by Naomi Booth
* * *
‘Ali?’ Pete says again, hugging my bump harder. ‘In the middle of all that sadness, we made this. I know it’s hard, I know it’s a sad memory, but it’s happy too because of this. You’ve given me all my best memories,’ he says. ‘You’ve given me everything that’s precious.’
‘You’re high,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.’
We lie still for a while and I try to quieten the energy in my body: that desire to run, the flickering feeling through my legs and abdomen. My stomach feels strange; the lower curve of my belly is hardening. The baby must be turning, pushing itself against me in new contortions.
‘Let’s try to sleep,’ I say. ‘We’ve got lots to do in the morning.’
Pete frets for a while, chewing his cheeks, tiny spasms in his muscles. Eventually he stills. I list things in my head: what we’ll take, what we’ll pack. It will have to be the bare essentials, none of the baby things will fit in the car; we’ll pack two cases of clothes, my mother’s books, we’ll load it all in the back seat of the car, and then we’ll flit. Tomorrow night we’ll be somewhere else, somewhere safe from harm.
VII
IDREAM that I’m a light-switch: someone has pulled on my spinal cord, and everything inside me wrenches downwards, a hot white light blistering back up through my body. I dream that a doctor’s fist is thrust up inside me, up past the wrist, mauling all of my secret places, trying to scoop my insides out. I gasp awake. My mouth is dry. It’s a dream. It’s just a dream. But then the pain comes on for real: a hard pulse through my spine. It’s early morning, there’s only the faintest light at the window. The pain pulls harder, and inside of me everything twists downwards. The pain is in my bones now; it feels like they’re trying to twist themselves free. The feeling is so sharp I think I’m going to be sick. I gasp again and stumble up from the bed. My legs are somebody else’s legs. I lean back, trying to balance, the wooden floor seeming to shift under my feet. I blink and look down again: a wad of thick, fleshy tissue, whitish and tinged with pink, gutters down between my legs. It splashes onto the floor, like a strange, glowing sea-creature hauled from the dark. I reach a hand behind me – the bed is wet. It’s a trick of the light I think, for a moment; it must be the sunrise that’s making everything strange, an early-hours hallucination that’s made this weird creature of blood and golden-jelly appear as if from me. I stare again at the window: the sun’s up and the light is thin and white and realist. I remember a phrase, one of those peppy birthing descriptions they throw around in antenatal classes: ‘the show’. Which means the start of things, the plug that has kept the baby sealed coming away from inside. ‘The show’ sounds so much cleaner, so much more auspicious than this darkly gleaming thing in front of me.
‘Pete,’ I say. It comes out as a whisper, less than that even. It comes out as a catch in my breath. ‘Pete.’ I fold back into the bed, I curl myself as tight as I can around my stomach. The liquid on my legs is already cooling. Perhaps it will dry to nothing. Perhaps it will dry and flake off and I will forget all about the showing show, and I will stand up perfectly straight and the ground will stay steady as we pack-up our things and set out in the car and drive for hours and hours until we’re somewhere safe and clean.
When the pain dies back enough that it seems like a dream again, I don’t sleep, exactly, but I try to block everything out. I curl in on myself and shut my eyes and make my hands into fists, which I push against my ears. I wriggle down under the doona as far as I can and I try to block out the succession of images that light up inside my eyelids: the squiggled veins, the moving blocks of red light, the black pulse of my heart beating on my retina. And when the pain comes back, real and vivid again, I hum and squeeze my eyes shut, but it will not go away. I have to uncurl and stretch my legs right out and then I arch my back, my body one long spasm. When the pain fades away again, I hug myself tight. There is no comfort now. I know it will return, I know what’s coming, and it’s so bad that I know that I must be dying. I’m one of those animals that I’ve watched in the past and done nothing for, the dying elephant I saw once on TV with a jackal snout pushed up through its anus, its entrails pulled out while it watched-on, slowly flapping one ear, or that possum we saw once, my mother and I, driving on the edge of the city late at night, where we’d been I don’t now know, and the light picked it up at the edge of the road, one of those roads laid straight on top of the dust, the tarmac edge curling and crumbling into the sand, and at that edge the lights of the car picked up its eyes, green and glinting desperately, and we came to a stop and it didn’t move, and then my mother said, ‘It’s stuck,’ and I saw that it was a bushtail and its tail had been flattened into the tarmac, run over by some huge wheel, sticking it to the ground, and that the creature couldn’t pull free. It stared at us in horror, or in supplication, frozen still. And then it resumed the frenzied activity that we must have interrupted, it tried to drag itself away from its own mashed body part, a twitching dance back and forth, and we could see that the tail was totally pulverised, flattened to matting and black blood, welded to the tarmac, and the poor critter, in a sudden burst of terror and with a terrible cry, pulled itself off the road, leaving the dead tail behind as it lolloped into the bush. We could still hear it crying. ‘That possum’s not for long without his tail,’ my mother says and starts her engine again. My mother. My mother and her soft, soft skin, her skin that wrapped her into darkness. Alone in the night. In pain, just like this, worse than this. She must have heard her own heart as it sped up, the purple muscle tightening like a fist, punch, punch, punching her to death, just like I can hear mine now, beating inside me, and the other heart, the other heart inside me, low down, beating to get out.
