The Best Thing (21 page)

Pug and I spent this morning over at Justin and Nina’s. And Paul’s. Paul is the first child I’ve been allowed to get a good, close look at.

I don’t know how Nina and Justin keep up with him. He never stops. For a while he sat quietly building a big tower with giant
Lego blocks, but then he was hungry and then he was thirsty and then he wanted to play in the sandpit and then he needed a nappy change and then he had to have a play with the hose and had to be changed again and then he wanted a biscuit, and on it went. He was like a very complicated pet. And this was a child you could
talk
to, who understood ‘dangerous’ and ‘hot’ and ‘don’t hit’.

‘What was your life like when he was newborn?’ I asked Nina.

She and Justin looked at each other and laughed. ‘It was a bloody nightmare,’ said Justin.

‘It was. When he started sleeping through the night it got better, but for the first six weeks … we nearly went off our heads, didn’t we, Justin?’

‘Yeah. Then it was great for six months—take him anywhere, he’d sleep anywhere, he smiled at everyone. He was such a gorgeous kid. Then he got moving …’

‘And he hasn’t stopped since!’ Nina gives a slightly hysterical laugh. ‘Like, he’s all right if you put him in the stroller, but you can’t stop or browse in shops or anything or he starts wanting to get out, screaming and throwing himself around. He’s a bit of a handful. But he still has a sleep in the afternoon, so we get a break then, and he’s good at night—except when he’s getting teeth, when he’s terrible. So …’ She looks at me and grins. ‘We survive. We wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves now, if we didn’t have him.’

‘Nope,’ says Justin, fishing a pebble from Paul’s mouth. ‘He sure knows how to fill up the days.’

Paul’s very sweet-looking, anyway, blond and smiley, with chunky little arms and legs. He’s really firm about what he does and doesn’t want to do, and quite friendly, not shy at all after the first few seconds.

One interesting thing I noticed: when Justin plays with Paul they become the centre of attention, everyone joining in or commenting. When Nina does anything with him they go off somewhere else, or sit to one side, and the ‘grown-ups’ talk that goes
on doesn’t include them unless Nina makes a point of contributing—which she does quite often, which makes me a bit less uncomfortable with the situation.

Nina seems much smarter than Justin. A couple of times she winks at me when he’s raving on, but she never puts him down. They seem to work together well, as a couple, and as parents you can’t say they’re not dedicated. It’s given me a lot to think about, that visit. I never thought before about the day-to-day-ness of having a child, the fitting in of things around sleep-times and meals and nappy changes. I try to think of Pug and me in Justin’s and Nina’s places, but I get distracted by the Paul figure, trying to see who that might be, that little girl- or boy-child, of
ours
, needing
us
to give it all those things, food and comfort and health and stimulation. The face—I need to see the face.

Mum and I have a talk about babysitting. It’s not like she won’t do
any
, but she reckons
one night a week
(and
not
Friday!) is all she’s ‘prepared to do’—and it always has to be the same night unless we make it another
by special arrangement
! And if I move out,
all
babysitting has to be done by special arrangement, and I have to bring the baby
to
her. I mean, she’s got it all worked out even before she’s
seen
the baby—I think that’s the only way she can bring herself to be so cold about it. When it’s born she’ll be different—aren’t grandparents always crazy about their grandchildren? Anyway, the whole thing makes me really
angry
, that she feels she has to get me to agree to this system, instead of just taking things day by day, seeing how they develop. And I have to sit there, ‘Yes Mum, yes Mum,’ with hardly any say in it at all.

‘She’s just trying to hang onto her own life, you know,’ says Pug that night. ‘She doesn’t want to spend all her spare time at home looking after a baby, any more than you do.’

‘Yeah, but somehow I thought she’d get more involved than she says she will. It’s like she’s pushing us all away from her, just when we had the chance to get close.’

‘Oh, bullshit.’

‘Stop laughing at me! What do you mean, bullshit?’

‘How does dumping the baby on your mum and goin’ off partying make you
close?
’

‘It’s not
that
. It’s setting all these rules. It’s like … I don’t know, a boarding-house or something. Or
school.’

‘Oh, bullshit! Bullshit!’

