More shapes and patterns; a moving scrapbook. I am only half aware of the people in the room, the things they’re doing to my body, the gentle commands.
I remember a cafe in Stroud, Hannah and I on our first date together as adults. The silences, the nervous laughter. The apologies, from both of us, and the sight of my father crying when I told him that Hannah had invited me round to her house to meet her family.
But . . . my baby. Where’s my baby?
The sea falls in on itself, again and again, and a cuckoo sings its two notes into a dusky wood. Eddie is laughing. They’re examining me again now. People, lots of them, looking at a screen that’s printing out jagged lines . . .
Where is my baby?
My baby. My baby that I made with Eddie.
Eddie. I loved him so much.
Eddie. That’s the name Hannah’s telling me. She’s telling me about Eddie. She says he’s outside. She looks shocked, amazed, but now I have to listen to a doctor, who takes the tube from me and starts talking slowly and clearly. ‘I’m afraid we can’t wait any longer . . .’ she says. ‘We need to get this baby out: you’re still not fully dilated . . . the foetal blood sample indicates . . . oxygen . . . heart rate . . . Sarah, do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘Eddie?’ I ask. ‘Outside?’ But there are more words from the medical people and then the bed-chair thing starts moving; it’s leaving this room.
The tunnel is fading. There are ceiling tiles. Hannah’s voice is close to my ear. ‘You agreed to have to have a caesarean,’ she’s telling me. ‘The baby’s struggling. But don’t worry, Sarah, this happens a lot. You’re going straight to surgery and the baby’ll be out in minutes. Everything’ll be fine . . .’
I ask her about Eddie, because it might just have been one of the stories from the kaleidoscopic tunnel. I am so tired.
Not enough oxygen ?
But it’s a real fact, not a tunnel fact: Eddie is waiting for me. He’s outside. He’s been messaging my phone; he says he loves me. ‘And he keeps saying he’s sorry,’ Hannah tells me. She is astounded. ‘Eddie Wallace,’ she mutters, as someone takes her by the elbow and tells her she will need to put on a surgical gown. ‘Father of your child. I mean, what?’
Eddie says he loves me. My child is in trouble.
Then the doctors all just sort of cave in on me, all talking, and I have to listen.
Chapter Fifty
Eddie
I sit bolt upright: the door to the delivery suite is opening. I realize I must have been sleeping. I feel terrible. And I’m freezing, shivering all over. Why didn’t I take a hat, or some gloves? Why didn’t I plan this properly? Why have I messed everything up, from the moment Sarah left my barn back in June?
‘Is there an Eddie Wallace here?’ asks the woman standing in the doorway. She’s wearing scrubs.
‘Yes! That’s me!’
She pauses, then nods over at the lifts, where we can talk without my waiting-area companion hearing. He’d fallen asleep, too, but now he’s watching me with jealous eyes.
Arrows of fear circulate my body like the science videos they showed us at school, and I walk far too slowly. The woman in scrubs waits for me, her arms folded, and I realize she’s looking at the floor.
I realize quickly that I don’t like that.
I realize even more quickly that if she gives me bad news, my life will never be the same again.
And so, for the first few seconds, I can’t hear what she’s saying, because I’m absolutely deafened by fear.
‘It’s a boy,’ she repeats, when she realizes I haven’t taken anything in. She starts to smile. ‘Sarah gave birth to a beautiful baby boy about an hour ago. We’re doing a few tests at the moment, on Mum and baby, but Sarah asked me to tell you that it’s a boy and he should be absolutely fine.’
I stare at her in sheer astonishment. ‘A boy? A boy? Sarah’s OK? She’s had a boy?’
She smiles. ‘She’s very tired, but she’s OK. She did really well.’
‘And she wanted you to tell me? She knows I was here?’
She nods. ‘She knew you were here. She found out just as we took her in for a C-section. Her sister told her. And your son’s lovely, Eddie. An absolutely gorgeous little thing.’
I fold forward on myself, and a sob of wonder, of joy, of relief, of amazement, of a million things I could never name tumbles out of me. It sounds like laughter. It could well be laughter. I cover my face with my hands and cry.
The woman puts a hand on my back. ‘Congratulations,’ she says, somewhere above me. I can hear her smile. ‘Congratulations, Eddie.’
Eventually I manage to straighten up. She is turning to leave. It defies belief that she’s off to bring more lives into being. That this miracle is commonplace for her.
A boy! My boy!
‘Sarah’s recovering in her room, and she’ll need to stay a few days on the postnatal ward. I’m afraid you won’t be able to come in tonight, but visiting hours on the ward start at two p.m.,’ she says. ‘Although, of course, it’ll be up to Sarah.’
I nod stupidly, joyously. ‘Thank you,’ I whisper, as she starts to walk away. ‘Thank you so much. Please tell her I love her. I’m so proud of her. I . . .’
I haven’t cried like this since the day they told me my little sister was dead. But that was the worst moment of my life, and this is the best .
After a long while I stagger outside, where the wind has dropped, and a thin grey is beginning to filter through the night sky. It’s silent, save for the sound of my tears and sniffs. Not so much as a distant car engine, just me and this towering, dizzying news. ‘I’m a father,’ I whisper, into the nothingness of pre-dawn. ‘I have a little boy.’
And I repeat this several times, because I don’t have any other words. I lean against the cold wall of the Women’s Centre and try to recalibrate my vision of the universe, so it can include this miracle, but it’s impossible: I can’t imagine. I can’t compute. I can’t believe. I can’t do anything.
A lone car enters the car park, makes slowly for a disabled space opposite me. Life goes on. The world is waking. The world contains my son. This is all his. This air, this dawn, this crying man whom he might one day call Dad.
Then my pocket buzzes and I see Sarah’s name, and the word ‘Message’, and I’m off again, crying uncontrollably, before I’ve even read the thing.
He’s beautiful , she’s written. He’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.
I watch, breathless, as she writes another message.
He looks like you.
Please come and meet our boy tomorrow.
And then the final one: I love you too.
Chapter Fifty-One
Sarah
It’s 2 June. Another 2 June on the Broad Ride: my twentieth, I realize, as I try to pull my hair into an elastic band. There’s a stiff breeze today, pushing clouds quickly across the sky, combing and whipping them into tight whorls. The breeze snatches at strands of my hair, dancing them away out of reach.
I think of the year when it rained so hard the nettles bent flat, and the year when my hat was lifted off by a rampaging wind. I think about last year, when it was so hot that the air around me compressed and even the birds were silent, dead-feathered in their trees. That was the year I met Eddie, and this began.
Eddie. My Eddie. Even though I’m exhausted, sleep-deprived beyond all reckoning, I smile. I smile hopelessly, and my stomach zips and zooms.
This is still happening to me, a whole year after I ran into him on the village green. He says it happens to him, too, and I know he’s telling the truth because I can see it right there in his face. Sometimes I wonder if it’s an after-effect of the battle we had to find and keep each other. Mostly, though, I think it’s because this is how it should feel.
As if sensing the swell of his mother’s heart, Alex snuffles, burrowing tighter into my chest. He’s still fast asleep, in spite of the number of people who have prodded and cooed at him in the last hour. I circle my arms around him, wrapped tight in my Stroud-issue sling, and kiss his warm little head, over and over. Having him on me – even when I’m so tired I would happily sleep in a dog bowl – is like turning on a light. I had no idea I could love anything, or anyone, so much.