An old woman, a fat old woman dressed all in green, comes into the room and sits beside Jeannie. She says to A., who is sitting on the other side of Jeannie, “That is a good watch. They don’t make watches like that any more.” She is referring to his gold pocket watch, one of his few extravagances, which is on the night table. Then she places her hand on Jeannie’s belly to feel the contraction. “This is good,” she says; her accent is Swedish or German. “This, I call a contraction. Before, it was nothing.” Jeannie can no longer remember having seen her before. “Good. Good.”

“When will I have it?” Jeannie asks, when she can talk, when she is no longer counting.

The old woman laughs. Surely that laugh, those tribal hands, have presided over a thousand beds, a thousand kitchen tables… “A long time yet,” she says. “Eight, ten hours.”

“But I’ve been doing this for twelve hours already,” Jeannie says.

“Not hard labour,” the woman says. “Not good, like this.”

Jeannie settles into herself for the long wait. At the moment she can’t remember why she wanted to have a baby in the first place. That decision was made by someone else, whose motives are now unclear. She remembers the way women who had babies used to smile at one another, mysteriously, as if there was something they knew that she didn’t, the way they would casually exclude her from their frame of reference. What was the knowledge, the mystery, or was having a baby really no more inexplicable than having a car accident or an orgasm? (But these too were indescribable, events of the body, all of them; why should the mind distress itself trying to find a language for them?) She has sworn she will never do that to any woman without children, engage in those passwords and exclusions. She’s old enough, she’s been put through enough years of it to find it tiresome and cruel.

But—and this is the part of Jeannie that goes with the talisman hidden in her bag, not with the part that longs to build kitchen cabinets and smoke hams—she is, secretly, hoping for a mystery. Something more than this, something else, a vision. After all she is risking her life, though it’s not too likely she will die. Still, some women do. Internal bleeding, shock, heart failure, a mistake on the part of someone, a nurse, a doctor. She deserves a vision, she deserves to be allowed to bring something back with her from this dark place into which she is now rapidly descending.

She thinks momentarily about the other woman. Her motives, too, are unclear. Why doesn’t she want to have a baby? Has she been raped, does she have ten other children, is she starving? Why hasn’t she had an abortion? Jeannie doesn’t know, and in fact it no longer matters why. Uncross your fingers, Jeannie thinks to her. Her face, distorted with pain and terror, floats briefly behind Jeannie’s eyes before it too drifts away.

Jeannie tries to reach down to the baby, as she has many times before, sending waves of love, colour, music, down through her arteries to it, but she finds she can no longer do this. She can no longer feel the baby as a baby, its arms and legs poking, kicking, turning. It has collected itself together, it’s a hard sphere, it does not have time right now to listen to her. She’s grateful for this because she isn’t sure anyway how good the message would be. She no longer has control of the numbers either, she can no longer see them, although she continues mechanically to count. She realizes she has practised for the wrong thing, A. squeezing her knee was nothing, she should have practised for this, whatever it is.

“Slow down,” A. says. She’s on her side now, he’s holding her hand. “Slow it right down.”

“I can’t, I can’t do it, I can’t do this.”

“Yes you can.”

“Will I sound like that?”

“Like what?” A. says. Perhaps he can’t hear it: it’s the other woman, in the room next door or the room next door to that. She’s screaming and crying, screaming and crying. While she cries she is saying, over and over, “It hurts. It hurts.”

“No, you won’t,” he says. So there is someone, after all.

A doctor comes in, not her own doctor. They want her to turn over on her back.

“I can’t,” she says. “I don’t like it that way.” Sounds have receded, she has trouble hearing them. She turns over and the doctor gropes with her rubber-gloved hand. Something wet and hot flows over her thighs.

“It was just ready to break,” the doctor says. “All I had to do was touch it. Four centimetres,” she says to A.

“Only four?” Jeannie says. She feels cheated; they must be wrong. The doctor says her own doctor will be called in time. Jeannie is outraged at them. They have not understood, but it’s too late to say this and she slips back into the dark place, which is not hell, which is more like being inside, trying to get out. Out, she says or thinks. Then she is floating, the numbers are gone, if anyone told her to get up, go out of the room, stand on her head, she would do it. From minute to minute she comes up again, grabs for air.

“You’re hyperventilating,” A. says. “Slow it down.” He is rubbing her back now, hard, and she takes his hand and shoves it viciously farther down, to the right place, which is not the right place as soon as his hand is there. She remembers a story she read once, about the Nazis tying the legs of Jewish women together during labour. She never really understood before how that could kill you.

A nurse appears with a needle. “I don’t want it,” Jeannie says.

“Don’t be hard on yourself,” the nurse says. “You don’t have to go through pain like that.” What pain? Jeannie thinks. When there is no pain she feels nothing, when there is pain, she feels nothing because there is no she. This, finally, is the disappearance of language. You don’t remember afterwards, she has been told by almost everyone.

Jeannie comes out of a contraction, gropes for control. “Will it hurt the baby?” she says.

“It’s a mild analgesic,” the doctor says. “We wouldn’t allow anything that would hurt the baby.” Jeannie doesn’t believe this. Nevertheless she is jabbed, and the doctor is right, it is very mild, because it doesn’t seem to do a thing for Jeannie, though A. later tells her she has slept briefly between contractions.

Suddenly she sits bolt upright. She is wide awake and lucid. “You have to ring that bell right now,” she says. “This baby is being born.”

A. clearly doesn’t believe her. “I can feel it, I can feel the head,” she says. A. pushes the button for the call bell. A nurse appears and checks, and now everything is happening too soon, nobody is ready. They set off down the hall, the nurse wheeling. Jeannie feels fine. She watches the corridors, the edges of everything shadowy because she doesn’t have her glasses on. She hopes A. will remember to bring them. They pass another doctor.

“Need me?” she asks.

“Oh no,” the nurse answers breezily. “Natural childbirth.”

Jeannie realizes that this woman must have been the anaesthetist. “What?” she says, but it’s too late now, they are in the room itself, all those glossy surfaces, tubular strange apparatus like a science fiction movie, and the nurse is telling her to get onto the delivery table. No one else is in the room.

“You must be crazy,” Jeannie says.

“Don’t push,” the nurse says.

“What do you mean?” Jeannie says. This is absurd. Why should she wait, why should the baby wait for them because they’re late?

“Breathe through your mouth,” the nurse says. “Pant,” and Jeannie finally remembers how. When the contraction is over she uses the nurse’s arm as a lever and hauls herself across onto the table.

From somewhere her own doctor materializes, in her doctor suit already, looking even more like Mary Poppins than usual, and Jeannie says, “Bet you weren’t expecting to see me so soon!” The baby is being born when Jeannie said it would, though just three days ago the doctor said it would be at least another week, and this makes Jeannie feel jubilant and smug. Not that she knew, she’d believed the doctor.