If there had been time to be frightened, I think I would have been frightened. Your mother was in the grip of pains she could not escape from. She squatted on a bean bag. It was as if her insides were all tangled, and tugged in a battle to the death. Blood ran from her. Fluid like egg-white. I did not know what anything was. I was a man who had wandered onto a battlefield. The blood was bright with oxygen. I wiped your mother’s brow. She panted. Huh-huh-huh-huh. I ministered to her with sponge and water. I could not take her pain for her. I could do nothing but measure the duration of the pain. I had a little red stop-watch you will one day find abandoned in a dusty drawer. (Later your mother asked me what I had felt during labour. I thought only: I must count the seconds of the contraction; I must help Alison breathe, now, now, now; I must get that sponge — there is time to make the water in the sponge cool — now I can remove that bowl and cover it. Perhaps I can reach the bottle of Evian water. God, I’m so thirsty. What did I think during the labour? I thought: When this contraction is over I will get to that Evian bottle.)
Somewhere in the middle of this, in these three hours in this room whose only view was a blank screen of frosted glass, I helped your mother climb onto the bed. She was on all fours. In this position she could reach the gas mask. It was nitrous oxide, laughing gas. It did not stop the pain, but it made it less important. For the gas to work your mother had to anticipate the contraction, breathing in gas before it arrived. The sister came and showed me how I could feel the contraction coming with my hand. But I couldn’t. We used the stop-watch, but the contractions were not regularly spaced, and sometimes we anticipated them and sometimes not. When we did not get it right, your mother took the full brunt of the pain. She had her face close to the mattress. I sat on the chair beside. My face was close to hers. I held the watch where she could see it. I held her wrist. I can still see the red of her face, the wideness of her eyes as they bulged at the enormous size of the pains that racked her.
Sisters came and went. They had to see how wide the cervix was. At first it was only two centimetres, not nearly enough room for you to come out. An hour later they announced it was four centimetres. It had to get to nine centimetres before we could even think of you being born. There had to be room for your head (which we had been told was big — well, we were told wrong, weren’t we?) and your shoulders to slip through. It felt to your mother that this labour would go on for eight or twelve or twenty hours. That she should endure this intensity of pain for this time was unthinkable. It was like running a hundred-metre race which was stretching to ten miles. She wanted an epidural — a pain blocker.
But when the sister heard this she said: “Oh do try to hang on. You’re doing so well.”
I went to the sister, like a shop steward.
I said: “My wife wants an epidural, so can you please arrange it?”
The sister agreed to fetch the anaesthetist, but there was between us — I admit it now — a silent conspiracy: for although I had pressed the point and she had agreed it was your mother’s right, we both believed (I, for my part, on her advice) that if your mother could endure a little longer she could have the birth she wanted — without an epidural.
The anaesthetist came and went. The pain was at its worst. A midwife came and inspected your mother. She said: “Ten centimetres.”
She said: “Your baby is about to be born.”
We kissed, your mother and I. We kissed with soft, passionate lips as we did the day we lay on a bed at Lovett Bay and conceived you. That day the grass outside the window was a brilliant green beneath the vibrant petals of fallen jacaranda.
Outside the penumbra of our consciousness trolleys were wheeled. Sterile bags were cut open. The contractions did not stop, of course.
The obstetrician had not arrived. She was in a car, driving fast towards the hospital.
I heard a midwife say: “Who can deliver in this position?” (It was still unusual, as I learned at that instant, for women to deliver their babies on all fours.)
Someone left the room. Someone entered. Your mother was pressing the gas mask so hard against her face it was making deep indentations on her skin. Her eyes bulged huge.
Someone said: “Well get her, otherwise I’ll have to deliver it myself.”
The door opened. Bushfire came in.
Bushfire was Aboriginal. She was about fifty years old. She was compact and taciturn like a farmer. She had a face that folded in on itself and let out its feelings slowly, selectively. It was a face to trust, and trust especially at this moment when I looked up to see Bushfire coming through the door in a green gown. She came in a rush, her hands out to have gloves put on.
There was another contraction. I heard the latex snap around Bushfire’s wrists. She said: “There it is. I can see your baby’s head.” It was you. The tip of you, the top of you. You were a new country, a planet, a star seen for the first time. I was not looking at Bushfire. I was looking at your mother. She was all alight with love and pain.
“Push,” said Bushfire.
Your mother pushed. It was you she was pushing, you that put that look of luminous love on her face, you that made the veins on her forehead bulge and her skin go red.
Then — it seems such a short time later — Bushfire said: “Your baby’s head is born.”
And then, so quickly in retrospect, but one can no more recall it accurately than one can recall exactly how one made love on a bed when the jacaranda petals were lying like jewels on the grass outside. Soon. Soon we heard you. Soon you slipped out of your mother. Soon, exactly three hours after the labour had begun, you came slithering out not having hurt her, not even having grazed her. You slipped out, as slippery as a little fish, and we heard you cry. Your cry was so much lighter and thinner than I might have expected. I do not mean that it was weak or frail, but that your first cry had a timbre unlike anything I had expected. The joy we felt. Your mother and I kissed again, at that moment.
“My little baby,” she said. We were crying with happiness. “My little baby.”
I turned to look. I saw you. Skin. Blue-white, shiny-wet.
I said: “It’s a boy.”
“Look at me,” your mother said. I turned to her. I kissed her. I was crying, just crying with happiness that you were there.
The room you were born in was quiet, not full of noise and clattering. This is how we wanted it for you. So you could come into the world gently and that you should — as you were now — be put onto your mother’s stomach. They wrapped you up. I said: “Couldn’t he feel his mother’s skin?” They unwrapped you so you could have your skin against hers.
And there you were. It was you. You had a face, the face we had never known. You were so calm. You did not cry or fret. You had big eyes like your mother’s. And yet when I looked at you first I saw not your mother and me, but your two grandfathers, your mother’s father, my father; and, as my father, whom I loved a great deal, had died the year before, I was moved to see that here, in you, he was alive.
Look at the photographs in the album that we took at this time. Look at your mother and how alive she is, how clear her eyes are, how all the red pain has just slipped off her face and left the unmistakable visage of a young woman in love.
We bathed you (I don’t know whether this was before or after) in warm water and you accepted this gravely, swimming instinctively.
I held you (I think this must be before), and you were warm and slippery. You had not been bathed when I held you. The obstetrician gave you to me so she could examine your mother. She said: “Here.”