* * *
‘Ali.’ The light is brighter now, a yellow spill outside. ‘Alice, what’s happening?’ Pete has uncovered me. He puts a cool hand on my forehead. ‘Christ,’ he says, and then draws the cover all the way back, so that my bump and legs are raw in the air. ‘Cover me up,’ I say. ‘Bloody well cover me up.’ My voice has come back, I can hear it shouting, and I grab the cover back from him and hide myself under it. I catch a glimpse of his face, sore and puffy, still tender from last night.
‘Babe,’ he says. ‘I think your waters have gone. Why didn’t you wake me?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s not that. It’s too early. And it doesn’t feel right. It’s something else, something worse.’
‘Ali!’ He sounds excited. He’s dashing round the room, grabbing things. I hear him knocking things out of the way and slamming drawers shut. And then the pain starts again and I groan and I claw at the sheets.
‘Alice,’ he says. ‘Are you having contractions?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s trying to kill me.’
And Pete laughs, he actually laughs. ‘Alice,’ he says. ‘It’s starting! Shitting hell, it’s already started. Right, it’s ok, but. I’m just going to need to leave, just for a couple of minutes. I’m going to go down the road to that old coot’s house to phone the hospital. Ask them what we need to do. I’ll only be gone a few minutes. You hear me, Alice?’
‘Yeah,’ I shout. ‘Bugger off.’ And I push my face into the pillow and the pain is so hard I grab at the linen with my teeth and suck the pillow into my mouth.
‘Oh, Ali,’ he says. ‘I bloody love you. It’s happening!’ And then he’s gone. I hear a clatter downstairs and the car start up, and then the sound fades and there’s nothing for a few moments, nothing at all: no birds, no possums, no sound of anything moving in the world outside.
* * *
When the pain subsides, I bury myself as deep as I can under the covers, I shut my eyes, I try to hum myself to sleep, but sleep won’t come. When the pain returns, I get up on all fours. I grit my teeth and push backwards into it, moving with my bones, following the way my spine seems to twist. It’s as though my vertebrae have come alive now, a long snake of bone working its way downwards, pushi
ng to rip itself out through the bottom of my back. As I push back, the eyes in the wooden floor stare up at me, and the sodden creature I produced gleams, and invisible things inside me pulse, organs and bones throbbing to break free. Everything inside and outside of me has come alive, charged with horrible animation. I shout the pain out, I scream it. There’s nothing in the background anymore; everything around me is rushing and teeming. And the skin across my belly is crawling with electricity, sharp little currents that dart like eels. I’m inundated; I’m breaking apart.
Where the fuck is Pete? Why isn’t he back yet? When the pain fades again, I hang off the side of the bed, and I call out for him. I don’t know how long he’s been gone. It feels like hours, though it could just be minutes drawn out by the pain. I shout his name again. Of course there’s no reply. And then I call out for her: Mum. Ma. Margery. Ma Ma Ma. There’s no one to hear me, there’s no reply in the house except for the sound of the wooden timbers ticking as they warm up in the morning heat. The eyes in the floorboards have gone back to being knots, the world of things has receded back into the distance again. I cry then, I cry at the sound of my own pitiful voice and the emptiness of the place. My mum used to hum church songs, kneeling at the side of my bed, if I couldn’t sleep, or if I was sick or in pain, stroking my hand. She wasn’t properly religious, but she’d gone to church school and the songs stuck, she said, and she went to church every so often, even when the promise of redemption began to seem unlikely. Amazing Grace, she’d sing into my hair, how sweet. I reach out for her now, fool that I am, I search the air for her with my fingers. Abide with me, that was another favourite. When I was small I used to turn my face away from her, even as she sang it to me. Fast falls the eventide. I’d allow her to comfort me, that was all. I’d allow her to take my clammy hand, but I’d turn my face to the wall. The darkness deepens. How much I resented her comfort. How little I gave her, or let her give me, the whole time I was growing up. Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day. Thank Christ for Pete. Pete, who let her love him, who danced like a happy dog when she baked him biscuits, who wrapped his arms around her neck when she read to him. Who knew how to be loved and looked her straight in the eye with gratitude. Thank Christ for Pete. O Thou who changest not, abide with me.
