The pictures fade, break up. No one’s ever saved me – not from death, or life. Saving’s almost loving – in fact, it costs still more. Even the Prodigal Son didn’t try to shoot his father.
My father. Still alive. Not dead in a basilica, slumped bleeding on white marble, but living, breathing, sneezing, just a foot or two away. I edge up on the couch so my newly-growing hair is almost spilling on his knee; long to fuse and merge with him, as I thought I had with Seton; roll up time like a length of heavy carpet, till my genes are simply his genes and I’m absorbed back into him.
I close my eyes a second, see that cemetery again, the one where I was buried way back in December – see my favourite gravestone there, with its intrepid Latin tag.
‘Quis separabit.’ I say the phrase out loud.
He doesn’t seem to hear me, asks me to repeat myself. I do so pretty desperately. He’s got to understand. He used to pick up Latin, pick up any language, any subtle reference, any casual phrase. It’s tragic he’s so changed.
‘Quis separabit.’ I make it louder, slower, will him to respond.
The rain fills in the silence, the three clocks speed and snigger; a lorry in the road below crashes gears, backfires. Still he doesn’t answer. There isn’t any question-mark, so perhaps he sees no need. But we’re separate and apart still, and those clocks are hurtling on towards the fifty-minute hour. I slew right round to face him, try to show him what I mean, hold out both my arms. He shifts a fraction – backwards – as if to remind me of the rules: no comfort and no contact, only words. But my words have failed to reach him, so I dare them one last time, still groping out towards him, trying to cancel any smallest space between us.
‘Quis … separabit.’
A siren splits the phrase in two, severs its twin parts. My answer, I suppose. I feel tears pricking at my eyes, scour them furiously. If I start crying now, I might never stop at all, may weep until I die. I sag back on the couch, crumple up my Kleenex. I’ve died too much already, died and been reborn. Lazarus was better as he was. No one should have raised him, given him new life. Those New Year bells were shamming when they promised a new start. You can’t throw out the old. It’s part of you. It is you. I shan’t be born again.
I curl up very small, hack off my new hair, lose my clumsy hands and feet, unscrew my hulking limbs. Then, when I’m small and smooth enough, I crawl back into John-Paul’s womb, secure the catch behind me. I was happy there before, quiet and very peaceful. Every flutter that I made shock-waved through his body; every time I kicked or cried, he felt it, and responded. My blood and breath and needs and growth were part of his existence.
I should never have come out, never cut the cord, never have been born that session in December when I imagined it was spring. I was wrong about the spring, wrong about a lot of things.
I burrow in still deeper, embed myself securely, the way I was before; start breathing John-Paul’s oxygen, sucking down his food. I’m already feeling safer. The curving walls have knit and sealed around me, and all the sounds are muffled now – sirens just the rumblings of his stomach, traffic the quiet pumping of his heart. My mother’s womb was scarlet steel, which bruised my pulpy limbs. John-Paul’s is plush, and dark.
I float a while in darkness, getting smaller all the time. I’ve lost my sex, my brain-cells, and my arms are groping paddles; my legs just half-formed buds. I inhale a snort of nicotine, taste cough-sweets; in my food-supply, which soothe my almost-throat – menthol balrried with honey, an after-kick of lemon. I’ve no longer got a cough or cold. My Mother keeps me well.
Suddenly, I’m jolted as she explodes me with a sneeze, but the cord swings me back and round again, keeps me firmly tethered. I strain my ears a moment. Her voice sounds faint and muted, but I think she’s trying to speak.
‘It’s time.’
‘No!’ I mutter, terrified, shutting my blind foetus eyes and clinging to the handholds of her womb. Of course it can’t be time. I’m hardly formed at all now, so how could I be born?
‘It’s time, Nial – over time now. We have to finish there.’
I decide to lose my ears, as well. Safer not to hear. I’m barely even human now, just a ball of cells, a swelling with a tail.
I feel my Mother standing up; move with her in the womb, lurching slightly, clinging on, as she walks towards the door. She opens it, stands waiting.
‘ “Who shall separate us,” ’ she murmurs almost casually, finally translating, when I thought she hadn’t heard, had given up all hope that she would ever understand.
I nod my feeble pinprick head, so tiny now, it’s nothing but a smile. But that smile is growing, growing.
Copyright
First published in 1990 by Grafton
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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Copyright © Wendy Perriam, 1990
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