In the days before the appointment, I find a new church. It’s large, Gothic, airy. Blue and red glass shines in its lead-framed windows. There are pamphlets, flower arrangements, charity boxes, dark wooden pews. I sit and look at the beautiful windows; I stand before the black metal racks and light pale ivory candles and drop my coin in the box. Sometimes I pray.
There’s a shop at one corner, selling mostly postcards, crucifixes. When I was younger I used to wonder about such shops, money-changers in the temple, but I suppose the church needs maintenance. I turn the rack of crucifixes and find, at the back, some little medals of St. Giles, round and inexpensive, nine-karat gold or pewter. I buy one, a small pewter disk, and hang it around my neck. It dangles below my collarbone, almost weightless. My reasons are mostly pagan, I’m sure; to give me courage, to bring me luck, to ward off the evil eye, perhaps. I don’t think about it too hard. This cheap, undecorative jewel around my neck makes me feel a little better.
I’m there so long that the priest approaches and asks if he can help me: a man with thick white hair and bright blue eyes in a pink face, tall and bulky but light on his feet. He tells me his name is Father Dominic. It sounds an ominous name to me, but I suppose not everyone thinks of the Inquisition when they think of the Dominicans. He seats himself beside me, heavy and kindly on the bench, and I tell him I’m partially lapsed and haven’t been to Mass for years, and he doesn’t seem to mind. He asks me if I’d like Confession, and I think about it for a while.
“I don’t think I’m ready yet,” I say in the end. “I might be ready a little later on. I don’t know.”
“What will happen later on?” He says this amiably.
I interlock my hands. “There are some things I have to do. Reparations.”
He studies me for a moment. The whites of his eyes are yellowing a little, but the centers are clear blue. “I often think,” he says, “it’s unfortunate the way we divide ourselves. People from your walk of life come here quite often.” He gestures toward St. Giles, pale and steady in his shrine. Then he smiles, showing square, slightly stained teeth. “Though not always to Confession. They always seem more burdened than the rest of our congregation.”
For a moment tears rise in me and I fight them down. I can’t afford them. A line of music comes into my head, Purcell. Paul played it to me one night. “Art thou forlorn of God and com’st to me? What can I tell thee then but misery?” What do I expect this nice priest to tell me? Though I long for salvation more with every day that goes by. “It’s curious,” I say eventually. “Most people who lose their faith say it’s because bad things happen. You know, how could there be a God if such terrible things happen in the world. I seem to go the other way. The worse things get, the more faith I feel.”
“That sounds like a good thing to me,” he says. No solution to the problem, but he’s trying to help.
“Either that, or I only talk to God when I want something.”
“We’re most of us like that, at times,” he says, and I think, when I want something, perhaps, but what I want is a better soul and a better world to keep it in.
I close my hand around the medal. Father Dominic says I’m welcome back anytime, and then he goes off to talk to the choir conductor. I buy some more candles and set the wicks alight, and wait out the time until my appointment looking at the wavering, dazzling shoal of flames.
Parkinson has a private clinic, away from the hospital. The stairs have green carpets, there’s an old-fashioned elevator with bronze doors and wire mesh around the shaft. I make no sound as I walk across the floor.
The receptionist, middle-aged with brown, undyed hair, shows me into a waiting room. There’s a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and, unable to concentrate on the magazines laid out, I stare at it, focusing and unfocusing my eyes. Little spheres of color appear, refracted from the crystals as my vision blurs.
It’s a long wait. I don’t look at the other women. I stare at the ceiling, my hands limp and dormant in my lap. My heart pounds in my chest, the veins in my neck pulse, but I don’t feel any emotions, nothing but the beating of my heart.
Finally Parkinson appears at the door, says, “Ms. Galley?” My hand rises to my throat as I stand, and the medal is there. I pad across the floor, into his cream-walled examination room, and prepare myself.
