LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘The day I put my head in the oven.’

      A slight disturbance swept across the blue pools, a ripple stirred the water, and Griet smiled.

      ‘As soon as you stop waiting for him and focus attention on yourself, life will improve no end’, she’d read half an hour earlier in Rhonda’s waiting room. ‘Show me a fairy tale with a beautiful woman in it and I’ll show you a bimbo in limbo waiting to be released by the love of a good man.’ She’d snapped the magazine shut in irritation and lit a cigarette.

      She craved a cigarette now, but she’d forbidden herself to smoke in Rhonda’s consulting room. A person had to have some self-discipline.

      ‘It was as though l had always looked at life through the proverbial rose-coloured glasses – such a wonderful hazy world – and then the glasses suddenly fell off. And then, for the first time, I saw myself as I am. Not as I’d like to be. It was a hell of a shock.’

      ‘Help Me, Rhonda’, the Beach Boys sang, ‘Help Me, Rhonda’. It was a tune that often ran through Griet’s mind when she looked at the Mickey Mouse clock. Her hour was nearly over.

      ‘It finally got through to me that maybe I’d never have a child, never write a great novel, never even have a successful relationship with a man. I’d never felt so fucking useless before.’

      ‘You spent nearly seven years with a man,’ said Rhonda comfortingly from her red sofa. ‘You were married for three years. You can’t make out now that everything was one big disaster.’

      ‘Sorry,’ mumbled Griet, ‘but that’s how I feel. It’s like a movie with a bad ending. You remember the end, no matter how good the rest was.’

      ‘It was not clear why the ice was green.’ That was the last sentence of the report she’d read that morning, the sentence that had given her hope again. At least there were still some things that even her husband and her shrink couldn’t explain.

      5

      And Why Are Your Eyes So Big, Child?

      There were days like today, when Griet felt as though she was trapped in the middle of a massive children’s party. Every woman in the supermarket had a child hanging on to her hand or packed into her trolley among the groceries. As though you could buy a child off the shelf like a life-sized gingerbread man.

      And as if the epidemic of children weren’t enough, every shelf in the supermarket mocked her failure as a woman. Baby bottles and disposable nappies and Purity food in various colours and flavours. Toddlers’ toys and pet food, colouring books and fat crayons, peanut butter and golden syrup. Everything made her think of children.

      On days like this she envied the biblical Sarah. Or Lorca’s Yerma. They’d at least escaped the humiliation of the modern supermarket.

      Purposefully, she walked past the rows of medicine, past Kiss-it-better-with-Band-Aid and Doctor-it-with-Dettol, heading for the boring washing powder aisle. She felt like Little Red Riding Hood – in a red T-shirt with an orange plastic basket – who had to resist the temptations of the forest. Her only comfort was that she didn’t have to push a heavy trolley around since she no longer shopped for her husband and his children.

      It was impossible to explain how everything inside her contracted every time she thought about the children she’d lost. Four of them: three from her husband and, long before she met him, the first one, which she’d chosen to get rid of. And now the two stepsons too. Half a dozen children, four from her own body and two from her heart, all lost to her.

      She couldn’t even discuss it with her shrink.

      She chose the cheapest washing powder because the advertisements all sounded the same to her. Idiotic women who took greater pleasure in clean washing than in sex.

      Can you see the difference?

      She wasn’t sorry about the abortion, she’d decided again and again. She hadn’t thought of the foetus as a person. She hadn’t given it a name.

      But she wondered, since she’d lost the others. She wondered whether she was being punished because she hadn’t wanted that one. And she was angry with herself because she couldn’t shake off the fetters of Calvinism.

      Good Lord, she’d been twenty years old, what could she have done? Her poor partner in crime had been barely a year older – the first man she’d ever slept with, fancy that! A sunburnt blond boy on a surfboard. It was a catastrophe that would ruin her promising student years, her brilliant career, her whole golden future.

      She’d never told him she was pregnant. She still saw him around town sometimes – a successful businessman in a silver-blue BMW, married with two children – and wondered what he’d have done if he’d known. She wondered how many men all over the world would never know that their lovers had had abortions.

      It was difficult enough to share birth with a man, to make him understand how it felt to be ripped open in such a primitive way. It was almost impossible to share the experience of an abortion with a man.

      Take Louise, for example. Her lover had dropped her in a back street in Woodstock, pressed a blank cheque into her hand and wished her good luck. He only pitched up at her flat again three days later. Griet’s sister Petra was another case in point. Her lover had driven to Lesotho with her and stayed in a hotel with her until she stopped bleeding, but their relationship was over within a month. You just can’t win, Petra had wept. There was no such thing as a successful abortion. Something always had to be sacrificed.

      Griet walked past the pet products and looked away quickly when a picture on a tin of dog food caught her eye. Beware of the wolf, Little Red Riding Hood’s mother had warned her, keep an eye open for anything that looks like a wolf. Griet had wanted a dog very badly – something to cherish in place of a child – but her husband wouldn’t hear of it. Beware of men who don’t like dogs, her mother had warned her.

      Of course she believed in a god, she had argued with her cynical husband. You can’t believe in witches and angels unless you also believe in a god. But her god was a god of love, not a wicked wizard who punished you because you’d had an illegal abortion as a twenty-year-old student. Her husband believed in nothing; not in wizards, not in gods, not even in himself.

      She liked to think the first one had been a boy. She knew the next two were girls. She’d given them names, Nanda and Nina, and had spoken to them for hours on end. Warned each of them against wolves and men who don’t like dogs. Funny how you recall your mother’s least sensible advice when you have a daughter of your own. You’d do anything to protect her: tell her she mustn’t go to bed with wet hair; ask a good fairy to make all her wishes come true; sell your soul to the devil if it would buy her happiness.

      But it hadn’t helped. She’d carried each of them for only three months. The only proof that they’d ever existed was the sonar pictures of two foetuses, no bigger than Thumbelina, the fairy child.

      She walked past the meat fridge. Maybe she wouldn’t feel so bloodthirstily angry with her husband if she became a vegetarian. She hesitated near the coffee. Maybe she wouldn’t feel so sexually frustrated if she stopped stoking her libido with caffeine. She chose a bag of Blue Mountain filter coffee and placed it resignedly in her plastic basket.

      She found it amazing that she could get by without caffeine, nicotine or alcohol whenever she was pregnant. As though her whole body was working so hard to create a human being that there was no energy left for unhealthy obsessions. The maternal instinct must be one of the most powerful forces on earth, stronger than any army, more potent than witchcraft or technology. Stronger and more potent – and less comprehensible – than even mankind’s self-destructive urges.

      The fourth one was the son who’d stolen her heart. And no wonder! He’d spent a full nine months creeping closer and closer to her heart, until, near the end, she could hardly breathe at night. He was too lively for the space in her womb, it seemed that he wanted to invade the space round her lungs too, as though

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