Dot (Araminta Hall)

one word of all the books on childbirth he’d bought and put on her bedside table; he’d even marked some passages with pieces of paper. He wondered if she really knew what a contraction was.
    ‘Well, when did they start?’
    ‘About an hour before I woke you.’
    ‘You know what’s happening, right?’
    ‘Yes. No. Not exactly.’
    ‘Your cervix is opening to let the baby out. You have to get to ten centimetres before the baby can be born. So it’s nothing to worry about, the pain.’
    Alice didn’t reply and Tony wondered if he had overstepped the mark, but it was hard to tell with Alice, she might simply not be interested. The next time she sucked in her breath was at least ten minutes, maybe twelve, by Tony’s reckoning. They probably shouldn’t be going to the hospital yet, but he couldn’t bear the thought of putting her through the journey when they were only five minutes apart.
    The hospital was bright and busy, a little oasis in the darkness of his worry. Tony held Alice’s bag and handed over her notes and answered all the questions the midwives put to her. They were finally shown into a room which held six beds, two with curtains drawn around them and the rest empty.
    ‘Settle yourself in,’ the midwife said, ‘I’ll be back in a minute to give you an exam.’ She drew the curtains neatly round the bed as she left, flicking them into shape.
    Alice looked at Tony, desperate and lost. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you need to get your nightie back on and lie on the bed. She’s going to want to see how many centimetres you are. You know, like we learnt in the antenatal classes.’ He wasn’t sure that Alice had absorbed any information in the classes he’d dutifully made her attend, even though he’d rather have spent time licking paint off a wall. Towards the end Tony had begun to wonder if the jolly woman was trying to frighten them all, if she enjoyed belabouring them with the inevitability of their reality. At least Alice hadn’t wanted to swap numbers with the other smiling couples at the end and, for that at least, he’d felt grateful.
    The midwife came back, snapping menacing-looking rubber gloves over her hands. She was reading the notes in her hand. ‘So, you’re Alice and Tony Marks, right? And you’re term plus eleven. Your pregnancy looks like it’s been perfectly normal. Is that right?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Tony. ‘Her contractions are about ten minutes apart.’
    ‘OK. Well, my name’s Sally. Now, Alice, could you lie on your back and let your legs drop open. I need to feel how many centimetres you are and then we’ll go from there.’
    Tony worried that Alice might cry; she seemed too delicate to endure any of this and he held on to her hand, making her look only at him as Sally rooted around in her body as if she was looking for something at the bottom of a bag. Sally’s face gave nothing away and with every passing second Tony worried that she’d found something wrong, that any moment an alarm would sound and Alice would be whisked away from him to a doctor with a sharp knife.
    Sally stood up, snapping the rubber gloves in the other direction. ‘You’re between two and three,’ she said, dropping the gloves into a bin.
    Tony was distracted by the thought of what happened to the gloves. Were they really thrown away after such a short life and if so how many pairs of gloves did that mean the hospital needed – all hospitals needed? He imagined the world drowning in rubber gloves smeared with women’s insides.
    ‘If you can I’d go for a walk, get something to eat,’ the midwife continued. ‘You’re in the early stages; I wouldn’t have thought your baby will be born in the next ten or so hours.’
    She left after that and Tony realised Alice was crying. ‘Ten hours?’ she repeated. ‘I can’t do this for ten hours. What does she mean walk about?’
    Tony thought it might be a blessing that Alice was clueless. ‘Some people think you have to move around to make the labour quicker, it’s in Miriam Stoppard’s New Pregnancy and Birth . And you need to eat to keep up your strength.’ Alice whimpered but Tony pulled her up, linking his arm to hers and taking her into the corridor where they took small jagged steps to nowhere. Every so often Alice stopped and leant into the wall, biting her lip and moaning softly, her eyes scrunched shut.
    ‘Breathe through it,’ Tony said, ‘sharp, shallow breaths.’
    But Alice pushed him away and all he could do