Foetal Attraction (10 page)

‘Just stop buggerizing about and get the … fucking … out of there!’ Oh, the tender nativity scene. It brings tears to the eyes, doesn’t it? I’d envisaged white linen and dawn’s early light, Alex beaming by my side … I feel a pop, and then there’s the warm water and blood making spilt Beaujolais stains on the sheets. The Muzak segues from ‘New York, New York’ on to the equally appropriate ‘Wima-way, Wima-way, ah,
AH
, ah, wimaway, wimaway …’ To my unspeakable horror, Yolanda starts to sing along. The radiator pipes
gasp
consumptively. As the doctor departs, I hear through the open door the luxurious laughter of people not in pain. I think my body is trying to turn itself inside out.

‘It’s so dark.’ I open my eyes to see the breathy pattern Yolanda’s words make on the window pane. I’m lost in the terrain of the bean-bag, the vast, brown continent of terry towelling. I’m limp as a Dali wristwatch. It’s maybe hours or only minutes since she last spoke.

Until now, I thought ‘squatting’ was something you did as a homeless teenager. But here I am, on all fours. Yolanda crouches beside me on her stocky legs and inserts another ice-cube into my mouth. ‘I do hate these winter months. You know, in Finland, they kill themselves,’ she said cheerily.

Feel I’m being killed, but by inches. Saint Sebastian has nothing on me. Hot bamboo shoots under the fingernails would be more humane.

‘Yes, the highest suicide rate in the world. Can you imagine!’

I can’t tell Yolanda just how much I feel like killing her right now, because there’s not enough time to catch my breath in between contractions. I surface, snatch some air, then plunge back into the vertiginous depths. It’s total Jules Verne. Tentacles of pain pulling me down. The contractions are coming faster and faster. They are fierce, but lasting for only a few
seconds
. Even though I know each cramp is short, it feels a decade long, while the time between is blink-and-you-miss-it-able. The tendons in my hands are tight, the knuckles white. My body is a roller-coaster ride. With no way off.

There are students in the room. I know because of the overwhelming odour of disinfectant and confectionaries.

‘Hypertonic action is associated with a posterior position.’ It’s the doctor again, doing his teaching ward round. He is speaking about me as though I’m not here. ‘It is usually accompanied with quite severe backache.’ Oh, no kidding, bacteria breath. It’s like, tell me something I
don’t
know. I’m percolating. Pain bubbles to the surface at a faster and faster rate till I’m spilling over and hissing on to invisible hot plates. ‘The short, rather sharp uterine contractions are not as efficient as normal contractions. Hence such a labour tends to be prolonged.’ The doctor picks up the mirror in which I’m supposed to watch the baby being born, and refluffs his blow wave. I know his type. A member of the Mile High Club – when flying solo. His students, with their stuccoed complexions, slouch around him. A packet of sweets rustles in the pocket of the one nearest me, like something alive. ‘The most frequent cause of hypertonic action of course is, does anybody know …?’ If Alex were here, he could kick them out. ‘… Fear. All right. Let’s move on and take a look at Mrs Singh, shall we?’

‘She’s frightened,’ Yolanda snaps self-righteously at the doctor’s departing back, ‘because she’s been abandoned by a
man
.’

‘For God’s sake, Yolanda.’ I haven’t spoken for so long that my voice is a stranger in my throat. ‘Stop making me feel like a fucking welfare case!’ But I
am
frightened. I’m scared titless. The truth is, I don’t want to be a mother. I don’t want to be a twenty-four-hour catering service – Meals on Heels. My brain will curdle. I’ll have stretch marks on my mind, from filling it up with useless information on bottle temperatures and teething tips. And there’s a strange part of my anatomy, throbbing. Something I didn’t even know I had. A guilt gland. I keep thinking of all the champagne I drank before I knew I was pregnant. And all the whisky I drank to calm the nerves once I knew I was. The kid’s going to be brain damaged. Or worse. Drive a Wheel-Clamping Van.

‘I’m not happy,’ the midwife clucks, her face pouched with anxiety. ‘Stay with her.’ I hear her rubber shoes squeal anxiously on the grey linoleum.

‘Tell Alex …’ I’m gasping, between groans, searching for a cooler place on the sweat-soaked bean bag, ‘that if anything truly bad happens, I’ll sue him.’

