The Night Book Part 2

Simon liked the rain. He drove through the streets in his big car, between his private practice and the public hospital. Late at night he wrote in his journal. Elke's waking was worse after they got back and she came and sat with him regularly.

One night he delivered a baby for a woman whose partner was drunk. He insulted a midwife and security was called. Simon came out of the hospital at dawn to find the sky streaked with fiery cloud and the first birds starting up. The drunk man was reeling about in the car park, arguing with a taxi driver.

Simon drove home and let himself into the quiet house. It was getting on for six o'clock in the morning and he stood in the kitchen looking at the shafts of light angling down through the trees. Elke came in and sat down at the table.

He thought about the baby he'd just delivered, the drunken father, the mother pleading with the security guard to let him stay. He thought about a paper he'd read recently. Research showed that girls who lived with their biological fathers reached p.u.b.erty later than girls who didn't. The presence of the natural father suppressed development in girls. He thought, What does that show but that we are animals. Creatures, regulated by hormones, by forces we can't control. You can't trick the body.

He sighed, suddenly so weary he could barely stand. He leaned over Elke and put his arms around her, smelling the warm sleepy brown reek of her hair.

'It's always you and me, getting no sleep. Why don't you go back to bed, LK.'

She looked up at him, her gaze wide and blank. 'Yes Dad,' she said.

Simon was on call during a weekend when a lot of the staff were down with flu. There was an air of crisis, of heroic making-do. Everyone was tired; everyone had been rostered on for too long.

At nine in the evening a woman was wheeled in. She was ten days overdue, and the labour wasn't progressing.

He walked into the room and picked up the chart, scanning it quickly. She was twenty-one, a young woman with a round, handsome face, glossy black hair and green eyes. The eyes were striking - too pale for the dark face. She grimaced with pain, showing a couple of missing teeth.

'Hi,' he said. 'Mereana.'

There was a hefty woman in a beige uniform at the side of the bed.

The patient needed her blood pressure taken and he went to do it himself, since they were short staffed. He said, 'Oh, for Christ's sake.'

He pointed. 'Take it off,' he said.

The woman in uniform looked where he was pointing. She said, 'Oh, sorry. I forgot. I had to go out for a minute.'

Anger and tiredness made him shaky. He said, 'Look at her. Look at her.'

His pager went and he looked at it and swore. 'She's in labour. How far do you think she's going to get if she tries to run away? Even you could catch her.'

The woman smirked. 'Sorry. My mistake.'

Simon and the patient stared at each other. She panted and screwed up her eyes suddenly.

'It's a strong contraction,' he said, feeling her stomach. 'You're doing fine.'

The big woman picked up the plastic handcuff that attached the patient's wrist to the metal edge of the bed and took it off, giving Simon a hard, ironic smile.

Simon said, 'Mereana. Your baby's in the posterior position. That means it's going to take a bit longer to push out. I'm going to give you something to bring it on. I think you should have an epidural, for pain relief.'

She agreed to this, rubbing her wrist. He noticed the mark from the plastic cuff.

'You'll be fine,' he told her, and squeezed her foot through the sheet.

He left her to the midwife and went to get hold of the anaesthetist. When the patient was set up he got the call to attend to another woman down the hall, so he went between the two for a while, then drove home, winding his way through back streets to the next suburb, a journey that took him five minutes. Later in the night he was writing in his journal with Elke beside him when they called him back.

The patient, Mereana was exhausted and distressed. She had progressed quickly, and they had allowed the anaesthetic to wear off so she could push. The drugs were making her shake, and she was vomiting.

The prison guard was standing by the bed holding a stack of paper cups. The midwife was peering between the patient's legs.

'Mereana.'

The patient cried and moaned. The midwife looked sideways at Simon, communicating silently as he bent down beside her.

'Is she all right?' the guard asked.

The midwife handed her a cup full of vomit.

'Oh s.h.i.t,' the guard said, pa.s.sing another cup off her stack and carrying the full one to the bin, averting her face.

Mereana shrieked, clutched the sheet and writhed, throwing the monitor off her stomach.

'Careful.' The midwife connected her up again. Simon read the scroll of paper the monitor had turned out.

He said, 'Mereana.'

She was hissing between her teeth. 'Oh G.o.d help me.'

