Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

23. Before

Before

Bobby is born on the kitchen floor in the midst of a storm. All day the wind has been rattling the farmhouse windows so fiercely, at times I wondered if they might be blown in.

In the final stages of pregnancy, my days were slow and I seemed to achieve so little. Some half-hearted tidying, the leisurely preparation of the family’s supper, chores which formerly took minutes could last for hours.

When I first arrived at the farmhouse—a tired, unloved place that housed three diffident men—I was shocked by the state of it, the state of them. They needed me, all three of them, they just hadn’t realized it. There was David, Frank’s dad, still aching from the loss of his wife. David had done the best he could bringing up his sons without Sonia, but his best was almost nothing. Frank learned to cook because his dad couldn’t, and six months of cheese sandwiches began to wear thin. He learned how to wash their clothes, he began supervising Jimmy’s homework. He cleaned too, here and there, but when I first came I was shocked by the ingrained grime—years of dust and cobwebs—he had not noticed or cared about.

Domesticity was something I’d never expected to find satisfying. My mother always hated cooking and cleaning when we were growing up, and was fortunate to marry a man who loved her enough to do it instead. What I have discovered is that the transformation of the farmhouse and the men within it has been more rewarding than I would ever have imagined. I thought I was predestined for a life of books: first university, then, with any luck, a career as a poet. I haven’t given up on my dream of one day being a writer, but Frank came along at exactly the right moment and swept me into a new and unimagined world where every single day is a different kind of education.

Turning down my place at Oxford hurt, not least because of the way it disappointed my mother. But what choice did I have? Spend two years in the same town as Gabriel and Louisa? Nothing on earth would have induced me to swallow my pride and do that. Soon enough there was Frank, the handsome, uncomplicated boy who had always loved me from afar.

If people were surprised I segued from one love affair to another they did not say. For Frank and I, in a sense, had known each other forever. I fell for him perhaps because he was the exact opposite of Gabriel. I was drawn first by his kindness and his honesty, a more straightforward man you could not meet. He gave me back my self-belief with uncomplicated devotion.

Like most women I have a birth plan: The moment my waters break or I feel the first twinge of pain, I will call my mother at her school. The secretary has been alerted that no matter what my mother is doing she must be interrupted. If she’s umpiring a netball match, the game stops. If she’s taking an English class it is abandoned, and the pupils must fend for themselves. The journey from her school to the farmhouse is less than fifteen minutes; the hospital, were we to need it quickly, half an hour away. First-time labors, I am told, can last for hours, often a whole day or more, so there will be plenty of time to get to hospital. I have learned the drill. I know how to time my contractions so I can tell how much my cervix has dilated. In an ideal world, we would sit out the first part of labor in the farmhouse and Frank would drive us to hospital for the final hours.

My waters break at three o’clock in the afternoon when I stand up from my chair with the intention of making a cup of tea. It’s the strangest sensation. Not a bucket of liquid splashing onto the slate floor, as I’d expected, but a trickle that alarms me initially until I realize what it is. The first contraction comes, in textbook fashion, almost immediately afterward.

It hurts a surprising amount for a first contraction. This is no twinge. And, even worse, just as I’m recovering, realizing labor is not going to be the cinch I’d hoped for, another one comes. That can’t be right, can it? Contractions close together? I stagger to the phone—I know the school telephone number off by heart—pick up the receiver, phone to my ear… the line is dead, just a crackling sound. I scream into the empty kitchen. How can this be? Only later will I discover a telegraph pole has crashed to the ground in the storm, wiping out phone lines for miles around us and, crucially, blocking the lane to the farmhouse. We cannot get out and no one can get in.

To begin with, I manage to stay calm. I retreat to my armchair, legs splayed in front of me, trying to breathe through the contractions, the way I’ve been taught. Imagine you are blowing a table tennis ball across a swimming pool. It’s an absurd phrase. I can picture neither a Ping-Pong ball nor a swimming pool. And the pain is so intense I can scarcely breathe, let alone master these long, gentle exhalations.

