Labour Pains (Non-Contractual)

Date: 1/4/2026

Sophie Langford is giving birth on the pavement. Not a hospital pavement — no reassuring white lines or ambulances idling with their mouths open — but the cold, municipal slab outside a glass skyscraper that pretends to touch the clouds. The kind of building she supposedly works. The sort of building that reflects your face back at you, distorted and smaller, as if to say: this is how little you matter. She is on her side, knees drawn up, blood slicking the concrete in a dark, obedient halo. Her skin has gone the colour of something barely clinging to life. Her eyes flutter, close, open again like faulty doors. Her manager kneels beside her, crisp as a spreadsheet. “When are you coming back to work?” she asks, voice pitched bright, managerial, as though this is a performance review. “You won’t be taking much time off, will you?” Sophie moans. A sound leaves her that doesn’t feel like language anymore. It feels older than words. Something unearthed. “Claudia!” the manager screeches. A woman with a razor-sharp bob and a power suit comes running, heels snapping like teeth. “Run her a bath, will you,” she says, already halfway to solving the problem. “We’ll need to clean her up ASAP, so she can go back on reception.” Seconds later she returns, breathless, dragging an inflatable bathtub like a party trick. Blue plastic, cartoonish, wildly inappropriate. It squeaks as it hits the pavement. Meanwhile Sophie’s body rebels. A seizure rolls through her — eyes vanishing into her skull, breath hitching, hands clawing at nothing. She looks like a candle guttering at the end of itself. “You’re killing her!” I want to shout. But I don’t. I know, instinctively, that I can’t be heard. I’m invisible. An observer. A spectator to the spectacle. I reach for Sophie’s hand and pass straight through it, like a cruel palour trick. No weight. No comfort. No proof I was ever there. “Just hang in there,” I say, uselessly. But she’s already disappearing. We’re losing her. Her boss paces, spitting feathers, checking an invisible watch, muttering about cover and rotas. I want to shake her. Slap her. Pour something human into her skull. I can’t. I am as powerless as Sophie, who takes her last breaths while something inside her begins to move without her. The baby is coming anyway. I walk away. I don’t look back. Somehow, grief feels less menacing when you refuse to meet its eyes. Now I am Sophie. Not dead, not alive. Back from the brink, patched up, stitched together and ready to perform my duty. For reasons known only to the feral cat dreaming this dream, I am sitting on top of a lift. Not inside it — on it — among rickety wires and dust and the soft, menacing murmur of descent. The lift is going down. My boss is with me, legs akimbo, heavily pregnant, suspended in midair like an obscene miracle. Sweat pours off her. Her hair has come loose. She looks terrified in a way I’ve never seen before. “Breathe,” I say, because apparently this is my job now. “Just keep breathing.” She screams into the shaft. The sound ricochets, multiplies, comes back wrong. It grows louder, sharper, more animal. This isn’t pain alone. This is panic discovering its voice. “Just calm down,” I say, automatically, like I’ve ever calmed anyone down in my life. “I don’t want to die!” she yells. “You won’t,” I lie. “You just have to keep breathing through it.” Something flickers in her face. Recognition, maybe. Or remorse, briefly trying on a coat it doesn’t intend to keep. “I’m sorry I was such a bitch,” she says, between screams. “It’s okay,” I say. “Let’s just get this baby out.” She frowns, deeply confused. “Baby?” I am in a convenience store with Kev from Royal Mail, a veteran of red vans and quiet despair. He looks shellshocked, as usual. Like a man permanently braced for bad news delivered in hushed tones. A pack of unruly teenagers barges past us, knocking poor Kev into a display. It wobbles dangerously. My heart stops. Kev would not survive the paperwork. Miraculously, it holds. I wander the aisles looking for lunch. A meal deal, obviously. I am a creature of habit. I don’t trust choice. As I reach for the sandwiches, I realise I’m not in my Royal Red uniform anymore. I’m wearing a big fluffy coat. I take it off. Underneath