Joanna Kavenna - The Birth of Love

‘And another one,’ said the midwife.

‘Well done, Brigid,’ said Patrick. ‘You’re doing really well.’

But he hated it anyway, she knew.

‘The sooner we get this moving along, the sooner you can start to push,’ said the midwife. That just filled her with further dread, the thought of having to flex her muscles through this pain. She was trapped. If she didn’t move, she would just prolong it all; she would be in labour tomorrow and perhaps beyond that. It was unimaginable. Yet her body was stubborn and rebellious. And there was her hopeless sense of outrage, that she alone was in pain and the others were just pretending to her, claiming a sympathy they didn’t really feel. They congratulated her, but it was hollow. They couldn’t understand what was happening to her.

Brigid lifted her leg again, dragged it off the spike. And then she held it in mid air for a moment, unable to force it down again.

*

‘Go on, Brigid, put your foot down,’ said the midwife. Brisk and practical. A sadist, thought Brigid. A deep dark ravenous sadist, trying to torture them all. She put her foot down, surrendered to the agony, and then moved her other foot. Another step gained. Another. She was on the sixth step, in tears now, but they were desperate solitary tears, so she wasn’t sure Patrick or the midwife — behind her, exhorting her all the way — noticed them at all. And even if they did, there was nothing they could do. She had to impale herself over and over again. She was battling onto the eighth step, crying quietly as she moved, when she looked up and saw the moon through the landing window. It was a full moon, so huge it was barely contained within the window frame. She looked up at it and paused. It was so round and large. It was somehow comforting, though she didn’t know why. It looked solid, though it was an immeasurable distance away. Immeasurable to her. For a moment she just looked at this moon, and then she moved again.

*

Down onto the spike she went. Impaled thoroughly. She cried out, and she heard Patrick saying, ‘Does she have to do this?’

She wanted to wail now, though she was trying to be quiet because of Calumn. Still, in some weary smashed-up portion of her brain, there was the image of her son, peacefully sleeping. Then the contraction came and she bent over and gripped the banisters. Nothing could help her now. She had lost the gas and she hardly bothered to turn on the TENS machine. She just bowed to the agony, let it rage through her, and she opened her mouth wide as if to scream, though no sound came.

‘Can’t she go back to the chair?’ Patrick was saying. ‘This is ridiculous.’

‘Just a couple more stairs,’ said the midwife. ‘Let her get through this contraction.’

*

She was bent double and clutching onto the stairs and her mouth was hanging open. Her body demanded certain postures. It had an idea of how to minimise the pain, though it was only a faint improvement. She clung to this anyway. She had her mouth open and she was trying to breathe, though all she wanted to do was rail against the midwife and tell her to go. She wanted to blame her.

*

When the pain receded she moved up two more steps, because she didn’t care how much worse things got. ‘Well done, excellent,’ said the midwife. ‘That’s really wonderful, Brigid. Can you do just one more?’

‘Hasn’t she done enough?’ She could hear from this that Patrick had already condemned the midwife. As if to show him it was OK, she lifted her leg again. It was the shrillness of the pain which was so shocking. You could only think, how shrill. How I have never felt pain like this. How I never will, unless I give birth again. How I must not. How I must never do this again.

*

‘Well done,’ the midwife was saying, patting Brigid gently on the back. ‘You did brilliantly. You were very brave. Patrick, can you carry Brigid downstairs?’

*

And Patrick, glad to be able to do something, took Brigid in his arms, and kissed her. ‘Was that horrible?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

He was wiping tears from her cheeks.

‘My poor darling. I’m very proud of you.’

The next hour was confused. There was a sort of acceleration. She lost control altogether. She was back in the rocking chair, and the gas had drawn her under. She felt as if she was dying, with the gas pipe in her mouth. She imagined this must be what it was like to die. This merging of the mind and body, this realisation that the two were inextricably bound together. The mind dwindled as the body faded, she had a sense of that, and she imagined her eyes must be glassy already. And then the gas made everything like a vision, or a nightmare.

*

So she shut her eyes and thought for a moment that she was running through her house, trying to find Calumn or her newborn child. In this imagining, or hallucination, whatever it was, she had already birthed the baby, and yet she couldn’t find it. She kept flinging open doors, and each one would open onto the same scene — a woman squatting in childbirth, semi-naked, screaming out her pain. And each time the woman would stop screaming and look at her. Brigid would stand there for a moment, held by this stare, then the door would slam shut. All these rooms, with women squatting in them, crying and screaming. Some would die, perhaps, and some of their babies would perhaps die with them. That made her shake, and she opened her eyes again, but she couldn’t focus on the faces of the midwife or Patrick; they were too remote from her, contained entirely apart from her, and she breathed in gas and murmured — Patrick bent down, but couldn’t understand her — and she saw the women again.

The midwife examined her, and her fingers were like shards of glass, and Brigid imagined her interior as a ragged hole, ripped apart by all the pain. The midwife was grave now, something had changed. Six centimetres dilated, she said. Six centimetres was nothing, for all these hours of pain. They had told her the second time was easier, and yet they had lied, or she was the exception. Hours and hours; it must be late, and she was lost and fumbling in the dark. Patrick was beside her. She was holding his hand; his skin was very damp and warm. She was sweating and she had heated his hand. Escalation, that was what was happening. Something she couldn’t control. She no longer tried to breathe deeply. The contractions seemed to be constant, or the intervals were too brief for her to recover from the lancing pain. There was no respite. She felt water at her lips, and she realised she was thirsty. But she couldn’t swallow.

*

‘You must drink,’ said the midwife. ‘You mustn’t get dehydrated.’

A cold flannel on her face. That helped briefly. And she had forgotten to twist the TENS machine. She had forgotten but it didn’t matter any more. She ripped off the pads, scrabbling with her fingers at her back. Her back was burning, she felt as if she had been branded.

‘You want to take it off?’ said Patrick.

She couldn’t reply, she just scrabbled with her fingers, and so he helped her. He ripped off the pads and rubbed the sore skin.

*

Into this nightmare of gas and pain came the voice of the midwife. As if from very far away. She was infinitely far away, in the world of non-pain. Patrick was there too, and Calumn and her mother were in the house but elsewhere and she could hardly remember them now. This too was death, losing any sense of your family, finding they had faded from your mind. She heard a voice, the measured tone of the midwife, and now she tried to turn her head towards it. It was saying, ‘There are things we can do to help the labour along, but you will have to move again.’

‘I don’t want to move,’ said Brigid.

‘I am afraid you will have to. We will have to change your position. It’s simply not going to happen otherwise.’