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Chapter 58
One morning, around dawn, Qiuyan begun to feel pain, intermittently, a sure sign she was going into labour. Anxiously Bing called the hospital to report the case.
‘How frequent are the pains?’ asked the nurse, in a flat voice.
‘I think once half an hour.’
‘Is this her first child?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then call back in ten or more hours.’
‘What? Ten hours?’ he was confused, ‘but she is in so much pain, can’t we come to the hospital now?’ ‘No, even if she comes, she would just have to stay in the waiting room until she can be allocated a bed. So better stay at home, and call us again when her pains come every five minutes, and each lasts one minute.’ Her tone was irrefutable.
So he hung up the phone, and explained to the mother and the would-be mother, who, by this time, had already prepared to go, with bags of things, including a pot of chicken soup.
‘I know the first child takes a long time, sometimes two days after feeling the first pain,’ her mother said. ‘But why can’t we just go and stay in the hospital?’
‘I don’t know, that is what the nurse has just said,’ he replied.
Minutes later, Qiuyan was going through another pain. She moaned, writhed and gripped his hand. But basically he was helpless. Jim’s family were back in China for holiday; otherwise, with their advice, or assistance or presence, he would be more assured of this situation.
Her pain having passed, Qiuyan was herself again. She arose from the chair, walked about the house, with one hand comforting her enormous belly, the other pushing her hip. Overall she looked very awkward, except on her face where a cool and content expression stayed.
‘Qiuyan, can’t you call your friends and ask about these things?’ he asked.
She smiled, smartly, ‘I have already asked them. I know the hospital won’t admit pregnant women until very late, unless the amniotic fluid leaks. But we need prepare for it and inform the hospital so that they can be ready.’
‘But, haha, you have made me so very nervous.’
Checking the time, it was 6am. He usually got up at 7am. They went back to bed, and he was thinking to ask for the day off, but then, if it would take ten more hours before she was ready to go to hospital, he might not have to take the leave. He was still on probation, and he had not told his boss of Qiuyan’s pregnancy. For some reason, he felt his boss wouldn’t be happy if he took a day off, even if it was unpaid. Therefore, although he felt compelled to stay at home with her, he was inclined not to ask the unfathomable boss for it.
‘Should I call the company and ask for a day off?’ he probed.
‘Of course,’ she replied.
‘Okay,’ he went for the phone, then halted, ‘Only 6am, the boss hasn’t arrived yet.’
However, he added, ‘Maybe I’ll go to work, and you can still call me anytime?’
‘But, what if it comes earlier?’
‘Then I’ll just take a taxi, and pick you and mum up on the way to the hospital,’ he said, coaxingly. ‘You know, the boss doesn’t know it yet.’
She carefully turned her body, to face him, ‘I think he would understand this, wouldn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you afraid of him, of losing the job?’
‘Not so much, but I don’t feel very secure in the company, still on probation. And the boss doesn’t look nice and kind.’
‘Okay then, you go to work, and I will call you when I feel it is coming.’ She said to soothe his concern. ‘Don’t worry, my mother is with me, and in any case, I can always call my friends.’
He kissed her cheek, then moved towards her fat breast, but she fended him off. ‘Bad-egg,’ she said.
In the morning, at work, he had been waiting for her call, but it didn’t come. He called home during lunch time, and was eased with her report that she was more or less at the similar pain interval. And the afternoon also passed in peace, and of course, Qiuyan had gone through those hard times without his company.
So with less guilt than he could have felt, he came back home, and spent his following hours in time measurement. And when the interval came down to about twelve minutes, he made two phone calls, one to the hospital, telling them it was now six minutes, a lie he thought well-justified, the other to the taxi company, demanding their immediate service. So that half an hour later, the three of them sat in the lounge at the birth unit, waiting. A nurse had come over to check her, and asked questions, and advised there would still be a few hours before the delivery, and they had to wait until a bed could be allocated, and in the meantime, there was a shower room, where they could use the hot water to massage her back to relieve her pain.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ Bing said to the nurse, his gratitude overflowing the rims of his spectacles. Oh, how good is the hospital, where helpless souls can be helped, by the good hearts of these people in their angelic white robes and hats. How beautiful and respectable are they, who don’t hesitate to look after others, who are not necessarily their relatives or friends. So long as Qiuyan had come here, with their assuring smiles casting about, the worries should have left behind.
But then the pain struck Qiuyan more frequently, and lasted longer. She seized his hand, enduring the spasm, and restraining from groaning out, though Bing, by this time, seemed to have got used to its coming and going, not feeling as horrified as he had felt in the early morning.
‘How painful is it?’ he asked, a little amusedly, in one of her peaceful gaps.
‘It really hurts, like a knife cutting.’
‘Knife cutting?’
‘Even worse than that.’
No sooner had she given the last word than another pain came. This time it lasted nearly one minute. And amazingly, after that, she was able to resume the topic, ‘But no, the pain is actually different from knife cutting.’