Fast labor leaves no room for thought or planning or even comprehension. It takes you. Catapults you from one world to the next, where you are simply a birthing machine, a screaming, writhing, sweating mound of primal woman. I’m disconnected from it to such an extent that, at first, I don’t realize the groans, the deep brittle lowing—I’ve heard cows in labor, it’s the exact same thing—is me.

By the time Jimmy arrives home from school, I am on all fours in the kitchen, sobbing, screaming, trying to prevent my body from doing what it wants to do, which is push the baby out.

“Oh, my God, Beth!” He’s across the room in seconds. “Is it the baby?”

“Of course it’s the fucking baby.”

A word I’ve never used before, but it feels good. Just right.

“There’s a pole down, blocking the lane. No way we can get out. I’ll go and find Frank.”

“No!” I scream it, a horrifying, bloodcurdling sound. Jimmy looks terrified.

“The baby is coming. Help me.”

He becomes calm efficiency straightaway, this schoolboy who is an almost exact copy of his brother. Jimmy, who has been monosyllabic and closed off since the day I first met him. It is as if the urgency switches something on in him.

“Right, right, got it,” he says, hurling his blazer across the kitchen floor.

I’m wearing a tent dress, which is a good thing, but my underwear will have to go. “Scissors, Jimmy. You’ll have to cut my pants off. I can’t reach them.”

Crying, but also laughing, at the chronic absurdity of this.

He is back in what feels like one second with scissors and towels and he snips off my underwear, the skirt of my dress flipped onto my back so I am butt naked before him. He doesn’t care and nor do I. There’s no time for that.

“Right,” he says, after he’s taken a look. “I can see the head.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yup.”

I scream again, in pain, in rage, in fear, but the scream is also the start of my giving in to this immense pressure which feels as if my insides are being squeezed with metal. There is nothing to do now except push, and even the pain—no words for the intensity, like being ripped in two, worse than that—feels good, helpful. My body has taken over.

“You’re doing really well,” Jimmy says in the soothing, professional tone of a midwife. Later we will laugh about this. “And you don’t need to worry. I’ve birthed loads of lambs and I reckon it’s the same thing. We are mammals, after all.”

And so it is that I deliver our baby into the waiting hands of my teenage brother-in-law. I don’t know how Jimmy understands he has to turn the baby over, this slippery, bloodied creature, and slap its bottom for that first reassuring cry, or whether he ties the umbilical cord then snips it off with scissors still smeared with this morning’s bacon, or how he realizes—lambing, I suppose—that two minutes later I’ll need to push out the afterbirth and we’re not done yet. But before long I am sitting on the floor with my baby boy, wrapped in a towel, in my arms.

“We did it,” I say to Jimmy, crying again. But these tears are different.

What can I say about the instant rush of love I feel for the tiny human in my arms? The dear little face I don’t yet know but am already addicted to.

“You did it,” Jimmy says. “I just helped at the end.”

“Is he OK?”

I don’t know why I’m asking a schoolboy without a scrap of medical training, but he has become godlike to me in this final hour.

“He’s perfect, Beth. Should you try feeding him? I think that side to side thing he’s doing with his mouth might mean he’s hungry?”

I unbutton the tent dress, push down my bra, direct my nipple toward my baby’s mouth, and, like a miracle, he clamps his lips around it and begins to suck. Jimmy and I look at each other and laugh.

Just then, the front door opens and Frank comes in, taking in the scene in an instant. “Oh, my God,” he says, hurling himself toward me, his face a fury of anxiety.

“It’s all right. Look,” I say. “Isn’t he lovely?”

“A boy?” He kneels on the floor and places a hand on the baby’s cheek.

And I see it, the wave of elation that transforms his face, just as mine must have been when I saw our baby for the first time. There can be no greater intoxication, no purer feeling, than the moment when you meet your child after all the months of wondering and hoping and dreaming.

“I love him,” he says.

“I know.”

“We’re lucky.”

“We are.”

He is ours, we are his, we are three.