‘You’re carrying low – a boy, for sure!’
‘Go back to sleep, Sam. You need to rest,’ Ted said. But Sam felt wide awake now. She knew she’d never get back to sleep for even a few minutes.
‘Dogs still out the back?’
‘Yes. Four magpies in the garden – did you not hear the orgy of barking? The neighbours will love us for dragging them out of their hangovers at this early hour on a Saturday.’
Four magpies, Sam thought, hauling herself out of the bed to hit the bathroom for her first of many trips of the day. Was she having a boy? Three magpies meant you were having a girl, four meant a boy. If she saw five magpies, Sam wondered if a silver baby would slither out.
From all the painful birth stories she’d been told, she hoped slithering out was part of it all.
They’d asked not to be told the sex of the baby. ‘It’s not long until we’ll know and it’s life’s biggest secret,’ she said to Ted. ‘Let’s wait.’
‘I thought life’s biggest secret was whether there is life on another planet,’ said Ted, deadpan. ‘OK, you win. No asking the radiographer if they can see a willy or not.’
The spare bedroom was turned into a nursery decorated in a riot of yellows and white and Ted, whose father had a lathe, had slaved over a handmade cot.
She wriggled her feet into her slippers after the bathroom. It was a long time since she’d been able to see her feet, much less bend down to pull on shoes.
‘You try and snooze,’ she said, kissing Ted on the head as he rearranged the pillows.
She went into their tiny kitchen to make toast with honey – she could eat it for the Olympics. Also ice cream. Gallons of it.
Being pregnant had made her ravenous. Nobody had mentioned that, although she’d been told of women who’d licked coal or consumed Marmite by the bucket.
She had no idea how she was going to get the baby weight off, but from the size of her rear end, which was admittedly hard to see in their wardrobe mirror, Sam was pretty sure it wasn’t all baby.
When she’d confided this to Joanne, her sister had laughed and said, ‘It’ll come off: sleep deprivation does that to you.’
‘I hope you’re joking,’ said Sam, because she knew how shattered Joanne had been when she’d had three children one after the other.
‘I am not joking, not remotely.’
Joanne smiled with the Mona-Lisa-like smile which implied that, for once, the younger sister knew something the older one didn’t.
Sam looked into the back garden to see if Dixie and Horace, the two small, bitsa-everything rescue dogs on whom she and Ted lavished their affection, had finished their morning run around the garden where they barked at birds, gave worms the evil eye and peed liberally in order to remind all other creatures that this was their territory.
But the dogs were busy and, knowing their lap of investigation could take some time, and because her lower back ached strangely, Sam sat down on a kitchen chair.
She hoped the dogs would be fine with the baby and they’d been playing crying baby noises whenever they fed them, as per internet advice, so the dogs would associate the baby with the loveliness of dinner, which was one of the highlights of Dixie and Horace’s day. Pavlov’s bell version of getting the dogs ready for the new arrival.
‘Do you think it will work?’ Sam had asked anxiously.
‘Course. The worst crime they’ll commit is to try to slobber kisses on the baby or clamber onto your lap for breastfeeding,’ Ted teased. ‘They’ll adjust.’
He’d been raised with dogs and was relaxed around them. In contrast, Sam’s mother had an allergy, or so she said, and no animal had ever graced Sam’s childhood home.
On the hard kitchen chair, Sam moved to try to find a comfortable position.
The ache was getting weirdly lower and deeper. Was this a sign that the baby was moving into the birth canal? she wondered.
Some women said pregnancy made them feel at one with their body: Sam, who had spent years having her hormones artificially manipulated in order to stimulate a pregnancy that never came, no longer felt as if she had a clue what was going on with hers. Which worried her, although she hadn’t breathed a word of this to anyone. The baby fear, that something would go wrong to stop her having this child because her body had failed before, was too ridiculous to voice out loud.
And there was another fear, one that loomed bigger each day: in all those years of trying to get pregnant, she’d barely allowed herself to imagine becoming an actual parent.
Now she wondered how on earth she could be a proper mother. Because she had no experience of how a warm, kind motherly figure behaved.
‘Happy birthday, Sam!’
