Читать книгу Keeping Faith - Roger Averill - Страница 8

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When a baby dies at birth, is stillborn, a midwife takes it into the Pan Room and closes the door, pulls down the blind. It’s a signal, a code, like lighting a candle in a window, lowering a flag to half mast. That way, when I come to wash the instruments and sort the bloodied, soiled linen from the rest, I am warned and can prepare myself for what I am about to witness.

Working in a maternity hospital, I can’t avoid these things. The first dead baby I saw was lying curled up in a cold metal kidney dish. All the usual features were there, but ridiculously small; shrivelled and shrunk like a grotesque doll. I remember its hand, the miniature fingers splayed and extended as if trying to touch something just beyond reach.

Most stillborn babies are purple or blue, but those that have died at birth carry the colour of life. Looking at them, their eyes bulging behind tissue paper lids, toes curled, I can’t help but work quietly in case I wake them, start them crying.

Before dressing the dead baby in a simple shroud and taking it to the parents — encouraging them to put a face to their grief, to nurse it, name it — the midwife, for the sake of hospital records, has to take its photograph. Watching her perform this bizarre ritual, seeing her arrange the tiny corpse so as to best display some mark or feature of medical note, I always have to stop myself from smiling, crying.

A nurse once said to me, shaking the Polaroid print, waiting for it to develop, ‘We’ve got to be like that bench, Josh: stainless steel. Plenty of blood gets slopped on us, but at the end of the shift we’ve got to wipe ourselves clean.’

She has left now, that midwife, to have her own child. I often think of her, though, as I soak up the diluted pools of blood from the bench, spray metho onto the machined surface of the sink, as I make everything gleam, give the whole room that sweet, alcoholic smell. In a way she was right, an undertaker can’t mourn every death. But that doesn’t stop you wishing you could, doesn’t stop you feeling guilty that you don’t.

I can’t help thinking that if the saying is right, that only the good die young, then these ones, the ones born dead, must be angels.