Mummy Needs Help
SUSAN EDMUNDS

One More Chapter

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Susan Edmunds 2020

Cover design by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

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Susan Edmunds asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008316112

Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008316105

Version: 2020-02-10

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

About This Book

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Acknowledgements

Also by Susan Edmunds

About the Author

About the Publisher

For Liam and Livi

About This Book

This ebook meets all accessibility requirements and standards.

Please be advised this book features the following content warnings: post-natal depression, mental health issues.

Chapter 1

Maria Matthews, 10:30am: ‘So the other day I taught my son how to put moisturiser on dry skin. Today I feel light, feathery touches on my calf. How nice, I think, darling son has noticed my legs could do with some cream. Look down and ARGH! He’s taking snot from his nose and very gently rubbing it into my skin.’

Renee

Age: One day

It was a hospital midwife with hair dye stains on her fingernails who handed me my baby, freshly expelled from the warm, wet indoor spa pool of my uterus into the overly air-conditioned delivery suite. You’d think you wouldn’t notice those details, but after thirty-six weeks of waiting, I’d developed some high expectations of what that particular moment should be like.

I’m one of life’s organisers, even in the most mundane situations. The type who gives you a run-sheet alongside a birthday party invitation. So really, the just-go-with-it nature of childbirth was never going to be a comfortable fit for me.

My daughter’s face was puffy and pink, like an old woman with a sinus-twisting case of hay fever. Her fingers were weirdly out of proportion, long and completely white. They looked like the hands of a waxwork witch who had terrified me at an amusement park when I was a child. Then, they had been curled around a purple crystal ball. This time they were forming angry fists as if the baby – my baby, I pulled myself up, this was my baby – had realised a bit too late that this was not where she had meant to be, and was trying to protest her way back to safety.

I leant back on the narrow hospital bed. It had been cranked into a seated position some time between when I summoned the energy to fire one last desperate push through my pelvis as the obstetrician peered into my nether regions, and when I’d been handed this little bundle of fury.

I could relate to her outrage. If I’d been picking a place to come into the world, it wouldn’t have been this corner nook of a public hospital – sorry, ‘world-class delivery suite’ – where the lights above looked like the engines of an alien spacecraft and everything smelt of disinfectant.

‘Mum’ll know she’s got this one around,’ the midwife said and winked at me. The sound of my baby’s cry cut through the air. I’d known there was a noise happening, and I vaguely knew she was distressed, but it had taken me a minute to make the connection that it was my daughter producing the wail. I forced a smile, but I seemed to be moving a beat behind the real world. It was like I was swimming in a fish tank while everyone else wandered around, peering in on me.

‘I’m cold.’ I looked for my partner, Nick, who was two steps away from the bed, his gaze locked on our baby in my arms. Was he trying to avoid looking at some other part of me? I was aware of a distant tugging from whatever tidy-up the obstetrician was still doing down below. Odd that she’d bothered to put a local anaesthetic on for that when everyone had been so keen to coach me, drug-free, through the baby’s head creating the problem in the first place. I made a mental note to remind Nick of his ‘your body knows what to do’ chant next time he complained of a tricep twinge after a few too many reps at the gym.

Nick pointed at me, looking at one of the women for help.

‘It’s not cold, Renee.’ She was brisk, whipping a blood-and-something-else-soaked sheet out from under me and replacing it with a crunchy plastic pad. ‘Your body’s in shock, it won’t last.’

A nurse who had wandered in to collect some of the equipment from the corner of the room shot her a glance. ‘We can turn the heat up a couple of degrees.’

Too right, I was in shock. Where I’d been used to a bump taking over my mid-section, there was now a wobbly pouch of skin, being pulled down by gravity like a collapsing tent. It was shaking alarmingly as my body trembled. The child I’d grown used to as a foot poking into my ribs or a head doing lazy somersaults in my uterus was gone. I missed her even as she snuffled around at my chest.

The hospital midwife took hold of my left breast and angled it at my daughter’s face. ‘Let her have a go at latching. Does she have a name?’

I shot a look at Nick, who didn’t seem to have heard.

The other woman winked. ‘You’ve a few weeks before you have to decide but if she doesn’t yet, you’ll get a ‘baby of’ wristband for her … not so great for the memory box.’

I shifted my gaze back to Holly. Nick and I had still been debating names in the car on the way to the hospital, although his arguments grew less strident as my contractions became more severe. ‘Holly,’ I said, settling on the most decisive tone I could muster. They didn’t need to know he’d told me it sounded like something you’d name a dog.

***

Contractions had started to niggle at me at 6pm the previous day, while Nick and I were having dinner. We’d deflected his parents, who had got into the habit of expecting us to visit for dinner every Thursday. It was a ritual for almost all the three years we had been together but the half-hour drive from our Putney flat to their immaculate Georgian home in Blackheath became impossible in my last month of pregnancy when I could barely fit my bump behind the dashboard of our little Toyota.

By 8pm, I was no longer able to convince myself that the cramps hitting me like a punch to the uterus were practice Braxton Hicks, or just the complaints of worn-out ligaments. Nick frowned as I pushed him off towards the bedroom, anyway.

Since he quit his sensible, well-paying job (not that I was holding that against him) to follow his chaotic, nail-biting dream of starting a gym with his mate, Sam, and had to be up before the birds most mornings, he had been terrible at staying up late. Once, at his cousin’s wedding, he fell asleep during the speeches and I’d had a huge job trying to convince his aunt and uncle that he was just tired, not drunk. I resisted the urge to tell them that it was their son they should be looking at if they wanted to know why the bar tab had run out more quickly than expected. I could just imagine having to tell our daughter that her father missed her birth because he’d been snoring in the corner.

My midwife, Karen, whom I’d been seeing virtually from the minute I emerged, bewildered, from my first-ever-in-my-life positive pregnancy test, had counselled me that the deliveries of first babies were hardly ever quick procedures, anyway.

