this was a happy time, she told herself, the girls’ chatter filling the foyer. ‘Tina!’ someone yelled out, the vowels bouncing off the walls. A nurse approached. It was Lou.
‘In here.’ She grabbed Dorothy’s hands and kissed her cheek. ‘I know, I know.’
‘It’s a blessing,’ said Carmen.
‘It’s a miracle.’
Tina’s body was obscured by the crowd of girls. Dot made her way to the corner by the window, where there was breathing room.
‘She’s not talking yet,’ said Lou.
‘Tina,’ Carmen said softly, almost singing. ‘Tina, Tina, you woke up.’ She leaned forward and Dot could see the smooth, relaxed arm. The girls crooned quiet hellos and patted the bed or the body tenderly. For a few moments the air in the room held this gentle wakening energy, more like a ward with newborn babies than here where people were submerged, semiconscious.
Lou stood with Dorothy at the window. In the car park a girl pushed a young boy around in a wheelchair, careening around cars and bollards, the boy’s arms stretched above his head. With no warning, the girl jerked the wheelchair to a stop and the boy tumbled out. For a second both children froze. Then he got to his feet and walked straight up to the girl and whacked her arm. The car park dissolved into an asphalt blur, the children out of sight.
A gull-like cry came from the bed, and one of the girls called out, ‘She’s pulling her tubes.’
Lou cleared them back to the corridor and passing the bed Dorothy saw Tina, her arms and legs jerking, her plump, unlined teenager’s face awake, her eyes open. A doctor pushed the door shut. ‘Come on, out of here.’
‘Let’s go,’ said one of the girls, her pointed finger on the button, holding the lift doors open.
It was lunchtime when they got back, and Dot and the girls set pots of chicken and rice out on the communal table beneath the vine-braided trellis. Their usual loud, rude talk warmed up again now they were sitting down, far from the hospital’s constraints. She and Andrew hadn’t even kissed in months. Focus on the positive. But maybe that was a positive. Confused! The table was dappled by shifting blobs of light that filtered through the vine, patches of whiteness in the paddle shapes of stegosaurus fins. As a child their son had been a dinosaur obsessive; before Donald could tell the difference between letters and numbers he knew a baryonyx from a coelophysis. Tendrils and crinkle-edged leaves curled above their heads. Beyond this shade, the courtyard light banged whitely up from ashy gravel. Heat pulsed. Sondra handed Dorothy her iPod. Free of make-up, her face looked peeled, huge as she leaned forward, awkwardly, and said thanks. Dorothy took her bowl to the kitchen with some others to scrape the dark-grey, splintered bones with squashed purplish ends into the rubbish bin.
Several hours later, Jo was still in labour.
‘They induced her,’ said Sondra, ‘her water broke and nothing’s happened so they gave her the shot.’
‘Going to hurt like hell now,’ said Carla, the youngest girl. ‘And they get the forceps in there too.’
‘That suction thing,’ Sondra said, ‘like the plumbers have.’
‘The ventouse,’ said Dot.
‘Gives the baby the pointy head. My nephew got one of those, but he turned back to normal.’
‘They’ll probably have to cut her open,’ Carla said. ‘Caesarean time.’ She ran a pointed fingernail down the middle of her belly. Pottery clay sat drying in half-squidged lumps on the art table, its surface taking on a webby bloom. The girls’ talk whittled into silence. After a time, through the walls between them and the administrator’s office, came the faint trilling of the telephone. They held still and then, a few long seconds later, they heard Carmen cheer.
Dorothy walked home as fast as she could, wheezing from asthma and all right all right age. Cries and thuds came from the neighbour’s kids, playing stickball in the street – a balding tennis ball rolled by her feet and with a grunt she scooped it up and lobbed it back to the pitcher who caught it flawlessly, like it was coming home into his hand.
The house was warm and smelled of toast. There he lay on the bed watching a cycle of BBC World News. Your husband. Dorothy held the stitch that gripped her side. On the screen, weather maps swirled. ‘Jo’s had the baby,’ she said, a hand on her chest from the urgent walk and from the burning knot of this news. ‘She’s fine. He’s