by Graham Joyce
‘Well Biddy, it’s crucially important to keep abreast of technical developments. A modern midwife should know of the resources available to support any difficult diagnosis. That’s why I’m showing it to you, here, this evening.’
I could see the alliances forming, too. Some of the women on the course were irritated by Biddy’s interjections. They just wanted to blink at the sci-fi equipment and go home to make their husbands’ suppers. Others supported Biddy with a well-timed chuckle directed against our teacher’s squinting superiority. As for me, I wanted to side with Biddy: I wanted to challenge MMM, to speak up for Mammy and say there is indeed a way of knowing a child’s gender long before it sees the light of day, but that only we few know of it. But I didn’t. I shrank. And anyway, MMM was already introducing Gloria Tranter, a spectacularly pregnant lady well into her third trimester. The radiant Mrs Tranter had agreed to be the subject of a demonstration, and was already taking her place on the examination couch while we crowded around the screen.
MMM rolled up Mrs Tranter’s clothes, then she smeared a kind of jelly over Mrs Tranter’s hugely distended belly.
‘Is it a Geiger counter?’ Biddy asked.
‘No, it’s not a Geiger counter, Biddy. It’s an ultrasound monitor. Are you ready, Mrs Tranter?’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Tranter, smiling at us as if she’d been handed a bouquet of spring flowers.
MMM flicked some switches and the screen fizzed. Then she moved a small, wired suction cup over the lady’s belly. And there on the screen was the outline, clearly visible in all the fuzzy grey lines, of the unborn baby. MMM pointed out the baby’s beating heart and its male genitals.
But it wasn’t what I could see that had me nailed to the wall. It was what I could hear. Because that machine had allowed me to see not an image of the baby in the womb, but to see exactly what I was hearing. And in a way it was a sound I had heard before, but fabulously enhanced. Now with all the switches and dials of MMM’s infernal machine turned up I could hear that baby. There was an amplified shucking, like someone pulling air in through the teeth and blowing out again, but in a slow, steady articulate pulse. I was utterly lost to that miraculous and awesome sound.
So lost I had to be called back. When I looked up, all the other women had taken their seats again and MMM was disconnecting the equipment and calling to me. And even though the machine was switched off and Mrs Tranter was climbing off the table I could still hear it, shucking and blowing. And I didn’t want to stop listening, because I could hear the baby and he was telling me all his plans for this life.
‘Are you with us, Miss Cullen? I know it’s all rather marvellous, but could you retake your seat with the others?’
Afterwards, as we left the college, Biddy came up to me, wheeling her bike. ‘Gone, weren’t you? For a minute there. Listening to that contraption. Completely gone.’
I was anxious to change the subject so I blurted, ‘She’s wrong. You can tell the gender by the heartbeat. A boy’s heartbeat is faster.’
Biddy looked at me strangely. ‘Well we all know that,’ she said. Then she climbed on her bike and pedalled away.
‘Have you heard about the miracle?’
The following morning I was bent over my vegetable garden with a rake, and when Greta called like that from the gate it startled me. My hand flew to my three hairgrips. ‘What miracle?’
Greta let herself in through the gate. It whined before it snapped back shut, and I thought: someone ought to put some oil on that gate. ‘We got away with it.’
I leaned on my rake. ‘Got away with what?’
‘The evidence. It vanished. They couldn’t charge us.’
Greta was grinning at me and I saw how one large front tooth slightly crossed the other. Like the gate, it made me want to fix it. Greta went on about how the police had taken Chas and Luke down to the police station but they hadn’t been able to charge the pair – or anyone else – because the evidence they’d collected from the house had gone missing. Greta described it as a miracle that they’d kept all the gear together and that even though the police had made a diligent search they hadn’t found anything else. ‘Not even a roach. Not even a grain,’ Greta said. ‘Don’t you think that’s a miracle?’
‘A miracle?’
‘Yes. It’s destiny. We’re protected, our little family up there on the farm. We’re watched over. We’re special.’
Oh dear, I thought. ‘What happened to Judith?’
