In Her Mothers' Shoes (14 page)

The girls had been warned long ago by the others in the home that it would be like this. They’d never quite believed it; now they knew.

Anahira threw her few belongings in an old leather bag. There was a sharp click as she closed the catch at the top.

‘It’s goodbye, then,’ she said, standing at the end of her bed.

They all said their farewells.

Lizzie hugged her tightly; the thin frame was limp and unresponding. She wanted to say something comforting.

‘Don’t forget to write,’ was all she could think of. It sounded hollow.

Anahira didn’t answer.

‘I wonder who’ll be next?’ Jessie said as the door closed behind her.

It was Christine. The girls knew nothing about it until they awoke one morning to find her bed empty. Lizzie immediately thought the worst, imagining a repeat of what had happened to Pearl, but Miss Mayhew told her Christine was over in the hospital having her baby.

They started to worry again that evening when she still hadn’t returned, but Miss Mayhew assured them Christine was all right, it was a long labour, that was all. She deflected their questions with the same response until the following morning when one of the girls on laundry duty told Jessie at morning tea that Christine had disappeared.

‘She’s run off with the baby,’ Jessie reported back.

‘What!’ None of them could believe it.

‘Jenny said she and Freda had to go over to collect the laundry trolley this morning and they overheard one of the nurses talking about it. Apparently Christine crept into the nursery last night and stole back her baby when the nurse was out of sight. She hasn’t been seen since.’

There was a chorus of cries: ‘But where would she go?’ ‘Good on her!’ ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘She always said she was going to keep her baby.’ Jessie said. ‘And she did.’

‘There’s hope for me yet,’ Lizzie said.

‘I wouldn’t count on it.’ Jessie put down her cup with a clatter. ‘They’ll put a double watch on the nursery now in case any of us get the same idea.’

‘There’ll be all hell to pay,’ Meg said. ‘Matron will be furious.’

‘Serve her right, the old bag,’ Jessie said.

‘Christine deserves a medal.’ Lizzie stood and collected the others’ cups to take to the servery.

Elation for their friend was short-lived. Two days later, Sally reported that Christine had been brought back and the baby returned to the nursery – without her. Sally didn’t know what had become of Christine and Miss Mayhew and Matron and anyone else in authority they asked refused to say.

Christine’s belongings disappeared when they were at work; they never saw her again.

What would happen to her? One day, they were all best friends, sharing everything, studying each other’s bodies, knowing more and sharing more about each other than they had with anybody. The next day, one of them would be gone, never to be seen again. And all she had was an address, somewhere in Nelson. She would write, but would she ever hear back? Somehow, it seemed unlikely. It was so sudden, this loss of friendship. Who would be the next to go?

‘That’s two deliveries now. I bags be next,’ Meg said. ‘I’m due before you two anyway.’

Lizzie wasn’t due for nearly another week when the first contraction came. They were in the kitchen cleaning up after lunch.

‘I’ll see how far they’re apart,’ Jessie said, putting down the tea towel and looking at her watch. She sent Lizzie over to the chair beside the servery. But she couldn’t sit still. She started clearing away cups. It seemed like an eternity before the next sharp pain shot through her.

‘Twenty minutes,’ Jessie called out, looking at her watch. ‘You’ve got ages yet.’

‘But shouldn’t I go see the nurse?’ Lizzie was terrified. This was the moment she’d been dreading – and also the moment she’d been looking forward to, because soon she would be free of this tremendous burden she’d been carrying around for so long through the hot summer days, restless in her bed, impossible to sleep at night. But before she could be free, she somehow had to get the baby out.

‘If you like. But she’ll just put you in that claustrophobic windowless room and make you lie on that uncomfortable high bed while she sticks cold stainless steel instruments up your fanny.’

‘Jessie!’

‘Well it’s true. And that’s just the beginning of the nightmare.’

‘I suppose if we got to have an adorable little baby at the end of the nightmare it would be bearable.’

Jessie folded her arms and looked at Lizzie as if she were mad. ‘But we don’t, do we? Not even Christine managed to pull it off.’

‘We should have seen it coming. She was absolutely nuts about babies, right from the start.’

‘And she never changed her mind.’ Meg came up behind Lizzie waving a spare tea towel at her.

‘Maybe she thought she deserved a reward at the end of all that pain,’ Lizzie said, ignoring the waiting dishes.

‘The only reward we’ll have is an
end
to the pain,’ Meg said.

‘Don’t count on it. If you get stitches, you’ll be in pain for some time to come.’ Jessie grinned mischievously.

‘Stitches? Nobody said anything about stitches before.’ Lizzie nearly dropped the cups she was stacking.

