Nutshell (14 page)

He considers. He's dealt in property, he owned a skyscraper in Cardiff and knows about a deal. “Tell me where it is and I'll call you an ambulance. Then I'll go.”

Her voice is cautious. Closely observing her own state, waiting for, wanting and dreading the next wave. “No. If I'm going down so are you.”

“Fine. No ambulance.”

“I'll call them myself. As soon—”

As soon as the second contraction, stronger than the first, has passed. Again, her involuntary shout, and the whole body clenching as Claude crosses the room to the bed, to the locker at its side, to disconnect the phone, while I'm violently compressed, and lifted, sucked down and backwards an inch or two from my resting place. An iron band around my head is tightening. Our three fates are being crushed in one maw.

As the wave recedes, Claude, like a border official, says dully, “Passport?”

She shakes her head, waits to get her breath. They hold each other in a form of equilibrium.

She recovers and says in a level voice, “Then you'll have to be the midwife.”

“Not my baby.”

“It's never the midwife's baby.”

She's frightened, but she can terrify him with instructions.

“When it comes out it'll be facedown. You'll pick it up, both hands, very gently, supporting the head, and place it on me. Still facedown, between my breasts. Near my heartbeat. Don't worry about the cord. It'll stop beating on its own and the baby will start to breathe. You'll put a couple of towels over it to keep it warm. Then we wait.”

“Wait? Christ. For what?”

“For the placenta to be born.”

If he flinched or retched, I don't know. His calculation might still be that we could get this over with and catch a later train.

I listen closely, intent on learning what to do. Duck under a towel. Breathe. Don't say a word. But
it
! Surely, pink or blue!

“So go and get a pile of towels. It'll be messy. Scrub your hands with the nailbrush and lots of soap.”

So far out of his depth, so far from a friendly shore, a man without his papers who should be on the run. He turns to go and do what he's told.

So it continues, wave on wave, shouts and wails, and pleas for the agony to cease. Unmerciful progress, relentless ejection. The cord unreels behind me as I make my slow way forward. Forward and out. Pitiless forces of nature intend to flatten me. I travel a section where I know a portion of my uncle has passed too often the other way. I'm not troubled. What was in his day a vagina is now proudly a birth canal, my Panama, and I'm greater than he was, a stately ship of genes, dignified by unhurried progress, freighted with my cargo of ancient information. No casual cock can compete. For a stretch, I'm deaf, blind and dumb, it hurts everywhere. But it pains my screaming mother more as she renders the sacrifice all mothers make for their big-headed, loud-mouthed infants.

A slithering moment of waxy, creaking emergence, and here I am, set naked on the kingdom. Like stout Cortez (I remember a poem my father once recited), I'm amazed. I'm looking down, with what wonder and surmise, at the napped surface of a blue bath towel. Blue. I've always known, verbally at least, I've always been able to infer what's blue—sea, sky, lapis lazuli, gentians—mere abstractions. Now I have it at last, I own it, and it possesses me. More gorgeous than I dared believe. That's just a beginning, at the indigo end of the spectrum.

My faithful cord, the lifeline that failed to kill me, suddenly dies its allotted death. I'm breathing. Delicious. My advice to newborns: don't cry, look around, taste the air. I'm in London. The air is good. Sounds are crisp, brilliant with the treble turned up. The lambent towel beaming its colour summons the Goharshad mosque in Iran that made my father cry at dawn. My mother stirs and causes my head to turn. I have a glimpse of Claude. Smaller than I cast him, with narrow shoulders and a foxy look. No mistaking an expression of disgust. Evening sunlight through a plane tree throws a stirring pattern on the ceiling. Ah, the joy of straightening my legs, of noting from the alarm clock on the bedside table that they'll never make their train. But I don't have long to savour the moment. My pliant rib cage is clamped by the squeamish hands of a killer and I'm placed on the snowy-soft welcoming belly of another.

Her heartbeat is distant, muffled, but familiar, like an old chorus not heard in half a lifetime. The music's marking is andante, a delicate footfall leading me to the true open gate. I can't deny the dread I feel. But I'm dead beat, a shipwrecked sailor on a lucky beach. I'm falling, even as the ocean licks around my ankles.

Trudy and I must have dozed. I don't know how many minutes have passed until we hear the doorbell. How clear it sounds. Claude is still here, still hoping for his passport. He may have been downstairs to hunt. Now he goes towards the videophone. He glances at the screen and turns away. There can be no surprises.

“Four of them,” he says, more to himself.

We contemplate this. It's over. It's not a good end. It was never going to be.

My mother moves me so we can exchange a long look. The moment I've waited for. My father was right, it is a lovely face. The hair darker than I thought, the eyes a paler green, the cheeks still flushed with recent effort, the nose indeed a tiny thing. I think I see the entire world in this face. Beautiful. Loving. Murderous. I hear Claude cross the room with resigned tread to go downstairs. No ready phrase. Even in this moment of repose, during this long, greedy stare into my mother's eyes, I'm thinking about the taxi waiting outside. A waste. Time to send it away. And I'm thinking about our prison cell—I hope it's not too small—and beyond its heavy door, worn steps ascending: first sorrow, then justice, then meaning. The rest is chaos.

Ian McEwan is the bestselling author of sixteen books, including the novels
The Children Act; Sweet Tooth; Solar,
winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize;
On Chesil Beach; Saturday; Atonement,
winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award;
The Comfort of Strangers
and
Black Dogs,
both short-listed for the Booker Prize;
Amsterdam,
winner of the Booker Prize; and
The Child in Time,
winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections
First Love, Last Rites,
winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and
In Between the Sheets
.