You Belong to Me by Elizabeth Cooke

Author:Elizabeth Cooke
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781504019286
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Two

For a moment, no one moved.

Faith sat, hunched over.

Joz stepped forward. She held out to her hand to Alex. ‘Hello again,’ she said. ‘Fancy seeing you, and all that stuff.’

He doesn’t know you, Faith thought.

You’ve never met.

For a moment, she saw the look of total horror that appeared on Alex’s face. He stepped back, to avoid Joz’s hand, and she, in turn, smiled at him, and shrugged.

Faith got up rapidly, and, as she did so, there was an abrupt, and painless, popping sensation. It was just as if a small paper bag had burst inside her. Almost immediately, a warm rush of fluid soaked her. She clenched both hands on her thighs. ‘Oh, God,’ she whispered. ‘Oh no.’

Alex grabbed her arm.

‘Can you call a doctor,’ she said.

‘Who is it?’

‘What?’

‘Who’s your GP?’

She looked at him, stricken. ‘I haven’t got one. I haven’t registered yet.’

‘You haven’t …’ He shook his head in disbelief for a second. Then, ‘I’ll call mine,’ he told her. ‘It’s Harret, in Milborne.’

‘Milborne?’ said Joz. ‘I just drove through a Milborne. It’s ten miles away.’

Alex gave her a filthy look. ‘It’s not ten,’ he said. ‘It’s six.’

‘But the hospital’s six miles, isn’t it?’

‘Nine. What the hell is it to you anyway?’ Alex was trying to support Faith as she sank backwards to the couch.

Joz looked from Faith to Alex, and then upwards at Guy. She smiled at him sweetly. ‘Well, none of my business, of course,’ she said. ‘You’ll be the husband, I expect? But it seems to me that a hospital would be more use.’

Guy seemed to jolt to life at that. ‘That’s right, you’ve got to go to hospital,’ he said to Faith. ‘Get up.’

Alex pushed him back. ‘Get up?’ he said, aghast. ‘Are you bloody serious?’ He stared at Joz. ‘And you …’ He gave her a furious look. ‘You keep out of this.’

Joz hardly batted an eyelid. ‘But he’s right,’ she said, smiling. ‘Absolutely right. She ought to get to hospital.’ Her gaze bounced from one man to the other. ‘I must say, this seems awfully interesting,’ she murmured.

‘Oh Christ,’ moaned Faith. ‘Somebody please do something. Anything.’

She lay on the trolley in Casualty, staring at the green curtains. It was midday.

Outside, she could hear a curious weave of sounds. It seemed to be made up principally of Guy’s voice, low and insistent and persistent. Around and over him the noise of the hospital surged and retreated: other voices; the rattle of wheels; the slap of shoes against polished floors; the ringing of telephones.

She was in a cream-coloured cubicle. A nurse had been to take her blood pressure and to give her a sanitary towel, after the Casualty doctor had given her a quick once-over. ‘The gynae man will want to look at that,’ she said.

Faith had fought down an urge to laugh. ‘He must be some kind of freak, then,’ she was tempted to reply.

There was no pain at all. That was the strangest thing. She lay with her hands crossed over her stomach, pressing down, as if she were trying to reach inside and hold on to the baby.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.