Douglas Kennedy - A Special Relationship

'Sure', I said tonelessly. 'Go'.

'Thanks'.

Then he changed the subject, and told me a rather entertaining story about a colleague at the paper who'd been caught fiddling his expenses. I fought the temptation to show my amusement, as I was still smarting after our little exchange... and didn't like the fact that, once again, Tony was up to his usual 'mollify her with humour' tricks. When I didn't respond to the story, he said, 'What's with the indignant face?'

'Tony, what do you expect?'

'I don't follow you...'

'Oh come on, that fight we just had...'

'That wasn't a fight. That was just an exchange of views. Anyway, it's ancient history now'.

'I just can't bounce back the way...'

He leaned over and kissed me.

'I'll call you from The Hague tomorrow. And remember - I'm on the mobile if...'

After he left, I must have spent the better part of an hour replaying our little spat in my head, taking apart the argument, piece by piece. Like some post-modernist literary critic, I was trying to excavate all the subtextual implications of the fight - and wondering what its ultimate meaning might be. Granted, on one level, this dispute had again been rooted in Tony's vanity. But what I couldn't get out of my brain was the larger, implicit realization that I had married someone with whom I didn't share a common language. Oh, we both spoke English. But this wasn't simply a case of mere Anglo-American tonal differences. This was something more profound, more unset-ding - the worry that we would never find a common emotional ground between us; that we would always be strangers, thrown in together under accidental circumstances.

'Who knows anyone?' Sandy said to me during our phone call that evening. But when I admitted that I was beginning to find Tony increasingly hard to fathom, she said, 'Well, look at me. I always considered Dean to be a nice, stable, slightly dull guy. But I bought into his decent dullness because I thought: at least I'll be able to count on him. He'll always be there for me. And when I met him, that was exactly what I was looking for. What happens? After ten years of staid decency and three kids, he decides he hates everything about our staid secure suburban life. So he meets the Nature Girl of his dreams - a fucking park ranger in Maine - and runs off to live with her in some cabin in Baxter State Park. If he now sees the kids four times a year, it's an event. So, hey, at least you realize you're already dealing with a difficult guy. Which, from where I sit, is something of an advantage. But I'm telling you stuff you already know'.

Maybe she was right. Maybe I just needed to let everything settle down, and enter the realm of acceptance and other optimistic clichés. As in look on the bright side, forget your troubles, keep your chin up... that sort of dumb, sanguine thing.

Over and over again, I repeated these Pollyanna-ish mantras. Over-and-over again, I kept trying to put on a happy face. Until fatigue finally forced me to turn off the light. As I drifted off into a thinly veneered sleep, one strange thought kept rattling around my brain: I am nowhere.

Then another thought seized me: Why is everything so soggy?

At that moment, I jolted back into consciousness. In the initial few seconds afterwards, I absently thought: 50 that's what they call a wet dream. Then I squinted in the direction of the window and noticed that it was light outside. I glanced at the bedside clock and saw that it read: 6.48 am. Then an earlier thought replayed itself in my head:

Why is everything so soggy?

I sat up, suddenly very awake. I frantically pulled off the duvet. The bed was completely drenched.

My waters had broken.

Five

I DIDN'T PANIC. I didn't succumb to trepidation or startled surprise. I just reached for the call-button. Then I picked up the phone and dialled Tony's mobile. It was busy, so I phoned his direct line at the paper and left a fast message on his voice mail.

'Hi, it's me', I said, still sounding calm. 'It's happening... so please get yourself to the Mattingly as soon as you get back to London. This is definitely it'.

As I put down the receiver, a midwife showed up. She took one look at the sodden bedclothes and reached for the phone. Two orderlies arrived shortly thereafter. They raised up the sides of my bed, unlocked its wheels, and pushed me out of the room, negotiating a variety of corridors before landing me in the baby unit. En route, I began to feel an ever-magnifying spasm. By the time the doors swung behind me, the pain had intensified to such an extent that I felt as if some alien was gripping my innards with his knobbly fist, determined to show me new frontiers in agony. A midwife was on the scene immediately - a diminutive woman of Asian origin. She grabbed a packet of surgical gloves from a nearby trolley, ripped them open, pulled them on, and informed me that she was going to do a quick inspection of my cervix. Though I'm certain she was attempting to be as gentle as possible, her gloved fingers still felt like highly sharpened claws. I reacted accordingly.

'You are experiencing severe discomfort, yes?' she asked.

I nodded.

'I will have a doctor see you as soon as...'

'Is the baby all right?'

'I'm sure everything is...'

There was another maniacal spasm. I reacted loudly then asked, 'Can I have an epidural now?'

'Until the doctor has examined...'

'Please...'

She patted my shoulder and said, 'I'll see what I can do'.

But ten godawful minutes passed until she returned with a porter... by which time I felt so tortured that I would have signed a document admitting to be the cause of everything from the French Revolution to global warming.

'Where have you been?' I asked, my voice raw and loud.

'Calm yourself, please', she said. 'We had three other women waiting before you for ultrasound'.

'I don't want ultrasound. I want an epidural'.

But I was whisked straight away into the ultrasound suite, where my belly was coated with gel and two large pads applied to the surface of the skin. A large fleshy man in a white jacket came into the room. Beneath the jacket he was wearing a check Viyella shirt and a knit tie. His feet were shod with green wellington boots. Take away the white jacket and he could have passed for a member of the rural squirearchy. Except for the fact that the boots were splattered with blood.

'I'm Mr Kerr', he said crisply. 'I'm Mr Hughes's locum today. In a spot of bother, are we?'

But suddenly he was interrupted by the ultrasound technician who said that sentence you never want to hear a medical technician say to a doctor, 'I think you should see this, sir'.

Mr Kerr looked at the screen, his eyes grew momentarily wide, then he turned away and calmly sprang into action. He spoke rapidly to a nurse - and, much to my horror, I heard him utter the words: 'Baby Resuscitator'.

'What is going on?' I asked.

Mr Kerr approached me and said, 'I need to examine you right now. This might be a bit uncomfortable'.

He inserted his fingers into me and began to press and probe. I was about to demand information about what the hell was going on, but another rush of pain made me scream with extremity.

'I'll have the anaesthetist here in a jiffy', Mr Kerr said. 'Because we need to perform an emergency Caesarean'.

Before I could react to that, he explained that the ultrasound had shown that the umbilical cord might be around the baby's neck.

'Will the baby die?' I said, interrupting him.

'The foetal monitor is showing a steady heartbeat. However, we need to move fast, because...'

But he didn't get to finish that sentence, as the doors swung open and two orderlies with carts came rushing in. The first was pulled up next to me. Then a small Indian woman in a white coat arrived and walked over to the bed. 'I'm Dr Chaterjee, the anaesthetist', she said. 'Relief is on the way'.