The Story

by Victoria Hislop

  ‘There’s pitahaya for you too – firm as a pear and slightly perfumed, like rose petals – it’s refreshing! Here, you can eat it like a dessert fruit, you peel it like this, lengthways, the rind comes off smoothly, it’s related to the prickly pear but this one hasn’t got any prickles. Or you can slice it into salads – add a dash of colour to your salad bowl, keep the winter at bay with Tropical Fruit from the parts of the world where frost can’t reach and the sun always shines, scoop out the pink flesh and taste the sunshine!’

  we didn’t use anything it seemed mean to ask him to as if i thought he was diseased or something so now i don’t know i could be pregnant – are you happy to be pregnant? the ads ask – i could be i suppose – i can feel something inside me it’s like a letter y it’s either a sperm wriggling or it’s one of those cells they go on about on the telly reproducing itself all wrong and giving me aids

  (now that was silly very silly you can’t have the pleasure that’s due to you, my girl, if you’re careless, that’s the third rule. But if you bend your ear I’ll let you in on the way to have fun – never do that again, this time you’ll be all right, I can tell, I can see and hear things other people can’t and)

  ‘There’s nothing like fresh fruit to build up your immune system, clean out your insides, keep you healthy and lean and full of energy…

  (as I say, you’re in luck this time but don’t try anything like that again)

  ‘…in these days of pollution and other problems – I mean we’ve all wised up to the devastation of the rain forests and their connection to… well, I shan’t talk about meat-eating because we still have a butcher’s counter here – all free range, of course – but anyway what with acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer and the thinning of the oxygen supply and the little creepy-crawly things out of the tap in your water – you need Fruit! Fresh fruit, goes straight to the immune system and kick-starts it into a new life…’

  Eventually, the serpent was successful: his fresh, young, sad target dropped her mother’s shopping list somewhere on the floor of the supermarket and forgot everything that was on it and came home instead with

  1 mango

  1 pitahaya

  2 pawpaws

  4 guavas

  2 tamarillos

  6 passion fruit

  and 13p change

  Her mother said, ‘Where’s the shopping I asked you to get?’ And so her daughter told her about Lola, about the Tropical Fruit stand and Tropical Fruit week. She kept quiet, however, about some of the other matters that had passed between her and the sales assistant.

  Her mother scolded, her mother railed: ‘In my day, an apple a day kept the doctor away – now you have to have –’ she picked up the guavas and the soft but firm mango and the tubular and prickle-free pitahaya and smooth and slippery pawpaw – ‘What do you do with this stuff anyway?’

  ‘I’ve brought the leaflet – look!’

  ‘Apples were good enough for us, and they should be good enough for you. And when I write down a pound of apples on the shopping list I mean a pound of apples, I don’t mean any of this fancy rubbish. Your generation doesn’t understand the meaning of no – you just believe in self, self, self, you want mote, more, more. You think only of your own pleasure. You’ll be the ruin of me. I don’t know, I try to bring you up right…’

  ‘Plump and rounded or long and thin, it has a distinctive firmness of texture and delicacy of aroma…’ her daughter began, reading from the recipe leaflet provided, and she thought she heard her mother stifle a snort as she kept on with the Tropical Fruit week promotion package.

  if he doesn’t come back that lady was right i’ll just find another one what she said made sense he thought he was something but was he anything to write home about anyhow i feel better about it already I’ll go back to school and i’ll just make out it meant nothing to me nothing and i don’t care about him she was wicked she was strong i liked her

  Lola was still at the stand, back in the shop, doing her patter, to other customers passing by:

  ‘Guava, passion fruit, tamarillo! Let me just tell you exactly how you can put each one to good use –’

  And meanwhile she was thinking,

  (my little girly, you’re young, you’re inexperienced, but you’ll soon know so much. You’ll look back on this and you’ll laugh or you won’t even remember that you ever felt so pale and wan. In fact you might even look back and wish that you could feel something as sweet and real and true as this first-time pain you were feeling till I taught you the three principles of pleasure and set you on my famous primrose path)

  The mother took the leaflet out of her daughter’s hand and scanned it impatiently; and read:

  For a happy and healthy life!

