He was with Angie right until the last minute. She'd been in labour for about twelve hours and it wasn't an easy one by all accounts. You know how it is though, when you don't have kids yourself then you don't know anything about these things ' it's like listening to a lecture in astrophysics you walked in the wrong door on in many ways. You nod and appear polite and that's it. Anyway, he was with Angie, she'd been pumped up on all kinds of safe painkillers and what have you, the baby was just five minutes from coming out and she screamed at Fred to get out. She may have gone as far to say 'get the fuck out now' even.
Fred didn't mind that. Angie had said to him many times that she wanted him there, but didn't want him to see the baby come out. Knowing how much he adored her cunt she didn't want him put off that particular part of her anatomy. I know in the last couple of months of the pregnancy they'd been missing sex - they both said so on more occasions than was comfortable. Fred and Angie mentioned it nearly everytime I saw them. Nothing graphic, well not descriptively graphic, but always a turn of phrase which told you more.
Angie had also said on many occasions she didn't want Fred to see the baby's head come out of there.
'We can't risk putting him off me. We need our sex life.'
'I don't think it will put me off. Angie has the most incredibly, adorable cunt and it's not just a physical thing. It's spiritual Ruk. Anyone as tuned in as I am to her can see that her cunt emanates beauty for miles around.'
'Okay Fred, okay!'
'All the same - she's possibly right, as much as I don't believe that to be the case, so I'll do as she wishes of course.'
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He didn't remember quite how she told him to leave the room when the baby was coming. He sat on a leather chair outside of the room and listened to all the noises coming from the room: Angie letting out massive, long groans, the midwife reiterating the same chant 'come on, come on, nearly there, nearly there', the sound of metal chinking as it does in hospitals. All of it seemed amplified, like Fred had achieved superhuman hearing powers, every detail - more hyper-real than real.
Then it came. Fred always called it the 'God slap'. A burst of watery screaming flew out. It was Alice - his girl.
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'It was like God coming down and smacking me clear in the face when I saw her. She was blue, purple covered in all the mucus and afterbirth and all that shit. She was screaming, bald, puffy, ugly as sin really, but it was instant. All these months I'd been so unsure - in fact more sure I wouldn't have love for the child, but that's what happened - a God slap. I'll be honest with you - I'd been afraid of feelings up until that point. I'm not a religious man - I'm still not - this is just the only way I can describe it. Instant, everlasting unconditional love. I don't say that lightly either Ruk because love is conditional - usually it genuinely is conditional. If me and Angie stopped making love, if she went with another man, if she stopped talking to me, stopped loving me - those are some of the huge array of conditions. But Alice needs none of that from me. She can hate me, make my life hell, shit on me, and I still, dumbly and absolutely worship her. That's what I mean by a God slap. I never knew all this was there - had no fucking idea whatsoever. Some kind of God, swooped down, opened up his palm, a whacked me solid right across me - opened up half of my brain, soul, heart, whatever, that I didn't know existed. That slap, my daughter Alice, has doubled the universe for me.'
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