Alone.

The midwife moved the heart-beat prong around, pushing down hard. I heard gurgling as I had eaten a bar of Turkish Delight. I hadn’t been feeling movement and when I’d Googled it, it said to relax, try a little sugar. The baby should start to flap soon after with the energy surge. Like a butterfly inside, the nurse said at first, does it feel like a butterfly? Can you feel anything at all? And she was saying, oh now, come on, where are you hiding? When was the last time you felt something? Can you remember the time? Maybe last night, perhaps after dinner? Or this morning? Anything? No. OK. That’s OK. We’ll double-check with a scan.

Double-check.

It feels like nothing. I can’t feel anything. I screamed. It feels like fucking nothing.

NOTHING.

Next a radiographer arrived and moved another bigger prong around on my belly, over and back, tracing my fallopian tubes, in and out, pushing on my full bladder, the window to the baby, she said. Under her arms was getting wet, a creeping pattern crawling along her blue scrubs, making two navy patches. I remember she was Welsh because I love a Welsh accent and she said apologetically, now where are you hiding? And so I immediately began apologising for screaming, and then took to apologising for lots of things, eating the lovely chocolate, and apologising for reading my book, until there was very little left to apologise for except the dirty cubicle curtain, and she apologised for this, and we were all apologies. Until the prong was pushed down on my pubic bone, hard, and I apologised for the bone, and she apologised for hitting off it. Then a doctor arrived swiftly, and he took the prong up and off my belly, placing it back in the claw of the machine.

I’d failed. Again. And he didn’t contradict me.

I wanted it out. Now. I begged Ms Welsh to please just get it out now. But she had lost her voice and was rubbing my forearm up and down. Please. I can’t bear it. But then the doctor interrupted and muttered something about spontaneous and labour. As though, together, we would waterfall her out. It’s dead, I screamed. But he wouldn’t listen. ‘All in its own good time’, he said, as if I was ageing a barrel of whiskey. A cask. I picked up my book as the jelly was getting sticky on my belly and I thought of myself as an utter cunt; it was disgraceful to have eaten such a large bar of chocolate just moments before I knew my child was dead, the pink sweetness made its way back up my food pipe to goad me. I had thought the sugar would make her squirm and wriggle and wake her up and I would discharge myself from this fuck of a place once I felt some movement. I said something like this. But no one listened. Then I vomited.

And Ms Welsh said she was so very sorry for my vomiting. Or my vomit.