The Making of Us by Lisa Jewell

time.
    ‘Are you going to call your mum?’
    Dean blinked.
    ‘She’ll want to know, Dean . This is her first grandchild, I might die . You need to tell her.’
    He raised his eyebrows and stuck out his bottom lip. ‘I guess so,’ he said, feeling the inside pocket of his jacket for his phone. His mum’s number went through to voicemail and he left her a message. ‘Mum, it’s me, give us a call, OK?’
    He slipped the phone back into his pocket and noticed that Sky was looking at him aghast. ‘Give us a call? Give us a call?’
    ‘Yeah? What?’
    She pursed her lips and shook her head. ‘You’re a fucking moron, Dean. Could you not have said something, you know, relevant ? Like maybe where you were. Or what was happening. Or that I was fucking dying ? Jesus!’
    ‘What?’ he countered, lamely. ‘She’ll call me back. I can tell her then.’
    Sky rolled her eyes and then grimaced.
    Dean got to his feet and clutched her hand. ‘You OK?’ he said.
    ‘Yeah, yeah, just a twinge. A thing. A contraction, you know.’
    Dean squeezed her hand and wondered what he should say or do to help. Everything felt potentially hazardous. But then saying and doing nothing felt even more dangerous. ‘Can I get you anything?’ he asked, thinking it felt like a reasonably safe call.
    ‘Yeah. A normal placenta and another ten weeks to grow this baby.’ She threw him her ‘you total wanker’ smile, folded her arms across her belly and turned away from him.
    The anaesthetist arrived, an Asian man with a goatee beard and trendy shoes. He curled Sky into a foetal ball and injected her back. Dean couldn’t watch. He was squeamish about needles, in particular needles that went into your actual spine. Sky made a total fuss about it but then, for a few moments afterwards, she was calm.
    Looking back on the day his first baby was born, Dean could hardly remember anything after Sky was taken into surgery. Everything started going really fast. Sky’s mum Rose pitched up at some point and immediately acted like nobody had been doing anything right until she arrived. His mum had called and said she wouldn’t be able to make it for at least a couple of hours because she was in Brighton. He was too shell-shocked even to ask her what the hell she was doing there. He had a photo of himself that Sky’s mum had taken, wearing a green tunic and trousers and a matching green hat. What do they call that? Scrubs. Yes, scrubs. At some point someone had put him in scrubs. Or maybe he’d put himself in scrubs, he couldn’t remember. And then a nurse told him he could go into theatre and he remembered very clearly thinking, Shit, no time for a quick smoke , thinking how much better seeing your kid being born would be after a smoke. And then the next thing he knew, she was out. Isadora. There. Like a skinned lamb. All loose skin and blue veins and feet and hands the size of thumbnails. He barely had a chance to look at her face. She was stolen away and put under a light like an alien abduction and then someone came and passed her under their noses, very, very quickly, long enough for Dean to see wide-spaced eyes and a big mouth and dark hair that grew low on her brow. And in that brief moment, his daughter glanced at him with a look of such intense intelligence and knowing that Dean’s breath caught and he felt as small and inconsequential as a fruit-fly.
    Sky looked at him desperately as the baby was taken away again. ‘Is she all right?’ she cried. ‘Is she OK?’
    ‘She looks fantastic,’ said a nurse, ‘just taking her away now, just to be sure. But she looks fantastic. Really strong.’
    ‘I want my mum. Where’s my mum?’
    ‘She’s outside, waiting.’
    ‘Can I see her? I want to see her.’
    ‘You can see her when we’ve finished putting you back together. OK?’
    ‘Dean, go and tell her,’ Sky pleaded. ‘Go and tell her the baby’s here. She’ll be freaking out otherwise.’
    Dean did as he was told. The world seemed to