I was shaken awake softly at four o’clock.

There is a slot, the blonde nurse whispered to me.

I did not understand what she meant by slot. There was a canula in my arm and although she detached this from the antibiotic drip she did not remove it, and it remained there, crusting, for two more days.

There was a slot: it was four o’clock, the ward asleep. Earlier I could still hear the snoring and proximally erotic moans of the other women, but now all was still. In the corridor it was bright and a nurse sat at her station, writing something, and for some reason I nodded genially at her as I passed. I felt, I think, that I was being civilly abducted and wanted to check that she knew about it. Led to execution. It was not unlike that actually.

I asked, Can you call my partner? in a consternated tone, a tone that suggested they wouldn’t call my partner or somehow they’d make it happen without him, but the blonde nurse said, Of course!, and then, I’m leaving you with Laura now. It might have been Laura or it might have been Linda or Lola – I’ve forgotten them.

When I’d been admitted two nights previously an older nurse put her hand on my abdomen and said with stern astonishment, This child is posterior.

What’s that? I asked.

She’s facing frontwards. The baby issued one of her poky stabs and the nurse flicked her hand away, horrified. That’s a face, she said. She’s sunny side up.

It’s your pelvis, she explained.

I lay afterwards in a cold sweat of Google findings, all the more awful for the fact that despite arriving healthily at thirty-seven weeks and reaching in this way the peak of my biological destiny I could not, in my heart of hearts, believe that this boulderlike mass crushing my ribs and pelvis, shoving everything upwards and downwards and threatening to let my organs exit my body like toothpaste worming from the tube, could actually be delivered through the vagina. It seemed a physiological miscalculation. I’d phoned Matt and wept self-indulgently.

It will be fine, he said. He had no evidence of this. He was useless to me. I waddled down to the front doors, where two women in dressing gowns were smoking, and took a last look at the early spring evening. Over the far wall of the carpark I could see the H shape of a goalpost. Vehement and eternal as a Platonic form. If I died, this winsome dying reddish light would be my final imbibement of nature. I was at peace.

Now I was walking down this death-row, fluorescent hospital corridor.

Do you want a wheelchair? somebody asked and, since I’d never been in a wheelchair before, I said yes. The rolling was worse because it made things go faster. We rolled into an equally fluorescent delivery room with a hydra-headed system of bulbs and a gurney and a huge medical waste bin. There was a radio on the shelf and it was playing ‘The Living Years’. Static flushed through the song in supple waves, as if washing it.

Do you want the radio on? the nurse asked.

Oh god no, I said.

I climbed out of the wheelchair and stood in the centre of the room, holding my clothes. This included my raincoat and walking boots, which I’d been wearing when admitted. A nurse handed me the duffel bag and surplus Aldi bag of baby clothes. We placed these things in the corner and, in the full gaze of everyone, I changed into the simple black plasticky slip I intended to give birth in and throw out immediately, claggy, as I understood it would be, with mucus and faeces and blood. This too all seemed so insanely unlikely now, as I stood there once again and absolutely nothing happened and the nurse said, Well, we’ve tried the gel so now we do the drip.

Righto, I replied.

Matt arrived. He had Lucozade and a muesli bar, but I couldn’t consume anything at this point. I lay back, conspicuously enfeebled and deeply embarrassed, and watched the drip slither into the canula as Matt and a midwife discussed the bypass that would soon outpace Killaloe, about the impact this would have on commuter suburbs of Limerick.

How do you feel? he asked.

I mean, a little achy, I conceded. This must be it.

The midwife looked at me blandly. No, she said. I am going to get the doctor.

The doctor was a weary-looking woman with a long ponytail.

OK, Niamh. She spoke louder than everyone else. You are two days since your waters broke and our attempts at induction, the first and second stage, are not working, and so we have no choice now but the final stage.

The needle, I said.

We will puncture and release the rest of the waters, yes.

I absolutely, I said, do not want that.

A look passed over the doctor’s face. She was a woman with several tiring children, I realised.

We don’t have other options.

I knew she was telling the truth and this was the law.

You can have gas and air, she told me. Her tone suggested that this was a treat. I agreed.

Niamh doesn’t want the radio on, added one of the midwives, compounding a general sense that I had notions and was acting absurd and would be shortly disabused of my notions and absurdity.