It’s when the pain moves downwards and I start to want to push that I know I have to get out and look for him. I can’t stay still anymore, I’ve got to move. The pressure is low in my abdomen and I can feel it now, the thing inside me, I can feel the whole weight of it pushing to get out. Only it’s in the wrong place, it’s pushing with its heels against the bottom of my back and it feels like it’s going to push right through. The skin across my stomach tingles then numbs, tingles then numbs. I put my hand on my lower belly, then move my fingers downwards against my taut pudendum. It feels strange. The sensation is dull and rubbery. I can feel my skin, but I can’t feel my hand feeling it. It’s as though my body is gloved in a soft, dead pelt. I’ve got to get out of the house. That’s all I know: I’ve got to move. It’s a feeling I remember having as a child, when things got bad and I wanted to run them off, rushing head first into the warm wind blowing off the sea. That’s what I need to do. I need to move with speed, to throw my body into a hurtling point and plunge through the world. I want to outrun the pain and this thing inside me. I push myself off the bed. I try not to be deterred by the way everything seems skewiff – if I move quickly enough, surely I’ll stay upright. It’s a drunk’s logic and I stumble at the door, but I make it through to the bathroom. I lean on the wash basin and catch my breath; I splash water on my face over and over, and then I pull my hair back in a band. I glance down at my legs: that’s too much to deal with. I find a long dress in the wash-basket and pull it on over my head. My body is acting like it’s never been dressed before; my limbs are unpredictable and my balance is seriously off. It’s like I’m trying to dress a toddler. I laugh. I laugh out loud at my ridiculous body. And I drag the clothes down over my head. I’m dressed and I’m upright and my heart is pounding to run.
When I open the front door the sky is the bluest it’s ever been: dazzling, unreal, not a wisp of cloud in it. And it’s hot. Seriously hot. I try to run, and stagger instead. I have to rest before I even make it to the road. I lean on the gate post. I gripe, and there’s nothing to come. I spit and try to straighten up. Christ, it’s hot. But I’ve got to get down there, I’ve got to get to the old man’s house and see where Pete is. The clock in the living-room said it was past noon, so he’s been gone for hours. I still have the urge to run, to move quickly enough to outrun the pain and leave all of this behind. I start a kind of jog, and even that’s too much. I pull up and power walk instead, pushing hard through the balls of my feet, holding the weight of my stomach in both hands. When the pain feels like it might be about to come back on, I walk faster. I shout and I curse and I punch my feet into the pavement and I keep on moving as quickly as I can. Over to my left are the mountains, blearing into a massive blue haze on the horizon. The sky around them seems almost to smoke, shading into violet above the peaks. The green of the distant forest has this smoky filter too, the swathes of eucalypt turning grey-green, grey, and then, furthest off, where the forest curves out of sight, dark blue. There is no wind; nothing moves. Except for my feet, except for my feet pounding down against the earth.
And then there is the sound of something else up ahead. A car, I can hear a car approaching. A rust-coloured car, nosing its way slowly up the hill. It looks like it hasn’t been driven in a while. The orange paint-work is patchy, a colour you don’t often see, and the engine is making a horrible grinding sound. The woman behind the wheel is drawn up practically to the windscreen: the windows of the car are dirty, furred up with green, but there’s one patch that’s been wiped clean and she stares out of it, looking left and right, clinging to the steering wheel for dear life. She clocks me up ahead of her, stares at me open-mouthed. I wave. ‘Hey,’ I shout. ‘Hey.’ She’s still staring at me, though she’s not slowing down. As she approaches, she scowls. She winds the window down. ‘You need to get help,’ she shouts out at me, the car still moving, ‘you need to get away from here.’ No shit. As I glance through the gap of the window I see that the car’s full of her stuff: there’s a pet-box covered with a cloth on the passenger seat and an open cosmetics-case is spilling tubes across the foot-well beneath it; the back seats are crammed with bags and small cases, a lamp, a mirror, old photo albums. She’s doing a flit. ‘Hey, wait up,’ I say. ‘Why are you leaving?’ She’s already past me and the filthy window is closed back up, and the car is too far on for me to kick it.
