Chapter 15 #4
And then she turns away and bends over Freya, working to stop the bleeding and shouting for her sister.
Get in here! Storm, she needs you! she yells.
And now Storm is at her sister’s side and the snatched memory I have of it makes it look like she’s pinning her shoulders down and sobbing into her ear or maybe it’s Freya who is sobbing,
but I don’t have time to make sense of it because I need to make the dead baby something else,
and I look down at my hands and realise they must already have a life of their own because without my remembering to tell them what to do they are already doing what we did with the old panda bear
I’m rubbing the lifeless body with the towel, cleaning and drying it and trying to chafe it back to life.
and somewhere in there I must have missed what Cat had been busy with because the little body has a pair of the stainless clamps we found in Stitch Country a lifetime ago attached to it, clamping the cord that is coming out of its belly button and they are as cold and lifeless and ungainly as the baby is.
and the cold steel is hanging against the little wisp of penis so I guess it’s a dead boy baby but that doesn’t matter any more because everyone is the same once they’re gone.
and then I am in the kitchen at my special warming station. I’m proud of how I thought of and then made this, the angled sheet of steel reflecting the fire’s warmth onto the table which I have laid clean towels on.
I discard the wet towel and wrap the body in warm dry cloth
and I’m trying not to breathe too fast or knock the cold steel clamp loose because then the baby will bleed out and stay dead,
and half my head is saying don’t be a fool Mouse you can’t hurt it because it’s already gone,
and the other part is just doing what we practised because doing is better than admitting the truth
and I’m putting the little hat I made from the old sock-end on the small head, noticing the baby hair that is unexpectedly thick, and the finer hair that also covers his ears and even stretches over his shoulders, healthy looking hair that now will never grow longer.
and the hat doesn’t look funny and sweet like I thought it might.
it looks like the wool cap on the head of the Russian that I killed
and now I’m thinking we should bury this baby properly, not like the man we rolled into a scrape in the ground
but my hands are gently opening the mouth which means feeling the chin bones hinged like a bird it’s so small and I take the corner of one of my pointlessly clean cloths and clear gunk from his mouth and I roll him onto his side and his little head lolls towards his downward shoulder
but I read about that in midwifery and I have a rolled bit of towel ready that I slide under his head, and I look at the unmoving face as I give him another brisk bit of rubbing
and I think it’s just like the books say
it’s not so scary seeing dead people
at least it’s not if they’re ones you haven’t killed yourself, it’s just like they’re sleeping but then can you be sleeping if you’ve never been awake at all, so dead is just dead in the end?
and now I hear someone say
I’m sorry
And I again realise the mystery voice reacting to the shock of another unthinkable death is me because I can hear the others shouting urgently at each other in the next room and then my hands, those hands with a life of their own they’re feeling the birdcage chest and feeling no flutter inside but I know what to do – I do know what to do we’ve practised this and it’s two things and one – the most important one – is not to give up and the other is five inflation breaths but not too big because this dead baby is so small I could burst its lungs if I gave a full Mouse-size breath and I’ve lifted the body carefully making sure the loose head doesn’t fall off and I’m gently huffing ghost breaths into the mouth and nose because that’s what my big mouth covers and I only realise I made a mistake I forgot something important I didn’t clean out the nose like I’m meant to when I’m on the fourth breath but then it’s too late much too late
because the dead baby sneezes and coughs gunk on my chin as I prepare to give it the futile fifth and final breath and I freeze and stare at the tiny face as it screws itself up in disgust and then one eye opens like a pirate in a picture book and then the other one joins it and time really does
stop
as he looks at me and I look at him
I don’t know what he’s thinking but just then in that first sight there is everything and my heart does something like those old rockets the dead world used to fire at the stars must have done – it kicks itself loose of the earth and soars free of gravity free of fear free of sadness but the sky I’m falling into is those eyes looking back into mine, eyes that have seen nothing yet but are still wiser and older than me and though it makes no sense at all my first thought at this first sight of each other is this
Oh. There you are.
and it’s not surprise or relief or newness. It’s recognition. Like I had always known him. Like I always would know him. And the relief lasted all of that one beat out of time, which was nevertheless a perfect thing, and then three more things happened.
I thought: You’re OK.
And then, before I had time to enjoy that thought, the next one barrelled in right on its heels and it was: And now I spend the rest of my life worrying about you.
But that felt OK. That felt right. That felt like a weight I was born to carry.
And then he started to cry, creaking like an old door.
And Cat yelled for me.
Mouse! she shouted. It’s not a placenta! Get the knives.
What? I shouted, twisting wrong-footed between the warm relief of the breathing baby in my hands and the cold jolt of her words.
What’s coming next, she shouted. Not a placenta!
And then it’s blurry again for a bit. But in the gap I don’t remember, the one hard thing I do know is that someone should have died. We didn’t know what we were doing.
Babies come in three ways when they come in pairs.
We hadn’t read that bit of the midwifery book.
But I did read it later. Too late. The way these two came with separate sacs and placentas was the most dangerous because we could have killed the second one by cutting the cord on the first one before she was out too.
But she made it. She nearly didn’t because she came awkwardly, but Cat’s clever hands gently corkscrewed her round and brought her into the world like she was landing a fish, only a slick and noisy fish that was protesting at the top of her tiny voice.
Unlike her older brother who went quiet at her first cry.
That’s how four didn’t become five, but six, and is of course when the real work began, the long hard job of feeding and cleaning and caring and keeping alive.
And I like to remember the good of that day.
And the surprise visitor following her brother into our lives.
And how we watched her as she lay with him like the book said, on the mother, skin to skin.
And in that one moment at least Freya was, Cat said, too tired not to love them no matter how hard she would make the effort later on.
I remember all that, how it was, how it felt. How proud I was of Cat for cutting and then mending so neatly.
I also remember the second sight, when the sister looked at me as I was doing the brisk rubbing of her with the towels.
It wasn’t the recognition of the first sight I had with her brother, though it was that too.
Cat says I imagined it because newborns absolutely don’t smile, but I swear she looked into my eyes as if she was expecting the answer to a question I must have missed her asking me, and then, maybe because her concentration was broken by the lightning beyond the big window her gaze slid off mine and fixed on something behind me which clearly tickled her because she smiled at it.
Except when I turned round there was nothing but the night and the rain and the rumble of the distant thunder as the storm moved slowly away towards the sea.
Later was when Cat told me I was imagining things, when the girls and the babies were clean and resting and safe because Storm seemed to love them enough for two.
Which was a surprise. We scrubbed and stripped outside letting the rain shower us clean like we did when we were kids.
It’s odd to think about that now, but back then in the moment, in the afterglow of that long day and all that fear and focused panic it made sense.
Maybe because we helped bring two new things into the world it felt OK letting the world do some of the washing up. I know it felt joined-up, somehow part of the same primal thing that we’d seen and done. Primal was one of Cat’s favourite words.
You did good, Mouse, she said, punching my arm gently.
Not as good as you, I said, punching her back.
Just as good, she said, face still turned up into the falling rain. Just as good because what we do, we do together. We’re a team. Always have been, always will be.
Only-ones, I said.
Yes. She smiled. Always. But these babies? They’re going to have more than each other.
That’s good, I said.
Cat closed her eyes and turned her face up to the falling rain.
I hope so, she said.