While my St George's chapter is not happy in the slightest, how good a St George's have we just had? Sunshine, a royal baby, and my 20th birthday :) Despite the very upsetting subject matter in this flashback, I wanted to set something on St George's day and make a point of it being April 23rd because no-one ever knows when St George's is - which is a shame in comparison to all the epic celebrations for St Patrick's day (which I'm not belittling in the slightest, by the way, I love it with all my half-Irish heart!)
Catterick Garrison, St George's Day 2010
Dylan was extremely happy to have his wife back in their little cottage. It felt so much more normal to have her tripping over Dervla (while the pair were fond of each other, they were not used to living around each other, with usually amusing consequences) and making a mess again. Sam had had a week's leave, three and half months ago, and although it had been a glorious week, it was wonderful now to have her back for the best part of a month before she deployed again. He did his best not to keep the dreaded d-word in his mind for too long — if he got stuck on it then his OCD tendencies came back to interrupt his wife and push him closer to alcohol. He had been sober for six days before Sam had returned, and she had been back since the end of March, during which time he hadn't had a drink even once. He hoped that he could pass muster for a normal husband until she was gone again. It was a cruel paradox: he hated her being away because it drove him to drink even more than daily life usually did, but he needed her far away so he could drink in peace.
However, if his suspicions proved true, he might have to actually get himself sober for good, because she would be on English soil for far longer than her allotted demobilisation.
She'd had three 'vomiting bugs' since she had been at home, and not the usual twenty-four-hours-and-over bugs either. These had been three-day-long bouts (minimum) of near constant sickness, which she had done exceptionally well to hide from her unit. It was her bad luck that another had come on in the last day or so when she'd planned to spend tonight in the pub. There was an English-by-birth Irish soldier among her fellow officers, whose idea it had been to create their own national holiday out of St George's day — Sam had already freely commented that he was just trying to make up for having been deployed for St Patrick's day.
But she had been looking forward to going out, until she'd gotten up from the sofa in a terrible rush while they'd been watching QI the previous evening, and returned with watering eyes and a starkly pale face.
"Again?" Dylan asked quietly, standing up at once as she nodded and heading to the kitchen for a glass of cold water. He returned to the room armed with a plastic bucket too, and despite the fact that Sam looked really unwell, she scoffed weakly with disgust.
"What are you doing with that bucket?" she asked croakily.
"Forgive me, but are you, or are not, sick again? Hence, sick bucket." He was firm but there were no sharp edges in his voice.
"Alright," Sam said, not having the energy to dispute him, which spoke volumes about how she was feeling. "I'll be fine, just not used to…" But she didn't have an end to that sentence.
Dylan carefully slid onto the sofa beside her, and then turned first himself, and then Sam, so that she was sitting against his chest, between his legs. "So is it me that you're not used to? Dervla maybe, or English rain?"
Sam rested her head back, before weakly telling him to shut up. She tensed as another wave of nausea crashed over her, and let out a nearly-inaudible groan as she braced herself to vomit yet again, but it didn't come, and she relaxed. "I'll be better tomorrow," she mumbled. "I'm not missing… what're they calling it? St Patrick's 2.0."
After a night of rest, Sam's winning streak was broken on the morning of the twenty-third. When she returned to bed, her cotton pyjamas creased by sleep and kneeling on the bathroom floor, she let out a sigh of frustration.
"Why have I been ill non-stop since coming home, and I haven't managed to make you sick yet?"
Now was not the time for wise-cracks about Dylan's cast-iron immune system, nor would an observation be welcome that the thing most likely making Sam so ill was definitely not contagious.
That afternoon, Sam had brightened considerably, even going so far as to accompany Dylan when he took Dervla for a walk (which he discreetly and drastically shortened.) He stopped on the pavement when they were nearly home, a few feet from the tiny chemist's shop at this end of their lane. St George's bunting was strung across the shop front, a line of little white flags with bright red crosses.
"Wait here with Dervla, for me?" he said, looking into Sam's eyes as though wishing she would read his mind and instinctively know what he was going to buy.
Sam leaned against the post-box, tired by the short walk. "Okay," she agreed. "Why?"
Sighing, Dylan came straight out with it. "I'm going to buy you a pregnancy test. So that we know for sure." He had expected her to splutter with laughter, tell him not to be so stupid and to take her home so she could have a nap. Instead, she looked up at the grim sky, realisation spreading across her face.
