Babyville (21 page)

“What is it? What's the matter?” All three of them are leaning over me and all I can think of is I want my mum.

Thank God she's here.

“Mum!” I wail at her, and she can tell from my face that I need to speak to her alone. The others leave and I look at her, mortified.

“I think I've just wet myself,” I whisper in shame, and she starts to laugh.

“Love, I think that's your waters breaking.” She smiles knowingly, forcing me to stand up so she can check.

“That's definitely your waters,” she says, grinning, gesturing to the chair. “Completely clear and odorless. My darling girl, your time has come.” And literally, as she says it, I feel something I haven't felt for nine months.

A period pain.

Mark pokes his head round the doorway. “Is everything okay?” Viv grins and I smile back. “Mark, it's time.” Although this doesn't feel real at all, it feels as if I'm saying these words and tonight I'll go upstairs and climb into bed next to Mark, and tomorrow will carry on as normal.

“Time for what?” Mark is being obtuse, and Viv laughs.

“The baby's on its way.”

And suddenly Mark goes into overdrive. “Oh God. Are you okay? Contractions, when are they coming. Shit, I can't remember, is it eight minutes or five minutes? Don't move, no actually, let's walk around and try some deep breathing,” and when he eventually stops to take a breath, I start to laugh.

“Mark, relax! I'm fine. These contractions are nothing, just like vague period pains, but we'd better phone the hospital because didn't Trish warn in the class of the danger of infection?”

“Yes, yes, phone the hospital. I'll phone them.”

“Mark.” Viv gently takes the phone from him. “I think I'd better phone.”

“Everything all right?” Dad walks back in, and Viv tells him. I'm surprised and delighted to see his ear-to-ear grin. “We're going to be grandparents!” he says, nudging Viv. “Who would have thought it?”

 “What
are they saying, what are they saying?” Mark's flapping like an old woman, and I'm tempted to tell him to shut the fuck up because it's starting to really irritate me, particularly when he's normally so calm, but I know I have to wait until transition to get away with screaming at him.

“Sssh,” Viv's trying to listen to the midwife. “Okay. Okay. So in about an hour? Fine. See you then.”

“Well? Well?”

“They said that you ought to come in because of the risk of infection, but not to worry too much, and if you wanted to turn up in about an hour, that would be fine.”

 “So
let me just make this very clear.” I'm lying on a hospital bed, attached to a fetal monitor unit that is showing contractions are coming every two minutes. I've had the ghastly internal (I swear, the midwife's fingers were thicker than a bloody salami) and it appears I'm two centimeters dilated and could have hours left to go.

“Go home if you want,” she says. “You probably won't be ready until the morning and the best thing you can do is get a decent night's sleep, and you'll sleep far better at home.”

“Could I stay here?” I say doubtfully, knowing that after a nine-month wait nothing short of the army could get me out of this hospital bed now that I'm actually here. “What about the risk of infection?”

“Hardly any if you're sensible,” she says. “It's up to you, but I'd suggest home.”

“I think I'll stay here,” I say, explaining to the others, when they come back in, that she'd said it was probably a better idea to stay at hospital.

I look at Mark and Dad. “I want to make it clear that when the time comes for me to push, I don't want anyone in here, except maybe Viv. Okay?”

“What about me?” Mark says, his hurt already apparent.

“Don't know yet,” I grumble. “I'll see.”

 “Nnnnnnnnnnnnrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhh.”
The sweat drips off my forehead as I push as hard as I can, lying back exhausted as the contraction, finally, starts to wane.

And I start to cry. “I can't do this,” I sob. “I can't do this.”

And I truly don't think I can. I don't think I'm going to get out of this one alive, the pain is so completely overwhelming and horrific. I feel as if my body is about to split open, and, at this moment in time, death seems like a pretty good alternative.

Oh no. Oh fuck. Here it comes again.

