Girls Really Never Forget

We all know girls have better memories than boys. Birthdays, bin night, every drunken night, never, ever forgotten. And as much as this is common knowledge, I know, I know for sure and without any shadow of a doubt, girls really do never forget.

I’d been on the futon in the spare room for two weeks, exiled from my comfy king size bed by Jane, nine months pregnant. Selfish. Two of the slats were broken and my face seemed to home in laser-focussed on the unknown stain - which remained on the coarse cotton fabric despite our best frantic rubbing - whenever I lay down. Over the fortnight I’d added my own saliva to the mattress and the musty smell rose up to hit me as I was stirred from my slumber.

‘Wake up. Wake up! It’s happening!’ Jane whispered, maybe not wanting to disturb our ripening child.

‘What’s happening, what’s…..’ My protestations were halted by a kick.

‘The baby’s here!’

Jane winced then, clutched her tummy and doubled over at the waist, crying in pain.

‘You OK?’

‘No, I’m not bloody OK! I’m having contractions, you idiot!’

‘Oh, is it like when you run too much and you get a little stitch?’ I said, supportively. I maybe shouldn’t have let the smirk escape, maybe shouldn’t have silently acknowledged my comic genius.

‘No, it’s not like when you bloody run too much and you get a bloody stitch!’ Jane said, not welcoming my support.

‘OK, OK. What do I do?’

‘We grab the bag, we get in the car and you drive me to hospital!’

‘What, now?’

‘Yes, NOW!’

The Autumn rain had stopped, but a sheen still glazed the road and reflected the dawn. The sun tentatively peeped it’s way over the horizon, maybe a little anxious about the contractions as well. We got to the hospital quickly and were led calmly and quietly through the doors by the waiting midwife. I’d phoned ahead – I’m quite organised really – and the small cottage hospital was expecting us, like royalty. It had been a slow week. With Jane lying comfortably on the bed, the midwife administered the first blast of gas and air. I relaxed a little then and decided to start on my packed lunch. Like I say, I’m pretty organised. With Jane uncomfortably vomiting over the side of the bed two minutes later, lying on her side now, I put the sandwiches away. And that was when the next twenty hours started in earnest.

The slow week ended shortly after the vomiting started and the lone midwife dashed off to admit two more mothers to be. I was left with the gas and air machine and a stacked set of rough cardboard bowls. The next eight hours flew past in a blur of me giving Jane gas and air at one end, having a quick peek at the other, then returning to the top end with one of the bowls. It was like the worst party game ever or like a magician spinning plates on a stage. Plates topped with sick.

The midwife popped in periodically to check if the little fella had made an appearance (we were sure the baby would be a boy, no girls either side of the family for thirty years, a fair bet) but he just didn’t fancy it. Now the benefit of a quaint cottage hospital is the cosy attention, the fact you can pop and make yourself a cup of tea, and the fact you probably have seen one of the other mums in Asda. Maybe a little more dressed and a little less uncomfortable of course. You tend not to see them doubled up, swearing and punching their husbands in Asda. Then again there was this one time…

But the downside of the cottage hospital is that for some reason these highly qualified nurses are not fully trusted to store drugs, no idea why, maybe the crime rate in the country startles the NHS. So, when it came to the conclusion Jane needed a muscle relaxant to ease our son into the world, we were told we needed to make a forty minute journey to the Royal United Hospital in Bath. The ambulance was called and I gathered up our possessions, which we seemed to have managed to disperse across most of the room in a short space of time, and after a short while Jane was slung into a wheelchair and taken to the entrance. The blue lights cut the twilight and we emerged from our nice warm room into the cool autumn air, steam rising off our sweating bodies. We’d both worked hard over the last nine hours.

The next challenge was logistics. We are, apparently, only allowed one ambulance trip a day, to the hospital. So, I had to follow the ambulance in our beat up 206, hoping that I’d put in enough petrol to get me there and us – three of us – back. So, we set off in a bizarre convoy and I made the decision to call into a garage along the way, just in case.

As the ambulance pulled into the yellow hatched area outside of the hospital main entrance, the rear doors were yanked open by a waiting nurse before it reached a standstill. Jane was spilled out onto the tarmac, thankfully in a bed, and pushed at speed through the huge revolving doors. I abandoned the car at the side of the driveway and dashed after the trolley. Straight into the delivery room and twenty minutes later there he was, my son. There were a lot of tears. Jane started to cry then as well. He was beautiful. I cut the cord – only three goes – and we sat on the bed in stunned and ecstatic silence. As is the policy with large city hospitals, I had to leave shortly afterwards, so I left Jane her flowers and Congratulations card and reluctantly made my way home. I drove dazedly through the silent city streets, back along the country lanes idly daydreaming about my son. I climbed the stairs and fell straight into my bed. The king sized bed, not the futon. It stank to be honest.

The next morning I was back at the hospital at the start of visiting hours. We were discharged quickly and efficiently and I carried my son in a blue polka dotted car seat back to the waiting 206. I think the car seat and pram combination may have cost more than the car. After checking the car seat was installed correctly, I checked again that the car seat was installed correctly. I gave it another check and we headed back to the cottage hospital. Waiting at the door was our midwife. With Jane and the baby safely back in the bed we vacated only hours before, the nurse suggested a quiet word.

‘You proud of yourself?’