I’m stripped, exposed, there’s nothing between me and the world. I stand behind the screen and pull on the gown, open at the side, short sleeves, high, confining neck. The last time I wore one of these, I was at the hospital, they put a needle in my arm and I woke up wearing a gown. It had flowers on it, shaped like those stickers old people put in bathtubs to stop themselves slipping. This one is pale blue, plain, a better class of invalid wear. The chain presses against my neck as I tie the gown shut, and I pull the pendant out to stop it pinching.
Parkinson asks me about my past. He’s good at it, he doesn’t lower his voice or look flustered, he’s matter-of-fact and polite, as if he were asking about my feet. I tell him how old I was when I first had a period, I tell him if it hurt, I tell him what contraception I’ve used in my life, I tell him about my lovers and my body and my daughter. I watch him move and listen to him talk, and give him everything I ever was. I trade on what I have.
He tells me he’s going to do a full examination, just to check. He says, raise your arm, lean this way, lie down, legs apart, relax.
For days I’ve been thinking this man could have released a killer back onto the streets.
Be a man, that’s what they used to say. A way of steeling yourself, living up to the best part of yourself, proving that you had the qualities that God intended you to have. Courage, endurance, will. No crying, no excuses. It was a powerful thing to say.
I lie down and set my legs, and be a woman.
I’m afraid of being sick, my throat is hot and my stomach feels displaced, and I’m scared of crying, because I remember too much of the night I lost Ann, but then I say, no, let it happen, be at the nadir if you have to. I close my fingers around the necklace, and stare at the ceiling, plaster roses around the light, and ask St. Giles to help me.
Parkinson sees me lying silent. “How’s your nephew?” he says.
I swallow. “He’s all right. He’s growing well.”
He nods, whether at the thought of Leo growing or at some new discovery in his examination I can’t tell.
“My sister’s been relieved ever since he was born safely,” I say. “There’s a tendency to miscarriage.” My voice drags down at the last syllable, and I lose the rest of what I was going to say, but he nods again.
“I’ve had a look at your records,” he says. “Though I’m not sure that need be a cause for concern. The evidence that miscarriage runs in families isn’t conclusive. And in your case, a traumatic miscarriage is quite possibly an isolated event.” He’s reassuring, confident.
Traumatic miscarriage. I turn my head aside. “Not unlike the chance of having non children,” I say. “You know, no matter how many pamphlets she read saying it didn’t run in families, my sister worried up till the end.”
“Ah, yes.” He glances up at my face, sees my fingers still clutched around my medal. “Now anmorphism, that was considered hereditary for a long time. The Middle Ages had a great many theories on the subject.” Anmorphism, the medical term for my disability. Doctors aren’t allowed to say bareback.
“Really?” All I know about the Middle Ages is the Inquisition.
“Oh, yes. They even conducted experiments.”
I don’t know if I want to hear this. The only experiments I’ve heard of were done in prisoner-of-war camps, captive civilian women in labor. The experiments they did, head-first deliveries, feet-first, should never be talked about by anyone.
“Relax, please.”
I try to relax.
“Midwives claimed to specialize in reversing the position of the baby in utero, turning them around, you know. They were quite in demand, women who claimed they could prevent the birth of a
nmorphic babies.”
I’ve heard of midwives in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries who specialized in disposing of anmorphic babies. If the head emerges first, place a bucket beneath the woman and it drowns before it’s all the way out: legally not murder, if it isn’t fully born. Or a quick scissor blade through the soft part of the head. Post-partum abortions.
“That wouldn’t work though, would it?” I say. My feet are so cold.
“Apparently it did, occasionally. Very hit-and-miss, though.” He presses down, and I put my teeth together. “It’s a more complicated business than that, of course; chemical changes, oxygen supply to the brain. It’s a subtle degree of brain damage that causes anmorphism. Far beyond medieval technology.”
There’s a silence. He doesn’t look at me, not at my face, his hands keep moving. “I thought it was impossible to affect births one way or the other at all,” I say.
