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Hannah follows her into the little office and sits on the hard plastic chair, shrugging off her coat for what she already knows is coming. She feels a bead of sweat run down the hollow of her spine and squirms against the chair back to stop the tickle.
“Got your notes?” the midwife asks.
Hannah nods and passes over the folder.
“And your sample?”
“Oh God.” Hannah puts her hand to her forehead. “I’m so sorry—in all the kerfuffle I totally forgot—”
“It’s okay, you can do one after. So we are…” She looks at a calendar by her desk. “Twenty-two plus four, is that right? Okay. Let’s get you up on the couch and we’ll measure the bump.”
Nodding again, Hannah moves across to the couch and lies down, trying not to ruck up the giant roll of toilet paper stretched across the slippery cover. Her dress is stretchy jersey, and lying like this she can see the still faintly surprising bulge of her stomach, smooth and round beneath the fabric. The midwife takes out a tape measure and measures from her ribs to her pubic bone, then she slips a stethoscope up under Hannah’s dress with a deft movement and listens for a moment before nodding and writing some figures down on Hannah’s notes.
“All good. You’re measuring right on track for twenty-two weeks, and baby’s heartbeat is nice and strong too. Right, sit up.” She helps Hannah upright with a strong, pale arm, and waits while Hannah swings her legs round and off the couch. “Let’s do your blood pressure now.”
She wraps the plastic cuff around Hannah’s arm, chilly against Hannah’s still hot skin, and pumps it up. She presses the stethoscope against Hannah’s inner arm and deflates… counting. Then a little frown creases her brow.
“Hmm, give that a minute and we’ll have another go. Why don’t you try for that sample while we’re waiting. There’s a loo in the hall.”
She hands Hannah a clear vial and nods towards the door, and Hannah obediently slides off the couch and makes her way across the corridor, feeling a little disquieted. In the loo she shuts her eyes, trying to drive out all thoughts of April and Ryan and Geraint, but she can’t seem to banish them and they crowd round her, intruding on her thoughts, pushing into this time that should be about her and her baby.
At last, though, the sample pot is close enough to full and she reenters the little office and passes the vial across, with the faint sense of embarrassment that never seems to leave the act of handing over a still-warm container of your own urine, no matter how many times she does it. The midwife dips a stick into the pot, reads something off, and nods.
“Very good. Nothing to worry about there. Now, let’s do that BP again and then we’re all done.”
Hannah sticks out her arm and the midwife slides on the cuff and inflates it again, this time much tighter, or maybe it’s just that it’s for the second time, Hannah’s not sure, all she knows is that it’s no longer just faintly uncomfortable but actually verging on painful.
There is silence. Hannah can feel the blood rushing in her arm, trying to get past the constriction, and hear the midwife breathing heavily through her mouth. It sounds like she has a cold and her nose is blocked.
Then the woman straightens and undoes the cuff.
“Okay, well it’s probably nothing to worry about, but it is still quite high.”
“I did run here,” Hannah points out, rolling her sleeve back down. She says nothing about the shock she had with Geraint before the midwife called, but she’s uncomfortably aware that it probably didn’t help.
“Let’s get you back next week for a check, and I’m sure it’ll all be back to normal.”
“Next week?” Hannah is dismayed. The normal routine is monthly. The fact that this is considered worrying enough to upgrade her to a weekly visit has unsettled her. “Are you sure?”
“So that takes us to the twenty-first… I can’t do two o’clock,” the midwife is saying, running her finger down her appointment book, “in fact the afternoon is completely blocked out, but I could see you at nine forty a.m. Does that work?”
Hannah sighs. She nods and takes out her phone to input the appointment.
“Sure. But I’m certain it was just because I was running late.”
“I’m sure you’re right. But better safe than sorry, eh? Now, go home and relax.”
Hannah nods, but as she leaves, the thought of Geraint’s email pops into her head like an unwanted intruder, and she finds herself thinking wistfully, If only it was that simple.
BEFORE
“I can’t do it.” Hannah stood in the center of the set living room, twisting her fingers together, nausea and dread mingling in the pit of her stomach. “I can’t. I can’t go down there and find out in front of everyone.”
“Fine. I’ll go.” April stood up and stretched luxuriantly. “I’ll text you. Castanets for a first, thumbs-up for a second, or skull and crossbones for a third.”
“Dickhead,” Hannah said, but she couldn’t help laughing. Somehow April’s attitude was exactly what she needed—a reminder not to take this too seriously. It wasn’t the end of the world, even if it felt like it. What made it worse was the unfairness of it all: April hadn’t even done collections—it turned out her professor didn’t believe in setting them in the first year. Will and Ryan had just done some kind of extended essay and got the marks back the same week. Hugh, on the other hand, had gone off white and trembling in his academic gown to sit a proper exam paper, and had been checking his pigeonhole every morning to see if the results had come through yet.
Hannah wasn’t sure how she had been expecting to get her results—a slip of paper in her pigeonhole, or an email from Dr. Myers. Instead, without warning, she’d had a group text from Rubye, one of the girls at Dr. Myers’s drinks party. Marks are up on Dr. M’s office door. Rx And that was it. No photo. No hint of how anyone had done. And everyone doing English seemed to have received it—which meant there was a very good chance they were all down there now peering at her name, while she was up here too scared to go and look.