  Take fresh fruit in season.

  Squeeze.

  Inside Information

  Nicola Barker

  Nicola Barker (b. 1966) is a British novelist and short story writer. Her novel, Wide Open, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2000, and another, Darkmans, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007.

  Martha’s social worker was under the impression that by getting herself pregnant, Martha was looking for an out from a life of crime.

  She couldn’t have been more wrong.

  ‘First thing I ever nicked,’ Martha bragged, when her social worker was initially assigned to her, ‘very first thing I ever stole was a packet of Lil-lets. I told the store detective I took them as a kind of protest. You pay 17½ per cent VAT on every single box. Men don’t pay it on razors, you know, which is absolutely bloody typical.’

  ‘But you stole other things, too, on that occasion, Martha.’

  ‘Fags and a bottle of Scotch. So what?’ she grinned. ‘Pay VAT on those too, don’t you?’

  Martha’s embryo was unhappy about its assignment to Martha. Early on, just after conception, it appealed to the higher body responsible for its selection and placement. This caused something of a scandal in the After-Life. The World-Soul was consulted – a democratic body of pinpricks of light, an enormous institution – which came, unusually enough, to a rapid decision.

  ‘Tell the embryo,’ they said, ‘hard cheese.’

  The embryo’s social worker relayed this information through a system of vibrations – a language which embryos alone in the Living World can produce and receive. Martha felt these conversations only as tiny spasms and contractions.

  Being pregnant was good, Martha decided, because store detectives were much more sympathetic when she got caught. Increasingly, they let her off with a caution after she blamed her bad behaviour on dodgy hormones.

  The embryo’s social worker reasoned with the embryo that all memories of the After-Life and feelings of uncertainty about placement were customarily eradicated during the trauma of birth. This was a useful expedient. ‘Naturally,’ he added, ‘the nine-month wait is always difficult, especially if you’ve drawn the short straw in allocation terms, but at least by the time you’ve battled your way through the cervix, you won’t remember a thing.’

  The embryo replied, snappily, that it had never believed in the maxim that Ignorance is Bliss. But the social worker (a corgi in its previous incarnation) restated that the World-Soul’s decision was final.

  As a consequence, the embryo decided to take things into its own hands. It would communicate with Martha while it still had the chance and offer her, if not an incentive, at the very least a moral imperative.

  Martha grew larger during a short stint in Wormwood Scrubs. She was seven months gone on her day of release. The embryo was now a well-formed foetus, and, if its penis was any indication, it was a boy. He calculated that he had, all things being well, eight weeks to change the course of Martha’s life.

  You see, the foetus was special. He had an advantage over other, similarly situated, disadvantaged foetuses. This foetus had Inside Information.

  In the After-Life, after his sixth or seventh incarnation, the foetus had worked for a short spate as a trouble
shooter for a large pharmaceutical company. During the course of his work and research, he had stumbled across something so enormous, something so terrible about the World-Soul, that he’d been compelled to keep this information to himself, for fear of retribution.

  The rapidity of his assignment as Martha’s future baby was, in part, he was convinced, an indication that the World-Soul was aware of his discoveries. His soul had been snatched and implanted in Martha’s belly before he’d even had a chance to discuss the matter rationally. In the womb, however, the foetus had plenty of time to analyse his predicament. It was a cover-up! He was being gagged, brainwashed and railroaded into another life sentence on earth.

  In prison, Martha had been put on a sensible diet and was unable to partake of the fags and the sherry and the Jaffa cakes which were her normal dietary staples. The foetus took this opportunity to consume as many vital calories and nutrients as possible. He grew at a considerable rate, exercised his knees, his feet, his elbows, ballooned out Martha’s belly with nudges and pokes.