‘I thought she’d left with you. Then she came back on Sunday. She and Chas seemed to have hit it off.’
Vixen. Tart. Slut. Then Greta pulled a face. ‘What’s up?’ I asked her.
‘Nothing. Just period pains.’
I let my rake fall to the soil. ‘Come inside. I’ll give you something for that.’
‘Lady’s mantle?’
‘Tshh. Mugwort and sage.’
Some time in the afternoon I heard a vehicle stop outside the cottage and I also heard the ratchet of a handbrake, but I was busy steeping herbs in vinegar so I didn’t look up, even when I heard a scuffle at the door. When I did eventually go out, there on the doorstep was a box record-player. I identified it as the one they’d had at Croker’s on the night of the party. I opened the box and on the turntable was a record. The record label read ‘“Green Onions” by Booker T and the MGs’. There was also a tiny handwritten note, saying, ‘Thanks!’
I immediately took the record-player indoors and plugged it in. I’d never used a record-player in my life, never had such a treasure as this. I saw the disc spinning and my hand trembled as I tried to lower the stylus on the vinyl. I didn’t know there was an automatic switch and I made a terrible scratching sound as I dropped the stylus on to the spinning disc. Then came the music I’d remembered from the party. It starts off with deep throbbing notes and an immovable beat, then it cuts with that jagged guitar and I found myself staring at the disc rotating on the turntable and disappearing into the music and not having to think about anything, and I tell you I was gone.
Later that day I was on my way to Bunch Cormell’s house. Her baby was thriving but she had cracked nipples from the boy’s enthusiastic mouthing, and I had some lanolin for her. As I walked down the street a car drew alongside, engine purring, keeping up with my walking pace. It was a police car. I stopped.
The police car stopped. Bill Myers leaned over and wound down the passenger window. ‘Want a lift somewhere, Fern?’
‘Bill! No, I’m just off to the Cormells’.’
He opened the door. ‘Jump in. I’ll take you.’
‘But it’s only two minutes!’ He smiled at me and held open the door. I got in. The upholstery inside the car smelled new. ‘This is nice, Bill. Better than your bike, anyroad.’
Myers put the car into gear and moved down the street. ‘How’s Mammy then?’
‘She’s middlin’, Bill. Didn’t recognise me the other day.’
He nodded. ‘Was surprised to see you at Croker’s the other night.’
‘Just as I was surprised to see you!’
He paused at the road junction and his indicator was going tick tick tick.
‘Quite a night of it, we had.’ The car moved off again.
‘I didn’t know all that stuff was going on.’
‘Don’t expect you did. They don’t work for a living, that lot, Fern. Deal in drugs, they do. That’s how they make a penny. Other people’s misery.’ He stopped the car outside Bunch’s house. It was a ridiculously short ride. I didn’t feel I could get out. ‘Not that we got what we went for.’
‘No?’
‘Even the bit of evidence we got I managed to lose somehow, Fern.’
‘Oh?’
‘Can’t think how I did it, Fern. Landed me in hot water it did. On my way to promotion I was. Sergeant. Buggered that up, it has.’
‘That’s a nuisance, Bill.’
‘You know if you’ve got cause to go to Croker’s again it would help me if you kept your eyes open. They do all so
rts up there. Pills. Needles. The works. If you see anything, like.’
‘I’ll keep my eyes open, Bill.’
‘Don’t put yourself in a spot though, Fern.’
‘No.’
He leaned across and opened the passenger door for me. ‘Go and see that nursing mother, then.’
I got out of the car and I waved at him as he pulled away. The bottle of lanolin I had for Bunch was sweating in my palm.
21
You have to. It was like a voice whispering in my head, getting louder all the time. You have to Ask. You must.
It was a watershed moment in my beliefs. If it worked for me then I would know for ever. If it didn’t, then my scepticism would be confirmed. Quite apart from that I was running out of options and I was running out of time. Judith was correct, in that if I was going to Ask then I had to do it while I was still in possession of the cottage, and if I was going to do it at a time when the moon was with me then I had to make immediate preparation.