"I'll go. If people are going to talk, they might as well do it accurately. Straight from the horse's mouth. I can't believe that I was so stupid and so blind."
"In fairness, when you've been ill, you've been so ill that you've barely had the ability for coherent thought. You've had no distance to put two and two together like you would have been able to do, had it had been a patient in an ED. Just go and get it over with."
But Sam had more to worry about than her medical stupidity. If this test was positive… If she'd conceived during that brief spell of leave in January, then she'd been pregnant in a war zone. The stress of that had been immense; who knew what damage she could have done. Why did she have to have such a god-damned complicated job? Why couldn't she have been happy with life in an English Emergency Department?
"Stop pacing, Dylan, I'm worried enough without thinking we'll be pulled up in the march-out for having carpet with holes in it!"
"I'd stop pacing if I had an answer!"
"I'd give you an answer if you'd just be patient and wait another ninety seconds!"
They weren't really cross with each other, but they could go from nought to a hundred in a matter of seconds.
Ninety seconds passed in silence, after which time Sam stood up from the kitchen table to go and retrieve the test from the bathroom. She froze in the doorway and turned back to face her husband with concern etched on her face.
"What?" Dylan said quickly.
"I don't want to look."
"You'd rather vomit through another tour and wait for the army to find out first?"
"Oh shut up Dylan! If I've only been sick since coming off deployment, then that doesn't make sense — and if I got pregnant in January, then I was running around bloody Helmand Province with… with a baby inside me! Do you have any idea how messed up that is, not to mention not allowed?" She pressed her palms together and put her fingertips to her lips, before putting both hands on the crown of her head and scrunching them into her hair. Her breathing had picked up, and she would have cried if only she hadn't spent so long on tour suppressing emotion that she couldn't let her guard down now, knowing that she was meant to be deploying again in the first week of May.
Dylan walked over to her. Slowly, he took her hands out of her hair and put them gently by her sides. "Whatever happens, we will deal with it. I picked a terrible time to be snippy with you; I'm sorry. Whatever happens, I'm still here. The fact that I'm still me, is probably less than ideal, but I'm here, and I love you." He kissed her lips gently. "I'll come with you."
They looked at the test together: the little indicator of positivity could not be clearer.
"I suppose that's that, then," Sam whispered, lifting her t-shirt and looking down at her unchanged stomach. "We're not going out tonight." It was the easiest way to fill the silence, even though she highly doubted she would have made it out even if they hadn't just got this life-changing news. She pressed her right hand to her bare skin and rubbed her thumb up and down. She had always thought that she and Dylan might have children one day, but she hadn't expected to feel so afraid. She supposed that this would fade with time, as she got used to the idea, and got used to not going back out on tour for quite some time. A lump rose in her throat: of course she would give it up at the drop of a hat for this, but she still loved her job. She put her left hand on the cold edge of the sink in front of her and took a deep breath, feeling sick again. If she was three and a half months gone, then she might have stopped feeling sick by now, but trust her to be a special case. When she closed her eyes, trying to breathe levelly, she felt Dylan's broad hands cover hers: he was standing close behind her, and put one hand on the sink and one hand over her stomach, holding her close to him.
He whispered his excitement into her ear, not caring to hold back a genuine smile. He put his chin on her shoulder and touched his cheek to hers. It was damp with tears. Sam didn't cry. "Are you crying?" he asked in disbelief.
"I've thrown up so many times that my stomach hurts," Sam said quietly, sniffing a little. "Why did it only start when I got home?"
"The subconscious is powerful, your brain probably managed to hold it off that long from the sheer inconvenience of being on tour."
"I'm not sure I'm friends with my subconscious then," Sam retorted. "I think I'd rather have been found out and sent home early — oh, for f-" She was cut off by an intense need to be sick again. It was incredibly undignified, but an appreciated gesture nonetheless, that Dylan stayed in the bathroom with her until it was over, holding her hair back because she hadn't had it tied up. When she sank back to sit cross-legged on the tiled floor, her shoulders sagged and her stomach hurt even more than before. "Whoever brainwashed pregnant women, into believing that morning sickness was a good thing, clearly never experienced it himself."
"Himself?" Dylan raised his eyebrows.
