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

of alarming-looking equipment and an incubator on a trolley. They surrounded the baby and neither Angie nor Charley could see what they were doing.

‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong with my baby?’ cried Angie, struggling to clamber out of bed and get to her baby. Instinctively Charley held her back. Icy panic swept over Charley, cold as death. No, no, no, no, no, no… was all she could hear, and she wasn’t sure if it was Angie begging or a voice inside her own head. She and Angie clung to each other, frightened and impotent, as the agonising seconds, as long as a lifetime, dragged by.

Then, all of a sudden, fracturing the tension with the shocking intensity of breaking glass, came the furious, thin scream of a newborn, venting indignation at being born. Angie sank against Charley in relief, tears streaming down her face. They watched the medics carefully place the baby in the incubator, handling her as if she was as fragile as blown glass. Her scrawny little body seemed so frail and vulnerable.

‘Can’t I just hold her?’ begged Angie, ‘Just for a second?’

Going over to her, the midwife pulled a sympathetic face, and patted her arm comfortingly. ‘Sorry, my lovely, not just now. We just need to settle her into the incubator and then she needs to go to into special care for a while.’ Seeing the panic on Angie’s face she put her hand on her shoulder and added reassuringly, ‘Don’t worry, you’re coming, too.’

It was at this moment that Will arrived. He glanced at the baby, swamped by the incubator and surrounded by medics fiddling with tubes and wires, then went across to the bed and gathered Angie up into his arms and held her while she sobbed. Charley could see Will was struggling to hold it together, so, feeling utterly redundant and uncomfortable at imposing herself on their very private emotions, Charley left them to it, and slipped out of the room.

In the waiting area outside the delivery suites, a large sign read, ‘No Mobile Phones’. Guessing that this was because the phones’ signals might interfere with the medical equipment, Charley made her way to the hospital entrance before ringing Tara. Tara picked up almost immediately, as if she’d been hovering over the phone.

‘Is everything okay? How’s Angie? Has she had the baby? Is the baby all right?’ she garbled, pelting Charley with questions.

Drained and weary, Charley leant back against the wall of the hospital. ‘Angie’s fine. Will’s with her now, but they’re taking the baby into special care.’

There was a beat before Tara said, ‘But it’s going to be okay, yes?’

The desperation in Tara’s tone was evident to Charley. Her mate so obviously wanted to hear her say, Yes, the baby’s going to be fine. She wished to God she could give that reassurance, but she couldn’t.

‘I don’t know,’ she replied dully. ‘They didn’t really say. It’s a little girl. I think she came out okay, but then they called a baby doctor in and suddenly the room was full of medics and bits of equipment and oxygen and… and now she’s in an incubator and—’ She stopped, too choked to speak.

‘Charley? You okay?’

Overwhelmed by the vulnerability of Angie’s precious new baby, and by her own fear of what might happen to her, Charley replied in small, tight voice. ‘Oh Tara, she’s so little and helpless…’

For once Tara seemed at a loss for words. They both were. Neither of them wanted to exchange pointless platitudes and cliched inanities, such as telling each other to hope for the best, or that modern medicine can work wonders these days, because they both knew, only too well, that modern medicine can’t always work miracles. Ultimately, the thread of life is spider-web thin, and once it’s broken, it cannot, for all the world, be repaired.

Charley kept the conversation short as she needed to phone Pam before her battery ran out.

‘Give Angie our love,’ said Tara.

‘Of course,’ replied Charley, before ending the call.

In contrast to the fear that had been all too apparent in Tara’s voice, Charley was thankful that Pam’s tone was reassuringly calm and measured. Whilst her mother-in-law was obviously concerned and anxious for news, her sensible, practical advice was to tell Charley to try not to worry.

‘Worrying doesn’t change anything,’ she told her, ‘it just wears you out and leaves you less able to cope with things. How much longer are you going to stay at the hospital?’

Charley hadn’t even thought about it. She was just taking it one minute at a time. ‘I’ll stay until I can find out from Will what’s happening,’ she told Pam, ‘but don’t wait up. I’ll try and text you if there’s any news, but my battery’s low.’

‘Don’t forget to eat,’ was Pam’s final piece of motherly advice.

Charley’s phone was now down to 2 per cent, so, anxious that Will might not be able to contact her, she went back into the hospital and followed the signs to the Neonatal ICU.

Outside the unit, Charley arrived at the nurses’ station where one of them immediately intercepted her, stopping her from going in. ‘Are you a relative?’ she asked.

‘No, just a friend.’

‘Then I’m sorry but you can’t go in. It’s family only.’

‘The thing is, I was there for the birth,’ Charley started to explain. ‘I came in with her, in the ambulance. And I just want to make sure my friend’s baby is okay.’

‘I’m afraid we can’t give out any information if you’re not a relative.’

The nurse was polite, and only doing her job, but a wave of frustration swept through Charley and she wanted to scream at her. She wanted to rant and demand to be told what was happening. Didn’t she understand how much Charley needed to know, needed to know that the baby was okay? She forced herself to calm down and be rational, and to remember it wasn’t the nurse’s fault that Charley’s phone had died and she couldn’t text Will, nor that Angie had gone into labour early and