Amazing experience! Like fuck. - Excerpt from Primrose Hill
In my first published novel Primrose Hill set in stifling London in the 1990s, teenager Si is living with his Mum Louise, who is pregnant. There's no sign of dad Andy.
Then the time comes for baby to arrive but the pain comes first and so Louise abandons her plans for a candlelit home birth. At the hospital, alone with his distraught mum, the stage is set for Si to step up to the plate …I like this scene because the book is essentially a comedy - albeit a dark, violent and –almost - a tragic one!
I’d never wanted to be there, but my mum said it’d be this amazing experience. I never wanted to be there, but who else was around to do it? There was no father in waiting to say hello to this still invisible child after it’d elbowed and clawed its way into the light, forcing itself headfirst through the living doorway of my yelling mum.
Amazing experience! Like fuck.
It wasn’t much like the plan my mum’d come up with. In that, Mozart played softly in the background, the scented steam rose from the soothing bath, my mum got in touch which the great mystical production of life etc. My nan, won over (even made slightly tearful) by the great universal process, stopped making bitchy remarks and made instead cups of herbal tea. A couple of friendly, homely, homebirth-loving midwives would be sitting around chatting and I – I thought at least I might be able to hold hands, mop brows, do the business, be like this essential supportive person in the team.
I just felt so lonely. Nobody was there. There was this midwife coming in and out, but she was mostly always going out. My nan wasn’t there because my mum was too embarrassed to admit she’d chucked in the towel and run into hospital at the first sign of unbearable agony, leaving a trail of overturned birthing stools and unlit candles in her wake. The worst thing was, after all that, she was still waiting for the anaesthetist to give her a paralysing injection two hours after I got there. He was a busy man, apparently.
So here we were, in pain, in hospital. The walls were papered with little rose buds, yellow, to give it that “you could be in your bedroom at home” feel, but I can’t say they fooled me. Stainless steel machines gathered around the bed like anxious family members, beeping indiscretely, gave the real game away. At constant intervals my mum clapped a ridiculous rubber mask over her face and became an image from the second world war. Gas and air didn’t seem to do much for her painwise, but her eyes glazed over more and more like she smoking a really big powerful spliff and from time to time I thought she was no longer really there until another contraction jerked her ruthlessly back to life, her red hair flying forward.
Then she would scream at the midwife, if she happened to’ve dropped by: “Where’s the fucking anaethetist? If I wanted to die I’d have stayed at home!”
And the midwife said, ironically: “You’re doing well, Louise, you’re doing well.”
And I was alone, perched on the edge of my chair with my hands between my knees like a child not allowed to touch expensive things, watching in silent shock what seemed to me a fight to the death between my foul-mouthed mother and the frantic struggling being inside her thrashing around, so desperate to break out, like a caught bird trying like crazy to free itself from human hands. It was like she hardly cared I was there. In the two hours after I got there all she’d said to me, in a one-off lull between the storms, was (through her teeth, in a less than friendly way): “This reminds me of having you”; that and: “Don’t touch me,” when the midwife, trying to give me something useful to do, gave me a flannel to wipe her face. Apart from that, just the endless swearing, not even at me, just at the midwife and the flowery wall.
The midwife spoke to me: “Are you all right there?”
“Fine.” I was trapped by the plot and had to sit it out to the end. I couldn’t even look away – I was glued to my seat.
“Why don’t you go get something to eat?” she asked abruptly, on her next flying visit. “The canteen’s downstairs. I’ll wait here till you get back.”
I looked at her suspiciously. I thought maybe something was about to happen. I wasn’t planning to miss the climax of the action, not after all this. I didn’t want the kid arriving naked and without luggage on our doorstep with nobody home.
“Go on,” said my mum. “It’s all right.” It made me jump to hear her voice and see her looking at me. But as quickly as she’d come back to me she was gone again, plunging into the front line.
I was starving. I wandered into the canteen, a refugee from the war, my legs floppy and my shoulders stiff. The food was a load of shite, dodgy mince pies and chilled sandwiches in plastic boxes cold and soggy with condensation. I bought a kitkat and a strawberry yoghurt and sat down at one of the canteen tables where the yellow formica curled up slightly on one corner and someone’d written ‘I’ll be back’ five times on the surface with a green felt pen. I peeled the top off the yoghurt and looked up and guess who I saw, walking in, with his fucking nerve...
