Not What They Were Expecting (11 page)

‘If you’d got your arse out of bed on only a full twelve hours sleep we might have had time to find it.’

‘I said we were going wrong the second we came in, but you were too busy practising your Clooney sensitive doctor blinking and shouting “get this woman into theatre – stat!”.’

‘’Scuse me, can I get by?’ a large red-faced woman asked James as she tried to get through the door he was partly blocking.

‘And another thing…’ started James before two more women, complaining about their ankles, forced James to shift back the other way.

Rebecca looked at the piece of A4 printer paper in a plastic wallet taped to the door they were standing in front of as James continued to list the things he considered important, and unimportant, when getting ready to leave the house in a hurry.

‘I think you’ve found it,’ she said.

The door led to another, more cramped, corridor and, after a couple of turns into empty treatment rooms and a little more light bickering, they found a reception room where behind a high-fronted counter a woman at a desk was doing paperwork. Rebecca and James stood there looking over, but the receptionist didn’t look up from her forms. Rebecca looked at James and James nodded at her to do something. Rebecca shuffled her feet across the lino as noisily as she could and half-heartedly cleared her throat. The receptionist kept writing. Rebecca turned to James with a look that said ‘I’ve done all that I can do, we’re in the lap of the gods now…’ James decided to take charge of the situation. ‘Hello there!’ he said in his most authoritative meeting-new-clients voice. The receptionist’s pen didn’t waver over her boxes for ticking.

The couple looked at each other again, out of ideas. The receptionist said ‘name’ without looking up from her paperwork, and it took them a moment to realise she was talking to them.

‘James Winfield,’ said James.

‘The mother’s name,’ said the receptionist, shifting her focus to her computer screen.

‘The same,’ said Rebecca.

‘And that was?’ said the receptionist.

‘Winfield’ said Rebecca.

‘First name?’ said the receptionist.

‘Many Winfields in today?’ muttered James.

‘Rebecca,’ said Rebecca.

‘Take a seat please,’ said the receptionist.

‘I guess we’re in the right place,’ said Rebecca as they took a seat.

‘You feeling OK?’ asked James, a hand on her knee.

‘Fine, yeah.’

‘Showtime!’

Rebecca looked around the waiting room which was, even before nine o’clock, quite crowded. Studded across the plastic seats were couples reading their copies of
Metro
from opposite ends, occasionally swapping a few words, shrugs or nods over celebrity gossip. The women in their pyjamas and dressing gowns were obviously inmates – in-patients, she corrected herself – and were more grouped together and chatty. The women sitting on their own, she couldn’t help but wonder if they were independent or abandoned. It was a bit like being on the train, Rebecca thought, surrounded by people she’d never be with otherwise; wondering what station they’d be getting off at based on what they were wearing or how they were acting. Everybody here had the same destination though.

‘They don’t, by the way,’ said James.

‘What?’

‘Sell porn in the shop. Closest was a picture of Carol Vorderman looking a bit frisky on the front of a puzzles magazine. News hasn’t reached the NHS that the sudoku fad ended five years ago.’

Rebecca smiled awkwardly at the woman sitting next to her as her husband discussed the availability of pornography. The other woman, who was probably nearly ten years younger than Rebecca but seemed much more experienced because her belly was twice the size, asked if it was their first time at the obstetrics unit. It wasn’t hers, but she agreed the place was quite tricky to find the first time.

Rebecca asked the other woman, Leanne, if ‘they’ hauled her in here a lot. Today, she was apparently talking to strangers as if they were both naughty children at the headmistress’s office. It sounded like Leanne had visited quite a few times, and Rebecca clammed up because she suspected it was unlikely to be because everything was going splendidly well. Instead she just smiled in a way she hoped put across sisterly support, without making too many assumptions about her condition, that didn’t look too gloomy or too cheerful, and that wouldn’t encourage further chit-chat. She was conscious that it was a lot to ask of a smile.

‘Kam sends his best,’ James said, playing with his BlackBerry.

‘You’re supposed to turn those things off in here!’ Rebecca said, eyes darting nervously towards the receptionist.

‘Yep, yep… Just checking in, then I’m all yours,’ he promised. ‘Good of him to drop a line to see how I’m doing and if there’s any news. Surprised he remembered to be honest.’

