Being pregnant had made her ravenous. Nobody had mentioned that, although she’d been told of women who’d licked coal or consumed Marmite by the bucket.
She had no idea how she was going to get the baby weight off, but from the size of her rear end, which was admittedly hard to see in their wardrobe mirror, Sam was pretty sure it wasn’t all baby.
When she’d confided this to Joanne, her sister had laughed and said, ‘It’ll come off: sleep deprivation does that to you.’
‘I hope you’re joking,’ said Sam, because she knew how shattered Joanne had been when she’d had three children one after the other.
‘I am not joking, not remotely.’
Joanne smiled with the Mona-Lisa-like smile which implied that, for once, the younger sister knew something the older one didn’t.
Sam looked into the back garden to see if Dixie and Horace, the two small, bitsa-everything rescue dogs on whom she and Ted lavished their affection, had finished their morning run around the garden where they barked at birds, gave worms the evil eye and peed liberally in order to remind all other creatures that this was their territory.
But the dogs were busy and, knowing their lap of investigation could take some time, and because her lower back ached strangely, Sam sat down on a kitchen chair.
She hoped the dogs would be fine with the baby and they’d been playing crying baby noises whenever they fed them, as per internet advice, so the dogs would associate the baby with the loveliness of dinner, which was one of the highlights of Dixie and Horace’s day. Pavlov’s bell version of getting the dogs ready for the new arrival.
‘Do you think it will work?’ Sam had asked anxiously.
‘Course. The worst crime they’ll commit is to try to slobber kisses on the baby or clamber onto your lap for breastfeeding,’ Ted teased. ‘They’ll adjust.’
He’d been raised with dogs and was relaxed around them. In contrast, Sam’s mother had an allergy, or so she said, and no animal had ever graced Sam’s childhood home.
On the hard kitchen chair, Sam moved to try to find a comfortable position.
The ache was getting weirdly lower and deeper. Was this a sign that the baby was moving into the birth canal? she wondered.
Some women said pregnancy made them feel at one with their body: Sam, who had spent years having her hormones artificially manipulated in order to stimulate a pregnancy that never came, no longer felt as if she had a clue what was going on with hers. Which worried her, although she hadn’t breathed a word of this to anyone. The baby fear, that something would go wrong to stop her having this child because her body had failed before, was too ridiculous to voice out loud.
And there was another fear, one that loomed bigger each day: in all those years of trying to get pregnant, she’d barely allowed herself to imagine becoming an actual parent.
Now she wondered how on earth she could be a proper mother. Because she had no experience of how a warm, kind motherly figure behaved.
‘Happy birthday, Sam!’
Ted appeared in his T-shirt and boxers, his body marathon-lean and tanned from sunny evenings spent in the garden sanding and painting the crib.
He’d been in a vintage Rolling Stones T-shirt and jeans at the college party where they’d met, a night when Ted said he was walking her home to keep her safe.
‘I can keep myself safe, thank you very much,’ snapped Sam.
Ted had grinned and walked her home anyway.
‘You were like an angry pixie, those eyes flashing at me and I just couldn’t keep away,’ he’d said later, when they were inseparable, Sam’s prickly defences long since lowered.
‘Honey.’ He leaned down and kissed her. ‘I couldn’t sleep and it’s not fair that you’re up alone on your birthday.’ With a flourish, he put a small box on the table in front of her and stood back proudly. ‘It’s a really small gift,’ he explained. ‘Tiny so I can get you a proper something when the baby is born or you can enjoy going out shopping with me, because forty is a special birthday. You should have diamonds and—’
Sam opened the box, gasped suddenly and stared at the interior blankly.
Ted squinted at her. ‘You don’t like? They’re gold-plated earrings. The gold will rub off, it always does, and I can return them if you’d like, but I know you like purple stones and—’
‘Ted!’
‘You really hate them?’ Ted picked up the box and looked at the contents critically. ‘I thought you’d hate it more if I spent money buying any proper jewellery without you—’
‘My waters have just broken,’ hissed Sam, as she felt the surge of liquid move from a trickle to a flood. ‘I love the present, Ted, but we need to go to the hospital. I can’t have the baby on the kitchen floor – it’s not clean enough with the dogs, and the baby will get kennel cough or dog flu or something . . .’
‘Your waters have broken?’ repeated Ted, not sounding like someone with a PhD in data analytics.
He sat down beside her, then immediately got up again as if someone had switched his brain off and then back on, and all the circuits were recalibrating.
‘Right. OK. Will I time your contractions or . . .?’
Her reliable, steadfast husband stared at her as if all rational thought had been sucked out of him and he wanted her to tell him what to do.
‘Get me to the hospital,’ she whispered.
Stopping only to ring the doorbell next door so they could tell their neighbour, Cynthia, that Operation Baby was ON and would she go in and take the dogs, as agreed, Ted helped Sam into the car.
Despite several strong buzzes on her doorbell, Cynthia didn’t appear.
‘She’s in the shower,’ said Shazz, Cynthia’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, coming out onto the shared driveway still in her skimpy denim cut-offs and a leather-look bra top worn with a net top, her short pale pink hair fluffed up into a halo round her head. Definitely just in from the night before.
‘Good luck, Sam, it’ll be fine,’ said Shazz, draping her beautiful, fake-tanned self over the car door and flattening Sam with the scents of fags, booze, club and not-been-to-bedness.
‘How do you know it’ll be fine?’ demanded Sam, her politeness filter entirely knocked out by the knowledge that Baby Bean wanted out and there were no medical professionals around to help.
‘I’ve seen it on the soaps,’ said Shazz thoughtfully. ‘It’ll work out. Babies are, er . . . you know – natural.’
‘The soaps aren’t real!’ Sam yelled. ‘And it’s scary. Imagine giving birth right now. Big baby.’ She lowered her voice and pointed downwards. ‘Small exit.’