Five Stories High

by Jonathan Oliver

  Though she had never felt the child kick, she sometimes thought it bit her. With its little baby teeth, gnawing away at her uterine walls. It didn’t hurt her very much, not really, because the teeth weren’t very sharp yet.

  And precisely nine months after conception, the man said to his wife, “Is the baby cooked yet? Is it time to take the bun from out the oven?” And the woman said yes, she thought the baby was cooked. And so he put her into the car and drove her straight to the hospital.

  The hospital staff were very good, and they diagnosed what the situation was almost immediately. “She’s pregnant, right?” asked the doctor, and he looked so pleased when his diagnosis was confirmed. The woman was taken to a special ward on the fourth floor full of lots of other pregnant women, all lying on their backs and straining hard to pop their babies free. The man was advised to wait in the downstairs cafeteria. “It shouldn’t take long,” the doctor said.

  And nor did it. The man had barely finished his cheese and onion sandwich when the doctor came to tell him he was now a father. But, the doctor went on ruefully, there had been complications.

  The complications were these. The birth had been a success, generally, as far as it went. The baby had been passed easily, mother and child were alive, and there had been a minimum of all that blood and gunk the doctor personally found so disconcerting. The infant seemed healthy, bright eyed and ruddy cheeked, the skin had the right lustrous glow. But there was only a head. Only the head had come out. The doctor had thought that maybe the rest of the body was still wedged somewhere up in the womb, the head had got broken off somehow. But they had taken a good long hard look with a flashlight, and the womb was empty. The head was all there had ever been.

  The doctor told the man to steel himself before entering the ward – it was quite a rum old thing to see a loose baby head flopping about with no torso to support it, it had quite turned the doctor’s stomach. The father saw his new son for the first time. For it was a son, clearly – although the body didn’t reach down far enough to show a penis, which was the usual identifier, you could see the baby was male from the eyes – there was a keen confidence to them, a clever wit. The son lay on his wife’s chest, all pink and perfect. The wife looked at her husband, and smiled, and put her finger to her lips, ssh, their darling little boy wanted to sleep. And sure enough the baby turned his gaze on his father inwards, closed his keen clever eyes. One of the wife’s hands cradled the baby’s head, the other reached out for her husband, and the husband took it. They were a family at last, and this is what he had so long wanted – but he couldn’t help feel just a little disappointed. It wasn’t even an especially large head. You’d have thought it could be larger, to compensate for all the body parts that were missing. But no extra portions, it was just an average sized head, the head was average, and no bigger than an engorged grapefruit.

  The midwives gave baby a wash so he was nice and clean, and they brushed neat his little wisps of hair, and then they put the head in a carrier bag so the new parents could take him home.

  The man was very quiet all the way back in the car, he really didn’t want to show how cross he was. But as he pulled into the driveway he couldn’t hold back any longer. He demanded to know exactly what his wife had done wrong to produce such a cripple. The woman burst into tears. She didn’t know – throughout the pregnancy she hadn’t drunk, or smoked, or taken any drugs, and she had practised all the callisthenic exercises recommended on the self-help DVD. She must have done something pretty terrible to ruin everything, but she couldn’t even guess what.

  They sat in the car for a while, in silence, and the dark of the night looked thick and sticky like tar.

  And the husband then told her he forgave her, and hugged her, and said that he loved her. But it’s true, though he loved her very much, from that moment on he began to love her that little bit less.

  He didn’t tell anyone at work he had a son, he kept the cigars for himself.

  And the truth was, the baby wasn’t much trouble, and some days the father could even pretend it didn’t exist, forget how short-changed he’d been. The wife kept the son on the mantelpiece by day, the baby liked it up there, maybe it liked the view, and when her husband came home if he didn’t want to see it they could put a cloth over it. And at night it was shut in the bottom drawer of their bedside cupboard, with just a crack left open for air, and it slept there quite peacefully.

  Now, you mustn’t go thinking the head was round like a ball. It couldn’t be rolled on the ground! What a sight that would have been! No, there was some semblance of a neck, a stump jutting out below the chin – not much, but enough to break up the spherical shape, and so imperfectly proportioned that the head was unbalanced and always listed a little to the side. The base of the stump was coarse, there were nodules growing out, shards of bone that led nowhere, and the flesh was red raw and spongey. The wife had to take care the neck was bathed regularly – it could so easily get infected, and sores and pustules would break across the surface, and on more than one occasion, in the early days of motherhood when she hadn’t been so diligent, she even caught tiny white maggots writhing around in the meat. The baby was a happy baby, and rarely showed anger or irritation, but the maggots were too much for him – he tilted the head back as far as it could go, as if trying to get away from his own neck, and the mouth opened wide, and he let out a silent scream.

  Always silent – always still. He never made a sound at all. The wife worried about it, babies were supposed to cry, weren’t they? She said to her husband, “Do you think something might be wrong with him?”, and he gave a nasty little laugh, and said, “D’you think?” The husband said he liked the fact his son was silent, it was the only thing he had going for him – but one night, after he’d been drinking, he came home and picked up the head from the mantelpiece and held it up close to his face and screamed at it – make some noise, make any noise, you freak! Stop staring at me! Stop judging me! And he shook the head, he shook it so hard, as if he were trying to dislodge some grunt or squeak or croak that had got stuck inside somewhere.