'I'm going to turn the baby around.'

The prison guard made a moaning sound and put her hand to her forehead.

They got her ready, and Simon took up the rotation forceps. He didn't do this very often and it was reasonably difficult, but he was confident.

The guard did a little skip of tension and knocked into the drip stand. 'You sit down over there,' the midwife snapped, and the guard sat down as if she'd been slapped.

There was a silence, just Mereana's sobbing. He grasped the forceps and tried to get the correct angle. It was hot and bright under the lights, and the midwife blotted his face.

He got the grip right and began to turn the baby to the anterior position. Mereana cried out. You needed to be strong. It felt brutal, the grind of metal against flesh, the resistance of flesh, the strange textures of skin and cartilage and bone. It seemed to take a long time. The patient was swearing and pleading and the guard had her face in her hands. He stopped, steadied himself, carried on.

Finally he got the position right and reached for the next set of forceps. He found the head and began to draw the baby out. The woman was frantic now, crying, flailing her legs, reaching down and trying to push him away. He slapped off her hands and signalled to the midwife to control her as the head began to emerge properly, the shoulders came free, and then there was the rubbery slither as the rounded belly squeezed out.

He pulled the baby clear and held it up - one look and you could tell it was going to be fine. It let out a cry, and in a sudden comic release of tension he thought of getting the guard to cut the cord.

He cut the cord himself, and the baby was placed on the woman's chest. It was a girl.

Looking into the mother's blasted, bloodshot, tear-stained face he said, 'Well done. '

They tidied up. The woman clutched the child fiercely, whispering to it. She glanced up at him, her green eyes wild.

The guard stood up, swaying slightly with exhaustion. He heard the jingle of keys at her belt and pulled her aside. 'You're not going to bother her. She has to feed the baby.'

The guard only shook her head and sank down in the chair, watching.

At the nurses' station, Simon looked up at the inst.i.tutional clock above him, the hall stretching beyond it into dimness, and he thought of the corridors he tramped through on endless nights and all the doors behind which the same struggle went on, and the white face of the clock seemed to swell, as though to push through the gla.s.s that held it. Outside, the dawn would be coming. There was the squeak of shoes on linoleum as the prison guard approached.

'What's going to happen to that baby?' he asked.

The guard leaned on the counter. 'She's got a long sentence. They let her keep it with her for six months and then they take it away.'

'Take it away,' he repeated.

She nodded.

He slapped the file down on the counter, walked out and drove home.

The kids were in their school uniforms and Karen was rushing around getting them ready. He hugged each of them in turn and said good bye as Karen hustled them out the door.

He called Elke back and put his arms around her, trying to think out what he wanted to say, but his voice was slurred with tiredness, and all he could manage was, 'LK, we've got to change things.'

Claire called from the front path and Elke wriggled free.

He grabbed her arm. 'No more night book,' he said. 'It's all over with that. I'm not putting up with it any more. You've got to sleep.'

She went down the steps. 'Sleep,' he called after her.

She looked back at him and rolled her eyes.

He walked through the quiet house, looking into the rooms, at the brightness and order. When he lay down, the walls whirled dizzily around. He thought about the patient. She would look after the baby for six months and then they would take it away. She would see it only when it was brought to visit.

He slept without waking until the afternoon, and when he surfaced he had a feeling of ease. A beam of light came through the window and made a dancing pattern on the floor; the cat sauntered along the hall and sat in the doorway, its ear revolving to catch sounds. Birds squabbled in the branches outside. Down the street, someone was tr.i.m.m.i.n.g hedges; there was the whine of a saw. The wind made the trees swell and shiver, flipping the silvery leaves.

The children were playing in the garden. He lay in the sunny room, listening.

two.

six years later

Some days Simon drove home at dawn, half-awake, all his reactions on automatic. He saw the sun coming up, colouring the clouds in the eastern sky pink, birds rising in a sudden noiseless wave, as if by a secret signal, from the trees in the park. The street-cleaning truck, its brushes whirring, snuffled its way along the gutters; delivery men dumped papers and crates outside the shops. Dreaming, he drove along the last stretch that led him to the open gate, the leafy drive, the automatically rising garage door. He drove into the garage and sat with his eyes closed, until he found the strength to plod up the stairs to the kitchen and make a cup of tea, and usually, as he was watching the first birds swooping down onto the wet lawn, he would hear Elke come in behind him. They sat at the table in silence. The lawn was a square of intense green, fringed by rocks and ferns. They watched rain falling through a shaft of morning sun, a bird pulling up a worm under the glittering shower. In the dawn hours they were outside time. They watched the light change.

