Common Ground (36 page)

Perhaps they've dimmed the lights or it's growing darker through the window but the monitor recording the baby's heart rate glows a bright orange and for a while I can't take my eyes off it. I stare at those digits, thinking of what's behind them: the life nosing its way out of its dark world, a fluid-lunged thing beginning to haul itself ashore through the breakers. The bath next door fills, cools and is run out again. We mean to reach it but after an hour of trying Rosie is back on the bed contorting with the tides inside. Together we wrestle the pull and the pain, locking our fingers, gripping, straining, stretching, and it dawns on me that I'm holding on to her as much as she is to me. Our heads pressed together, I'm whispering words of encouragement, knowing she's only hearing tones. And in between the crests of the contractions, Jean is talking her down, a trainer in our corner –
calm, calm, you're doing great
– as Rosie drags deep from the gas and air. And then it surges again and she cries against the inevitability of it, before channelling, breathing and bracing. Jean lifts her voice, coaxing the animal in her: ‘OK, NOW PUSH THIS TIME. PUSH NOW. SHOUT IF YOU WANT TO. BUT PUSH. That's
brilliant
.' Except I'm seeing something else: each time Rosie pushes those orange digits on the monitor plummet. Jean glances at them too and makes hurried notes.
Decelerations
, they call these; the baby's heart rate is swooping low with every uterine contraction before swinging back up again as it subsides. It's difficult to watch; a necessity to bestowing life that seems to come close to ending it every time.
Come on. Come on
– I'm willing it –
come on, little thing.
Another hour or more with Rosie, head-down, rolling into the waves every two minutes and for a minute, but no further progress. It seems a futile torture and I can see she's tiring with every exertion; her face is red, exhausted and soaking with sweat.
But baby has to come now
– that's what Jean is saying.
Baby has to come
. By 6 p.m. it is concerning enough that she asks another midwife to send for the duty doctor.

A tall man in smart trousers, blue shirt and a white coat breezes in, smiles and introduces himself with a warm Nigerian lilt. He checks the Partogram and quietly confers with Jean. I hear words passed between them –
vertex
,
presenting, crowning.
Then he nods and asks in a sudden calm, loud tone, like a headmaster: ‘Why don't we have this baby now, Rosemary? You know you can, don't you? You know you
will
do it. You just
have
to push now, Rosemary. When it comes …
NOW.
' Suddenly there are three of us willing her –
Yes! Yes! That's it
– as the current drags her down again. She pushes back against the pillows, eyes shut, biting her lips. And the noise she's making now is a soul-noise, an animal noise. I press my head into hers again, my arm around her shoulder, and I'm rocking and whispering all the reassuring words I can think of. Any spell to conjure this life from her and end the pain. I feel the sinews of her straining neck and her iron strength and hear the juddering, bellowing of deep, desperate lungs. She calls out again, a long howl, which resolves into a sharp series of exhalations, each a moan or a ‘
hooo
'. A commotion as Jean and the doctor cheer and lean forwards and suddenly something else is with us: a slick, bruise-coloured, blood-cowled form that Jean attends to quickly but gently. She wipes it, clears its face and then lays it shivering and unfolding on Rosie's chest. ‘It's a
boy
.
A little boy
,' says Rosie and then, ‘Thomas.
Thomas.
' And I'm face to face with a life that has fought its way to this beginning, all the way from nothing, from eternity. Thomas who, had things been different, might never have been, but now squeaks in his mother's arms as some hitherto unrealised part of my brain counts each of his strengthening breaths. And with every one I'm becoming more lightheaded. My heart is thumping in my chest. This brew of emotions is strong; old waters are bubbling up through the grass. Instincts. There are words they use in the books, words like ‘wonder', but all are insufficient to relay the hugeness of the shift, the acute brightness and sensitivity like your head's been thrust through a door into a different room, as if it's you that's just been born. And your mouth is asking ‘Is he OK?' once, twice, because you feel useless and you can't hear properly and because you're too scared to do anything but ask that dumb question and look. In fact,
that's
what the books should tell you: that you can't stop looking and that, from here on, there will be no end to your fascination. How you are seeing in the present tense and differently, more like the way a hawk sees: every lash, pore, patch of skin and every shaking, stretching limb, every fingernail and toe; the small exactness of the lips and those welded-shut eyes scowling open and rolling towards the light. But you're not seeing with the fury of a predator identifying weakness; it's the attentiveness of adoration. You're thinking,
Careful! Be careful
, as though he is made of thin glass. The books should explain that this brings as much terror as euphoria and how you might not realise you have tears looping down to your jaw until the doctor tells you; how even the soft hospital blanket they place around his innocent little form can seem like a desecration of perfection.

