The Ice is Singing Page 13

  ‘It’s not an illness,’ Sally told her. ‘African women work in the fields up to and including the day their baby is born. Pregnant women are often more robust than those who are not; pregnancy is a healthy, natural state.’

  ‘You’re not African, and this isn’t a field. You look awful. Go home, have some food, and go to bed.’

  Examining herself in her bedroom mirror one night Sally was shocked to notice sudden changes in her body. Her small breasts were swollen and heavy, her waist was disappearing. She knew, of course, obviously, that her body would change shape. But the speed of the metamorphosis took her by surprise, made her feel slightly panicky, as if things had been taken out of her control.

  Her plans for a home delivery were being threatened, both by the GP who had visited her, who refused to allow any first babies to be born at home (‘especially to women as old as you’) and by the hospital, who now had her on their books, and summoned her for four-weekly checkups. A friend introduced her to a midwife who was in favour of home deliveries, and they agreed that the best way to manage the whole business now was probably to pretend to go along with what the hospital said. When labour started, Sally would simply stay at home. Nadine, the midwife, would be called, and the doctor could be informed afterwards that the baby had been born before Sally had time to get to hospital.

  When she was four and a half months pregnant, Sally, who normally slept well, woke up in the middle of the night and could not go back to sleep. This happened four nights running. She went for long walks to tire herself out, even went swimming though she hardly had the energy for it. But she woke again next day at 2 a.m. Lying in the darkness puzzling about what was waking her, ears peeled for cats or footsteps or distant sirens, she suddenly felt an awful sensation in her belly. A sort of scramble, a shuddering shivering slither, as of something furtive and formless trying to escape. She lay still, the instant sweat boiling out of her skin, rising up in hot bubbles through her pores. It was as if her flesh were crawling – inside.

  The Quickening. At four to five months, the mother-to-be first feels her baby kicking or turning. Sally recalled word for word the descriptions from her books. ‘Some mothers have described that first miraculous sensation of baby stirring as being like the delicate brushing of a butterfly’s wings.’ As she lay paralysed and sweating on the bed, it moved again; she felt a thing that was not her shift in her belly. She shuddered involuntarily. She tried to imagine the gentle flutter of a butterfly’s wings, and visualized a butterfly trapped, in there, surrounded by the folds of red meat – fluttering in a panic like a trapped bird, smashing its wings to sticky dust against the thick wet walls. She ran to the bathroom and vomited.

  Back in bed she held herself stiff, waiting for the creature to move again. Tried to feel joyful, tried to feel some connection between herself and the small person who was stretching its limbs in her womb. She could feel nothing but revulsion.

  There, inside her, it would grow: there, inside her, it would move. Her feelings were of no consequence to it. It had a life to live, and would live it despite her. It would wriggle and squirm repulsively in her belly whether she wanted to sleep or not. A suffocating claustrophobia descended on her and she opened the window and leant out to try and breathe. It was there. Inside her. She couldn’t go out without it. Couldn’t decide not to have it. Couldn’t just put it down for a bit. It was there – moving, living, growing bigger all the time. She made herself breathe deeply and regularly, forcing her body to relax limb by limb. She was shaking.

  It grew worse every night. As soon as she lay down to sleep it started to writhe. On a television film programme she had seen a clip from Alien, where a monster burst from a man’s stomach. The stirrings in her own belly brought the scene vividly to mind.

  When Sally was not preoccupied by the sheer physical revulsion the foetal movements caused her, she recited to herself like an incantation that she wanted this baby, she had chosen to have it, she had wanted the experience of pregnancy and motherhood, it was a part of being a woman. At night the sense of claustrophobia became more and more keen, so that she often ended up sitting by the open window, duvet wrapped round her, panting slightly and conscious of the creature growing, upwards, to increase the pressure on her lungs and constrict her breathing further. She wanted to run. The terror that gripped her could only be answered by running, fast and headlong, as far as possible.