‘Yes?’
‘Not doubt it is as sharp as knife cutting, but,’ she paused, thinking, or imagining, as one does in writing, ‘when cut by a knife, the pain, afterwards, will last all the time until it heals. But this pain, as soon as it has passed, I could hardly feel anything, like now, as though the pain a minute earlier had not occurred at all.’
‘Are you sure?’ he asked in awe, ‘how can that come and go so neat and clear?’
She didn’t answer. For then another wave of torture had just begun. Her resources were all employed in managing its violence.
Later, she said, ‘My low back is so sore, maybe we try the shower?’
‘Yes.’
He helped her stand, and turn, and walk towards the shower room. He closed the curtain, took off her clothes, removed the shower head from its clip, turned on the water, and felt the temperature. The water was then running, smoothly on her back. After a while, tired by her heavy body, she sat on the chair. Then another pain came; he gave her one hand for her grasp, with the other continuing to shower her.
Once, when she was pain-free, she turned back to him and said, ‘Lao Gong, woooh… I am so ugly.’
Lao Gong, in Chinese, meant ‘Husband’, or closer, ‘Darling’ in English. She didn’t usually say that word, nor did he usually say its counterpart ‘Lao Po.’ For some reason, the form of address, though very popular between Chinese couples, always sounded to him a bit coarse, and unnatural, even vulgar.
So, he grinned, and didn’t say a word. He moved the head pointing at her bountiful breasts, then her half-Earth tummy. The flow was channelling, beautifully, at two sides, until lost to her secret field.
‘Everything is beautiful, except…’ he hung his words, amusedly.
‘What? Bad-egg…’ she stared at him, with the eyes of a defending mother.
But he just grinned.
‘Speak …’ she demanded, then, ‘Oh…’ Her next pain came.
After about five such attacks, she was declaring, ‘Enough, enough, the water doesn’t make a difference.’
From the storage room he obtained a clean white towel, and while drying her body, he took a chance to kiss her nipple, regarded by him as the most beautiful, and her overly stretched belly button, the only ugly point, well, in his opinion, of his milky stocky wife. And she said, ‘Tickling,’ instead of ‘Bad-egg.’
It was nearly 1am in the morning, when she was finally given a bed. Her pain was never so real. In front of others she was no longer ashamed of, or conscious of, her tears and screams and writhing. ‘Push, push, push,’ she, sucking the oxygen that reminded him of his classmate Kang, seemed to have forgotten the world. For those minutes, the pain had taken control of her flesh and soul. And Bing the husband, beside her, was just a person, any person perhaps, whose hand she could reach to grab, and whose eyes she could seek to glare into.
The baby’s heart-beating was resonated in the room. The overhead monitor was displaying its fluctuating strength. Sometimes it even stopped, as it seemed, for a second or two. He would then tremble, and ring the bell. And the midwife would come, not at once, but just in time, when the heart was pounding again.
At last Qiuyan agreed to use the lumbar anesthesia, in spite of the dissuasion of her mother, who had been mumbling, ‘It would cause back pain in the future.’
The injection, with a long needle pricking quite a while at Qiuyan’s spine, had been the most dreadful and nerve-rending practice Bing had ever seen. However, curious or mesmerized, he had not moved move away his eyes to avoid it, until he was feeling very dizzied, which alerted the midwife, who had to offer him a glass of sugar water to help him recover. After the injection, the battle continued for at least another half hour. Then with a shriek that could in no way match the delicacy of his wife, a bloody mass slipped out from her, to be followed, seconds later, by a shrill nasal voice.
The baby was not in the least as he had imagined. The face was soggy, plump, or swollen, with streaks of blood still clinging to it. The shapeless features looked like they had just been squashed. Its skin, heavily wrinkled, was the worst he had even seen in a person. But she was moving, and wailing frantically; her clenched fists thrusting out for any support that came to their way. As soon as she caught the midwife’s hand, her utterance softened to a series of discrete whines, whilst her head was turning sideways, searching for protection in the cold world.
The midwife asked him to cut the umbilical cord, of which toughness was comparable to the rope made of strongest vines. His hand with the scissors was slightly shaking, taking longer than he had prepared to get it done, and the result was not as neat and short-ended as he would have wished. But it must be slightly better than his own cord, which, cut by his grandma, had left a little too much on him.
The baby was then placed upon her mother’s breast, beginning her imaginary sucks. Qiuyan, utterly exhausted, was having a weakest smile, her hand resting upon the baby’s back, while still going through other pains after the delivery.
The maternity ward they were later transported into was very quiet, or in other words not as what Bing had thought to be a place of chorus, where all the babies cried all the time. The atmosphere was more like a sparsely occupied bird’s nest in a forest; at any moment, only one or two birds twittering, then quietening, then arising again elsewhere.