‘You can expect eight hours of active labour,’ she had said as she thrust a birth planning worksheet at me. Usually I loved these things – a chance to fill in forms and make stuff happen. But it had contained such cheery questions as ‘Would you prefer an episiotomy or for it to be allowed to occur naturally?’ Nick had turned a deep grey when I’d explained what that term actually meant. Her clinic was around the corner from the offices of the events management firm I worked at and I dutifully trotted there on my lunch breaks. ‘You’ll need to rest at the start to ration your energy,’ she had told me. ‘Sleep, if you can.’

As if.

I reached for my phone and swiped to pull up the app to chat to my online mums’ support group. Someone there would be around to coach me through an hour or two on my own. The responses started to flow almost immediately.

‘No harm in checking in with the midwife,’ Felicity, who ran the group, posted.

Another message popped up beneath it. ‘Listen to your body. You’ll know when it’s the right time to take action. Have you any calming oils you could burn, pop in the bath for a bit?’ I checked the name. Of course – Frankie. She and her three home-schooled children lived in a yurt on her parents’ farm. She probably gave birth in a river or something.

An hour and a half later, I hauled myself up to turn over in the half-full bath, knocking a bottle of shampoo so it clattered across the bathroom floor. Half a minute later, Nick peered around the doorway, rubbing a hand over his face. ‘All okay in here?’

I wiped the back of my hand across my forehead, which was clammy with sweat. ‘I was just trying to relax but it’s not working very well.’

He gave me a look. It was one I knew well, deployed when I was mid-crisis at work and arguing that it was perfectly fine to exist on two and a half hours’ sleep a night, or when I got upset over my mother not replying to an email I knew I shouldn’t have bothered to send.

‘Do you want me to call Karen? I think this is one situation you can’t just power through on your own.’

I cringed and pulled myself up to my hands and knees. ‘Yes. Okay. Not a time for DIY. Maybe just give her a call and see what she says.’

He nodded and disappeared. Another contraction hit. Frankie must have had some better oils than I did if she thought they were going to do anything.

There was muttering outside the door and the sound of Nick pacing the length of our poky flat.

Then he put his head around the door. ‘She’s gone away for the weekend.’

I struggled to sit up, bracing myself against the slippery plastic of the bath. ‘What?’

‘Something urgent. Apparently, the hospital has systems in place – we’ll just head in there and there will be a duty midwife who will take care of us.’ He was clearly parroting the lines she had given him. He caught my eye and must have seen the expression on my face. ‘She says it’ll be fine. They know what they’re doing.’

‘I’m sure they do.’ I tried to slide down further into the water. We’d discussed this as a possibility, and I had duly researched as best I could who might be on shift if that happened, but I had filed it away in the same best-not-thought-about category as the possibility of induction if I was still pregnant at forty-one weeks. ‘Can I talk to her?’

He shook his head. ‘She’s just getting on a plane. She’ll call you when she gets to the other end. Do you want to go now?’

Another contraction sucked at my cervix, sending a wave of heat up my body. I cringed. The steam from the bath was making me nauseous. ‘I think I’ll feel better if I’m out of the bath for a bit. She did say to stay home as long as possible. Can you help me out?’

We hobbled to the bedroom, his arm supporting me under my shoulders, a towel draped inadequately around me. I’d felt big before but now it was as if I needed my own moon. The distance between my hips seemed to have doubled in a matter of hours. I flopped into our bed, drawing my knees up to my chest. Nick crawled in beside me, tracing the bumps of my spine with his fingers. His movements became slower and less regular until they stopped entirely after about ninety seconds and his breathing deepened. I turned over. He’d fallen asleep again. How perfectly on-brand. Another contraction socked me in the stomach. There was no way I could stay in bed.

***

Nick appeared from the bedroom another hour later, wiping his eyes with the back of his hands, as I curled in a ball on the sofa. ‘Should I be timing them or something?’ He screwed up his face in the light of the living room.

‘Could have started doing that five hours ago.’ I looked up at him through my fingers. ‘Half an hour more, then we’ll go.’

He rolled his eyes and reached for the bunch of keys that he’d thrown on to the coffee table when he walked in the door the night before. ‘Let’s just go now.’

As I opened my mouth to disagree, another contraction rolled in. ‘Okay.’

The hospital was less than ten minutes’ drive from our home, but you could have told me that we were driving the length of the country and I would have believed it. We stopped at every red light and with each contraction I pulled myself up on the door handle, trying to scramble away from the pain. Nick had started to count down the time between them – one of the few practical domestic uses of his personal training skills I’d ever seen. I pushed out of my mind the thought that he could have the chance to use his first aid certificate for a roadside delivery.

‘Another one in twenty seconds,’ he intoned as we pulled into the hospital car park.

‘No, no, no,’ I moaned. ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

‘Sorry, hun, it’s a bit late for that.’ He hoisted me out of the car, and we stumbled through the doors of the maternity ward. ‘You can do it, you’re awesome.’

The midwife on duty took her time pulling on the blue latex glove she would use to examine me in the same manner that you might remove the giblets from a frozen chicken. Her blue-gloved hand buried in me up to the wrist, she nodded – almost impressed. ‘Advanced labour,’ she hissed at a passing nurse.

Half an hour later, the magic 10cm of dilation had been reached. The midwife whipped away the gas machine I’d been sucking desperately every minute. ‘Now, you need to push. Like you’re on the toilet.’ Her voice was firm. ‘It sometimes takes a few goes to get the pushing right. Next contraction, go for it.’

Nick was still counting the seconds. ‘Get ready.’ He squeezed my hand as it hit. I pushed as if I wanted to shove my intestines out through my urethra on to the bed. But at the end, the midwife was still looking at me. ‘Try again next one.’

Nick patted my shoulder. Was this what he did to his clients? No wonder he wasn’t earning as much as I thought he should. ‘See if you can sort of push down more in the middle of your body?’ He pointed to something he’d found on his phone. ‘I see here it says …’

The midwife caught his eye and he stopped. ‘Maybe you could rub her back?’

