Fourteen Months
The scans have always been perfect.
My due date was the third of November. It’s the middle of April now, and nobody at the surgery says the word “overdue” any more. The word they use is “ongoing”.
I conceived on the first round. The clinic rang me at work to congratulate me, and the nurse said I’d made their statistics look wonderful.
I’d chosen the donor from a laminated folder: number 4408, six foot one, a doctorate in chemistry.
When I rang back three months later with a question about his side of the medical history, the coordinator put me on hold for eleven minutes and came back to say there was no 4408 in their records, and had I perhaps copied the number down wrong.
That sounded odd: I was pretty sure I hadn’t.
The scans have always been perfect. Heartbeat strong, measurements textbook.
At the twenty-week scan the sonographer, a cheerful woman called Denise, was narrating everything for me—there’s the spine, there’s the heart, all four chambers—and then stopped abruptly. She looked for a long time at something near the top of the screen, went out, and came back with a colleague, who also looked, wrote one line in my notes, and left without being introduced.
“Baby’s lovely,” Denise said.
She didn’t print my photographs, though I’d paid for them at reception, and when I asked she said the printer was down.
The movements started in the fifth month, always between three and four in the morning. Kicks are what the books promise you. What I got were hands. A palm laid flat against the inside of me, travelling slowly across, the whole hand at once, deliberate as a man checking a wall for a stud.
One night I knocked a glass off the bedside table and swore, and something knocked back. Twice, evenly, from within, like knuckles on a door.
I told the midwife. She wrote it down and asked how I was sleeping.
November came and went. At forty-two weeks they induced me: the drip ran for two days and my body ignored it.
In December a registrar tried to break my waters and couldn’t.
She was down there a long time with the little hook, getting flushed, and at last said the membranes were “unusually robust”.
In January they booked me for a caesarean. I went under counting backwards from ten and I remember reaching four. I woke on the ward that evening, still pregnant, my stomach unmarked.
Mr Osei came to see me once, stood at the foot of the bed holding my notes without opening them, and told me there had been an anaesthetic complication and we’d try again when I was stronger.
He retired in February. His secretary said it had been planned for a long time. His retirement, she meant.
The craving arrived around then. Match heads. I keep a box of Swan Vestas in the cutlery drawer and suck the heads whilst the kettle boils, and spit them out grey into the sink.
My mother caught me doing it at Easter; she looked worried, and remained so for the rest of the visit. She doesn’t come round now. She says it’s her hip.
The spaniel two doors down used to throw himself at his gate for me. He flattens himself into the hedge now, and his owner apologises, and neither of us says anything more about it.
I’m scanned monthly. “Routine,” they say, though nothing about monthly scans in the fourteenth month of a pregnancy is routine, and we all pretend together.
Dr Mehta stopped meeting my eye some time in the winter. A second doctor attends now—tall, by the door, watching me rather than the screen.
The baby measures forty weeks exactly. It has measured forty weeks exactly since November, every measurement identical to the millimetre, month after month, and this appears in my notes each time without comment, in smaller and smaller handwriting.
Three weeks ago they did a 4D scan.
The picture came up amber and grainy and there was my child, folded neatly, its hands closed round its own ankles, its mouth open.
It wasn’t moving. It held that pose for the whole session, and when Denise slid the probe across my stomach for another angle, the face turned. Smoothly, on its neck, tracking the probe.
Denise said the machine was playing up. This time she printed everything without my asking, a whole strip of pictures, and in the last one the mouth had closed.
One word on last week’s report was flagged. The registrar read the measurements aloud until he came to it, then finished reading silently and turned the page over on his desk, face down, as though I hadn’t seen. I looked it up before I’d even left the car park.
Dentition: erupted.
I cried once. Only once, that same afternoon, in the driver’s seat with the engine off—and it heard me.
It pressed from the inside, slow and even, exactly where my hand was resting, and held the pressure there until I stopped. I’m ashamed of how well that worked. I drove home steadier than I’d felt in months and slept nine hours.
That was the turn, I think.
I sleep beautifully now. The heartburn’s gone, and the backache; everything has been made easy for me, as if a decision was taken somewhere that I’m to be kept comfortable.
The hospital rang on Tuesday offering another theatre date, and I heard myself telling them we were happy to wait.
𝘞𝘦.
Over the winter, in those hours between three and four, we settled a code between us. One knock for no. Two for yes. I’ve never told the midwife that, or my mother, or anyone until you.
Last night it woke me at ten past three, knocking.
I put both hands over it in the dark and asked, out loud, feeling foolish: is it soon?
Two knocks means yes. It gave me four.
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