Then, at some point while I'm distracted and staring, a different animal steals into the room. Jean has not ceased in her attendance of Rosie, her care necessary because the placenta didn't birth properly. The cord came away in her hand (
1820 hrs Valementous insertion
– the Partogram records), but I presume this must be a fairly common occurrence. No one seems too concerned. There are a couple of injections before the doctor is called back to perform another summoning and deftly removes the placenta.
Right
, I think,
that must be that
. ‘You'll be fine now,' Jean confirms as she pops out of the door, ‘so I'll leave you alone for a bit.' And then it's just the three of us wrapped up in each other, lulled into a beautiful calm until, weirdly, Rosie stops speaking to Thomas. Then altogether. Even making those soft, low mammal sounds has become too taxing for her. ‘Are you OK?' She smiles, and then blinks wearily down at the boy. I kiss her forehead and notice how pale it has become.
Fatigue. The lights
.
Must be.
The garish strips have been flicked on above us. She closes her eyes and shuffles position, as if going to sleep. Her long, brown hair falls in twists across her face and arms; peat streams coursing through snowy moor.
She's too pale
. I frown. Then I hear the splash of water on stone. I take a step back and see blood spreading across the linoleum.

I must be shouting because Jean and a nurse run in exactly as another splatter spills sickeningly onto the floor. They both cry out ‘Oh!' at the bright, scarlet pool. It is the movie blood of veins, arteries and haemorrhages. Panic hits me like a slap and I stroke Rosie's head: ‘What is it, sweetheart? What's
wrong?
' But she won't – or can't – respond. Her arm goes limp and slides from Thomas, leaving him washed up on her breast. As the nurse slams the red alarm button over the bed, Jean scoops the baby up in a single movement and hands him to me. Then the doctor bursts in and suddenly I feel like I'm falling backwards or that the bed and its attendants are drifting away, the way a loosened boat slips from harbour. And now I see it and feel it, that wild animal that crept into the corner while my guard was down. I sense its size and shape; nature's other side, the chaotic antithesis of the hypno-birthing affirmations; this vicious twin of glorious creation and I'm thinking,
You cruel fucking thing
, to give and take in the same gesture, to open the heart and sharpen the senses, then do this. Leaning over her, the doctor is asking firmly and loudly: ‘Rosemary? Rosemary?' And I want to yell at him –
Stop talking and DO something
– but they are trying, and I see that too. Drips are wheeled to the head of the bed; saline and bloods quickly plumbed into the back of her hands. There are more injections. Her blood pressure flashes on a monitor (88/50). Jean lays paper towels on the floor so nobody will slip. But I'm still slipping, further back to the window and to the darkness outside, struggling with the unfathomable weight of this baby staring up at me with its deep dark-blue eyes. ‘It's OK,' I whisper with my lips touching his forehead. ‘Everything's going to be all right.' But I'm not talking to Thomas; I'm haggling with that presence staring indifferently at me from the bed.
Please. Not this. Not this.
Of course, there's no arrangement you can make, no matter how hard you beg. It just glares back asking if I remember what being animal
really
means. And as Rosie lies there passed out, her blood darkening the paper towels, I realise I do. I'm afraid like I've never been before. The animal terror. ‘Learn to fear,' advises J. A. Baker in his dark, apocalyptic book
The Peregrine
: ‘To share fear is the greatest bond of all.' And I feel it now more deeply than I thought possible.
Fear
, the spark that ignites the flight of deer; that freezes the hare in its form; that fuels the owl's defence of its nest; that makes the fox caught in wire tear off its claws trying to escape.
Enough
, I say into Thomas's soft skin.
I've seen enough. Please stop.

