The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Chapter 1

MARY

I’d spent the past few hours trying to convince myself that this couldn’t be happening.

I mean – obviously I knew it was going to happen.

Someone said that the only things you can be sure of in life are death and taxes, but I’d like to add that a pregnant woman with a bump big enough to contain a small hippo is going to give birth at some point.

But it was always going to be then . At some future moment in time that was far enough away I could pretend I didn’t have to worry about it yet. It was still October.

And while, yes, three weeks before my due date was probably close enough that I should have been starting to get ready, I’d had some other stuff going on.

You know, minor distractions like mourning the loss of my career, home, friends who I’d considered more like family, and, most of all, the marriage that was supposed to make all my dreams come true, until everything tumbled into a nightmare.

Plus, the cottage I’d rented without bothering to view in person first was a bleak shell that however many times I vacuumed still stank of a sad, lonely loserness.

I had plans about how I was going to make it fit for a new baby.

Well, less plans , more vague notions when I happened to notice another patch of mould on the bathroom ceiling or spot an indeterminate stain on a scrubby carpet.

And now, after months of floundering around in my grief, no idea who I even was any more, trying to eat something reasonably healthy in between drifting from my bed to the sofa and back again, I couldn’t ignore the increasingly distracting pains gripping my humungous uterus.

My head was in denial, but my body knew.

I was having a baby, in a house right in the middle of Sherwood Forest, snow falling, and not a clue who I could call on to help me do whatever I needed to do now.

I scanned the leaflet that the midwife had handed me at my last appointment, listing useful items to bring to hospital.

I couldn’t focus on the words, instead stuffing a few random clothes, a bag of basic toiletries and my phone charger into a bag.

Would I need anything else? I added a water bottle and a cereal bar, my purse, and then remembered the free sample pack of maternity pads I’d picked up at some point.

Given it was past nine o’clock, I added a dressing gown in dire need of a wash and a hairbrush.

What about a book? Labour took hours. I wondered whether I’d need something to fill the time, until the next contraction hit, and I decided that giving birth was probably enough to be getting on with.

Okay, bag packed, next step was to order a taxi. The Sherwood Taxis app calmly informed me that, due to high demand, a car would be with me in ninety minutes.

Stress levels building in sync with the pains, making it increasingly difficult to think clearly, I tried another firm.

They wouldn’t even accept my booking due to the increasingly bad weather, and because they didn’t normally operate this far into the middle of nowhere.

The third one I tried was horribly expensive.

I went back to Sherwood Taxis and found their number, hoping that if I could speak to an actual human being, I might persuade them to let me jump the queue.

* * *

By the time my phone pinged to tell me the taxi was here, I’d given up sitting and was completing another cumbersome circuit of my tiny living room, mumbling and grumbling under my breath.

The twenty minutes since I’d told the taxi-firm dispatcher that I was a pregnant woman, alone in the middle of nowhere, needing to get to the hospital, and she’d promised to send someone over, had felt more like hours.

I’d timed two more contractions before I stopped caring, the sensations merely blending into ouch, and oof and the need to get to the chuffing hospital, because my brain had abandoned clear, rational thought about the same time my body merged into one, singular agonising spasm.

I dragged my bag across the floor after the latest contraction eased and opened the front door to find a man-bear looming on the other side.

My attempt at a scream emerged as more of a strangled moan, which didn’t really matter seeing as there was no one within a quarter of a mile to hear me.

‘Are you all right?’ the bear rumbled, sounding even more alarmed than I felt.

He stepped forwards into the light from the hallway behind me and morphed into simply a very tall, broad man in a heavy sweatshirt, snowflakes melting into jaw-length, straggly dark hair as he peered at me with even darker eyes, creased with concern.

‘Most taxi drivers wait in the car,’ I gasped, one hand still pressed against my pounding heart.

‘You’re pregnant,’ he said, stating the more than obvious. ‘I didn’t want you to slip.’

He glanced back at the snow settling on the driveway and then at my flip-flops. ‘Shoes?’

‘I’m pregnant.’ I shrugged. ‘Nothing else fits.’

