Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  I don’t know how long it lasted. I pushed when my body demanded it. Once or twice tried not pushing. Couldn’t tell what effect it had, other than making me feel I was at the limit of what I could stand. I remember putting my hand between my legs to try to feel how much I was dilated (vaguely thinking: four inches for humans – double it?) but I couldn’t tell and my fingers came away wet with blood and in any case what was the point since I’d already started pushing? I thought: Okay, this is it. You die. She died in childbirth. Fittingly Victorian, for Jake. Then the reality of death struck me – death right here, right now, actual death – and all I had besides pain was fear. Vestigial fear of the Devil and hell quickly torn through into the bigger, up-to-date fear, of falling through cold black silent nothingness like an empty lift shaft between two universes – for ever.

  But you didn’t die. That was the treachery of suffering. It took you to the point from which you thought death must follow, then let you know it could hold you there indefinitely. That was when you stopped fearing death and started wanting it, praying for it, begging for it. I knew how that worked. Serves you right. Monster. Murderer. Mother-to-be.

  I lay on my side, jaws clamped around one of the table legs. My thighs were sticky with blood. During the final stages of labour the uterine contractions are very strong and usually painful. The baby’s head presses on the pelvic floor, which causes the mother to have an overwhelming urge to push down. In the gap before the final contraction I heard Kaitlyn thrashing around in the bathroom. Then it was the last contraction, and with a sharp scalloping sensation and a sound like a rubber glove being pulled off, the baby, in a knot of satiny gore, slithered out of me.

  At that moment Cloquet crashed through the window and went flying across the floor.

  8

  They were here.

  All the calculations and evasions and disguises and double-checks and now it was for nothing and there was no time and no strength. I started wondering how they’d found me – but it didn’t matter how. Only that. I was turning to see the child when the first vampire leaped in through the broken window. I glimpsed close-cropped grey hair and a small neat face before he turned to take Cloquet’s four shots in the shoulder with barely a twitch. There was an inexplicable suffocating pressure on my arms and chest, though my legs felt weightless. The front door opened. Cold air that should have been knife-fresh rushed in packed instead with the pigshit-and-rotten-meat stink of the Undead.

  In spite of which the imperative was simply to see the baby, verify its existence, establish it was breathing. With immense dull elephantine effort I reached down and lifted him towards me.

  It was a boy. His eyes were closed and he was covered in mucus and blood. I licked his muzzle, quickly, cleared the tender nose. He coughed and wriggled closer. I knew this was only a moment but it was pathetically intact, like a petal in a paperweight, my astonishment at the miniature hybrid hands and feet, the little penis and the soft covering of gold and black hair. He opened his eyes. They were dark, like mine, like Jake’s. I thought: You walk around with it inside you and nothing prepares you for the absurd concreteness of the fact: a new creature suddenly here, disturbing its share of atoms. I put my hand under his head and sensed flickery consciousness inside. He blinked up at me, once, twice.

  I want – you’ve no idea how much – to be able to say I loved him, instantly. I want to be able to say the miracle happened just as it was supposed to, that his life took immediate priority over everything. I want to tell you that as soon as I saw him the paradigm shifted, that the rubbishy clutter of my self fell away, that the contract was rewritten, that he’d come out of me dragging half my soul behind him like a blanket, that I was now – with molecular certainty and before I was anything else – a Mother.

  The truth is I felt neutral. A living creature had come out of my body, but that was merely a bizarre fact, just another thing that happened to be the case. If I wanted to I could snap his newborn neck or rip out his newborn heart. There he was, warm flesh and banging blood, arms and legs and head, teeth and tongue – but in those first pure moments he was simply a live alien object in my hands, nothing to do with me. He was like a word you repeat so many times it loses its meaning and becomes raw sound.

  Delilah Snow’s legacy.

  Everything since I’d met her had been leading up to this moment.

  The table lifted and spun away through the air to crash against the range. Two vampires stood over me. A Henry Mooreish perspective, their heads remote. One was a petite young (looking) male with dark brown curly hair and a smug long-eyelashed face like the early Bob Dylan’s. The other was a slim, attractive, green-eyed woman in her (nominal) late thirties with coppery red hair cut like Hitler’s. Both wore black jeans and zip-up leather jackets with a red leather emblem – something like a cuneiform character, I thought – embossed on the left lapel. Both had a stripe of thick white paste beneath their nostrils – an olfactory block, though from the look on their faces not completely effective. Their smell made me gag. The redhead was terrifically excited, at a pitch that gave her a steady gleam. I could hear a helicopter. The sound brought a feeling of exposure. I didn’t know why I could barely move. My legs were pillowcase light. An invisible weight lay across my abdomen. I tried to turn so I could shield the baby (if a reflex then a lumbering one, something I dimly knew I was supposed to do) but the woman kicked me hard in the side of the head, and in the time it took me to absorb the blow the youth rammed something big and sharp-pointed straight through my throat into the floor, pinning me. The pain rolled me up to the edge of blacking out, then back again in a sickening blur. I raised my left sandbag arm but found it grabbed and held by the grey-haired vampire. With no hint of effort in the natty, civilised face he forced it down, produced a second spike (not silver; someone wanted me alive through this) and impaled my helpless hand. I began to choke.