Gradually, and I mean
painfully
gradually, the injections start to work. The bleeding slows and then ceases altogether. After an hour Rosie stirs and starts to come around. Two more and her colour returns. Another and she's sitting up for the toast and sugary hot chocolate Jean has brought in on a tray. When I hand Thomas back to her, she's the one asking, ‘Are you OK?' I'm the pale thing now, my arms cramped and trembling from holding the baby in the same position for the last four hours. Rosie, on the other hand, remembers nothing and is confused at where the time has gone. ‘I think Dad might need a hug,' explains Jean and she comes over and puts her arms around me. After a moment I relent and sink into her hold. Wrapped in that human warmth, watching Rosie and Thomas burbling happily to each other again, I feel the fear withdrawing. Over Jean's shoulder, the animal has slipped from the room. There are other wards and beds to prowl; other hearts to bless and brutalise.

It's not far off two o'clock in the morning when I leave. Thomas and Rosie have been whisked off to a ward with the promise of more hot chocolate and buttered toast. But I'm not allowed to go with them. And they won't let me stay overnight, not even in a chair in reception. ‘Go home,' the midwives say, laughing, ‘we'll be watching them. Get some sleep.' But who are they trying to kid? There's too much stuff running round my head; too many revelations. I know where I'm going. I thank them all and ask them to pass on my heartfelt gratitude to the doctor busy bestowing calmness further down the corridor.

Outside it has turned deeply cold and the streets are deserted. Not another vehicle as I drive through the oily night, passing under the misted orbs of streetlamps along Skipton Road then right, down Bilton Lane. At the crossing point I stop, pull on my jacket from the boot and walk to the same fence I hunkered by on New Year's Eve. Wiping away the drop-in-temperature-tears with a sleeve, my eyes adjust. The silence thickens. Aside from a pylon showing as a deeper geometric darkness against the sky, the edge-land is an indistinct mass of blurry, coffee-black, all looming presence, distance and intimacy, exaggerated by Bilton's orange-washed roads and the few houselights still blazing over the fences. It is almost exactly like I found it those many months ago, only it doesn't feel strange any more.

When I first came to this spot I was seeking somewhere I might belong. I felt the urge to align myself with a place that, like me, seemed caught between states. Mapping this patch of ground has made it part of my life; we have blurred and planed together. It has altered my internal landscape even as I've watched it change. Perhaps this is a process that we all go through at some point, a kind of internal stock-take that occurs when confronted with the tectonic shifts in our existence, like moving away or impending fatherhood. There are times when we need to lose illusions and work out who we are, how we got here and where we're going. And now I realise how the outside world can inform our inside world. The common ground and edge-lands that surround our homes may not provide our food or fuel any more, but once unlocked, they can still sustain us, revealing the complex intermeshing between human and nature – showing us what we are, what we are not and how these two things are inseparable.

Despite the darkness, I know what lies beyond the fence. And, as I breathe, I pull this region close to me, drawing it into my lungs, conjuring visions of the precise shape of far hills, the lane and the woods, the hanging, grey silence of viaduct and gorge, the shuffling mice in the meadow, the dormant vetch seed in the soil, the starling shifting its hold on an electricity cable, the silent imprinting of a badger paw beside the holloway. I think of how beautifully telling it is that for all my time spent recording this edge-land's manifestation, of witnessing its histories and inhabitants coming to life, it still required that most human experience, a child being born, to feel the true sense and shape of being animal. And how, conversely, I feel all the more human for it.

Nearly twenty-four hours have elapsed since I stood in my kitchen waiting for the light to come, wrestling with the overbearing bleakness in this world. Sometimes it is impossible to come to terms with the things our species has done, and what it is capable of doing, but it can be easy to forget to hope too. And this is what I'm left with here and now. I write and circle a word in my notebook. HOPE. Even after everything there is hope because deep down people do care. People
are
good. They take jobs that mean staying awake all night watching a ward of sleeping mothers and their newborn children, or they travel halfway around the world far away from their own families to care for the sick and dying on another continent. If someone stumbles on an escalator or falls in the street, the first instinct is not to steal their bag but to help them. I've witnessed that countless times and never before appreciated it for what it really is. To touch and reassure, to hasten over and bear-hug an emotional father in a maternity ward, kindness, compassion, the selflessness, the care, the heeding – these are natural states too. We need to fight to keep them alive and foremost, not surrender them to the other impulses our species carries within: selfishness, self-interest and one-upmanship.