Then Alice
Then
Alice
He is dead. Not dead when I found him, not exactly, not clinically, not thoroughly. That happened in the ambulance minutes later, I am told. But my mind cannot contain this information and so instead I lie in our bed, curtains drawn against the light, a covering of his shirts, the arms of them wrapped around me. Rick is here with me as the hours turn into days, and he doesn’t say anything apart from my name occasionally, a whispered Alice , because he understands there is nothing to say.
People come and go. Eddie. Tom. Robin. I talk to no one, Rick deals with it all.
They speak of the funeral, a horrid, pulsing word, but I will stay here in my frozen state and Rick will know, without me telling him, that this is all I can do.
He makes me drink water and eat food, tiny doll’s size mouthfuls of bread – ‘for the baby,’ he says – and though the child in my belly moves and kicks and seems ready to fight its way out, I am no longer connected to it.
Rick says, ‘Alice, are you going to stay here in this flat? Robin will cover the rent until you know what you’re doing to do,’ and I don’t like this conversation because he is forcing change right in behind my eyelids.
‘Stay here,’ I say, because although I am thinking of nothing, nothing is my chosen state, somewhere in the hinterland of my consciousness I believe Jake is still away on tour. And I am waiting for him to come back.
Rick runs a bath for me, water just above lukewarm – ‘We don’t want to boil the baby,’ he says, holding me steady while I step into the tub. He picks up the shampoo and massages it into my hair, and when I get out, he holds a towel for me and wraps it around me as if I’m a child. When I am dry, he passes me an old blue dressing gown of Jake’s to wear, and it smells so strongly of him, the scent of cedar and ferns and lime, that I am jolted into real, painful tears, as if I am crying for the first time.
We sit together on the brown sofa, Rick’s arms around me, and we cry and cry as the light changes in the window.
‘What will I do?’ I ask him, and he shakes his head.
‘Somehow we’ll get you through this. We’ll take it minute by minute if we need to.’
The baby comes that night. I wake to find the sheets soaked beneath me and I hobble through to the sitting room, where Rick is asleep on the sofa.
‘My waters have broken,’ I say, and he is fully alert before I’ve finished the sentence.
Unbeknownst to me, Rick has been studying the baby books and he knows exactly what to do.
‘We’ll call the hospital and let them know we’ll be coming in. But we don’t want to go too soon or they’ll just send us away again. We need to wait until your contractions are five minutes apart.’
It’s almost comical sitting here with Rick, drinking tea in the middle of the night, him timing my contractions on his watch.
‘That was a huge one, it lasted thirty seconds. Won’t be long now.’
And though the pain is exquisite, I react not at all as each wave breaks over me. This is all I’ve wanted, for my body to be ripped apart by pain.
The first hurdle at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital is that they try to send Rick away.
‘Only family members or spouses,’ they tell him, and when I begin to cry, he shouts, ‘But I’m the baby’s father, for God’s sake. Doesn’t that count for anything?’ and I don’t know if they believe him or if they are just trying to put a stop to my unending tears, but he is allowed to stay.
The midwives think I am odd, strange, disturbed. The pain crescendos as my cervix dilates and my womb contracts and the muscles around my belly turn into a coating of iron. And I am addicted to it.
‘No!’ I shout through another contraction, waving away the gas and air, the offers of other medication: pethidine, an epidural. But otherwise I am entirely silent – ‘stoical’, the midwives tell Rick – just the slide of a solitary tear when I think how Jake will never see this baby.
The final moments of delivery, the overbearing desire to push – not that I want to, just that I have to – and Rick crying out, ‘Here’s the head. Oh my love, the baby is coming.’
The baby is out, the cord is cut, there is a newborn cry, tiny, tinny, a kitten’s mewl.
‘It’s a boy, Alice,’ Rick says, and I don’t need to look because I always knew that.
He’s first to hold the baby, wrapped up like a package in a perforated white blanket, just a flash of deep pink skin to behold. He walks around the small, hot room gazing down at the bundle nestled in his arms.
‘You look like Joseph in the school nativity,’ I say, and he laughs, his loud, shouty laugh.
‘Here you are.’ He places my son on my chest. ‘Your turn.’
He unwinds the blanket from the baby’s face and we look at him properly for the first time. And right at this moment he opens his eyes and then there is no mistaking him, and I bite my lip, but the tears won’t stop coming, and Rick is crying too.
The midwife is back with a clipboard.
‘Mother’s name Alice Garland, father’s name Richard Fields, time of birth six seventeen. Just checking all the details before we send this off.’
I see Rick look at me and I give a tiny, sharp nod.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘That’s right.’
‘And do we have a name for baby yet?’
‘Charles Jacob Garland,’ I say after a moment’s pause, and my voice comes out strong and steady even though I’ve spoken his name out loud for the first time since he died.
When the midwife has gone, Rick leans over the bed, over the baby, and puts his mouth against my ear.
‘Alice Garland, you are a survivor,’ he says.
And the thing is, Jake said the exact same words to me once before.
And if he said it, if he believed it, then, I tell myself, it must be true.