by Jo Mazelis
The woman jabbered; her voice, which was husky and strained, grew shrill. She put her hands together palm to palm, praying and pleading, her eyes ever wider, her brow a knot of anguish. He tried to ignore the woman, then angrily, desperate to break the spell of her noise, he banged the heel of his fist on the centre of the wooden worktop, and shouted, ‘Non!’
Both the woman and Amanda jumped at the sudden noise, but it had done its work. The woman bit her lip and picked up the loose package. Then just as she turned to go the florist groaned and uttered a curse, and called briskly, ‘Madame!’
She turned and he tossed three coins in her direction. They fell at her feet and she quickly picked up two, but the third was nearer to Amanda.
The child stepped forward, bending to retrieve the coin, and as she did so she met the woman’s gaze for the first time. They stared at one another for a moment, then stood up. Amanda, holding her bouquet upside-down, dangling the four satin flower heads like the hanged man on a tarot card, lifted her other hand towards the woman, the small copper coin held between her thumb and forefinger. The woman stared at her in confusion for a moment and then, bobbing her head briefly, quickly took the coin and left the shop.
Amanda followed. The woman, once she was a few paces from the shop, hesitated as if uncertain which way to go. She seemed distressed, her head turning this way and that, while her feet remained fixed to that one slab of pavement.
Amanda went to her side.
‘Madame?’ she said and reached for the woman’s hand, which was cold to the touch and made Amanda think about the ivory soap dish on the washstand in her mama’s bedroom.
The woman looked at Amanda. Her expression was one of incomprehension; frowning, she shook her head at the child.
Amanda lifted her bouquet of flowers the right way up; the hanged man restored to buoyant and rude health.
‘Oh,’ the woman said, and touched the petals of one of the flowers, smoothing the pink satin between her fingers as if measuring its quality.
Amanda would remember this gesture all her life; her upraised arm, how small she must have been then, and yet how strong and generous she felt. But Amanda was also aware then, as later, that she didn’t quite know what she was doing, what she meant to happen. Did she mean to give these flowers to the woman so that she could take them and sell them once again to Monsieur Arbot? Or was she communicating something else to the woman, something about her appreciation of the woman’s talent, of the beauty of the flowers. Or perhaps a meaning which was even greater; a reminder of happy days, of beauty, of life?
But the woman did not take the flowers from Amanda’s outstretched arm; instead she suddenly withdrew her hand, turned her back and hurried away. Amanda watched her go, saw how her shoulders were hunched against the bitter cold of the sunless morning, and she grew aware of the frost that crept up through the soles of her boots, chilling her to the bone.
THE MOON AND THE BROOMSTICK
There had been three, perhaps four miscarriages already. Two had happened when Maria’s pregnancy was already far advanced.
The midwife examined her hips, her teeth, the taut muscles of her stomach.
She was treated like a naughty girl. Ordered, now she was pregnant again, to give up all violent exercise. Maria’s mother, the Russian acrobat and contortionist, Tatiana Britt had never abandoned her calling – practising her skills behind the scenes when she became too unwieldy to perform for the public.
But she dearly wanted a child, and so at winter’s end when she was five months pregnant she bid farewell to Stan (or the Great Bendini as he was publicly known) when he left to begin the season with the travelling circus.
She felt lonely and bored, but spent hours at a time resting with her feet propped up so they were higher than her head. She wrote Stan long letters asking after all their friends, mentioning the small towns that she knew they would be going to, reminding him of things they had once done together, telling him she loved him. He replied twice. His letters were concise.
But Maria was grateful for all the benefits modern medicine had bestowed. It was a young century, the atlas still sported many splashes of pink to show that Britannia held onto her empire, and scientific progress had transformed the lives of many.
Children no longer worked in the mines or factories, fewer women died in childbirth, though there was still a very real risk. And babies and children, even once safely delivered, might yet die from any number of causes.
Guiltily then, she ignored her impatience and boredom, and submitted to examinations and thermometers and bed rest.
The sheets on her bed in the nursing home were starched white cotton, crisp and cool, the food was bland and lukewarm, and she had been disallowed not only brandy, which she liked to take a lick of now and then throughout the day, but also coffee as it was thought to induce miscarriage by quickening the heart.
Tea was offered instead and she grew to like it well enough, but it was a pale substitute.
Her belly ballooned; so much so that she was cross-examined about her dates, about her monthlies and marital relations with Stan. When she told the nurse that she and Stan were intimate frequently, once or twice a day, sometimes in the afternoon, and even, shockingly, during her menses, the nurse’s face grew ashen and she looked as if she might faint. When the nurse had recovered, she said that this was unnatural, a woman’s body was not designed for such overuse and he, Stan, must learn self-control and shouldn’t make her suffer so.
‘But it isn’t suffering,’ she’d protested, ‘I like it.’
The nurse shook her head slowly in reproach.
‘But my dear, you’ve lost four babies. Don’t you see?’
Maria saw.
Next they accused her of overeating.
‘Mother must eat for two, but she must not overindulge.’
