Always Alchemy: The Ever After Book (Alchemy #6)

1. Stick it in me, Mister

1

STICK IT IN ME, MISTER

MADDY

I ’m going to fucking kill Belle Charlton.

Just breathe , she said. Just breathe through it. It’s beautiful.

Breathe, my arse. She told me my body would, and I quote, open like a lotus flower , when in actual fact I’m only four centimetres dilated and feel like a fucking Venus flytrap clenched around this baby that my husband has put inside my body.

The husband whose skull, now I look at him, seems way too big for any baby version of him to pass successfully through a birth canal.

The husband who I’ll pretend I didn’t beg and beg and beg to put a baby inside me.

Back to my former best friend.

I should have known when she referenced a fucking lotus flower that she was spouting utter bullshit.

Three things are now clear to me :

One. Breathing is for getting through a slow flow, not childbirth.

Two . There is nothing beautiful about this.

Three. In a second, I’m going to cave and scream the place down and demand every single drug this fucking hospital has in its presumably impressive supply. This gas and air shit isn’t cutting it. On the contrary, it’s making me feel super thirsty and super sick. The only advantage, as far as I can see, is the ability to clamp down on the mouthpiece with every ounce of the violence I’d rather divert into biting down onto Zach’s hand.

‘I hate this,’ I pant out. (This is, in fact, a concession. What I really feel like saying is I hate you).

‘I know, baby,’ Zach says, rubbing my back in a way that’s totally ineffectual. ‘You’re doing so well.’

‘No I’m not,’ I groan. ‘Four centimetres. I’ve got ages yet.’

‘Just breath through—’ he begins, before stopping. I assume my facial expression has adequately communicated to him exactly what I think of that idea. ‘I’ll get the midwife,’ he says instead.

‘Wait.’ I can barely get the word out as another massive contraction engulfs me. The way it rises inside my body, gathering mass and consuming me with pain, is the most ominous thing I’ve ever, ever experienced. It’s like watching a scary AF tornado coming towards you, but inside your body. The agony is like nothing I’ve ever, ever known, and it knocks me sideways.

It sounds stupid now, but my entire fear around the pain of labour revolved around the pushing-the-baby-out bit. How sore would my vagina be? What if I tore? What if the baby’s Zach-French-sized head ruined my pretty pussy forever?

I never, ever considered that the painful part comes first. It’s like my body is a giant washing machine, every internal muscle I have roiling as it prepares to eject this human cannonball. The contractions are like every food poisoning cramp and every period pain I’ve ever had, rolled into one and magnified by a million.

It is un-fucking-believable.

I collapse at the end of the contraction. I’m crying. I want off this bed and out of this room now. ‘I want a C-section,’ I weep. ‘I can’t do another one.’

My husband looks grim. Like, worried grim, not angry grim. In this moment, he seems less like a blasé man who’s done this twice before and got the t-shirts and more like a guy who’s already buried one wife and won’t entertain the slightest risk to his other one.

He bangs the bell hard, twice, and then squeezes my hand before releasing it and striding to the door.

‘Hey,’ he shouts in his best don’t fuck with me voice. ‘I want Mrs Readey in here now , and call an anaesthetist, too.’

God, I love it when my husband swings that big dick of his.

I may even let him put it inside me again when all this is done. Even if it probably won’t touch the sides once this baby is done ruining my pelvic floor.

I’m probably being pathetic. Women do this every minute of the day in filthy slums and remote prairies. Here I am, in the private maternity wing of one the most established hospitals in London, and I can’t even suck up a little pain. The only good thing about not being as advanced as I like is that the contractions are still a few minutes apart. Fuck knows how I’ll handle it when they speed up.

My phone, which is lying on the bed, lights up. I’ve been texting the Alchemy girls between contractions, partly to vent at people who actually have vaginas and partly to distract myself.

Before the last one, I sent them a badly spelt rant about how fucking painful this is along with some inarticulate death threats to Belle for mismanaging my expectations.

Aida responded with the following:

There are no heroes here. Get some fucking pain relief and do it now.

I replied:

Trying to hold off. Better if I can do it naturally. I really want this to be a successful birth

Aida has just expressed her view of that particular perspective:

LISTEN TO ME. A successful birth is one where the mother and baby are both healthy. OK? Nothing else. Forget the fucking birthing pool and whale music. If you need pain relief TAKE IT.

God I love her. I lift the phone as Zach comes back around the bed and type out all I can manage.

K xxx

When the anaesthetist finally shows up, I beam at him. He’s the most angelic human being I’ve ever seen. I have never, ever been so happy to see anyone in my entire life. But as he takes out the massive epidural needle and begins to fiddle with it, I eye it warily.

