by Rebecca Ley
A sentiment that is used to placate a whole people, but I still wish it to be true. I can try and let myself think it is, looking at that thing. If any of it is true, that would be something to die for. It would be music; the humanity of people; the beauty of pain; the melancholy of hearing a note. It would be all of suffering: it would be a piano.
Part 3
Mathilde
Stitches
1
The one thing I liked about going to the hospital was listening to the radio. They had one in the waiting area, along with the newspapers. There was something other-worldly about the all-day electricity there.
The sound of the radio was tinny and it crackled, and the receptionist rarely got the frequency right, but people were mesmerised by it. It was used as an alternative therapy in private rooms, as though music could take the place of redundant antibiotics.
The best visits were the ones where there was music playing; old records piped through, classical tunes and recognisable songs. Some people, like Gloria, had their own players at home. But for most, this was as good as it would get. And those few minutes where you hoped your name wouldn’t be called, where you could sit and listen for as long as your wait allowed, were as good as any you’d ever get.
Sometimes there wouldn’t be music, sometimes there’d only be Mrs P. No one dared or no one bothered to change the frequency, and so we would sit and listen to her, and look at her face on the newspapers, the same image on every paper, shot from the same angle, by one person with a good camera. She gave her regular sermons on BBC’s Auntie’s Hour, a leftover from when she was the head of the broadcasting company. As we came in for my appointment that day, her voice echoed throughout the room. We sat down and my grandmother sighed audibly. ‘That’s how she did it,’ my grandmother said, ‘She ruled the waves. “England isn’t eating” blasted out of every room.’
I tried to shush her, looking about me to see if anyone was listening. ‘The country was on its knees,’ I said.
She scoffed.
‘She got us out of the blackout,’ I said.
My grandmother laughed. ‘And what do you know about that?’
‘It’s better now,’ I said, bolstered by the people I had met at Gloria’s dinner party. ‘There’s more food, and energy.’
My grandmother grabbed my hand, and slowly squeezed my fingers, like she was holding an apple firmly in her grasp, about to bite. ‘We live in the same house don’t we? We’re both here, aren’t we?’
‘I know, grandmother,’ I said, pulling my hand free. ‘All I’m saying is it’s better now.’
We came to these appointments, anxiously, twice a year. My grandmother saw the other worried women with their daughters, their very young daughters. But the older, the more anxious, of course.
‘—We’ve seen picketing that threatens to bring the country to its knees once again, endangering our farms and choking our food supplies. An attempt to strangle the country—’
Mrs P’s voice reverberated about the room. Someone coughed into their newspaper, shuffling the papers. The receptionist stared at her appointment list.
‘—Despite our problems and our failures, this is still a good land to live in and bring up a family. It is a land of great natural riches—’
A woman walked through after her appointment with her husband. ‘People are starving!’ she screamed at the radio. ‘You let them starve!’ Her husband grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the hospital as quickly as he could.
‘—There are wreckers among us who don’t believe this. But I am talking to you, the majority. I am an Auntie to you all, our regime is here to help you flourish, to nurture England’s green land, to bring you the fruits of your labour. Those who seek to disrupt our agricultural industry disrupt the nation. Those who choose not to replenish our population, crush our country—’
‘Regime,’ my grandmother scoffed. ‘Oui, Ancien Régime, but where is la Révolution?’
I shushed her. It was better when we didn’t talk about France, when we pretended it wasn’t there. Which it wasn’t, I always tried to tell her, in every sense that mattered. But maybe she lived there long enough that it wasn’t just the culture and language and people that mattered, and that she missed; it was the ground and the streets and maybe even the stone and the glass in the buildings, if they hadn’t got to that yet.
‘There’s a Sainte Chapelle in my heart,’ I said one day, when she lamented the inevitably broken Christian stained glass of the chapel.
‘That won’t outlive you, Mathilde,’ she said. ‘That won’t go on without you.’ I suppose she was right.
As we sat listening to the radio, we were handed the same set of forms, and I completed them, the same as I always did.
‘—my nationalisation of the grid gave you a gift of shared energy, and rationing means that no one will starve, and no one will have more than another. This is fair and equal. We must never return to the days of the blackout. We must not be held to ransom by farmers as we once were by private energy corporates, who served only the wealthy—’
The nurse called me over as my grandmother took up the paper, one of her few chances to read it. Mrs P’s face gleamed from the front page, some article included inside about her sartorial choices – bestowing her with the impression of frivolity and benevolence – which my grandmother turned to immediately. ‘Twenty years,’ my grandmother said. ‘And we still think just because it could be worse, that’s enough.’
‘—I will not be swayed. I will not turn back to those dark days.’
Applause filled the room from the radio. Someone lowered their newspaper and said cheerfully: ‘Auntie knows best!’
My grandmother murmured to me, ‘My Aunt was bombed in her bathtub in Lyon. What a phrase.’
They led me towards a scale. They took my weight with my shoes on (so I always wore the same out of the two pairs I had, as though consistency was key), and my height, where they claimed I’d gained a centimetre, and I laughed. Then there were blood tests, and finally, the room.
