They said little else for a while, and their silence lapped generously to the edges of the room and enclosed them.
Then Steph said, ‘It’s like a little church in here.’ It was true. The small room was dark but for the fire, the fairy lights and the candles. Michael stretched himself out on the floor in front of the fire, and said he knew what she meant.
He had seen a chapel like that, once. He had been persuaded to go to Spain for a week, years ago, with three other lads who drank in the pub where he was working. On the first night they had gone round the bars and the other three had brought girls back to the apartment, all of them so drunk they paired off and then, Michael told Steph as she slowly pulled the comb through her hair, ‘they just screwed all over the place, right in front of each other, four of them in the bedroom, two in the main room. I didn’t know where to look.’ He had spent the night on the concrete balcony and woken the next day with mosquito bites on his lips and eyes. The others, when they surfaced in the afternoon, thought it hilarious. Michael had hardly seen them after that. He spent the week alone, disfigured and miserable, keeping different hours. He couldn’t face the pool or the beach so instead he took buses inland, alighting in hill villages and walking about in the heat to the silent bafflement of old people and children who watched him from sitting places in the shade. To get out of the sun he would buy soft drinks at cafйs that had only two or four white plastic chairs and an umbrella, or he went into churches. He liked the brick floors, dusty here and there with sprinklings of fallen plaster, the green stains in the joins where a little damp seeped between whitewashed walls, and the peeling Madonnas in their painted, fairground colours. He knew that these places were in poor taste, mawkish and out-of-the-way, and that the country saints they elevated were obscure, but it had seemed to him that the plastic chrysanthemums, the tinsel and the coloured lights somehow made them precious, contained, intricate.
‘If it’s like a church in here, that makes us a couple of saints,’ he said.
‘Sinners more like,’ Steph said, with satisfaction.
They grew comfortable. One of the candles burned down. Steph could not lay her hands on the matches to light a new one and Michael found them in her pyjama breast pocket, or pretended to. He set about roasting the chicken, and when Steph suggested they bake potatoes at the same time since the oven was already on, he thought her brilliant. He opened the wine and between them they finished the bottle. Soon afterwards the gas ran out again. Michael had spent the last of his money on the food, so they went to bed. They lay while Michael stroked her bump, and asked her what it felt like to be pregnant. Did she want a boy or a girl? He kissed the bump. Did she talk to the baby?
‘You’re meant to,’ he said. ‘I read it somewhere. You’re meant to talk to it.’
‘That’s plants,’ Steph said sleepily. ‘Anyway, I do sometimes. Hello, baby!’ she whispered, to prove it. ‘Why don’t you talk to it, Michael? Say hello. ’Cause if it’s a boy,’ she added nervously, ‘I was thinking of Michael.’
Michael turned to her and tried to see from her face if she were serious. But the flickering light from the silent television was dancing over her features and he could not tell. ‘You mean calling it Michael?’
Steph nodded. ‘So you’d better get to know it, it ought to know who it’s named after. Or it could be Michaela, if it’s a girl.’ She pronounced it Michael-ah.
‘Michael-ah,’ he repeated.
‘Talk to it, go on. Tell it something nice.’
He kissed the bump again and stroked it, and when his lips brushed the taut skin of her stomach and he felt the ridges of her stretch marks on his mouth he was aghast at the intimacy of it. He whispered something that Steph could not hear, and she realised she was not meant to. She could not fight sleep any longer. Seeing her settle down, Michael switched the television off. As she was letting her eyes close, she remembered with a shock that she had not heard a word from Michael about his mother.
‘Your mum! You never said! Was it all right, then? Seeing her? I can’t believe you never said. She is your mum, isn’t she? What was it like?’
Michael smiled in the dark. He too was almost asleep. ‘Oh, oh yeah, it was great. She’s my mum all right. It was great. You wait till you meet her. I’ll tell you tomorrow. Plenty of time tomorrow.’
Steph woke because the baby had just kicked her much harder than usual. It was not painful, exactly. She lay awake until it happened again. It was somehow serious, not in the least playful. This one must be a boy, definitely a footballer. She needed to pee anyway, and she got up, feeling an ache in her back. The baby moved again when she was on her way back to bed and she groaned softly, with surprise rather than pain. In bed she lay and nearly fell asleep again. A little later, she was not sure how long but perhaps half an hour, another kick came, along with a bigger surprise. Was it possible? Steph stared into the dark and tried to remember what giving birth had really been like last time. But she couldn’t; it was too long ago and she had been so young, practically somebody else. It was as if it were something dramatic and mildly scandalous that she had been told about, or seen in a film. But even as her mind was trying to keep it from her, her body was digging into old memories asleep in the blood, kicking nerves and muscles awake. These were contractions, not kicks. That last one had been stronger, more like a clamp seizing her round the middle than the baby’s foot knocking her from inside. She waited. Twenty minutes later came the next one, the same grabbing and wringing of her body, not painful yet but with the threat of ferocity to come. The struggle to expel was beginning. Still, she had done this before. It would be ages yet, hours and hours. Time enough she hoped, biting her lip, to get Michael used to the idea. It was surely a bit early though, she thought, trying to count back. She had thought she had at least another six weeks or so, judging by her size and what she could recall of the goings-on with Jace. But whether it was coming early or whether she’d just got the dates wrong, she had to get Michael used to the idea not just that she was having it, but that she was having it now, and she was having it here- at home, or the nearest she had to one. Steph suddenly felt her confidence fail, because after what had happened today, getting Michael to go along with that might be more difficult than if he had stayed as he was at the beginning, tolerant but careless of her. But he was turning out to be so kind. If that thing with the towel on the bathroom floor was a sign of how careful he was going to be with her and the baby, he might panic and drag her off to Casualty.
She had to smile at the picture that made, Michael with his eyes wild and everybody thinking he was the worried father. But it would not happen that way, because she would just refuse. She was not going to hospital. Once she explained to Michael why she had to have it here it would be all right, she reassured herself, feeling for a moment oddly powerful. There was something about having a baby that stopped other things mattering too much. She would get her way. Then the thought of Michael drew her mind back to the memory of him inside her, just a few hours ago, and she found this was easily the nicest thing to think about while she waited for the next contraction. Actually, wasn’t it supposed to bring on labour? Steph was suddenly sure now that it did. Once at the clinic, when she was pregnant with Stacey, another woman in the waiting room had said how fed up she was, overdue and still waiting, and somebody else said, you go home and have a nice time with your boyfriend, that’ll bring it on, never fails. Another grab of her belly that this time reached right round to her back interrupted her thoughts. Michael stirred, turned over and stretched out an arm for her.