Shelley watched them, clutching the door frame as the first contraction bit down hard.
Jack seemed frozen.
Harry shouted again.
Hanna was pointing to the barn and yelling.
Shelley gave a quick pant. Hers wouldn’t be the first baby born in a stable, she reminded herself, provided she could get there.
The next contraction clawed so harshly she slumped to her knees.
She looked up just in time to see Jack disappearing into the barn.
Present Day
This wasn’t a place Vivi knew, or a feeling she recognized, or a sound she could identify through the strangeness of this elusive reality. Thump, wheeze, thump, click, bleep. On and on, never stopping, never changing: soft, loud, lilting, dropping … There was a fog, not in her eyes, yes, in her eyes, but in her head too, deep inside her brain, spreading all the way through her right out to the edges of her vision, circling brief moments of clarity in a dim, misty halo.
She blinked slowly, and felt a clutching sensation around her mouth. She thought she might be standing on the corner of the Fulham Road talking on the phone, waiting for an ambulance to pass.
The siren wailed into silence; voices rose and rippled across an invisible divide. Someone was speaking her name. ‘Vivienne, can you hear me? Vivi. Vivienne.’
The fog closed in, colourless and opaque, and everything went quiet again as she floated back into darkness, away from the strange sounds and confusion of pain.
A while later Vivi’s eyes flickered open again. She could see a vague, bluish light and blinked to try to focus on it. She felt dazzled and trapped, pinned inside a place she couldn’t distinguish. She tried to make sense of the peculiar noises around her: heavy whispers; loud, desperate breaths. An unsteady hush was punctured by bleeps; grazed by a constant, low-pitched hum.
She moved her pupils to the edge of their sockets. She was lying down, that much was clear, and without trying she knew she couldn’t get up. In the semi-darkness her gaze reached the long, loose limbs of someone sprawled on a chair. It was her brother, Mark. She’d been talking to him on the phone while on the corner of the Fulham Road. A siren shrilled as an ambulance went by …
Now Mark was here, beside her, his head and body slumped awkwardly as he slept. He seemed younger than his nineteen years, more like sixteen, although the stubble on his chin and shadows, like bruises, around his closed eyes aged him again.
There was someone beside him, in another chair. He was asleep too, his handsome yet grey face resting on one hand.
It was her stepfather, Gil, here to wish her happy birthday. He’d probably brought flowers. He always gave her flowers.
She tried to speak, but something was filling her mouth. She wanted to take it away, but her hand wouldn’t move, weighed down by something she couldn’t see. Her tongue was heavy and too weak to clear the blockage.
Confusion and fear descended on her, like clouds gently bursting with the threat of more to come. This was a hospital, she realized. She was in hospital, but why? What had happened to her? She felt a sudden, desperate need for her mother, so powerful that she wanted to cry out for her, but her voice was a small, stifled moan inside the mask over her mouth.
Mark’s eyes opened, and as he saw her watching him he sat forward so quickly he almost slipped from the chair.
‘Vivi?’ he croaked urgently. ‘Oh God, Vivi,’ and he started to cry. ‘Dad,’ he muttered over his shoulder. ‘Dad!’
Gil woke with a start and shot to his feet almost before he knew what he was doing. He looked rumpled and afraid. ‘Vivi, sweetie,’ he murmured, coming forward. ‘Oh, Vivi.’
A nurse suddenly swept into the room, summoned by only she knew what. She slipped in front of Mark and Gil, blocking them from Vivi’s view, but her face was kind, her voice reassuring.
‘I’ll get your mother,’ Gil said, and a moment later he was gone.
Mark stood silently watching the adjustment of tubes and patches, the checking of readings and making of notes on a tablet. The small, plump woman was calm and efficient, smiling as she smoothed the hair from Vivienne’s forehead to inspect her eyes.
‘Hello, Vivi Shager,’ she whispered in a soft, accented voice. ‘Nice to meet you.’
Vivi couldn’t answer, wasn’t even sure what she’d say if she could. It was hard to think, to register everything that was happening, to move beyond the terrible pain in her chest.
A face appeared beside the nurse, gaunt, pale and trying to be calm. As Vivi’s eyes locked to her mother’s she felt safe for a moment, the way she had as a child when Gina had moved in to make everything all right, but then the feeling was gone again.
Gina’s voice, her tone as she said, ‘I’m here,’ provided another brief lifeline, but Vivi didn’t know how to grasp it.
Flashes of memory were showing themselves now – the brightness of sunshine in Beaufort House, friends’ faces turning from laughter to confusion and horror; a stranger thumping her chest, sirens wailing – and as the stultifying reality of it overwhelmed her she closed her eyes again, trying to shut out the fear.
A week passed in frightening and painful stages; a slow and often doubtful return from a near-fatal myocardial infarction – in other words a major heart attack. Vivi had been told more than once that it was lucky a doctor had been at hand, and that she’d been so close to the hospital, because every second had counted.
Apparently she’d suffered two cardiac arrests in the ambulance, and had twice been brought back to life.
She had no memory of that short, frantic journey to A & E, although some residue of it seemed sometimes to filter into her dreams. What had come next, her arrival, the emergency treatment, also remained a blank, but she’d been told about the resuscitation efforts, the urgent transfer to a cardiac catheter lab, how her poor, struggling heart had collapsed into near-catastrophic failure.
She was in the High Dependency Unit now, having been moved from Intensive Care two days ago, though she wasn’t sure she could remember it happening. She remained weak and sometimes disoriented, as though she was tuning in and out of someone else’s world. The monitors she was attached to registered her heart’s functions, from its rhythm, to blood flow, to pressure, while the drainage tubes in her chest and bladder performed their unjolly, but necessary duties.
In more lucid moments she felt as though she’d been slammed by a speeding truck. It hurt to breathe, to move, even to think. In some ways thinking was the worst for it invariably took her to a place of panic, to a dark, unnatural world she might never now escape from.
People came and went:
