JOANNA HAD NO NIGHTIE. She had dragged her heavy self around Cavendish Square during the last weeks, searching for a garment that she could stand. There were only silky shortie pyjamas, floral sacks, or tops that said things like “I can’t bear to sleep alone!!” and featured teddies, hugging. Ten-year-olds, thought Joanna wearily, her feet sloshing with the blood that was pooling in them. And grannies. And hookers. These are the people who buy these pyjamas. Not me. She drove home again, dispirited, her elbows riding high over her abdomen, hardly feeling the pedals through the tingling in her soles. Eventually she packed something of Jan’s in the hospital bag, an outsize black T-shirt with kodak on the sleeve.
In the aftermath, Joanna lay alone in the bed in her black T-shirt, her wardmate chattering on her cellphone like a starling into the silence. The woman had had a caesarian, and cheerfully passed on a pack of maternity pads to the bleeding Joanna.
I haven’t taken this seriously enough, she thought. I almost died back there. We all do. That’s what childbirth is. That’s why men find it so hard to be there: you can’t ask someone who loves you to watch while you have a near-death experience.
And how much harder was it for the lost sixteen-year-old girls in government hospitals, the ones who had blundered into motherhood? They, without husbands or midwives or visitors, had to endure the fat agency nurses who slapped the girls’ thighs and refused them painkillers, shouting, “Ja, it was nice going in, hey? But it’s not so nice coming out!”
Joanna lay shattered on the sheets that had been scorched with James’s trajectory and thought, Something has walked through me from another dimension. Strictly speaking, he had been born dead – deprived of oxygen for eight minutes. Joanna herself could not understand why the doctor and nurses were panicking. She could see that he was fine, her Lazarus baby. They gave him oxygen from a tank, and his grey face turned pink, an alien resurrection.
Already her body was putting itself back together again. It was her head that had been split open like a pomegranate. No one had explained properly to her about the confusion, the terror and the love. With her eyes on the ceiling Joanna was realising that a little – a lot – of the attachment she had thought was Jan’s actually belonged to James. The transfer was instantaneous and seamless. Not the slow rubbing of days and nights of intimacy, but a lightning stroke, the way addicts and God-botherers describe their moments of clarity. Joanna had salivated when she held James in his newness and moved her mouth over his skull – the warmth at his temples, the coolness of his cheeks. And she also knew that she had broken her promise to Jan. It was as good as infidelity.
When the two of them had first found out she was pregnant they had made a keen and secret vow: to love each other more than they loved the children. But when she was actually alone with James in the hospital, the two of them orbited each other exclusively in the small time they had before he was returned to his incubator – damp, reluctant, predestined. Time elongated and truncated. There were blank hours during the labour that she couldn’t explain. There was only James, and when the nurses took him away from the bed where Joanna was trying to sleep, there was her stretched flesh because of James. She kept still and thought that if you were ever going to lose your mind, then childbirth would be the time to do it. Her brain and her body had been unhinged, and any curious, spiteful spirit could have wandered through the gap.
I had a little bird¸ hummed Doctor Renfield. Its name was Enza. I opened a window and In-flu-EN-za!
Joanna didn’t feel possessed, but perhaps it was too early to tell. She tentatively counted her wounds. Her bladder felt beaten into a thin bag, like the red rubber fart cushion her father had once used to sabotage a family visit; she needed to get to the toilet again. She had managed before. She wouldn’t call the nurses, who took ages to come, or were affronted by her demands. Joanna braced her palms on the bed and hauled herself into a sitting position. She felt surprisingly well. The midwife was a wonder: Joanna had not been torn. The nurses and doctors on their rounds kept asking to see her stitches, and seemed mildly put out that she had no stigmata for display.
Joanna swung her legs slowly over the side of the bed, the railings chilly against the backs of her legs, like the bars of a jungle gym. The muscle memory of hanging upside down was still there. She slid off the edge and stood up, shaking.
She began limping across the grey linoleum to the bathroom. The pads in her panties prised her thighs apart and made her walk like a cowhand. Surfboards, she thought. That’s what we used to call them in high school. Riding the red tide.
