The Best Thing (22 page)

When we get to the hospital they help me in. I’m
so glad
to
see Lois, the midwife—I feel like telling her to send Mum and Pug away! But once we get into the suite I just don’t get the time. Lois does an internal examination, which brings on another pain, and tells us that I’m three centimetres dilated—a measly three centimetres after a night and half a day! I’m so pissed off and so scared of how much worse it might get!

All afternoon (it lasts forever, but it’s over in a few seconds) the contractions go on, getting harder, stronger all the time. It’s like a nightmare where I’m standing looking up a cliff face, knowing that a huge chunk of it is going to come loose and fall on top of me. Then I
see
it coming loose and all the rocks come thundering down and I feel them crushing me and burying me, but none of them just kindly knocks me out—I have to
feel
each one thudding into me. Then it eases off—but there I am again, at the bottom of the cliff, looking up and
knowing
that that rock-face is going to give way again.

I get into the rhythm of it. To save my body from screaming chaos, I have to. I’m kneeling beside the bed on some thin mats and I work out that I can
just
get through each one by hanging onto Pug’s and Mum’s hands as hard as I can and yelling ‘A-a-a-a-ah!’ on and on at the top of my voice—some of the pain disappears out my mouth then. Knowing that doesn’t make me feel any better, though. I can’t
believe
I got myself into this.

At about five o’clock everything stops dead. Lois tells me I’m fully dilated. I didn’t even feel her examine me—in between roaring I’m half-asleep, stupid, and the far end of my body doesn’t seem to belong to me any more. They have to lift me around to face the room in the squatting position I chose (like a gift from a catalogue) during the birth classes, way back when, in the life before I was in labour. ‘You’re all set now, Mel,’ Lois says very clearly, as if to a deaf person. ‘So if you feel like pushing, go right ahead.’

‘God, who’s got the energy to
push?
’ I say, rolling my eyes at Pug.

‘You have, mate. Somewhere in there. Don’t worry. It’ll come.’

And it does, the very next contraction, which is just
huge.
I can feel it coming a long way off (‘Oh God, oh God,’ I hear myself whimpering), and I get a good grip on Pug and Mum’s arms. My throat closes off and I feel—little baby, I feel your head start to move down inside me. Before the contraction is even properly finished I have to tell them all, ‘I felt the head moving!’ All of a sudden I see the point of it all—it’s as if I’d
forgotten
there was a baby right up until that moment. Now I’m incandescent with excitement—it’s only a matter of
minutes
till we
see
, after all those months!

‘Yes, we’ve got a head here.’ Lois produces a mirror from nowhere and, God!, there you are: I’m gaping open a little to show a wrinkled piece of grey skin with dark streaks of wet hair on it. ‘Fuck me dead!’ whispers Pug, squeezing my hand very suddenly—I think he’s going through the same realisation as me. Mum runs her hands through my wet hair, lifting it dripping off my neck. ‘Nearly there, you
soldier,
you!’

Somehow during the next push I manage to keep my eyes on the mirror and I see your head ease out. It turns as it eases, and I can feel the turning inside me, the full stretch of myself making way for you.

‘Look, it’s got your eyebrows,’ I joke hoarsely to Pug. What a cool customer I am, after all that roaring.

And here I am, half-delivered of a baby, as I’ve never been able to imagine I’d be. A face at both ends, like a Queen on a playing card. Your eyes are closed, your nose is blunt, your mouth all bunched up and cross-looking.

‘Now just gently push the shoulders out, Mel, with the next contraction.’

Well, I do, but not just the shoulders come out. The whole baby slithers out in a rush, Lois neatly catching it and laying it on the padding between my feet.

‘A girl!’ says Pug, as if it was the last thing he’d expected to see!

I’m totally amazed, staring and staring. Her head was whitish
grey, but as soon as she’s out she starts flushing pink, all over, very quickly. She opens her mouth and there are gums in there, and a tongue as fine as a kitten’s. Out of her throat on her first breath comes a tentative cry, a voice never heard in the world before. From her navel the live multicoloured umbilical rope spirals back up to my insides, to that beautifully positioned placenta.