Finally they began to suggest that she might be carrying twins, and searched her belly, pressing the stethoscope first here, then there to detect a second or third heartbeat.
By her seventh month she was instructed to prepare her nipples for breast-feeding, something that she could not understand but endured. She was given, as were all the expectant mothers, a small nail brush and a bar of disinfectant soap and instructed to scrub her nipples twice a day. It was painful but she did as she was told, marvelling at how women in more primitive countries, or in the past, or Eve herself, mother of Cain and Abel, had managed to procure a nailbrush and carbolic. How had the human race managed to survive and thrive without? Well, she considered, perhaps something was done with bunches of twigs and herbs?
Then she began to imagine her twins (which by the rough and tumble that went on in her belly she was convinced must be boys) tasting the carbolic soap on her nipples when she first offered suck, and pulling nasty faces before refusing her delicious milk. So secretly, a month before they were due, she stopped using the soap and after one week of grating the wet brush on her weary nipples, she abandoned that too.
Stan wrote saying that they should name the boys Romulus and Remus, and included a diagram of a she-wolf he’d had the idea of constructing. Concealed inside the animal’s teats were two baby’s bottles filled with cow’s milk. He was always coming up with new and wild ideas for the circus and while she could see the appeal of this one, she didn’t think it would work, not for her two boys anyway; and she suggested that perhaps it would be better performed by dwarves in diapers?
But the names were nice enough, and they could always give the boys a whole clutch of others so that they could decide later on which to use in their act, which for friends and family and which for the world beyond the circus. So, Romulus Samson Jacob John and Remus Nero Alexander Harold grew in her imagination, not weighted down by their freight of names, but strong, agile, handsome and clever boys who would become great men.
Two weeks before the babies were due; another woman was brought onto the ward. Like Maria, this woman was expecting twins. Her belly was prodigious and vast, her insect legs and arms
tiny in comparison, her small pale face fearful and timid as a mouse’s.
She was a vicar’s wife, as devout as a nun. She called out for God’s help in a choked whisper between bouts of weeping. Her labour had begun thirty-six hours before in the vicarage, a long and rackety drive away from the hospital. The babies were stuck and despite all the manipulation and coaxing from the midwife they would not budge. In a few hours, if natural childbirth did not occur, the babies, dead or alive, would be removed by Caesarean section. If not, mother and babies would be lost.
They wheeled the woman off at close to midnight, her cries echoing down the tiled passage, ‘Oh God, oh God, oh Jesus, Jesus.’
Perhaps the same thing would happen to her, for Maria surmised, if God punished and tested even the virtuous vicar’s wife, what might he do to her; an unvarnished sinner who had only jumped the broomstick with her Stan, and not legally married in God’s eyes.
She lay in bed terrified for what seemed like hours. Waves of spasmodic pain were passing through her body. It was two weeks too early, but it was now, and now was implacable, irresistible; she couldn’t fight it. She struggled to sit upright, the twins seemed locked in a tight knot of stillness in a different, lower position in her body. Her eyes travelled up the ward to the desk where the night nurse usually sat in a quiet pool of yellow light, passing the dark hours by reading romantic novels or knitting Argyle sweaters for her sweetheart, but there was no one there.
Four other women slept in the other beds, all of them heaped on their sides, bulky as sows under the covers.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and struggled to stand. A contraction overtook her and she waited it out, rubbing her back to ease the pain and rocking her body like an Arabian dancer because that seemed to help, but was probably forbidden.
Slowly, as every four or five minutes another contraction stopped her, she made her way towards the door that led out of the ward and closer to the delivery rooms. It was hot and airless, and despite the strong smells of disinfectant she could detect the coppery tang of blood in the air.
She heard voices up ahead, words spoken in urgent whispers, and these seemed to be coming from a lit room whose door was ajar describing its edges with a sharp shape of white light.
Another contraction overtook her and she stopped near an open door. Resting one hand on the doorjamb to steady herself, she undulated heavily, sensing weakness in her once strong legs that must have come from underuse. She wished that she could be with Stan; that instead of being here in this distempered place with its imprisoning walls, she could be in their little wooden caravan, breathing in the smells of the animals, the axle grease and the sweet, sweet air.
She gazed into the unlit room and noticed the silvery disk that hung beyond the window. It was a full, round moon with a hazy halo of light around it. She thought about Stan sitting on the caravan steps with his pipe, how he would look up and see this same moon. As soon as this idea came to her she felt she must get nearer to that moon, to stand by the window and press her hot cheek against the cool glass. If she thought hard enough and gazed intently enough at the moon, it would be as if Stan were with her and he would know that she was thinking of him.
She knew that it was forbidden to trespass into any room other than the bathroom, yet could not resist. She had gone forward only two steps when her stomach tightened again and a great wave of pain paralysed her. The rocking seemed to help, if only to focus her mind on something other than the burning cramped ache that coiled through her. There was no wall to support herself by, but her hand, groping in the gloom, found a metal rung, probably part of a bed, which she wrapped her trembling fist around.
