Dark Dance

by Lee, Tanith

  The surgery was crowded, a plague ward. Children sneezed and cried and ran about in a fever. Men and women coughed and evacuated their noses, blue germs puffing from their mouths in the chilly room. The chairs were hard and the magazines few. You were not encouraged to come.

  The buzzer went angrily. Who would dare to be next.

  ‘Miss Day? Go through please.’

  Rachaela walked through into the doctor’s room, which was quite large, with netted windows over a garden.

  The man wore a suit and tie. He was slim and fit with well-brushed thinning hair. He gave Rachaela a neat and ironed smile.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  Rachaela sat down on the chair he indicated.

  ‘I need an abortion.’

  The doctor put his smile away and raised his brows.

  ‘Let’s not put the cart before the horse, shall we? So you think you may be pregnant. What leads you to believe this?’

  ‘My periods have stopped. I’ve been sick several times.’

  ‘How many periods have you missed?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Have you brought a sample of your urine taken first thing in the morning?’

  ‘I did a Predictor test.’

  ‘I see. Well as you’re here, we’d better take a look at you.’ He pressed at the intercom. ‘Mrs Beatty, come through please.’ He said, ‘Just slip off your under-things behind that screen. Keep your slip on.’

  Rachaela did as she was told, and came out to the examining table, very white with something on it like a large paper towel.

  Fat Mrs Beatty entered and sat down in a corner beyond the screen.

  ‘Knees up, please, ankles together. Just relax.’

  The last time a man had touched her it had been a pleasure, a miracle of sensation. This one was rough, knowing how tough the female body had to be, how much it could take.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘um.’

  And he poked and prodded at her vagina and her belly. He stared in behind a light, like a miner.

  ‘All right. You can put on your things now.’

  He washed his hands, soiled by her, at a sink, and Mrs Beatty slunk back out of the room.

  ‘Well, Miss—ah, Miss Day. I’d say you’re definitely pregnant.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Everything,’ he said, ‘seems very healthy. Let’s have a look at your blood pressure.’ He attended to this, checking his gauge. They waited in silence. ‘That’s excellent. You’re a very healthy young woman.’

  His congratulations did not thrill her.

  ‘I want an abortion.’

  ‘There’s absolutely no reason that you should. You’re what—’ he consulted her statement before him, ‘twenty-nine? That’s not too late. There are tests that can be run if you’re worried the baby—’

  It’s not a baby. It’s a thing, a parasite, lodged in me.

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘But, Miss Day. It’s not as simple as that. You have a responsibility. The child has been conceived. A life, Miss Day, which you are carrying.’

  ‘It was an accident.’

  Could she say that? She had not taken any precautions, nothing had been further from her mind. The gate left open, and the fertile Scarabae seed, better at inbreeding, sown in one of five vortices of ecstasy. Yes, she was responsible.

  ‘I’m afraid, accident or not, the child is a fact.’ He ran his eye over her. He smelled of disinfectant and aftershave. ‘Do you have any family?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And I take it your boyfriend isn’t interested.’

  Boyfriend.

  ‘I left him.’

  ‘I see. An awkward situation. But people come through worse. You must be brave. In this day and age things are made quite easy for a young mother, a single parent. I see you have an address in quite a nice area.’

  She had just gained the small flat via the proceeds of the compensation for the other. It had taken weeks to sort things out. Thus her delay in coming to this man. This man who believed in the sanctity of life, its life, not hers. Hers was immaterial.

  ‘My address doesn’t matter. I don’t have any money—’

  ‘There are means of support for women in your situation.’

  ‘But I tell you, I don’t want it. It—it was forced on me.’

  ‘Surely not.’ He allowed himself to show a measure of distaste.

  ‘I can’t—I can’t have it, care for it.’

  ‘You can decide all that when the baby is born. And you’ll change your mind. Children are wonderful things. Special.’

  ‘Not to me.’