He still keeps examining. “Not to modern technology, no. We understand the process a great deal better, nowadays.”
I open my mouth to say, “Really?” What I say is, “Isn’t there a law about it though?” and it’s not what I meant to say, it was the wrong thing.
He shrugs. This is uncomfortable for me. “An old one.”
“Yes,” I say. I don’t know, I’m guessing, I keep on guessing. “I suppose incompetent midwives kept causing deaths in childbirth by doing it wrong.”
“Indeed.” He nods when I say the word incompetent.
“Though I suppose nowadays the risks are far fewer.”
“Oh, of course.” He smiles without looking up. “There have been so many technological advances in the past few hundred years, it’s quite astonishing.”
“Curious,” I say. The thought of Ann stabs me for a second, and then the moment passes. I keep my voice light. “If it were possible to prevent anmorphic deliveries, I would have thought we’d have heard about it. You’d think there’d be great demand for it.”
He withdraws his hand, reaches for an instrument. I hear a metal click, it sounds like a speculum, but I won’t look, I stare at the ceiling. “Oh, there would be,” he says. “Not very practical long-term, though. Imagine the chaos if anmorphic individuals suddenly stopped being born.”
I imagine it. DORLA would die off in a generation. Aging catchers against younger and younger lunes, until a new society took over.
“How long have you been trying to conceive, Ms. Galley?”
“N-nine months,” I say, hasty and breathless. I hadn’t thought about it, the answer comes out shakily.
“Well, I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you.” He sounds almost like a grandfather. “It’s quite normal for couples to take up to a year or even two years to conceive.”
“A year?” It doesn’t seem right. It was so easy to conceive by accident.
“Oh, yes. It’s a common mistake. And you seem to be in good shape. I wouldn’t be surprised if you found yourself pregnant any day.”
“So I might be having a baby soon?” My voice quavers, it’s pathetic, I can’t bear being this way.
“It could be. In a moment I’m just going to give you a quick X-ray, just to be doubly sure.” He turns the speculum a little, I flinch before I can catch myself.
“It’s too bad you can’t really prevent anmorphic babies,” I say, trying to cover, reaching for a subject. “My sister would have been so relieved to know about it.”
“Well,” he says. His voice is quiet. “It isn’t such a disability, after all. We could prevent it, but I wouldn’t consider it ethical. Prejudiced, really.”
It isn’t such a disability. I lie still and let him touch me, and listen to him say those words.
“It can be difficult for anmorphic parents, though.” He speaks quieter still. “They can often feel isolated in an entirely lycanthropic family. And of course, anmorphic children often benefit from having an anmorphic parent.”
I think, against all my principles, against all my defenses, I would have wanted Ann to be a lyco. It would have been better for her, it would have been good for me. She could have been my hope of reconciliation. Maybe I would have liked lycos better if I had mothered one.
“It isn’t altogether conventional,” he says, “but those cases, now, they’re the ones in which a physician feels more inclined to—intervene.”
Cases in which a physician feels inclined to intervene. Cases in which a physician feels inclined to intervene. I play the words over in my head, trying to pull them apart like mesh, looking for what he just said. Cases in which a physician feels inclined to intervene.
I think he just offered me a bareback baby.
“Really?” I say. He isn’t looking at my face. I stare hard at the ceiling, and keep hold of the medal. The thought runs through my head—the medal, he’s seen me clutching it all the time. He must think I pray to St. Giles, make him my saint, make a point of being a bareback. He must think I’d want a bareback baby.
Something comes together in my head.
It may be that the saint just helped me, it may be that I’ve just witnessed divine intervention. Because what he’s offered me is as illegal as hell.
“Quietly, of course,” he’s saying, “and for a consideration. Obviously, there has to be discretion…”
He’s asking me not to talk about it, he’s talking about a secret business set-up. He puts me on my feet, takes me over to an X-ray machine.
