Ghost Story

by Toby Litt

  CALLING IT IT, CALLING IT A BABY

  Or, in fact, writing about the subject, the incident, at all: isn’t this merely grotesque and absurd? For Corpsing I did an amount of research into embryos and foetuses; one book mentioned in the Acknowledgements was particularly useful – Ulrich Drews’s Color Atlas of Embryology. During this last pregnancy, Leigh and I got the Atlas down from the shelf to see what the baby would look like at seven and a half weeks. All the books I used in researching Corpsing had been kept together, and the Color Atlas had been sandwiched for over a year between Gunshot Wounds by Dr Vincent di Maio and Elizabeth Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body. I have forgotten most of the research I did; this, I think, is how it is with novelists – we are by nature generalists, able at very short notice to fake up expertise on almost anything. Looking at it again, now, I see and remember that the embryonic period lasts from the fourth to the eighth week; it is known as organogenesis. In pencil I had underlined the following: ‘The embryo assumes a human shape and the large organ systems of the body – bones and muscle, gastrointestinal canal, liver, heart, and lungs, as well as kidneys – are established.’ The embryonic period is followed by the foetal period, usually. After we had buried the baby and driven home, Leigh said, ‘But it looked so perfect.’ I was reminded, as so often in extreme situations connected with family, of The Godfather: Part II – the scene towards the end, during which Michael Corleone demands to know whether Kay’s terminated pregnancy (‘It was an abortion, Michael – it was an abortion!’) was a daughter or a son. I have to admit that I am finding the idea of abortion particularly difficult to deal with. I realise that my principles haven’t changed, and that I am still – as you’d put it briefly – in favour of a woman’s right to choose. But as I looked around the waiting room of the Emergency Gynaecology Department on the day of the miscarriage, the thought that some of these women might decide to have abortions – or that, in another department of the same hospital, pregnancies were terminated as late as eighteen weeks – I found both these things very upsetting. I wanted to plead with these women to have the babies, if they had been lucky enough to carry them that far. Not particularly rational, although this feeling had a great emotional logic. What we lost was an embryo, whose sex will never now be determined. (Michael Corleone finds out that he has been denied a son.) And so, Leigh and I are left with genderless ‘it’ as all we can call it. A good friend of ours, Ian Sansom, recently wrote a book called The Truth about Babies, in which he collects together a vast number of infant-related quotes. When I was thinking the other day, at the local tube station, of writing something about calling it it, I remembered this one: Jerome K. Jerome, ‘On Babies’, from Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886): ‘If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that fellow human beings can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call her dear baby “it”’. Ian was the only close friend of mine that I told about the pregnancy during the pregnancy. In a way, Leigh and I do find ourselves, every time we hear ourselves referring to the baby as ‘it’, brewing cups of scorn and hatred that we ourselves – through no fault of our own – have to drink. We sometimes refer to it as ‘the baby’ but have not dared give it a proper name of either gender. Perhaps we should pick one that does for both: Alex, say. But Leigh’s equivalent friend to Ian is called that, so it won’t do. I have told Leigh, once, that I thought of the second miscarried embryo as the Shed Baby; I could tell her that I called the third the Scan Baby, but it is far from tender.