‘You could pick her up,’ says Lois, and I do, astonished that I’m allowed to, that she’s mine. She’s so
hot
and damp and rubbery, but not slippery at all. Her arms shoot out and her fingers spread in surprise, even though I’m as gentle as I can be. She stops squeaking and opens her eyes—oh,
eyes!

Pug is—everything is on his face that you and your new mother could hope for (except for the bruises). He looks wrecked, sick, unshaven—heaps worse for wear than I feel! His hands are fists at his mouth, and he’s staring at you as if he’s terrified you’ll evaporate in front of his eyes. Tears run, ignored, down his face into the stubble.

‘Come here,’ I say, and he crawls over and sits with his head on my shoulder, gazing at you, touching your hair, your ears, your hands and feet, swearing in a shaky voice. All the time you frown at him in a really
outraged
way, but you don’t make a fuss. Above me your grandmother blows her nose and says, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, she’s so lovely.’

You are such a marvellous little body, and somehow a personality, too, filling all the space in the room like a wind, making us all glow.

One last contraction approaches, nothing like as strong as the ones that brought you, and Lois is there with a metal dish to catch the placenta as it shlooshes out, wonderfully soft after your hard head. The umbilical cord is blanched-looking now, no longer beating.

‘Here, Dino.’ Lois hands him a pair of surgical scissors. Then she clamps off the cord near your belly and invites him to cut.

‘Oh, God.’ He sounds mildly hysterical, but he does it. And
there you are, with that enormous yellow toggle hanging off your tiny belly full of such complicated workings—including the workings for growing a baby, a tiny uterus like a pear tomato tucked away for future use. Have one, won’t you? Whatever age, I don’t mind. Because I want you to know what I feel, that the whole meaning of my life arrived in this birthing room, that I saw the point, seeing you, that I knew. I couldn’t feel less like crying; I couldn’t feel sturdier or happier or less embarrassed about my body than when they help me unfold it and lift it limb by limb onto the bed, puffy and saggy and bruised and leaking blood. Such good work it’s done, such a prize it’s delivered, just the way Mum said. What a system! Who worked this one out? Call them in here! I want to congratulate them!

She was born at 6.45 p.m. They let me stay in the birth centre overnight, which is great because Pug can stay too. The three of us sleep together on the double bed, the baby between us. In the middle of the night she starts wriggling in a slow, underwater kind of way and giving creaky little cries, so I sit up and give her her first breastfeed with the help of Joella, the midwife on duty. The baby falls back to sleep after a few minutes of feeding, but Pug and I are both wide awake by then, and we start talking. We go through all the names we’d been considering, but none of them seems right for this creature, the newness, the
ours
-ness of her. Then Pug, muttering to her in Italian, drops the word ‘bella’, and we decide that Bella is about as right as we’ll ever get.

‘What if she grows up really ugly, though?’ I say.

‘You’re joking. Look at that skin.’ Warm, pink, pearly. ‘Look at that hair.’ A fluff of black down. ‘Check out those eyebrows.’ The faintest curved black brushstrokes. ‘You’ve gotta be joking.’

Then we get onto talking about the labour. ‘It’s … it’s rough stuff,’ he says, and I look at him and his eyes are filling up again. He puts his face in my shoulder and mutters, ‘I thought it was never going to end. It was real easy to imagine … that … that
she’d get stuck and you’d both die.’ I feel a tear run down inside the neck of my T-shirt.

‘Yeah, well, dying seemed like a pretty good option a couple of times there.’ I’m trying to joke him out of it but I’m a bit wet-eyed myself. He takes a corner of Bella’s cotton blanket and wipes my eyes and nose. ‘Thanks.’

‘That’s okay.’

We both giggle. Then he kisses me with his bruised mouth, which is somehow really, really sexy—it has to stand in for the whole act of
, plus a few other things, new things, twenty-four hours’ worth of things between us that can never be unmade, that can never, ever have not happened.

Sunday night and I’m home at Mum’s on the hospital’s early release programme. I’ve given Bella four feeds, and I’m starting to get used to that, even though she doesn’t get proper milk for a day or so yet. Mostly she sleeps, recovering from the shock of arriving—and also that’s when she grows, a nurse told us this morning. So sleep on, little baby, grow!

