Shallow Breath

39

Desi




By April 1993, Desi can no longer see her feet. She is astonished by the spectacular size of her stomach, and entranced by the independent life inside it, which wriggles and pushes and kicks and keeps her awake at night.

Hester comes to spend time with Desi most days after she has collected Jackson from school. While her mother restocks cupboards and fusses around the house, Desi walks down to the beach with her exuberant brother, listening to the stories of his day. Sometimes they get into the water, and while Jackson swims Desi follows her midwife’s advice and floats in the shallows, enjoying a few exquisite moments of weightlessness. When they get out, Jackson always marvels at how fat she is becoming, baiting her with his impish grin, delighting in the fact she is too cumbersome to chase him.

Pete comes up from the city most weekends, and he is her favourite companion. He is happy to sit quietly, watching the water with her from the verandah, or to tinker on small jobs around the house. Moreover, because he was the only one to know Connor and Desi in Monkey Mia, he recognises parts of her that the others don’t. Although he says little, he always manages to make her feel good about herself.

In contrast, by the time Rebecca leaves, Desi is usually despondent. Rebecca and Theo had married over Christmas, and while Desi enjoys seeing her friend on this new high, a permanent shimmer to her eyes, she can’t help wondering if she’ll ever have that again. She is grateful when her old friend’s visits become increasingly infrequent, as Rebecca busies herself settling into her new home and helping Theo run the vet surgery.

As Desi’s due date draws nearer, each morning swells like an ominous sea. She hasn’t confided to anyone how scared she is about giving birth. While the baby is cocooned inside her, she is confident of keeping it safe, but the more she reads about labour, the more it sounds like a risky ordeal for them both. She is already awash with sadness that her child will never know its father. What if something happens to her, too, and he or she is orphaned? Or, even worse, what if something happens to the baby, and she loses this precious gift forever, and along with it the final thread of Connor’s life?

She follows all the advice. She takes regular walks. She gets rest. And she sits on the verandah, breathing in and out in time to the ocean’s steady ebb and flow, trying to focus on everything she’s able to do, rather than letting herself be caught in spiralling fears of failure.




Once they start, her contractions go on for weeks. ‘Braxton Hicks,’ the midwife says, as Desi is weighed and hands in yet another pot of urine. ‘Your body is getting ready.’ But Desi grows so used to this involuntary flexing of her muscles that it becomes a habitual part of her days. Her mother begins to hover, finding excuses to stay for longer, causing Desi to shoo her out with promises that she will call when the main event begins.

She is alone on the verandah as the sun is setting, half watching the ocean and half dozing, when she is sure she sees something break the surface in the distance. She looks closer. Could it have been a dolphin? The water has settled over it again; there’s nothing to see. Perhaps she was dreaming.

Then she senses something wet beneath her. She jumps up to find she’s been sitting in a puddle. She stares at it for a second before she runs towards the phone.

Before she can get there, pain overwhelms her, as though someone has run up behind her and slammed hot knives into her back. She almost collapses as she dials the number.

‘It’s happening!’ she yells into the phone. ‘Can you come?’

‘Is anyone with you?’ Pete’s voice is concerned, but calm and reassuring.

‘No.’

‘I’ll be there as fast as I can,’ he says, ‘but I’m going to call an ambulance first, okay?’

She is about to reply when her breath is taken from her by another hellish twist of those burning blades. She drops the phone for a moment, falling to her knees. ‘I think the baby’s coming right now,’ she shrieks after the pain dies away, but all she hears is the dial tone. Pete has gone.

She crawls across to the sofa and manages to get her elbows onto the seat before the next cruel fire flares in her abdomen. When it’s finished, she finds she has bitten down hard on a cushion to stop herself from crying out. She thinks briefly of going for the car, but the contractions are too fast and too intense. She is stuck.



She is unbearably hot. She manages to yank off her T-shirt as she crawls towards the door again. Another spasm hits her, and she curls up into a ball until it passes, then makes it onto the verandah. On and on they come, wave after rolling wave of intolerable agony. Once outside, she tries to listen for the ocean, to steady her breathing, but she can’t make out anything above the blood that pounds in her ears. The surroundings of the house are dark and still. She is utterly alone.

When the next surge crashes over her, it breaks her down and buries her, leaving her sobbing into the floor. ‘No more, no more, I can’t do it,’ she pants into the empty air.

Something changes after that, and although the pain is still excruciating it settles into a more predictable rhythm. Every time it comes she strains against it with all her might. It seems like it’s been going on forever when she finally hears a siren.

She is vaguely aware of lights flashing red and blue, and voices coming nearer. They already know her name, and they are checking her and soothing her. She tries to respond, but it comes out as a grunt. She feels a hard pop, and the voice by her legs says, ‘The head’s out now, Desi. Another push and you’re done.’

At first, she barely registers what they are saying. She is beyond spent; there is nothing else in the world except the blistering currents of pain that crash over her, and the brief spaces in between while the next one rolls in. But, briefly, her mind flashes back to one day in Atlantis. She sees herself hurrying with half a dozen others to the edge of the dolphin pool. Mila had been circling extraordinarily fast, as though trying to evade something, while the other females, Rani, Lulu and Karleen, chased her. As Desi watched, she’d spotted a tiny tail poking from underneath Mila’s belly. Mila had risen to snatch some air and then dived straight down towards the bottom, her fluke kicking vigorously once, twice, before a small streak of grey broke free. The baby wriggled frantically to the surface and took its first breath as its mother did another circuit of the pool. Mila slowed a fraction as she returned to pass by her infant, brushing its belly with her pectoral fin. The newborn immediately fell in beside her, and they began to cruise the pool in perfect sync, as though there had always been two of them together in the world.

Desi returns to the present, covered in sweat and crouched on all fours. Without being told, she knows exactly what to do. She rises up onto her knees, just as her body, unprompted, gives one great, last push. The noise she makes might sound like agony but it is wrapped in triumph as her baby girl slips into the world, to be caught by waiting hands.