My belly is firm, and warm, and round. My cheeks are soft and my hair is long and falls around my shoulders in swathes of dark ringlets. My face is bare, spare my glasses, and I am reading as I take the weight off of my feet. My clothes are loose; dark fabrics that leave me space to grow a little. My body is still, placid, easy. My companion stirs, nudging gently against my swollen abdomen.

My husband is singing in the kitchen. His low murmurs carry over the music as he pours our tea. When he comes to me, he sets the drink down beside me and kisses my forehead. I am calmed by his very presence. I do not think of how I look, supine, sprawled and flushed in the cheeks. I am anchored in my space by our unborn child. I have forgotten how it felt, the pain behind my eyes. I have forgotten the great ache of un-received gifts and the wishes I have made, quietly to myself, in spite of myself. I have forgotten my need to be in the boat with my post-adolescent baby sister.

I pondered on the morning as my fingers traced the frayed, synthetic fabric on my seat; maroon through stainings both factory-borne and accumulated through the passage of time- the necessity of overuse. My right hand still half-folded around around my phone as it glowed and glared and nudged me, nudged again. We find ourselves so drawn to it, don’t we? Like that desire to check the post even when we expect nothing, even when nothing might just be better than something. That big blowing marker of a demand for who we are. It becomes so hard to say no to any semblance of a yearning for our attention, regardless of the context.

The ex, of course. More texts from a woman who didn’t want me around than a woman who did- in theory, that is. I hadn’t had time to find anyone with whom I could draw comparisons to what had already been and gone. That needy glow reminding me that sports’ day is in two weeks, and if I’m not there for Ava’s egg and spoon race there will be those vague, unspoken consequences. The kind of consequences where every second sentence coming out of Ava’s mouth becomes mummy says… followed with some sweetly jarring accusation about my lack of engagement in my own child. Sweet and sticky out of her soft mouth, like the ice cream she still manages to get half way round her face whenever we go down to the docks on a Saturday afternoon. I wipe it away as much as I can, and half the time she doesn’t even know it’s there.

I slip it all back into my breast pocket, and my fingers make contact with a few loose pieces of gum.

Across from me sits a woman and a child, still small. Her hair is pulled back, tied loose, and those few wayward strands reach down to the crown of her daughter’s head as she sits on her mother’s lap. The mother is disengaged in a way that all mothers look as an eventual default; not through disinterest, or displeasure or even discomfort- it’s that safety mechanism, when the reserves are dry, and four hours of sleep has become the absolute norm, and you no longer remember who your favourite band was before the sound of infant cries became that string tugging you from need to want to appeasement. She sits, disengaged, but still holding the child close to her breast in a way that became so routine what, four? Five years ago? Her child plays with the hem of her purple shirt, folding her hands inside it only to unravel again and repeat the process.

I think about the day that Natasha broke the news. That sense of bottomless retrospective, thinking of the past 4, 6, 8 weeks? All those weeks that we had shared breakfast, and visited her parents, and planned that eternally-postponed trip to Mexico, and we’d done so not knowing that we were in company- that this small, vague but now material promise of a child had been physically there, in that moment, in every menial task and oblivious interaction. I remember the warmth, that amusement that came from all the moments we had already shared, and would eventually share, with this small growing person. We put Mexico on hold, again. Mexico became an ambiguous motivator for a non-descript future, a future that would not transpire. I blamed Mexico, or lack thereof, on the breakup. It seemed a frail excuse now, in the face of concrete certainty. I was not going to Mexico. I hoped Ava would see it for me eventually.

I had carried it with me in the supermarket this morning, and even though that pointless, fruitless quarterly goals meeting a month ago; projections and reflections, sitting in our places on that long grey table hoping that the next few months will give us that extra 12.5% we need to not sit at our offices til 8pm, planning how we got into this indistinct but nevertheless career-threatening shit-storm. It’s always the worst words to hear, isn’t it- your career is on the line. Not knowing how to pay for that mortgage, or put enough aside for your pension. Having to give up saving for Mexico because that’s next year’s problem, or maybe another five down the line. What’s five more years?

I rubbed my chest, just under my right nipple, that soft layer of fat between skin and bone giving slightly. Not enough to demonstrate the depth of that beneath, the teeming mass of tissue, symbiotic and intimate in that tightly packed space. I squeezed, a little. I squeezed, and nothing yielded an answer. Nothing gave anything away. I sighed, and then a coughed a little. Then I spluttered a little on hot wetness in the back of my throat that only seemed to spatter itself around the more I tried to get it under control. The receptionist looked up, we caught one another’s eye, and she looked away again. I wasn’t waiting, after all. I just needed somewhere to sit.