When the contraction had passed (they were getting longer as well as more intense and closer together) she stepped forward still holding onto the metal rail. Now that she was closer to the window she stepped into the pool of its pale silver light, and she saw that what she had been holding was the foot of a metal crib, and inside it she saw two perfect babies’ heads laying next to one another on the mattress. A single white sheet lay over the babies and their tiny eyes were closed. She leaned closer, holding her belly as she did so. She did not think she had ever seen anything so perfect as these alabaster babies with blue veined eyelids, and long black lashes and mouths so pale and perfectly formed. She immediately sensed that they were not breathing and thus not alive, but something about them convinced her that they weren’t dead – or at least not dead in the way that something which has once been alive is dead. No, she had a barely formed impression that these were dolls.
Or not dolls as such, but something like. Perhaps they were wax or bisque mannequins used for the purpose of training the doctors or other scientific research.
Another contraction and she gripped the sides of the crib and swayed. Again the pain drifted away, retreating from body and mind momentarily and leaving behind the surprising nothingness of no pain.
She looked at the baby mannequins again. It seemed both strange and frustrating to her that someone had lain them in this crib and covered them with a sheet just as if they were asleep. You’d think they’d be kept in a cupboard or under glass, not put to bed like a little girl’s dolls.
Without thinking about it (as after all these were not real babies; they would not get cold and die) she drew back the sheet, and that was when she saw it, saw the strangeness of what had been done to the tiny naked mannequins. They were joined together. It was as if the wax or whatever they were made from had been allowed to melt and pool, fusing their lower torsos together into one unnatural trunk.
They were girls, and each had a clamped stump at her belly button and an elusive odour, sweet and sour at the same time. It was that which made her realise that they were real – not mannequins at all. She gasped and would have stepped back, but another contraction locked her in place, and she thought with terror of the violence inside her and she was suddenly more afraid than she had ever been. She who had soared through the air, somersaulting, balancing, or hanging by a leather strap in her teeth while her body spun beneath her, a cocoon of weight like a plumb bob.
She screamed. The sound was low, guttural and strangled, and the noise seemed to come from somewhere else entirely, as if it was the echo of another woman’s voice, another woman’s pain.
And then as if in answer to her cry, she felt a sudden hot gush as her waters broke, and voices and people surrounded her. Hands were on her body pulling her away and out of the moonlit room, but the grip of her hands on the crib’s rail was so strong that it jerked and rattled, shaking the wax babies so it seemed for a moment that they might wake. Alarmed, she let go and the crib clanked heavily and was still.
Her twins were also girls. Black-haired and button-eyed, with faces like fairy changelings, and perfect, perfect, perfect.
She made a promise to the moon the next night. She and Stan would marry. She’d been warned; she did not know what sin the vicar’s wife, poor thing, was guilty of, but from now on Maria decided she must make amends.
Stan would understand. He invented the world as he went along; nothing was beyond him.
For years after, especially when the moon was full, she saw again the poor dead babies with their fused bodies and blue white skin and sometimes she thought she’d dreamt it all. Or worse it occurred to her that the dead twins had been her babies, and these two bright girls, Charlotte-Kay and Georgina-May were the children of the vicar and his good wife, and somehow, by unnatural chance or charm, she’d stolen them.
And later still, when times were hard, and Stan told her of his latest plan, she saw the rightness of it straight away. She sensed that it had almost been the girls’ fate to be Siamese twins, and now with tiny corsets stitched together at the hip and tiny beautifully made little double dresses, it became their destiny, and no one, not even their mother thought it was a sin.
UNDONE, 1969
The girls have sewing class. The boys, metalwork, carpentry, technical drawing.
The first task in
sewing is to make an apron.
While from the mysterious workroom of the carpentry class with its resin scent of wood, its hammers and vices, boys sometimes appear bearing the fruits of their labour. Curious objects these, darkly varnished; a block on a stand with a shelf into which small crenullations have been cut. A pipe rack.
When they are grown, these girls, these boys, father will select a pipe, fill it with tobacco, tamp it down, then sit in his armchair before he lights it. Mother comes in then, hen-like and hesitant, a steaming cup of tea trembling on its matching saucer. She is wearing the gingham apron she sewed ten years ago when she was twelve.
That is the picture, as nice and clean as the images in the Ladybird books. To this they aspire.
Or should.
Except.
This one, knee socks sagging, the elastic in their tops exhausted, snapped white filaments escaping like stray hairs. This one, needle and thread in hand, tries to form the long tacking stitches as she has been instructed, but fails. She takes it up to the teacher for her inspection.
‘No. No. The line is not straight. The stitches are uneven. Unpick it. Start again.’
Some of the other girls sit at the prow of the sewing machines, pressing their black-shod feet on the foot pedal, nudging the engine into stuttering buzzing life.
They are the chosen.
Back at her table she snips the knot from the cotton. Pulls out the thread of her morning. Has barely rethreaded the needle before the bell rings.
Next week is the same as last week. Here are the same two pieces of gingham, limper now than when she began. Here is the needle with its length of cotton. Another knot is tied. Here is the needle going into the same hole as last week.