bed she observed the twin cocoons that were the babies, swaddled in white, with a disbelieving awe: did I do that?
The hospital was not silent, neither was it dark, although by now the windows were made of black mirrors. Lauren’s reflection had deep shadowed holes where it should have had eyes. A vision of horror. She turned away.
The building had a hum of several different tones forming a drone, a cold chord that wouldn’t resolve. Lauren put her head on her pillow and realised that one of the singers was her hospital bed, which harmonised dissonant with the slightly lower, much more powerful hum of the heating. Then there was the hum of her bedside lamp, which had a buzzy texture that she actually found quite soothing. She closed her eyes, still propped in a sitting position with the bright lamp blasting through her eyelids. She breathed deeply in and out, three, four times. Sleep was coming. She’d waited so long for this.
A whimper from one of the babies struck through her thin slumber with an urgency that felt physical. Her eyes were forced to open, but every time she blinked she could see a backdrop of red with dark streaks where a map of the veins in her eyelids had been burned onto her retinas. She batted the lamp away from her face with a clang.
Perhaps he’ll go back to sleep, she thought, with a desperate optimism. Riley’s whimper became a cluck, and then a cluck cluck cluck waaaa, and then she had to take action. One crying baby was enough.
She pulled the trolley as close as it would come, but found she couldn’t lift him. She needed one of her hands to stop her numbed useless lower half falling out of the bed as she leaned over, but two to lift the baby, with a hand under his head and one under his body, as she had been shown. Riley’s mouth was open, his eyes screwed shut, legs starting to stretch out and arms reaching, searching trembling in the air for some resistance, finding none.
Lauren thought about the womb and how it had contained them both, fed them and kept them warm. She felt bad for them, that nature had taken away their loving home and put her there in its place; that they’d been pulled from her uterus and placed in her arms, where she was the only thing standing between them and oblivion, them and failure, them and disappointment. She, who couldn’t even pick up her boy and fill his little tummy, which was now, face it, her only purpose in life.
Morgan heard his brother’s crying. He was shifting in his sleep, not quite awake but he would be soon. Lauren reached out and gathered up the front of Riley’s sleep suit in her fist until he was curled around it tightly in a storks’ bundle. She held her breath and lifted him one-handed, worrying about his head dangling backwards on his elastic neck for the second it took to transport him to her lap. But then she figured, two hours ago during the birth he’d been gripped with metal tongs and pulled by the head with great force on the confidence that that neck, seemingly so fragile and delicate, would bring the rest of him along safely.
As she struggled to feed Riley, Morgan woke up properly and cried with hunger. She listened, helpless, the sound an alarm she couldn’t turn off, a scream wired directly into her body, taking up all of the space in her brain so that she could think of nothing but feeding him, of doing what was necessary to soothe the boy, to make it stop. After a few agitated minutes, she found herself sliding a little finger into the corner of Riley’s mouth to unlatch him. With difficulty, she placed him back in the cot, one-handed, straining crane-like to swap him over with his hungrier brother. For a while there was only the sound of little lips smacking, one baby feeding and the other contemplating until Riley remembered he hadn’t finished his meal and thought that his heart might break.
She fed one while the other demanded to be fed, and went on in this way like Sisyphus, thinking there had to be an end to it but finding that there was not. She pressed the buzzer for help, but when the midwife came she seemed so irritated and abrupt that Lauren didn’t feel she could call again. The night stretched out and jumped forward as her shredded brain tried to doze, to rest and recharge after the labour, the day and night and day of not sleeping and then this night, this long night of lifting and swivelling and feeding and sitting in positions that hurt for scores of minutes too long, her back complaining and her arm muscles torn and her nipples cracking and bleeding and drying out only to be thrust into the hard, wet vice of her baby’s latch. And then, as the drugs from the blessed injection wore off, there was the pain from the destruction of her pelvic floor. Where they had cut her and sewn her, where her mucus membranes had been stretched to the point at which they tore.
She lost track of whether she slept. It seemed to Lauren that she did not, yet she found herself setting one baby down gently in the cot, blinking once and noticing that most of an hour had passed.
The curtain between her bay and the next had been drawn across. The nurses must have brought in another new mum. The twins were quietly dozing, inverted commas curling towards each other, peaceful.
From the other side of the curtain she could hear a cooing, a mother talking to a baby. The voice was low, muttering, somehow unsettling. Lauren couldn’t work out why it sounded odd. She listened for a while longer. Just a woman, murmuring nothings to her baby – why was it troubling her? There were baby sounds too, though this baby sounded like a bird, squawking softly, quacking, chirping to be fed. Then something else, another sound, more like a kitten. Lauren let her eyes close and drifted, dreaming of a woman with a cat and a bird, an old woman all skin and sinew, holding an animal in each hand by the scruff and feeding them worms from a bucket. Both hands full, the old woman used her long black tongue to encircle and trap each worm, pulling the wriggling thing free of the squirming tangle before trailing it into the mouths, the open beak of the bird and the gaping jaws of the kitten. The kitten’s needle teeth nipped at the membrane skin of the creature and it recoiled, panicked, in a futile effort to escape before it was dropped, falling from the mother’s black unfurling tongue across the beak and the jaws of the bird and the cat, each snapping at the fat wet worm until they tore it in two and turned away from each other, mouths working with smacks and gulps, sulkily satisfied with half. The old woman was telling the animals something as they fed, some urgent legacy, the details of which Lauren couldn’t quite catch, whispering, pressing on them the importance that they remember everything she said to them, that their lives depended on it. In the dream, the animals listened for as long as they could, but then they cried out because they needed more food. And as they cried out, the sounds became less like a bird and a cat and more like human babies, a squawk became a cry, the kitten’s meow trailed off to a soft baby whimper. In the dream, the woman held the animals and shushed them as they transformed, rocked them gently as their human forms emerged and then she laid the twin babies gently in the hospital cot.
Lauren’s eyes flew open. The dream lingered – there was a smell of something animal in her nostrils and she shook her head to rid herself of the disturbing images. All was silent except the breathing of her twins and the nearly imperceptible sounds of another set of twins in the next bed. Another set of twins. The woman in the bed next to hers had twins too, she was suddenly sure of it. She listened carefully – two babies snuffling, definitely. What were the chances? The dream forgotten, Lauren was pleased – she wanted to peek around the curtain and say hi but she couldn’t have reached. Besides, it was still the middle of the night. She’d have to wait until morning. Two sets of twins in one day. Maybe that was a hospital record.
Stuck in the bed, her body weakened by the spinal injection, sleep-deprived, sore and exhausted, Lauren consoled herself. At least she’d have someone to talk to now, someone who’d been through something similar. The sun was creeping into the edges of the windows, lending its peach to the white and yellow of the electric light on the ward. Behind the curtain, all fell quiet; the other mother of twins must have fallen asleep. Lauren shut her eyes again, but the moment her eyelids met she could hear the breathy swoosh of her baby’s cheek rubbing up and down on the cot sheet as his little head moved left to right, searching out a nipple. She forced her eyes open, pushed her body into an upright position, braced herself for the pain in her arms as she swivelled and lifted the child to feed.