"Don't start, Grumpy, I'm feeling bitter."
"And cold, by the look of you." Sam's teeth were chattering, and goosebumps had risen on her arms. "Go and get some rest, I'll get you a hot water bottle. It might make your stomach hurt less."
Sam stood up gingerly, testing the water and hoping so much that she wasn't going to be sick yet again. "How wonderfully romantic," she added, still holding Dylan's hand as her anchor. When he stood up too, he hugged her carefully, and she kissed his cheek. Guiltily, she ran her tongue around her mouth afterwards. "I need to brush my teeth." Her cheeks turned slightly pink, although she was still mostly pale.
They lay side by side in bed, Sam under the duvet in her pyjamas and Dylan on top of it, fully-clothed still. She was feeling slightly less terrible now, but the nervous energy radiating off of her husband wasn't helping. Her right arm wasn't tucked under the duvet, allowing her to hold Dylan's hand tightly in the dusky half-light. There was no discreet way to shift her grip so that she had a fingertip pressed to the inside of his wrist, so he noticed at once.
"What are you doing?" he asked, still staring upwards.
"Feeling for your pulse, because I can feel that you're nervous and that's even considering that my only point of contact has been holding your hand. You're like a big ball of static, stop it," she said, as Dylan's blood rushed under his skin. Sam let out a breath through her nose and returned to holding his hand as she had before. "It's Friday night. We've got the weekend to… to think, and then we'll do all the official things on Monday morning. It's our news, until then."
Dylan made a non-committal sound, his mind racing far faster than his pulse. He got up from the bed and set to leave the room, pausing momentarily and turning back to look at Sam. "You need to get some sleep."
He was closing down on her, and she didn't know why. She didn't know how to fix him either. He was shutting down all emotion, disappearing into himself. She only hoped that he was happy. He hadn't actually expressed anything either way — but she knew that he didn't like her being away for so long, and at least that would be remedied by this.
As the clock ticked towards two in the morning, Dylan paced the living room anxiously, unable to sit still for even a moment's reprieve. He was going to be a father. He had such a sense of duty to be better than his own father, but how different was he? Just as impatient, just as mean, just as reliant on alcohol. It was not a saving grace that his dependence stemmed from OCD — good grief, his OCD! How could he manage to give a baby the care it needed, while fighting intermittent wars with his brain? It did not bear thinking about, that children could be predisposed to mental health conditions as a result of their parentage. If he thought too much about that, he'd probably never sleep again. Sam still didn't know what he went through when things were bad; he didn't want to tell her. Come to think of it, she didn't actually know that things got 'bad.'
Not that he was sleeping right now, of course. Sam needed sleep, not to be disturbed by his tossing and turning while the impossible task of sleep escaped his grasp.
At first, when Sam woke up, she wasn't sure what had woken her. She lay in the dark for a second, before rolling over to switch on the bedside light, which she had bizarrely forgotten to leave on. This simple movement served a dual purpose: ending one fear (the dark) but replacing it with a multitude of others. The twisting motion required to reach the light switch twinged painfully, tightly in the bottom of her stomach. Sam had only known that she was pregnant for about six hours, but she knew now that something was not right. She lay perfectly still, in the hope that maybe her mind was playing tricks on her. Maybe it wasn't real. Maybe none of this was real. Looking at Dylan's side of the bed, tilting her head minutely, it was empty: it hadn't been touched tonight.
The next cramp in her stomach was so painful that it forced her upright, doubled up with her knees hugged to her chest. She rested her forehead down, crying out in anguished little sobs.
There were a few minutes that followed in which she didn't feel any more pain. Maybe nothing was happening at all. She carefully got up and made her way to the bathroom to rinse her face with cool water. When she went to the toilet, there was bright red blood in the bowl. Rinsing her face had been a waste of time: she cried again, this time with her arms crossed over her stomach.
From the living room, Dylan heard Sam walking across the landing and into the bathroom. This was unusual: she was a fairly heavy sleeper when she was at home, and rarely woke up in the night of her own accord. He froze where he had been pacing up and down, listening hard. When he heard her cry out, all his worries and intrusive thoughts dropped out his mind; he took the stairs three at a time.
The bathroom door was ajar, but he still tapped on it before pushing it all the way open.
