CHAPTER 33
There was a lot of noise and bustle when the ambulance went off, but even though it had only taken ten minutes to get to the house each of those minutes had been an age to me.

Tricia was bleeding from between her legs, and with Cyril’s help and the telephone operator’s calm advice we had jammed two bath towels under her skirt and I was pressing them hard against her private parts. For a very few seconds I had felt embarrassed to find myself in that position with my wife’s father looking on, but the dreadful reality ended that. So much blood…

I didn’t want to move her, you don’t if you can help it I had been told, but Cyril had found a pulse, weak but nevertheless a pulse. The ambulance crew had a bag of some liquid or other, I don’t think it was blood, and while one of them moved me gently but firmly away from my wife, the other searched for a vein.

“What’s her name, son?”

“Tricia. Tricia Barker”

“Do you know what blood group she is?”

“No…”

Cyril chipped in. “Type O, son”

There were more questions, about her age and how long she had been expecting, but eventually the man had all he wanted, and suggested I go and put the kettle on.

“I don’t want to leave---“

“Gerald. Go to the kitchen. Get out of these lads’ way”

Cyril’s voice wasn’t loud, but the tone was there. I stood up.

“And wash those hands, son”

I looked down. So much blood, all of it hers, or Robert Hardy Barker’s.

They wouldn’t let me in the ambulance, so Cyril drove, mounting the pavement a couple of times, but he got us there. Tricia had been taken straight in, but a doctor was with us ten minutes after we were sat down, and it wasn’t in the usual place the cartoonists filled with kids with saucepans on their heads. This was a private room. We hadn’t been there five minutes when my mother, father and mother-in-law rushed in. Mam was to the point.

“Taxi fares we can argue about later, son. Where is the lass?”

That was when the doctor came in, a Doctor Holdsworth as he introduced himself, and he wasn’t looking at any of us properly, because he was only a young lad, not much older than me, and he was so hesitant, and Cyril, Dad, just put their hands one on each of my shoulders as Dad murmured “Breathe, son”

The young man cleared his throat. “Mr Barker?”

Dad and I replied as one, and there was a moment of confusion, just an instant, on the doctor’s face before he began the speech to me.

“I’m dreadfully sorry, Mr Barker, to have to tell you…”

No, I didn’t faint or black out, nothing like that in any way at all. I just stopped listening as he spoke about what he called placental abruption, blood loss, and I was grieving for my little boy, but Mam was sobbing as I played the doctor’s words over again in my head, and it wasn’t just the baby, oh no, nothing as simply dreadful as that, but it was my Tricia, my lover, my wife as well, and that is when I just sat down on the worn carpet and bawled like a child. The doctor lost his flow at that, and I realised he was crying himself, and asked myself how someone so young could have been handed such an awful job to do, which was when I realised I was sitting outside myself watching a tall red-haired man digging his fingers into a worn-out piece of cloth and all but screaming.

Dad led the doctor out, and in a while there was a nurse, and cups of tea, and a vicar or chaplain or whatever he was called came in and asked what he could do for us, even though he knew the answer was nothing at all, absolutely nothing.

I was staring into my tea, eyes sore as they dried out after I had shed every tear in my body, when the chaplain spoke to me.

“Gerald? Perhaps this is the wrong time, but, well, did you have a name for the child?”

I turned my face to his, seeking any sign he was taking the Michael, but no, he was serious.

“I don’t even know what my… our child would have been, vicar”

“It’s just Archie here, Gerald. Archie”

“Aye. We had names picked out, Archie. But…”

He reached out to put a hand on my knee, which was a bit odd, but I didn’t mind. Compared to what had just happened I couldn’t actually find the strength to mind anything.

“It was a little girl, Gerald. She was a little girl”

“She was Susan Jane Barker then”

That set Mam off again, and then Dr Holdsworth came back in.

“Mr Barker, we have… We have done what we can, and if you wish you can see your wife before…”

Before she goes into a fridge, he meant. Before we put her in the ground, along with little Suzy, unless the hospital did other things to children who arrived before they could be born. Cyril laid an arm over my shoulders, and I wondered how he could stay so quiet, so calm.

“I’ll sort out arrangements, son. You go along and say goodbye to or girl. We’ll stop by after you’re done”

It was over. My life lay in a hospital gown under a single sheet on a metal trolley, and after all five of us had had our moments the Hospital Friends brought round an old ambulance they used to run girls from the nurses’ home and dropped all of us except Cyril off at my place, no longer ‘ours’. I looked at the front door, knowing what state it was in, what marked the carpet and the walls, and put my key away. Cyril pulled up, handing his wife the keys as he climbed out.

“The two of you get back to ours, pet. We’ll be home later”

Mam just nodded, and as they drove off Cyril raised an eyebrow.

“Red Lion? Abie Brown usually does a lock-in”

Dad nodded sharply. “Aye. Let’s make sure we forget this fucking day”

The news had clearly reached the pub, York being the way it is, and a minute after we had sat down, there was a tray at our table with six pints of ale, three tumblers, and a bottle. We ended up sleeping in the pub, and when I awoke with the taste of death in my mouth all I could remember was a tent in Belgium, a pile of blankets and a similar hangover.

I don’t remember much of the funeral, because I had seen too many of them already and I was hitting the gin a bit too much just then. We went to a church, hymns were sung and words said, and then they put my life into a hole and shovelled dirt onto it. I had found one moment of lucidity, though, and begged the hospital to let little Susan Jane Barker sleep with her mother rather than being incinerated, cremated, burned. The only bright spot in the day, if you can call something utterly black “bright”, was that we had found somewhere near Bob for the girls, and that meant that they had the best person in the world to watch over them as they slept.