I lay back and sucked heavily on the plastic Entonox tube, exhaling with a deliberate drag. When I closed my eyes the arachnoid light structure above me turned to a firmament of burning stars and began spinning sickeningly, coalescing at one end into a rod or arrow, and pricking the billowing sack of a bulging structure I realised was my own cervix externalised into hallucination. At this, pain like an entire countryside of baying hounds broke through me and I screamed and the doctor said Good girl, keep breathing, and the Entonox thrust me forward, leaking warmly everywhere, the baby startled and imparting this to me – Help, help, she said, what? – and the spinning lights sped back and dissolved and the firmament was gone and I was upright, hit it seemed by a contraction immediately. I vomited bile and tried to cry but it came out as a stoppered snarl.

Surely this was not supposed to be how it felt.

I huffed. Hallucination pivoted again. I was back in a kitchen from my childhood and a big man at the fridge saying, Does it talk, and the woman smiling saying, Now the dog will think you are a dog. The priest was wheedling seekey-atric, seekey-atric, I was at national school, in the toilet-smelling hallway, rapidly reading a crisp set of children’s paintings with Irish taglines – madra, ceapairí, lón, bainne. The words were mere noises like soap bubbles squeaking idiotically and my eyes scanned across them, across and across and across them in panic, and a teacher – Mr Mooney – was somewhere by me, and this had to do with the rod, the stick, the arrow piercing me, it was a finger, an appendage, surely not the horror of it so predictable and yet disappointing. Did someone interfere with me at school? I don’t remember that. Why would I think of that? I felt the irritating weight of some received outrage or trauma. Oh fuck off, I thought. I probably uttered it too.

You’re doing well, Matt said.

The next contraction, like a road-traffic accident. Epidural, I said. Epidural please.

Pain twisted me over onto my front. For some reason I was naked now – did I consent? – with my poor breasts swinging down without density and my backside, I presumed, on view like a cleaving moon. Don’t let them tell you that you will not be aware, at every moment, of just how embarrassing this is. My body squeezed into a foetal position at each contraction and I gagged and in the next hallucination I was seventeen, kneeling over a toilet in a cubicle of Home nightclub, throwing up Bacardi and Red Bull. Oh no. The banal menace of these astral visits to forgotten places seemed to promise something unspeakably dreadful and derivative, like rape. Lots of rape. More than one rape. How do you forget about a rape.

Epidural, I said, again. There was only enough time between contractions for a single word. Epidural, I said.

Niamh is requesting an epidural, the doctor repeated.

For this to work, the anaesthetist explained, you will need to stay completely still.

And this is a moment or perhaps it was forty whole minutes, two hours, who knows – time finds its elasticity – this is a moment in the narrative I can explain as practical – the needle and the line, the need for precision – but remember as a glimmering, spiritual experience. They tell you contractions are a familiar pain, the known pangs of period cramp amplified. This is a deceit. The pain is new and wholly other and more like a machine action scaled to the size of a human frame. To sit and feel each atomic swell peak and dissipate, molecules swarming like wasps, and remain still – choking only Contraction coming, and clamping my teeth on the tube again – was surviving death, surviving the most exquisite concentration of life, surviving, nonetheless. By the time it was done I felt pleasantly dulled from the ribcage down but for an itchy, burning corner of my abdomen where the baby was then located and twisting, of her own accord, back to the anterior position after all. Not sunny side up but bearing down and back and now I wonder if she’d planned to do that the whole time.

Reborn on drugs my Entonox hallucination produced a sink, the sink and draining board and banging little cupboard underneath, of the school classroom allotted to Mr Mooney and madra, ceapairí, lón, the daily bale of milk cartons wrapped up in plastic dripping with condensation and paintbrushes in a jam jar by the taps. All of my life led to this day, time narrowing even as it was enriched with such random and detrital images. Everything I’d ever done and been seemed trivial. I felt ashamed.

We laughed, we told jokes, Matt and I, though I don’t now remember the jokes.

The window on the carpark filled with golden Hollywood deposits of light.

The baby was born just two hours later, naturally, as I lay on my back with my knees bent up and held in place by two midwives’ elbows, as I bellowed and was told over and again to stop wasting energy making sound but to instead send energy down, down to the vagina which seemed to have sealed itself in refusal and left me unable to deliver any baby.

There was no room, I said, there is not enough room, I have tried but I can’t do it, cut her out, but no, they wouldn’t.

She was dragged up suddenly, with propulsion, and held in the air, surprisingly long and with black hair plastered with blood and blue huge eyes and wearing an expression of sophisticated horror – as in, What? – and for a moment she looked darkly at us all and then she sucked in breath and cried.

A closing token in the form of an image is branded on my imagination now. The baby, suckling sorely on my breast, and Matt’s smile and just behind him a placenta black and modular and torpid in a dish, set aside, looking like something from the sea: bladderwrack or mussels or a bludgeoned octopod.