‘You can’t have been listening,’ Meg said. ‘One of the girls two groups ahead of us went into all the gory details when we were in the garden one Sunday afternoon.’

‘I never heard that. Where do you have them?’

‘Where do you think?’ Jessie pointed to the area at the top of her legs. ‘Where the baby comes out, silly.’

Lizzie swallowed hard and bit back a cry.

‘She said it happens to a lot of girls at the hospital,’ Meg continued.

‘That’s because they don’t care about us,’ Jessie said. ‘They only care about keeping the doctor’s bill down, so they try to avoid calling him. And the result? A lot of us get torn apart and have to get stitched up afterwards.’

‘Oh God, I hope it doesn’t happen to me.’ Lizzie’s voice started to quiver.

‘Oh, Lizzie, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘No, it’s all right, I’ve got to know. Christine used to tell us everything she knew from those books, but she never told us about stitches.’

‘The nice books she reads wouldn’t go into that sort of unpleasant detail.’

Lizzie felt another stabbing pain in her abdomen and yelled in pain.

‘You’ve still got a long way to go,’ Jessie said, looking at her watch.

‘You make it sound so matter-of-fact, so clinical.’

‘That’s what doctors are supposed to do.’

‘Well I hope you’re not like any of the doctors I’ve met so far. They’ve all been awful.’

‘I’m going to be brilliant.’ Jessie grinned. ‘Though I’ve a long way to go.’

‘Anyway, I hope I don’t need a doctor. I want a nice easy birth . . . like I was.’

But lying on the high narrow bed with its stiff, plastic-covered mattress, Lizzie soon realised she wasn’t in for an easy birth. She was stripped down, her clothes taken away – she never thought she’d be sorry to have the ghastly grey smock disappear – and made to wash in front of the nurse, ‘even down there’. Then the added humiliation of having her pubic hair shaved. Now that it was gone, she felt totally and utterly exposed.

All that covered her was a worn old hospital gown the nurse had to tie at the back. Her bare bottom was visible; her underpants were nowhere to be seen.

The nurse approached with a long rubber tube, a stainless steel dish, and a grim smile. ‘You have to have an enema,’ she said.

‘An enema – what’s that?’ It sounded like a banana. Would she have to eat it? And what were the rubber tubes for?

She soon found out. And she hoped she would never in her life have to go through that again.

Once in the delivery room, the nurse kept telling her off, that she should be more dilated by now, while the contractions kept coming so far apart she found herself almost dozing off in her quiet isolation – until the sharp stab in her abdomen brought her back to reality.

After enduring the agonising contractions for five hours Lizzie asked if she could have something to make it less painful. She was given a couple of pills to take, but they didn’t seem to make any difference.

‘I can’t give you anything stronger than that. You’ll have to wait until the doctor comes.’ The nurse, to her credit, looked sympathetic; Lizzie soon came to the conclusion she was the only member of staff in the whole hospital with any feelings.

The nurse departed and Lizzie dozed off again, alone – terribly alone – in the sterile white room, bare of any adornments and smelling strongly of antiseptic.

She awoke to another gripping pain, but this time it felt different, lower down somehow. It was followed quite soon by another. She felt an urgent desire to go to the toilet and staggered down off the high bed, padding off in her bare feet to the door.

‘Where are you going?’ The nurse was in the corridor, her voice urgent, almost fearful. ‘I told you to stay on the bed.’

‘But I have to go to the toilet, right now!’

‘I’ll get you a bed pan.’

Lizzie wailed as another sharp jolt went through her. ‘I’m sure my contractions are a lot closer together.’

After being told off so severely for not being sufficiently dilated, Lizzie felt she deserved praise for this, but the nurse said nothing, just helped her up on the bed then fetched a bed pan from behind the curtain. But Lizzie couldn’t produce anything in it. By now the contractions were coming so close together she hardly had time to get her breath back.

The nurse disappeared behind the curtain then produced an unsightly contraption with what looked like horse stirrups dangling down from a bar and insisted Lizzie put her feet through them. Protesting made no difference. The nurse was firm: this was the way it had to be; all the girls had their babies like this, she insisted. Weakened by the constant pain, Lizzie did as she was told, lay back on the uncomfortable hard bed with its clingy plastic cover and held her legs in the air. Was there no end to this public humiliation? First the enema and now this. She’d never been so exposed in her life, especially when the nurse started peering between her legs.

‘Looks like the baby is ready,’ the nurse smiled at last. ‘I was beginning to wonder if you were going to get there.’

The momentary relief Lizzie felt at this news was quickly dissipated by another contraction, awful in its intensity.