I was stuck in an unending loop. Contraction. Try to push. Everyone watching. Everyone sighing. A monitor strapped to my stomach beeping. I’d lost track of time, either through pain or too much nitrous oxide. I became aware of the midwife staring at me more intently. I was fighting to keep my eyes open between each contraction. ‘I think we should get an obstetrician in here, see if we can get you a bit of help getting this baby out, okay?’

An intervention. My antenatal class had spent an hour on the various methods that could be used to ‘help’ deliver a baby – forceps that looked like giant salad tongs and might cause irreparable damage to you or you baby. A ventouse that looked a bit like an electronic toilet plunger – and might cause irreparable damage to you or your baby. But I couldn’t summon the energy to care. I just wanted it to be over. To go back home to my own bed and sleep. I would later see ‘poor maternal effort’ scrawled on my maternity notes. As if it were a lack of trying on my part that stopped a 3.5kg baby from gliding through my size eight pelvis.

After all that, I knew that Nick wouldn’t put up too much of a fight over our baby’s name.

***

I watched Holly snort and snuffle, trying to find her spot on my breast. Finally, her little mouth, which looked like one I’d seen on a newborn kitten when I was a child, connected with the tender, newly brown skin of my nipple. The suction was firm. Perhaps, in our search for a name, we should have considered Dyson.

‘She’s not on right.’ The midwife who’d manhandled my breast into position leant over, sliding the tip of her little finger into the edge of Holly’s mouth, breaking the seal.

She gestured for me to try again. There had been a handout at the midwife’s rooms with a photo of a small baby suckling at a voluminous, veiny breast. They’d said something about lining up the baby’s nose to nipple. I waggled my breast at Holly who opened her mouth. The midwife watched, scribbling in my maternity notes book. ‘That looks better, well done. Does it feel okay?’

‘It feels pretty weird.’

I could see Holly’s jaw moving as her eyelids fluttered shut. I reached out for Nick, who was hovering at the side of the bed. ‘Do you want to hold her once she’s finished?’

He nodded. I traced the line of her cheek tentatively. She was tiny. I had objectively known she was going to be small, of course. I’d told one friend the smaller the better. But she was more like a little doll than an actual human. Her skin was soft and so smooth it almost felt like it should have a scattering of marshmallow dust across its surface. The clock ticking on the wall tapped out the seconds in the silence. Someone had scrawled across its face that it was hospital property, as if you might try to sneak off home with it like some sort of low-rent souvenir. Clearly many people giving birth on this ward were not getting high-calibre baby gifts. Holly’s sucking slowed into a butterfly tickle. I wiggled, trying to dislodge her. When she slipped off, still asleep, I tucked a hospital-issue blanket around her and passed her to her father, a bit like the Christmas ham my grandmother used to wrap in a trusty blue-and-white tea towel.

Nick grasped her in the crook of his arm, making her seem even tinier against his gym-honed bicep muscles and veiny forearms. He looked worried she would slip from his grasp. With a twitch of his body he turned her so she was stretched out down the length of his arms, her head in his hands. Her nose wiggled as if she were smelling something unpleasant. He was staring at her, transfixed. I watched them for a minute. While I was still feeling slightly bewildered and discombobulated, he seemed to have leapfrogged straight into the overwhelming rush-of-love stage.

I almost couldn’t believe we’d ended up here. When we’d met, at my half-sister’s thirtieth birthday party in the private function room of a Notting Hill restaurant, I’d just started in my job as an events manager – the first time I’d shaken off that ‘assistant’ title – and made a vow to stay single to focus on nothing more than getting as far up the chain of command as I could. Long-term, I wanted to buy the business from my boss, who terrified and inspired me in equal parts.

I had only wanted to stay at Natalie’s party for half an hour to show my face. She was part of my dad’s ‘real family’ – the one he had forgotten to tell my mother about before she fell pregnant with me. The party was totally Natalie. Big and loud and full of people who had lots of money and did very little to get it. I stayed in the corner, sipping a glass of champagne that would have normally cost half my wage, when Nick ambled over. He’d played rugby with Natalie’s brother, Jonathan. ‘Don’t hold that against me,’ he said with a grin as he leant against the brick of the wall. ‘I’m not one of them.’

I raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re not?’

From the look of him, he was exactly one of them. His shirt and slim-cut jeans looked expensive. His haircut was definitely a three-figure one.

He seemed to realise I was appraising him and threw up his hands. ‘Oh, I may look like them, but I promise I’m actually a real person.’

That had made me smile. You could spend all day with Natalie or Jonathan and feel like you were chatting the whole time but by the end of it you wouldn’t be able to pinpoint a single thing that you’d actually talked about. Their mother, Veronica, had to tell them who I was just before my dad’s funeral, when I was twelve. I guess he had been away enough during their lives that his visits to see me every year or two weren’t even noticeable. Natalie, three years my senior, had treated me like some sort of exotic animal in a zoo at first, before finally accepting that I was actually quite boring when we ended up in some of the same classes at university together.

For my part, I’d instantly got over my gnawing jealousy of what I’d decided was Natalie’s perfect life when I saw her mother tell her off at the funeral for her choice of shoes.

‘Do you know’ – Nick’s voice had dropped to a near whisper so I had to lean closer to hear him – ‘I think Jonathan secretly listens to One Direction in those AirPods of his while he’s out running with his mad dog.’

I had laughed champagne out of my nose.

‘And Natalie, I reckon she writes out Nickelback lyrics in Valentine’s Day cards for that weird boyfriend of hers.’

‘Stop! I’m going to spill my wine everywhere.’

He had grinned at me. ‘So how do you know her?’

I bit my lip. ‘She’s my sister.’

‘Ah. Oops.’

We had ducked out and gone for coffee at a little café down the road that was a lot less glitzy. A year later, we were living together in our little flat.

