Birth in Suburbia, Carol Falaki [electronic reader .TXT] 📗

his newspaper.
Harry worked for the local council, in an office where he lived a virtual life, creating and moving
pages of emails and memos from one place to another; and where he emerged from this world, occasionally, for meetings. At home his virtual existence continued, for most of the time. Television, newspaper, dozing; at the weekend when he worked on his allotment, and had a pint or two of real ale at the Grape and Dragon, he came to life.
Harry was a gentle man, rounded in every sense of the word. Life had removed all of his edges. Maggie was sharp enough, and busy enough, for both of them.
He retained the power to surprise. One day, Harry demonstrated his own joy at the prospect of becoming a grandfather, by producing a cot, complete with blankets and a soft white teddy, without having uttered a word. Liz went into her room late one afternoon there it was.
Liz sometimes worried about being a single parent, and how it might affect her baby. So, between reading the child-birth literature, she read books and magazines about parenting by the cart-load, and she talked to Chrissy, who had almost five years experience as a single mum.
Every day Liz practiced her yoga and relaxation and took a long walk, although recently her pelvis had become painful, clicking when she walked, and Maggie had suggested she rest more and stopped lifting.
“Rest and listen to your body,” she said. And so Liz rested her body, but her mind remained busy.
The rest and relaxation helped, but the pain persisted and Liz took advice from a physiotherapist. Her hip clicking and low back pain was caused by pregnancy hormones, which had the effect of loosening her pelvic joints to help make space for her baby’s passage. Her mum was right about those hormones.
When Liz returned to her mum and dad’s home to discover Helen was still living next-door she was delighted, especially on finding Helen was also pregnant. They now had so much in common. Liz fell easily into company with Debbie and Helen. Together they could share their worries and fears about pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. They compared their experiences, discussed what the midwife or doctor had told them at antenatal clinic and compared symptoms, heartburn, piles, constipation, stretch marks. When their babies arrived they planned to continue to support each other.
In her room each night Liz put her hands on her stomach. She lay on her bed and spent time talking to her baby, who was always active late into the night. Liz told her baby stories of her own childhood, and recited fairy tales and poems. Sometimes she would sing, or play music. Her baby always responded to Queen – I Want to Ride My Bicycle - by kicking like mad. This made Liz laugh. It was her favourite time of the day.
This was also the time of day when she imagined being inside a ‘bubble’ at the bottom of the sea. It was a trick her yoga teacher Diane, the mother of three, had suggested. Liz was practising for labour, and even though it was impossible to imagine what it would be like, still she tried.
“When the wave of a contraction approaches,” Diane said, “keep your bubble on the stormy sea bed. Don’t let it be swept away. Keep control. The contraction will pass, and you will still be where you want to be, in a familiar place, inside your bubble. The main problem is keeping it up; treating every contraction, no matter how strong it is, with the same determination.”
Liz noticed how her baby responded to her relaxing times and her anxious times. When Liz was anxious she was aware the same raised levels of adrenalin circulating through her blood, also circulated through her baby’s bloodstream. Did this mean that her baby also felt restless, or even frightened?
Liz realized she couldn’t prevent herself from being anxious some of the time, but she could balance this in the best way possible by creating some peaceful and some happy times for herself and her baby. With this in mind, as well as her favourite rock music, she also played Mozart and Beethoven, much to her father's delight.
About a month after she had come to stay with her mum and dad in Wellonsey, when she was 20
weeks pregnant, Liz had an unexpected, cathartic experience.
She was in her bedroom. The bedroom had been her own since she was two years old. She knew the dark shadowed corners, the creaking floorboard and the thin crack on the wall beside her bed, which took the shape of a seagull, a vampire bat, or twin mountain peaks; whichever it chose to be.
The crack always returned, slowly claiming its place, even when it had been filled before being painted over.
She knew about the old man, the one who had died there before her family had come to the house. It no longer worried her, but, when she was a young child she had often hidden beneath the covers, listening, and afraid to look out.
Liz was 11 when she found the photograph, wrapped in faded blue velvet, under the loose floorboard. It was a photograph of young couple. They were dressed in old-fashioned clothes; immortal in sepia, sitting closely together, but not touching, on a checked rug, beneath a spreading tree. Their shadows reached long on the ground and became one.
On the back of the photograph was written 'Darling Dora and Bill.1928'. Bill bore a remarkable resemblance to Andrew Penn, a boy from the fourth form when she was at school, who all the girls in her class, including Liz, fancied like mad.
Liz spent many hours studying the
photograph, romancing, imagining. She decided this was the man who had died, there in that room; that her bedroom had been his, and Dora was his secret love.
After this, fear of the shadowy corners left her; Bill became her ally. Liz confided in him. She gazed from the window. Had Bill stood here, watching the same trees bud and blossom, and the clouds swell and dissolve in the same sky? Now the photograph was framed and on the wall, the seagull crack beneath it, a cupboard of stored memories.
On this day, nearly four months ago now, Liz, at 20 weeks pregnant, had been sitting on her bed. Her mum and dad were at work. It was mid-afternoon and a shaft of sunlight was caught and refracted through a glass paperweight on the window ledge. The resulting rainbow settled like a multi-hued halo around another photograph on the wall.
The photograph was of Liz, when she was around ten months old. Liz had felt her own baby move, she was sure, for the first time that same week, and, while she lay on her bed watching the rainbow on the image, her baby moved inside her again.
Between Liz on the bed and Liz in the photograph was a lifetime. What did life have in store for this baby growing inside?
Liz cried, silently at first; then she began to shake, and a palpable grief swelled and grew until, in
resonant sobs, it burst out of her filling the room with her crying. The force of her grief was so powerful that Liz was rendered beyond inhibition. Sobbing became wailing and tears stung hot on her face, salty on her lips. All of the injustice and pain she had suffered at the will of Jack rolled on through her thoughts, one after the other, even forgotten things. Like a moving picture, they were all there, a dream, a nightmare from another time and place.
As the tears and the sobs subsided Liz became aware of the noise she had been making and thought about the neighbours, but this did not trouble her for more than a moment because, although she was suddenly very tired, she felt light. She was calm for the first time in years and it was wonderful. That calm feeling stayed with her for days afterwards.

