The Making of Us by Lisa Jewell Page A

have been torn into fragments and was whirling around his head. He couldn’t get a grip on anything. He remembered Sky’s mum jumping to her feet when she saw him, grabbing his forearms, almost shouting at him: ‘Is it OK? Are they OK?’
    Then he remembered people streaming out of the delivery room and a lot of shouting. He stood and watched, transfixed almost, somehow not putting facts together in his mind. They were shouting about somebody else, he told himself, maybe there was a door to another room off Sky’s room.
    ‘What’s going on?’ said Sky’s mum to the next person to walk urgently past them.
    The person looked at Sky’s mum for a split second, said nothing and carried on walking.
    Dean’s mouth felt dry. He licked his lips. He could feel fear pulsing from Sky’s mum like radiation. The more she panicked, the more Dean withdrew inside himself. If he didn’t say anything and he didn’t do anything then everything would be cool.
    ‘How can you just stand there doing nothing? That’s your woman in there! Find out what the fuck’s going on!’
    Eventually someone emerged and told them that Sky was haemorrhaging, that she had lost a dangerous amount of blood and that they were having trouble locating her blood type, but that they would begin a transfusion the moment they’d managed to locate some.
    Still Dean felt it, a sense of calm resignation, that there was nothing he could do, that people were doing what needed to be done, that very soon he could go home. The thought crossed his mind, once again, that he would like to slip out for a smoke, but with Sky’s mother there, stressing and fretting, he knew he would not be allowed to. It felt to Dean as if he suddenly existed in three different dimensions. Part of him was here, cool and calm, yet two other parts of him, his child, her mother, had been unstitched and put away somewhere out of sight. Every time he tried to give over some thought to one of them, the other demanded his attention, and then he’d be back in his own head, wanting a spliff. Sky, baby, spliff, boing boing boing.
    And then, some time later, maybe an hour, maybe less, a doctor appeared and stood in front of Dean and Sky’s mother, and Sky’s mother immediately began to wail, ‘ No, no, not my baby, not my baby girl, no, no, no ,’ and nobody used the word dead, but Dean knew that she was.
    Sky was gone .
    His pretty, stroppy girl was gone.
    Sky’s mother wouldn’t touch him. It was as if he’d killed Sky. And maybe he had. He’d got her pregnant. If she hadn’t been pregnant, she’d still have been alive.
    His own mother arrived an hour after Sky died and Dean sat and let her hold him for a while, while Sky’s mum shouted at people and screamed. Dean had not done anything physical yet. He had not cried or shouted or fainted or hit anyone or thrown anything. He had not, as far as he could recollect, even spoken. He hadn’t needed to. Sky’s mum had been doing all the speaking that needed to be done.
    A nurse they had not seen before came to them after a few minutes and Dean’s mum released him from her embrace.
    ‘The baby’s doing well,’ she said, ‘would you like to come and see her?’ The question was directed at Dean. He nodded. He did want to see her. He wanted to get away from this. His mum came with him but Sky’s mum did not want to leave her daughter.
    ‘I’ll come later,’ she said, ‘take a picture for me. Give her a kiss. Oh, God.’
    His mum held his hand as they walked down the corridor behind the nurse. Dean could feel his head reordering itself as they walked away from the mess of grief towards a blander landscape. ‘She’s a bit tangled up,’ the nurse explained with a smile, ‘lots of tubes and things, nothing to be scared of, though. She’s very strong, she won’t have to stay in long.’
    ‘Will we be able to hold her?’ asked his mum.
    ‘Possibly. You’ll have to speak to the nurse on duty.’
    They had to scrub their hands