Besides, he thinks Thomas is dying. He stays true to his diagnosis.
The milk has bubbled over in the pan. Thomas tuts. ‘I’ll have to clean that up tomorrow.’ He props himself against the sink and I pour the milk into a mug. When I hold it out to him he shakes his head, so I sip it and feel it as a solid, welcome heat in my mouth and between my hands. Another thing I can be sure of.
‘I’m an idiot,’ Thomas says.
‘Nothing new there.’
‘Well, now I’m a bigger one than usual.’ He pats the soft roundness of himself with gentle hands. ‘A huge one.’
‘Does it hurt?’ I ask him.
‘No. But it makes me… slow. And awkward. And I can’t sleep at night for its turning and poking.’
‘It moves inside you?’
‘All the time, but worse at night. Sometimes I love it and sometimes…’ He looks at Betty, who has emerged from the pantry and shut the door behind itself. ‘…I hate it and I want it out of me. It drains me. I can’t explain it.’ His face contorts again. ‘It makes me so ugly.’
I put down the mug and give him my most serious face. ‘I hate to tell you this, Thomas, but you were always ugly.’
He punches my arm. It actually hurts.
I say, ‘Ow!’
‘You deserve it.’
I move to the window and relish the constant moon. The garden is flat and leafless, like a picture. Nothing moves. I wish I could speak to my moon, charm it, make it smile.
‘What’s going to happen?’ says Thomas.
‘With you, or with everyone?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know. Both.’
I understand what he wants from me. I say, ‘You’ll have this baby and it will be – it will be – people will take one look at it and they will realise that it needs our love, our unity. Babies bring people together. That’s what they are for. Everyone celebrates the arrival of a baby. I read that somewhere.’
‘And everyone will love it?’ Thomas says, a husk, waiting for me to fill him with hope.
‘Everyone.’
‘But it will be mine.’ He puts his hands on the swelling and his face becomes peaceful as he closes his eyes. Is he trying to communicate with it in the way that I communicate with my Bee? Are pictures passing between them? After a moment he opens his eyes, and says, ‘How come you’re so sure?’
‘Sure of what?’
‘That it is.’ He makes a gesture, palms unfolding, like the blooming of a flower between his fingers. ‘Is a baby.’
‘I just am. And so are you.’
‘You’re my confidence, ‘ he says. ‘You’re my confidence, Nate.’ He reaches for my hand, and squeezes it.
‘Get some sleep,’ I tell him. ‘Let Betty put you to bed.’
Betty comes forward, and scoops him up. He sighs. I think he might sleep now.
I return to my room to see Bee lying there, and my space in the bed beside it. For the first time I ask myself – is that truly where I belong? Is Bee an integral part of me?
I am Thomas’s confidence and Bee is mine. But what if Bee has lied to me, just as I have lied to Thomas? I can’t bear to think of it, of Thomas’s hands on that swelling and Doctor Ben saying there is no hope. And I doubt. I doubt.
Once, in the school allotment, when Paul and Adam mixed up all the labels on the seeds for a joke, Miriam made it their job to care for all the seedlings personally until they could identify them all. It took them months and every time they asked Miriam for help, she said, ‘You made that bed, now you have to lie in it.’ It became a well-worn phrase for a while, behind her back, although I’m sure she heard us whispering it, trying to emulate her teaching tone.
There are two types of understanding in this world. There’s the kind that comes from the reading and the hearing, and it doesn’t penetrate the skin. It is surface knowledge, like a soft blanket that can be placed over the shoulders. And then there is the understanding that comes from doing. That kind of understanding is not soft. It is water that soaks into the rocks and earth, and makes the seeds grow. It is messy, and painful, and impossible to hold.
I get back in my bed. I lie in it.
Thomas moans deeply. The sound, dense with pain, fills his small room. It sinks into his peeling wallpaper and the thrown-back bedsheets.
I talk to him, but he is in a place beyond listening. I say ridiculous, hopeful things, as the skin over his left hip suppurates and oozes, a red mess of blood and pus. Doctor Ben examines it. From my position, sitting next to Thomas’ head, I have a view of Ben’s expression and also down the length of Thomas’s naked body. The swelling is giant, grotesque, the wound on it sickening. Nobody knows how it happened. There were screams in the early morning and I found him this way, Betty hovering over him, shaking its featureless head back and forth.
Thomas’s shiny skin is pulled tight across his chest and stomach, stretched to the point of splitting. But my eyes are not drawn to this as much as to his cock and balls. The balls are shrivelled like walnuts, tiny, in a wrinkled pouch that nestles under a tiny worm of a cock. There’s no hair on him there. And the smell is so sweet and terrible, like death.
Bee, Betty and Bella squeeze up against each other in the corner of the room, blocking the light from the window so we are in semi-darkness. They are motionless. I can see now how it is possible to hate them. Did Betty do this to Thomas, or is this suffering part of the coming of the baby? Is this part of their plan? His eyes roll back in his head and he moans again. I have to say something. I have nothing to say.
‘Thank you for coming out,’ I say to Doctor Ben.
He nods. I think my desperation persuaded him to attend.
‘The injury must have happened days ago. It’s become infected,’ he says.
‘No. He was fine yesterday.’
Ben shakes his head, then says, ‘Can you hold him down? You’ll need to be strong.’
‘I’ll try.’ I clamp my hands on Thomas’s shoulders, try to prepare myself to put my weight against him. Ben lowers one hand on to the swelling. It could only be a light touch, but Thomas lets out a noise that I have only heard animals make, a cry beyond meaning, and the vast lump inside him moves, independent of his body, rippling under Ben’s hand.
Ben falls back, stumbles, and I can’t hold Thomas. He has a strength that I could not have imagined as he pulls himself up from the bed and throws me off. He turns on to his knees so that he is crouching, and Thomas puts his own hands to his wound and pulls it apart.
I see his fingers reach in, peel back the skin and dig through the thick yellow mess that spills out of him, coming free from his body, hanging in strands and globs and soaking into the sheets. He pulls free a solid, grey-streaked mass and it falls on to the bed. It writhes and flails and Ben cries out, a noise of such terror. He gets to his feet and reaches out to the mass. Thomas screams.
The Beauties move so fast that my eyes see it as a trick in the dim light. Two of them take Ben’s legs while the third puts its hands on either side of his head, and squeezes. There is the sound like the cracking of an egg, and then Ben is gone. He is all gone. His eyes and nose and mouth are gone to pieces, a mess, and all I can recognise is the tangle of grey hair that my Bee scoops up in its hands and carries from the room. Bella takes the rest of Ben, carried in its arms. I am left alone with Thomas, Betty and the thing on the bed.
The baby.
Thomas’s eyes are clear and free from pain. He sits back and gathers the baby to his chest. And it is a baby, recognisable in its arms and legs, its scrunched-up eyes and moving mouth. It lets out a noise that is undoubtedly a baby noise. I saw a brand-new baby once before, all pink and swaddled, when I was very young, and it was being passed around a room filled with women who softly held it close. I’m certain that’s what this is. A baby. A baby. The word is a delight in my mind. The baby’s skin is yellow, as yellow as the Beauty, but in every other way it is a baby.