“Come on, Maeve, come on, Maeve. Good girl, good girl. You're doing brilliantly. Big big push. Big big push. Just one more push.” The midwife is about twelve years old. Fresh-faced, no wedding ring and skinny as you like. There's no way in hell she's ever had a baby and I wonder what the hell she thinks she's doing, rubbing my shoulder, encouraging me when she's clearly got absolutely no idea that I am about to die, that this pain is the most horrific thing imaginable, that I am not giving birth to a baby, but to a sack of large King Edward potatoes.

“Don't touch me,” I hiss at her, as the contraction subsides again and Mark leans over to wipe the sweat from my brow.

“You can do it,” Mark says, from his position next to the bed, all sense of dignity I might once have had now forgotten as he watches me strain until I'm the color of a freshly boiled lobster. “One more push.”

“NNNNNNnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnrrrrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhh. FUCK OFF!” I scream, and then I squeeze his hand even tighter. “Viv!” I sob. “Where's Viv? I can't do this.”

“Yes, you can.” She runs in from the hallway, straight over to the bed, where she brushes the damp hair off my face and strokes my forehead as I try to muster some energy from somewhere. “I'm here now,” she soothes.

“I can't.” I look at my mum, and there are two of her. I'm so tired I've got double vision, and I know I can't do this anymore. I've changed my mind. I want to go home. I want this pain to go away. I don't want this baby.

The midwife suddenly looks at the fetal monitor machine, and I think I might be imagining it but her eyes seem to widen slightly. A second later an older woman appears in the doorway—the senior midwife—who comes straight over to the bed and starts moving the belt around my stomach up. The belt that's monitoring the baby's heartbeat.

“Come on, Maeve love,” she says kindly as she moves the belt up and down, looking at the machine with measured glances. I try to see what she's looking at, but I'm too tired and I just lie back. “Right,” she says, placing her hands on my hips as she attempts to gently roll me over. “Baby doesn't like this position so we'll have to roll you onto your side.” Like an elephant I start rolling, and then another contraction comes.

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooo,” I scream, vaguely aware that the room, in what feels like a few seconds, has filled with people: the midwife; the senior midwife; an obstetrician; a pediatrician. It is completely surreal, as if a party is going on around my bed. I hear them whisper that they can't find the baby's heartbeat, and I see the panic in Mark's eyes, but I don't care any more. The obstetrician sits between my legs and I watch him through glazed exhausted eyes as he delicately pulls on a pair of latex gloves, looking exactly as if he's about to perform a major piano concerto at the Wigmore Hall.

He smiles up at me. “Just a little episiotomy,” he says. “Won't hurt a bit.” I no longer care. I just want this over with. I don't care about scalpels, or stitches. I don't even care if my deepest fears are realized and I end up doing something I once thought would be horribly humiliating like pooing on his hand. I don't care. I don't have a shred of dignity left, and the fact that a strange man is sitting between my naked spreadeagled legs means nothing. Nothing could be worse than the pain of these contractions.

As another contraction hits, I know I really have reached the end of the line. This is the last one. I know I can't do any more than this.

The senior midwife has now replaced the obstetrician between my legs. “Come on, Maeve, that's it. Good girl. Big big push. Big big push. One more. The baby's coming. I can see the head. Here comes the head.

“Come on, Maeve. Just one more.”

“You can do it, Maeve,” Mark echoes and I bear down, pushing with all my might, screaming with the agony, knowing that it is now do or die.

“NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNRRRRRRHHHHHHHH.”

21

Sam climbs out of her
four-wheel-drive (bought especially to navigate the rough terrain of Gospel Oak's finest streets), unclips George from the backseat, and deposits him safely in a bouncy chair on the kitchen floor before going back outside to collect her shopping.