* * *
When I get to the old man’s house I’m so hot I can barely breathe. My skin is tightening across my shoulders and cheekbones, puckering into pinkness, and the skin across my belly is the worst: tight and hot and desperately itchy, running with horrible flickering pulses like the ticks you get in muscles when you’ve been running, like the convulsions in metal heating up too quickly. I need to get inside and I need to drink water. I walk down the path and pause in front of the house. The door is ajar, beneath that horrible canopy of webbing. The silk is so thick in places that it looks like white candy-floss. I can see at least two spiders, fat and well-fed, perched in the centres of their webs. ‘Alright,’ I call out. ‘Hello? I’m looking for Pete. Hey, I really need some help out here.’
Nothing. No sign even of that mangy cat. I eyeball the spiders. Come on then, mother fuckers, I’d like to see you try to cocoon this beast of a meal. Two for one. I shrug my shoulders up towards my ears, to make my dress touch the back of neck. And then I take a deep breath and step up onto the porch. I rap on the open door. Still nothing. There’s that strange smell, much stronger now: metallic and sweet and sceptic. ‘Hello,’ I shout again, and I hear something move inside – a shuffle and then a low grumble. ‘Listen, Mr Prendergast,’ I say. I’m trying to muster my no-nonsense demeanour, the one I employ with difficult clients at work: angry young men wh
o don’t want to leave their homes, angry old men who don’t want to move from their pisssoaked cardboard canopies. I will be clear and firm and give no opportunity for refusal. I will be reasonable and collected, despite the way the world is blurry and my body is trying to break apart and nothing will stay still around or inside me. ‘I need to talk to you, mate. I’m not from the authorities, I’m not trying to sell you anything. I need to know if you’ve seen my boyfriend, Pete. I need to use your phone. And I…’ I look down at my stomach. Why is it so hard to say it? My tongue is hot and flabby. ‘I… I might be…’ I can’t say it. I can’t say what I might be, what my body might be doing. ‘I… I need a drink of water,’ I say instead. ‘So I’m going to open the door now.’
I wait a while, and when there’s still no response, I push the door open, slowly. At first it’s difficult to make anything out: the windows all have nets and there’s junk everywhere. Unopened mail banked up at the side of the door, rotting shoes in piles, cat shit in several places, now white and desiccated. I’ve seen this sort of thing before. I cover my mouth and nose with my sleeve. Further back in the house, I can see a kitchenette, a small L-shape of counter-tops, and every surface is covered: pans, bowls, glasses with tide-marks, cartons, tins with their mouths hinged wide open. Something moves, something shifts low down in the kitchen in the midst of all the debris. My first thought is rats – not that this in fact an old man, slumped on the floor, barely distinguishable from the debris around him. I didn’t see when we visited before how thin he was: completely emaciated. Six stone at best, I reckon, which is about the point where you’d lose your mind and start hallucinating. Pete was right, he needs help quickly. The old man groans, his head lolling down onto his chest.
I don’t want to go further into the house. I know about cat shit and toxoplasmosis. The smell here is super poisonous. I just need to get him to speak to me. ‘Alright,’ I say, moving my sleeve away from my mouth for just a moment. ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about. I’m not coming near you. I don’t want to disturb you at all. I just need to know if my boyfriend, Pete, came here. You remember, we were here a few days ago? I… I’m…’ He’s lifting his head up now, with some considerable effort. His eyes are dark and I can’t read his expression, but he’s looking at me. ‘I’m pregnant,’ I say. ‘In fact, I might be in labour.’ I feel a great distance from my own voice as I say these words: labour is something that happens to other bodies. Labour is something contained; it’s measurable, containable work. It’s working hard to produce something. I can surely deal with a labouring woman, I can take the steps that are necessary to take care of her. It’s just that it’s not really me who’s labouring. What’s happening to me feels immeasurably deadly, uncontainably destructive. ‘This is important, mate. I need to know if Pete used your phone and whether he went into town from here. Did something happen? Did he go down to the Medical Centre?’
