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At 4pm, Dolores stood staring at the foetal heart monitor.
‘I might just call Doctor in for a look.’
She walked to the door of the room, shifted some mechanism so that it was held wide open, and walked out. Claire was sitting at the end of the bed, legs dangling, head pressed into Ronan’s chest. He was holding the damp face cloth to the back of her neck. ‘There’s something wrong,’ Claire whispered to his shirt buttons. ‘Tell them there’s something wrong.’
‘It’s alright, love. They know there’s something wrong. They’re going to do something now.’
Dolores came back into the room. She stopped at the end of the bed and patted Claire’s knee. ‘Doctor’s gone to prep for theatre.’
‘Epidural?’ Claire gasped. She hated the thought of a general anaesthetic, of missing the whole thing.
‘The anaesthetist is on his way. Ah, look, here he is now.’ A short, stocky man came through the open doorway, accompanied by a tall, sturdy red-haired girl with a badge on her uniform that readStudent. Claire was lowered to her back and then rolled onto her side. Dolores held her shoulder while the student held her hip. She could feel a hand on her foot, a thumb making circles.
The anaesthetist spoke gently at her back.
‘Now, Claire, this will take only a moment. You must hold very still.’
That was when she felt it, the mighty hardening of her uterus, and the pressure of something huge, a baby’s head, moving, moving, at last, moving. It must have been the change of position, she thought, something about being on her side. She couldn’t speak through the pain, couldn’t breathe. With wide open eyes, she appealed to Dolores, but the nurse’s gaze was intent on the syringe aimed at Claire’s spinal cord.
The head is coming, she roared in her head.
‘The head .?.?.’ Breathlessly, she made the shape of the words with her mouth, but nobody saw. In desperation, she raised her right leg. Surely, surely, they could see what was happening. An alarm sounded.
The student nurse raised Claire’s leg at the knee and, finally, looked.
‘She’s crowning.’
A second alarm, higher pitched this one, chimed in with the first. Dolores slammed her palm against the call button on the panel above Claire’s head. Claire heard aboingingsound, just like on an aeroplane, from the nurse’s station outside the door. Some sort of cart rattled through the doorway, and suddenly the room was filled with an army of bodies dressed in blue paper, masked faces, machinery. Ronan was pushed aside. He stood with his back pressed against the wall opposite Claire. A sergeant major midwife, seniority marked by an old-fashioned navy uniform and the glint of badges on her lapel, stood stony-faced between Claire’s legs.
‘Turn off that alarm,’ she barked at Dolores.
There was no small talk.
‘Do you know what to do?’ she asked the red-haired student still standing at Claire’s hip.
The girl bit her lip, glanced towards the ceiling as though searching her memory. ‘I do.’
Sergeant Major nodded once, and the girl threw her entire sturdy weight across Claire’s midriff. Claire could see nothing but the white ceiling above her head, feel nothing but the searing pain of Sergeant Major’s hand inside her, pulling, tugging, hauling, turning her insides out. A bellow came out of her now, carried upwards on the gush of breath from her compressed lungs, a loud, deep, inhuman roar.
And then silence.
The red-haired girl raised herself to standing, but Claire could only see the top of Sergeant Major’s head, bent over her work. Behind the woman’s shoulder, Claire could see Ronan, still pressed against the wall. His eyes were fixed on the end of the bed. One of the masked and gowned bodies lifted a limp infant onto an incubator that seemed to have appeared from nowhere. Two, then three, more bodies gathered around. They spoke in urgent commands that Claire couldn’t fix in her head. Sergeant Major pressed a folded towel between Claire’s legs, pulled a sheet over her knees, rubbed a gloved hand up and down her calf.
Claire looked at Ronan. He looked as though he might faint or vomit. She held out her hand and he crossed the room to hold it. Sergeant Major gave him a silent nod and kept up her pressure on Claire’s calf.
The red-haired nurse, student badge glinting, turned from the group at the incubator. She cast a half-smiling glance at the white towel-wrapped bundle cradled to her uniform. Relief rose in Claire’s chest. It was alright. That was a nightmare. Christ Almighty, she hadn’t even pushed, not one push, but it was alright now.
Ronan helped her to sit up, shoved a pillow behind her back, pushed her hair back from her face. She held out her arms to hold her daughter.
‘I’m very sorry,’ said the nurse, glancing briefly to her superior who nodded an approval. ‘The umbilical cord was wrapped tightly around the baby’s neck. The team did everything they could, but your baby has died.’
The hope in Claire’s heart, the rising flood of joy, refused to hear it.
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head as if the nurse had made a silly mistake. ‘It’s a girl. That’s what you’re supposed to say.’
Ronan wrapped one arm around her shoulder, the other around the baby, and squeezed. With half his body on the bed beside her, he held them both and started to rock.
* * *