  In his seventh month, on their return home, the foetus put his plan into action. He angled himself in Martha’s womb, at just the right angle, and with his foot, gave the area behind Martha’s belly button a hefty kick. On the outside, Martha’s belly was already a considerable size. Her stomach was about as round as it could be, and her navel, which usually stuck inwards, had popped outwards, like a nipple.

  By kicking the inside of her navel at just the correct angle, the foetus – using his Inside Information – had successfully popped open the lid of Martha’s belly button like it was an old-fashioned pill-box.

  Martha noticed that her belly button was ajar while she was taking a shower. She opened its lid and peered inside. She couldn’t have been more surprised. Under her belly button was a small, neat zipper, constructed out of delicate bones. She turned off the shower, grabbed hold of the zipper and pulled it. It unzipped vertically, from the middle of her belly to the top. Inside she saw her foetus, floating in brine. ‘Hello,’ the foetus said. ‘Could I have a quick word with you, please?’

  ‘This is incredible!’ Martha exclaimed, closing the zipper and opening it again. The foetus put out a restraining hand. ‘If you’d just hang on a minute I could tell you how this was possible…’

  ‘It’s so weird!’ Martha said, closing the zipper and getting dressed.

  Martha went to Tesco’s. She picked up the first three items that came to hand, unzipped her stomach and popped them inside. On her way out, she set off the alarms – the bar-codes activated them, even from deep inside her – but when she was searched and scrutinized and interrogated, no evidence could be found of her hidden booty. Martha told the security staff that she’d consider legal action if they continued to harass her in this way.

  When she got home, Martha unpacked her womb. The foetus, squashed into a corner, squeezed up against a tin of Spam and a packet of sponge fingers, was intensely irritated by what he took to be Martha’s unreasonable behaviour.

  ‘You’re not the only one who has a zip, you know,’ he said. ‘All pregnant women have them; it’s only a question of finding out how to use them, from the outside, gaining the knowledge. But the World-Soul has kept this information hidden since the days of Genesis, when it took Adam’s rib and reworked it into a zip with a pen-knife.’

  ‘Shut it,’ Martha said. ‘I don’t want to hear another peep from you until you’re born.’

  ‘But I’m trusting you,’ the foetus yelled, ‘with this information. It’s my salvation!’

  She zipped up.

  Martha went shopping again. She shopped sloppily at first, indiscriminately, in newsagents, clothes shops, hardware stores, chemists. She picked up what she could and concealed it in her belly.

  The foetus grew disillusioned. He re-opened negotiations with his social worker. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know something about the World-Soul which I’m willing to divulge to my earth-parent Martha if you don’t abort me straight away.’

  ‘You’re too big now,’ the social worker said, fingering his letter of acceptance to the Rotary Club which preambled World-Soul membership. ‘And anyway, it strikes me that Martha isn’t much interested in what you have to say.’

  ‘Do you honestly believe,’ the foetus asked, ‘that any woman on earth in her right mind would consider a natural birth if she knew that she could simply unzip?’

  The social worker replied coldly: ‘Women are not kangaroos, you cheeky little foetus. If the World-Soul has chosen to keep the zipper quiet then it will have had the best of reasons for doing so.’

  ‘But if babies were unzipped and taken out when they’re ready,’ the foetus continued, ‘then there would be no trauma, no memory loss. Fear of death would be a thing of the past. We could eradicate the misconception of a Vengeful God.’

  ‘And all the world would go to hell,’ the social worker said.

  ‘How can you say that?’

  The foetus waited for a reply, but none came.

  Martha eventually sorted out her priorities. She shopped in Harrods and Selfridges and Liberty’s. She became adept at slotting things of all conceivable shapes and sizes into her belly. Unfortunately, the foetus himself was growing quite large. After being unable to fit in a spice rack, Martha unzipped and addressed him directly. ‘Is there any possibility,’ she asked, ‘that I might be able to take you out prematurely so that there’d be more room in there?’

  The foetus stared back smugly. ‘I’ll come out,’ he said firmly, ‘when I’m good and ready.’

  Before she could zip up, he added, ‘And when I do come out, I’m going to give you the longest and most painful labour in Real-Life history. I’m going to come out sideways, doing the can-can.’

