hear my phone but I'm too wiped to even look, it will be Lex or Bonny or Paul or… I just don’t want to deal with whoever it is now. I’ve got Eleanor to cope with and so I turn it off and walk into the delivery room and see we’re just moments away from the baby being born.
Eleanor is screaming, I’ve never been present at one of my girls’ labours before and I don’t recommend it. I try to encourage and say the right thing. I try not to let my fear show in my voice and then I hear myself cheer as I watch her slither out onto my daughter's stomach and then hear her cry but Eleanor lies back silent.
‘Do you want to cut the cord?’ I'm offered, and my hands are shaking as I do it. Even though I’ve done it so many times it's different when it's one of yours.
And she is one of mine.
They whizz her off to be checked and she’s a bit small but doing well.
They tell me all this, not because they know I’m a nurse and I’ve done my midwifery too, but because Eleanor is refusing to look at her. Eleanor is lying with her eyes closed and when she refuses to take her baby, they hand her to me.
She is so small and light and is so incredibly beautiful, new and innocent.
‘We’ll keep her in the nursery for the night,’ the midwife offers later when we’re moved to the maternity ward. ‘Eleanor's been through a lot today. We’ll put the baby under a warmer…’
‘Can we have her in with us?’ I ask, because Eleanor needs to be near her baby. ‘I’ll stay…’ The midwife nods and they set up the cot and the warmer and I put the baby down now and have a rest in the chair but I'm not tired any more and I just sit there.
I’m not even thinking.
I just sit there, not thinking.
It’s too hard to think sometimes.
But then I do.
I stand up and I go to the window and I look out to the night, but there’s no solace there, because my eyes are drawn to the outline of the hospital mortuary. I can’t really fathom that he’s in there.
So I go and sit down and I turn on my phone and Paul’s replied.
Call me, doesn’t matter what time.
It’s almost midnight, I can’t call him now.
But I do.
He’s nice.
He says that he knew something must have happened when I didn’t show up but I’m not to worry about that. He’s only worried about me. How I’m doing.
I’ve never really had that.
He’s taking a taxi over to the hospital to get me at seven. He’ll drive my car and me home and, when I’m there, he’ll make me a cup of tea.
It helps.
I see the baby stir and even though she’s sleeping I pick her up. Maybe I shouldn’t, I don’t want to get her into bad habits but she deserves to be held surely – her mum hasn’t so much as looked at her. I guess I need a cuddle too. She wakes up but doesn’t cry, she just stares up at me.
‘You look like your granddad,’ I say, because she does. She’s got his chin and that sparkle in her eyes, that sparkle that could melt the hardest heart – it melted mine once and then it melted Lucy’s. ‘Use it for good,’ I say, because her Granddad certainly didn’t.
The midwife comes in and I give the baby a bottle and change her nappy and, as I go to wrap her back up, I look at her ears and around her nails. I remember Rose taught me that years ago. The baby’s as white as snow at the moment but I see the lovely coffee colour that she’ll one day be, and no, she’s not Noel’s.
But she’s a part of me.
Of him.
I walk back to the window with her and I don’t look to the mortuary, instead I look at the stars and the moon and I wonder where he is.
Wonder how I feel.
Wonder how we will be.
Then I look down at the baby and she’s gazing back at me and all I can do is smile.
Smile in wonder.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lucy
‘When can I see the baby?’
It’s the only thing Charlotte stops crying long enough to ask.
God, she just lost her pony last week and now her dad – I know it seem a bit cruel to compare the two, but Noodle was everything to