I shifted my weight on to my left thigh and inched off the bed, finally swinging my legs around so the soles of my feet connected with the cold lino of the floor. I leant over to kiss his cheek and the top of Holly’s head. ‘I’m going to go and find a shower. I need a wash.’

Nick cocked his head to gesture to the gym bag he had thrown over his shoulder as we ran for the door of our flat. It was overflowing, one zip only half-closed, a nightie making a bid for freedom. Somewhere in there, there was an old smartphone loaded with rainforest sounds and soothing beauty spa melodies that I’d planned to have playing through the initial stages of labour. There might even have been a bottle of facial mist my mother sent after she missed my baby shower. I extracted the nightie, slid my feet into a pair of worn-in slippers, and placed one tentative step in front of the other towards the door.

I looked back over my shoulder as I reached to pull it shut behind me. Nick was staring down at Holly, his entire body anchored completely still. I waved to get his attention. ‘You two will be okay?’

He ducked his head in the tiniest fraction of a nod. In one of the rooms across the corridor, a woman was shrieking. Had I made that much noise? I felt like a lolloping hippopotamus, my midsection moving pendulously with each tentative step.

The communal bathroom was at the end of the corridor. I pushed open the heavy door and sidled in, still moving as if I was carrying a baby bump in front of me. The stalls were all empty.

***

I pulled out my phone as I entered the shower cubicle at the far end of the room, a sectioned-off space with a swinging half-door to shield it from the rest of the room. It was as if whoever designed it had decided that, having been laid out on the bed like a roast chicken mere minutes earlier, you’d be willing to give up most privacy from then on.

I pulled up the mothers’ group online. Only a day or two before, there had been a message from someone about the pain of the first post-birth wee. What was I meant to do? I scanned through posts. Something about a car seat. A weird rash. There it was. ‘Do it in the shower and try to lean forward a bit as you do,’ Helen had advised. I wasn’t totally sure but I had a feeling she was a doctor or a nurse. She seemed to have all the information any time anyone asked anything vaguely medical.

I stripped off my hospital gown and threw it in the metal-topped laundry bag in the corner, hanging my nightie on the hook on the back of the door. There were no mirrors in the room, which was probably fortunate.

I coaxed the tap on and slid under the lukewarm jet of water, trying to position myself according to Helen’s instructions. I turned and let the water run over my face. The rhythm of the shower pressure melded with the pulse in the hospital air conditioning into a sort of hypnotic thump-thump. I crossed my arms in front of my chest.

I poked at my stomach. I didn’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. It looked as if I’d eaten a big dinner every day for the last six months. Where had my taut basketball of baby gone? Maybe I’d thought the bump would slowly descend until my body was ready to suck it all back in again. By the end of my nine months of pregnancy (which is actually ten if you think about it but who’s counting?) I couldn’t lie on my stomach, walk up steps, or fit in the car. But now I kind of missed that bump.

I turned the water off when the door to the bathroom opened and someone else traipsed into the room.

Pulling my nightie down over my hips, I shuffled out of the shower cubicle. The nightie was too tight – whoever had bought it for me had obviously not realised either that I wouldn’t immediately be a size small again. The newcomer was brushing her hair, a toothbrush jammed between her teeth. She turned and grinned at me. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

I waved it away. ‘You didn’t. I should be getting back to the baby, anyway.’

The other woman was a few years older than me but not many, perhaps in her late thirties, with a sensible bob haircut and kind eyes. ‘How’s baby doing?’

I opened my mouth and shut it again. Was leaving her behind the wrong thing to do? I gestured vaguely to the other end of the hospital. ‘Good, I think. She’s with her dad.’

The woman caught my eye in the mirror as she spread toothpaste on her brush. ‘Mine too. Gotta take a break while you can. Who knows when there’ll be another?’ She smiled, brush in her mouth. ‘You okay? First time?’

I nodded. I hadn’t announced my pregnancy until fourteen weeks, reluctant to believe that the pregnancy was real. I’d been taking the pill but a course of antibiotics must have rendered it ineffective. Nick had almost fallen over when I had showed him the stick with its two lines. He’d open and shut his mouth like a fish before settling on: ‘What do you want to do?’

What I’d really wanted was to push everything back a couple of years. To give myself time to build up a bit more of a career and for us to be a little bit more sorted – there were still months when there wasn’t a lot of money left over for Nick and Sam to pay themselves once they’d paid their staff and their rent. But I knew there was no way I was going to do anything other than keep the baby. ‘There’s never the perfect time for a baby, right?’

His face had lit up. ‘My mother is going to be over the moon.’

The pregnancy had been uneventful, although after the novelty wore off at about twelve weeks, I just wanted to get it over with. Nick’s brother, Elliott, and his wife, Samantha, passed on half a house-load of baby gear. I’d quietly donated the onesie that declared ‘supermodel in training’.

As predicted, Nick’s mother, Ellen, had been intensely attentive, keeping track of my appointments and updates on Holly’s growth. My own mother, however, disappeared at about the second month, after telling me she was certain that I would be mother of the year. ‘You’ve been mothering me your whole life, you’re a natural.’

I realised the woman with the toothbrush was still waiting for a response. ‘Yes, first baby.’ I forced a laugh. ‘Don’t know what I’m in for, right?’

‘I’m sure you’ll be great. They just need someone to love them, don’t they? All the rest is just a bonus.’

She swished the water around in the sink, clearing out the smears of toothpaste, then retrieved a lip gloss tube from her pocket. ‘Is your man any good?’

I paused. ‘At what?’

‘Does he help out around the house and stuff?’

He’d become a lot better over the course of my pregnancy. Beforehand, he left things until they physically became a problem for him before he dealt with them. His laundry pile would grow like a colour feature on our beige sofa until he ran out of work shirts and put it all away. He would leave a plastic container of leftovers on the kitchen bench until the contents were almost walking away before he’d deal with it. (I discovered this in an unfortunate battle of will he was unaware he was locked in with me while I tried to work out what his limit really was.)