My grandmother followed me. The doctor was the same man I always saw. I attributed to him a kindness, as he had a friendly way of sitting, and putting the curtain around, and looking at me over his glasses. I could imagine him as the sort of person who would be at Gloria’s dinner party, and for a moment, wanted to tell him about what I’d experienced, to explain I was different, not in body, but in other ways.
‘Change behind the curtain,’ he said, as my grandmother sat down, and he made a comment on the weather. She remained silent. He shuffled paper – my results – as I came from behind the curtain, positioning myself on the chair, placing my feet on the stirrups, my legs widely spread.
‘You’re almost twenty-two,’ he said, questioningly, and I agreed. He checked my notes. ‘And your results here still put you in great health, top percentile.’ He smiled, joyously. ‘Let’s have a look then.’
He swivelled his chair towards me and positioned himself in front of me. He pulled his plate of instruments towards him and I looked at my grandmother; as though looking away from him helped. I directed my speech to my grandmother, my head turned that way, and I watched her hands fiddle with her shirt, counting the stitches on the cuff of her sleeve. I sucked in a gasp of breath. He forced me open, without warning, and it was cool and uncomfortable, if not painful. He swabbed and prodded and my stomach tensed, though it was nothing to do with my stomach.
‘Are you trying for a child?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said.
He stopped the prodding and I counted the stitches with her. One loop, two loops, three. I heard paper shuffling again, he was consulting his chart. ‘You’re twenty-one,’ he said, ‘Fairly unusual in your state not to be trying or planning.’
‘I’m not ready yet,’ I said, which was foolish.
He laughed, heartily, like he was in on a good joke. ‘Everyone is ready. There is only ready.’
The prodding hadn’t resumed. I waited for it, and the waiting
was almost as bad as the thing itself.
‘I would start soon,’ he said, prodding more forcefully now. ‘I wouldn’t want to report otherwise.’ Prod. ‘And if you miss your window, a girl like you,’ ceasing now. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about. Look at me,’ he said, and I turned my head from the stitches to him and he slowly pulled out the thing that pulled me apart. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘Do it now. If there is no partner, we can supply the necessary aids.’
I had nothing else. I saw my future closing in front of me; me, my grandmother, and a baby, to propagate this earth with one more. What did one more count for? It counted for something, to them, to Mrs P. And yet, as we were one, a singular, an individual, we counted for little. And then there was him, and the dinner party, and the gooseberries, and it seemed miles away.
‘Technically you have four years, to try on your own.’ He chuckled. ‘But that’s not an eternity.’
I released my feet from the stirrups without him telling me so. ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘It’s getting worse,’ he said. He looked out the window, at the sun shining brightly. ‘The heat is almost tropical. We’re lucky Dengue isn’t here yet,’ he said, ‘Lucky we closed our borders when we did.’ He gestured to my swabs in the container. ‘I’ll get these checked, but if all’s well, I’d hope you don’t let it get urgent. The interventions.’
I thought of the wine at the dinner party, I smelt it, didn’t I? But I didn’t drink it then. I regretted it. I regretted it so much as I dressed back into my clothes that I could almost taste it. An iron, clanging, bitter taste. No, it was just blood, from where I’d caught my lip. The cramps started, forcefully, and I felt I could taste them too.
He looked at me, frustrated, as though I were a child in school that wasn’t paying attention. ‘I’ll walk you out,’ he said. My grandmother looked at him with eyebrows raised, but followed him, gesturing for me to come along, out the door. He turned away from the reception and through to a different ward, commenting on how this hospital was the most prestigious in the country, Auntie said so herself. We got to a set of double doors and he punched in a code on a keypad, and with a strange electronic whirring, the kind of noise that was alien to me, the door clicked open. He held it open for us as we stepped through, and then led us down another corridor that smelt of clinical disinfectant and a foreign cleanliness.
‘Better to go out this way,’ he said, walking more slowly now. The doors to the rooms on the ward were open, and I could see inside seven or eight beds neatly lined up together. They were all full, but not with the quiet melancholy of the frail and infirm, but a sick writhing of people feverish and restless, whose minds didn’t want to be there. I listened to their moans as they wrestled with their sheets and shuffled their limbs.
The doctor kept walking. We went past room after room. I looked at my grandmother and she shook her head at me as though to say: Just act normal.
I realised as I passed these people, and the noises got more and more sickening, that there were only women. I wanted to ask the doctor what was wrong with them, but before I could he stopped abruptly outside one door. It was a room of about ten or so beds, so close together that each person could have reached out and touched the other if they wanted. From inside this room was a visceral screaming, and I tried to step away and keep walking, but the doctor took me by the wrist.
‘You have to be careful,’ he said, holding me towards the open door, as though I were a hen’s egg, unseen and rare, in the oval dip of someone’s palm.
Inside, amongst the writhing women with saline drips, was one in particular who was being held down forcibly, her arms and legs strapped to the bed, a sheet draped over her middle. She woozily rocked her head from side to side, and a screaming gurgle escaped her lips as a nurse rubbed her arm and walked towards her feet. As she reached under the sheet I thought for a moment that she was in labour, and we had ended up in the delivery suite. But after a few movements, the nurse left, syringe in hand. She walked past us out of the room, and said casually to another nurse: ‘Tell her to keep her legs elevated.’
