The Christmas Surprise (13 page)

‘But she needs drugs, monitoring …’ Rosie pulled back the sheet on the girl’s narrow hips. ‘I don’t think she can even give birth. She needs a Caesarean.’

Faustine looked and nodded.

‘I’ll radio in to our nearest field team. They’re working in a refugee camp …’

‘Well they need to be here,’ said Rosie.

She took out a cool disinfected towel and rubbed it on Célestine’s head, then went outside to think.

‘What is it?’ said Stephen, who was pacing in the shade, the children making passes at his stick.

‘She needs to give birth,’ said Rosie. ‘She’s got an infection, and if we don’t get the baby out it will kill them both.’

‘Can you do it?’

‘I can try and induce it.’ She looked at Stephen. ‘But
she’s far too young to have a baby, you know. It’s going to be a difficult birth. She really needs a section, and I definitely couldn’t do that. Or not without killing her; there’s no anaesthetic. CHRIST.’

Stephen looked at her.

‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Oh God, I can’t believe I brought you out to this.’

Rosie shrugged and shook her head.

‘Well let’s just try and think that it would be even worse if I wasn’t here …’

Faustine came running out. Her face was calm, but very pale.

‘She’s fitting.’

‘Oh crap,’ said Rosie. ‘This baby can’t wait. It can’t. How far away are the field team?’

‘Eight hours,’ said Faustine.

Rosie swore.

‘She hasn’t got eight hours. I’ve seen this before.’

Both the others nodded.

‘Unpack me a pair of gloves,’ said Rosie. ‘Faustine, I’ll need you.’

Célestine’s parents, who had already lost both their sons, sat looking carefully ahead, too numbed by fate to do anything else. Rosie pulled on the gloves and got Faustine to try and cool the girl with stream water –
Stephen fetched it – though it was not as clean as she would have liked. She set a pot to boil on the fire, then, very carefully, gave the girl a ‘sweep’: a gentle stimulation of the ovaries to try and bring on labour. Now that her waters had gone, the baby really needed to be delivered or risk even more infection. And round here, everything you touched was infection.

Célestine moaned and clutched at the thin cotton covering her. Faustine murmured to her comfortingly in French and mopped her brow. Rosie had found a stethoscope in the medical bag but could tell too from touch that the baby was alive. For now.

Suddenly a great wrench went through the girl and she cried out.

‘Yes,’ said Rosie. ‘Yes. That’s labour starting.’ She looked at the girl’s face in pity. ‘And it’s not messing about.’

All through the day and on into the night, Célestine laboured in the boiling heat, her cries faint as Rosie did her best to hold on to her. The group doctor was talking her through it on the radio, but she remembered most of it from her training, and from delivering Edison’s sister at Christmas time, although that seemed now incredibly far away; a different era, almost, in a clean room, with a doctor present and a healthy, motivated mother. Célestine on the other hand was unresisting, her eyes cloudy.

As they went on through the night, still with no sign of the back-up team – their jeep had broken down on the way and there was no prospect of replacement parts, it seemed – everyone dozed in broken jerks here and there whilst Stephen brewed tea and more villagers arrived, their faces grave, with offerings of food.

By three o’clock, Rosie felt incredibly filthy and delirious with tiredness; she couldn’t imagine what Célestine was going through. Célestine’s eyes flickered occasionally; she was in a strange world of her own, a world of animal noises and deep disconnection. She could not answer a basic question. And she was not dilating, not properly.

The group doctor was asking Rosie with some urgency if she could possibly perform a section, and she was telling him with absolute clarity that she could not, practically, morally, ethically or without some risk of killing both mother and child. The group doctor pointed out that she was likely to do that by doing nothing, and Rosie squeezed her eyes tight shut and wiped her grimy forehead and looked at Stephen, who looked back, neither of them knowing what was right and what they should do.

Eventually, twenty-four hours after Célestine had gone into labour, they heard the most welcome noise
ever: the sound of a heavy four-wheel-drive car turning into the village. Rosie jumped up as the team thundered towards the hut, her heart pounding with relief, but as the three sober-looking people came in – two men, one local, one French, and a woman – one look at their faces told her everything she needed to know.

She offered to leave, let them perform their duties, but as she did so, Célestine roused briefly, made a little noise, and grasped Rosie’s sleeve with weak fingers. The doctor nodded and Rosie sat back down.

‘Hush,’ she said to the girl, mopping her brow gently, trying to bring her temperature down. The truck had ice, which she tried to feed Célestine, stroking her, cooing to her, using words that weren’t of any language but the international sound of one human being attempting to comfort another.

The team prepped as quickly as they were able, and one of the men approached with a gas mask, ready to administer a general anaesthetic. Célestine turned her face away, and Rosie, with gentle coaxing, attempted to get the mask on her. There was a bit of a muddle – a strangulated yell, an arm flailing out briefly, the French doctor swearing – then, suddenly, Célestine turned towards Rosie, looked at her once – a sharp, entirely clear, direct look that Rosie would never forget – and said huskily, very slowly, ‘
Bébé … vive
.’

Then slowly, almost happily, her eyes drooped and then closed, so that she looked for all the world like a baby going to sleep. She exhaled once, a long, ragged sound, and then, as they all froze watching, her grip on Rosie’s hand unfurled and she lay still.

Her mother, in the corner of the hut, sank to the floor with a howl. Faustine immediately went to take her out. As Rosie stood there, numb, the doctors continued as if nothing had happened.

‘You’re going to …’

They looked at her.

‘You can clear out now if you like; this will have to be quick,’ said one of them in broken English.

Rosie stumbled out of the hut, into the arms of an anxious, waiting Stephen.

‘What?’ he said, but she could only shake her head, too shocked to speak.

One of the children led them down a long path towards a waterfall, where the water tipped and spilled over boulders, frothing at the bottom. Neither of them said a word as they stripped down to their underwear and got into the water.

The swift current blasted off the sweat and the muck
and woke Rosie out of her stupor. She let herself be completely consumed by the flow and the cleanliness. Finally, feeling cool for the first time since she’d arrived, she stood upright on two stones. Then she burst into tears.

Stephen came towards her.

‘Ssssh,’ he said, taking her in his arms, his chest glistening with spray. ‘You were magnificent! You did brilliantly!’

‘I couldn’t help her,’ said Rosie. ‘I couldn’t help her.’

‘Of course you did,’ he said in surprise. ‘You did everything right, Rosie. Everything. You kept her going until the medics got here.’

‘I shouldn’t have started labour,’ said Rosie. ‘I should have just waited.’

Stephen shook his head.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, she was already very sick,’ he said. ‘There’s no way she’d have lasted that long. No way. They would have been too late, Rosie.’

Rosie choked back tears.

‘She was only a child.’

‘It’s different here,’ said Stephen. ‘And I don’t mean different because it’s Africa. I mean because it’s deep bush. Deep in the country. You help where you can, you comfort where you can, and you don’t panic. And you
didn’t panic. When the time came, you did everything right.’

Rosie was still coming to terms with what had happened. She had seen people die before, of course, in A&E. From horrible, pointless things. But not from something so preventable.

Stephen held her tightly close to him.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll go and get some sleep. You did your best darling. That’s all you can do. I was very proud of you.’