‘What cord?’ said Ruby.
‘The umbilical cord,’ said the blonde woman. ‘I’m a therapist too. He’s doing a natal, he’s re-experiencing his birth. Quick, turn him, get him untangled. Loosen your grip so I can turn him.’
Ruby loosened her grip, the blonde woman rolled David round between Ruby’s legs. ‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s all right now. Let him squeeze himself out the way he was doing.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Ruby. ‘This never happens back in Los Angeles. They just go back to that big YES and Zonk! They’re out again.’
Murmurs and crowd noises. This wasn’t Los Angeles, said several other Americans. Small stirrings of solidarity between the expatriates and those of us who were English, feelings of pride that things in London might perhaps be not quite so simple as in Los Angeles. There was renewed interest all round. David was wiggling and shimmying, parting Ruby’s legs with his hands and uttering rending groans.
‘Whatever it is it feels good,’ said Ruby. ‘It feels like something big happening. You have to stay open to whatever comes up in this kind of work.’
‘He needs help,’ said the blonde woman. ‘I’ll push from behind. Somebody else take his head and shoulders and ease him along when he tries to get himself out.’
‘What are they doing now?’ said the little girl to her mother.
‘David’s being born,’ said her mother.
Willing hands were laid on at both ends of David, Ruby, and the blonde lady. More and more people joined in the delivery. By this time David, still with his eyes closed, was halfway out of his trousers with all the wiggling. He was wearing black knickers. There was more pushing and pulling, much encouragement and advice, and finally with one big hoarse cry David was all the way out. Of Ruby’s legs and his trousers both.
There was a general happy clamour and some of the girls had tears in their eyes. I looked at Harriet and saw that she did too. I squeezed her hand and she squeezed back. Ruby hugged David. ‘Give Mommy a big kiss,’ she said.
David still had his eyes closed, and as he moved into Ruby’s embrace he fumbled one big bouncy breast out of her bikini top and applied himself to it like a veteran infant.
‘Jesus!’ said Ruby and pressed his head to her bosom. There was a spontaneous ovation from everybody except Ruby’s boyfriend, who said something violent in Italian, rolled his eyes up and made a gesture. David opened his eyes and smiled a happy smile, Ruby put her breast back, somebody brought her a cup of tea. People lit cigarettes and joints, settled back cosily.
There were many earnest questions put to David by girls with glistening eyes and men in whose faces there now shone an awful lust for infancy. How had it felt, where had he been, how did he feel now? David said it had been a deep experience, it had taken him back to the darkness of the womb, his pre-natal anxieties, his ambivalence about his mother, his resentment of his father, his fears about coming out into the world. He told of his joy at the first light of emergence and Ruby’s boob. He felt good, renewed, serene. There was less tension in his neck. That was as much as he could say now, it was something he’d have to reflect on, it had been a very deep experience.
Now there was a rush to be next for Ruby’s Original Therapy but the primordial soup wasn’t in it any more, being born was what everybody wanted to have a go at. Harriet put her name down on the list, I didn’t. Not my time for rebirth just yet. Ruby promised to take on all comers, to go right through the night if necessary, and after a short break the therapy resumed.
Some wept as they were reborn, others raged. Some both raged and wept. The wailing girl went dead silent when she did it, the one who’d muttered to herself shouted the whole time. Stravinsky was abandoned, no one needed music any more. Additional mats were brought in to afford as it were a longer birth canal. Some thrashed about in Ruby’s grip while being pulled and pushed the length of the room and others shimmied smoothly through her legs like fish. Ruby was red and blotched and chafed all over from being scraped along and struggled with up and down the room but she said that she was so energized by the atmosphere that she wasn’t tired at all.
Even though many of the girls did their writhing in bras and knickers the whole thing was not sexually stimulating, everyone was in such terrible need of something harder to find than sex. I particularly noticed one impressively handsome bearded young man who had sat in a lotus position with a very straight back and a very aloof face earlier in the evening. Now he actually grovelled and whimpered waiting for his turn.
I could never have imagined Harriet squirming on a mat in the grip of a lady wrestler’s legs but when her turn came there she was. She was fully clothed of course but her face was naked and I’d never seen her look like that before. I thought of films in which strange harsh voices spoke through women who were mediums. Harriet groaned and sobbed in her own voice but her body arched and twisted as if some terrible thing in her wanted to shed her like an old skin and get out. I couldn’t help noticing, what with the disarray of her clothing and her skirt sliding up, that she had much more of a figure than I’d given her credit for.
By then I wasn’t feeling cosy any more. One moment I was safe and a little detached and the next I looked at the candle flames and moving shadows and was sick with terror. It was as if the evening had reversed a giant devil-mirror with its picture of a world and I was silvered at the back of things, lost atoms speeding to infinity. Terror was all there was, nothing else. It might reflect the images of aeroplanes or cathedrals or Ruby in a bikini and the faces in the room but there was no reality but the terror, all that it reflected was illusion.
When Harriet had finished we left. The night outside was quiet and peaceful but the silver terror was all about us. We got a taxi and Harriet cuddled tiredly against me. Well, I thought, here we are, and took her in my arms and kissed her. When we got to her place I paid the driver, she opened the front door and we went up to her room without a word.
We took our clothes off with the terror in the room. The terror was the energy that moved us, our naked bodies moved together like the sound waves of a scream. Most animals don’t make love face to face, I thought as I fell asleep. Male and female face the same way, seeing what’s about them. Whales and humans show two backs to it.
26 Neaera H
‘Death of the oyster-catchers’ was the heading of an article in the Observer:
A programme to kill 11,000 sea birds has been under way for the past month on the sands of the Burry estuary on the Gower peninsula in South Wales.
Men with shotguns have been shooting oyster-catchers on the morning and afternoon tides and, so far, several hundred have been killed. The marksmen are being paid a bounty of 25p a bird.
The South Wales Sea Fisheries Committee, which is running the culling programme, believes it is necessary to kill the birds in order to save the world-famous cockle beds of Penclawdd. The birds, they say, are eating five to six million baby cockles each winter and they can eat more in a month than the cocklers can gather in a year.
Cockling in Penclawdd, the article went on to say, was one of Britain’s first forms of social security in that it offered a livelihood to women who had lost their men in mining accidents. The article ended with the words of a cockier from Crofty. ‘We’re having a struggle to even reach our daily quota of cockles nowadays,’ he said. ‘Quite simply, it is either us or the birds.’
Uncanny, I thought. Is there something keeping its eye on my mind, waiting to strike down whatever I think about? I’d never in my life seen a word about oyster-catchers in the news before. Now they’re killing them. ‘Us or the birds,’ said the cockier.