Francesca Segal - Mother Ship: Heart-wrenching, heart-warming and heartfelt Adam Kay, author of This is Going to Hurt

Francesca Segal is an award-winning writer and journalist. Her first novel, The Innocents, won the 2012 Costa First Novel Award, the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the 2013 Sami Rohr Prize, and a Betty Trask Award. Her most recent novel, The Awkward Age (smart, soulful and compelling, Nick Hornby) was published in 2017.

also by Francesca Segal

The Innocents

The Awkward Age

For A-lette and B-lette

Generations of women have asserted their courage on behalf of their own children and men, then on behalf of strangers, and finally for themselves.

Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born

Identical girls felt like a lottery win.

For the first time in my life I was part of a posse; I was a one-woman girl gang. Pregnancy was like performing a perpetual magic trick, to move around the world in the silent company of my daughters. Two tiny sidekicks always there, shifting just below the hot, taut skin. I was writing a novel. Together we sought out the sunniest desks in the library and there spent long afternoons, some of us reading, others napping. We shared a new and urgent interest in anchovies, and cottage cheese. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the three of us did Pilates. At night I dreamed them into being, but during the day I didnt have to for I felt them they were there and with me, wild for sugar, protesting little pugilists if I had the temerity to drink iced water. At my fortnightly visits to the hospital Multiples Clinic the sonographers would tut a bit, fussing that both babies were measuring small, but before my eyes they wheeled and flipped with great energy, and they were growing, steadily. Everything was as it should be. At every midwife appointment I received rave reviews for blood pressure, for blood sugar, for appropriately substantial weight gain, for being a sensibly mainstream blood group. Despite being over the age of thirty-five and carrying twins, my pregnancy was plain sailing. I felt excellent. I have not surveyed my friends widely, but I believe I was probably smug, and unbearable.

And so it was with shock that I sat up in bed one morning, twenty-nine weeks and six days pregnant, to discover that Id wet myself. I wondered if there was some way I might whip the sheet from under Gabe as he slept on beside me, as a circus clown pulls a tablecloth from beneath a china tea set. Maybe he would never have to know? But when I reached for my phone to google sudden pregnancy incontinence, the screens white glow revealed that what had begun to leak from me was blood.

Most of the next thirty-six hours were dull. At the Central Hospital I was put on an antenatal ward and told that I needed to stay in for twenty-four hours observation; each episode would reset the clock. Six, eight hours would pass, I would be given permission to dress and venture out for some air, I would bleed again, and then be rushed to the labour ward where nothing would happen, and then I would be back up on antenatal in a room of women, variously crying. I was not crying, because, unlike them, I was not in the throes of having a baby. I had ten more weeks, a full quarter of a pregnancy ahead. On my last scan Baby A had measured somewhere around two pounds, Baby B was smaller. The weight of four packets of butter, or a few apples. Less than a bag of sugar. They couldnt come now, I remember thinking, and so they wouldnt. I was very calm.

Around midnight I shambled to the loo, closing myself into the bathroom with relief at the brief solitude, at the relative silence. But suddenly it came again, and this time within seconds much of the floor was slick with blood; I left a trail of vivid footprints as I backed towards the sink. Still, I couldnt seem to take on board that this was Not Good; I mostly felt bad for the hospital cleaners. When it seemed to have stopped I used the convenient handrails to heave myself down on to all fours and, with a wad of remarkably unabsorbent aquamarine paper towels, I began to mop up the floor. It was from this position, on hands and knees, my breathing heavy with effort, that the emergency cord caught my attention. Its bright red toggle seemed for some reason to resonate. How clever it is, I thought, from my position on the smeared tile, that someone could reach that cord even from down here. My own face confronted me at the unexpected bottom of a full-length hospital mirror, chalk-white. Then, almost as a passing thought, You should maybe think about pulling it.

When the nurse arrived I was full of reflexive apologies for the disturbance, for the mess. By now, still kneeling, much of the blood was soaking its way up my trailing hospital gown. The nurse did not seem to find it cute when I said I was tidying up. Leave that, she snapped. Come.

What did I think, then, padding obediently behind her, back down to the labour ward for the final time? I can barely remember, but I believe that those were, at thirty-five, my last, belated hours of a Peter Pan childhood. It now seems impossible, but even then, I was still convinced it would all turn out all right. It had been a long day and Gabe had only gone home to sleep an hour earlier; I wanted him beside me, but I didnt want him to be tired. I didnt call.

Downstairs I was trussed up with the sort of straps one might use to move a wardrobe, which held in place two Dopplers to monitor Twin 1 and Twin 2, and a third monitor, measuring the contractions I was not yet having. Tiny, galloping hoof beats; a herd of miniature wild horses thundering across a miniature plain. Everyone on the inside was still all right. So it seemed it was me who was bleeding, inconveniently, insistently.

I phoned Gabe around 6 a.m. and caught him already up and dressed, about to come back to the hospital. If not this then for what, exactly, would I bother him, he wanted to know? He arrived, irritable with me, but bearing breakfast, nonetheless. I looked at it with longing. While he was downstairs buying me a pot of lava-hot porridge, it had been decided that I should be nil by mouth just in case. Just in case I need a C-section, I told him wildly, as though I had found myself among incompetents, among lunatics who must nonetheless be humoured. Isnt that insane?

I remained hungry the rest of the day, until around 3 p.m. when my accumulated uneventful hours won me a reprieve. Gabe went foraging, and returned with two sandwiches. I ate both his and mine. Chicken and avocado, oozing mayonnaise, and a second course of cheddar and sliced tomato on generously buttered brown bread. Then I had a cinnamon Danish pastry and half of Gabes blueberry muffin. As we ate, we talked. Though I hadnt known it, at midnight while I was cleaning the hospital floor, my daughters had passed across a magical threshold, from twenty-nine weeks to thirty, at which statistics change, outcomes improve. Two-pound babies have uncertain futures. Respiratory distress syndrome from immature lungs. Irreversible lung damage from long-term ventilator support. Pneumonia. Brain bleeds. Cerebral palsy. Anaemia. Retinopathy of Prematurity, which can cause partial or total blindness. Sepsis. Necrotising Enterocolitis life-threatening bowel death. I knew none of these words then, but I understood that if we could buy my daughters another week, another two, another five, their prognosis would be materially different. And now they were not twenty-nine weeks but thirty. For the next few months I would take it easy I could write, after all, in bed.