Then the time comes for baby to arrive but the pain comes first and so Louise abandons her plans for a candlelit home birth. At the hospital, alone with his distraught mum, the stage is set for Si to step up to the plate …I like this scene because the book is essentially a comedy - albeit a dark, violent and –almost - a tragic one!
I’d never wanted to be there, but my mum said it’d be this amazing experience. I never wanted to be there, but who else was around to do it? There was no father in waiting to say hello to this still invisible child after it’d elbowed and clawed its way into the light, forcing itself headfirst through the living doorway of my yelling mum.
Amazing experience! Like fuck.
It wasn’t much like the plan my mum’d come up with. In that, Mozart played softly in the background, the scented steam rose from the soothing bath, my mum got in touch which the great mystical production of life etc. My nan, won over (even made slightly tearful) by the great universal process, stopped making bitchy remarks and made instead cups of herbal tea. A couple of friendly, homely, homebirth-loving midwives would be sitting around chatting and I – I thought at least I might be able to hold hands, mop brows, do the business, be like this essential supportive person in the team.
I just felt so lonely. Nobody was there. There was this midwife coming in and out, but she was mostly always going out. My nan wasn’t there because my mum was too embarrassed to admit she’d chucked in the towel and run into hospital at the first sign of unbearable agony, leaving a trail of overturned birthing stools and unlit candles in her wake. The worst thing was, after all that, she was still waiting for the anaesthetist to give her a paralysing injection two hours after I got there. He was a busy man, apparently.
So here we were, in pain, in hospital. The walls were papered with little rose buds, yellow, to give it that “you could be in your bedroom at home” feel, but I can’t say they fooled me. Stainless steel machines gathered around the bed like anxious family members, beeping indiscretely, gave the real game away. At constant intervals my mum clapped a ridiculous rubber mask over her face and became an image from the second world war. Gas and air didn’t seem to do much for her painwise, but her eyes glazed over more and more like she smoking a really big powerful spliff and from time to time I thought she was no longer really there until another contraction jerked her ruthlessly back to life, her red hair flying forward.
Then she would scream at the midwife, if she happened to’ve dropped by: “Where’s the fucking anaethetist? If I wanted to die I’d have stayed at home!”
And the midwife said, ironically: “You’re doing well, Louise, you’re doing well.”
And I was alone, perched on the edge of my chair with my hands between my knees like a child not allowed to touch expensive things, watching in silent shock what seemed to me a fight to the death between my foul-mouthed mother and the frantic struggling being inside her thrashing around, so desperate to break out, like a caught bird trying like crazy to free itself from human hands. It was like she hardly cared I was there. In the two hours after I got there all she’d said to me, in a one-off lull between the storms, was (through her teeth, in a less than friendly way): “This reminds me of having you”; that and: “Don’t touch me,” when the midwife, trying to give me something useful to do, gave me a flannel to wipe her face. Apart from that, just the endless swearing, not even at me, just at the midwife and the flowery wall.
The midwife spoke to me: “Are you all right there?”
“Fine.” I was trapped by the plot and had to sit it out to the end. I couldn’t even look away – I was glued to my seat.
“Why don’t you go get something to eat?” she asked abruptly, on her next flying visit. “The canteen’s downstairs. I’ll wait here till you get back.”
I looked at her suspiciously. I thought maybe something was about to happen. I wasn’t planning to miss the climax of the action, not after all this. I didn’t want the kid arriving naked and without luggage on our doorstep with nobody home.
“Go on,” said my mum. “It’s all right.” It made me jump to hear her voice and see her looking at me. But as quickly as she’d come back to me she was gone again, plunging into the front line.
I was starving. I wandered into the canteen, a refugee from the war, my legs floppy and my shoulders stiff. The food was a load of shite, dodgy mince pies and chilled sandwiches in plastic boxes cold and soggy with condensation. I bought a kitkat and a strawberry yoghurt and sat down at one of the canteen tables where the yellow formica curled up slightly on one corner and someone’d written ‘I’ll be back’ five times on the surface with a green felt pen. I peeled the top off the yoghurt and looked up and guess who I saw, walking in, with his fucking nerve...
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