Yolanda readjusts the red frames on her nose. ‘Relax. Nothing bad can happen. I’m here.’ For some reason this information is not entirely consoling. ‘Besides, you had the abnormality scan.’ She is still speaking to me in the tone of an infants’ schoolteacher. ‘That test can
detect
up to two hundred birth defects. There is nothing to worry about …’

Yeah, you want to say. But what it can’t tell is whether or not a kid will pick up its discarded bath towels. Whether or not it’ll go feral. Whether or not I’ll look up one day to see it half-way up the stairs with the baby-sitter in its mouth. Solids will be the nose, eyes and toes of other kids in its playground. An abnormality scan doesn’t tell you whether or not it will turn thirteen and get the ‘I Hate My Parents Hormone’, just like I did. A gust of rage takes hold of me. Where is that rotten mongrel bastard? He got me into this. He was there when it went
in
, he should be here when it comes
out
.

I hear the door suctioning open. My heart does a fast fandango. My teeth click like castanets. It strikes me, ludicrously, that my lipstick will have worn off. Though exhausted, I prop myself up on my elbows. It’s the midwife. A sliver of grey despair shoots through me. He’s not coming.

The doctor bursts back into the room, the faces of his attendant students electric with nerves. I’m lifted on to the bed. I hear the death rattle of a hospital trolley. There are hands on every part of my body. More unguents are smeared on to my stomach and a grey apparatus suctions itself to my flesh. Instruments glint smugly from the trolley. Voices fade in and out, like voices on an overseas call. ‘… Foetal heart …
slow
…’ ‘Cord around the neck …’ ‘Head still in posterior position.’

‘Foetal distress while the cervix not fully dilated’, I hear the doctor decode for the students in a piercing whisper, ‘nearly always means a Caesarean section.’ Ah, a quick bit of Slash and Grab. No wonder they call this hospital Caesar’s Palace. He will make the golf after all. I feel the vague prick of a needle going into my arm. A thick mauve worm of my blood is baited up the tube. The room is pungent with the smell of anxious armpits. The doctors gloom amongst themselves, shaking their heads scientifically.

I catch sight of Yo-Yo. She is sending the monitor slit-eyed glances of mistrust. ‘With all these machines and operations, we still rate fifteenth in infant mortality in the world. Did you know that?’

The room goes silent. My skin is as taut as a drum skin. But the tattoo of my baby’s heartbeat has faded.

The midwife’s face is grim, determined. ‘Doctor?’ she insists.

‘Terminate monitor.’ The doctor’s words have a leaden finality about them; a submarine hatch closing and nobody knows you’re on deck. ‘Ring the theatre.’

Feel I am being prepared for a sacrifice. Terror coats my lungs. I want to scream, what’s happening? But there’s an ice-cube in my mouth.

Then, the foetal monitor hiccups. Like a drummer
back
from his break, the thudding percussion kicks in again. The doctor examines me. ‘Baby’s head has turned.’ The students slump back from the bed, bored. In their grimy-white hospital coats, they look like a row of large, despondent icebergs. One of their number passes around the bag of toffees upon which they suck, despondently. The room empties, like a tide gone out; leaving me washed up, wasted.

I’m on my side staring at the picture on the wall opposite of two dead grouse in the mouth of a Dobermann. I see myself in the mirror. I look like a laboratory rat, all pink-eyed and practised upon, drugged, deranged, with wires hanging out of me. Fingers fumble along my spine. ‘You’ve had some complications which have exhausted you, lovey …’ the midwife coos kindly.

As the anaesthetist prepares the epidural, Yolanda starts singing the harmony line to ‘Shenandoah’. Mid-note, her disapproving face registers alarm. ‘Now that’s what I call a needle. What’s it for? A horse? Some women never regain the use of their legs after an epidural, you know …’

‘It’s very rare,’ the nurse reassures. ‘Some women do find the epidural a little painful however …’ This is like saying that Saddam Hussein is only a
little
demonic. Above my scream, I hear Yolanda droning on, more mind-numbing than the Muzak, about how education and instruction change the whole process of birth from one of fear to one of pleasure and …
Though
lecturing on non-medical intervention, her tone is sharp as a scalpel. The pain starts to lift. The air in the room becomes translucent. And then I’m free-falling into sleep. Relief rushes up towards me like the earth.

Ladies’ Night

BEING IN ENGLAND
was like living amongst some remote and foreign tribe. Maddy felt as bamboozled by the unwritten etiquette and exotic rituals as Captain Cook must have been when witnessing aboriginal tribesman attaching coconuts to their penises. Perhaps if she got buck naked with the natives she might be able to make friends with these people. The old Poms may act superior but after all beneath the pin-striped underpants, they had the same wrinkles, crinkles, dimples and pimples.

