The Two Lives of Lydia Bird(79)

‘Don’t drop her, will you?’ she pants.

‘I won’t let go, Elle. I promise.’ It isn’t lost on me that it’s the second time I’ve made solemn promises in recent hours. I can’t process it, it’s too much. Then all thoughts but here and now are pushed aside as a brand-new life takes her first lungful of air in my hands. ‘She’s here, she’s here! We bloody did it, I told you we could!’ I’m laughing and crying with sheer relief, we both are, and I drag a sheet from the bed and wrap it around the mewling, wriggling baby. I pass her over and Elle cradles her precious child in her arms.

‘The ambulance is coming, I can hear it,’ I say quietly.

‘Thank you,’ she says, her mouth trembling.

I lean in and hug her, careful not to squash my new niece. The sirens get louder and then stop, here at last.

‘You were brilliant,’ I say.

‘You too,’ she whispers, still sobbing, sagging with relief.

‘I’ve never delivered a baby before,’ I say, as if this is news to either of us.

‘You’re forgetting Ariel,’ she says.

‘True. She didn’t make half as much of a song and dance about it, either.’

‘Hello?’ A male voice calls and we can hear boots on the stairs.

‘In here,’ I shout back.

Two medics dressed in dark green appear in the room, a balding man and a tall woman with a blonde ponytail, both standing at the foot of the bed assessing the situation as they introduce themselves as Andy and Louise.

‘Looks like you’ve had a busy morning, love,’ Andy says, grinning at Elle.

‘She’s a girl,’ Elle smiles.

‘Okay if I check her over?’ Louise perches next to Elle and carefully examines the baby. I step away to let them do their thing, watching as the cord is clamped and then cut.

‘Could I ask you to hold the baby while we check Elle?’ Louise asks.

I’m relieved someone else is in charge as she places the swaddled child in my arms. I take her over to the window as the medics tend to Elle, their words washing over me, background noise as I study this new human. I stroke my fingertip down the brow of her tiny nose, featherlight, across the down of her cheeks. My niece. She isn’t purple any more, more of a beautiful peach, downy and still a little blood-smeared. Her mouth puckers when I touch her bottom lip, instinctive, full-on Maggie Simpson suction. How clever you are already, I think, knowing how to survive. I hope you always have that in you. When she wriggles and her hand emerges, I place my finger against her palm. Tiny, translucent fingers curl around mine, the most fragile thing I’ve seen in my life. I stare at her dewy newness and I realize with a jolt that in the next world over she doesn’t even exist. ‘Oh,’ I whisper. She’s been in my world for only minutes and already she has widened the space between here and there. There, Elle is not a mother. There, this child didn’t make it. I don’t know what it all means, but suddenly I realize how very tired I am. The last twenty-four hours have been heavy to say the least. I’m almost relieved when it’s time to hand the baby back to Elle, who by now is sitting up in bed looking far more normal than I’d imagine someone could look after jettisoning a whole new person into the world. I overheard Louise soothing Elle’s concerns about the speed with which the baby arrived; it takes as long as it takes, apparently. She’s delivered more than one baby in the back of the ambulance, even one at the base of an escalator in a shopping centre once. Better than toiling through two days of hard labour, she said, which I guess is true.

I hand the baby back to Elle and then nip on to the landing to call David and tell him that mum and baby are fine and he should get back pronto. He goes into meltdown. I have to be firm and tell him to stop panicking and pull himself together.

‘Do you have to go to hospital?’ I ask, sitting carefully on the edge of the bed when Louise and Andy head downstairs.

Elle shakes her head. ‘No. Louise is trying to get my midwife on the phone to ask her to come and see me, check me over again.’ She looks down at the baby. ‘And this one too.’

For a moment, we both gaze at the sleeping child. I’m not surprised she’s zonked out; however difficult the last hour or two was for Elle and me, it was even more eventful for her.

‘Any names yet?’ I ask. They’ve knocked so many options around in the last few months and weeks that I’ve lost track.

Elle studies her daughter. ‘We’d settled on Charlotte, but now she’s here I’m not sure she looks like one.’

‘Hmm,’ I say, considering. ‘How about … Lydia Ariel Peach?’

Elle’s smile is tired but there. ‘There’s only room for one Lydia in my life.’

And yet there’s two of everyone else in mine, I think. Two of everyone, apart from Freddie and this little girl.

‘David shouldn’t be too long.’

‘I can’t wait for him to get here,’ she says.

I eye the bloodstained sheets. ‘Why don’t I make you some toast and you can sit in the chair and eat it while I change the bed? Make it all a bit less, er … Alien?’

Her mouth twitches. She knows how I am with gore. ‘Was it awful for you at the business end?’

‘Oddly not,’ I say. ‘Being the first person in the world to see this little lady was pretty special, to be honest.’ It’s a sweeping understatement. People say all kinds of flowery things when they witness a birth; they call it a miracle, or life changing, or precious. For me it was all of those things and so much more – it was pure, human magic. Elle performed the magic trick of all magic tricks right in front of my eyes today. My sister is a sorceress, and her daughter is a masterpiece.