‘Stop
laughing!
’ I turn away and lie on the very edge of the bed, stewing, embarrassed. He follows me, puts his arms around me even though I try to fling him off. ‘Get away!’

He stops laughing. ‘Hey. Hey. Mel. Ssh.’ He holds me until I’m still. ‘Listen. You listening?’

‘Yes,’ I say sulkily.

‘Your mum’s being so good about all this, we should both be down on our knees kissing her bloody feet, not hassling her to look after our kid. Christ, what are you worryin’ about this for, now? Forget it. Look, she won’t mind, if it’s an emergency, if we’re really goin’ crazy, she won’t mind bending those rules. It’s just now, she’s scared like you are, don’t you reckon? ’Cause nobody knows what it’s gunna be like with that baby being out here with us. And, shit, the lady’s had enough stuff to cope with this year already, hey?’

‘Did you know it’s very sexist to call a woman a “lady”?’

‘What?’

‘You’re supposed to call a woman (as opposed to a man) a woman, not a lady, as opposed to a
gentleman.
You’re not supposed to put women on a pedestal like that.’

His grip relaxes. I turn back to find him gazing at me with an expression of immense patience, like a kindly grandpa. ‘Like, am I just talkin’ to myself here, mate? ’Cause if I am, you know, I’ll just …’

‘Oh, Dino, sometimes I really
enjoy
you.’ I push my face in under his chin.

He sighs. His voice buzzes against my eyelids. ‘Well, I don’t know what the fuck you’re on about half the time, but I enjoy you too. All right?’

‘All right.’ I surface and look at him, almost sick with happiness. ‘Fine by me.’

He laughs through his nose. ‘You are such a dickhead sometimes,’ he says in his rustiest voice, the one where you can hear the squeak of the kid’s voice through the rasp of the man’s. ‘Come down here, willya?’

‘In Lucy,’ Dr. Lovejoy said, ‘notice that the birth process was somewhat more difficult. Her birth canal was broad but constricted from front to back. Her infant’s cranium could pass through only if it was first turned sideways and then tilted.’

Human birth is even more complex, according to Dr. Lovejoy. ‘The much larger brain in the human infant demands a rounder birth canal. Even with the rounder birth canal, the human birth process is complex and traumatic, requiring a second rotation of the fetal cranium within the birth canal.’

I’m struck down by the flu. There’s nothing like being eight and a half months pregnant
and
horribly sick—I honestly want to die. Worst flu I’ve ever had. It starts with feeling sick in the stomach and hurting all over, inside and out—feels as if even the
baby
is hurting! That goes on for twenty-four hours and then a horrible cold comes on, thick and poisonous so I can hardly breathe. I thought I felt stupid before, but now I spend my days slumped around the house with my mouth open to breathe, completely blobbed out. I’m cramming in vitamins but they make no difference
at all.
And I have to keep away from Pug because he’s got a fight on Friday night. Another reason to be miserable.

The first time I see him in four days is when he comes down the aisle with Jimmy. I don’t like the look of him—he just doesn’t have his usual glow.

He fights badly, moves heavily, takes a lot of punishment. I’m nearly crying watching him coming back round after round. After the third round he’s just defending himself, and sometimes not even very well. We have five rounds of Klaus Hupper getting
cockier and cockier, bulldozing Pug up against the ropes, opening the cut beside his eye again. This is at Kingsford, too. Although there’s a big bunch of Pug’s supporters in the crowd, most people are on Hupper’s side. So they all think he’s in terrific form and Pug’s just crumbling in the face of his skill, whereas anyone who knows Pug can tell something’s wrong with him.

In the end Hupper wins on points, though the win is so obvious that his fans start cheering as soon as the last bell goes. Jimmy’s there to catch Pug when his legs give way
two seconds
after the bell. He holds him up, getting blood all over the shoulder of his shirt, until Pug comes to enough to be helped to his corner. It’s lovely to see those guys being so gentle and motherly with him, towelling him down, making him have a drink.

When we get back to the change-room Pug smiles at me and shakes his head. ‘Feel shockin’. Even the bits that didn’t get hit.’

‘You done good, Dino, you done good,’ says Jimmy, making him sit down. ‘Never touched the canvas once.’

‘Felt like lyin’ down and goin’ to
sleep
on the bloody canvas!’ He sounds stuffed up, and there are big dark rings under his eyes.