The doctor let go of my wrist. He turned and carried on walking, gesturing for us to follow, as though nothing had happened. We walked in silence behind him until he led us to another door to exit the hospital. He clicked it open and held it for us to walk through.
‘It’s important that you saw that,’ he said. ‘She was almost thirty. Something had to be done.’
Neither of us said anything, but nodded, and walked from the hospital in silence, until the building and its sour clinical stench was well behind us.
‘If I do it,’ I said, ‘we’ll have more money. And I’ll have to do it eventually, won’t I. So maybe it should be now.’
It was a long, hot walk home, up Pond Street and down through Hampstead (past Gloria’s house), which we took slowly. My own fragility after seeing the doctor was mirrored by my grandmother. She was quiet, and almost angry, and I took that anger as directed at me.
‘There are other ways, you know there are,’ she said. We didn’t look at each other. ‘Margot and I didn’t want that lonely life for you. We decided, when it was only a whisper of an idea. When you were nine years old. If you met someone, fine. If not,’ she shook her head, ‘you are not cattle.’
What we heard about cattle around the village now was cattle starving to death, cattle dying of heat exhaustion, cattle flooded out of their fields, their homes. I thought we sounded exactly like cattle.
‘Everyone else has done it,’ I said, trying to convince myself.
‘We could wait. There’s still time for Mrs P to step down. She won’t be in office forever. It will happen eventually.’ I’d never considered this was because of our President; it was just the law that everyone agreed with, to boost the population. Even now I would think it reductive to say that without Mrs P there would be no policy.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It won’t change.’
‘Is this what you want? Hungry baby in our tiny house, the three of us, collecting coupons for the rest of our lives?’ Her voice was raised, and her head was turned towards me.
I felt my throat closing. I wondered what my mother would say. ‘What else though? Refuse? End up in prison and die while I’m at it?’
She softened her tone, apologetic. ‘It was a choice for me.’
‘I know.’
We both stopped walking after that and looked at one another. It had never occurred to me, I’m sure wouldn’t occur to people, that it had once been that easy. ‘I wish I could give you that,’ she said. ‘La liberté.’
I wanted to tell her about the meetings I’d had with George, but I sensed a great deal of ambivalence on her part. On the one hand she had encouraged me. Money, which was running in his circles, meant freedom. On the other, I’m sure she was afraid of his power, personal and political, and would rather I was well away from it.
‘If you were needed somewhere,’ she said. ‘In a role, a job, somewhere important, if you had to be away, you’d be exempt.’
‘Where am I needed?’ I said. ‘Nowhere. The only thing I can do is sew, you made sure of that.’ I regretted the words, instantly. ‘I’m sorry, this isn’t your fault.’
‘No,’ she said, not looking at me. ‘You’re right. I should’ve done more.’
We continued walking. I rubbed my lower belly, the cramping started to cease. Did I yearn, for a moment, for that vessel to be filled? They told me I was empty. But my grandmother assured me against that feeling. She gave me the illusion of choice.
‘Then the only other answer is money,’ she said. ‘Either you pay off a doctor to sign you something, to say you can’t have children, or someone else pays. I know it’s done. I know they do it.’
‘It’s death,’ I said, ‘You know how people disappear.’
‘Bearing a child is death, too, Mathilde. How many young women are lost to it? It’s too dangerous. Without drugs, without enough doctors. And if you make it through, then what? Your child dies at three years o
ld of the flu and you may be exempt then, but you are left with nothing. No funding, no life, only heartbreak. Or you run out of food, and one more mouth to feed kills us all. How many friends have you lost to this insanity? To this crazy notion that even though there’s not enough for the living, we should make as much room as we can for the unborn?’
I didn’t want to count them. I had stopped counting. Some had left children behind, others had not. I gave myself tunnel vision, on purpose. I pretended we weren’t friends to begin with.
‘Why did Maman have me then?’ I said. ‘Did she choose it?’
My grandmother looked at me, as we tapped lightly down Netherhall Gardens, past the empty, forgotten giantess houses; broken windows and overgrown lawns, brick walls higher than our heads, buildings dark, oppressive. They’d stood empty for years.
‘It was different then, Mathilde. She chose you because she wanted you and loved you and there was a life to be had for you. Now, there is nothing.’ She lowered her voice as she spotted a woman on the other side of the street. ‘To bring a child into this nothing is cruel. It is a drop in the ocean.’
I nodded. I agreed with her. But I did also think that the world could continue on without us, for longer than we imagined.
I knew that the only thing that kept us going was the other. Or maybe the gooseberries that had once grown on bushes, and the parsley that we could just about get to live. It was the chicken we might nurture and respect and then eat, glad of the small system that still existed in the world that allowed us to do this. What the weather blotted out, we fought against. I fought against this invasion of my body, but I also imagined that somewhere, that ocean she spoke of was a presence and a force, a force that might have brought us to this point, and this earth we lived on. I had a strong sense of this ocean of people and the drops we were within it. I still had a strong sense that I was a woman second, and a human first.