Up in the lift to level four and the maternity wing, we tread squeaky linoleum to the visitors’ waiting room. We describe who we’re here to see, and are directed along a corridor by a sympathetic RN. Nurses are often vociferous opponents of the current government’s anti-surrogacy policy, being those most often landed with the sad results. They get to keep their jobs because they’re in such short supply, the only trained staff left to fill the skills gap that opened when a raft of medicos working in the fertility clinics and gene-research centres were struck off the register and hospital payrolls. Not that this particular part of the hospital is busy these days, and at the far end it’s imbued with an almost suffocating quiet. No babies here. We stand at the door of the share room, looking in. A woman — not ours — is asleep under the covers in the first bed. The privacy curtains have been pulled around the second. Inez calls a tentative ‘Hello?’ On a low answer, I open a gap in the curtain and together we step into the sanitised white space.
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