The fiasco with Arthur McCann hadn’t helped me in the slightest. In fact he hadn’t shown his face since the morning after. Moreover I had no prospect of finding the wherewithal to pay off the estate.
I took off my clothes and sat in Mammy’s room, at her old dressing table, gazing at my reflection in the foxed mirror. Did I have the courage? A sorry figure looked back at me. I don’t know how long I stayed like that, staring. After a while I came to, and my hand automatically fluttered to my hairgrips, and the grips released themselves into my hand. I picked up Mammy’s hairbrush. It still smelled faintly of her sebum. I began to brush my hair forward, and then I took a comb and parted my hair in the middle, the way Judith had for Arthur McCann.
I lit some incense, one of my own. Bistort, valerian, lavender. The extravagance. The intention. Mammy would be furious, oh. I went outside, naked, knelt on one knee and smeared some incense oil on the gate.
I returned inside. The incense smoked the room and clouded my reflection in the mirror. Judith had still not collected all her things from that night. The clothes, the nylons, the cosmetics, the face paints. I spread them out before me on the dressing table. The tiny brushes, the miniature pots, the tidy little cauldron of it all. First my eyes. Then my eyebrows, nut-brown. My cheeks, a hint of rose flush. The buds of my lips. I loved myself in that mirror. It almost wasn’t me. Then I rolled on the nylons, smoothed them over my shins and along the sheen of my thighs. Slipped on the little skirt, the other clothes. Finally the wicked cologne. A spray, a burdened puff of air.
And then I willed him to come.
He was a long time coming, but I knew he would have to. And sure enough after a while I heard his van outside the gate. I heard the ring of the great metal churns as he bounced them out of the van and on to the road and rolled them one at a time into the garden, and each time I heard the hinges on the gate complaining, I heard him drag at the pump and then curse when the dry pump wheezed and spat. So I went outside.
‘You have to prime it,’ I said.
‘Good God,’ Chas said. ‘I was looking for Fern.’
‘Oh, Fern stepped out for a while. You do know how to prime a pump?’ I asked.
I leaned over to drag the half-full pail of water, but I paused, looked back to see his eyes on me, on my legs, on my bent back. I could almost see a blue fire leaping around him, paralysing him. I lifted the pail to the pump. ‘You pump, I’ll prime.’
He was wary. He grabbed the handle of the pump and started to work it as I tipped the water in. Though I watched where I was pouring I knew he hadn’t taken his eyes from me. He couldn’t. Then the pump handle found some resistance, and that slowed him as he pumped. ‘So where did Fern get to?’ he said.
‘Oh, she’s around here, somewhere.’
With the pump flowing he dragged a churn into place and held it there. ‘Are you sisters, you and Fern?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
Then he stopped pumping and let the churn clang back on its bottom. ‘You know what, you nearly had me for a minute there, Fern.’
‘I did?’
‘Oh yes. Nearly had me.’
‘Then you’re easily had.’
He looked at me as if calculating what I might mean by that. Then he stepped towards me, too close, though I didn’t step back. He was near enough for me to smell him; his manly scent strong but not unpleasant. He stood close enough for me to feel his breath on my cheek. He reached up a hand and gently lifted my hair above my ear and held it there for a moment. Then I put my hand on his and firmly pushed it away.
He looked confused for a moment. Then he smiled, turned, and dragged another churn under the pump. I went back inside while he completed his chore. From the window I watched him roll his churns to his van; watched him hoist them in the back before driving away.
After he’d gone I put on my coat and I went out to the woods. I’d done my calculations. As I saw it – and going by the Old Moore’s Almanac – the moon, or ‘the mistress’ as Mammy called her, would be hatching anew at 4.32 a.m. three days after the Friday, and if I was correct my period should have finished three days before that, which was perfect. Auspicious, even. It was just that it was running things up close to the date of my eviction. After my Ask not counting the day of reckoning itself, I would have three days before being turfed out. That meant three days for an answer to present itself.