  And when she had sat panting by the window in the dark for a while, and felt her panic subsiding, she thought about how she would describe pregnancy, if someone who was writing a baby book asked her; just for balance, perhaps, she would put forward a different view.

  Perhaps she would describe it as a disease. You get this disease (off men, of course – that fits). To begin with you don’t know you’ve got it, but then it starts to make you sick. You feel dizzy and nauseous, you throw up. Perhaps your body is trying to get rid of the disease by doing this – but it won’t succeed. Because you have been invaded by the perfect parasite. Your body starts to swell; breasts, belly, blow up to gross proportions – your body changes shape. Your weight increases and your back aches; your ankles swell, and varicose veins pop out on your legs. Not content with deforming your body, the disease numbs your brain, infiltrating it with chemical solutions to slow and pacify it – as they drug animals to quieten them before slaughter. You cannot shake off the lingering sluggishness. But you remember how you were before you caught this disease, and at times your rational mind panics and your swollen body balks and quivers in terror at the changes that afflict you.

  All this is nothing compared to the stages that must come. When the woman is so swollen and deformed that she can scarcely stand, the creature inside her wriggles out. It takes a long time, boring out between her legs, through the most sensitive part of her body. Once delivered it clings to her like some accursed beast wished on a victim in a fairy tale. It insists on her continuous presence and attention; it feeds by chewing on her swollen nipples. And the world supports the disease in its attack upon the woman, saying how wonderful motherhood is, how you must enjoy it, how it makes you bloom. It says ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’ and tickles the parasite under the chin. It chuckles over sleepless nights. The woman is now destined to devote the rest of her life to nurturing the creature; her freedom, her individuality are destroyed. And the most cruel part of all is that the disease of motherhood involves the lifelong delusion of the victim. Even when the creature has taken all it can from her and moved on, she will feel the compulsive emotional need to put its interests before her own. Helplessly and pitifully she will love it, to be rewarded by its ingratitude and contempt.

  Sally’s intellectual pleasure in this comparison was corroded by guilt. She had chosen this, she wanted it. She had tried to get pregnant. Nothing was taking her over, she had her own life, work, friends. Care of the baby was going to be shared. It could never use her in this way. And how could a process so natural – so necessary to the survival of humanity – be seen as evil? There must be a badness within her – a failure – for her to even be able to imagine it like this. She was not doing it right. She was failing to be natural. Anyone could be a mother, women who were unhealthy, who didn’t know and didn’t care about their bodies, women who were undernourished and overworked, obese women, smokers – they didn’t find it so hard. What was wrong with her? Pregnant women were happy. What was wrong with her?

  Sally did not tell her friends about her waking nights, nor about the attacks of panic which wrung her to breathlessness two or three times a day. She was too angry and ashamed to talk about it. She made silly mistakes at work, giving customers the wrong change and forgetting titles and authors. When Martha suggested that she should stop work now, until the baby was born, Sally did not put up a fight. She seemed to be retreating into herself more and more. After trying to draw her out and being rejected, Mary and Sonya decided that Sally probably needed more personal space, at this important time in her life. She was no longer being sick, and the baby wa
s clearly growing; what could they do? They made sure there was plenty of good food available, and they knocked on her door to chat to her on all sorts of pretexts, at evenings and weekends.

  Sally hid in her room. It was her body. Her neat, well-proportioned body, her healthy flesh and skin that the creature was taking over. Soon raw red lines like welts would appear across her bulging stomach; she would be branded by stretch marks. If she had been able to tell it to stop just for a day – for a few minutes . . . But it would not. Its growth was inexorable. She was no more than its cage, trying to hold her inside walls away from its blows. Inside her own body, in the very centre of her self, her womb, something alien to herself was growing – something beyond her control. Inside her single state, a terrorist was issuing demands and making threats. Her body was in rebellion. And there were still three months to go.