Her wardmate’s curtains were open; the woman had finished her phone call and was looking around, chatty and hopped up on the post-op pills. She smiled at Joanna and asked her if she needed any help.
“Thanks,” said Joanna. “I’m fine.” The black shirt singled her out in some way, she thought. She was a groupie at a death-metal concert, unprepared for parenthood. She was surprised the hospital hadn’t turned her away.
Joanna hobbled on to the cubicle, tiny as an aeroplane toilet. There was just enough room to turn and sit down slowly as the T-shirt rode up. She felt her ligaments sigh, stretched and floppy, perished as elastic. I haven’t locked the door, Joanna thought, and then laughed at herself. Everyone in the ward was at liberty to peer at her distended genitals. She was a three-day exhibition, a floor show, sprawled on her back in a bed, gathering the hot sheets to her sides for protection.
The urine streamed out, stinging, pinkish, victorious. Her body, woken from its hibernation, was ridding itself of as much water as it could.
The bathroom, now that she saw it minutely, was not altogether clean. At some level hospitals were primitive, thought Joanna. All we really have is soap and towels and hot water. For the rest you just had to wait and trust that your body would repair itself as it always had, knitting its constituent parts back together while you slept or read a Heat magazine or watched Sewende Laan with the sound off.
Outside the window, cars came and went in the parking lot; people were ferried in the little golf cart to the doctors’ rooms; ambulances beeped and swooped like angel messengers. The soundtrack looped. Joanna felt herself slipping from the toilet seat, her bones turned to putty. I’m swooning, she told herself. I really am! Before the head-aching sleep she managed to touch her hand to the emergency button. Through the door she heard the alarm, like a microwave oven, sound at the nurses’ station. The floor was steady and cool.
There was a woman standing over Joanna, short and fierce.
Miss Suzy called The Doctor!
Miss Suzy called the Nurse!
Her hands were in fists; her hair frizzed angrily at the temples. She made no attempt to help Joanna get up.
“Now see what a mess you’ve made!”
Joanna lifted her head and saw the splatter pattern on the floor. She wanted to say, But it doesn’t matter. No one’s cleaned here today yet.
The woman jammed her fists to her hips. “Didn’t the nurses tell you not to get out of bed?”
“I’ve been by myself before,” Joanna explained. She felt her eyes trying to roll up in her head. The warm stream between her legs was cooling. “I thought I was fine.”
The woman was abruptly forced forward by the door opening again behind her. A long-faced cleaner fell back and then stood patiently with her bucket and mop, waiting for an interval. The woman went on with her lesson.
“But now there’s blood everywhere! And Daphne has to clean it up!”
Joanna felt some dim rage stirring in her exhausted belly. “Are you going to help me?” she asked. “Or should I call somebody else?” Daphne put a quick hand to her mouth.
The angry woman relented. She gestured at Daphne to leave the cleaning. The two of them shouldered Joanna upright, all at once solicitous, trying to avoid the puddles she was making. I’m riding the red tide, thought Joanna. It made her want to grin.
Back in the bed she saw lights in front of her eyes, like fireworks. She soaked through the plastic-backed cloths they gave her, three in a row, until the nurse on shift at midnight said, “Ag, bokkie, you must ask the doctor for something to stop the bleeding now. We don’t have any more sheets.”
Later, at home, she wondered if the butchery smell that had settled over the bathroom, the bedroom, everything she touched, was normal. Maybe that was why some cultures sequestered the post-partum. She would have liked to be in a dim hut somewhere next to a stream, having food brought to her by the little girls, having her bruised body deftly washed by the older women. As it was she only just managed to stand under the water in the shower, a giantess, a many-breasted Diana of Ephesus, mistress of a ruined temple in a forest far away.
Jan tried to help but what he wanted was instructions, and she couldn’t think of any to give him. Everything ordinary seemed ridiculous: banal. What she wanted was to be left alone to think about what had just happened. The only other person she wanted to see was James.
Joanna had circled herself, sniffing for the blues, but there was only the sticky, gasping love. Here, in her own bed, while the massive bleeding tapered over the days to a more ordinary inconvenience, she prodded her thoughts. The dark parts were the normal ones, the places where the wooden bridge to the hard, bright outside had always been splintery. Joanna knew to avoid them.