He picked up my bag before I had a chance to ask, and held out a hand to take mine.

I hadn’t told the dispatcher on the phone that I might actually be in labour, scared it might send any taxi driver heading in the opposite direction.

After all, having fallen asleep on the sofa and missed my antenatal class, and not got past the introduction of the book the midwife had begged me to read, who knew if this was, in fact, a bad case of pepperoni-induced indigestion thanks to the pizza I’d eaten for dinner?

So, I did my best to look like a woman who wouldn’t be pushing out a baby for at least another three weeks, and, aware that I was completely out of alternatives, gripped the bear-man’s hand and followed him into the blizzard.

* * *

The driver hadn’t said a word since questioning my footwear – a sensible query, given how cold and wet my feet were – but as we turned onto the main road leading into Nottingham, he kept glancing in the rear-view mirror, the furrows between his eyebrows deepening every time.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked, giving up on the furtive glances and taking advantage of the current queue of traffic to twist around and look directly at me.

‘Yep,’ I squeaked, keeping my gaze firmly out of the window, despite there being nothing to see but snowflakes splatting onto the glass and the darkness beyond. A sudden wave of nausea sent my head reeling once he’d turned back to advance the car a few inches forwards.

‘Do you know what, I’m actually quite hot. Can I open the window?’

‘Not in this weather,’ the man replied. ‘Try taking your coat off.’

I looked down at the puffy black jacket that had refused to zip closed since September, which I had completely forgotten I was wearing, and started wrestling it off. I now felt less worried about revealing my potential situation and more concerned that I was going to throw up in his car.

‘I’m fine,’ I gasped, in a futile attempt to convince at least myself, if not him. ‘It’s fine. I’m just really, really hot.’

And what was going on with my hair? Coat half off, I flicked the long strands of light brown that wouldn’t stop falling into my eyes back over my shoulder. Since when was hair this heavy? It was unbearable. I felt a disturbing urge to rip it out.

‘Oh. No.’ Here we go again. ‘Not fine. Nope. Really not fine! ’

I wasn’t normally a sharer. Definitely not the type of person to chat to a taxi driver. Yet, I now continued jabbering incoherently about how I was ‘not fine’, ensuring this stranger had no option to politely ignore the emergency on his back seat.

As the pain peaked, I finally stopped talking, instead gripping the headrest in front, screwing my eyes shut, jacket still hanging off one arm, and let out the kind of groan that would have been mortifying in any other situation.

Once the torture had passed, I flopped back, shoulders dropping as I tried to control my breathing.

‘You’re in labour.’ It wasn’t a question.

Still, I glanced at his frown, debating whether to finally admit it – to him, and myself – before deciding that he wasn’t going to throw me out of his cab into a snowstorm. If anything, he’d find a way to get me to the hospital a bit faster, reducing the risk of things getting messy in his car.

‘I’m starting to think so, yes.’

‘When did it start?’

‘Um, a few hours ago.’ I leant my head against the window. The cool glass felt like heaven. ‘I’m only thirty-seven weeks, so it could be false labour or something like that.’

He looked at me, impassive. ‘Waters broken? It might be a trickle, not a gush like you see on TV.’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

‘First time?’

‘Yes.’ I remembered to finally shrug out of the jacket sleeve. ‘Is it yours?’

‘I’ve never given birth myself.’

That caught my attention. Had this sombre bear-man made a joke? His mouth gave a tiny twitch.

‘Hah. Funny.’ I screwed up my face again, doubling over with a moan as everything disappeared into the force of another seemingly endless contraction.

I didn’t want to tell him, but they were getting a lot more intense.

Once it was over, I leant sideways to look at the maps app on the phone stuck to his dashboard.

The further we went, the journey time only got longer.

My fear ramped up another few notches.

‘I have a medical degree.’

‘You’re a doctor?’

He shifted uncomfortably on the seat. ‘I qualified as a doctor. I don’t practise as one.’

‘Why not?’ I asked, genuinely curious.

‘Life had other plans.’

‘Ugh.’ I slumped lower. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘Do you want me to call anyone?’

‘Believe me, if I had anyone else I wouldn’t have called you.’