  For every shudder of revulsion from her husband, for each of his glares of contempt, the wife tried to make up the shortfall. She loved what she had forced from her womb, far more than she could ever have thought possible. Privately she was relieved there was only a head, how much more love would she feel if he had a complete body, surely her heart would burst! He was a good boy. She could tuck him under her breast and let him feed there for hours. Though his teeth were keen like razors, he never hurt her more than necessary. And whenever he woke in the morning his baby face seemed to beam with delight, and she was certain that had he legs he would race towards her, and had he arms he would throw them round her in a big hug. It quite made her teary at times, the sentiment of it all.

  And she’d give him names! For his ears only, any name she liked the sound of. Her husband hadn’t chosen his son a name yet, and she’d learned to stop asking; the subject always irritated him. But she could name her son secretly, and as often as it took her fancy. Today Lionel. Tomorrow Steve, maybe, or maybe Andy. Next week, who knows, something exotic perhaps, names from the story books, Ali Baba or Sinbad! There was a thrill to it.

  She wasn’t necessarily averse to the idea of having a second child. But her husband would usually insist they tried to make one when he was drunk, or when he was angry, or when he was in tears with desperation. She knew better than to refuse him. He would climb on top of her and pin her down and hump away, and sometimes he took her so abruptly she hadn’t even got time to shut the baby in the cupboard drawer, sometimes her son had no choice but to stare at them during the whole clumsy thing. And the man might just stop, and roll off, and say, “What’s the point? What if all that comes out is just as damaged as the last one? What will we do then?”

  The woman was one day shocked to realise that nearly a whole year had passed since she had become a mother. And although the year had had undoubted difficulties, it nevertheless h
ad been the best year of her life. She wondered how best to celebrate her son’s first birthday. She couldn’t buy him a present – her husband might see, and besides, his lack of limbs made most toys impractical in the first place. But maybe she could bake him a cake. Everyone, she thought, should have the joy of a birthday cake. It was true that he wasn’t eating solids yet, but the cake would be pretty and colourful and surely he would just love to see that, and he would enjoy watching her as she ate the cake for him. Every last crumb – and so long as she ate it all quickly, she could dispose of the evidence before his father got home.

  So that’s what she did. She went out and bought all the ingredients: marzipan and icing and mixed nuts and chopped fruit – and she worked on the cake all through the days, and at nights she made sure it was hidden from sight underneath the loose floorboards.

  The big day arrived. The woman could hardly contain her excitement! She had to disguise it whilst she served her husband his breakfast, she was so frightened he’d see how unusually giddy she’d become, but it was all right, he didn’t look at her, and he hadn’t looked at her for a long time. And as soon as he’d driven off to work – as soon as the house was full of nothing more than her and her darling – she went and fetched the cake, put it on the poshest plate she had, stuck a single candle through its skin, and brought it in to show her baby boy. “Happy birthday, Bertie!” she said – she’d decided to call him Bertie today, but maybe she’d call him Billy later, and Benny after that; it was his birthday and he could have as many names as he wanted – “Bertie, this cake is all for you!” And that’s when the boy began to scream.

  She dropped the cake, of course – it smushed against the floor, but what of that? Her son had never made a sound before – she had prayed that one day he might – and now there was this whining shriek, so high-pitched it didn’t sound human, and so insistent, the baby never even broke for breath, how could he do that, how could that be? And she thought it was a reaction to the cake, could babies be cakephobic? – but it wasn’t that, he hadn’t even seen the cake, not with his eyes rolled back into his skull – and she then thought it was another infection, his neck stump must be riddled with maggots again. But no. No. Because this wasn’t pain. It was obvious now. The first sound her child had ever made, this terrifying sound, it was a cry of jubilation.

  Now her only thought – I have to fix this. The woman tilted her head to one side, and considered. Because she didn’t think her husband would be very pleased the child had started making noises, and such disagreeable noises too. Of late he’d joked about throwing the defective little body in the bin – she’d always laughed – but he had been making the joke rather a lot. She had to fix this, but she didn’t know how. He had been such an easy child, she’d never learned how to calm him down – other mothers must know such things by instinct, but she didn’t, and she suddenly felt so stupid and small. She had to get her son to the hospital. They would help. They must help. She phoned for a taxi, and then paced the room waiting for it to arrive. The shriek never faltered, and it never softened either, and it was actually painful to hear – it was a steel bolt driven into her skull. But she didn’t mind the pain, she welcomed it. Wasn’t it good to suffer for your child, wasn’t that what love was all about?

  At last the taxi arrived. She picked up her son and stepped over the cake oozing deep into the carpet. She supposed she should have cleaned the cake up, but oddly that didn’t seem to matter any more, and she understood with only vague curiosity that she was never going to come home again.

  The taxi driver refused to drive with a screaming head in his cab, until the woman offered to pay him double and stuffed a handkerchief into its mouth.

