After the One by Cass Lester (e book reader free .TXT) 📕

care if they’re bloody Branston Pickles! I’m calling an ambulance.’

‘Charley, you’re overreacting,’ Tara told her. Pam and Angie both vociferously agreed with her, and all three of them started talking at once, telling Charley to calm down, stop panicking and not to bother the ambulance service… until Angie’s waters broke and splattered onto the floor.

Everyone froze.

‘Shit!’ said Tara under her breath.

‘Ah,’ said Angie, visibly forcing herself to keep calm, for Finn’s sake.

‘Mummy done a wee-wee!’ said Finn, scandalised.

‘Don’t worry, everything’s going to be fine,’ said Pam, to nobody in particular, but in an attempt to reassure everybody.

Thirty seconds later, Charley told them the ambulance was on its way. She just bloody well hoped it would arrive before the baby did.

Chapter Thirty-five

Charley paced up and down the shop like a panicking first-time father, anxiously nipping outside every now and again to see if she could see the ambulance. Eventually, after what seemed like hours, she spied a couple of paramedics in their dark green overalls, calmly walking towards her.

Walking? What’s the matter with these people? she thought. ‘Where’s the ambulance?’ she cried, rushing up to them to guide them to the shop.

‘We had to leave it on the double yellows round the corner,’ one of them told her nonchalantly. ‘There was a van in the way.’

For crying out loud! Please, tell me this isn’t happening to me.

Technically of course, it wasn’t happening to Charley, it was happening to Angie.

‘How often are the contractions?’ one of the paramedics asked Angie, once they’d got to their patient. When she replied they were still several minutes apart he simply said, ‘Can you walk to the ambulance?’

‘For goodness’ sake!’ cried Charley. ‘Haven’t you got a wheelchair or something?’

‘I’ll be fine to walk,’ Angie assured her, then she gave Finn a big hug and a kiss, and told him to stay with Tara.

‘Want Baa-Baa!’ wailed Finn. Angie stopped to fish the bedraggled and beloved fluffy sheep out of the changing bag and handed it to her son with a smile. Then, after plonking a kiss on the top of his head, she turned and calmly waddled off with the paramedics, Charley hovering anxiously at her elbow.

Charley had no sense of how long it took to get to the hospital. Every second seemed like ages, and although the calm, relaxed attitude of the medic looking after Angie was probably meant to be reassuring, for some reason it irritated the pants off Charley. She wanted to scream at him, convinced he wasn’t taking the emergency seriously enough. She clung onto Angie’s hand.

By now Angie’s contractions were coming at more regular intervals, and she was frowning in concentration, focusing on controlling her breathing.

‘Have you got a watch?’ the paramedic asked Charley, with infuriating calm.

‘No, but I’ve got a phone.’

‘You might find it useful to time between the contractions,’ he told her.

Charley’s hands trembled as she took her phone out of her back pocket.

‘They usually get Will to do that,’ Angie told her. ‘Although, in all honesty, normally at this stage, I wouldn’t trust him to count to ten!’

I’m not surprised, thought Charley, as her fumbling fingers struggled to set the phone’s clock controls to stopwatch.

Angie gave her arm a comforting squeeze. ‘It’s okay, Charley. You’re doing fine,’ she said with a perfectly straight face.

‘Thanks,’ said Charley in all seriousness.

Angie bit her lip, clearly trying not to laugh.

The ambulance swung into the bay outside the hospital and the paramedics wheeled Angie’s trolley bed to Maternity. Charley hurried alongside her, still clutching her hand. Charley was hoping to God that Will would be there before them, and when they arrived at the maternity unit she frantically scanned the faces of everyone milling around. She couldn’t see him. As soon as they were in a delivery room, and while the midwife was helping with Angie’s cumbersome transfer from the trolley to the hospital bed, Charley texted Will.

Where are you?

Stuck in traffic. Don’t leave her.

I won’t. Promise.

‘Will’s stuck in traffic, so you’ve got to hang on a bit,’ joked Charley.

‘No chance!’ Angie gritted her teeth, bracing herself to cope with the pain of the contraction sweeping over her.

‘It’s the babies who decide when they’re coming. Not us!’ the midwife told Charley cheerfully, then checking Angie’s notes, she added lightly, ‘Even when they’re a little bit early like this one.’

Soon Angie’s contractions were coming thick and fast and it seemed to Charley that she barely had time to recover from one wave of pain before the next one engulfed her. Watching countless episodes of Call the Midwife hadn’t prepared Charley for the reality of being in the same room as a woman actually giving birth. It definitely hadn’t prepared her for the harrowing groans of agony coming from Angie in her final stages of labour, as if her whole body were being torn apart.

Nor did it prepare Charley for the overwhelming, joyous and utterly miraculous moment when the baby finally slithered out, and suddenly, astonishingly, there was a brand-new baby person in the room.

‘Well done, Angie,’ exclaimed the midwife, ‘You’ve got a baby girl!’ as Angie sank back onto the pillow, exhausted and drenched in sweat. Relief and joy surged through Charley and she burst into tears.

‘You silly sod!’ cried Angie, putting her arms out to give Charley a hug.

For a moment the sound of Charley’s crying and Angie laughing at her covered the silence that had followed the birth and distracted both of them from the swift, urgent actions the midwife was now focused on performing with the baby. It was only when the midwife leant over and pressed an intercom button behind Angie’s bed, and said calmly, but insistently, ‘Baby doctor to room eight. Baby doctor to room eight,’ that Angie and Charley realised something was wrong.

‘What’s happened?’ cried Angie instantly struggling to sit forward, her face contracting in fear, but the midwife didn’t answer. ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded more urgently.

Suddenly the doors to the delivery room crashed open and half a dozen medics burst in, pushing piles