The Janus Stone

The nurse ushers Ruth into a room with a bed and a contraption like a TV screen. Another woman stands by the screen, nonchalantly chewing gum. Ruth is reminded uncomfortably of the autopsy room. Only this time she is the body on the slab. Don’t be morbid, she tells herself. This is a perfectly routine procedure. So is an autopsy, persists the voice inside her head.

The nurse tells Ruth to undo her trousers, and rubs gel onto her stomach. Ruth squirms. She hates being touched on her stomach and avoids massages and beauty treatments like the plague. ‘Relax!’ she remembers a masseuse once saying to her. Eccentric she knows but, for Ruth, having some manicured stranger kneading your shoulder blades whilst chatting about their holidays is the very opposite of relaxing.

The other woman now places something like the end of a stethoscope onto Ruth’s stomach, pressing quite hard. Ruth has been told not to go to the loo before the scan and the pressure is really very uncomfortable. For a second she feels like jumping off the bed and heading for the nearest Ladies. But then she sees that the screen is full of what look like wispy grey clouds. In the centre of the clouds something is moving.

Ruth has seen scans before – of bones and other archaeological objects. She knows that the high-frequency sound waves bounce off solid objects. She knows how to look at degrees of light and shade, to assess density and structure. But this – this is something quite different. This collection of dark circles, moving slowly on the screen, this is both completely incomprehensible and suddenly utterly real. This is her baby.

‘That’s the baby’s heart,’ says the woman, speaking for the first time and pushing the gum into the corner of her mouth. She points towards four black, pulsating circles.

‘That’s its spine.’ Ruth sees a slender white line moving across the screen. For some inexplicable reason, tears come to her eyes. Then she remembers something.

‘Can you tell if it’s a boy or a girl?’

‘Not at this scan. We’ll probably be able to tell at the next one, at about twenty weeks.’

But looking at the screen through swimming eyes, Ruth is convinced that the baby is a boy. There is something masculine, almost jaunty, about the little figure swimming around in her womb. The woman points at another part of the screen. ‘Long legs. Has your partner got long legs?’

Has Nelson got long legs? Ruth imagines him striding from place to place, impatient, eager to get to the next job. He is tall, presumably his legs are long. Longer than Ruth’s, certainly. Then, suddenly, it hits her for the first time. This baby is half his. Up until this point, she has thought of the baby as entirely hers, has even thought that it is the only thing in the world that is really hers. But it is not hers. For a second she sees the shape on the screen as completely alien – a male, a miniature Nelson. She closes her eyes.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes… just a little sick.’

‘That’s OK. It often happens. We’re done anyhow.’ She hands Ruth some scratchy paper towels to clean her stomach and Ruth sits up slowly.

‘I’ll print off an image for you to take home.’

‘An image?’ Ruth looks at her blankly.

‘Of the baby! To show your partner.’

‘Oh, yes. Thank you.’

Ruth drives slowly back to the university, aware that she is doing the whole mirror/signal/manoeuvre thing with more care than at any time since her driving test. She keeps to the two-second rule and is so slow passing a bicycle that the car behind her hoots impatiently. She knows that she is driving like an old lady in a hat but she can’t help herself. She is filled with the overwhelming realisation that she is carrying another human being inside her. A human being, moreover, with its own personality and its father’s long legs. She is its vehicle, carrying it smoothly from A to B, making sure that she gives all the right signals and doesn’t crash into an oncoming lorry. How will she keep it up, a journey of nine months, never exceeding the speed limit, no Little Chef to stop at on the way? Perhaps she’ll get used to it in time…

Term is over for the students. She sees them everywhere: carrying cases into cars, having tearful farewells in doorways, writing loving messages on each other’s T-shirts. Get over it, Ruth wants to say. You’ll see each other again in September. But she can remember what it’s like to have the whole summer stretching ahead of you: working, travelling, lounging around annoying your parents. Four months is an eternity when you’re eighteen. By the time the students come back, Ruth will be seven months pregnant. According to the printout in her bag, her baby is due on the first of November.