Organic carrots; organic potatoes; organic broccoli; organic cheese; organic chicken. Chris has already started to question how their monthly food bill seems to have tripled, despite having the addition of one tiny five-and-a-half-month-old baby who eats little more than a few tablespoonfuls. Chris doesn't understand the importance, not to mention the expense, of organic food. To be perfectly honest, Sam doesn't really understand the importance of organic food either, but everyone else seems to be doing it and if everybody else's baby is eating organic, then George will too.

Not that eating nonorganic food as a baby appeared to do Sam—or any of her friends for that matter—any harm, but times change, and although Sam resents the amount of money it costs, she's not prepared to take a risk just in case feeding George “normal” food might result in something terrible.

George is, after all, the love of her life. The apple of her eye. Her very reason for living. She didn't feel it at first, didn't get the whole mother/baby bonding thing. She had never been good at newborns, had never felt particularly comfortable with them, but had relaxed when all her friends told her it would be different when she had her own.

It wasn't.

For three months George was a screaming bundle of colicky sleeplessness. If he wasn't sleeping, he was crying. If he wasn't being fed, he was crying. The only time, in fact, he stopped crying was when Sam strapped him to her chest in the BabyBjorn and took off around the neighborhood.

At least, she would think, striding through the Heath up to Kenwood, I am reaping the benefits of exercise.

Except that, unfortunately, she wasn't. Sam had assumed that breast-feeding would be the perfect way of getting her figure back. Had been told by well-meaning friends that they could zip into their pre-pregnancy jeans within six weeks of breast-feeding.

These same well-meaning friends had said how fantastic breast-feeding was, that you could eat as much as you liked and still lose weight.

Sam threw herself into eating with wild abandon. She found she was starving, could quite happily graze all day, and continue throughout most of the night. She would sleepwalk downstairs, George latched firmly onto her breast, open the fridge door on autopilot, and reach in for whatever came first to hand. Slabs of cheese. Mountains of tuna salad. Ninety-eight percent fat-free toffee yogurts were a particular favorite, particularly as Sam chose to ignore that they were 100 percent pure sugar to make up for the lack of taste.

Sam lost a stone and a half immediately after George was born. Within eight weeks of breast-feeding, she had put it on again. Plus a little bit more for good measure. She has taken to wearing shapeless smocks, and has refused to worry about the excess weight. If being an earth mother means she has to look like an earth mother, then so be it.

At least, she tells herself, smiling as she watches George try to hold his toes, George no longer screams as he did. Not during daylight hours, at any rate. The colic disappeared at around three months, and since weaning him onto solids (she knew she was supposed to wait until four months, but George was so advanced, so strong and healthy, and so clearly hungry, she decided to do it at three and a half) he's been sleeping almost through the night. That's if you disregard the wake-ups at two-thirty, three, three-twenty, and so on until six o'clock every morning when Sam decides she's had enough and goes in to get him up.

She took him to the baby clinic for a checkup, wanted to make sure the birthmark at the back of his neck was not, as she occasionally thought in a panic, meningitis. Sat in the waiting room with bags under her eyes and lank, greasy hair, and wondered whether she looked as terrible as all the other mothers in there, all with the same vacant, exhausted appearance.

One woman shook her head wearily at Sam as her baby started to wail again, and soon the entire room struck up as a background chorus. I hadn't understood, Sam thought as she rocked George back and forth, shushing him softly to calm him down, people who harm their babies. I hadn't understood how anyone could possibly do such a thing. But now, in this waiting room, unable to quiet George, exhausted with frazzled nerves, Sam knew. She also knew she would never do such a thing, but she knew how you could be on the edge, and how little it would take to push you over.

She had reached into the huge black bag (ostensibly a “diaper bag,” despite being the size and weight of a small suitcase filled with rocks) and drew out one of a selection of fourteen pacifiers that were rattling around in the bottom, to silence George's crying. It worked instantly.

A disapproving look from the weary woman, now calmly unbuttoning her shirt as she prepared to breast-feed.

“Do you find,” she said lightly, her tone giving nothing away, “the pacifiers good?”