  FOXES

  When my wife gave birth to three foxcubs, I just couldn’t take it any more; I took off – across country, hoping to find a sufficient difference in the wildwood. Within minutes of being born, the foxcubs had been tearing at the books on the lower shelves, some of them my own. I mean, written by me. It was a day of long wide high grey, not drizzle but as if the air were fuller of moisture even than during a downpour. The North Sea was on top of us; the month of March. The foxcubs had also been greatly attracted to toilet- and tissue paper; it was clear there could no longer be any place for me, in such a house. The three floors were two of them Elizabethan, one Georgian – you could tell by the size of the windows and the height of the ceilings. I would like to say I was sorry to leave but climbing through the fence at the sloping edge of a fallow field, just as the sun was being consumed by the horizon, I felt a sense of abysmal homecoming. The trees: their trunks were ivy-troubled and their upper boughs burdened with mistletoe. A few hundred yards in, I started while there was still enough light to construct a hide. I had not brought a billycan, though my penknife was in my inside jacket pocket along with a sprig of lavender, some folded paper and a very expensive pen. I had heard twelve very small feet, chasing me across the field, and ran like a maniac, but when I looked behind I saw only the opposite hedgerow. Unable to sleep, I was unable also to prevent myself from remembering the early days of the pregnancy – the first trimester during which my wife had become convinced there was a fishbowl in her belly – she even knew what kind of tropical fish it contained: Clown Fish. She developed the notion they were laughing at her. The salt water in which they had to be kept (inside her belly) made her feel nauseous from the moment she woke up to the moment she projectile-vomited, usually around fifteen minutes later. After that, she began to feel accustomed to it: ‘We were sea creatures once, weren’t we? I wonder what the pH of my amniotic fluid is. I imagine it to be like the vinegar in a jar of pickled eggs.’ These conversations worried me; I was left no room within them but agreement, for how could I critique her sensations? In an attempt to distract her, I put posters of deserts from around the world on the walls of the kitchen – which was where we spent most of our waking time together. A man walked past, about ten feet away from my wildwood hide; he was accompanied by two cocker spaniels with whom he was engaged in very intense, though quite one-sided conversation. ‘…we shall do that, shan’t we? And then afterwards we’ll go back and we’ll sort everything out. We’ll leave the left side and the right side roughly as they are; but we’ll move the middle up and darken in. There needs to be a smear, diagonally…’ He was so enraptured by his words that I could probably have stood in the path blocking his way and he still wouldn’t have seen me – unless one of the dogs had taken notice of my scent. But I worried that, on the way back from his walk, I might be discovered, asleep: I moved my hide further from the path. Night was now as dark as it was going to get; I had wanted to hear an owl, and I did a few moments later. It was at this point that I decided to think consecutively about the stages of the pregnancy, ticking off mental boxes. The first trimester ended with our visit to the nearest big hospital for a scan. The three foetuses were arranged head-to-toe-to-head, like slaves space-savingly arranged in a slave ship. This thought was interrupted by a splash of anxiety: How much was my house worth? How much had I lost by leaving it? How much would my wife be able to bank if she sold it and moved, with the three little foxcubs, into rented accommodation? The moon had come clear of the clouds it had been bathing in milk, and now shone a day or two off full, but most likely the brightest it would be all month. Another idea I tried to repress was of sending a postcard, a confessional postcard, to myself at home – containing in the text something so hurtful and hateful that I would have to return before it arrived, in order to be there to intercept it and prevent my wife from reading it. The dogwalking and dogtalking artist had not returned; perhaps his perambulations were circular – or perhaps I had caught him on the homeward leg – or perhaps he was in the pub. I felt a desire to see the painting he had been describing and this, in its weak way, reminded me of the second trimester and its black nightmares. My wife became convinced of a series of abominations, concerning myself and her and our children-to-be. Although the nurse present at the scan had assured us that the wombic arrangement of the foetuses was textbook, my wife had become convinced that they were trying to tell her something: as if – knowing they were being observed – they had arranged themselves into a letter:
M or W, or a message: SOS or III. She was sure this letter or message meant either Yes or No: it tortured her that she could not, them being her intimate relations, decide which. Strangely, when they had been born as foxes at 3 a.m. – was it only that morning? – after an hour of painful labour, she evinced no surprise, only joy-times-joy. In the moments after the delivery (by me alone, at home), she wept and I could see her being invaded by religion – as if she were a nest that ants were entering, carrying lit matches between their front legs, ceremonially. Beneath the surface, she was being illuminated by a dangerous and itchy fire. I, at this juncture, was retching as if trying to dislodge a turd coated in stomach acid that had fought its way up into my oesophagus. The midwife arrived moments after the afterbirth, but I left it until evening before I left. During the slave-scan, my wife had convinced herself that she not only was able to distinguish the sex of each foetus but its future profession, cause of death and the number of children it itself would leave behind. I set myself to thinking of the weight and the wait of the third trimester…I couldn’t. This was intolerable: I would have to return to the house and find out how my fox-children were faring; how many books had they destroyed? I was a bad father, to abandon them, thus, without giving them a chance to give me a good enough reason. Besides, it was a matter of no little curiosity to me that no attempt had been made to hunt me down in the wildwood. It was, after all, to the very same place I had escaped following the previous incident which there is no point describing here. As I emerged from the undergrowth, I felt a scrabbling at my leg and looked down fully expecting a weeping foxcub or three. It wasn’t; it was a cocker spaniel – a second one followed, and then the owner, now no longer talking. I said hello in a high voice, before he could attack me. He did not immediately reply. I wanted to bring the conversation around as quickly as possible to painting, but could see no way to do this without revealing that I’d overheard him earlier – calling up the spectre of being accused of being a spy. An art-spy, if such creatures exist. I even had writing materials in my jacket pocket; a very expensive pen. ‘My wife has had three foxcubs,’ I said. ‘They’re a devil to keep,’ the man replied. ‘That’s why I ran away,’ I said. I noticed he was still walking. ‘Are you a farmer?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he replied, now over his shoulder. ‘What do you do?’ I called, realising I was only two questions away from painting. ‘Mind your own bloody business,’ he shouted back. I made all possible haste home, which was only two fields away. Once I hit the hardness of the road my footsteps echoed back off the hedges. There were no lights on in the front of the house, but that was nothing unusual – the kitchen was round the back. Quietly, so as to be able to escape if I saw anything disgusting, I crept through the gate and down the path at the side of the house. I was able to stare in through the window without attracting the attention of the corpse upon the kitchen table, feasted upon by three now full-grown foxes. It was not my wife, I would have recognised her; and besides, my wife wasn’t a man. This was a man-corpse, cooked. For a very brief moment, I thought I might have got the wrong house, but I recognised the posters of the deserts of the world, left over from the first nauseous trimester. The foxes were talking as they ate, and this is what they said: ‘One, two, three.’ ‘One.’ ‘One two three.’ ‘One-two.’ ‘Three. One.’ ‘One.’ ‘One!’ ‘One.’ ‘Two.’ ‘One.’ ‘One two three one two three one two three.’ ‘Two.’ ‘Three.’