And then she turned towards the bassinet.
I pushed myself upright, holding the mattress with both hands, and the room went white at the edges.
I said: do not touch him.
I have been told since that I said it very quietly. I believed at the time that I was shouting.
She ignored me. She said: Karenza is waiting downstairs in the car. I’m taking him now.
I reached for the bassinet and the pain across my incision put me straight back down.
What happened next took about two seconds and I am not going to describe it, except to say that my head hit the bed rail, and that the rail is still bent, and that the hospital has photographs of both.
By the time my vision cleared, she had him.
Standing by the window. Holding him correctly, with one hand under his head, because she has had two children of her own and she knows how.
That is the image. Not a struggle. A competent grandmother holding a baby properly by a window, and his mother on a bed unable to sit up.
I got my hand to the red button beside the bed and pressed it.
It is about four inches from the pillow and it took me two attempts, and I have never been so grateful for a piece of plastic in my life.
I have since found out that it is tested every morning by a nurse on that ward, who does it as part of a round of about forty rooms and has presumably never thought about it once.
Security were in that room in under a minute, and there were about twenty people in the corridor by then, because a suite like that has a glass wall onto the nurses’ station.
Their chief came in first, about half a step ahead of the other two.
He is a big man and he came through that door fast and then stopped dead inside it, and the two behind him stopped because he had.
He looked at my face. Then at her, by the bassinet, holding my son.
And she started shouting straight away.
Before anybody had asked a single question. Before the chief had finished walking through the door.
An innocent person waits to find out what is being asked. A person with a prepared account delivers it immediately, because the only thing that matters is which version lands in the room first.
