‘A baby,’ I said unsteadily. ‘That’s where my baby was.’
36
They taught me about condoms in the hospital, when it was far, far too late anyway. In the few months before I was discharged, when everyone was talking about AIDs, we had HIV-awareness groups, and one of the nurses, a girl called Emma with a nose-ring and sturdy calves, would sit in front of us, blushing a bright red as she showed us how to roll a condom on to a banana. A sheath, she called it, because in those days that was what the newspapers called them – and when she talked about anal sex, she called it ‘rectal sex’. She said it with her face turned to the window as if she was addressing the trees. The others would be laughing and joking, but I’d be sitting at the back of the group, as red-faced as Emma, staring at the condom. A condom. I’d never heard of a condom. Honestly, how could anyone so ignorant have managed to live for so long?
For example, the significance of nine months. Over the years I’d caught jokes and muttered asides: ‘Oh, yeah, cat’s got the cream now, but wait till you see his face in nine months’ time.’ That sort of thing. But I didn’t understand. The really stupid thing was that if they’d asked me the gestational period of an elephant I’d have probably known. But truths about humans I was lost with. My parents had done a good job of filtering the information that got through to me. Except for the orange book, of course, they weren’t that vigilant.
The jigging girl in the next bed stared at me really hard when I admitted how ignorant I was.
‘You’re not serious?’
I shrugged.
‘Well, bollocks,’ she said, a faint note of awe in her voice. ‘You really are serious.’
In their exasperation the nurses found me a book about the facts of life. It was called Mummy, What’s That In Your Tummy? and it had a pale pink cover with a cartoon of a girl in bunches looking up at a big pregnant stomach in a flowery dress. One of the reviews on the back said: ‘Tender and informative: everything you need to know to answer your children’s little questions.’ I’d read it from cover to cover and I kept it in a brown bag pushed right to the back of my locker. I wished I’d had it earlier. Then I’d have understood what was happening to me.
I didn’t tell a soul in hospital what those weeks after the van were like. How it took me weeks and months to piece it all together from whispers and odd allusions in the ravaged paperbacks on the shelves at home. How when I realized there was going to be a baby I knew, beyond any doubt, that my mother would kill either me or the baby or both. This, I suppose, is the true price of ignorance.
In the alley outside a car door slammed. Someone jingled keys, and a woman giggled in a high thin voice, ‘I’m not going to drink a thing, I swear.’ Their laughter dwindled as they continued down the alley to Waseda Street. I didn’t move, or breathe – I was staring at Jason, waiting to hear what he would say.
‘You’re a good girl.’ Eventually he took a step back and gave me a slow, sly smile. ‘You’re a good girl, you know that? And now things are going to be fine.’
‘ Fine? ’
‘Yes.’ He put his tongue between his teeth and ran his finger carefully along the biggest of the scars, the central one that ran from two inches right of my navel diagonally to my hipbone. He clicked his nail over the knotty place in the centre of it, and navigated his way round the little holes where the surgeon had tried to stitch me up. There was a note of curious wonder in his voice when he spoke: ‘There are so many of them. What made them?’
‘A-’ I tried to speak but my jaw was locked. I had to shake my head to make it move. ‘A knife. A kitchen knife.’
‘Aah,’ he said, wryly. ‘A knife.’ He closed his eyes and slowly licked his lips, letting his fingers linger on the gristly whirl of scar tissue in the middle. The first place the knife had gone in. I flinched and he opened his eyes, looking at me intently. ‘Did it go deep here? Hmmm? Here?’ He pressed his finger into it. ‘That’s what it feels like. Feels like it went in deep.’
‘ Deep? ’ I echoed. There was something in his voice, something rich and horrible, as if he was taking immense pleasure in this. The air in the room seemed staler than it had a few minutes ago. ‘I-’ Why did he want to know how deep it went? Why was he asking me this?
‘Did it? Did it go in deep?’
‘Yes,’ I said faintly, and he gave a delighted shiver, as if something was walking across his shoulders.
‘Look at this.’ He ran his palm down the skin on his arm. ‘Look, my hair’s standing up on end. I get such a stiff for this kind of thing. The girl I told you about? In South America?’ He circled his fingers around his bicep, half closing his eyes in pleasure at the memory. ‘She’d lost her arm. And the place where they took it off… it was like a…’ He held his fingers bunched up, as if he was balancing the most delicate, the softest fruit on his fingertips. ‘It was beautiful, like a plum. Whoah-’ He grinned at me. ‘But you’ve always known about me, haven’t you?’
‘Always known? No – I-’
‘Yes.’ He dropped to his knees in front of me, his hands on my hips, breathing hotly on to my stomach. ‘You did. You knew what gets me.’ His tongue, dry and corrugated, stretched out to meet my skin. ‘You knew I just love to fuck freaks.’
My paralysis broke. I pushed him away and stumbled backwards. He rocked back on his heels, looking mildly surprised, as I grabbed up my camisole, fumbling it on. I wanted to run out of the room before I started to cry, but he was between me and the doorway, so I turned and crouched in the corner, facing the wall. Everything was coming back to me – the photographs in his room, the videos the Russians swore he watched, the way he’d talked about the Nurse. I was one of them – a freak. Something mangled to turn him on, just like in the videos he watched.
‘What is it?’
‘Um…’ I said, in a tiny voice, using my palms to wipe my eyes. ‘Um… I think, I think maybe I’d-’ The tears were running into my mouth. I cupped my hands to catch them so he wouldn’t see them dropping on to the floor. ‘Nothing.’
He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘See? I told you it would be okay. I told you I’d understand.’
I didn’t answer. I was trying not to sob.
‘This is what we’ve been moving towards all along, isn’t it? It’s what pulled us together. I knew the moment I saw all this – your paintings, all the freaky photos in your books – I knew you and me were… I knew we were the same.’ I heard him fumble out another cigarette and I imagined his face, smirking, confident, finding sex in this, sex in the scars I’d been hiding for so long. I imagined what I looked like to him, crouched in the corner, my thin, cold arms wrapped round me. ‘It just took you a little longer,’ he said. ‘A little longer to recognize that we’re a pair. A pair of perverts. We’re made for each other.’
I leaped up and grabbed my clothes from the chair, dressing quickly, not looking at him, my legs shaking helplessly. I pulled on my coat and fumbled for my keys in my handbag, all the time taking short, desperate gulps of air, trying to hold back the tears. He didn’t say anything or attempt to stop me. He watched me in silence, smoking thoughtfully, a half-smile on his face.
‘I’m going out,’ I said, throwing open the door.
‘It’s okay,’ I heard him say behind me. ‘It’s okay. You’ll be okay soon.’
Even as recently as 1980, it was possible in England for a stillborn baby not to be buried. For her not to be buried in a grave, but instead to be taken in a yellow waste-bag and incinerated with other clinical waste. It was even possible for her mother, a teenage girl with no experience, to let the baby go and never dare ask where she went. It was all possible, because of a simple accident of the calendar: my baby had failed to live inside me for a crucial twenty-eight weeks. Just one day short, and the state said that my baby should not be buried, that she was a day too small to be a human being, a day too small to get a funeral or a proper girl’s name, and so would for ever carry the name foetus. A name that is full of sickness and nothing like my little girl when she was born.