Free The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell

kind of numbness, where pain was absent but sensation was still present.
     
    She could feel them, the two doctors, rummaging about inside her, like people who had lost something at the bottom of a suitcase. She knew it ought to hurt, it ought to hurt like hell, but it didn’t. The anaesthetic washed coolly down and then up her spine, breaking like a wave on the back of her head. There was a green canvas screen bisecting her body. She could hear the doctors murmuring to each other, could see the tops of their heads, could feel their hands in her innards. Ted was nearby, at her left, perched on a stool. And there was a great heave and suck and she almost cried out, what are you doing , before she realised, before she heard the sharp, angry cry, surprisingly loud in the hushed room, before she heard the anaesthetist, behind her, saying, a boy . Elina repeated this word to herself as she stared ahead at the tiled ceiling. Boy. A boy. Then she spoke to Ted. Go with him , she said, go with the baby . Because her mother and her aunts had discussed in hushed voices stories about babies being given to the wrong mothers, babies disappearing into the labyrinths of hospital corridors, babies without name-tags. Ted was getting up and going across the room.
     
    Then she was alone on the table. The anaesthetist somewhere behind her. The doctors below her. The screen cutting her in half. She lay, her hands folded on her chest and she had no control over them, couldn’t move them if she wanted to and she didn’t want to. There was a sound like a Hoover on the other side of the screen but she wasn’t thinking about that because she was thinking, a boy, and listening for sounds from across the room, where two nurses were doing something to the baby and Ted was watching over their shoulders. But then something happened, something went wrong. What was it? It was hard for Elina to order her thoughts. The doctor, the student, the woman, said, oh . In the kind of voice you’d use if someone barged in front of you in a queue: a tone of disappointment, of dismay. Just after this, Elina had felt a cough rising in her throat, which exploded from her lips with quick force.
     
    Was that right? Or was it the other way round? Did she cough and then afterwards the doctor said, oh ?
     
    Either way, what came next was the blood. So much of it. An unaccountable amount. Over the doctors, the screen, the nurses. Elina saw it falling to the floor, fanning out over the tiles, forming rivulets and gullies in the grouting; she saw people treading it as footprints around the table; she saw a plastic bag hanging from the wall filling with red-soaked cloths.
     
    Her heart reacted almost instantly, setting up a rapid, panicked knocking in her chest, as if trying to attract someone’s attention, as if trying to communicate that there was a problem and would someone please help? It needn’t have worried. The room was suddenly swarming with people. The student doctor was calling for assistance, the anaesthetist was standing up, peering over the screen, a frown on his face, and then he was making an adjustment to the clear bag suspended above Elina’s head, and a moment later she felt whatever it was hit her veins. She seemed to swoon, her vision wavering, the ceiling moving above her like a conveyor-belt, and the thought occurred to her that perhaps this wasn’t the drug, that perhaps it was something else, that she mustn’t whatever happened lose consciousness, she must stay, she mustn’t go anywhere, and part of her wished someone would come and speak to her, to tell her what was happening, why she could feel people’s hands far up inside her skin, up by her ribs, why someone was shouting, quickly now, quickly , and where the baby was and where Ted was, why the student doctor was saying, no, I can’t, I don’t know how , and the other doctor was saying something to her, something cross-sounding, and why Elina was being pushed by something or someone to