  Sonya and Mary were woken one night by Sally’s screams. They ran to her room. She was crouching on the floor beneath the window, clutching her belly. As they ran to lift her up they saw that her thighs were streaked with watery blood, and that there was a pool of liquid on the floor. They wrapped her in a blanket and drove her straight to hospital. Then they waited in an anteroom until morning, when a nurse came to tell them that Sally had lost her baby, but that she herself would be all right.

  Sally’s friends were divided on how badly the miscarriage affected her. Some thought she coped very well, since she returned to work within weeks, and resumed all her previous activities. Others thought her too withdrawn – felt that she should have talked about it more. They mentioned to one another the healing effects of grieving, and the dangers of burying intense emotions. They wondered whether she would try again. Sally told them she would not.

  Sally did not tell anybody why she would not try again, and perhaps she did not tell herself. She tried not to think of it, but at night pictures would come into her mind. She saw the blue-red gleaming flesh of skinned rabbits that hung on metal hooks in the butcher’s shop when she was a child, the transparent membranes enclosing juices. She saw a small pale face as of someone who has never known blood, pale and bloodless and perfectly shaped as a white petal floating away on black water. She saw red meat stretching and contracting in a spastic repetition of useless movement. The heart stopped beating. The creature died.

  Over the months Sally lost a lot of weight, and Mary and Sonya were very concerned. Sally angrily refused to discuss it or take advice. Now and then she ate a lot, to shut them up, then made herself sick in the toilet afterwards. At night when she undressed, she looked at her body in the bedroom mirror and saw with satisfaction that her breasts had vanished now, her rib-ridged chest was as flat as a boy’s. She was glad. She didn’t deserve to have breasts. She didn’t deserve to be a woman.

  Tuesday Mar. 4

  Sometimes the girls came to visit. I’d get a phone call the night before – and then perhaps another next morning if they’d changed their minds or remembered a rehearsal or outing.

  They came straight from school because it was nearer. They came in and stood in the kitchen, looking round as if they expected it to be different. I told them to sit down, and I put the kettle on. The twins were up, sitting on a rug in the corner with some toys; one kept throwing a rattle out of reach and then crying for it. Vi went to play with them. Ruth sat at the table, carefully hanging her bag and jacket over the back of the chair, like a visitor.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked.

  ‘All right, thank you. How’s school?’

  ‘OK. We’re doing a concert on Friday night.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Orchestra. School orchestra. He’s made me first violin because Anthea missed two rehearsals.’

  ‘Oh. That’s good.’

  ‘We’re all going to listen to her being a star,’ chipped in Vi.

  ‘Vi!’ said Ruth.

  ‘Gareth and Linda and you, you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s nice. It’ll be nice for you to have your family in the audience, Ruth.’ There was a silence, broken by one of the twins starting to cry.

  ‘I’ll give them their tea,’ I said. ‘We can have ours afterwards. It’s in the oven.’ I wanted them to know I’d already made it. I mixed up some pap with hot water from the kettle and left it to cool for the twins.

  ‘One of them’s dirty, Mum, I can smell it,’ said Vi. It could have waited till after their tea. It was the boy. I took him to the bathroom. When I went back into the kitchen they were talking but they stopped. Vi wanted to help so she fed one while I fed the other. She kept exclaiming and laughing about how messy they were.

  ‘Why don’t you go and watch telly or something?’ I said to Ruth. She was just sitting staring at the table. She went to the bottom of the stairs then turned back and went to the sitting room. I don’t know why she thought of going to her old room. There was nothing in it but some old toys and books, and a few clothes she didn’t like dangling in the wardrobe – mainly things I’d given her.

  ‘How’s Gareth?’ I asked Vi.

  ‘He’s fine. He’s going to some telly competition in Rome next week.’

  ‘Is Linda going?’

  ‘No, no, she’s too busy at work.’

  ‘So you and Ruth get left to your own devices quite a bit, do you?’

  ‘We’re OK. We both have lots of homework. We’ve been painting Ruth’s room mauve. It’s disgusting. She chose it.’

