Snapshot #9
Polaroid, colour. Faded. An exhausted, shiny-faced woman holds a swaddled baby in her arms. The baby’s face is almost as pink and blotchy as the mother’s.
“Huh,” Sean says, fondly. He reaches out and runs the tip of his finger over April’s tiny head as if, perhaps, he might feel again the warmth of her newborn skin.
He had been desperate to touch her, that was the thing. It had felt as if only touching her skin would make this moment real.
The labour had been difficult. Actually, he hadn’t known at the time whether this labour was more or less difficult than your “average” labour, but certainly no one could, or ever did, describe Catherine’s labour as “easy”.
She had screamed and screamed for hours. She had screamed blue bloody murder. She had begged him to make it stop, as if such a thing was somehow in his power. Was this not his fault, after all? She had cried that it was a mistake, that her mother was right, that she wasn’t ready for this, that she’d never be ready for this.
All of this, the nurses assured him, was “normal”.
Eventually the screaming had stopped and his fear that Catherine was dying had been replaced by fear that something was wrong with the baby. Because this baby looked like no baby he had ever seen on television. This baby, covered in blood and blotches, looked like a baby from a horror film.
The nurses told him that this too was normal, but he hadn’t been convinced.
But as soon as she had cried, everything had changed and he had switched from being scared to being desperate to touch her, just to confirm to himself that she was real. She looked so much like a tiny, plastic dolly, albeit a tiny, plastic Halloween dolly.
When he did get to hold her, a strange sense of pride had washed over him and the concept of “unconditional love”, which he had recently discussed with Alistair, suddenly made sense. He understood only now, how you could love someone, how you could be proud of someone, simply because they were, simply because they existed. He had vowed, then, never to be like his own parents whose love had always seemed entirely conditional on recent performance. He had promised himself that he would never allow himself to forget this feeling no matter who April became, no matter what she ended up doing, no matter what her life choices turned out to be.
Alternating in waves with that sense of pride was fear. Because being a father felt like a whole different thing. It felt vast and terrifying. And in those moments of fear, everything his parents had said, everything Perry had said, seemed true. Because no, he wasn’t sure about this. And no, he wasn’t ready for this at all.
A nurse had taken April from his arms and handed her back to Catherine then, and this had prompted Catherine to start crying. Her emotions would be all over the place for weeks to come, but they didn’t know that yet.
As Catherine wept, her tears falling on baby April’s face, Sean had momentarily returned to his initial fears that something wasn’t right with the baby. Catherine had now, he thought, spotted it too. It was the only explanation he could come up with for her looking and sounding so heartbroken.
He had tried to comfort her then but she had laughed maniacally through her tears, insisting that she was fine.
Even this, the nurse said, was normal. Nurses, it seemed, had different definitions for words like “normal”.
“Go get yourself a hot chocolate from the machine at the end of the corridor,” she had told him. “Give us a chance to clean things up here, eh?”
So Sean had done just that.
On his return, he had peered through the window and seen the baby suckling on her sleeping mother’s breast, and in that moment yet another sensation had washed over him, a feeling so powerful that he can remember it vividly today, and as, looking at the photo, he does so, the hairs on the back of his neck bristle.
He had felt himself disappear, that was the sensation. It was as if he had stepped outside himself and could see his life from an entirely different perspective.
For his whole life, up until that point, had been about him. His only priority had been to work out what he wanted, what he was going to do to make himself happy.
Sure, there had been moments, many moments even, during which he had acted to make those around him happy. No one had ever accused Sean of being selfish.
But even those moments of supposed selflessness had, he suddenly saw, been motivated because doing whatever he was doing for whoever it was made him feel happy.
At the moment he looked through that window, however, everything changed, and something, his ego perhaps, momentarily vanished. The only thing that mattered henceforth was April, protecting April, providing for April; making sure April was happy and healthy and loved. The sensation of selflessness, of total devotion to another, come what may, was like nothing he had ever sensed before.
It hadn’t lasted, of course, but that was no small mercy, because who could survive with such intensity of emotion?
But the sensation had returned from time to time, whenever April was ill, or twice when she went missing, and a few times when she ran towards traffic, or rolled out of a taxi in high heels, drunk, in her late teens. And in those moments he had remembered that she was the only thing that mattered, that protecting this child was his only reason for being on this planet.