‘I’ll just go out and make a call while you’re organising the ultrasound scan, shall I?’ she suggested, taking pity on the poor man’s nerves.
‘You won’t go away, will you, Callie?’ Steph demanded, looking younger than ever swathed in a voluminous hospital gown.
‘I promise,’ Callie said with an encouraging smile. ‘But I need to do something about my accommodation. We aren’t all getting free beds for the night.’
‘But you will come back, won’t you?’ she said, sounding as uncertain as a little child left for the first time in an unfamiliar place, but clearly hoping that no one would be able to hear the pleading in her voice.
‘As soon as I’ve made my calls,’ Callie reassured her, and slipped out of the cubicle.
‘Can you direct me to a phone I can use to call out of the hospital?’ she asked one of the women at the reception desk, having chosen her for the kindly way she’d spoken to the last person to approach her. ‘And do you have any sort of directory of organisations in this area who provide sheltered accommodation for runaways or pregnant girls?’
The woman blinked at the question, but Callie would have to give her points for the fact that her smile never wavered neither did her eyes stray towards Callie’s waistline.
‘I’ve got some telephone numbers on a database on the computer. I could call them for you, or would you like me to print them out?’
‘Could you print them out, please? Until my friend has finished having her tests, she won’t know when she’ll be released.’
‘I wouldn’t wait till then before you make contact,’ she advised softly, as the printer started chattering, beckoning Callie to the far end of the reception desk to give them some semblance of privacy for their conversation. ‘There’s an excellent YMCA but they’re always so heavily over-subscribed and only take people in on a night-by-night basis, so there’s no continuity. There’s only one official residential centre in town, and that takes the girls up to six weeks after the birth, so they rarely have any beds free.’ She paused a moment in thought then wrote something on the paper. ‘This one I’m adding at the bottom of the list is still trying to start up at the moment—they’re struggling financially, so they won’t have the same number of carers. It’s a private one, not officially on the hospital list yet. A friend told me it’s being set up by a woman whose teenage daughter ran away from home when she discovered she was pregnant, and then died.’
Callie thanked her for the information and set off for the phone. She could only imagine the feelings of guilt that were driving the poor woman to set up some sort of refuge, but directing Steph to somewhere that could fold before the end of her pregnancy might not be the best course.
Fifteen minutes later she had to admit that she was out of options and started to dial the number written on the bottom of the list in the receptionist’s neat script. The sight of the woman’s surname startled her for a moment and brought back one of her worst memories from the time she had been doing her rotation in Obs and Gyn.
‘Yeah?’ said a bored voice when the phone was answered, the sound barely audible over the racket going on in the background.
‘Is that The Place to Go?’ Callie asked, wondering if she’d misdialled.
‘Yeah,’ said the same bored voice.
‘Is Mrs Keeley there?’
‘Who? Oh, you mean Marian. Nah. She had to take Jess to ’ ospital. ’Er waters broke,’ she offered, with the first glimpse of real emotion in her voice.
‘Which hospital did they go to?’ Callie asked over a superstitious shiver when she heard the woman’s first name. What were the chances that there were two people called Marian Keeley who had each lost a pregnant teenage daughter? What were the chances that she would be the one who had provided the spark that had made Callie decide between specialising in Obs and Gyn and A and E?
‘She’s taken ’er to City. It’s where we all go when it’s time,’ said the laconic voice on the other end of the line. ‘Can I take a message? I dunno when she’ll be back, mind. Babies can take hours to be born sometimes. And it can hurt a lot, too,’ she added with an audible edge of fear to her voice.
‘That’s why they give you gas and air to breathe,’ Callie said matter-of-factly. ‘To take the pain away.’
‘You’ve got kids?’ she interrupted, almost eagerly.
‘No, but I’m a—’
‘Well, what would you know about it, then?’ the girl snapped, and Callie was left with the dial tone burring in her ear.
‘That went well,’ she muttered wryly as she replaced the receiver and made her way back towards the curtained cubicles.
‘Come with me, Callie,’ Steph said as soon as she caught sight of her. ‘They’re taking me up to the place where they do scans.’
Callie hadn’t done anything about finding herself accommodation for the night yet, but she couldn’t bring herself to rebuff the youngster, not when she was the closest thing she had to a friend.
She let Steph’s nervous chatter wash over her as she rationalised that she could always book into a hotel for one night, even if it meant she had to start looking for a job sooner rather than later. Also, if they were going up to the antenatal department for the ultrasound, it might be close enough to the labour ward for her to see if she could make contact with Marian Keeley.
‘Callie! Look!’ Steph exclaimed a little while later as she saw the indistinct image appear on the screen. All her fear and disappointment seemed to have been banished by that one shadowy impression with its tiny heart beating so valiantly. ‘It’s the baby! My baby!’ she whispered, with a mixture of fear and awe as the being growing inside her became real for the first time. ‘Look! It’s moving!’
It felt as if a giant vice was being tightened inexorably around Callie’s heart. She could remember all too clearly her own terrified joy when she’d seen her baby’s heart beating, and for the first time had allowed herself to hope that she and Con would finally have their miracle.
‘Would you like a picture to keep?’ the technician asked.
The intense look of longing that swept across the youngster’ s face was a far cry from the resigned defensiveness she’d worn as a shield when Callie had first met her. Her ‘Yes! Please,’ was every bit as fervent as Callie’s had been, and she had no doubt that it would be evidence of a precious memory, as her own early scans had been.
Then, she’d been amazed how different it had been to look at the scan of her own child rather than that of a patient. With professional distance between them, she’d been able to look at the images analytically; when it had been her own baby, she’d demanded, ‘Is the baby all right?’ every bit as anxiously as any other expectant mother.
‘Everything looks fine so far,’ the voice interrupted her thoughts. ‘No sign that your accident did any damage to the baby or to the placenta.’
‘So that means I can go?’ Steph said, although Callie thought she could detect a little less eagerness in the words than before. Perhaps the young girl was actually feeling the reassurance of having so much professional help around her.
‘Not until the morning,’ the midwife who had been assigned to Steph said firmly. ‘Although it was brief, you did suffer some loss of consciousness, so we’d like to keep you under observation for a while just as a precaution. In your case, that’s more important because of the baby. Anyway,’ she added cheerfully, ‘it will give you a chance to look us over and get to know us before you come in for the real thing.’
It was another half an hour before Steph was settled in the small four-room ward with two heavily pregnant companions,