Free Go to Sleep by Helen Walsh Page A

and I just can’t take it any more.
    For his sake, I buzz the midwife and ask her for a ‘topup’ – a slug of formula to supplement my meagre drizzle of milk.
    ‘We don’t really recommend it,’ she begins.
    Across the ward the black girl eyes me, coldly.
    ‘I know you don’t,’ I plead, barely able to hold my eyelids open against the weight of exhaustion. I feel useless. Inadequate. The one woman on the ward who is always the exception, always asking for something else. I know this is what they think. ‘Please,
please
look at my baby . . . he’s
starving
, look at him! It’s not fair on him.’
    She snorts as though to say ‘you mean it’s not fair on
you’
, and she huffs away. Another myth lanced – the jovial, worldly, reassuring midwife. They all hate me. They hate my baby. Grudgingly, she returns with the sleep-inducing stodge, administered through a tiny cup with no teat so that he won’t then reject the bluntness of thereal thing. The midwife tuts and shakes her head as she bustles away.
    ‘How
dare
you judge us, you bitch!’ I shriek. I can feel my eyes popping out of their sockets, bulging with fatigue. I am so angry. She doesn’t even turn around. ‘You fucking turned us away! You sent me out on to the streets to have my baby. D’you wonder I’m fucking up?’
    She just ignores me. Everyone keeps their heads down. There is a long drone of silence and after a while I start to wonder if I’m even here at all. Joe slurps and guzzles, enthusiastically draining his formula.
    Belly full, hunger slaked, Joe sleeps. He is at peace, but I’m now too wired to join him, too irked by the injustices I’ve suffered, the staff and the other mothers on the ward always looking over, taking note, passing comment. I think about getting up, going for a shower while I’ve the chance, but I can barely raise a finger. I’m drunk with fatigue, drifting in and out of this grainy half-life, yet hyper alert to Joe’s every inflection; each little shudder, snort and bleat prodding me to remain alert, reminding me of who I am now.
    A woman appears by my side. She’s different, she’s smiling. She’s
nice
. How Mum and I used to hoot over ‘nice’. How delirious I am with gratitude now nice has come to my bedside.
    ‘Hello, Mum!’
    She’s almost fanatic in her enthusiasm. Even to me, as punch-drunk as I am, her smile seems manic.
    ‘Name?’ she says. She has a clipboard. That smile again. ‘Don’t you even stir, darling – I can get all that from this –’ She lifts my notes from the end of the bed, diligently scribbles on her form. ‘Okay, Rachel. Email address?’
    On autopilot, I give it.
    ‘Father’s occupation?’ she asks.
    ‘Erm, he’s a professor, a professor of Tropical Medicine.’
    She lets out a low whistle, gives one approving nod of the head.
    ‘And he didn’t let you go private, hey?’
    Belatedly it dawns on me what she’s asking.
    ‘Oh,
Joe’s
daddy. Right.’
    On cue, he wakes – his baleful, fitful sobbing piercing through the doldrums of the ward like a mosquito’s whine in the dead of night; drill, drill, dry staccato drill.
    I try to ignore him. ‘Sorry, I thought you were asking me what my father . . .’
    Joe cries louder, his tiny larynx rattling with rage. Clipboard Woman looks panicked.
    ‘Never mind that, hon.’ She places the clipboard with a half-filled form under my nose. I can see my name and home address, a bit more scribble and a perforated line at the bottom where she’s marked a big, looping X. ‘Just sign here for your starter pack, and I’m out of your hair.’
    ‘Starter pack?’
    She smiles, and this time it’s nasty, impatient. Her head moves from side to side as she speaks, but her hair remains frozen in place.
    ‘Your nappies, wipes, buds, shampoos, all your creams and cotton wool balls . . . everything you’re going to need in that first week, all here.’ She leans down and produces a transparent sack, full of baby stuff. ‘There’s