But since one weekend when I’d tripped and nearly fallen on workout gear strewn all over the lounge floor, unable to see my feet due to my growing stomach, he’d snapped to attention.

‘He’s improving, I guess.’

She moved to hold the door open so we could both leave the room. A trolley rattled down the hallway somewhere in the distance.

She patted me on the shoulder as we prepared to set off in opposite directions across the ward. ‘Hope it lasts. You married?’

I shrugged. ‘He doesn’t believe in it. Too many happy families in his life to see the appeal, I guess.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Whatever you do, don’t break up in the first year. You’re both basically officially crazy for the first twelve months.’

Waving back over her shoulder, she laughed. ‘You think I’m being melodramatic, but you wait. You’ll want to wring his neck in a month. But then somehow in a year’s time it’ll all be sort of okay again.’

I watched her wander off down the hallway, limping slightly. It had better not take a year to be ‘sort of okay’.

***

Nick

Age: One day

Renee was propped up in bed, poking with one hand at a plate of food an orderly had placed in front of her. In the crook of her other arm she had balanced Holly, who had drifted off to sleep again. From the card on top of the meal, it seemed that she had received whatever the previous occupant of the bed had selected that morning. There was a lump of rice in one corner, a saucer of floppy cabbage, and some sort of meat with orange sauce.

She caught my eye. ‘I’m not sure I’m that hungry.’

A nurse was leaning across her, making a note on a clipboard. She regarded the tray. ‘I don’t blame you.’

I caught her eye. ‘She’s been vegetarian for fifteen years.’

The nurse cringed and rummaged around in the pocket of her scrubs, producing a white swipe card. She lowered her voice and leant towards me. ‘The cafeteria’s closed but if you duck down the lift and pop out the staff entrance, just across the street is a good kebab place. This card will get you back in to the maternity ward. We’re not meant to let visitors in at this time of night.’

‘That would be amazing.’ Renee’s eyes seemed to go misty with the thought. ‘Can you grab me—’

‘A falafel, no problem,’ I said, finishing her sentence.

‘And maybe—’

‘Chips?’

‘Please.’

I winked at her and backed out through the curtain. ‘Back in a bit.’

***

The man behind the counter in the kebab shop shot me a grin as he handed the bag of food over a quarter of an hour later. ‘Rough day?’

I wiped my face with the back of my hand. I must have looked shocking. I’d been at the hospital for roughly eighteen hours straight. ‘Actually a fantastic day, just a tiring one. I’ve got to take this back to my partner and daughter.’

The d-word felt odd in my mouth. He seemed to tally up the order in front of him. ‘Got enough for two of them?’

I grinned. ‘Oh yep. Only my girlfriend eats at the moment.’

He raised an eyebrow as I backed out of the shop.

***

Back on the ward, the nurse was still at Renee’s bedside. Renee seemed to be firing questions at her. I smiled – Renee’s determination had been part of what hooked me in the first place. Once she decided something was going to happen, there was no other way about it. This kid would want for nothing.

Very-dull Natalie might have been her half-sister but she had grown up about as different from Renee as you could imagine. Natalie and Jonathan lived in their huge house in the country, where we used to have rugby practice on the front lawn at the weekends. But when Renee’s mum, Marjorie, worked out that she wasn’t going to get the live-in boyfriend out of Renee’s dad that she expected, she packed the two of them up and they travelled around the country, with her taking work where she could. If it were now, she’d probably be an Instagram influencer or a digital nomad or something. Renee always told me I took far too romantic a view of it but it sounded pretty cool to me, as someone who holidayed once a year in the same place every year until I was fourteen.

The nurse tapped me on the arm. ‘Now you’re back you’ll need to pass over your delivery and go. Visiting hours have ended.’

Renee struggled to sit up on the hospital bed, where she had positioned Holly across her chest, clutching her breast in one hand and the baby’s head in the other. ‘Even for fathers? You’re sending him away?’

The nurse made an expansive gesture towards the other empty beds in the room. ‘It’s not fair on the other mothers to have people around all hours.’

‘There’s no one here.’ Renee looked as if she might be going to cry.

‘We could get a new one in at any minute. Sorry.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s the rules.’

Renee watched her leave then turned to me, her eyes watery. ‘I knew we should have paid the extra to have a private room. I can’t believe they’re sending you away.’

I squeezed her hand, shifting my weight on the single plastic chair placed next to the bed. I should want to stay. But after the night of labour then a day of visitors – my parents, a couple of Renee’s friends – and a bit of wandering around with the baby while Renee tried to rest, the prospect of collapsing on my own bed at home was dancing in front of my eyes like a mirage. I couldn’t even sit comfortably, let alone sleep, where I was.

‘I’ll come back first thing. Sam’s taking all my clients for the next little while.’ I brushed hair out of her eyes and landed a firm kiss on her forehead. I could hear her swallowing hard.

‘What if something happens overnight? How am I meant to know what to do? How do I get her to feed when she’s meant to?’ Renee’s voice was strangled. She gestured around the empty room.

I stroked her hair. ‘The nurses said to call if you need them. They’ll help you. Karen said she’d call you in the morning.’

Trust us to have a baby on the one weekend of the year the midwife gets called away.

I gestured to her phone, on which messages were pinging through. ‘And you’ve got your mad group to chat to if you get bored. They’re more use to you than I am, anyway.’

Renee turned her face away, focusing on the dark outside the window. ‘You’ll come back as soon as you’re allowed in?’

I kissed her again. ‘I will.’

The silence dragged out between us. She was waiting for me to say something meaningful, but my brain had checked out for the evening. What was I meant to say? ‘Well done for expelling my baby from your body?’ ‘Thanks for suffering a third-degree tear for my kid?’

I leant over Holly, aiming to land a kiss on her cheek. Trying not to be too rough, I didn’t put enough effort into the movement and came up short, executing an empty air kiss like the women Renee worked with would, while they looked over my shoulder at parties for someone more interesting to chat to.