  ‘Well, Miss Day, I’m sorry but I see no excuse to recommend you should opt for a termination. Of course we need to go into your history. But judging by what I’ve seen and what you’ve told me, I see no reason why you shouldn’t square up to this and assume your responsibility. Think of all those women who long to bear a child and are unable.’

  ‘I don’t care about that. I care about my own body. I want my freedom.’

  ‘Then I’m sorry, Miss Day. I can’t help you.’

  Then where do I go?’

  ‘You’ll have to find that out for yourself. I’m not here in the position of a butcher. Life’s important to me.’

  ‘I’m desperate,’ she said.

  He flushed. He said, ‘You people make me sick.’

  He rose. Rachaela got up too.

  She struck him violently across the left side of his face dislodging all expression. He gawped at her, his left eye watering, and the imprint of her hand bright-pink across his clean-shaven, aftershaved cheek. So he would have to confront the next patient.

  Heavy as lead, she walked from the room.

  The main chamber was ten feet by fourteen. The walls and ceiling were white with a hint of peach, and the carpet dove-grey. She had known all this before she moved into it, from the estate agents’ sheet.

  The bathroom was boxed off, giving a tiny entrance lobby as you entered the flat. The suite in the bathroom was white and the floor black-and-white tiles. There was a frosted window. The kitchen area also opened off the room, without a door. It had a black floor, white cupboards, and a stainless-steel sink and drainer. The one window in the kitchen and the two in the main room were on the same end wall. They looked across the lines of houses and the blocks of flats towards a distant handkerchief of park with tall bare trees. In summer they would be green, as the agent had cunningly pointed out.

  Rachaela had expensively rescued her furniture from store. She spread the bed with a blue and crimson Indian blanket, put up lampshades, hung blue curtains.

  The flat was not unpleasant. For one. It was only for one.

  The radio stood on the kitchen work-top.

  She turned it on. Haydn, clipped and safe, with only the passion of melody.

  She had been so frightened. It had taken all her strength to go to the man who thought children were special. Why were they special? They were unformed dough, unfinished things, due to be warped into the general useless and dangerous mass of human adults.

  Rachaela touched her stomach and took her hand quickly away. It was in there. A growth, busily feeding on her, swelling second by second.

  It would take so much courage to find another doctor, and she would surely have to go to a hospital to do so. She feared hospitals. She distrusted the uniform of the white coat. And then she might meet another one like the one today.

  Could she do something herself?

  She had tried all the sane home remedies she had ever heard of to dislodge it. Gin and hot baths, exercises. She could not bring herself to fall down the house stairs. The commotion, and people running out, a broken leg.

  She was afraid, too, of the abortion. To have the thing scraped or vacuumed out of her womb, the very thought of it last night had sent her to the bathroom, heaving over the modern white lavatory.

  But she must find someone. Someone kind who would put her first.

  As she had told her
self she must not, she saw the Scarabae reaching out, their agents in the surgery, the doctor listening, nodding.

  This was not a plot. It was simple bad luck.

  The tradition of the family. Continuance.

  No wonder he had left her. He had seen to her as he had seen to her mother. He had been more certain with Rachaela.

  She sat down in her chair and threw its new blue cushion to the carpet.

  How pretty the flat was. She could live here, surely, at peace, alone.

  And she would need to work. There was the cafeteria in Lyle and Robbins. Old-fashioned, not too demanding, and no drunks. Then again the Pizza Eater on Beaumont Street was a better bet for tips. No bookshops. Computerized tills. These things could be sorted out and surmounted.

  But not this.

  She lay back in the chair.

  She was so tired.

  The clear windows showed the roofs of London, the redundant chimneys and the crop of TV aerials, the spring sky. An aeroplane. She recalled no aeroplanes flying over the heath. Out of time and place, that spot.

  Perhaps something will happen. Anna had said that.

  She had meant the pregnancy.

  Was it wrong to kill it?

  It was a monster.