"Sam? Are you - oh." He bit down on the inside of his bottom lip. Sam was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, and there was no point asking her if she was okay. Bent over he knees, she was crying silently, but so hard that she was shaking. He bobbed down on the floor in front of her at once. "Look at me, Sam."
She lifted her tear-streaked face, her mouth turned down into an expression of heartbreak.
"What's going on? You need to tell me, so I can make it better." He so hoped that his hypothesis on seeing her distress would not be proved correct.
"I'm losing the baby, Dylan."
For half a second, this revelation caused Dylan to lose all grip on reality and every bit of his medical knowledge. He mentally shook himself, having to pretend that this was happening to someone other than his Sam so that he would know what to do. First of all, he cupped her face delicately in his hands and wiped fresh tears away. "No, you don't know that," he said softly. "You're alright, you're going to be just fine."
"Don't patronise me! I'm a doctor the same as you are: I know what it means when you're cramping and bleeding —"
"— a little bit of blood can be completely normal —"
"— do you want to check, and tell me that it's just a little bit of blood?"
Dylan's shoulders dropped. It was getting harder and harder to deal with this situation. "No. I promise I'm not trying to patronise you or tell you that you don't know what you're talking about. I'm sorry if I sound like that - I'm just... Can you stand?"
"M-hm, I think so," Sam said, all tensions evaporated. As she stood up, she hissed in pain, and she reached out for Dylan's hands. He was there at once, like he always was, steady and true. The back of her pyjamas was stained with blood, and she knew it. "I don't want this to happen, Dylan," she mumbled sadly.
He kissed the top her head and hugged her briefly. "Neither do I," he admitted, allowing himself to sound exactly as he felt: broken. He took a breath. "But we have no confirmation yet. You need to get changed, and I will take you to the hospital, and whatever happens, we'll handle it just like we have everything else. Just us. It's going to be alright."
Late on Saturday afternoon, Dylan came home alone. Sam would be spending the night in hospital, in recovery from and under obs as a result of surgery. There would be no baby Keogh.
He took Dervla out for a walk, sullenly silent. He was glad of seeing no-one that he knew: he didn't doubt that the pregnancy test was already common knowledge, and he couldn't face questions about it. When they returned to the cottage, Dervla circled it, confused.
"She's not here," Dylan said hollowly. "Stop looking for her, you stupid creature!" He hadn't expected the admission of Sam's absence to hurt him so much. "She'll be back tomorrow. Be careful with her." What use was it, issuing empty instructions to a dog?
He packed a few things to take back to the hospital for Sam, and counted them in and out of the bag more times than any sane person would find acceptable. Any sane person would just put them in the bag and have done with it, he thought.
The unshakable intrusive thought was already taking root in his brain though, that this was all his fault. If he'd been a better person, if he hadn't had OCD, if he hadn't used alcohol to quiet his brain. If, if, if. It was a bitter memory that suddenly surfaced, of a French phrase he'd heard over and over again in school: Avec des si, on mettrait Paris en bouteille. With ifs, you could put Paris in a bottle. Yes, the ifs would destroy you in the end, but it was the ifs that tormented Dylan every day. His life revolved around ifs.
If you stop drinking, the next time won't end in miscarriage.
If you unpack this bag, unfold and fold all the clothes and put them back in, then Sam will be alright.
If you'd just been a normal husband and gone to bed, slept next to her like a normal night, then none of this would have even happened.
They had said that they would spend Monday making plans, working out where a baby would fit into their lives and Sam's career in the army. But Monday dawned insultingly brightly for they way they both felt. Dylan phoned the surgery early in the morning and explained his absence in as few words as possible. Sam stayed in bed while he did so; when he returned and saw that tears were leaking from her eyes again, he got back into bed and put a gentle hand on her shoulder which she shrugged away.
"Sam," he said pleadingly. He was always the one shutting people out: he didn't know how to take what he so easily dealt out. Even though it obviously caused her discomfort, she turned so that her back was to him.
Sam wasn't sure, but she thought she might have preferred it if Dylan had taken his usual path of surly grumpiness. She felt so emotionally damaged after their hellish rollercoaster weekend, she just wanted him to be the same as always, to kiss her once because it was the right thing to do and then remind her that she was so much stronger than this. But it was incredibly difficult to watch him struggle exactly the same as she was.