My antenatal teacher’s words play in my mind .

If you’re scared of the needle, you don’t need an epidural badly enough.

Fuck that. If this guy brandished a length of lead piping and told me he was going to jam it into my spine and feed the epidural through that, I’d be on board. As far as I’m concerned, he can do what he likes.

‘I won’t give you a total spinal block,’ he warns as he turns me onto my side. ‘You’ll need some pain to work with, okay?’

You’ll need some pain to work with might be up there with the biggest load of horseshit I’ve ever heard, but whatever.

‘Okay,’ I agree. Stick it in me, mister. Give me everything you’ve got.

Words I may not be saying to my husband for quite some time.

I cannot with this baby.

He is literally the most beautiful human being I’ve ever seen.

His eyes are enormous, his irises sky blue. He has the softest little tufts of black hair (no paternity test required) and he’s not overcooked or undercooked or… anything. He’s just perfect . I can already tell he’s going to be super smart, and I silently give thanks for the excellent physical and intellectual gene pool I chose in my smoking hot husband.

But the best thing of all is his little mouth. It’s like a tiny rosebud, and I’m obsessed with every little thing he does with it. He’s only a couple of hours old, but I already know his main moves.

There’s the purse of his mouth, unimpressed and thoughtful .

There’s the way he presses his little lips together in a way that I know in a few weeks’ time will turn into a smile, and I also know it’ll slay me when it happens.

But his favourite move right now is the rooting thing, where he opens his mouth like a tiny baby bird, eyes squeezed shut as he searches blindly for his mama’s frankly massive boob. It’s the cutest and cleverest thing ever .

His name is Jonny.

I’ve always hankered after the name Jonny, partly because I had a huge crush on the England rugby star Jonny Wilkinson when I was little—though I didn’t divulge that to Zach. I may be well and truly over my blonde era now, but I still love the name. It’s wholesome but cheeky, and it turns out Zach’s a fan too, though he’s insisting we call him Jonathan on his birth certificate.

I’m not sure how I feel about the name Jonathan. It always feels like it should end in thon , like marathon. Jona- thon . I mean, it’s a totally square name. Perfect for the nerd I’m sure he’ll be, if he takes after his dad (I’ll do my best to temper that with my coolness, but I suspect the French genes are strong. I mean, look at that hair). Anyway, I do take Zach’s point that he needs a barrister name, and that Jonny won’t cut it.

We’ll name him Jonathan, but we’ll call him Jonny, and he will be the most amazing little boy who’s ever lived.

He does the rooting thing again, and I transfer him to my totally engorged boob and manage, after a few flicks, to get my nipple vaguely into his mouth. Fuck, those tiny gums are strong. And I can’t imagine how porno I’ll look when my milk actually comes in properly. I wonder if I’ll even be able to stand up straight.

I look down at him, sucking away, his ridiculously small hand curled into a fist on my boob. His breathing is so regular, his head so downy. I stroke it with the lightest touch and marvel at the fact that a fully fledged human brain lives under this tiny, delicate skull. I know we have a fuck-load of mountains to climb from here, but in this moment of peace, as our little son suckles peacefully and all these fantastic feel-good hormones course through my body, I feel stupendously, gloriously happy.

When I glance up at Zach, he’s watching us with eyes so wet his eyelashes have gone all starry. I smile at him. ‘Hey.’

‘Hey.’ He’s sitting on a plastic chair next to the bed, as close as he can get it to us. His hand strokes my thigh over the thin hospital blanket. There are galaxies full of love in those damp blue eyes.

‘You okay?’ I ask quietly, and he lets out a little laugh.

‘The only person who gets to ask that is me. You’re so incredible.’

I smile smugly. ‘Yes, I am. Obviously. But I know this is a lot for you,’ I add more gently.

His smile grows wider, his eyes wetter. ‘It’s a day I never thought I’d see. It’s—extraordinary. You’re extraordinary. Both of you.’

His praise is a warm glow around my already full heart. I know he was sceptical about knocking me up, but I was confident that his scepticism centred more around my age rather than his desire to expand our little family. Still, his ecstatic reaction to Jonny is more than I could ever have hoped for.

‘I can’t believe I was scared of having a boy,’ I say with a laugh. We didn’t find out the sex of the baby, even though I was dying to at every point. And my God, was it worth the wait. When the consultant told us it was a boy, I was frankly gobsmacked. I don’t know why—I was big at the end. I should have guessed. But because Zach already has two girls, I assumed we’d just keep on making girls.