“They're a life-saver,” Sam said defensively.

“I just think it's such a bad habit, really. Aren't you worried he'll grow up to be a thumb-sucker?”

“No, fuck off. It's none of your fucking business,” was what Sam wanted to say. She swallowed hard and heard herself say lightly, “Not in the slightest.”

“Sometimes I wish I could get Oliver to take one,” the woman said, stroking the head of her rather ugly baby, who was now sucking vigorously on her left nipple. “But he's just not interested, and it's probably a good thing.” She smiled indulgently at her baby, clearly lying.

“Oh push hard enough and I'm sure you'll manage to force it in,” Sam said, and laughed, slightly too hysterically. It shut the woman up.

But the pacifiers were causing something of a problem at night. George slept like an angel from seven in the evening until two-thirty, from which time he screamed every time the pacifier fell out of his mouth. Roughly every twenty minutes.

In the early days Chris and Sam would take turns. And on the weekends Sam would put earplugs in and leave Chris to do the night duty while she tried to catch up on her sleep, although it never actually worked. George's screams were far too loud to be blotted out by a couple of balls of wax (even though she did what the instructions tell you never to do: break one earplug into two, roll both halves up and shove them in as far as they'll go). Sam would lie there, rigid, too exhausted to move, pretending to be asleep.

It became a game. Who could pretend for longest. Sam always lost. Always climbed out of bed hissing at Chris that she was exhausted and it was his fucking turn, and did she have to do absolutely everything around here.

They didn't even fight about it anymore. She didn't have the energy. She just got up, every night, at two-thirty and continued to get up until she'd had enough and she blindly stumbled down to the kitchen to heat the bottle.

“What about sleep-training?” Chris said one night, having spoken to some colleagues who had children, had been through the same thing. “You take away the pacifier and let them cry it out for timed periods.”

They tried it that night. Sam sat cross-legged on her bed and listened to George scream, tears running down her face. Eventually, after one hour and fourteen minutes, she jumped up. “I can't do this,” she explained to a bewildered Chris as she picked up a hysterical, red-faced George, and cuddled him until he calmed down.

“That's the worst thing you could have done,” Chris said calmly. “Now you've taught him that if he cries long enough Mummy will eventually come and get him.”

“Oh fuck off,” she said in fury. “He's my baby and he needs me. He's a tiny baby. This whole sleep-training's a farce, it just makes them feel abandoned and scared. Poor baby. Poor Georgy. It's okay. Mummy's here. Mummy's here. Ssshhh. I promise I won't leave you again. Ssssh.” She didn't dare admit it, but she'd bought the book and was seriously considering starting again on the weekend.

 “Red
lentil and cheesy vegetable casserole,” she mutters to herself, as she flicks through the children's recipe book, stuffs a pacifier into George's mouth, and starts unpacking the shopping at the same time.

George drops the pacifier and starts to whimper as Sam tears open a packet of organic unsalted rice cakes and hands him one. He gums down on it and she breathes a sigh of relief as she busies herself in the kitchen, preparing to cook up yet another batch of food. Holding the cookbook open with her elbows, Sam leans down to pick up the rice cake George has just dropped. Five-second rule. It was on the floor less than five seconds, so she shoves it back in his mouth and just sighs when he drops it again.

“Are you not hungry, darling? Georgy? Rice cake? Mmmm. Yum yum yum. Look. Mummy loves rice cakes.” Sam nibbles on it, then takes a bite. “No?” George is now looking past her shoulder at the lights of the digital clock on the microwave. “Oh well. Mummy will just have to have it,” and Sam shrugs as the rice cake disappears in a single mouthful.

“Mummy's making red lentil casserole with cheese. How delicious. Can you think of anything more delicious? Red's a color, isn't it?” Sam babbles as she opens the larder and pulls out ingredients. “Red's the color of the post-box. It's a hot color, isn't it?”

