Go to Sleep by Helen Walsh Page A

ill and he’d been keeping house and home. Yet when I phoned to check, I had this horrible sump in my guts – the crushing sensation he was there in his front room, shaking his head to tell his sister not to put me through. I fought the paranoia back down; there’d be a simple explanation. We’d been looking forward to Bonfire Night in the park; we’d even started talking about what we’d be getting each other for Christmas. Ruben had put his arm round me, walking me back from town the other night and although he had not yet once referred to me as his girl in all the time we’d been seeing each other there was a sense thatwe were closer, somehow. We were a proper item. I carried on calling.
    By the Wednesday, I’d become obsessed with the idea that he was seeing someone else. The thought consumed me so utterly that I found myself needing to be vindicated. I no longer cared how much it would hurt me. I wanted to trap him, make him squirm; let him know how little he now meant to me. I went to his work, but he hid in the kitchen. I went to his house, and nobody would answer. Three brothers, two sisters and his mother all at home, and not one of them could hear the doorbell.
    The last time I went to Ruben’s – the time I made up my mind I’d call no more – I had another strong sensation he was there, he was watching me. Yet when I jerked myself round, glaring up at every window in the house, nothing. There was no Ruben; there was nobody.
    I was numb, then angry, then just plain sad to have been used like that. To have let myself be used so. I’d been asking for it. Playing Let’s Pretend in my big house, performing for him; bending myself to his will. I’d been asking for it, right from the start.
    And if it hadn’t been for Mum, I would have grieved on and on. But she knew, my mum. She came and sat next to me on my bed and asked, in that way of hers, if everything was okay and the rapture of confession overpowered me. I sobbed and sobbed and out it all poured. And Mumjust sat there and held me, stroked my hair, told me it would all be fine. But it wasn’t fine. Somewhere out there, Ruben was walking the streets with his new squeeze. His true love.

11
    I have been up for almost twenty-four hours now. I am tetchy and anxious. Twice I have been to the hospital, twice they have sent me home – the latest, just now, dismissed with no little irritation by the matron herself.
    ‘What you’re getting isn’t much worse than period pain,’ she said, smiling as if to make me feel foolish. I wanted to slap her, but through gritted teeth told her that, with all due respect, this was several degrees worse than the Curse. I splayed my arms out on the reception desk to support my unwieldy mass. Matron nodded over to a woman being rushed through in a wheelchair, a projectile of foul language spewing across the room: ‘Now
that’s
labour pain, Mummy!’ she exclaimed, gleeful almost. ‘That’s when you really know!’
    ‘But I
am
in labour,’ I protested. ‘My waters broke sixteen hours ago.’
    She simpered through her exasperation, arched an eyebrow and took me through to a room.
    ‘Here. Lie down.’ She examined me briefly, and a little roughly. ‘Your waters are still intact, Rachel. You must have had a little accident. And your contractions are still irregular. You haven’t had one now for, what, forty minutes?’
    ‘No . . . but they were five minutes apart when I checked in before.’
    ‘This
happens
, dear! You’ve still got a way to go. I’m sorry.’ I didn’t move. She eyed me intently, her tiny blue eyes piercing through me. For a beat, I think she’s relenting – but then the firm set of the jaw, and the eye contact is over. ‘There isn’t a bed for you, just now. This one is needed. You can sit in the waiting area if you are really refusing to go back home.’
    She met my gaze, no room for negotiation. I sighed hard, pushed myself up.
    ‘Of course I’m not
refusing
.’ Another big sigh.