Ted appeared in his T-shirt and boxers, his body marathon-lean and tanned from sunny evenings spent in the garden sanding and painting the crib.
He’d been in a vintage Rolling Stones T-shirt and jeans at the college party where they’d met, a night when Ted said he was walking her home to keep her safe.
‘I can keep myself safe, thank you very much,’ snapped Sam.
Ted had grinned and walked her home anyway.
‘You were like an angry pixie, those eyes flashing at me and I just couldn’t keep away,’ he’d said later, when they were inseparable, Sam’s prickly defences long since lowered.
‘Honey.’ He leaned down and kissed her. ‘I couldn’t sleep and it’s not fair that you’re up alone on your birthday.’ With a flourish, he put a small box on the table in front of her and stood back proudly. ‘It’s a really small gift,’ he explained. ‘Tiny so I can get you a proper something when the baby is born or you can enjoy going out shopping with me, because forty is a special birthday. You should have diamonds and—’
Sam opened the box, gasped suddenly and stared at the interior blankly.
Ted squinted at her. ‘You don’t like? They’re gold-plated earrings. The gold will rub off, it always does, and I can return them if you’d like, but I know you like purple stones and—’
‘Ted!’
‘You really hate them?’ Ted picked up the box and looked at the contents critically. ‘I thought you’d hate it more if I spent money buying any proper jewellery without you—’
‘My waters have just broken,’ hissed Sam, as she felt the surge of liquid move from a trickle to a flood. ‘I love the present, Ted, but we need to go to the hospital. I can’t have the baby on the kitchen floor – it’s not clean enough with the dogs, and the baby will get kennel cough or dog flu or something ...’
‘Your waters have broken?’ repeated Ted, not sounding like someone with a PhD in data analytics.
He sat down beside her, then immediately got up again as if someone had switched his brain off and then back on, and all the circuits were recalibrating.
‘Right. OK. Will I time your contractions or ...?’
Her reliable, steadfast husband stared at her as if all rational thought had been sucked out of him and he wanted her to tell him what to do.
‘Get me to the hospital,’ she whispered.
Stopping only to ring the doorbell next door so they could tell their neighbour, Cynthia, that Operation Baby was ON and would she go in and take the dogs, as agreed, Ted helped Sam into the car.
Despite several strong buzzes on her doorbell, Cynthia didn’t appear.
‘She’s in the shower,’ said Shazz, Cynthia’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, coming out onto the shared driveway still in her skimpy denim cut-offs and a leather-look bra top worn with a net top, her short pale pink hair fluffed up into a halo round her head. Definitely just in from the night before.
‘Good luck, Sam, it’ll be fine,’ said Shazz, draping her beautiful, fake-tanned self over the car door and flattening Sam with the scents of fags, booze, club and not-been-to-bedness.
‘How do you know it’ll be fine?’ demanded Sam, her politeness filter entirely knocked out by the knowledge that Baby Bean wanted out and there were no medical professionals around to help.
‘I’ve seen it on the soaps,’ said Shazz thoughtfully. ‘It’ll work out. Babies are, er ... you know – natural.’
‘The soaps aren’t real!’ Sam yelled. ‘And it’s scary. Imagine giving birth right now. Big baby.’ She lowered her voice and pointed downwards. ‘Small exit.’
‘Yeuch.’ Shazz took a step back, thinking about it. ‘That’s going to mess it all up down there, right? In the lady garden palace.’ She shuddered.
For a brief moment, Sam thought about her own lady garden palace and getting the baby out of it. She’d watched lots of Discovery TV birthing shows and right now, she was scared.
Ted got into the car.
‘Hospital bag!’ Sam reminded him.
He got the bag.
Looking right and left like a racing driver, Ted whizzed through every red light on the way to the maternity hospital. Beside him, Sam panted and screeched with a combination of nerves and pain.
Another wave hit her. This was not what she’d anticipated, not this searing pain that felt as if it would rip her in two. Plus, she might kill Ted before they got to the hospital. He kept going over speed bumps too fast.
