by Naomi Booth
I push myself up onto all fours and I cry then, just for a moment, because the pain is so strong that I know the thing inside me must be struggling for life too, struggling against my skin, and that it will fight me to the death, though that would do it no good. I pant for a few seconds until the worst of it has passed, and then I pull myself up onto my feet. What do I do? What do I do? Do I let it just carry on? Do I let my skin seal me and the baby in? Do I lie down and let us both be sealed into a catacomb of my skin? I think of my mother again, alone in the night, fastened into her body, trapped and calling out. No. It’s not over. It’s not nearly over. I’m going to do something. I’m going to do something to stop it and I’m going to do it fast, before I have a chance to think it through and get too scared.
I search the kitchen shelves for spirits. We’ve not brought much with us, but there’s a bottle of ouzo and a small bottle of vodka. I take a deep glug of the ouzo. It’s been months since I’ve drunk alcohol and it feels like straight-up poison: I’m drinking petroleum straight from a can. I take another big glug. Then I search through the kitchen drawers. I grab three knives: one is our sharpest, a long, clean blade that Pete uses for slicing meat; then there’s a shorter one that I prefer for cutting – more control, and a thinner, slightly blunter blade; and then there’s the carving knife, with its long, bright, serrated edge. I take the vodka and I use it to douse the carving knife. Then I run the knife under hot water, just to be sure. It’s clean, it’s got to be clean now, and it’s almost too hot to touch but it’s gleaming as though it’s clean, so I’ve got to do it and I’ve got to do it now, before it’s too late.
I fill a bowl with hot water and I grab as many tea-towels as I can find, and by the time the next pain hits I’m back on the floor in the living-room in front of the mirror. I lean back for a moment and moan as the pain tears deep into my rectum. And then I take another glug of ouzo and try to steady my hand. I look at the woman in the mirror, the blood-drenched wraith who’s staring back at me with a carving knife in her shaking hand. I watch her position the knife between her legs. I watch her try once and I watch her courage fail: she pulls the knife away at the crucial moment. Then she takes the knife in both hands and tries again. She places it carefully, lining it up vertically with the strange white tissue between her legs. She waits for a moment. And then, as her body buckles with the next gasp of pain, she gulps her breath in and slowly, deliberately, pushes the serrated edge into her flesh. And I feel the pain a long way away. It’s a series of tiny, fizzy pin-pricks in calloused skin.
Nothing happens for a moment. I sit there, watching myself sitting perfectly still in the mirror. I turn the knife over in my hands and each scalloped point has a tiny blur of blood on it. I stare at myself again, and now I can see something happening. Little pearls of blood appear along the seam of skin, like little red stones glistening on a string.
I take the knife again. I line it up and press it slowly into myself again, careful not to go too deep. Again, there is barely any feeling, just the distant prickle of something too far away to be real pain. When I move the knife, my body contracts, juddering downwards. So I lean back and push, I push my legs as far apart as I can. I scream downwards. The blood is collecting in little drops and running away from the perforations I’ve made into the folds of my pelvis. I push and I push and I feel the skin stretch. I’m about to take the knife up again but the pushing won’t stop, I’m pushing so hard that my teeth are grinding together, and suddenly everything breaks apart. There’s a gush of liquid and blood between my legs, and I can see in the mirror the curve of a dark mound moving towards me, extending from the woman’s vulva like an enormous blood clot. I gulp the air, I lift my face upwards and I gulp and I gulp, and I try to stay calm. I take another swig of alcohol and I lean backwards again. Another deep pain, another push, and this time I can feel the skin tear with all the burning pain of a skin that can really feel. I use my hands to hold the head that’s emerging from me. I keep on pushing, and then I can feel shoulders, a smooth belly, the hardness of feet, quickly guttering out of me. And then more, more still coming, the cord, and more liquid, more blood, more and more hot blood, spattering out of me so fast. I gasp and gasp and then I gather the skin between my legs into my hands: it’s warm and wet, and in places my fingertips meet textures I’ve never felt before, strange frills of torn, stinging skin around the hard cord. I’m open, my skin is open again.