Adina, so named some months before, snuggled at her mother’s armpit. Her beauty began to shine. A colour, so fresh and pure, was suffusing her tiny cheeks; a vitality seemed to rush to the surface surmounting her old skins. But when her father began to bathe her in the water, she turned into an animal, struggling with all her might, her belly shaking with ripples as if of the sea, her legs kicking violently, with a power, that could build or destroy a planet. But as soon as the washing was done and she was wrapped and brought to his chest, she began to settle, whimpering softly, becoming again a vulnerable little thing, with all feebleness that could be seen in a life.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, he asked Qiuyan, ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Much better now, after drinking the chicken soup.’ She smiled. ‘You must also be very tired.’ She extended her hand to hold his. Then she chuckled, mildly, ‘You fainted, hehe, faint-hearted.’
‘Well, you didn’t see the needle, otherwise you…’ he said, ‘well, you probably had no nerves left to faint any way.’
‘No, I still had plenty of it, otherwise how could I know you had fainted?’
‘Hehe.. so you have already forgotten how you had been howling all those hours, haven’t you.’
‘Of course not, it was a nightmare.’
He checked the time. ‘It is nearly half past four. May I go to work today? I haven’t asked for leave yet.’
‘Can you ask then?’ she said, then hesitating, ‘or if it is not easy, you may go. I will be okay here with my mum. But are you sure you are not too tired for work?’
‘I feel all right.’
So he spent the day at work. Qiuyan had stayed three days in the hospital, where she and her mother had complained about the food provided, ‘How can a mother take cold drinks, or even ice creams immediately after giving birth?’ But they were not wasted, for Bing had consumed them all. However, concerning them more was the time restriction that visitors had to leave after 9:00pm, which meant Qiuyan had to handle the restless baby all by herself during the night. According to Chinese custom, the mother was weak, even weaker than the new born baby, requiring at least one month for her full recovery. Cold food or a draught was strictly prohibited.
‘Enjoy your baby,’ the receptionist said to them, after Bing signed the discharge.
They decided to walk home, because the taxi he had called had come to them without a safety seat for children, and a taxi with one would be at least an hour’s waiting.
They walked very slowly, matching the pace of Qiuyan. But the day was fine, the sky cloudless blue. When they reached the bridge, he asked her to sit down on the footpath edge, taking a rest.
‘Look at her, how beautiful she is,’ Qiuyan said, touching the baby’s cheek. Adina had been behaving well in his arms, her eyes oftentimes opening tiny cracks to catch the sunlight that, to her, must be very strange and wonderful.
‘Look at the man, what is he doing?’
‘He’s feeding the birds.’
The old man, white-haired, slightly stooped, sat on the footpath opposite to them. At least ten birds of various kinds were jumping about his feet, to catch the grains the man was taking out of a bag. One of them was rather big, black with white streaks around its neck, but definitely not belonging to the ravens.
They arose to resume their journey, then Qiuyan said again, ‘Look at the ducks, at least twenty of them.’
‘But are they all ducks?’ He noticed, under the bridge, some of them looked more like birds or chickens.
‘Yes, definitely, can’t you see the webs on their feet?’
‘Strange, that is the only thing for duck’s identity. And the water is so clear, like that in Emei mountain. Do you remember the bridge in Jiaoda?’
‘Hehe, of course, that was where you began to lure me. But if these ducks were in Emei, they would be caught within hours and eaten. But these wild ducks must be very delicious.’
‘Well, even here, we can catch it if you want,’ he spoke, seriously. ‘It will be good for your recovery.’
‘Really?’ she turned to him, her pale face alive receiving the sunshine. ‘I need at least three, one is not enough.’
‘I don’t know how many I am able to catch,’ he said, ‘have to wait until evening, when I won’t be noticed by others. Otherwise, I will be in trouble.’
‘What trouble?’ she asked, ‘just a few ducks at large anyway.’
‘I don’t know, but remember that we have yet to become Australian citizens,’ his tone remained serious, ‘we could be kicked out of the country if we are found eating the ducks or birds.’
‘Aren’t there just too many of them in the country?’
‘But if we Chinese eat one each day, it won’t take long before they are all gone.’
‘How about kangaroos?’ she changed the topic, ‘have you ever eaten kangaroo?’
‘Once, when I was in Melbourne,’ he recalled, ‘it was just like rough beef, nothing special.’
‘Can we buy some?’ she asked, ‘it may help me recover, my friends said.’
‘Your friends said? I bet you just turn greedy after your tummy was emptied and want something to top it up.’
‘Haha, I deserve it, don’t I?’
It was getting warmer. His arms, with the heat of the baby, grew wet with perspiration. Then her mother took a turn with the baby. And every twenty meters or so, Qiuyan would sit down on the kerb to take a rest.
The journey took the group forty minutes, for a distance which normally took them about ten minutes.
--- End of Chapter 58 --- |
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SMH 让我们一起来合计合计- 私立学校真是你最好的选择吗？ (2012-3-30) patrickzhu 
发表于 2014-8-26 20:25
