The Mother-in-Law(17)

The car fills with the sound of heaving breathing. “Mrs. Diana?”

I recognize the voice immediately. “Ghezala?”

Twenty-two and pregnant, Ghezala has been in Australia for five months since escaping Afghanistan. In recent weeks I’d visited her several times, to drop off a pram, a bassinette and some newborn baby clothes, and each time, Ghezala had put on a pot of Kahwa tea and we’d settle in for a good old chinwag. Ghezala’s English isn’t great and the conversations are often lists of what she’s had for breakfast, what the weather is going to do this week, what she’s watched on the television . . . yet I always enjoy the simplicity of it.

“Mrs. Diana?” More puffing and panting. “The baby.”

I pull to the side of the road, calculating dates in my head. It’s a few weeks early, not dangerously early, but early. And Ghezala has no family or friends in Australia. Her partner, Hakem, is at least in the country, but his capabilities as a birth partner remain to be seen.

“You need to go to the hospital, Ghezala. Remember the voucher I gave you for a taxi? Call the taxi and use the voucher to pay the driver. Ghezala? Do you remember the voucher?”

I hear another contraction take hold, so I wait. The fact that she can’t talk through it worries me and I wonder if I should call an ambulance.

“Ghezala,” I repeat when the panting stops. “Do you have the taxi voucher?”

“I . . . I don’t know.” She sounds spent. Without thinking about what I was doing, I’ve already done a U-turn and am headed toward her house, but it’s a good twenty minutes’ drive from here. “Where is Hakem, Ghezala?”

“Outside.”

I bite back an urge to scream, “What is he doing outside?” and instead ask: “And how bad is the pain? Out of ten.”

“It’s . . . a four.”

But I get the feeling Ghezala’s four is most women’s eleven. Her next breath catches on another contraction.

“Ghezala, I’m going to call an ambulance.”

“No,” she says. “Can . . . you come, Mrs. Diana?”

“I’m on my way to your house right now. Ghezala—”

But the phone goes dead. And when I call again, it rings out.

It takes twenty-five minutes to get to her house and when I get there, Hakem is in the front yard, smoking a cigarette. He must spend half his life in the tiny, overgrown courtyard of theirs, smoking cigarettes. I leap out of the car and run toward the house. “Hakem? Where’s Ghezala?”

He gestures toward the house with his head. “Inside.”

“Inside? Why aren’t you in there with her?”

He looks at me like I’ve suggested he book a holiday to the Bahamas. I get the feeling he’s being intentionally obtuse.

“Have you called an ambulance?”

He turns away, takes a drag of his cigarette. “You might think you are our savior, but you know nothing. You are different from us. Different from Ghezala.”

“Hakem. Have. You. Called. An. Ambulance?” I ask through my teeth.

He takes a step toward me. The whites of his eyes are yellow and filled with little red cracks. “No. I. HAVEN’T.”

Hakem is thickset, and a good thirty years younger than me but I match him in height, inch for inch. I square up against him. “Do not try and intimidate me, young man. I promise you, you will come off worse.”

It’s not true, of course. I would come off worse, far worse, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life it’s that minds win wars, not muscles. And as I’ve made up my mind to get Ghezala’s baby delivered healthy and well, I’ll be damned if I don’t do exactly that.

I’m still right in Hakem’s face when he holds up his hands in defeat.

“Call an ambulance,” I say, as the screen door slaps closed between us. “Now!”

I find Ghezala on the tiled kitchen floor, her back against pillows. I skid and almost fall in a wet patch, gasping when I see that the baby’s head is already out. There’s no time for an ambulance, I realize as Ghezala shudders and I drop to my knees. She gives a great moan and I only just have time to grab a tea towel before Ghezala pushes her baby boy right into my hands, pink and bloody and squirming. I wrap him in a towel and rub him vigorously until he lets out a piercing, glorious cry.

It takes me back to another time. The single bed with moonlight streaming in the curtainless window. The pop followed by a feeling deep within of something bursting. My breath a cloud in the room.

Hakem is wrong, I am not different from Ghezala. We are exactly the same.





9: LUCY


THE PAST . . .

“Where on earth has she got to?”

Tom shifts newborn Archie in his lap, and glances at his watch. Diana should have been at the hospital an hour ago, and she has a surprise, he tells me (only holding out about thirty seconds or so before letting it slip that the surprise was a giant teddy bear). Now he is positively jittery with impatience to give it to his grandson, who is all of six hours old. God love him.

Ever since I announced my pregnancy, Tom has been the image of a devoted grandfather—dropping to his knees every time I visited to “talk” to my belly, or reaching out to feel the baby kick. Diana had chastised him: “Give the girl some space!” but I didn’t mind. Actually I preferred Tom’s tactile approach to Diana’s style, which was barely mentioning the baby at all. Of course, I’d steeled myself for the fact that my pregnancy wasn’t likely to be the bonding point I hoped it would be for Diana and me, but I was nonetheless disappointed to find that it hadn’t injected even the slightest warmth into our relationship.