Two weeks until sports’ day gave me some time to make some plans. Then what? What, after sports’ day? What do you do with a six year old girl in a few weeks, that truly sticks around? I wiped a small spray of sharp orange-crimson from my mouth with the back of my hand. I thought of ice cream and all that just won’t wipe off. I didn’t want to have to carry it with me to sports’ day. I didn’t want it to sit with me in those dusty white garden chairs whilst she stumbles round, clutching at an egg the way that children do, all fists, all force. Egg running down wrists, but the thought was there. Firm hands, still soft and pink like I imagined them back when Natasha and I counted back on all those days she’d secretly been with us. My own hand firm against my lower chest, and iron in my mouth. Palm pressed hard as if to hold the egg, to take it under control, keep its mess from smearing itself around.

The egg was already smeared.

Another heave; my stomach like a boat on an open ocean, punched from underneath by an untimely swell. The slight, ingrained panic of desperately wanting to catch a breath in between waves of it; unable to force open my airways as the hot, hot remnants of my home-made carbonara forced itself out my throat and into the impractically shallow pulp bowl. A little spatter of the acidic, creamy, curdled mess exited my wincing nostrils. In front of my bottom left incisor, stuck between my gum and my lip, a piece of something not completely digested, grainy and sour. I spat what I could into the bowl. My body reeled on the back of the wave, spinning, lurching, and right in the middle of that imbalanced spin, I could feel the hot tear of fragile skin.

Rip, I was thinking. It’s a ripping more than a tearing. No point being delicate about it now.

I reached for the midwife, reaching before looking, whilst I found my centre of gravity again. The nausea was giving way, if only to the pain. Natural birth, my ass. I don’t know what I was trying to prove, to whom, doing it naturally. There was some hope, I guess, that my maternal instincts would kick in, and I was going to push out this pink, clean, mucus-free little human and I was going to glow pleasantly, a little pink in the cheeks, ready for my applause for achieving premium, top-tier womanhood. I had clung onto it as a possibility for most of my 40 weeks; eager to not to make a mess, to definitely not be one of those women whose faeces were discreetly wiped away by one of the medical staff mid-push, god forbid.

I turned to face the midwife. “When are we stopping?”

She smiled, with a very firm squeeze of my hand, which had locked itself onto her forearm. “You’re doing great, it’s all going great. Keep taking those deep breaths-”

“That’s not what I asked,” I panted, “I need to stop.”

I faded as she responded, all out of focus until my eyes fell upon the door. He was stood with his back to us, having finished that phone call he must have needed to take- a phone call that must have been of great import. The way he pulled it out of his pocket as I heaved up the first serving of half-digested dinner, not long after that discussion about the necessary episiotomy-

“What’s an episiotomy?”

“And that’s absolutely necessary?”

-and the mean words I couldn’t keep in my stomach any more than I could our dinner, heaving their way up alongside a contraction-

“If you’re uncomfortable you don’t have to watch, you know”

-and my god, he may as well have been running to make that phone call on time. Now, now though, there was no phone pressed to his head. It was just him, with a back to the door, dealing with things in his own time. Processing. Riding out his own pain, I’m sure.

Like nausea to pain, my bitterness gave way to soreness. Shame. I felt her, sitting in the great bowl of my pelvis, pushing as hard as I was. I felt her wanting to get free, and I was willing to take a hammer and chisel to those bones if they were too narrow, be that the case. I was willing to give blood and bodily fluids just to get her free, if I could. Even if it was ugly.

And it was, it was really ugly. His co-workers wives had popped out their babies pink and clean, and they beamed up at their husbands, pink and clean themselves, if a little out of breath- as if they had taken the stairs instead of the lift on the way to the office for a quickie on his desk after hours. I chuckled, and it sputtered in my chest a bit, arrhythmical. There’ll be no quickies on a desk with a big old episiotomy, that’s for sure. Sorry babe.

 “Do you want me to call him back in for you?”

 I turned my head slowly back to the midwife, with all the intention of spinning it round, and none of the energy. I looked back at those square shoulders, head facing directly away from all the sweat and vomit, blood and faeces, all the heaving and all the screaming.

Suddenly, I’m back a year, two years maybe, dropping home on my lunch break to change the skirt I failed to adequately protect with a sufficient tampon. He’s sitting at his computer, on his day off, when I walk in with my jacket wrapped around my waist.

“Did anybody see you?”

“Probably not-”

“How did you let that happen?”

And I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, thumbing the browning stain as I sat there in my clean pants, like a small child who should really pack a change of clothes now and then, just in case. What my colleagues must be thinking of me, letting myself bleed everywhere like that. Did I get it on the office chair? Did a client see it? How could I let this happen?

God forbid, a client saw it. God forbid, I bled on something again after doing it to our bedsheets only a few months prior- and he showered a good 10 minutes longer, that morning.

 I stared at his head, framed by the hospital door window. A pane of glass and a big slab of steel between him, and that big mess. Bloody genitals on bloody sheets. I wanted to reach for his hand, I wanted to hold it. I wanted to tell him I was scared. I wanted him to wipe my face when I regurgitated his favourite meal against my own control.