James thumbed in a quick response: ‘We’re great. Exciting times!! We’ll send pictures!’ and pocketed the phone.

‘Can’t believe we’re going to actually see them,’ he said.

‘Touch wood,’ said Rebecca.

Despite what James had said about her sleeping for half the day, she’d had a restless night. She was planning to tell work the news today, and would become, in the eyes of the partners, one of those women who said they wanted a career, but then had a baby instead. Where that thought had come from at 3am, she didn’t really know. It seemed odd in a couple of ways – firstly in that a small-to-middling local law firm doing run-of-the-mill work for small-to-middling run-of-the-mill local businesses was hardly a brutal corporate environment where you were valued solely on the hundreds of hours you billed a week. And secondly that she’d certainly never said she wanted a career.

When she’d started with the firm she’d actually been worried it was too big for her ambitions, with half a dozen partners, twice as many associates and a handful of trainees. But she also knew that anything smaller ran the risk of her standing out too much, and probably having to really sign on to nurturing the firm’s future, and ultimately being responsible directly for the livelihoods of everyone you worked with. Anything much bigger and, well, you were getting into the world of constantly long hours, having to brag about achievements to get ahead, and competitive power dressing.

So she signed up for the middle path, at a place where the only major drawback was that her dad was vaguely known as a local bigwig. She had hoped she’d learn to do something useful, but that work wouldn’t take over her life and, in those days before Sky+, wouldn’t mess too much with her viewing schedules. It also meant that, if she did wake up one morning with a sudden urge to have the sort of career her dad, and probably her mum, wanted her to, she’d be somewhere where just a little effort to grow as a fish could make her more of a presence in the pond.

The other thing keeping her awake had been that she’d not been able to put behind her the thought that maybe there was something wrong with the pregnancy (she was still wary of even thinking the word baby). The midwife’s visit when she couldn’t find a heartbeat was playing on her mind still, even though she’d had all the assurances it was normal, and there was no evidence that anything more was amiss. She worried about getting bad news, how devastating it would be for James, and weird and horrible for her. She imagined it like an old-fashioned magic trick where a conjurer got you to hold somebody’s watch then covered it with a silk handkerchief and, without you feeling a thing, later whipped the hankie away to show you weren’t holding anything at all.

But nagging just outside her thoughts was the idea that if it wasn’t working out it would make life a lot easier. It was just a silly, middle of the night thought, but it wouldn’t shift. The idea that she could even have a thought like that worried her. She’d shifted uncomfortably in the bed, tugging the covers around her shoulders while sticking her leg out from under the duvet, then doing the opposite. She’d turned to face James, but couldn’t settle pressed up against a slab of his naked mole-marked back. Tiptoeing around the idea, she rationalised that they’d not had a lot of time to prepare for the news, and that was coming out as nervousness.

It didn’t mean anything. She wanted this to happen. She didn’t want everything to just go back to how it had been. It wouldn’t work like that anyway. And with all the people looking forward to it now it was too late to do anything else in any case. Not that she wanted to do anything else – she couldn’t even contemplate the alternatives.

But the thought wouldn’t go away. She thought about waking up James, getting a hug and telling him why she couldn’t sleep, but she couldn’t do that. Couldn’t let him know she was even thinking about thinking what she wasn’t even thinking really. If she put it like that he’d think she was mad for a start, and either way she suspected he’d take Bompalomp’s side on everything from now on anyway.

‘Rebecca Winfield?’ said a voice, pulling her out of her reflections.

Chapter 14

Rebecca and James bustled to their feet as if they were getting the call that their flight was boarding on a budget airline when a member of staff in a dark blue uniform called out her name.

‘Follow me, please,’ she said with a quick smile and a trace of a Northern Ireland accent. As they walked to the office Rebecca spotted a few couples looking up at them, the husbands looking irritable and leaning over to speak to their wives, probably to point out that they had been there first. She gave a guilty smile which she hoped conveyed to the room that she could understand the injustice, but she didn’t make the system.

