After the End(101)

“Max—” I manage.

“I’ll call him.”

I reach for my bag, where somewhere, I know there is a tatty business card. I fish erratically for it, and someone takes it from me and retrieves the card. I feel a sudden urge to be on all fours, and I half move, half fall onto the floor, crying out as another contraction seizes me. It’s happening too fast. Too early, and too fast. If the baby’s in distress I can’t be here, can’t give birth on the floor of a restaurant . . .

And then I hear the distant sounds of a siren, and they get louder and louder, and Lars is rubbing my back and saying You’re doing so well, and then someone says She’s in here, and there’s a wheelchair, and paramedics, and gas and air—oh, glorious gas and air!

I deliver my daughter in the back of an ambulance, halfway between the pub and the maternity unit at Milton Keynes hospital. I deliver my daughter with Lars’s hand crushed in mine, and with a paramedic at the business end. And despite being three weeks and four days early, and despite her weighing just five pounds one ounce, she is absolutely perfect.

At the hospital they take her away. I beg them not to, but the midwife—though kind—is firm.

“She’s early and a bit grunty. I’d feel happier if NICU check her over. I’m going to get you a cup of tea with lots of sugar, and before you know it she’ll be back with you where she belongs.”

My chest tightens, my breasts tingling with the promise of milk that has nowhere to go. I’m supposed to be at Warwick maternity unit. I’m supposed to give them my notes, which say in big letters that we’ve lost a child, that we might be worried, we might be scared. They take me onto the ward, and I keep asking When will she be back? Can you see if she’s OK? but they’re busy, and they don’t understand—they don’t understand what we’ve been through.

“It’ll be OK,” Lars says, and although he can’t possibly know that, I am reassured by his calm presence, by the fact that he seems utterly unfazed by what has happened. My arms ache with the weight of the empty space between them. I try not to—I try so hard not to—but I start crying. I just want my daughter. Please, give me my daughter.

“Pip!” A door swings shut with a loud bang, and Max rushes onto the ward, jacketless and with his tie hanging crooked, loose around his neck. He looks wildly around, sees me, and crosses to my bed. Then he sees me crying, he sees the empty Perspex crib next to me.

“No.” He shakes his head and takes a step back. “No, no, no . . .”

“Here she is!” The midwife walks briskly towards us, pushing a cot. “Here’s Mummy.” She’s talking to the bundle of blanket she now lifts and places in my arms. She’s talking to my daughter.

“She’s absolutely fine. A tiny bit jaundiced, which is quite normal for a preemie, but nothing we’re concerned about. Congratulations, Mum and . . .” The midwife looks between Max and Lars. Lars coughs awkwardly.

“I’m just a friend.”

“We were having lunch when I went into labour.”

Max doesn’t seem to be listening. He’s gazing at the scrap in my arms, and reaching to stroke a single finger across her forehead. “Can I hold her?”

“Of course.” I open my arms and let him take his daughter, and he walks over to the window and holds her up to kiss her face and whisper words I only hear in my heart. The midwife leaves, and Lars stands up.

“Thank you so much,” I say. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been there.”

Max seems to see Lars for the first time. I wonder what’s in his head—if he’s wondering who Lars is, what he means to me—but he shifts our daughter to the crook of his left arm, and extends his right to Lars. “Max.”

“Lars. I work with Pip.”

The two men look at each other for a moment, and then Max smiles.

“Thank you.”

“It was nothing,” Lars says, which makes us all laugh, because it was everything. “Look after her,” he says to Max, as he leaves, and I don’t know if he means the baby or me.





forty-seven





Max


   2018


At Kucher Consulting, life revolved around problems. I was a problem-solver, a troubleshooter, the guy who could see what no one else could. The fixer. I could identify the barriers to a successful merger, or set the strategy for a new market entry. I could find the weak spots in a company’s organizational structure, and make it stronger. There wasn’t a problem I couldn’t solve.

None of those problems involved a teenage girl who doesn’t want me dating her mother.

I like Brianna. I thought we got on well. We chat about music—we found unlikely common ground in Eminem—and I gave her a tin of paint and some brushes so she could upcycle a desk Blair had given her for her bedroom. She’d smile and say hello when I came to see Blair, and show me YouTube clips of orangutans being reunited with their keepers.

So it’s somewhat of a shock when I turn up to collect Blair a couple weeks after we went to Roisters, to be left standing in the doorway as Brianna turns on her heel and stalks away.

“You told the kids, then?” I say, when Blair’s briefed the babysitter and we’re walking to the cinema.