I stuffed my phone and wallet into my pocket and, not breaking eye contact with Renee, walked backwards out of the room. She wasn’t a big person, anyway, but she looked tiny in that hospital bed, shadows collecting under her wide eyes, her dark brown hair tied into a messy bun on the top of her head. As I made for the lift at the end of the ward, I flicked glances around the other rooms, looking for any of the nurses I recognised. Two were standing at their station, laughing over something on a piece of paper in front of them. They turned as I cleared my throat. ‘I’m off. Will you keep an eye on her?’

The younger one gave me a withering look. ‘That’s what we’re paid to do. They’ll be fine. Go and get some sleep so you can be useful when she comes home.’

I stabbed at the lift button for the first of the car park levels. I had only the vaguest memory of where I had left the car. On the trip in, Renee had curled up into a ball every couple of minutes, shouting at me that she was going to lose control of her bladder all over the fabric car seats. Between contractions, she’d demanded to know why we had ever sold her car, with the leather seats that would have been easier to clean. It felt a lot longer than a day ago.

The car was parked halfway across two parking spots, near the lift door. I slid into the driver’s seat and placed my hands on the steering wheel. Flashes of images of the night danced in front of my eyes. The midwives muttering about dropping heartbeats, me Googling for the right thing to say when Renee was struggling to push the baby out, the obstetrician’s fixed smile. She’d got her wish of no major drugs, to my astonishment. When I broke my arm kickboxing it felt like I had morphine on tap. But they had given her roughly what you might get before you got around to the proper pain relief for a filling.

Then as soon as we’d started to recover from that, Renee and Holly had had to tackle breastfeeding. I was a useless third wheel for that, too, stroking her back while she tried to twist into the right position to get everything aligned. The tension in Renee’s jaw and the way she tightly curled her toes when Holly tried to latch told me about as much as I could handle about the process.

I eased the car out of the parking spot and towards the main road, catching a glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror. Everyone had been at pains to point out how much Holly looked like me, like some sort of weird reassurance that I was definitely the father.

Nosing the car out of the car park building and into the flow of evening traffic on the street, I watched the other drivers. They were all heading home, or out on a Saturday night date, or running to do some errand or other. Was I the only one whose life had changed completely over the last twenty-four hours? Maybe that was why people got those weird stick-figure stickers on their cars. If you didn’t make a bit of noise about it, all the hard work you put into bringing a small person into the world might go unnoticed. Not that I’d done much yet, it had to be said.

At least at home I could chuck some clean sheets on the bed, sort out the heating so it was warm for Holly’s arrival. It was late spring but the nights were still getting chilly.

I could still smell her babyness. People had talked about the smell of a newborn before but now I got it – there was a distinctive aroma that made you want to bury your nose in her fine downy hair, which weirdly was kind of all over her body. Although I had seen where that little head had been, mind you. When my mum kissed her cheek I’d wanted to say: Do you know where that’s come from? She hasn’t even had a bath yet. I didn’t – even unwashed she still smelt more like a sweet biscuit than someone who had until recently been percolating in the bodily fluids of another person.

At last another driver indicated for me to merge into the right lane ahead of him so I could make my exit. I waved, still running through a checklist in my head of all the things that I needed to get sorted for their arrival.

Three years earlier, I’d been a single person, going through the motions at a crappy IT job for a broadband provider that couldn’t provide a continuous connection under threat of death, living alone in my little flat. I’d assumed then that the closest I’d get to a family would be sitting at the table for my mother’s overly elaborate Christmas dinners with my brother, Elliott, his wife and their horde of incredibly noisy children. Occasionally, my sister, Kat, would fly in from wherever in the world she happened to be.

Now, Renee and I had a mortgage on a marginally bigger flat, I had switched my job for a gym I owned where I had to keep other people employed, and I was somehow expected to keep a helpless infant alive for the next eighteen years, too. Some people seem to leave school all grown up, don’t they? Others get it together at thirty. For me, growing up didn’t happen until about 8.30pm in the evening of the March before my thirty-fifth birthday.

If only I’d known then what I was really in for, I might have tried to hasten the process a little.

***

Renee

Age: One day

Hey, have you heard the one about new mums and sleep? Apparently, we never get any of it, or something. Ha bloody ha. It’s a pity I’m too tired to remember the punchline. Of course, everyone had told me we were going to be exhausted and look back wistfully on the days when we managed thirty minutes’ sleep in twenty hours. I thought I’d understood. Babies aren’t born with their circadian rhythms aligned. They wake randomly all day and all night, and you just have to go with that. Live your best life. Enjoy every minute because they grow so fast. Cherish the moments. #blessed

But I didn’t really get it.

By the time Nick walked out the door to head home from the hospital that first day, I had been awake – apart from the odd five-minute snatch of sleep – for nearly thirty-seven hours. The labour had kept me up for one night of that, obviously. Then we’d had visitors to chat to and our baby to keep the energy fizzing. I slithered down in the bed as he shut the door behind him, tucking Holly in beside me. A nurse appeared in what felt like fifteen seconds. ‘You can’t have your baby in the bed with you.’ She peered over us.

I cracked an eyelid open at her. ‘What?’

‘It’s against hospital regulations. She needs to be in her bassinette.’ She gestured to the weird Perspex container next to the bed that looked more like something you might keep your lunch in.

I let my head rest more heavily on the unyielding pillow and looked down at Holly. ‘I can’t get her to move once she’s asleep. She just wakes up.’

The nurse slid a hand under Holly and transferred her across. She screwed up her little nose as her face touched the cold sheet of the bassinette, but her eyes remained closed. The nurse gave me an ‘I told you so’ look and pulled the curtain shut behind her.

I closed my eyes. The room was spinning as if I’d just got off some sort of amusement park ride. My heartbeat was thumping in my eyelids. But just as the warm rush of sleep slid up my body, I was jolted back into the hospital room by a snuffling from the bassinette. I kept my eyes closed, willing her to stop. The noise became more insistent, with a grunt every other second. I rolled over and reached for the bassinette, patting Holly’s back, my eyes still closed.