  It was only as they entered the hospital that the son at last fell still. And there was a certain relief to that, but also some frustration too – how would the doctors believe her now? And she looked at the reception desk, and the whole gaggle of people queuing up to be cured, people with cancer and lumbago and the common cold, and she realised that her baby wasn’t here to see a doctor.

  She got into the service elevator. “Where to?” she asked her son, and the baby didn’t hesitate, he head butted the button for the fourth floor.

  She recognised the maternity ward straightaway. The midwives didn’t even stop to look at her – she wasn’t pregnant, she already had a child, it was as if she were invisible to them. She walked the length of the ward, looking from left to right at every bed, and she felt her son’s head in her arms twist from left to right too, analysing all the mothers to be.

  They reached the bed in the far corner, and there was a woman there propped up high on the pillows, and soaked with sweat – and on her chest, quivering, lay a freshly born slab of torso.

  For a moment our woman thought this new mother was dead. She was so pale. She was still. And then her eyelids fluttered open, and she gazed at her visitors, and she licked her lips, and nodded.

  The torso wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t a hunk of well cut beef. Though it had no limbs, there was part of the left shoulder, sticking out awkwardly from the side, and a single bone seemed raised in welcome salute. There were already scabs, the woman recognised it needed a thorough bathe before the maggots got in. And, right at the top, perched high and proud – a little stump of neck.

  The head was now struggling in its mother’s arms, straining to be free – and the woman felt a sudden pang, her son had never tried to escape her before, and wasn’t that sad, this sign that her little boy was growing up?

  She set one neck stump upon the other, and they fit perfectly, the head and the torso were like two giant jigsaw pieces, all the nodules and bones matching up and snapping tight into place. And now here was her son, and hadn’t he grown! – he had a body now, at least a part of a body, he had a chest, and a belly button, and a funny little cock that already seemed to wake and stiffen.

  The mother of the torso said quietly, “They’re fetching my husband from the cafeteria. This isn’t the son he wanted. He’s going to kill me.”

  “No,” said the woman. “He won’t.” And she held out her arm, and the woman grabbed hold of it, and she had a stronger grip than perhaps either of them had expected.

  They walked out of the ward, and into the elevator, and out of the hospital, the two women carrying their legless child between them, and the new mother’s night dress was spattered with bloodstains, and the old mother kept expecting they would be stopped. But they weren’t. Out of the hospital, and on to the street, and the new mother didn’t ask where they were going, and that was good, because the old mother didn’t know.

  They were tutted at for taking up too much space on the pavement, but no one challenged them, or thought to stop them – and no one tried to help.

  They passed out of the town centre with its hospital and its shops, and soon they were in the suburbs, and polite semi-detached houses lined the streets and seemed to stretch on forever.

  It grew dark. It began to rain.

  The new mother said, “I’m so tired.” Her feet were beginning to drag. And she wasn’t wearing any shoes, and she was bleeding all over, the night dress was now dripping red, and the old mother felt a surge of guilty relief that she’d only had to give birth to something as small and compact as a head.

  She thought – I could just leave her here. I can take our son, my son, and leave her, I don’t owe her anything. If I run, she’ll never catch us. And she flushed with shame, and she said to her new sister, “I will never betray you. I will always be here for you.”

  Soon even the first mother could barely go on. She just wanted to stop. She needed to stop. But there was no place to rest. And it was only then that she thought to look about, and saw that the street was truly empty – the houses were long gone, there was nothing lining the road, not fields, not countryside. There was the street and nothing else, narrowing now, but still snaking onwards into the pitch black void. The pitch black felt thick and sticky, and it smelled like warm tar.

  She migh
t have stopped anyway. Given up. Sat down upon the ground, and died. But she looked at her son’s face. And at that same moment the other mother looked at the son’s face too. The son wasn’t frightened, and he wasn’t lost. Those keen clever eyes were burning. He knew where they were going.

  They didn’t see the house until they were practically on top of it. A single building emerging from the dark. As if it had slipped out from behind a curtain to surprise them. It didn’t look welcoming. The windows were blackened. The garden was overgrown. The roof was too sharp somehow, how can a roof be too sharp? But the front door was open. The door was open wide.

  Even now the first mother hesitated. She tilted her head, and considered. Whenever she had a big thought to think, she always tilted her head. Her husband had laughed at her for it, said it looked as if she were trying to turn her brain on. He hadn’t always meant it unkindly, and for a moment she felt a pang of love for him, and nostalgia, and regret, and she thought that even now it wasn’t too late, she could turn back home, perfectly childless, and they could start all over again.

  A pang of love – and then the dark tar of the night seemed to roll over her, and the love was extinguished, and she never felt it again.

  The rain was falling so hard, and the mothers were so tired, and their baby son squirmed in their arms with impatience. What are you waiting for?, the baby seemed to say. What are you waiting for?, the house seemed to echo. Come in. Come into the dry.

  So they did.

  IS THIS THE haunted house I promised you?

  All houses get haunted, in their own good time. You’ll have to be patient.

  No, I have no questions for you. No, there is no written exam. That was a joke. Besides, I wouldn’t trust you with a pencil. I wouldn’t trust you with anything sharp.