Niamh and I catch each other’s gaze and we don’t need to speak. To be honest, I’m not sure I could if my life depended on it. My need, suddenly, to hear this heartbeat is overwhelming.
I startle a little as I feel a hand reaching out for mine. It’s not Adam, however. It’s my friend. My soul sister. My fellow granny-in-waiting. The only other woman in this world who will understand how much this moment, in this space, with these two other people, could ever mean.
Dr Harkin presses down on Jodie’s stomach and starts to move the probe around. My eyes go back, once again, to the screen, which is no longer static. There is movement. And there I see it, that little jellybean again. Dr Harkin taps something on the keyboard in front of the monitor and we zoom in just slightly. It’s not the clearest of pictures but I think I can make out the little buds of arms and legs and, yes, I see that super tiny flickering dot.
‘And that,’ Dr Harkin says, ‘is baby’s heartbeat. Let me put the volume on.’
She taps another button and a soft but remarkably fast ‘whomp whomp’ sound fills the cubicle. ‘Baby’s heart is currently beating at around one hundred and sixty beats per minute, which is exactly where we want it to be.’
I think she keeps talking. I’m vaguely aware of the drone of her voice, but I can’t hear anything except for the rhythm of that heartbeat, and I can’t feel anything but the tight squeeze of my friend’s hand.
There he or she is. This tiny little thing that will be such a big part of our lives. This tiny little thing who I have worried about already. The cause of my concerns that Adam and Jodie are tying themselves down. The reason I’ve woken up in the night after a dream I am left holding the baby while trying to meet my deadlines and walk Daniel and care for my mother. There he or she is, and those concerns, while not silly, don’t seem to matter as much in this moment. We’ll make it work. We’ll cope and manage because we always do. And because this little jellybean has just stolen my heart.
35
TWO HAPPY MEALS
Niamh
The house is silent. It’s not something Niamh usually gets the opportunity to experience. She’s normally fast asleep by ten these days – and Fiadh is usually the only one of her children to be asleep before her.
Normally she has to shove earplugs into her ears to drown out the shouts of her boys over their PS5 to their friends. And yes, she and Paul have both asked them, many, many times to keep the noise down and they do try. For a bit. But inevitably some big drama unfolds in whatever game they are currently obsessed with and they start to get louder and louder again. Niamh believes that anyone who thinks women are emotional and irrational has clearly never listened to teenage boys playingFortnitewith their friends online.
Paul tends to come to bed between eleven and twelve. Somewhere along the line – maybe in the last year – she started to see it as a mega bonus if he managed to not wake her up when he did. Even though she used to love those half-asleep moments with him. Those seconds or minutes when he would climb into bed, give her a cuddle and whisper that he loved her were among her favourite of the day, and she would fall back asleep a very contented woman.
But that was before the night sweats and the hot flushes and the not-hot-flushes-so-much-as-thermostat-malfunctions that now seemed to hit around eight every evening kicked in.
The nightly spontaneous combustion is so reliable now, she could almost set her watch by it. One moment she’ll be relaxed and feeling perfectly comfortable with a normal body temperature and the next, as the clock strikes eight, something switches and she becomes almost radioactive with heat. If she had a thermal camera pointed at her, she is sure she would look like someone from one of the old Ready Brek ads in the eighties. When she looks in a mirror during one of these episodes she is always surprised to see that her face is not ablaze and her skin not a fetching shade of ‘Serious Sun Burn’.
She hasn’t found a way to cool herself down when that surge hits – not one that works to any truly effective level anyway. Unlike a flush – or a flash if you happen to be American – this particular form of torture does not pass in a minute or two. It stays, and it builds and builds until Niamh finds herself with no other option than to lie with the bedroom heating off, the window wide open, in her lightestPJshorts set and on top of her duvet to try to sleep. It’s horrendous enough in January. During the summer months it was sheer torture. No amount of cooling spray or ice-cold water would stop the feeling that her blood was literally boiling inside her.
Recently, she tried blasting a fan directly at her body, but Paul had begged for mercy. He was freezing, he said, as he lay shivering in bed, duvet pulled up under his chin, and – on occasion – wearing a hoodie with the hood up. A fan is a step too far, so she puts up with lying, sweltered, on top of the bed, feeling as if she is baking like a Christmas ham.
Given those nightly horrors, she very much has not wanted to cuddle. The last thing she needs is an additional heat source. The only spooning she’s interested in these days involves a giant carton of Ben & Jerry’s and her open mouth.
But tonight, she doesn’t care that she is too hot. She doesn’t care that Paul feels like a nuclear reactor pumping heat in her direction. She needs to feel the weight of his arm around her waist and the security of him behind her. The familiarity of his touch and his smell. The knowledge that there is nothing in this world that he can’t make just that little bit more bearable.
Tonight she needs that comfort so much that not even the changing of his breathing into soft snores, right in her ear, annoys her.
Because tonight he needs her as much as she needs him. And she doesneedhim. Tonight, even though they have yet to talk it out between each other, they both know they have dodged a bullet. Fear walked in and rearranged their priorities entirely. Niamh got a tiny glimpse of what it would feel like to lose something you couldn’t help but love.
She thinks, from how he has acted since, that Paul might just have got the same glimpse.
Just as he said he would, he had waited outside the hospital in the car park, messaging Niamh approximately every nine minutes to see if there was any news.
There was none, of course, until there was not only news, but pictures and a sound which Niamh had very quickly recorded on her phone to share with him.
She didn’t expect him to react quite the way he did. She certainly was not expecting that as they walked out of the doors of the hospital, he would be standing, shivering, in the cold, waiting to pull his daughter into a tight hug and cry.
‘I’m so glad everything is okay, love,’ he said, his voice dripping with sincerity. He had teared up when Niamh showed him the video before hugging Jodie again, and then Adam.
In fact, it was Paul who had suggested that Adam come back to their house for the night, if he wanted to. He had squeezed Niamh’s hand tightly when they had all climbed into the car and for the first time in weeks she realised the feeling that was now bubbling away inside her was hope. That squeeze of her hand said more than words ever could. He was undone. Paul, who had been like a bear with a sore head – just as she had been like a bear with a sore head herself – was mellowing. Of course he didn’t want to see Jodie in pain. It was clear to him now that she needed her dad and his support. And that soon there would be another person who needed him. Niamh had no doubt that was why there was a shake in his voice and a glimmer of tears in his eyes.
Once he’d had time to compose himself, Paul had switched into super-dad mode. He stopped at the McDonald’s drive-thru on the way home, insisting that both Jodie and Adam needed to eat something. And no, it didn’t matter that neither were hungry. They needed food. The baby needed food. Yes, he may have panic ordered much too much food including, for some bizarre reason, two Happy Meals. But he’d been right. Both Jodie and Adam had eaten when they got back to the house – both going straight for the Happy Meals. Then he had set out again, his body fizzing with unspent emotion, coming back half an hour later with ice cream, chocolate and a bunch of slightly wilted garage-forecourt flowers. ‘They were the best I could do on a Sunday night,’ he’d told Niamh as she’d tried to make them look presentable in one of their vases. ‘I should’ve got her flowers before. We should’ve celebrated this baby before. Imagine it had been gone and we’d not showed it our love.’
‘It’s okay to have mixed feelings,’ she’d told him. ‘I have so many. Less now, maybe, that I’ve seen the wee mite wriggle on the screen.’
‘You have mixed feelings?’ he’d asked, genuinely surprised. Niamh had once again wondered how men can so often be so bad at reading the feelings of their lifelong partners.