  COME TO ME. NOW.

  The three of them stared down at me. The young Bob Dylan smiled. The helicopter was close with its sound of monotonous urgency. Whisks of snow-cold air played over me. My legs were negligible, two scraps of chiffon. I tried to turn my head to see if Cloquet was alive, but it was impossible. The only two certainties were my helplessness and the weight of the child’s gory head in my hand. My heart still didn’t move. It was like a racehorse that just stands in the stall after all the others have gone: I didn’t feel anything about him (apart from curiosity) though he’d looked at me with such mesmerising nude wideawakeness. Maybe his heart was suspended too? There was that between us, the intuition that as yet there was nothing at stake. No love lost, as they said. There was leisure to consider all this. The emotional universe found room in a split-second for elaborate expansions.

  FASTER.

  With a glance at the redhead for permission, the young vampire jammed a third steel skewer through the upper part of my right arm, the hand of which was still holding my child’s head. The metal went through the long hairy bicep at an angle, missed the humerus, dragged at a knot of nerves. Pain jangled like a stumbled-into wind chime. Blood and oxygen frothed around the wound in my throat. It reminded me of a school biology experiment we’d done with bicarbonate of soda. Which in turn reminded me of a line from Jake’s journal: I have lost, I thought, mental appropriateness. My legs were afloat. I was a cripple tied to a post in a fast-flowing river. The redhead pulled a military knife from her boot and cut the umbilical cord. She was beautiful. Her lipsticked mouth worked slightly with concentration.

  THAT’S IT. FASTER.

  ‘Grab it, Noah,’ she said.

  The Bob Dylan youth, Noah, reached down for the child – and the child bit him.

  Noah snatched his hand back, bloodied. ‘Ow!’ he said, half-laughing. ‘That fucking hurt.’

  ‘We’re wasting time,’ the grey-haired vampire said. ‘Give me the things.’

  The woman had a leather satchel. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Do it.’

  There was a separate frail rage that I’d done all th
at exhausting work of getting this child out safely into the world and now here they were, erasing it. Separate, that is, from the overwhelming desire to close my eyes, turn my head away, let them take him. What did it matter? Why should I care? Did women getting raped suffer this profane indifference? Were some abuses so extreme it was easier to surrender the self than sustain it?

  ‘Watch that mouth,’ the redhead said. ‘Careful...’

  ‘The things’ were a cattle prod, a ketch-pole and a woven steel-fibre sack. They worked as a team and I got it all in dreamy detail, the prod’s dry zaps, my fingers one-by-one prised back, the child’s jerks and flinches, his high-pitched yelps and snarls showing white canines and a shrimp-pink tongue, the two-tone shimmer of the woven steel bag that reminded me of zoot suits or the iridescence of street oil, the redhead’s delighted absorption and pearly skin and pounding stink. She had no malice towards me. This was something valuable to her, that was all, a necessary object. Despite the cold coming in I felt as hot as a new-baked loaf. I watched my offspring lifted, throttled, jabbed, bagged, tied. The darkness closing over his head tore something between us.

  For a moment all sound and movement ceased, as if someone had pressed a pause button on reality.

  Then the helicopter’s whine and chop ripped through – and everything rushed back into motion. The aircraft was right outside, whisking-up snow and shooing-in freezing air.

  KILL THEM! KILL THEM NOW!

  There was a burst of automatic weapons fire, barely audible over the racket of the propellor blades, then the first of the wolves – last night’s black – was through the door.

  The animal’s bite and slash tore a third of Noah’s face off. He went down onto his knees with a falsetto shriek and a violent shudder as if he was revolted. Simultaneously the grey-haired vampire, holding the sack with my child in it, shot straight up through the air and came to rest with his back against the ceiling and the wriggling bundle pressed tight to his chest. A second grey wolf sprang at the redhead. She got her left arm up and the creature’s jaws locked around it, its momentum knocking her backwards into the range. For a moment she looked like a woman at a bar resisting an insistent bad-breathed drunk. Then I saw the detail of her little round nostrils flaring as in complete silence and with a kind of delight she stabbed the animal repeatedly in its belly with the knife she was still holding from cutting the cord, until at the sixth or seventh puncture the big body slid from her to the floor, as if not dead but triumphantly passed out. Three more wolves ran in the door and a fourth appeared at the broken window. The warmth of them reached through the freezing air and went into me. I could feel my will in their shoulders and hind-quarters and necks. A kind of frantic joy raced back and forth between us. The black tore at flailing Noah’s throat. Shots fired. The wolf in the window fell with a yelp. My womb contracted. The grey-haired vampire was inching backwards on the ceiling to get his feet against a beam. Two grey wolves leaped and snapped under him, though it was obvious he was out of their reach. As he stared down at them, blinking, a big bullet-wound opened silently in his left temple without visible effect. I tracked the shot back: Cloquet, one arm useless, the other holding the Cobra, clearly without the strength to squeeze off another round. For a moment Cloquet frowned, struggling to haul himself into full consciousness, then with a confused scowling look of having been betrayed by something, collapsed. One of the greys had sprung onto the redhead in an exact replication of its brother’s move, except this time the jaws had locked around the knife hand. The vampire’s free hand – diamond-ringed, French-manicured – fumbled at her belt. A wolf the colour of burnt toast joined the attack on Noah, and after a queer, intense, concentrated moment, as if the animals were having difficulty holding still for a photo, the vampire’s head came off his shoulders with a wet crunch. Immediately the corpse’s capillary system began to darken, as if death had only a small window to stake its claim.