  In the blustery dark descending the well-lit centre of the house, Rachaela found a woman had stepped out from a doorway, a neighbour from the floor below.

  ‘Oh, Miss Day. I picked this up by mistake. I’m afraid I think it’s only junk mail, but it’s addressed to you.’

  Rachaela took the glossy envelope.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You can never tell these days. It might be something you want.’

  The woman was conciliatory in warm fawn. Her hair was a greying fair, thick and shaggily cut. She had a square face and large brown eyes, smiling. She wanted to be friends.

  ‘How are you finding the flat?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘I find it’s so small,’ said the woman. ‘But then, I’ve had all these years to accumulate rubbish.’

  Rachaela waited, her heart drumming and her stomach rife, for the challenge of the street and the night.

  ‘Well I mustn’t keep you. Take care,’ she added kindly, ‘it’s a nasty old night.’

  Rachaela went on down the stairs, stowing the piece of junk mail in her bag.

  She forgot the woman outside. The wind struck at her, the sky was choked with dark blue churning cloud.

  Rachaela walked down the street and caught a bus at the corner. It twisted and turned and bore her into an ominous and derelict suburb, stark in the orange street lights.

  Where she got off, the buildings had been knocked down, great rattling walls of corrugated iron, striped with bills, separated her from yawning cavities. She walked past the rowdy pub which had been described and up a hill of council houses fish-boned with fake shutters, gardens spattered by gnomes, and windmills that whirled with weather. The street ended in waste ground. Some youths in leather and day-glo socks were holding a meeting on the gloomy grass. One shouted at Rachaela, a ritual of menace. She walked on and came to a one-storey building surrounded by a cordon of wire fencing.

  Through the gate and over the lumpy ground, and she opened the door and went into a long drill hall with a clacking wooden floor.

  The air was hot and sour, the room crowded, the lines of wooden seats around the walls filled by women of all apparent ages between the virgin and the crone. It was a place of women, a mocking slightly sordid club. And from a yellow door issued a man in a white coat, and the eyes of his harem of suppliants went to him, the click of knitting needles hesitated and pages of rustling magazines halted.

  He joked briefly with a woman in a lilac cardigan at a desk. Then he was gone, like the god.

  Rachaela went to the desk.

  ‘I’ve got an appointment for seven.’

  ‘Oh yes. Miss Day is it? That’s right. If I could just take your address.’ The woman entered details and nearby the nearer women listened. A pallid girl with round frog eyes watched Rachaela, popping a boiled sweet into her rosy, fatty mouth. ‘I’m afraid we’re a bit behind tonight. It may be a bit of a wait.’

  ‘All right.’ Rachaela went from the woman and found a chair at the end of the line.

  About thirty in front of her. Surely some of them were together. It was ten to seven now.

  The frog princess was the nearest to the yellow door. Presumably when one went in, they all moved up a chair, into the heat of the previous sitter, intimately. We are all women. We are bound to protect ourselves. The cap and the pill, the scrape of the spatula taking our smear, to save us from semen and from cancer. We are the responsible ones.

  But there were children with the women here and there, subdued children eating chips or drawing on pieces of paper on the floor.

  Fourteen-year-olds with kids and thick mascara, slim with strange fat faces that had not lived, but had overseen, screaming and crying, the birth of offspring from the trunk below.

  Certainly, none of them looked afraid. They were all quite comfortable in their evening club, the Family Planning Clinic.

  I’m afraid I haven’t planned. Heavy with child I come to ask for an extraction.

  Would this one listen?

  Was it to be the man from behind the yellow door? She had hoped it would be a woman on this visit. A woman’s touch would be less horrible, perhaps.

  But these were all women. Look at them.

  The needles of that one clocking like Madame Defarge, her soiled yellow hair piled up on her head and red lipstick like a gaping wound. And there one writing, probably a letter, holding the paper sideways and chewing her nails.