The grunting continued. I hauled myself up off the bed and over the bassinette, from which I retrieved her and propped her against my chest, swaying. She raised her little fists to her mouth. The universal baby signal for hunger. I groaned. My nipples were still smarting from our previous attempt. ‘Are you sure?’

She started to push her hands further into her mouth. I wriggled back on the bed and unclipped my maternity top, trying to hold her head with one hand, position my breast with the other, and guide the two together. She snorted and contorted as she tried to make the connection. Just as she latched, her eyelids started to drift closed again. I stroked her cheek. Of all the personality traits she could pick up from her father, falling asleep mid-meal was not one I would have chosen.

‘Don’t fall asleep yet, little one,’ I whispered. ‘I cannot do this all again in another half-hour.’

My eyelids were so heavy. I could just shut them for a minute while Holly worked out what she was going to do.

‘I have told you that you can’t sleep with her in the bed with you.’ The nurse was beside me, tapping my shoulder.

I squeezed my eyes shut before trying to open them. ‘I’m not asleep.’

She clicked her tongue. ‘Sure. Just snoring. Look, I know you’re tired. But what if you dropped her off the bed or rolled on her in your sleep … you’d never forgive yourself.’

Chastened, I wriggled to unlatch her. Her eyelids snapped open. I bit my lip. ‘I just want to go to sleep.’ I was so tired that the air around me felt like water, but I did not have the strength in my muscles to swim against it. ‘What time is it?’

The nurse looked at her watch. ‘Almost one. You’ll probably find she sleeps a lot better tomorrow. They go through a bit of a phase at first, wanting to feed lots. It gets the milk going. All that colostrum’s brilliant for her.’

Tomorrow? First, I had to get through tonight.

When Holly’s eyes floated shut again, I spotted my chance. I pushed myself off the bed with my free hand, carefully supporting Holly’s head with the other arm. Her lips were twitching.

Using only the muscles in my thighs – which until that minute I had suspected had disappeared some time around the third month of pregnancy – I rose to my feet, keeping Holly perfectly horizontal. I stretched out over the bassinette and lowered, half a millimetre at a time, towards the tightly stretched white sheet spread across the thin mattress.

As Holly’s back slid closer and closer, I moved my grip so that she was at last lying flat on her back in the bassinette. I extricated my fingers one by one, my gaze fixed on Holly’s face. As my last little finger pulled out from under Holly’s back, I stood up. ‘Please sleep well,’ I whispered.

I crept back on to the bed, wincing as it complained at my weight. Perhaps it was going to be okay.

One step at a time, wasn’t that what they said? I consciously relaxed the muscles in my legs, then my abdomen, chest, and arms. As I felt myself sink back into the respite of overdue sleep, Holly’s arm hit the side of the bassinette. I held my breath. It took about two-and-a-half seconds before she cried.

I reached out to gather her up again and, cradling her against me, stumbled back to the bed and swiped open the screen of my phone. ‘Keep me awake,’ I posted to the mums’ group. ‘The hospital won’t let me have Holly in bed with me and she won’t sleep alone. I’m so tired.’ I finished with a GIF of a sleeping child toppling off a chair.

I stared at my screen. Usually replies would flood in right away. But then, I didn’t usually post in the middle of the night. Finally, one from someone called Mei Warburton. I didn’t recognise her name. ‘Maybe try playing some games on your phone or something,’ she posted. ‘They’re right, to tell you not to bed share. So dangerous. You could fall asleep and smother her.’

I stared at the words. ‘Thanks for the incredible insight. I hadn’t thought of that,’ I typed before deleting it.

Another message pinged up. Frankie. I wasn’t even sure she had electricity in the yurt at night. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she tagged Mei in the post. That was a power move. ‘She’s literally been inside you for the last nine months. Of course she wants to be close to you. Just try to co-sleep safely, okay?’

I looked down at Holly in the crook of my left arm. Whatever Frankie’s idea of safe sleep was, it probably didn’t involve balancing above a two-metre drop to a hard linoleum floor. Maybe I could watch a movie.

***

At 3.30am, a nurse I did not recognise peered around the curtain and frowned when she saw my face. ‘Everything okay in here?’

I opened my mouth but found I could not speak. Holly had latched back on, drifting in and out of sleep, but lying across me in such a way that I could not even reach my phone any longer. I was counting creases in the curtains to keep myself awake.

The nurse was at my side, her hand on my shoulder. Her grip was firm and warm and I felt myself relax towards her.

‘I’m so tired,’ I spluttered. ‘She just wants to feed. I can’t put her down or she wakes up again. I haven’t slept since Thursday. I can’t work out how this “safe co-sleeping” stuff is meant to work.’

The nurse indicated for me to unlatch Holly and I rolled her on to my forearms.

‘Let me take her for a little walk,’ she said, watching my face for a reaction. ‘You get a little rest before visiting starts again.’

‘Are you allowed to do that?’

‘I’ll bring her back if I need to.’ She grinned and winked. ‘Don’t tell anyone – but it looks like you could do with a break.’

I watched as she propped Holly against her shoulder, tucking my baby’s head in under her chin, her body curled around as if she were still tucked up in my womb. The nurse – I realised I didn’t even know her name – walked out of the room.

***

The breakfast trolley rumbled into the room what felt like thirty seconds later. I blinked – it took half a second to register where I was and that I was meant to have a baby somewhere near me. I whipped around. She was asleep in the bassinette, her arms thrown up as if in silent celebration, her fists clenched tightly. A hospital orderly pushed back the curtain.

‘Breakfast?’

She looked chastened as I glared at her. ‘Sorry. Baby sleeping?’

I nodded. ‘The last thing I could cope with is her waking up right now.’

She grinned. ‘You wait until you get back home, and you’ve got everything else to worry about, too. I had five kids and no one ever brought me breakfast in bed.’

I had to fight not to roll my eyes. ‘Thanks for that.’