  Outside, the chopper dipped and a cloud of snow shot in and swirled. I thought of TV feather-pillow fights. It was what TV girls did, in nightshirts, in panties, in men’s dreams. I’d never had a pillow fight in my life. The wolf on the redhead contorted as a spray of bullets struck its flank, then slid to the floor, tongue lolling. Two tall young vampire males with machine guns stood in the doorway, one facing in, the other out, laying down covering fire. I could feel wolves getting hit in numbers, a faint gunshot tattoo in my bones. The redhead, splashed and smeared with blood, ran to her friends at the door. Wolves were howling and yelping, jack-knifing, taking bullets. Three leaped in through the broken window and stood guard over me. Their good rich odour blotted out the vampires’ smell. I looked back up at the ceiling. The grey-haired one, crouched against a beam, stared down at me for a moment, the sack clutched tight against his chest, then sprang and swooped for the door, where the other three, as if choreographed, ducked down to let him, with his bagged captive, out over their heads.

  ‘Au revoir, Talulla,’ the redhead said. Then all of them ran for the chopper.

  9

  Clouds had come up from the south and covered the moon. Outside the darkness and the snow had a yellow tint. Cold air meandered through the wide-open door and broken window, ruffled the pages of Moll Flanders on the dining table. (Keep reading, Lu, Jake had advised. Literature is humanity’s broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart even for monsters, even for you. It’s humanity without the judgement. Trust me, it’ll help.) On the back of the dust jacket, I remembered, was a quote: ‘Moll is immoral, shallow, hypocritical, heartless, a bad woman: yet Moll is marvellous.’ That was the sort of character I was supposed to have become. That was the sort of character I’d failed to become. No, I thought, as two of my guard wolves struggled to get a grip with their teeth on the steel skewering my right hand, Talulla is not marvellous. Talulla is fucking useless. I kept seeing them prising my fingers back one by one. I kept feeling the distinctive weight of the child lifted from me. I kept groping in the void where my horror or rage should have been. I remembered reading a story about a woman whose ten-year-old daughter goes missing and is eventually found dead, having been raped and murdered. There’s this moment when the police come to the mother’s house to tell her they’ve found the body, and even as she’s hearing the words and understanding what’s happened she’s staring at the living-room floor where there’s a TV guide with Monica and Chandler from Friends on the cover and along with I’m very sorry to have to tell you, we’ve found the body of a girl matching the description is the thing about Matthew Perry being in a sex-addiction clinic and the two things are both in her head at the same time and it’s a disgusting equalisation and it must mean she’s evil or insane.

  That was me. I was like that. Always had been. When I was nine I had a pet mouse and neglected it and it died. My dad had just said, very quietly, I’m so sad about this, Lulu. And my heart had filled up with panicky self-hatred to hear him say that and to see that he really was sad, but also there was a sensual thrill that I’d done this to him – me! My face had felt warm and soft, just as it had when I’d turned and seen Aunt Theresa standing there in the basement and my pants were round my ankles and she’d said, Talulla Demetriou, you are a dirty, filthy little girl.

  I’d expected emptiness in my womb, like the space left by a scooped out avocado stone, but it felt undelivered. The pains (I would have said contractions if the baby wasn’t already out) meant something was wrong. Something other than the blank where instant love should have been, something other than my dead heart, my failed motherhood, my third recurring daydream.

  It was filtering through to the animals that they couldn’t grasp the spikes. I watched their long teeth slip and slash. Distress began to gather in them, my distress. I turned my head. Cloquet was still unconscious, for all I knew dead.

  The only way to free my hand was to slide it up the shaft of the spike and off the other end, like a chunk of meat off a shish kebab. Three feet, give or take. It made me think how time must have crawled for Christ on the
cross, a horse’s tail swishing, a centurion easing his leather cap, a boy drawing with a stick in the dust. That was the world: innocent vivid continuity, regardless.

  My wolves lay down around me. There were a dozen of them in the room now, and others arriving. I wanted more than anything just to be able to turn on my side and curl up in a ball. I clamped my jaws together and began to force my hand up the spike, slowly at first, then when the scale of the pain registered, quickly, to get it over with. Three seconds with a white-hot circle in my palm – then it was free. The first moments of welling blood were worse than the impalement, but with a sudden disgust at the figure I cut – helpless, legs spread, choking – I willed myself through it, gripped the skewer in my throat and yanked it out. My left arm was still pinned, but I had the joy of being able to turn onto my left side and draw my knees up a little, as far as my still-big belly would allow. Blood pooled from my neck like a cartoon speech bubble. Cloquet coughed and groaned, then fell silent again.