I lean back on my palms and let my head drop. I breathe deeply and my body begins to slacken. Everything that has been braced so hard is loosening off, collapsing. The skin of my pelvis feels especially strange: prickling with heat. My body feels more distant and more vivid than it ever has; the sensations running across my skin are both blurred and sharpened, the way that sometimes happens after heavy drinking. I can feel my pulse, in my perineum and all the way through the new tears inside me.
Exhaustion washes over me in a great wave. I know I need to look at it all, to take a proper survey. And it occurs to me that there should be crying at this moment, there should be some sort of sound to mark the passage, to show that we are through, that me and this thing I’ve birthed are through to the other side that is life. If that’s where we are. I right myself. I open my eyes and steal myself to look in the mirror: between my legs is a blessed mess, the skin frayed away, the blood still seeping. And then there’s the cord, twisting out from deep inside me, purple at its core and coated with a clear film. It extends away from me like a line of something impossible: a line of red, burning sand twisting into glass. I made this, I must have made this, throwing it out, a life-rope of plaited blood, and yet I can feel nothing when I touch it. The bloody fingertip that skirts it is clean and dull by comparison.
At the end of the cord, curled like a weird telephone, is the child. Thing, thing is a better word, a thing, a creature I do not know how to name. It does not move. It lies on the floor like a lozenge, its legs folded up against its body, its head bowed into its chest. It’s a pellet of life, deep purple, thickly glossed with yellow and white. It looks larval rather than human, like the egg of a bee, slicked in honey and wax and gore. It does not look like a child. And it does not move.
I feel another pain shudder through my abdomen, an echo of the earlier waves. Something else is moving inside me and, as I arch backwards, another creature slips out of me, whooshing wetly against the floor. It shivers there, bright and red. I can barely look at it, it’s so vivid. It’s enormous and still palpitating softly at its edges, like a giant, beached blood-jelly. This must be some part of cutis, some new horror to accompany my silent egg. I steal another look: it’s shimmering in the light, iridescent and deadly as a boxfish. I’ve never seen anything so red. And at its centre is a network of capillaries so dense that they’re black; the whole creature wobbles, a living disc of blood. It sits there pulsing, red and wet and terrible, and the cord still links it to the other thing. I turn back to the first creature and try to find a face now. Is there anything underneath the fatty white mask? There are eyes, I can just about see them, and the snub of a nose. But the eyes are shut. The baby’s eyes. My baby. She. She looks as though she has sealed herself fast against this world, as though she prefers the darkness of the womb and doesn’t now want to see. She. Poor little she. Her eyes must be sealed: the waxy skin has closed her face and that livid body of blood at the end of the cord has stolen all of the life from her.
I can feel tears on my face, but my body doesn’t move or make a sound. Between my legs is hot and the blood is still coming. I don’t know how long I sit like this: it is seconds, perhaps, or minutes. It feels like the world has stopped moving and we are all frozen: me, and her, and the disc of blood. It feels like the elongated moment of a fall, when you wait for the pain to arrive in the long, numb tumble.
* * *
There’s a noise. A loud noise. It’s in the room and it’s not coming from me or from the bloody tableau between my legs. There’s the noise again, a hard rap. I recognise the sound in a dim
way, like remembering a word from a forgotten language. The noise is a knock. There’s a knock at the door, again and again, and a voice saying, ‘Alright? Alice? Mate? You in there? I need to talk to you.’
A woman stands in the doorway. I’ve never seen anything so pristine. She stands there surrounded by light, her hair pulled back off her clean, dark face, her body perfectly intact: no wounds, no signs of violence, her skin perfectly in place. She’s so clean she seems ethereal, a dream of a body without pain. She’s speaking: words issue from her, low and quick. Perhaps she’s an angel. I know her, but I can’t place her.
‘Christ, Alice,’ she’s saying. She’s crouched at my side now. ‘Christ.’ She glances round at the mess in front of me. Pigs eat their dead young sometimes. I remember my mother telling me that. Maybe it’s to hide the shame of letting your child die.
‘There are footprints in blood all along the road,’ she says. ‘Christ Almighty, Alice, what happened?’