‘Yeah, he’s gorgeous, isn’t he?’

‘No, are you proud of yourself?!’ I was missing some subtleties here.

The tired, overstretched midwife then took time out of her busy schedule to explain what she meant. I had, apparently, presented the air of a frantic, panicked father-to-be when the ambulance pulled up the night before. I don’t know why, I’d managed to make a packed lunch after all. Therefore, the ambulance driver was under instructions to keep an eye out in her rear-view mirror as she drove my precious cargo to the hospital, along the winding, rain glossy country roads. So, when I had pulled into the twenty four hour garage to buy Marlborough Lights, energy drinks, a bunch of flowers, a Congratulations on the Birth of your Baby Boy card and a Congratulations on the Birth of your Baby Girl card (smart hedging there), the ambulance driver just assumed I had, well, crashed my car in a frenzied panic. The driver then reacted by calling the hospital. The midwife then reacted by calling the police. The police reacted by calling out the Air Ambulance crew stationed in town who then scrambled their helicopter and searched the roads between town and Bath with a big searchlight. They didn’t find me of course, I was in a garage buying fags and Red Bull. After I recounted the story Jane forgave me. The midwife didn't.

My son grew first into a beautiful toddler and then into a beautiful, curious three year old. I worked for a large telecommunications company and travelled all over the globe. A month after my son’s third birthday, I travelled to Sudan to sign a large contract. An engineer and I, let’s call him Andy (well that was actually his name as it goes, he won’t mind) flew business class via Frankfurt to Khartoum. We knew Sudan was a dry country, and we knew we needed to keep our guards up when it came to ice cubes, salads, fruit and the like to avoid a poorly tummy, so we drank our way through ten G&Ts on the flight, storing up our willpower for the next five nights. On arrival we stumbled to the luggage belt and stood watching the rubber concertina groan it’s circuit through the humid, airless Arrivals hall. There’s always that one bloke who stands there with a gradual slumping of his shoulders as he watches the countdown of cases off the belt. Until there’s none left, and he hasn’t got his. Well, today that bloke was us. We put in our complaint to the airline and were told the luggage would miraculously appear at our hotel in the next couple of days. We had a meeting that afternoon and I had on a pair of jeans and a Charlatans gig T-shirt. My Father, who worried about me travelling so much, had a theory that if I dressed in a suit I would naturally be the first target for the hijackers and it had stuck. We explained our predicament and were ushered into a taxi with one of the airline representatives and two hundred dollars compensation. Our guide took us to the local market and bought us a shirt each, a pair of trousers each and a pair of underpants. I am pretty sure the whole sartorial ensemble did not cost two hundred dollars. Nevertheless, we made it to our meeting reasonably smartly dressed and back to our hotel.

Now, the hotel. The Hilton Khartoum wasn’t on the Hilton website. And I had stayed in a few Hiltons and none of them had their signage photocopied and blutacked to the chipped painted door of the building. And I’m pretty sure none of the Hiltons had only a table tennis table in the basement for entertainment. Andy and I passed the evening in that basement, helping ourselves to free Sprites from the fridge rather than risk the water. We finished our last game around midnight and headed to the lift – which didn’t open. We pressed and waited patiently before looking for a set of stairs. Behind a fire door we found them and ascended up into a billowing cloud of grey, acrid smoke and a throng of men of the Sudanese Fire Service. The hotel kitchen had caught fire and mayhem had ensued. The guests had been evacuated into the gardens but nobody thought to check how our game of ping pong was going.

After that, the week went smoothly. No more fires and we had stuck to our rules of bottled water and cooked food. On the last day we were called to the office of the CEO of Telecom, our customer. We sat nervously side by side in matching leather chairs in front of the vast expanse of mahogany that made up the CEO’s desk.

‘Gentlemen, you have done well, here is your contract,’ he said, with a flourish as he handed us a signed contract for seventeen million dollars. It had been worthwhile, the trip and the sheer terror of the fire had been worthwhile.

‘A toast. To our continued relationship,’ the CEO declared, handing us each a small glass of milky liquid.

Not wanting to offend our host, we clinked glasses and drank to our collective health. Our health which, as we flew over the Mediterranean Sea later than evening, started to escape us – through every possible exit.

I landed at Heathrow some hours later feeling dreadful. Luckily, I had a taxi to take me home. The taxi driver was happy to stop along the M4 a few times to let me evacuate myself onto the hard shoulder. As I walked into the house, my son leapt up into my arms, squeezing his chubby little arms tight around my neck.

‘Hello little fella, easy now, Daddy’s a bit delicate.’

‘What’s up, you look dreadful?’ Jane said, a look of concern crinkling her brow.

‘We were OK all week, all week, but then we had this drink, the bloke said it was made of tree sap or something. All week we were careful. I’ve got to go to bed,’ I said, burping as punctuation.

I lay on the bed and within thirty minutes I was in agony, with nothing more to vomit my stomach had gone into spasm and the pain, the pain was intense, like nothing I had ever felt before or since.

‘Jane, Jane,’ I cried, ‘you have to get me to hospital, casualty, I can’t take it anymore, the pain in my stomach, I think there’s something really wrong, the pain!’

And Jane stood at the foot of our king-sized bed and said, ‘Oh no, poor you. Is it like when you run too much and you get a little stitch?’