I trudged the path through the trees, taking the short-cut towards the A47 and cursing the stupid shoes of Judith’s I was still wearing. A blackbird called out in alarm and went winging in front of me, trying to draw me off. The woods were in the headlong rush of spring and the trees were full of birdsong. I could hear insects busy in the treebark. You could almost see the lush green fern inching higher by the second. I set my back against the great old oak and I asked Mammy, in hospital in the town, if my calculations were correct and if I was doing the right thing.
A breeze played in the creaking upper branches of the oak. Wood pigeons cooed in mating nearby. I could hear a cuckoo in the depth of the woods. Gradually the sound of the cuckoo and the pigeons went away. Soon all birdsong had stopped. The sound I imagined to be the labour of insects seemed to go, and it left me listening only to the wind in the trees and the pulse of the growing things in the earth. Finally the wind dropped.
The woods became silent and still. Only the pulse, the rhythm of the growing cycle of life, remained. And then quite naturally that stopped, too. I listened hard, and then I heard Mammy’s voice speak to me.
She said, ‘Why are you all dressed up like that?’
‘Why are you all dressed up like that?’ Mammy was sitting up in bed, eating black grapes. Bill Myers sat beside the bed. He was in uniform and his police cap was on the bedside cabinet.
‘Good lord, Fern, I wouldn’t have recognised you,’ he said. ‘Would have passed you by in the street.’
I was glad to see Mammy was coherent this time, but I had mixed feelings about seeing Bill there. He’d messed up my plans. I’d gone expecting Mammy to mistake me for one of the girls again. One of the girls needing help. I’d thought it might answer a few questions.
But I felt slightly dizzy. I didn’t remember the journey into Leicester that afternoon. I recalled leaning my back against an oak in the woods, but then I was there, in ward twelve, with no intervening journey. That is, I must have hitched a ride from someone but I couldn’t remember it. Neither did I feel tired, so I couldn’t have walked the distance.
‘Are you all right, Fern?’ Bill was saying. ‘You look a bit queer.’
‘I’m all right.’
‘Are you looking after yourself?’ Mammy said. ‘Are you eating properly?’
Bill surrendered the bedside chair to me. He picked up his cap. He said he’d got some business to sort out at the police station in Charles Street, but that he’d come back and give me a ride home.
‘You look thinner,’ Mammy said. ‘Here, have a grape.’
*
‘Why are you all dresse
d up like that?’ It was also what Judith said when I knocked on her door that evening. At first I thought she wasn’t going to let me inside. She took a long time to answer the door, and I couldn’t hear the sound of her distracting vacuuming.
As I looked over her shoulder I could see why. Chas was relaxing on her couch, watching TV. He had his boots off and was picking at his toenails with a penknife. ‘I can come back another time.’
‘No, come in.’
I went inside and Chas looked up. He winked at me and went back to picking at his toenails. Judith chased me through to the kitchen, where I told her about my plans, my calculations, the dates and the rest of it. ‘Good for you,’ she said.
I could see she was uncomfortable with my being there. I said, ‘We’ll talk about it another time. He was round at my place earlier.’
‘Was he?’ she said, too lightly.
‘He made a pass.’
She turned away and filled a kettle from her tap. ‘You going to have some tea?’
‘There’s something not right about him. I don’t think he’s a good man.’
‘Why? Because he made a pass at you?’
‘No, not that.’
‘Who wants good men?’ Judith said. ‘Good men are dull.’
I should have gone then. I wanted to go. But I stayed and drank tea with the two of them. I sat in the living room while the TV was running. I thought if I stayed long enough I might catch an episode of Outer Limits. Judith and I chatted, but somehow without real engagement. Chas spoke barely a word to us. I knew he was listening to everything I said. Apart from the moment when I’d come in the door, he never once made eye contact with me. But I knew he was watching me, too. Watching me. Constantly.
I got up suddenly and put my coat on without a word. I opened the door on to the street. ‘See you,’ I said, and I closed the door on their dumbfounded faces.
*
When I knocked on the door of William’s cottage, he answered in his socks. He didn’t have much of a greeting for me, just thrust out his bottom lip. ‘Thought you’d have been here before now,’ he said. ‘Mammy send you, did she?’