She glances round at everything: the knife, the bottle of vodka, the curled red mess on the floor. She stares at me, starting to mouth something, and then she stops, wordless. Mara. Mara and I shouted into Echo Point together, yesterday; was it only yesterday, a day ago, before the world was so bloody? She’s still staring at me, and then she does the strangest thing: she takes a towel from my side and gathers the creature up. She rocks the bundle hard against her chest. She rocks and rocks and pats the bundle, and then she peers into the clutch of fabric and rocks some more.
‘She’s cold,’ she says. ‘She’s cold, the poor thing,’ and she sings a song I’ve never heard and pats the bundle so ferociously that I realise she doesn’t understand that the baby is dead. And I feel sad for her, rocking a dead thing like that.
‘It’s cutis,’ I say, and I point towards the enormous clot on the floor. ‘It’s all gone wrong,’ I say.
Mara looks at me and then at the shimmering thing. ‘That?’ she says. ‘That’s just your afterbirth, darl.’
There’s another noise: a small peal of sound from inside the bundle. Mara hands me the towel, pushing the cloth down and putting the wet little creature against my skin. ‘Hold her,’ she says. ‘She’s early, s’all. She’s small. She needs to be warm.’
I look down at the face of the creature: it’s all creased up and her mouth is a bright, red, soundless O. Her eyes are closed and swollen, and the skin is purple and swollen there, like a blind baby bird’s. But her mouth is working, opening and closing, a tiny beak. ‘But she’s blind,’ I say. ‘She’s sealing over.’
‘No,’ Mara says. ‘You bloody goose. Give her a chance. She’s had a surprise and she’s only just waking up.’
I gather her hard against me then, and I rock her like Mara did, feeling the throb of her body against my chest. She’s hotter than me; I can feel my skin cooling under the layers of blood and sweat. I’m shivering. I’m cold and I’m shivering.
I turn to Mara. ‘I’m cold,’ I say. ‘And I’m still bleeding. Am I dying?’
‘No,’ she says. She holds my hand in her own clean, warm hand. ‘No,’ she says, again, a little too firmly.
* * *
We sit like that for a while and I start to feel sleepy as I rock the baby. ‘How long?’ Mara says, nudging me awake. ‘How long have you been here?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
‘How early is she?’
‘Three weeks,’ I say.
‘I can’t get a phone signal,’ she says. ‘We need to get you seen to. How long since she was born?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say again. ‘A few minutes maybe.’
‘And where the fuck is Pete?’
I shake my head. I try to explain, but not much comes out. ‘Gone,’ I try to say. I don’t know if the word is audible.
‘Alright, shhh,’ says Mara. ‘You need to stay nice and calm.’ She puts the back of her hand against my forehead. I can see her looking at everything around me again: at the knife, and the vodka bottle, and my blood-stained feet. She concentrates for a few moments, taking it all in.
‘We need to cut the cord,’ she says. She’s eyeing up the knife. She swallows hard. ‘Alright,’ she says, ‘I’ve seen this done plenty of times. Been a birth partner twice before, so I guess this makes three. Can’t be that hard, right?’ She takes the cord between her fingers and, the way her fingers flinch, it must feel slippery. She works her way along the cord, until she’s close to the baby. ‘I think you need to put her down,’ she says. I place the bundle on the ground, and again there’s the tiny, scratchy sound, like a kitten coughing. The baby must be sick. Surely she should scream loudly, surely she would demand food and warmth more fiercely, if she were well?
Mara pinches the cord between her thumb and forefinger, just a few inches up from the baby’s body. The towel has fallen away from her and the baby’s tiny tummy is heaving up and down. All her little limbs are scrunched up. She looks primeval, like the re-animated fossil of an ancient bird. ‘Love, you’re going to have to help,’ Mara says. ‘This is a three-hander.’ She braces the cord with her other hand, a few inches higher up. I reach for the knife, though every movement hurts, and when I hold it, the blade is shaking. ‘Steady, girl,’ Mara says, ‘just go between my fingers. It won’t take much pressure, just a bit of movement.’ I line the knife up and I start to saw. The rope splices quickly and there are only a few drops of blood, black and thick, as it unravels. Mara is bundling the baby back into my arms.