He was head of obstetrics at the hospital. Karen wanted him to scale down his workload. She told him he should keep his gynaecology practice but give up obstetrics; that way he'd let himself off the punishing hours. He'd thought about it, but wondered how he would adjust to a nine-to-five day. He was like Elke: he resisted Karen's notions of order and correct routine. Karen couldn't function without a good night's sleep; she went to bed armed with earplugs and special pillows, and was grumpy if the night had been interrupted. Sleep was a delicate subject between them. She said,'I crave oblivion.' He didn't see oblivion as something you could crave.

Sometimes he lay awake and resisted drifting off, feeling that, if he slept, the night would be over too quickly. If he wasn't careful, he woke Karen coming in from night shift. She'd accused him of setting a bad example with Elke. Early on, she'd decided on a strict regime to make Elke sleep properly, and for a time had created the unfortunate sense that he and Elke were the opposing side of the battle. Karen went at things literally, she mounted campaigns. When things went badly she sat on the edge of the bed and complained, then slept and woke refreshed, optimistic all over again. Her battles with Claire were more complex, dark and wounding. He sympathised. She was a good mother. It wasn't easy dealing with teenage girls.

He went to work, and clarity and focus came to him; then he drove home and greeted his family through a kind of film. He was cushioned by his night hours, by the sense of otherness they gave him. Karen was always saying, 'Are you listening. Have you heard a word I've said?' He loved her, he loved the kids. He worked hard, he kept strange hours, he was happy.

On a Wednesday evening he was putting on his suit when he heard Karen's voice raised. It was a mild, grey evening, the rain falling on the wet lawn. Out the window he saw a seagull flying, high against the white sky.

He knotted his tie and went down to the kitchen. Karen was holding the iron in one hand and a shirt in the other. Her face was flushed.

Claire was saying, 'That is just bulls.h.i.t. That's totally unfair. How can you say that. You shift your position from one day to the next. You're completely illogical.'

Karen said coldly, 'I'm not going to listen to you raving.'

Claire banged a book against the bench.

'Now look ...'

Claire shouted, 'I wish you would die. Of cancer. In agony.'

'Claire!'

'You think I don't mean it ...'

'Jesus Christ,' Simon said. 'All right. Get out. Off you go.' He pointed to the stairs. Claire b.u.mped his shoulder as she pa.s.sed, and ran up to her room.

Karen stood there with the iron raised, shaking it, her eyes lit up. 'You see. You see what I have to deal with.'

He went upstairs. He pa.s.sed Elke, silent on the landing. They looked at each other.

Claire was lying on her back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, her long legs crossed, hair trailing all over her face. She was sixteen and five foot eleven. She was freckle-faced, angry and intense. She was top of her cla.s.s in maths and sciences, and wanted to be a doctor.

'Claire. You can't say things like that. You just can't.

He looked down at her. She was the most verbally violent person he knew. Words burst out of her. She lost control of herself but never the flow of her sentences. She raged, she articulated; when it came to arguing she left everyone for dead. Words were weapons, but she was still a dopey teenager, and didn't understand how they hurt. He'd tried to put this to Karen: 'Teenagers are short on empathy. She doesn't really mean it. She can't handle her own firepower.'

At this, Karen just looked bitter.

Now he told Claire, 'You apologise.'

'I'd. Rather. Die.'

Elke appeared in the doorway. Without turning her head, Claire said, 'Get lost, Elke.'

'Come on,' he pleaded. Elke went away, silent.

He got nowhere, and so he turned businesslike. 'We're going out. Dinner's downstairs. Barbara's coming in ten minutes, so b.l.o.o.d.y pull yourself together.'

Downstairs, Elke and Marcus were at the table, eating pasta. Elke looked up with interest; Marcus was dreaming over his plate.

Simon put his arms around Karen and said, 'Barbara'll sort them out.' Barbara was Karen's mother.