is another big fluffy coat. “Silly me,” I chuckle, peeling that one off too, to reveal — of course — another big fluffy coat. This one is heavy. The pockets bulge. I reach inside and pull out spanners. Big, clanking, unapologetic spanners. I set them on a shelf. And then — “Amanda! Nooo!” Kev yells. Too late. The shelf tips. Gravity finally gets its say. It crashes down on the teenagers like an avalanche of tinned tomatoes and baked beans. “Ouch,” one whimpers. “That’ll learn them,” Kev laughs, picking up a spanner and slipping it into his pocket. “You can never have too many spanners,” he adds, as though this is common sense rather than theft. I walk out of the shop a postie and reemerge as — A bodyguard. Keira Knightley’s bodyguard, to be specific. I know. Me. Five foot three on a generous day, built like a nervous sparrow, protecting a woman who looks like a cathedral beside me. She’s wearing a kaftan, as she always does in my dreams, glowing, serene. And she’s being hounded by Handsome Jack from The Plough. Flip flops. Skinny jeans. Winter. A crime he somehow pulls off. He’s drunk. He’s weepy. He’s orbiting her personal space like he orbits women half his age on his usual nights out. “Do you mind?” Keira snaps. Enough. “Sir,” I say, finding a voice I didn’t know I had, “if you carry on, I’m going to have to escort you out.” He laughs. Looks down at me like something stuck to the sole of his flip flop. Something in me hardens. I grab him by the waistband — no small feat, given his beer belly’s ongoing negotiations with gravity — and drag him out of the lobby like a naughty dog. “Get out,” I shout. “And stay out.” In the rain, he looks suddenly small. Fragile. I almost falter. Almost let him back in. I don’t. No fucker messes with Keira Knightley. The rain has now thickened into something theatrical. And there they are. Kylie and Amy. Oh course they are. Kylie and Amy, blissfully drunk, legs swaying side to side, dancing with the concrete below. “Oh here we bloody go,” I mutter. Too late. They’ve clocked me. “Amandaaaa!” Kylie slurs, feet unsteady beneath her. Amy looms beside her — arch-nemesis herself — pure Sideshow Bob, dressed like a clown with loose morals. “Wanna go clubbing?” Kylie slurs. “I’ve got to work,” I say. “You’re so boring!” she laughs. It hits. It always does. “Metallica’s playing,” she adds, dangling temptation. For half a second, I waver. Then I look at Amy — already scanning the street like a predator in clown stilettos — and the answer settles. “Tempting, but no.” Kylie shrugs, scrambling onto a moped that looks one breath from disaster. I start to protest, then stop. What’s the point? She’s already pulling away, shrinking in her wing mirror, rain swallowing her whole. I am back on the lift. Still going down. My boss is slick with sweat. The bulge between her legs is undeniable now. Obscene. Undeniable. “Baby?” she says again. “Push!” I yell. “No no no no no,” she cries. “This can’t be happening!” “Oh, it’s happening,” I say. She screams. The sound tears through me, through the wires, through the bones of the building itself. And then — Something emerges. It has the shape of a baby. The weight of one. The wet, shuddering insistence of life forcing itself into the world. But its skin is wrong. Not skin at all — more like layers. Thin, translucent sheets fused together. Paper, but breathing. Forms stretched tight over bone. Tiny ribs visible beneath overlapping pages, each one stamped, initialled, hole-punched. Its head lolls forwards, soft and unfinished. Wet. Alive. Breathing. Writhing, contracts fused together, timesheets and performance reviews slick with blood. A mouth opens where a signature line should be. Soundlessly at first. Then — Rip. A tearing noise. Slow. Deliberate. Ink tears from its eyes, black and oily, running down its temples. Its umbilical cord is a red ribbon of tape, still attached. Still binding. The baby squirms. Paper crinkles. A tiny hand flexes and I see fingerprints already pre-filled, already signed in someone else’s name. My boss sobs. “What is that?” The thing turns its head towards me. Towards the building. Towards the world. Its mouth opens again. This time it makes a sound. Not a cry. A demand. And somewhere far above, far out of reach, the lift keeps descending.