‘We need a band,’ she says. ‘You got any elastic bands round here?’
I shake my head. She looks around the place. ‘Bloody hell,’ she says and she takes a swig on the vodka bottle. ‘Do I have to think of everything? Hair ties?’ she says.
‘Upstairs,’ I say, ‘bathroom cabinet.’ She jumps up. She runs up the stairs and is back in a jiff with a little elastic tie. Everything about her – her calmness, her cleanness, her energy – seems impossible. But these things happen every day, they’re happening again right now, only somewhere else. People are born, people are dying: it’s all horribly possible. Mara just takes this in her stride. She unfolds the towel and finds the stump of cord, a little three-inch sprig extending from the baby’s tummy. ‘I don’t know if this will work,’ she says, ‘but let’s give it a try until we can get you seen to.’ She ties the band around the end of the cord, looping it several times until it’s tight. Then she folds the towel back around the baby: ever so careful, ever so tender.
‘Listen,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to scare you, but I came here to tell you and Pete something. They’re evacuating us. Saying we have no choice now, that we have to leave. The wardens from the camp will be round in a couple of hours to try to evict us. We were going to stay firm, stage a sit-in with some blokes from our street. Anyway, the thing is, the thing I wanted to tell you is, they’ve evacuated the medical teams. Apparently they went a couple of days back. There’s no one left in town to help you.’
She looks at me now, uncertainly. I don’t know what to say. I can feel the baby squirming against my skin. I can feel her mouth opening and closing against my collar bone. I look down at her and see one of her eyes trembling. Her eyelid flinches a couple of times, and then, very slowly, as though she’s being roused from the longest sleep, it begins to open –
‘Listen,’ she says. ‘You need to come with us. I know what we’ll do. And Paulie’s going to agree, when I talk it through with him, when I explain the situation. We’ll go to the camp. We’ll take you there. There’ll be doctors there, there’s gotta be.’
– there are tiny lashes, which I hadn’t seen before, and, as the eye slowly, drunkenly opens, there’s an oily, dark iris, and a tiny pupil dilating wildly. She sees me. The baby sees me. The eye is spinning and swimming, and she looks right at me. And then, very slowly, her eye closes again.
‘So I’m going to go and tell Paulie, and then we’ll come back for you.’
‘The camp?’ I ask.
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘It’s the only way we
can get you treatment, I reckon.’
‘If you take me there, they’ll take your house,’ I say. ‘You might not be able to get it back.’
‘Maybe,’ she says.
‘Why would you do that?’ I say.
‘I’m not going to leave you here on your own, am I, mate?’ Mara says. ‘And who knows: maybe they’re right. Maybe the camps are safer.’
I don’t reply. I watch the baby’s face, waiting to see if her eye will flinch open again.
‘Oh shit,’ she says. ‘You need to feed her. Try, try now. Her mouth’s gaping.’
I stare at Mara. I hadn’t even thought about feeding her. And thinking about it now – I can’t. I can’t just feed her. I don’t know how to explain it to Mara, that I can’t even try. Trying would feel too hopeful.
Mara looks at me for a long time and I shake my head. She swallows hard again, her soft throat jerking up and down.
‘I could…’ she says, and then looks down at the ground. ‘I mean, she needs to feed and if you haven’t got any formula... I guess you’re probably worried about– ’
I lift the child up to her. I push the baby into her arms. She looks at me and nods. And then she shrugs her top off her left shoulder, as if it’s so easy, as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. She pushes the baby’s face up to her breast, and the baby’s little beak works and works, not finding anything at first, or not latching right, but then, after a few moments, she’s latched on, she’s sucking the milk in tiny little gasps, and its running down her chin and down Mara’s breast, and the baby’s taking it. ‘Right fierce latch, this little terrier’s got,’ Mara says. ‘What a bite!’
I make a sound. It could be a laugh; it could be a death rattle. Mara links her fingers with mine while she feeds the baby, and then she says that everything is going to be ok.
‘She won’t need much,’ Mara says. ‘Her tummy’s the size of a marble right now, that’s what they told me when Iluka was born. But she’ll need it often.’ She hands the baby back to me.