She’s wrapped in a bunny rug in the Family Heirloom, parked behind my bedroom door. I’m supposed to be resting my poor bruised body while Pug and Mum organise dinner, but I struggle out of bed and sneak over for a private look at her, for the thrill of having her here to look at, instead of inside me, a total mystery. It’s new every time I look at her; every time I find something else to notice. She must be growing so fast, so much going on inside that thin red skin, behind that sleeping face, those two loose fists the size of the ends of my thumbs. Unbelievably small and quiet. This little
person
who spent eight and a half months
inside me.
The ghost I saw kicking, just a few centimetres long, on the ultrasound screen, now an air-breathing person with a hardly-used voice, and a fresh-cut mouth hardly a centimetre wide, and grey-blue eyes (mostly crossed when they’re open!).
You
were the one who made me sit up, jamming your feet under my ribs, who woke me with your stretching and squirming, who pushed your
head up against my bladder fifteen times a night! It’s lovely to meet you,
finally.

God, this motherhood stuff, it does things to you! I walk out onto the front veranda in the afternoon, lightweight and unbalanced without my lump, without Bella in my arms.

Mum’s sitting in one of the new cane chairs reading an interior decorating magazine. She looks up.

‘She’s asleep,’ I say.

‘Why aren’t you, then?’

‘I’m just seeing what it’s like to be awake while she sleeps. Just for fun, you know.’

‘Strange, I’ll bet.’

‘I don’t know what to do with myself. Yes, I do—put on another load of washing.’

‘You just sit tight there. She’s going to wake up in three minutes, anyway.’

‘Pug at training?’

‘Yep. He’s coming back afterwards, he says, so don’t panic.’

‘Good. I don’t know how I’d’ve got through the last couple of nights without him.’

‘Probably come and thrown Bella in with
me!
Thank you, Pug.’

‘Thrown is right. That crying, I don’t know, it really gets to me. I hear it and I can
feel
my heart speed up, and I just—aagh!—go so tense!’

‘Yes, I remember that feeling with you.’ Mum smiles. ‘You just have to remember, it’s not a personal attack on you, not an accusation that you’re not a fit mother.’

‘It sure sounds like it.’

‘It’s the only way she’s got, to communicate. After a while you’ll be able to tell which cries mean you have to get up and run to her, and which you can ignore.’

I grunt, reassured, irritated. So much to learn,
too
much. And we can’t go about it systematically. Bella holds us to her own
weird timetable, screaming demands (for
what?
), conking out mid-feed, sleeping for hours when we feel fresh and staying awake for hours when we’re exhausted, pooing at all times of the day or night. We’ll never get on top of this baby-care business, we’ll never get it right.

‘It does get better. Truly, it does,’ says Mum.

I clutch the lifebelt of her sympathetic look. ‘Well, I can’t see how anyone’d ever get around to having second children if it stayed this bad.’

‘Exactly, and they do. So hang in there. Try and relax. It’s a period of adjustment.’

I stare across the road at the livid red bougainvillea snaking up the porch opposite. ‘Why don’t you just say: “Well, you brought it on yourself. You asked for it”?’

She laughs gently. ‘I must be nicer than you think.’

Simone de Beauvoir: ‘Babies filled me with horror. The sight of a mother with a child sucking the life from her breast, or women changing soiled diapers—it all filled me with disgust. I had no desire to be drained, to be the slave to such a creature.’

Gifts keep arriving. Almost every second day Pug turns up with something knitted or sewn or bought by one of his relatives. His mum is impossible—she can’t go to the shops without finding something she
must get
for Bella, some ducks to string across her pram or a couple of singlets with roses embroidered on them, lacy bonnets, bibs, bunny rugs, miniature pillowslips. The woman next door, who I’d never met before, bought Bella a sleepsuit, and someone from Mum’s work, who I remember coming to dinner
years
ago, sent a gift home with her. I mean, here I was wondering why birth is a covered-up, taboo subject, yet everyone, down to total strangers peering into the pram on the street, actually celebrates with you when you’ve brought a baby into the world. Everyone wants to welcome it. It’s really … sweet, touching. It makes you see a part of people that never shows itself on any other occasion.