I am sobbing so hard that it sounds like I am laughing, but I am not, I am not. I worry about my mental health, because surely what has just happened is a mirage. I was never getting out of there. My baby was never getting out of there.
But it was real; it has to be, because now I am no longer pinned underneath Harriet but running up and down the hall hammering on doors. My neighbours come out but they immediately inch back inside again, looking alarmed, like it is me they need to fear. Sticking their heads out of the door is the token amount of effort they must make so that they feel like good people, people who don’t ignore what’s in front of them. Anything more is beyond their neighbourly remit.
Don’t ruin the anonymity, for God’s sake. This isn’t a borrow-a-cup-of-sugar kind of place. We aren’t living in the suburbs. I’ll put your post in your postbox and pretend I don’t see you in the lift. Let’s keep to the status quo.
‘I need some help!’ I shout to one of them, begging.
I don’t have my phone, Tom isn’t home and I need desperately for somebody to do something. For somebody to bring me biscuits and call the police and order me a cab to the hospital. For somebody to touch me kindly, not violently. For somebody to check that my baby is okay.
But the woman I am looking at has kept the chain on the door.
‘What is wrong with you?’ I yell, but it only serves to confirm her fears about me.
She didn’t move here to be part of a community and get involved. She moved here to lock the door and know nobody’s name. And in truth, hadn’t I been happy to do the same?
Finally, I get it together enough to make my own way in a cab to the hospital, where I shriek at the woman on reception, my hysteria alarming people in the waiting room.
‘I was attacked,’ I say, out loud, in shock at what I am saying. ‘I’m pregnant and I was attacked by my neighbour. She has a history of violence.’
They call the police for me, then they take me into a scan room.
I hold my breath and stroke my stomach rhythmically, like a mantra.
I weep like I need to emit something and I tell it – her, I have suddenly become sure today, her – that I am sorry that she should have had to have gone through something like that, when she hasn’t even had the chance yet to gasp some air and drink some milk and relax for a while in the world.
The sonographer speaks.
‘The baby is fine,’ she says.
It is a fine baby.
I lie there then, longer than I should, longer than NHS waiting times allow. But I cannot move. I just watch my baby on the screen. While Harriet and I speeded up and became louder, the baby carried on steadily and surely, drumming a beat inside me that tells the doctors and me that she is safe.