In the examination room the woman got them to sit down and then introduced herself as Sandra the Sonographer. Rebecca began to feel like she was in an educational children’s show. Maybe Dorothy the Doctor would be in soon. Sandra began setting up equipment, washing her hands and briskly getting things ordered and organised while she’d been explaining to them what she was going to do, but she’d been smiley and chatty too, while she was doing it. She’d been patient with James while he told her everything he’d learned about scans from the internet as if it might be news to her. She was shortish, fiftyish, with rectangular metal glassed on a rounding face, and a practical short but soft haircut, and Rebecca felt nothing but reassured by her calm friendliness.

‘If you’d just pop yourself up here now, Rebecca, we’ll get a look at this wee thing.’

Handing James the handbag she’d been nervously clutching, she clambered onto the examination table. Although the head end of the table was angled like a sun lounger, lying back she could see nothing but ceiling, so she strained forward slightly, her head levitating awkwardly above the vinyl, to see what was going on in the room. Sandra was preparing what looked like a supermarket barcode scanner attached to a 1980s computer monitor, and grabbed a squeezy bottle of gel.

‘If you could just lift up your top a bit and pop open your trousers for me.’

This was going to be the year for dropping your drawers in public thought Rebecca. A bitter joke about her dad flashed through her mind, but she tried to concentrate on what was going on. Getting distracted was easy as Sandra approached and tucked some paper towel into the top of her knickers, adjusting them down slightly in the process.

She made a mental note to buy some more Veet.

The room went quiet except for some gentle humming of the latest number one single from Sandra. James stretched out and held Rebecca’s hand, although she had to let go as the contortions involved in linking fingers while lying flat and keeping propped up to see what was going on were too tricky.

Rebecca watched as the sonographer took an adhesive backing off a large flimsy-looking circular pad with a gentle rip. Her heart beating fast she looked over at James, who grinned nervously back.

‘Just lie back now,’ said Sandra.

Then the noise filled the room, a gentle ‘wokka wok wokka’ from the machine that was racing at a rapid beat. Rebecca’s breath caught slightly as she tried to breathe in normally.

‘That’s the heartbeat,’ said Sandra casually, ‘sounds good and strong.’

James stood up next to his wife and stretched his hand out to her again.

‘Sounds like they’re…’ he started, but he couldn’t say what it sounded like. It was like nothing he’d experienced before.

‘First time you’ve heard that, is it?’

The couple babbled and nodded happily that it was.

‘Lovely sound. If you just lie back now, the gel might feel a wee bit chilly, I’ll swing the monitor around for you to see in a sec.’

The sound from the heartbeat monitor stopped, but Rebecca could still hear the sound of it in her head.

The check-out scanner Rebecca had seen earlier was pressed into her belly a little more firmly than Rebecca expected, but not in a rough way.

‘I’ll just take a few measurements here, on the spine and circumference of the skull and we’ll get ye a proper look.’

James leaned around and could glimpse the screen, blurry grey with blue and red lines, like primitive computer game graphics, stretching across it in diagonals and circles. While Sandra was working away she’d been lightly humming, but then she stopped. And then she tutted and went quiet.

Rebecca gripped on to James’s hand a little more tightly. They kept smiling, but the smiles were a bit more forced, and the mumbly chatting stopped. James watched what the sonographer was doing more closely. Sandra fussed with the monitor, applied a bit more gel to Rebecca’s belly and kept working. Don’t let anything be wrong, thought Rebecca to herself. Please, don’t let anything be wrong. Guilt and fear seeped through her body.

‘Is everything…?’

Sandra didn’t answer straight away.

But then she did.

‘Yes, yes everything looking super. Some of these machines, they’re getting old and temperamental. But aren’t we all? Now let me show you.’

Sandra showed them the scan, talking them through the light and shade; the spine, the head, the heart. She was talking about measurements and technical details that Rebecca was only half listening to as she stared at the screen. Rebecca forgot that thirty seconds ago she’d started bracing for bad news. She’s pregnant. There’s a baby. There was no space in her head for her doubts and her worries at that moment, just a feeling of wonder and joy. It wasn’t just too many ready meals and the start of an ulcer that had her looking and feeling like she did, it was Bompalomp. In the flesh. In her belly. Or womb or whatever would be the grown-up way of putting it. She watched James as he bounced along excitedly to everything Sandra was saying, his biggest, most boyish grin on his face.