George could not be less interested. Even Sam isn't particularly interested, but she read somewhere that the most intelligent children were ones whose parents had spoken to them constantly, even from birth, whose parents had explained everything to them.

Sam is determined to be the best mother of anyone she knows. She's never been competitive before, has never really known the cut and thrust of the design world, having always had the creativity and ability to shine naturally, but now, as a new mother, she is determined to do everything right.

Already she believes that George is super-baby. My son the genius, she jokingly refers to him, although listen closely to her laughter and you'll hear it's false. Georgenius, she coos, as she rocks him back and forth at night, reading him
Where's Spot?
(Against her better judgment. She really wanted to start him off on Rudyard Kipling, but
Where's Spot?
and
Charlie the Chicken
appealed to George in a way that
Kim
just didn't.)

“I think he might be quite advanced,” she says, trying to blush with false modesty but failing miserably. “He's definitely going to be walking any second. Look.” And all eyes turn to George, sprawling on his stomach, lifting his head, and looking around happily, but certainly nowhere near the point of standing, let alone walking.

“Did I walk young too?” she asked her mother on one of the rare occasions when she popped in to see her first grandchild.

“Darling, I don't remember.” Her mother looked at Sam as if she were mad. “It was years ago. I do remember you looking ever so sweet with your little pigtails, though,” and she smiled at the memory as she reached for a baby wipe and dabbed a small smear of vomit from her silk shirt with a frown.

“How can you not remember?” Sam tried to hide the disappointment, knowing that she'll never forget these years, never forget George's daily progression, but her mother's tone became irritated as she explained, again, how she had to work in the family business, had no choice, was merely following orders. Sam dropped the subject.

“It's not that I mind about me,” she said to Julia that night, ignoring the fact that these late-night long-distance phone calls were going to send Chris up the wall. “But I mind for George. I'm used to her being a crap mother, but she's supposed to fall in love with her grandson, isn't she?”

Julia sighed. “I do think it's bloody odd that she's not around and not helping, and I completely feel for you. But, Sam. This is your mother. Your mother who is far more concerned with her charity lunches and bloody bridge. You're the one who always says how selfish she is. Maybe you were wrong in expecting her to finally change.”

“But he's so gorgeous.” Sam blinked the tears away from her eyes as she leaned back on the sofa and turned her head to examine one of the many photographs of George now littering every available bit of space in the living room. “How can she not want to spend time with him?”

“I don't know. I know that if I were in London I'd be there every day, and he's not even my relative.”

“Godson's the next best thing.”

“Don't I know it. I just wish I was around a bit more, being godmotherish. As it stands, all I'll end up doing is sending him presents from New York.”

“You know I didn't ask you to be godmother just because I thought you'd buy him expensive presents?”

“I should bloody hope not. Anyway, you wouldn't have asked if that was the case. Not on what London Daytime Television was paying me.”

They both laughed.

“But seriously, Sam, I know you asked me for the right reasons. I know I'm expected to give George moral guidance, and be the person who looks after him if . . . well, heaven forbid . . .”

“Yes, I know. That's exactly why I asked you. But I also want George to be able to come to you when he's older, to ask anything of you.”

“And I want to retain the ability to say no,” Julia laughed. “But Sam, can I just say one more thing about your mother . . . Your mother is your mother, she's not going to change. It's the only certainty in life and you have to stop expecting things from her.”

“I know. I know. It's just that it still bloody hurts. All these years I thought I'd buried all the pain of her not being around, not being interested, not knowing how to mother, for Chrissakes, and now I've had George, all those feelings of resentment and anger feel just as raw as they did ten years ago.”

“Maybe you should think about seeing someone.”

“God!” Sam started to laugh. “How long have you been in New York exactly? A few weeks and you're already buying into all that therapy rubbish?”

“I don't actually think it's rubbish,” Julia said defensively. “I wish I'd been to see someone when I was with Mark. Would have given me the impetus to leave years before.”