Soon, it will sink in. I’ll understand what’s happened. All I can feel now is wild, empty. I have to go somewhere quiet and think about this. But the only thing in my mind now is the medal, that he saw me holding it and he told me something. Divine intervention, bringing me to the verge of understanding everything that’s happened. I stand before a screen and wait for the click of the X-ray, wait for the light to go through me.
FORTY
“Sue,” I say, “it’s Lola Galley.”
There’s a brief silence. “Hello, Lola.” Her voice is limp, without inflection.
“Listen, I wanted to ask you something.” She doesn’t respond. “How’s the baby?”
“Nearly due.” She knows that isn’t what I wanted to ask.
“Listen, could you tell me the name of your doctor?”
“My primary?”
“No, your gynecologist, the one you’re seeing for the baby.”
“Dr. Marshall,” she says.
There’s a pain deep in the pit of my stomach, I’m holding myself tense. “Dr. Marshall? Is he your regular doctor?”
“I saw him when I had Julio,” she says. She sounds tired.
“Oh.” Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve got some sort of brain fever, I’m dreaming up solutions. Marshall. It’s such a respectable name.
Then something nags at my mind, it’s a moment of puzzlement before I put my finger on what’s bothering me. “Didn’t DORLA fix you up with a doctor?” I meant, after Johnny died. DORLA sometimes looks after widows, for a while.
“I’d just made a change,” she says. This conversation is tiresome for her. “I didn’t want to change again.”
“A change?”
“After Johnny lost his hand.” She says it flat, without a tremor. “They found me a doctor then, but then I went back to my old one.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know, Johnny thought it was a good idea.” I’m pulling her through bad memories, she doesn’t want to be talking about this.
“Who were you with before?”
“A Dr. Parkinson,” she says. The name doesn’t mean much to her; he’s just the man she went to see. There’s no pause or drama in the way she says it.
There’s an acrid taste in my mouth. I uncross my legs, cross them again. “You saw him at the start?”
“Yeah.” There’s a shrug in her voice, this isn’t interesting to her, but she can’t face making me leave her alone.
“Did he—what do you think of him? I mean, how come you changed?”
“He seemed okay.” There are spaces in be
tween her answers. I can hear the voices of her children in the background. “Why? Are you looking for a gynecologist?”
She isn’t lying, I think. She doesn’t sound like she’s lying. He didn’t make her the offer he made me. “No, I—Sue, I’m sorry about this. Did Johnny ever say anything about him?”
“Just that he thought we should go back to Dr. Marshall.” I notice the “we,” even talking about her own body she says “we.” It must have been a good marriage.
“Didn’t you talk it over?”
I’ve pushed it too far. “He’d just lost his hand.” There’s an edge to her voice, a rising note. “He’d seen a lot of doctors. He wanted me to go to a different one, that was fine with me. They put you in stirrups, you can’t tell one from another anyway.”
It’s almost hope, what I hear in that last sentence. Though she’s telling me to go to hell, there’s a trace of her old vitality, it’s a crude and offhand remark almost like a joke. She used to be funny, when Johnny was with her.
“I’m sorry.”
She doesn’t say anything. Her children talk in the background, but I can’t make out what they’re saying.
After the examination, I walked out with my coat wrapped around me, my head ducked against the still air. Soon I can go home, I told myself, this will be over soon and then I can go home. I went back into the church. Father Dominic wasn’t there. Other people were wandering to and fro, so I headed straight for the Aegidian shrine and knelt down, to make sure I’d be left alone. I was shaking, I was sick, I stared at the picture of the saint but I couldn’t find a word to say to him. Some candles were burning before it, but there weren’t enough candles in the world to light for my Ann. The church was quiet but I didn’t hear it, sounds raged in my ears, and I felt blazing, wicked, unforgivable. Take your pain to God, the nuns would have said. I felt a kind of desperation, a need for there to be some force for goodness, something absolute, something right, and that I longed harder and harder for faith the worse the world became.
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