I watched Holly as I ate my limp cereal. She did look like Nick, with her almond-shaped eyes and heart-shaped face. Somehow his blond hair had won out so far, too. Her eyes were almost navy, a colour that I had been told would give way to bog-standard brown within a couple of months. Even in full sleep-thief mode, she was cute. Even if I wasn’t her mother, I was sure I’d agree she was one of the handful of newborns who are actually objectively adorable. Not like a little old man at all.

It was only half past six. Who thought giving breakfast at that sort of time was appropriate? An hour and a half until Nick would be permitted back in.

There was a commotion on the other side of the curtain. A woman was complaining. ‘Can I not just go home? I don’t want to be stuck here by myself.’

Someone told her to get into the bed. ‘You need to rest, Lauren. Have you anyone at home at the moment who could look after you even if you were discharged?’

The bed creaked and a bassinette wheel squeaked. I kept a wary eye on Holly. ‘Mum will be back tonight, I guess. My sister’s too busy at work to worry about me. But I don’t need anyone, I’m fine.’

The other woman, who I assumed must have been her midwife, clicked her tongue. ‘Well, I can’t sign off on sending you off so soon after giving birth without anyone to keep an eye on you. You are barely even old enough to drive. Spend the day and we’ll see how you’re feeling at the end of it, when your mum’s back here to help you again. This is a big deal, you know.’

The reply was belligerent. ‘Of course I’m old enough to drive. I’m seventeen. I just can’t afford a car yet.’

The door shut as the midwife left the room and the noises from the rest of the ward became more muted. It was like the recorded soundtrack of what someone might think a hospital should sound like in a movie. Shoes, the occasional shout, a lot of beeping. For a maternity ward, there were surprisingly few baby cries.

I took a sip of the overly diluted orange juice that had come with my breakfast. The only other time I had been in hospital in my life was getting my tonsils out when I was eight. Then, Mum had camped out on a chair next to the bed with me, passing me ice blocks to numb the pain. I’d been pleased to have her undivided attention for a whole forty-eight hours. What was the protocol for talking to someone else within the same room? Should I just strike up a conversation? Did she even know I was there?

I cleared my throat. ‘You okay?’

She shifted her weight in the bed. The sheets made a static rustle. ‘Are you talking to me?’

I grimaced. Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do after all. ‘Yeah, just checking.’

The metal base of the bed groaned again. ‘I’m okay. I’m over this place. Just want to get out.’

I felt the opposite. Once I was out into the car park, it would all be on me. Although no doubt Ellen would be on our doorstep as soon as she could get to the flat, wanting to shadow my every move and remind me that there was a better way to do it. When would my own mother show? Maybe it was best not to think about it.

‘When was your baby born?’ I tried to keep the conversation going.

‘A few hours ago. I thought I only had to stay a couple and then I could go.’

There was the unmistakeable sound of a baby starting to snuffle. I could hear my roommate curse under her breath. A minute passed and the snuffling turned into a grumble, which threatened to turn into a full-blown cry.

A rustle indicated she had picked her baby up. Under the curtain, I could see she was on her feet, swaying from one foot to the other, muttering under her breath. ‘I can’t even remember any lullabies.’

I laughed, then cringed when Holly stirred. ‘Neither can I, but I doubt they’re going to judge you on the words. Just hum something that sounds a bit relaxing.’

I realised after a minute she was humming a version of a song I’d heard blaring from a car when I went to the supermarket a couple of days earlier. The lyrics were definitely not the type of thing you’d normally hear in a nursery.

Despite her best efforts, her baby was working herself into a frenzy.

Across the room, the curtain was yanked back and Lauren shuffled out. Through the gap in my cubicle curtain, which the orderly had left half open, I could see she was wearing a hoodie that bore a Disney logo. If I had passed her in the street, I would have unquestioningly accepted the idea that she was at least four years younger than seventeen.

Our eyes met as she shifted her baby on to her shoulder.

‘I’m Lauren, by the way.’

I waved. ‘Renee Campbell. Nice to meet you in this weird way.’

Lauren grinned. ‘I’ll walk up and down the hall for a bit. Annoy the nurses until they help me.’

I watched her. I was still working out how best to hold Holly but Lauren was slinging her baby around as if she had been attached to her for years.

‘You’ve done that before.’

Lauren shook her head. ‘I’ve spent time looking after my little cousins. They’re all the same, pretty much.’

‘You think?’

Lauren looked down at her baby, whose little legs were kicking at the air. Holly was somehow still asleep. ‘It feels a bit different, I guess. Mackenzie’s so tiny. But yeah, once you’ve dealt with a couple of them, there’s not that many surprises.’

I lay back on the bed and tried to scrape a sliver of jam over the floppy piece of toast on my breakfast tray.

‘Good luck.’ I smiled at Lauren. ‘I hope she settles for you soon.’

I watched as Lauren pushed open the door and ventured out on to the brightly lit corridor. The glare of a fluorescent tube bounced off her pink-tinged bleached-blonde hair, pulled up into a messy plait on the back of her head. I pushed my fringe back off my face. My skin was clammy from hours in the unnatural warmth of the maternity ward. When had I last brushed my teeth? I shut my eyes, willing my brain to shut off. Every time I relaxed, something unwelcome would ping in. Was Holly too hot? What was it Felicity had posted about them overheating? The nurses were determined to wrap her as if she was on an intrepid expedition to the Antarctic. Would I stumble on the stairs when we arrived home and drop her? Would we discover the apartment had a toxic mould problem? Helen had posted something in the group about the rate of respiratory diseases being caused by unhealthy old buildings. Our building probably hadn’t been properly aired out since 1923. Would she be bullied at school?

I focused on my breaths, counting each inhalation. The room was quieter than it had been all night. I paused. What was missing? I flicked an eye open and watched Holly. After a minute, I jumped to my feet. Stabbing at the call button, I shouted for help. ‘My daughter! She’s not breathing!’

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