even breathing the same air as the people who brought life into the world.

Alice rolled her head to the side and smiled at him. ‘Are you happy she’s a girl?’

‘Of course. Are you?’

‘I didn’t mind,’ she answered, which Tony thought was probably true. Secretly he’d hoped for a son, but now the baby was here he could see that it didn’t matter. Alice winced as Dora sewed her up.

‘I can’t believe how amazing you were,’ said Tony. ‘I lost it when we got in here.’

She laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t notice.’

‘Were you scared? What were you thinking about?’

‘I can’t remember. Actually I can, but it’s so strange. At one point I thought about, you know, how sometimes you see beetles lying on their backs with their legs waggling in the air?’ Tony nodded. ‘Well, I’m never leaving one like that again.’ He laughed. ‘And then I thought about my mother. I thought about her doing all this and it seemed impossible.’ She shook her head as if ridding herself of the thought.

‘I can’t believe how’ – he searched for the word – ‘how violent it was. Did it really hurt?’

Alice nodded. ‘D’you want to hold her? I think she’s finished.’

Tony looked down at his daughter, so small it was ridiculous. He stood up and lifted her into his arms and she was so light it was almost as if she didn’t exist. Alice shut her eyes and he went to stand by the window, looking down into the car park as the sky over the hills broke into a pinkish dawn. A cacophony of emotions knocked at his heart and it felt dangerous to let them all in. I will be a better man, he promised himself as he held his daughter in his arms. I am a lucky, blessed man. We’ll get through this together, I won’t let you down.

‘So,’ Dora said from behind him, ‘has baby got a name? I like to know the names of all the babies I deliver.’

Tony looked over at Alice, who opened her eyes. He’d been trying to discuss names with her for weeks, but each time he’d made a suggestion, she’d shrugged him off.

‘You’ve got some ideas, haven’t you?’ she said and so Dora looked at him.

He ran through his top three girls’ names in his head: Holly, Jasmine and Isabella. None of them were right, none of them captured what it meant to be standing here holding this little life.

‘Dot,’ he said, surprising even himself.

‘Dot?’ repeated Alice.

He blushed. ‘Well, Dorothy, I suppose, but we’ll call her Dot.’

‘Dot,’ Alice said again.

‘Obviously only if you like it.’

Alice wrinkled up her nose. ‘How did you think of it?’

Tony worried that she was playing for time. He could feel the midwives busying themselves and he felt suddenly self-conscious, so he lied. ‘Oh, I had an Aunt Dot. She was lovely and I just thought, you know …’ Dot, he thought, let her be Dot. Because she is a beginning. A tiny dot of a life that will grow into something wonderful. The need for her to be Dot tugged at his heart.

‘Well, I think it’s a lovely name,’ said Alice, shutting her eyes again.

Tony smiled and looked down at his daughter. At his Dot.

15 … Recklessness

Alice’s heart sank when Sandra called her on the morning of their circus trip to say that she’d been up all night being sick and didn’t want to risk going anywhere because of the baby, but that Gerry would take Mavis and drive them all there. It had seemed too rude to balk at this after Sandra had gone to all the trouble of organising the trip and buying the tickets and, besides, Dot was very excited.

So Gerry picked them up at the appointed hour in his battered white Chrysler and the girls giggled in the back while Alice asked him polite questions about his teaching and music as he drove them to Cartertown. Once they got there the girls were so overcome with the bright bodies throwing themselves around the big top and the huge animals within touching distance that Alice only had to smile occasionally at Gerry from behind Dot’s bobbing head.

It was getting dark by the time they filed out into the night, a group of excited people who dispersed into a cold evening, all going back to warm homes and cups of tea. The girls pulled on their parents’ hands, tired out by the excitement. Alice strapped them both into the back seat and then settled herself into the front. Gerry turned on the heating and put the Police into the tape deck. Both girls were asleep before they’d even left Cartertown.

‘How’re you feeling now?’ Gerry asked as they bumped along a deserted road, so dark that his headlights carved two neat lines out in front of them and nothing seemed real.

Alice had become used to Sandra’s openness and only blushed slightly at the question. ‘Oh, you know, good days and bad days.’

‘San says you haven’t heard from him at all.’

‘No, still nothing.’ Alice turned her head and saw herself reflected back by the window, Gerry glancing at her from over her shoulder.

‘Well, he’s a bloody fool.’

‘Apparently he left with a barmaid called Silver.’ Alice didn’t know why she was saying this, but the car was like a bubble of life which wouldn’t exist when she left it.

‘I know. God knows why.’

‘You met her?’ The link was tenuous but intoxicating.

‘Yeah, I drink at the Hare and Hounds sometimes.’

‘Did you see them together?’

Gerry shifted. ‘Well, not really. I saw him talking to her in there a few times.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘But she’s nothing compared to you. Honestly, he needs his head reading.’

Alice smiled at this; she was learning to take what she could out of small kindnesses, even when it felt like termites were burrowing into her skin. ‘Thanks.’