Little Darlings. Melanie Golding
the floor, red and black and hot like the fear.
After the birth, Lauren was convinced that nothing could be as awful. But towards the end, when they’d decided forceps would be needed, the worst of it had been performed behind a screen of drapery and anaesthetic. She’d not seen or felt the whole of it, not even a significant percentage of it. Where was the lovely anaesthetist now, now that she had a further stranger, a medical person (who could actually be anyone at all, some goon off the street in a costume and how would she even know) inserting a whole hand into her and squeezing her womb until it stopped bleeding? One blue-gloved hand (‘Gloves, Mr Symons?’ ‘Do you have Large?’ Oh God.) on the inside, one pushing down from the top and nearly disappearing into the spongy mass of stomach flesh created by the absence of the babies.
‘Just try to breathe,’ said the person (a doctor, she hoped). An older man this time. ‘This shouldn’t hurt too much. Tell me if you really need me to stop.’
‘I really need you to stop.’
The person/doctor did not stop. A nurse gave her nitrous oxide. Lauren bit down on the mouthpiece and spoke through her teeth, ‘Please stop.’
‘Just relax if you can. I need to carry on applying pressure for a few minutes longer. The bleeding has nearly stopped. Breathe slowly. Try to relax your legs.’ He was grunting with the effort.
‘Oh,’ said the nurse, as a sharp pain distracted Lauren momentarily, a hot feeling of flesh unzipping around the man’s forearm. ‘We’ll have to do those stitches again.’
‘Please—’ Her voice caught in a sob, but there was no energy for crying. ‘Please. I can’t. It really hurts.’ The hand inside her shifted horribly. She cried out.
‘Just a minute longer.’
And she kept the terrible silence for as long as she could, unable to fight or fly, a strange man’s hands compressing parts of her body that she would never see or feel with her own. Not just in her but through her, further inside than felt natural, or right. She was a pulsating piece of meat full of inconvenient nerve endings and un-cauterised vessels. No intrigue here, no mystery, no power. She’d been deconstructed by nature, and then by man, then nature again, and finally by man – the two forces tossing her hand over hand, back and forth like volleyball. Where was Lauren in this maelstrom of awfulness? Where was the person she had previously thought herself to be? Intelligent, funny, in control, that Lauren. She’d been hiding as best she could, sheltering in the back of her psyche somewhere, allowing the least evolved part of her instinctive self to be the thing that was present in this trauma. Disassociation, the word like a mantra within her silence as the older man withdrew his hand with exaggerated carefulness, the nurse took away her gas and air and inserted a needle for a drip in the back of a hand so pale she barely recognised it as her own. She was flaccid, weak, beaten. She was all shock and pain and sorrow.
Patrick was waiting, trying to comfort the screaming twins by poking his pinkie fingers in their mouths.
‘You scared me for a minute there,’ he said, his voice only decipherable over the din because of its low register.
She couldn’t think with the crying – the interference caused her mind to fill with white noise. She made an effort to form a sentence, her language processors struggling uphill in the wind against her reptilian brain.
‘You were just afraid I’d leave you alone with these two.’
He looked at her. His eyes were glazed in a film of tears. ‘Well, yeah,’ he said, ‘that too,’ and he kissed her.
Immediately a midwife started to arrange pillows, propping her up so she could feed the babies.
‘You should feed as much as you can now,’ she said. ‘It helps your uterus to contract.’
Feed as much as you can, she thought. As opposed to the meagre efforts I’ve been making so far.
As the midwife stuffed a tender nipple into the mouth of one twin and then the other, Patrick turned away. He shuffled around looking for change for the vending machine and headed off to get them both a cup of tea. By the time he came back and sat down, the midwife had left. He picked up a magazine but didn’t open it. His hands were shaking.
‘It’s six o’clock,’ he said.
‘Right,’ said Lauren.
‘I should go, before I get kicked out.’
‘I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if you stayed for a while.’
‘OK.’ He breathed in loudly through his nose. She waited for what he would say next. ‘But I’ve got to get to the shops, and everything.’
She wanted him to take her home and look after her. He’d done that once, early on. Only the second time Lauren had gone to his flat. In the night she’d started having terrible stomach pain, food poisoning most probably, from a bad takeaway. The next day he’d boldly insisted she stay with him until she was better. She didn’t want to stay – it was early days and they were still being polite, seeking to impress each other. Neither had yet heard the other fart. For a week she vomited near-constantly and her bowels had never moved faster. If this doesn’t put him off, she’d thought, and it hadn’t. He set up a bed for himself on the couch and tended to her every need. He did it all without complaint, and yet even then there’d been signs that he wasn’t a natural caregiver. She heard him, unable to prevent himself from gagging on the smell when he entered the bathroom after her, twice or three times that week. Also, he cooked with a certain undisguised reluctance (always did, she would discover), huffing when required to alter anything at all during the process. It didn’t really matter then because she ate almost nothing that week anyway. And it meant she loved him all the more, for doing what he did, making such an effort to override his natural inclinations. It proved without question that he loved her.
The erosion of enthusiasm for self-sacrifice can happen fast in those for whom it’s an effort to start with. It can be like dropping off a cliff: I care, I care, I care, I don’t care; for how long exactly are you planning to be ill? Patrick must have used up all his caring that week. When she was ill in the early months of pregnancy, he’d seemed more irritated than sympathetic. She found ways of coping. She would list all his good points, in between retches.
He fidgeted in his seat for a few more seconds, then looked at his phone and got up. He kissed all three of them on the head and said he loved them, the new names sounding less strange now but still out of place somehow. ‘Bye-bye Riley, I love you. Bye-bye Morgan, I love you. Bye-bye Mummy, I love you.’ The word Mummy jarred. It took a moment before she realised he meant her.
Patrick walked the short distance to the corner of the bay, turned and gave a weary wave.
‘See you in the morning,’ he said.
He earns enough so I don’t have to work, she thought. My mother liked him, when she was alive. He’s funny. He’s got lots of friends. He’s really good looking, in my opinion.
With a son on each breast she watched the tendrils of steam diminish as her tea went cold in its brown plastic cup on the bedside table. The sun sank beyond the car park but the electric lights held back the darkness. Home seemed like a different country, one to which she might never return.
Night fell outside, and the babies seemed to know it: they were awake.
‘Sleep when they sleep,’ the nurse had said, Patrick had said, her mother-in-law had said many times when she was pregnant. Sleep when they sleep: neat, and as far as unsolicited advice went, sensible enough. I would do that, she thought, if I could, but they were asleep all day in between crying and being fed. Now they were awake and she wanted to watch them discovering themselves and each other and the edges of their little world but her eyelids were heavy, her head throbbed. If she closed her eyes she knew she’d be dragged under in an instant. She felt she should be awake for them, that she was duty-bound. This and the pain