The day Sydney’s COVID numbers broke 600, I booked in for a week-13 structural ultrasound. Becoming pregnant during New South Wales’s COVID-19 pandemic has been a struggle. Weeks on end of lockdown, without hope of seeing family or friends, removed from the world as much as possible. The heaviness of lockdown sits deep inside the body, a weight carried in the bones. Sitting also in my body is a strange, emerging life, one that I had never imagined hosting.

The week of the ultrasound, Sydney’s COVID numbers soared beyond 900. The room in which the ultrasound takes place is softly lit, warm pink tones paint the walls. Ahead of the examination bed is a big screen. I lie stretched out on the bed. ‘It’s cold,’ the technician tells me as she rubs gel on my stomach and places the device against my skin. I look at the screen, stare at the familiar and unfamiliar. Familiar: name, address, age. Unfamiliar: what looks like a little jumping bean, bouncing around, black and white lines melting into each other like moving Rorschach images. The technician calls out names of body parts—kidneys, spine, brain—and I nod, pretending to understand that I can see where, in this shifting blob, a flicker is a kidney, a blotch is a brain. She turns up the volume and a heartbeat that isn’t mine but in some way is also mine breaks through the machine at 145 bpm. Later when I search online for information about foetus heartbeats and ultrasounds the internet will describe this sound as ‘the thunder of galloping horses’ or ‘a watch ticking underneath a pillow’. There’s a lot of space between a galloping horse and a ticking watch, but to me, it sounds like being in a pool and pushing your head under the water, when everything outside is muffled and inside the blood rushing in your brain fills your ears. That is the sound of a foetus’s heartbeat.