“She does. She has to.” Eleanor dismisses my concern like it’s dust in the breeze. “But you’re right, you may have to tread softly,” she admits, grumbling.
I chuckle, and give her a considering look. “Are we OK now?”
She pulls a face. “Yes, as long as you guys stop using me as an excuse not to be together.”
I shake my head and hug her. “Deal.”
“And you let me brainstorm ways to get Mum back.”
“…Maybe.”
“Good, cos I have an idea…”
Chapter 5
Then
Nat is 16, Tim is 15
Nat
“Call him,” I plead with my mother as the latest contraction dies down.
“No.” Although she’s holding my hand and gently wiping my forehead with a cool cloth, she remains implacable and steadfastly unwilling to let me have what I really need.
“Please,” I whine weakly, leaning my head back against the rough hospital pillow. I’ve been at this for sixteen hours. I’ve already puked on a nurse’s scrubs. She was pretty decent about it, but I’m still sweating and breathless and I can’t believe how much pain I’m in. Mum won’t let me have an epidural. She claims it’s because she’s concerned about potential negative effects, like all those horror stories you hear about women who can’t walk for a while afterwards, or it numbs everything from the waist up and nothing from the waist down. But I can’t help wondering if a part of her wants me to experience the full pain of childbirth, to teach me a lesson and make me realise the full consequences of my actions.
“You’ve gotme,” she says, her expression even but her voice brittle. “You don’t need him here. This is enough of a circus as it is.”
“He has the right to be here for - ” But before I can complete that sentence, another contraction steals my breath. I can’t bear this much longer. The pain is like nothing I could ever have imagined, and I envisioned plenty over the past few months. It’shot, ripping, murderous. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind being dead if that’s what it takes for this to stop.
This one goes on and on, and I become vaguely aware of the midwife doing yet another internal. “Yep, ten centimetres. You’re ready to go,” she says, her voice reassuringly steady and confident. She’s been really brilliant, and my main measure of that is that she hasn’t once given me side-eye for my age. It’s as though, for the first time, it doesn’t matter that I’m sixteen; I’m just another pregnant human on her list whose baby she needs to deliver safely.
And then the full meaning of what she says hits me, and despite everything, I squeeze Mum’s hand, desperate for reassurance. I nearly cry with relief when she squeezes back and smooths my hair away from my damp face, giving me an encouraging look. If she hadn’t…I’m not sure I could do this.
From then on, everything is a haze of pushing and bleeding and just plainhurting. People give me loud instructions and encouragement, and I’d tell them all to shut the hell up if I could catch my breath long enough. I pant through the pain as best I can, but I’m terrified out of my mind and it’s beyond me. I’m not pushing right, and in the end, one of the nurses gets me to pull a towel with her in a weird tug of war. It’s strange, but it works. It corrects what I’m doing, and I start making something approaching progress.
Please, just let me die, I can’t do this anymore.
The hideous stretching down below is not something I ever want to experience again, and I scream just once when it feels like I’m being ripped in two. And then they finish the job with a scalpel, while I try to pretend it’s not happening. The thing they use to cut me down below is so sharp and the sore tautness so intensethat I barely feel anything beyond a scratch, but the idea of what they just did has me chucking up again, mercifully into a cardboard bowl thrust under my chin by a helpful nurse. I want to go home. I need this to stop,now. How is this happening… How is thisevergoing to work…
And then, suddenly, impossibly, yet very simply, the baby is out.
Here.
In my arms, yowling and covered in blood and white goo, and wriggling.
“It’s a girl,” I hear someone say, and all I can think is,don’t ever get pregnant, sweetheart. I don’t want her to suffer like this, not ever.
Some sort of instinct takes over, and I rub her back to soothe her as she cries at the outrage of leaving a warm, safe place, and being forced into this world with all its anger and loneliness and Mr Stewarts.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to her helplessly regretting inflicting this life on her. Poor little mite didn’t ask for any of this: her clueless teenage mother, her resentful grandparents, her father being kept from her. I’ve got to shield her from as much of this heartache as possible, and I break down, weeping onto her little face, as the knowledge that I have no idea how to do that slams full force into my bewildered and frightened brain.
I hear a loud, choked sob next to me, and my mother buries her face in the pillow next to me, cupping the baby’s head and stroking it blindly with one hand. I’ve never known my mother to cry like this. She was angry when my father died. She was angry when I got knocked up. She doesn’t cry when she’s upset. She shouts.
“I’m so sorry,” she whimpers brokenly, and her face is red and tear streaked when she looks up at me. “Oh, Natalie, I’m so very sorry…” She looks at my baby with wonder, as though she’d been so wrapped up in her annoyance that she hadn’t anticipated an actual baby arriving at the end of all this. A sweet, living, breathing newborn. Her granddaughter. “I haven’t been there for you through all of this. I was just so…” She wipes her eyes and gives me a pleading, desperate smile. “Please forgive me. I promise, I’ll look after you both. I’ll help you. Whatever you need.” She kisses my daughter’s head, not caring about the goop. “Whateversheneeds.”
I’m too shattered to do anything but nod. But the blissful relief for her support that floods through me almost distracts me from the stitches currently sewing my ripped up vagina back together.
