jet of pain snaps me back, propelling me to push before I know where I am. When it subsides I prop myself up again, exhausted, and breathe, breathe, breathe. I’m here. Still just me. I can hear a voice, barking anxiously from somewhere behind my head. I fumble out for the phone but my fingers can only dance wildly across the floor, unable to respond to my commands.
Another heave, another blitzkrieg of pain and then I think I see it, a flash of black hair slicing the hot red oval between my thighs. It seems to suck back inside me, then there it is again, more of it this time. I push harder, so hard that the veins on my forehead throb and my heart gets driven back down through my ribcage.
There’s a soft slurping sound as this tiny, shrink-wrapped thing slithers out on a sea of jelly. There are two screams – mine, demented, and then baby’s. My elbows are buckling beneath the strain of holding me up and I have to lie back down and claw back some strength before I’m able to lift the wrinkled body – a boy, I now see; a beautiful boy, and darker, even darker than I’d imagined – from between my legs and on to my chest. The slits of his eyes jab out at the world from between swollen folds of skin, as though he’s been in a fight. His little mouthopens, seeking, already demanding; his lungs quickly swelling with the injustice of being dragged from the warmth of his lair. I lift up my jumper, tug down my bra and offer him my breast, some vague crumb of recall making me lift the umbilical cord above the mite’s heart. Here he is then. Here’s my Bean. We made it.
Ambulance lights suddenly strafe the window. I can hear them pounding the stairs. Did they break down the door? It sounds like a whole army, but there’s just two of them, stood in my living room, shocked, relieved, emotional.
A small crowd of people has gathered outside and as I’m wheeled out, my son cleaned up now and wrapped in a brilliant white cotton blanket, blue strobes eerily lighting up his battered face, they spontaneously cheer and clap; some of them are crying, all of us haphazardly thrown together for one binding moment by the miracle of new life. Dad arrives, smiling, distressed. Embarrassed.
THE BIG BANG
13
As I’m wheeled from the ambulance into the recovery suite, my perfect little man lying prostrate and naked upon my chest, his tiny blind mouth fumbling around my nipple as he tries and fails and tries again to latch on, this is what I am thinking:
All my life I’ve heard women – my Mum, Faye, the teenage mums from The Gordon – speak about the agony of childbirth. But until I became pregnant I’d never really picked it apart. ‘It’s murder, but you soon forget’ was one gem of hand-me-down wisdom; that wonderfully perfumed ‘you’ with all its promise of mothers’ union, of belonging. And I fantasised. Even as I sat there in the NCT classes, I fantasised; listening to the course leader reel off the different options of pain relief as though she were reeling off the specials on a lunchtime menu, I would not allow myself to dwell on the reality. The pain.Or to respond to that looming and devastating finale that would smash wide open all those months of feverish fantasising.
Throughout my pregnancy the Truth sat in exile, banished to the loneliest peripheries of my consciousness. Occasionally, in the dead still of the night, it would steal up on me unbidden and yank me from my slumber, delivering a cattle prod to the chest that would force me wide awake, flummoxed by this dreadful equation, namely: how can it be possible for this hillock of weight, a mass so immense that it knocks me off balance, be compressed and parcelled through that slender tunnel? What will it
feel
like? How will I withstand the burning and tearing of this transgression – this obscene violation? The thought would have me clenching my thighs reflexively, groaning and sucking at air. But I could always surpass myself; always conjure ever more lurid
Another heave, another blitzkrieg of pain and then I think I see it, a flash of black hair slicing the hot red oval between my thighs. It seems to suck back inside me, then there it is again, more of it this time. I push harder, so hard that the veins on my forehead throb and my heart gets driven back down through my ribcage.
There’s a soft slurping sound as this tiny, shrink-wrapped thing slithers out on a sea of jelly. There are two screams – mine, demented, and then baby’s. My elbows are buckling beneath the strain of holding me up and I have to lie back down and claw back some strength before I’m able to lift the wrinkled body – a boy, I now see; a beautiful boy, and darker, even darker than I’d imagined – from between my legs and on to my chest. The slits of his eyes jab out at the world from between swollen folds of skin, as though he’s been in a fight. His little mouthopens, seeking, already demanding; his lungs quickly swelling with the injustice of being dragged from the warmth of his lair. I lift up my jumper, tug down my bra and offer him my breast, some vague crumb of recall making me lift the umbilical cord above the mite’s heart. Here he is then. Here’s my Bean. We made it.
Ambulance lights suddenly strafe the window. I can hear them pounding the stairs. Did they break down the door? It sounds like a whole army, but there’s just two of them, stood in my living room, shocked, relieved, emotional.
A small crowd of people has gathered outside and as I’m wheeled out, my son cleaned up now and wrapped in a brilliant white cotton blanket, blue strobes eerily lighting up his battered face, they spontaneously cheer and clap; some of them are crying, all of us haphazardly thrown together for one binding moment by the miracle of new life. Dad arrives, smiling, distressed. Embarrassed.
THE BIG BANG
13
As I’m wheeled from the ambulance into the recovery suite, my perfect little man lying prostrate and naked upon my chest, his tiny blind mouth fumbling around my nipple as he tries and fails and tries again to latch on, this is what I am thinking:
All my life I’ve heard women – my Mum, Faye, the teenage mums from The Gordon – speak about the agony of childbirth. But until I became pregnant I’d never really picked it apart. ‘It’s murder, but you soon forget’ was one gem of hand-me-down wisdom; that wonderfully perfumed ‘you’ with all its promise of mothers’ union, of belonging. And I fantasised. Even as I sat there in the NCT classes, I fantasised; listening to the course leader reel off the different options of pain relief as though she were reeling off the specials on a lunchtime menu, I would not allow myself to dwell on the reality. The pain.Or to respond to that looming and devastating finale that would smash wide open all those months of feverish fantasising.
Throughout my pregnancy the Truth sat in exile, banished to the loneliest peripheries of my consciousness. Occasionally, in the dead still of the night, it would steal up on me unbidden and yank me from my slumber, delivering a cattle prod to the chest that would force me wide awake, flummoxed by this dreadful equation, namely: how can it be possible for this hillock of weight, a mass so immense that it knocks me off balance, be compressed and parcelled through that slender tunnel? What will it
feel
like? How will I withstand the burning and tearing of this transgression – this obscene violation? The thought would have me clenching my thighs reflexively, groaning and sucking at air. But I could always surpass myself; always conjure ever more lurid
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