Page 16 of The Mother-in-Law
‘Outside.’
I bite back an urge to scream, ‘What is he doing outside?’ and instead ask: ‘And how bad is the pain? Out of ten.’
‘It’s . . . a four.’
But I get the feeling Ghezala’s four is most women’s eleven. Her next breath catches on another contraction.
‘Ghezala, I’m going to call an ambulance.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Can you come, Mrs Diana?’
‘I’m on my way to your house right now. Ghezala—’
But the phone goes dead. And when I call back, it rings out.
It takes twenty-five minutes to get to her house and when I get there Hakem is in the front yard, smoking a cigarette. He must spend half his life in the tiny, overgrown courtyard of theirs, smoking cigarettes. I leap out of the car and run toward the house. ‘Hakem? Where’s Ghezala?’
He gestures toward the house with his head. ‘Inside.’
‘Inside?Why aren’t you in there with her?’
He looks at me like I’ve suggested he book a holiday to the Bahamas.
‘Have you called an ambulance?’
He turns away, takes a drag of his cigarette. ‘You might think you are our saviour, but you know nothing. You are different from us. Different from me. Different from Ghezala.’
‘Hakem. Have. You. Called. An. Ambulance?’ I ask through gritted teeth.
He takes a step toward me. The whites of his eyes are yellow and cracked with little red blood vessels. ‘No. I. HAVEN’T.’
Hakem is thickset and a good thirty years younger than me, but I match him in height, inch for inch. I square up to him. ‘Do not try and intimidate me, young man. I promise you, you will come off worse.’
It’s not true of course. I would come off far worse, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life it’s that minds win wars, not muscles. And as I’ve made up my mind to get Ghezala’s baby delivered healthy and well, I’ll be damned if I don’t do exactly that.
I’m still right in Hakem’s face when he holds up his hands in defeat.
‘Call an ambulance,’ I say as the screen door slaps closed between us. ‘Now!’
I find Ghezala on the tiled kitchen floor, her back against pillows. I skid and almost fall in a wet patch, gasping when I see the baby’s head is already out. There’s no time for an ambulance, I realise as Ghezala shudders, and I drop to my knees. She gives a great moan and I only have time to grab a tea-towel before Ghezala pushes her baby boy right into my hands, pink and bloody and squirming. I wrap him in a towel and rub him vigorously until he lets out a piercing, glorious cry.
It takes me back to another time. A single bed with moonlight streaming in a curtainless window. A pop followed by a feeling deep within of something bursting. My breath is a cloud in the room.
Hakem is wrong, I am not different from Ghezala. We are exactly the same.
9
LUCY
The past . . .
‘Where on earth has she got to?’
Tom shifts newborn Archie in his lap and glances at his watch. Diana should have been at the hospital an hour ago, and she has a surprise, he tells me (only holding out about thirty seconds or so before letting it slip that the surprise is—was—a giant teddy bear). Now he is in his chair, positively jittery with impatience to give it to his grandson, who is all of six hours old. God love him.
Ever since I announced my pregnancy, Tom has been theimageof a devoted grandfather, dropping to his knees every time I visited to ‘talk’ to my belly, or reaching out to feel the baby kick. Diana chastised him (‘Give the girl some space!’), but I didn’t mind. Actually I preferred Tom’s tactile approach to Diana’s style, which was barely to mention the baby at all. Of course I’d steeled myself for the fact that my pregnancy wasn’t likely to be the bonding point I hoped it would be for Diana and me, but I was nonetheless disappointed to find that it hadn’t injected even theslightestwarmth into our relationship.
When the alarm on my phone goes off, signalling three hours since Archie’s last feed, I adjust the pillow on my lap and gesture to Tom to bring him over. Tom does as he’s told, carrying Archie as if he is made of glass, then he backs away again, his eyes theatrically averted, as I fiddle with my nursing bra.
