Intimate Distance by Katerina Cosgrove Page A

with his knife and fork. I’ve long since finished. Kiki doesn’t serve us meals at the formal dining table any longer, as she did that first night. Only once did we have the honour – all family now.
    I lean back and massage my belly. My navel protrudes like an olive. All day I’ve felt pains, woken at six in the morning thinking the baby must be coming today. But the contractions have been bearable, unpredictable. I was determined to have a morning swim then walked the whole length of the beach. When I got home, in the shower, the pain intensified. Now I feel needles pushing through my abdomen, a wrenching apart as if someone with huge solid hands has come to prise me open. Zoi looks at me. A gush of water. All about me now, the smell of the sea.
    â€˜You alright?’
    â€˜I think my waters have broken.’
    I rush to the bathroom. The back of my dress is wet through. In the bathroom I sit on the toilet, shoulders hunched. My lips are dry.
    â€˜Zoi,’ I call as loudly as I can. ‘Zoi!’
    Instead Kiki comes in, putting on her jacket, throwing her apron to the floor. A gesture so out of character, betraying her agitation.
    â€˜ Ela , ela , let’s go. Better there than here.’
    â€˜Where’s Zoi?’
    â€˜He’s putting your things in the taxi. Come, come, let’s tie your hair back. We can’t have you looking like a gypsy.’
    She comes back with a pink elastic.
    â€˜I don’t want to move.’
    Kiki hoists me up by the elbow.
    IN THE HOSPITAL I’m put in a wheelchair. Nobody seems to hear me. I can feel my wet dress sticking to the vinyl seat. In this moment, without the pain maddening me, I can sense the leaking between my thighs, the opening up to vulnerability.
    â€˜She’s early,’ I can hear Zoi saying. ‘This isn’t meant to happen until October.’
    The orderlies wheel me into the ward, Zoi running alongside.
    â€˜You’ll be fine,’ he says.
    The whole universe is an egg, as is the rising sun. In the Orphic texts, Chaos was created first, then Night and the round Abyss.
    I’m rolled onto a bed very high off the ground, with pale blue sheets that crackle in their stiffness. The contractions are coming on strong now. Regular as a metronome, Zoi counting the spaces between. The time between pain is still, white and unruffled. I breathe easily, talk of nothing, joke with the cheerful midwives. Then the pain is red and sharp, dismissing all that came before. There’s no time, no next moment. There will be no time in the future when pain doesn’t exist.
    â€˜No drugs.’ I can hear Zoi yell to the midwife. ‘Not unless absolutely necessary.’
    I can still register somewhere in the sane, quiet part of my mind that his Greek is very formal, almost aristocratic. He’s talking down to the women around him, these women that hover around me like ministering sisters: calm, tender, with soft hands and soothing words. I hold his arm, bear down on it.
    â€˜Let me get up. I want an epidural.’
    â€˜No, no,’ the midwife soothes. ‘Try to kneel on the bed. Like a frog.’
    The word in Greek sounds strange to my ears. I have no language now, no pleasantries; I’m one huge, black, roaring mouth. I want to squat on the ground. In the deep abyss Night gave birth to a wind egg. She moaned wordlessly in the time before language and pulled the egg out of her from open legs. Large and blue and with a shell so fragile it cracked at the force of her last birthing cry.
    The midwives hold me up by the elbows. My sheets are splotched with blossoms of red. The doctor is called in. I lie on my back again, too exhausted to hold myself upright. The doctor’s rubber-gloved hands are already spattered. He looks up over my knees to Zoi, gives him an encouraging look.
    â€˜Head’s crowning. The hard part’s nearly over.’
    He puts his own tired face close to mine,