Page 63 of Little Wing
I put my hand over Jessie’s over you.
‘I wish I hadn’t done it,’ I whispered. ‘And I wish it hadn’t been with him.’
My tear dropped onto my hand and we looked at it as we might a crystal ball.
‘Don’t go upsetting yourself,’ Jessie said and she put her arm around my shoulder.
I looked at Jessie. ‘Sometimes,’ I told her, ‘sometimes I’m so scared I can’t breathe. Sometimes I’m so upset I can’t cry. Other times, though, I’m so at peace, so excited that I float above the world.’
‘I wonder if it’s a boy or a girl,’ Jessie said.
‘I don’t know how it’s going to get out,’ I said because just then the thought dawned on me for the first time.
‘Same way as it got in,’ she said.
‘I know that – but. I just don’t know how an entire baby is going to get out.’
I started to cry again. ‘Is it going to hurt? Will everything be OK?’
I didn’t expect Jessie to have the answers but these were questions I couldn’t exactly ask Iain.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘We were all born at home and certainly itsoundslike it hurts. I’ve heard my mother cry and holler and bellow like a cow and pant like a dog – but there’s the joy and peace that follow so quickly and that carries louder and for longer.’ She looked at me quizzically. ‘Can’t be that bad,’ she said. ‘After me she went on and had another four. Have you not seen the nurse yet?’
‘The nurse? No?’
‘Aye – you’ll want to see the nurse.’
‘How will I find her?’
Jessie laughed. ‘Oh, she’ll find you.’
And she did.
Eventually.
It took a couple more meetings on our boulder along am Bealach with Jessie asking if I’d seen the nurse and me shaking my head.
‘You need to tell Mr Buchanan,’ she said.
And it struck me then that Iain and I have not spoken once about the day I’ll give birth. We just rub along in the here and now. My actual baby is as unreal to him as, currently, it is to me.
‘I don’t know how to,’ I said and we looked at each other, worried.
But then, Iain told me that he’d spoken to Jessie’s mother. He told me she’d come to the house and given him a ticking-off for not seeing to it sooner.
‘I’m sorry, leannan,’ Iain said to me last night. ‘This is new ground for me as well as you.’
He said tomorrow you have a visitor; tomorrow you’ll meet Fire.
Fire?
Mid-morning there was a knock at the door and I’d forgotten about this conversation. I thought maybe it was the postman. I opened the door and there she was. Around forty years old with her hair cut short and the most beautiful curls the colour of liquid chocolate. She wore a little hat on the back of her head and a uniform with a white collar, white cuffs, a wide belt, one of those upside-down watches and a special badge too. There was a small black car at the end of the path and I didn’t know how I hadn’t heard it. I had been drawing at the kitchen table, a million miles away.
‘I’m Nurse Keaton,’ she said. ‘Some people call me Nurse Fire. As in Sophia – which is my given name. All the kiddies like to say they are playing with Fire. How should you like to call me?’
I was so flabbergasted by all of it that I just stood there, in the doorway, gawping at her.
‘Well, you can decide once you know me a little better. May I come in? It’s lovely to meet you – and I’d like to get to know Baby too.’