A flawed assumption, clearly.

‘It’s a step towards evening the scales,’ my husband deadpans.

‘I give it a week before you’ve bought him a tiny England rugby kit.’

‘Cal might have beaten me to it.’ He shifts and pulls his phone out of his pocket. ‘Look.’

Oh my God. Among the flurry of congratulatory messages in the Alchemy boys’ WhatsApp chat is a screenshot of the teeniest, cutest onesie—white, with England’s national rugby team’s red rose in the middle.

‘Okay, that’s very cute,’ I concede.

He puts his phone away and gives me and Jonny a watery smile again. He looks absolutely wrecked, which is not surprising, given we both just pulled an all-nighter.

‘You sure you’re up to seeing the girls?’ he asks.

I’m offended that he’s even asked. ‘Obviously. I wish they’d hurry up, though.’

Ruth, our nanny, is bringing them in after they’ve had breakfast. It’s a Tuesday, but Zach has messaged the school to say they’ll both be in late.

Meeting their baby brother is far more important.

ZACH

For as long as things have been serious between me and Mads, I’ve felt this odd conflict where I worry simultaneously about having expedited her future by pulling her into instant motherhood at such a tender age but also having robbed her of so many facets of the future she deserves because she’s not with someone who can share all those awe-inspiring firsts with her.

She’s always insisted that this exact situation is what she wants, of course, and my hyper-vigilant observations of her with the girls tell me she derives nothing but pleasure from her relationship with them, so I know I should cut myself some slack.

Still, it’s taken the past nine months and the past twelve hours to fully understand that this experience of love and parenthood and family is far too vast to be curtailed by concepts of limits and firsts .

Watching my wife bear, and grow, and birth our son has been every bit as new and awe-inspiring as those firsts were with Claire.

Standing by as our obstetrician laid him in Maddy’s arms? Best thing I’ve ever, ever seen.

And witnessing this first meeting between our daughters and their baby brother?

I’m a fucking mess.

Stella was three when Nance was born. We have tonnes of footage of that day—it was all super cute—but she wasn’t far off being a baby herself.

This is totally different.

Now, Nancy’s ten, and Stella turns thirteen in a month or two. My daughters will, I hope, remember the day they met their brother for a long, long time. The past nine months have been a family celebration. The girls have embraced every ultrasound photo. Maddy’s done a fantastic job of including them in the preparations for Jonny’s arrival, from allowing them to rub anti-stretch-mark butter into her bump to consulting them on the decor for a tasteful, gender-neutral nursery .

She even brought them along to a couple of our later obstetric appointments, once we were comfortable everything was progressing well.

Now, I sit in my chair and watch as the girls flank Mads on the bed. She has her knees up, Jonny swaddled and propped in the ridge between her legs as they coo over him.

There are ends, and there are beginnings, and, although Stella and Nancy have experienced new beginnings in some form with my marriage to Mads, Jonny’s arrival into the world is the best possible proof I can give to our daughters that life is indeed a circle and not just a dead end.

I have no intention whatsoever of connecting the following dots for the girls, but it blows my mind that new life has come from the ashes of Claire’s life. That she had to die for Jonny to exist. I can’t fathom it, and I don’t want to. It’s a binary whose truth makes me uncomfortable, when I want only to celebrate today. To give thanks for the amazing humans in my life. For the palpable joy, the hope, that exists today, in this pleasant, sunny room.

One of the midwives, Susan, comes in to check on us. She’s in her fifties, with a briskly warm energy that reminds me of our nanny, Ruth. She’s been on duty since we left the labour room this morning, and she’s doing a great job of providing endless cups of tea for us. (Maddy declared earlier that her first cup of tea after giving birth was the best thing she’d ever tasted in her life, a fact I don’t doubt.)

‘How are we all doing?’ Susan asks cheerily. ‘Ooh, you must be Jonny’s big sisters! Isn’t he a lucky boy?’

Maddy gives her a huge grin. I suspect her warmth towards Susan is a combination of feel-good hormones and that natural human instinct to gravitate towards people who seem to know what they’re doing in situations when you yourself feel like you’ve entered a parallel universe .

‘Indeed he is,’ she says. ‘This is Stella and Nancy, and they’ve come to meet their baby brother.’

Susan beams. ‘Isn’t that lovely? Stella and Nancy—what beautiful names. Are there any biscuit-eaters among you?’

Nancy opens her mouth to deliver a vehement affirmative, but she’s interrupted by a shrill, tinny ringtone coming from the depths of Susan’s apron.

Holy fucking shit .

The tune?

I Want it That Way by The Backstreet Boys.