Girl A(14)

‘The vapours?’

‘Yes. That’s the one. She’ll be fine.’ His eyes were struggling to stay on mine; he could hear more important conversations all around us. ‘Would you like me to introduce you to anyone? I’ll have to circulate.’

‘I still have some work to do,’ I said, although I didn’t. ‘Circulate. It seems like a big deal.’

‘There’ll be bigger ones. Let me see you outside.’

Piccadilly was still crowded. There were blue and white lights above the road, and shoppers wizened with paper bags. It was cold enough to snow. Couples wore dinner jackets and gowns, and ducked into hotel lobbies. Each shop window presented some new, warm fairy-tale. December in London. I intended to buy something expensive, and to walk back to my hotel through Mayfair. I liked to see the doormen’s outfits, and the glow of the apartments above the street. Ethan helped me into my jacket. I was still holding the flyer.

‘That,’ he said.

‘Did you choose the picture, too?’

‘Yes. Do you know it? Children in the Sea?’

‘I don’t.’

‘Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida?’

‘I still don’t know it, Ethan.’

‘It reminded me of you,’ he said. ‘You and Eve, perhaps.’

‘It’s an impressive biography,’ I said. ‘Even if you did write it yourself. I’m proud of you.’

He was already turning back for the Academy. Preparing a specific smile for his re-entrance. ‘It’s just storytelling,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’

The story of Ethan’s birth was part of our family folklore long before my own, and mine – ending with a girl born uneventfully in a hospital bed – was a disappointing sequel, which Father seldom told.

Mother was eight months’ pregnant, and working at the reception desk of a nothing company an hour outside Manchester, where Father mended the electronics. At this stage, she struggled to reach the typewriter; the secretaries ridiculed the way that she walked; Father had to travel up from his basement office three times each day, bearing Tupperware and massages. There was little indication that the baby was coming, just an odd discomfort, the anticipation of a pain. Then the water was in her knickers and on the cheap office chair.

For the fourth time that day, Father ascended the stairs. One of the directors of the company, Mr Bedford – the villain of the story, in case there’s any ambiguity – was already at Mother’s side, holding her phone. Mother was holding it, too, and asking Mr Bedford to please let go of the receiver; she and her husband had agreed that the baby would be born at home, and they would go there now. Mr Bedford, it transpired, had dialled for a taxi to the hospital twice already, but Mother had hit the cradle before he could finish the order.

Mr Bedford was insistent. The baby was early, and Mother should be in hospital. If he couldn’t call a taxi from the reception phone – which Father had now disconnected at the port, and whose cord he held aloft, well out of Mr Bedford’s reach – then he would call an ambulance from his own office. My parents, trailing the desk phone and amniotic fluid, hit the road. They hobbled out of the office through the slow sliding doors and across the car park, and Mother keeled over in the back seat of the Ford Escort which they drove together to and from work each day. Father turned the keys in the ignition. Just as they pulled out, onto the A road, they heard the siren, and an ambulance swung past them, lights flashing.

‘Mr Bedford,’ Father would say, ‘must have had a lot of explaining to do.’

At home, twenty minutes away, they laid out the soft, clean blankets which Father had bought with his Christmas bonus. They moved the cushions from the sofa onto the floor, and drew the curtains. Mother crouched in the makeshift bed. In the familiar gloom, her face glowed with tears and saliva.

Ethan was born forty hours later. At the end, Father said, Mother kept falling asleep; he had to tap her head to wake her. (And did she think, now and then, of the blue and white lights and a hospital room?) They weighed the baby on the bathroom scales. He was seven pounds, and healthy. A son. He had torn his way into the world, had fought to get there early. They huddled on the floor, bloody and naked, like the survivors of some terrible atrocity. Like the last people in the world, or else the first.

The part of Ethan’s birth that Father tended to omit was Mr Bedford’s vengeance, a few weeks later. The Gracies had stolen company property and disobeyed direct managerial instructions. Besides, the other members of the facilities team disliked Father. There had been complaints about his fondness for public ridicule, and about the hours he spent at Mother’s desk, kneading her body. Mr Bedford congratulated my parents on the birth of their son, and requested that they refrain from returning to the office. Their final pay cheques would be provided by post.

Mother didn’t work again. For the next seventeen years, she was full of children, and she approached the role as a martyr. She was doing God’s work, and she would do it well. We were never more precious than when we were inside of her; when she had us in the tight confines of her body, and we were quiet. In all of my early memories, Mother is pregnant. Outside, she wears thin dresses, with her belly button protruding like the start of a tumour, and at home, on the sofa, she reclines in knickers and a stained T-shirt, and feeds us. We clamour for her, sometimes two of us at a time, batting each other for the fuller breast. At my age, she had Ethan and me and Delilah, and Evie on the way. She smelt grisly, of insides. She leaked. The contents of her body were determined to reach the surface.