  ‘Do you – who cooks?’

  ‘Oh, Linda and Dad both cook – and sometimes we have take-aways. We’re eating fine, honestly.’

  ‘When did Gareth learn to cook?’

  ‘He’s quite a good cook, Mum. He made spaghetti bolognese the other night, you should have seen it, it was great.’ The twins had finished their slop. I wiped them and took the girl out of her chair to give her a drink. The boy started to cry. It was only because Vi was there. I asked her to walk up and down with him for me.

  When I’d fed them I cleared up their mess. ‘I’m going to bath them, Vi. They go in the big bath now.’ She might have wanted to see.

  ‘OK Mum. I think I’ll start my homework.’ She sat at the table and took out her books. The twins cried as I took them to the bathroom. The boy cried all the way through his bath. The girl kept sucking the flannel. I knew she would make herself sick. I’d forgotten to get their clean sleeping suits out of the drier because the girls were there, so I had to call to Vi to get them for me. She brought the whole basket of clothes, saying she couldn’t find what I wanted. She said, ‘Something’s run.’ They were clean enough, they’d been washed.

  I got them bundled up and dressed and into bed, and when I looked at my watch it was after seven. I went into the kitchen. They were both sitting at the table. Ruth said, ‘Do they always cry that much?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose they do.’ I got the casserole out for them. It would have been even longer to wait for rice to boil so I just put bread on the table.

  They ate in silence.

  ‘Have you been out anywhere nice?’ I asked.

  ‘We went to see Close Encounters,’ Vi said.

  ‘With Vi’s special friend,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Who’s Vi’s special friend?’

  ‘Well he’s not a boyfriend,’ said Ruth deliberately.

  ‘Shut up!’ Vi was blushing. ‘He’s a friend, he’s just someone I happen to get on with. He is not my boyfriend. If he was my boyfriend I wouldn’t go to the pictures with him with you, would I?’

  Ruth shrugged.

  ‘How’s your b— Trevor, Ruth?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I – you’re still seeing him, are you?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  There was a silence. I cleared the plates away. I’d bought some chocolate gâteau. As I was taking it out of the fridge one of the babies began to cry.

  ‘Haven’t they gone to bed?’

  ‘That doesn’t mean they have to sleep, Ruth.’ It was the girl. I paced up and down wit
h her for a while, until she seemed settled. Then I put her down. I was just creeping to the door when she started up again. I sat on the bed and gave her the breast. I was tired, I had to stop myself falling asleep. I put her down again and crept out of the room. They’d put the radio on, in the kitchen, I could hear the faint hubbub of pop music in the background. They were talking in low voices. I opened the door quietly before they noticed I was there. They had cleared away the dishes and Ruth had her homework out. Vi was leafing through a magazine. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but the way the room was – the music, and the full kitchen table, and the easy lazy conversation between them – made me want to sit at the table and be in that room with them. It was as if they lived there again.

  We used to sit around the table a lot. I’d be reading my bland teenage fiction, or the paper. Or the small ads. There was a fight over the local paper every Friday night when it arrived. I was trying to remember when it started – I think when Vi’s bike was stolen and I was looking for a new one for her. People sell such strange things: antique diving helmets, used corsets, gold-plated bath taps (‘unwanted gift’). Ruth found one of the all-time gems; ‘Priceless Chinese-style vase. £5.’ They would snatch the paper from each other to read them out, and we would all giggle helplessly.

  When I closed the door behind me they went quiet.

  ‘I – would you like a drink of coffee?’

  ‘Yes please, Mum. Is the radio too loud?’

  ‘No. It’s fine. It’s nice to have it on. I seem to forget it’s there.’ I made coffee and sat at the table. Ruth got on with her homework. Vi idly showed me a couple of fashion photos in her magazine, and asked if I liked them. Gareth had given her some money for new clothes – she was going shopping with Linda. One of the twins started to cry again. I got up.