  Martha’s hand paused, momentarily, above the zipper. ‘Promise to come out very quickly,’ she said, ‘and I’ll nick you some baby clothes.’

  The foetus snorted in a derisory fashion. ‘Revolutionaries,’ he said, ‘don’t wear baby clothes. Steal me a gun, though, and I’ll fire it through your spleen.’

  Martha zipped up quickly, shocked at this vindictive little bundle of vituperation she was unfortunate enough to be carrying. She smoked an entire packet of Marlboro in one sitting, and smirked, when she unzipped, just slightly, at the coughing which emerged.

  The foetus decided that he had no option but to rely on his own natural wit and guile to foil both his mother and the forces of the After-Life. He began to secrete various items that Martha stole in private little nooks and crannies about her anatomy.

  On the last night of his thirty-sixth week, he put his plan into action. In his arsenal: an indelible pen, a potato, a large piece of cotton from the hem of a dress, a thin piece of wire from the supports of a bra, all craftily reassembled. In the dead of night, while Martha was snoring, he gradually worked the zip open from the inside, and did what he had to do.

  The following morning, blissfully unaware of the previous night’s activities, Martha went out shopping to Marks and Spencer’s. She picked up some Belgian chocolates and a bottle of port, took hold of her zipper and tried to open her belly. It wouldn’t open. The zipper seemed smaller and more difficult to hold.

  ‘That bastard,’ she muttered, ‘must be jamming it up from the inside.’ She put down her booty and headed for the exit. On her way out of the shop, she set off the alarms.

  ‘For Chrissakes!’ she told the detective, ‘I’ve got nothing on me!’ And for once, she meant it.

  Back home, Martha attacked her belly with a pair of nail scissors. But the zip wasn’t merely jammed, it was meshing and merging and disappearing, fading like the tail end of a bruise. She was frazzled. She looked around for her cigarettes. She found her packet and opened it. The last couple had gone, and instead, inside, was a note.

  Martha, [the note said] I have made good my escape, fully intact. I sewed a pillow into your belly. On the wall of your womb I’ve etched and inked an indelible bar-code. Thanks for the fags.

  Love, Baby.
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  ‘But you can’t do that!’ Martha yelled. ‘You don’t have the technology!’ She thought she heard a chuckle, behind her. She span around. On the floor, under the table, she saw a small lump of afterbirth, tied up into a neat parcel by an umbilical cord. She could smell a whiff of cigarette smoke. She thought she heard laughter, outside the door, down the hall. She listened intently, but heard nothing more.

  Desideratus

  Penelope Fitzgerald

  Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000) was a Man Booker Prize-winning British novelist, poet, essayist and biographer. In 2008, The Times included her in a list of the ‘50 Greatest British writers since 1945’ and, in 2012, the Observer named her final novel, The Blue Flower, as one of ‘The 10 best historical novels’. A collection of Fitzgerald’s short stories, The Means of Escape, and a volume of her non-fiction writings, A House of Air, were published posthumously.

  Jack Digby’s mother never gave him anything. Perhaps, as a poor woman, she had nothing to give, or perhaps she was not sure how to divide anything between the nine children. His godmother, Mrs Piercy, the poulterer’s wife, did give him something, a keepsake, in the form of a gilt medal. The date on it was September the 12th, 1663, which happened to be Jack’s birthday, although by the time she gave it him he was eleven years old. On the back there was the figure of an angel and a motto, Desideratus, which, perhaps didn’t fit the case too well, since Mrs Digby could have done with fewer, rather than more, children. However, it had taken the godmother’s fancy.

  Jack thanked her, and she advised him to stow it away safely, out of reach of the other children. Jack was amazed that she should think anywhere was out of the reach of his little sisters. ‘You should have had it earlier, when you were born,’ said Mrs Piercy, ‘but those were hard times.’ Jack told her that he was very glad to have something of which he could say, This is my own, and she answered, though not with much conviction, that he mustn’t set too much importance on earthly possessions.