There’s a noise coming from it that sounds like an alarm, but something at the back of her mind tells her she can’t just reach out and press a button to quieten it down. The room is strange, an arrangement of garish antique dressers and a monstrous wardrobe and that hideous purple wallpaper with a pattern that resembles moths fluttering against the sky at dusk . . . Slowly, the foreign shapes and smells shift into familiarity.
She moves her legs carefully to the edge of the bed and leans forward to check on the soft, mewling bundle of her daughter, her peachy cheeks and rose-petal eyelids dotted with milk spots, a tuft of blonde downy hair springing up from the crown of her head. As always, her tightly bunched fists are held at the sides of her head, and she is wrapped caterpillar-like in a turmeric-yellow hand-knit blanket gifted from a client.
Aurelia watches as Coco drifts back to sleep, then leans forward to ensure the blanket is safely tucked under the mattress. The movement seems to cause her internal organs to slide around the spacious room of her abdomen, and she recalls with a shudder Coco’s quick birth back in London just four weeks earlier.
She’d been at her Preschool Singing Time group with Gaia when the cramps started, but there were yet a couple of weeks to go before her due date. Gaia had had to be poked and prodded out of the cozy nest of Aurelia’s womb twenty days after she was supposed to be in the world, and even then it took another seventy-one hours before she begrudgingly emerged, her angry shouts of protest bouncing off the walls of the hospital room. No, it was too early for these cramps to be anything more than Braxton-Hicks, she’d thought, as the group sat in a circle and began to sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” The midwife said false contractions were more common with subsequent children because the body had to work harder, running around after one child while growing another.
She asked the group leader for a cushion to make the hard floor more comfortable to sit on, but it didn’t work, and when she could no longer sing for pain she stood up and took Gaia quietly by the hand to their car.
She drove home, intent on having a restorative nap with Gaia to ease the cramps, but they grew worse with alarming speed, so that by the time she pulled up into their driveway in Hampstead she couldn’t make it out of the car.
“What’s wrong, Mumma?” Gaia asked, unclipping herself and clambering through to the front passenger seat. She placed her hands on Aurelia’s belly and looked at her mother with concern. “Is it the baby? Is she coming?”
Aurelia tried to answer, but just then a contraction was building to an almighty peak, rearing like a tidal wave of fire, prying her jaws open and flowing out of her mouth in one long, agonizing holler. Her waters broke in a terrific gush between her legs and around the foot pedals, and in the ecstasy of the gap between that contraction and the next she found her mobile phone and dialed for an ambulance. It came five minutes later, and the team that raced up the driveway found Gaia standing by the car, hand on hip.
“I can see my sister’s head!” she yelled. “Come quick!”
A noise makes her glance up. Tom is standing in the doorway, a broad smile across his face, his arms folded and his head cocked in curiosity. She is breastfeeding Coco. She can’t remember lifting her out of the crib and putting her to her left breast—the one that always produces more milk—but Coco is feeding nicely, and surprisingly it doesn’t hurt.
Tom takes a couple of steps across the room and kneels down in front of her.
“I thought you’d be busy with Clive,” she says, wondering what time it is. “Are you done for the day?”
He doesn’t answer, but presses his hands into the mattress on either side of her, leaning in to kiss her. She pecks him back, but when he makes to kiss her more passionately the baby struggles, Tom’s weight pushing her into Aurelia’s chest.
“Tom,” she says, pressing a hand against his shoulder to ease him away. “You’ll hurt the baby.”
But he persists. He straightens his legs and raises his hips, his mouth hard against hers, his tongue searching. She turns her head away in rejection. She is feeding their