  The hall smelled of women, too. Cheap scent and costlier scent like fly spray, sticky underarm deodorant, hair lacquer, babies and washing-up hands.

  Rachaela felt sick. If that happened, where was the lavatory? There must be one. She should have asked.

  She could feel it, pressing against her belly from beneath, like solid indigestion.

  Try not to think of it. She took slow breaths of the nauseating air.

  A girl in a purple suit began to talk to her friend beside her.

  ‘I don’t like this waiting. Gets on me nerves.’

  Teah.’

  Yes, thought Rachaela.

  ‘Don’t know what he’ll say this time. I reckon he fancies me.’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘Well why not?’

  ‘It’s more’n his job’s worth.’

  The purple girl toyed with a packet of cigarettes beneath the ‘No Smoking’ sign, playing with them like a toy. If she could not consume them at least she could hold them.

  ‘He keeps on, give it up. I’ve tried ain’t I? I started with all that worry.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘All them counsellors and psychiatrics. Was I sure? ‘Cause I’m bleeding sure. Can’t have another kid can I? Can’t afford it and he’ll leave me.’

  ‘Oh Lyn.’

  ‘Well he would have. We was in a fix as it was. An’ I took the bloody pill. I did. Regular. And then I goes up the shute. That would have been number three.’

  ‘Lyn, you always go on.’

  ‘It’s this place. It reminds me. All them psychiatrics at the hospital. I had to see four of them. Like a bloody judge and jury, trying to persuade me to have it. I can’t have it. I’ve got two already.’

  Rachaela listened, her eyes on the wooden floor. To one who had travelled before her.

  ‘Well, you got rid of it, Lyn,’ said the unfriendly friend.

  ‘It was a struggle. And then the way they treat you. And the pain. Christ, I thought it would be all right. I’ve never been right since. You know I ain’t. I couldn’t bear him near me after.’

  That was psychological. They told you it was.’

  ‘No it weren’t. They done something to me, the clumsy buggers. They treat you like shit when you go in for it.’

  The yellow door opened an
d a slim, fat-faced young girl came out, looking satisfied.

  The god emerged again and went to the desk. He gave instructions and vanished once more.

  ‘Miss Garland,’ sang out the woman in lilac, and the frog princess, sucking her sweet without fear, went forward and inside the door.

  The Defarge woman dropped a stitch and cursed.

  ‘I’m going outside for a fag,’ said the purple girl. She got up and left the hall.

  A new picture. Probes for the body and others probing at the mind. The team of psychiatrists, trying to delve the reasons of the would-be terminator. Would it be enough to be afraid? No. The dream she had had, lying on the beach and the sea coming in, split open and fire running out of her guts, that would not be enough.

  Of course, they would not make it simple. It must not be easy. She bore a life. She could not merely flush her body like a toilet bowl.

  The girl next up from Lyn’s friend was discussing food. ‘A nice cut of steak and fry it up with onions. I could give him that every night. It’s no good me saying, Tony, it’s bad for you. You’ll get a heart attack. And try giving him salad. Chips with everything. Our ceiling’s black from frying chips. Running with grease. He makes me sick.’

  She had done the favour for Rachaela.

  Rachaela rose and walked quickly out of the hall.

  Outside the night came thankfully cold, a smell of external houses and open street. The glare of the nauseous streetlights which made the world faceless and colourless.

  The purple girl, now in black, stood by the fence smoking greedily. She glanced at Rachaela and away.

  It was not possible to ask her questions. In any case, everything was now revealed. A difficult business. A humiliating struggling business. Ending in harsh treatment and pain, and a lingering scar.

  She could hear the adjacent streetlight sizzling like a radioactive isotope. The earth was alive with poisons, and surrounded by the threat of outer space. What use was anything.

  The abortioned girl stared after Rachaela as she walked out of the gate and back along the street. There was a faint affront on the girl’s face, as if she knew Rachaela had denied herself a similar vileness and suffering, the secrets of the female club.