‘I’m off my face,’ he complains in the car on the way home. We compare notes and figure out we must have the same bug.

I decide to stay over at Pug’s place. He goes straight to bed while I potter about. I have a shower. I put all the magazines in a neat pile and all the socks and undies and dusty T-shirts in a garbage bag for the laundromat. I’ve never tidied up a single thing over at Pug’s place before, but I find myself obeying some kind of compulsion, unable to stop once I’ve started.

He’s sprawled all over the bed and I don’t want to wake him up to move over, so for a while I sit and just look at him in the combined moon- and streetlight. His face is a mess, as bad as it can be without bones being broken—warped out of shape with swellings around his mouth and right eye, where the blood teems, repairing squelched cells, rinsing away the broken bits. I touch
his face and feel the heat of the work; he’s too far down in sleep to react.

A little pain goes whispering under my belly, like lightning through a thundercloud. It’s different from all other twinges and pressures of pregnancy. It’s like the very edge of a period pain, nine months unfamiliar.

I sit listening, and five minutes later there’s another one, and then (it seems like a miracle every time) every five minutes after that.
It’s ready already.

I make Pug move over, and I lie down, because all the books say you should try and get some sleep early on and save your energy, but of course I’m too excited and have to keep checking the contractions by my watch. They’re so regular—I can tell myself,
You’ll have another one in one minute,
and
exactly
sixty seconds later there’s that little pain-whisper. It’s really exciting being the only one awake and knowing. I lie there arguing with myself whether to wake Pug up—he’s said he wants to know as soon as it starts, but he’s sick and looks terrible and really would be better off sleeping. So I creep about, going to the toilet about fifty times, coming back to bed to count and doze and try not to panic.

Nothing more happens all night, just those regular, lightning-like pains. At about five, when the sky’s getting light, one of them wakes me up, a proper cramp this time. I stare at the ceiling, alarmed, waiting for a catastrophically bad one, but the next few are weaker.

At six-thirty I touch Pug’s shoulder. He opens his eyes, closes them again and says ‘Y’okay? You’ve been up and down like a bloody yo-yo all night.’

‘It’s started.’

He opens his eyes (the right one only opens about halfway, it’s so swollen) and stares at me. ‘What, already? But you’re not due!’

‘They said any time two weeks before or two weeks after the due date.’

‘Will it be okay?’ He sits up.

‘Beats me, but it’s coming whether it’s okay or not.’

He starts pulling on his clothes. ‘Great, maybe they’ll have a spare bed I can use in Intensive Care.’

‘You look like a bomb blew up in your face.’

‘That’s how I feel, too.
You
look okay, but. How’s your cold?’

‘Not bothering me. I’ve got more important things to think about.’

We walk to Stanmore, and on the way I have to stop and think about a couple of these pains that hold on for longer and are quite crampy. Pug watches me closely, then when the pain stops he goes into an imitation of Fiona’s assistant at the classes. ‘What’s she say? “Visualise.”
Visualise
a flower opening, Mel—“slowly, slowly, all the petals. Helps your”—what’s it called, where the head comes through?’

‘The cervix.’ I’m laughing.

‘Yeah. Helps the cervix open. Go on, Mel, visualise a flower.’

‘A
flower.
This is
muscle!
These muscles’ve been holding this baby up for eight and a half months! This is going to take some
work.’
I have a flash of fear then.

Pug can tell. ‘We’ll be at your Mum’s soon.’ He takes my hand.

The morning goes past in a flash—I can’t believe it when Mum says, ‘How about some lunch, then?’ and it’s twelve-thirty! By this stage I have to stop doing anything but breathing at the very top of each contraction, even though they’re still exactly five minutes apart. ‘I’m going to have to start making a noise soon,’ I warn them. Mum rings the birth centre and we go through all the revolting business of getting there, which means three super-strength contractions (in five minutes) and my waters breaking all over the towels as I kneel on the car floor in the back, leaning on the back seat with Pug holding my hands and saying, ‘Sounds just like Fiona said it would. You must be doing everything right.’ I’m embarrassed at having yelled out and leaked everywhere, and so angry I could slap him, except that I’m too terrified of the next contraction. It’s okay for
him,
it’s happening
outside
his body.