Free Common Ground by Rob Cowen

my face and the
drip-drip
of ice and snow thawing in quickening rhythms, I can almost feel the earth turning.

ULTRASOUND
    There are owls everywhere I look. Cut from felt and sewn onto cushions, plasticised and stuck on car windows, printed on clothes, curtains and lampshades, encased in children’s keyrings. Walk along any high street and they line up in the furniture and fashion stores, turning retailers into cartoon bird sanctuaries where hawk, eagle, tawny, barn, snowy and great grey owls mass behind the glass. There’s even one in the hospital. Between two blue fabric boards pinned with notices and leaflets, the local primary school has decorated a section of the Antenatal Clinic’s wall with cut-out animals. It’s an odd menagerie: tigers, elephants, lions, a giraffe, a fox, a red squirrel, a hedgehog, and then what looks to be a tawny owl. I say ‘looks’, because it is not much more than a splodge of brown and cream poster paint, but two wide, front-facing eyes give it away. Little hands have captured a subtlety that fashion designers and toy makers usually miss: an owl’s face is curiously human.
    After tingling our hands with the gel dispenser at the door, Rosie gives her name to a lady at the desk. ‘Your twelve-week scan, is it, love?’ she asks. ‘Take a seat and someone will be with you soon.’
    We sit on a line of smart, red chairs opposite the solitary owl as it stares out from the branches of its broccoli tree. Our fingers are entwined under the handbag in Rosie’s lap, wrists touching, pulses dancing in nervy excitement. She sips water occasionally, to try to quell the ebb and flow of morning sickness. For good reason the Antenatal Clinic is a long stretch from the tobacco fog of smokers at the entrance and the baked-goods and coffee smells of the hospital café. You have to follow a red line down numerous shimmering square corridors. Once inside, this ward seems softer than the rest of the hospital, lighter and more relaxed – all peaches and pine. This is the good end of the human journey, I suppose; a place where the body conforms to its predetermined trimesters and where pain has a purpose at least. And there are plenty of reminders of the prize if all goes well: posters to promote breastfeeding show happy mothers cradling cute babies; cherubic faces crawl across white pillows in adverts for local photography studios.
    Had the clinic’s windows faced the outside world rather than an enclosed courtyard, we might have seen the bright, cold morning and its sky of plate-glass blue. Instead, the waiting area’s luminosity comes from wire-waffled squares of fluorescence in a tiled ceiling. Wooden toys stand on low tables by racks of tatty magazines that I’m apprehensive about touching. So we sit and look at the owl, stroking each other’s wrists with our thumbs and listening to the muffled beeps, buzzes and squeaks of shoes striding across disinfected vinyl.
    The sonographer, Rachel, is pretty with hair tied back and wearing a fitted white tunic with blue bands about her arms. She carries a clipboard and a warm smile, but is clearly up against it. ‘Would you like to follow me, please?’
    We do, to a small but bright room, just enough space for the equipment, a bed, sink, storage and the obligatory multicoloured bins with toxic warnings. It smells clean, surgical, like the hand gel at the door. Rosie lies on the freshly papered trolley bed and rolls up her top, as directed. Rachel turns a pole on the room’s Venetian blind, plunging us into dark, and seats herself at the ultrasound’s kidney-shaped plastic control board. With its big buttons, detachable bits and ergonomic curves it looks strangely childish, a Fisher-Price ‘My First Ultrasound’ toy. That is until it fires up and the screens come alive. Serious beeps and lights. Rachel takes control like a pilot at a console. She looks back at me as I stand nervously,