Now, with five weeks to go before her baby was due, when Liz thought about Jack she remained calm. She was free.
She loved her waxing, gibbous belly and the new life developing inside. It replaced the black hole that had been her relationship with Jack. Her life had entered a new orbit.
What difference would it make if Jack had met someone else? None, she had her own life now. She knew she was free of him. Their relationship was over and in time he would be forgotten.
But her innocent baby would always be there to remind Liz of how she could never be completely free of Jack. He was, and always would be, her baby’s biological father.


Chapter Seven

An Invitation


It was Friday and Chrissy had been shopping. Everything she needed for the barbecue was in the boot of her car, except for the bread. She would buy that tomorrow.
She waited beside the school gates, with the other parents, and studied their footwear to pass the time; flimsy sandals, suede loafers, training shoes and high heels. Her own feet looked quite pretty in her new sandals. It was a shame about the blisters; they burned like glowing cinders under newly laid coal.
Some of the women were chatting. All of the men stood alone. Most eyes were fixed on the entrance. Chrissie’s feet were killing her, she had had enough. She slipped her shoes off, and the pleasure she felt in the touch of the cool grass between her toes reached all the way up to her eyes.
She watched Natalie cross the playground with amusement. She was deeply engrossed in animated conversation with a boy of her own height. Natalie was growing so quickly. Her fifth birthday was
a couple of months away. The boy was unfamiliar to Chrissy; a new friend for Natalie. His hair was unruly and black and contrasted with Natalie’s short blond curls.
“Mummy,” she called excitedly when she saw Chrissy.
“Mummy, can Jonathan come to our barbecue tomorrow? Please, please.”
“Well I’m sure he’s very welcome, Natalie,” Chrissy replied, “but we will have to ask his mummy.”
“I’ll ask my daddy,” the boy said, a delighted expression on his face, and he led them to a man standing by the railing.
Chrissie’s attempt to introduce herself in her usual business-like manner; the one she reserved for all men she had never met before; the one which meant, “I am equal to you, keep your distance and don’t give me any bullshit,” was foiled by the need to tread carefully in her bare feet, swap her shoes to her left hand in order to greet the boys father, and unexpectedly, by finding herself looking at a man with an interesting face. She decided to put her shoes on. Her feet were hot and her shoes were tight. The skin was dragged from a blister on her heel.