Maddy and Gillian, toga-ed in towels like a couple of Roman concubines, reclined on
chaise
-like beach chairs. All around them, naked ladies lay supine, noses buried in Jackie Collins or Jilly Cooper. It could have been a Mediterranean beach scene. Except it wasn’t. The sun beneath which they wallowed was eighty watt. The shore, linoleum. The backdrop, the grey and grimy walls of the Porchester Baths. It was Ladies’
Night
. Taking a break between the sauna and the scrub room, Gillian had now settled down to a third volume of her Visa-card statement.

‘What in heaven’s name are Yokel Okel Stores and how did they get into me for two hundred and forty-seven pounds? I’d better sign a joint bank account with someone rich. And
soon
.’

‘What happened to Milo? Did he take you out to dinner?’

‘No.’ She scrunched up the bill and tossed it over her bare shoulder. ‘The Sally Anne Soup Kitchen was closed.’

Maddy laughed. ‘I thought you said he was loaded?’

‘Yes. And mean as cat’s piss. He made the chauffeur drive around and around until he found a meter which still had money in it.’

‘Like Montgomery. At least we know how they end up being squillionaires.’ The tea lady topped up their cups with tepid beige liquid and shuffled off on crumbly Cheddar-cheese legs. ‘If only you put as much energy into finding a career as you do into these male mutants of yours …’

Gillian drew back, horrified. ‘Career women, my dear Madeline, get heart attacks and hair loss.’

‘You’re like some throw-back from a Jane Austen novel, do you know that? For your information, it’s the end of the twentieth century. A girl’s got to stand on her own two Maud Frizon stilettos.’

‘I was brought up to inherit vast amounts of money and get married. I have no other training.’ With no make-up, Gillian appeared much older. Under these merciless lights and only a dimple’s distance away, Maddy could detect the plastic surgery scars. Gillian was a testament to Picasso. She was totally cubist. Her inner thigh was now her upper breast tissue. The backs of her knees were now her neck. Framed, she’d be worth millions. ‘Besides,’ Gillian rallied, ‘if God hadn’t meant us to hunt men, he wouldn’t have given us Wonder Bras.’

‘Come on, Gillian. You’re intelligent and attractive. What are your skills? Let’s build on that … What are you good at?’

Gillian laced her fingers together and used her hands as a head-rest. She pondered long and hard. ‘Well, I excel at getting upgraded into First Class … Drinking champagne is also a forte … As is tanning all over with no strap marks and getting out of giving fellatio.’

Maddy shot her friend a look of tart admonition. ‘You’re so bloody scheming and manipulative. I’ve got the perfect job for you, girl. Politics.’

‘Ah, funny you should mention that … I have actually been spending quite a bit of time around the House of Lords of late. Do you know it? It’s a local London retirement home.’

‘Proof of life after death.’

‘Exactly. And death, my dear, is just what I have in
mind
. Thanks to, what was it? – Yokel Okel Stores – I’m going to have to marry some old moneyed geezer, then bump him orf. It’s one of the civilized things about living in England. PMS is justification for homicide.’

‘Oh yeah. And what if they prove it wasn’t around the time of your period?’

‘Then I’ll get off for PPMS – Premature Premenstrual Syndrome.’ Gillian unscrolled her arms. ‘Or PMSHOFLM – Post-Menstrual Syndrome Hanging Over From Last Month. Or …’

‘I didn’t know you were a gerontophile.’ Since living with Alex, Maddy’s vocabulary had contracted elephantiasis.

‘Absolutely.’ Gillian drained the dregs of her teacup then placed a generous tip for the tea lady on the saucer. ‘I stop just this side of the grave.’

Maddy knotted the towel around her waist and slipped her feet into mouldy flip-flops. ‘With Upper-Class Englishmen, how do you tell?’

Part two of their beautification treatment involved being coated in what looked like guacamole, wrapped in tin foil and left in the tropical climate of the steam room. The Cosmetic Commandant informed them that this was a ‘Seaweed-wrap-anti-cellulite-therapy’ which would sweat out the toxins.

‘Speaking of which …’ Gillian said, turning her
Martian
complexion towards Maddy and peering over the top of her Raybans, ‘how
is
Alex?’

Maddy had been dreading this. ‘So,’ she sidestepped, ‘how do you?’

‘What?’

‘Get out of giving fellatio?’

‘Oh, there’s so much our mothers didn’t tell us …’