He kept imagining her shattering into a mess of blood and bone, like someone had detonated her from the inside. This was where the nights took him now. The days were spent endlessly going over what had happened; the nights, when he finally slept, a gruesome slideshow of bodies being torn and ripped apart in different ways.

One night he’d dreamed he had looked over the platform edge but there had been no blood; just a pile of brown limbs like a doll’s, with a head sitting neatly on the top.

Liam throws back the covers and gets out of bed. He can’t stand being inside his own skin any more. He’s going to see her. They’re going to the police.

He can’t live with this a moment longer.

SUMMER 2019

ELLIOTT

Olivia Rose Little landed in our world like a tiny red-faced missile in the early hours of one June morning.

Anya had quite a long, rough labour. It all feels blurry in my mind and I haven’t even got hormonal surges to blame for the bits I can’t remember.

Because her waters broke at home early in the whole process, she was told to come in. Then, because of the Strep B, she had to be hooked up to antibiotics throughout. For hours and hours she didn’t progress but was in an uncomfortable level of pain.

Anya was, it’s fair to say, quite angry about the whole thing. When the pain became bad, she refused an epidural for some reason and I pretty much watched uselessly while she bared her teeth, told the world to ‘go fuck itself’ several times, and told me she hated me at least three times. Then, finally, a second midwife was rushing into the room. Anya transformed into an astonishing warrior woman then, who pushed out our slippery little daughter with a sound that was almost inhuman, from a deep, animal place inside her that I had never seen before.

My primary emotion was astonishment. Despite the visible evidence that Anya had been growing a small person over those months, the actual sight of her – scrunched, slimy, beautiful – was truly awe-inspiring. I didn’t even know I was crying until the midwife said something like, ‘Come on, Daddy, blow your nose,’ highlighting what a useless spare part I was in that room.

I stumbled out into a pale, drizzly dawn at about five that morning and looked around, wanting to tell someone, anyone, that I’d witnessed a miracle.

I was a dad now.

How did that work, then?

I had no precedent from my own life to show me how to do it. All I could do was think about Patrick, my only blueprint.

Anya needed a couple of stitches but was home by the following afternoon.