LITMIR.BIZ

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much better; there is a bloom on her cheeks and she smiles shyly in return.

      ‘I haven’t been feeling well these last few days,’ she says. ‘Some kind of bug.’

      In the bathroom she checks to see if she is bleeding but there are no traces. Outside the sun is shining and for the first time in ages she feels a kind of happiness. At lunchtime she returns to the bench in the hope of seeing the old man but he isn’t there. She eats with comfort and knows now that her obsession is at an end. She feels also that there has been a shift in the disposition of the world towards her. Several of her colleagues have come to her during the day and engaged her in jokes and silly games. She has laughed a lot, clasping her hand over her mouth like some shy schoolgirl caught in mischief. Even the sun has lost its oppression. It lies upon her now like a comforter, warming her, making her glow.

      The days which follow are the happiest of her life. She begins to enjoy her work and it seems that a genuine friendship blossoms between herself and her workmates. She goes for drinks after work with them to a little pub where she is shy at first but where the barman gradually comes to recognize her when it is her round. She goes to the cinema and one night at a club one of her colleagues kisses her, and tells her that now, when he has finally got to know her, he thinks she is great.

      The next morning she wakes in her flat and rushes to the toilet, throwing up. On her knees she grips the toilet bowl trying to hold down the panic that is threatening to make her scream. Please, oh please, she cries. It is midday before she can hold down any food. And it is the same the following day and the day after that and the day after that again; sick and frail in the morning with her hand clasped over her stomach until the light midday meal that carries her over till the evening. And it is in these morning hours also that she is stricken with the crazed urge to eat things. In her flat she has to remove the detergents, the soaps and even her bathroom sponge from out of her sight. At work she has her desk cleared of ink, correction fluid and her eraser. And one morning in her nausea and weakness she realizes that her period, normally like clockwork, is three weeks overdue. She thinks of the days without food and the days of nausea and the glass, and wonders has all of this thrown her biology out of alignment. She waits another week, then two more, and at the end of four weeks she visits her doctor.

      Her doctor is a kindly, middle-aged man who listens with his head inclined to his left side, a man hearing signals from a distant planet. He hears her list of symptoms and finally asks her does she herself have any idea what it could be. She skirts around the obvious shaking her head, not wanting to face the incredible. He asks her about her love life and she tells him shamefaced that she has no partner, she is still a virgin. He shakes his head in mystification and tells her he will do a pregnancy test, otherwise he has no clue what it could be. Five minutes later she finds out that she is pregnant.

      She remonstrates. ‘How can that be, I’m still a virgin?’

      ‘It’s very strange,’ he tells her. ‘I never thought in all my days of practice I would come upon such a case. It is a condition that is very rare, one in a million if I can remember the statistics correctly. There is no medical explanation which covers the case entirely. It’s a form of parthenogenesis. What happens is that …’

      He seems awed by her presence and he moves about the room giddily as he talks, keeping his distance and erecting a barrier of technical language between them.

      ‘I find it unbelievable,’ he concludes, ‘totally unbelievable.’

      ‘Well,’ she counters, ‘it’s happening, whether you believe it or not.’

      ‘It’s not that,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen that. It’s just that you’re one in a million, one in ten million.’ He looks at her suddenly. ‘You are going to keep the child?’ It sounds like an accusation, not the question it is meant to be.

      She spreads her hands. ‘I don’t know. This is such a surprise, such a shock. I hadn’t thought about it.’

      He sits on his desk, making an effort to bring the situation under control. Despite the lack of frenzy and raised voices there is no doubt that the room has been visited by some disaster. He clasps his hands before his face in the manner of a penitent and seeks inspiration in the ceiling.

      ‘All right,’ he says. He has finally come to some decision. ‘There really is nothing I can do for you at the moment. I could give you something for the nausea and vomiting but that is not the issue. What I suggest is that you go home, think about it for a while and come back to me with your decision. Think it over. There are other options, things to be done and so on.’

      He is becoming flustered, his sentences are beginning to ramble. She unsettles him with her thin face and her eyes continually focused in her hands. He repeats himself again, almost pleadingly.

      ‘There really is nothing I can do for you now. Call back in a few weeks when you have a decision.’

      She is glad to leave the room. She has difficulty in breathing there, the air seems filled with smoke. Outside in the sunlight she braces herself and it works its way into her, warming her chilled bones. She is marooned now, at a loss where to go. It strikes her that this world is stranger than she can ever imagine. She wonders is it always going to be like this, will there always be this cruelty at the heart of things. Will the world keep offering up jagged pieces of itself, not as a means to enlightenment but as a reminder that it will always have the upper hand? One moment it will seem solved, comprehensible and full of sense, the next it will have heaved beneath her feet throwing up shapes and configurations without precedent, filled with terrors. She walks carefully through the streets now, unsure of her footing. People look strange, their skins have a funny pallor: she can see their veins. She fears that at every corner someone with a clown’s grin will draw her aside and show her some new atrocity. She finds herself walking towards the canal and has to suppress an urge to stretch her arms ahead of her like a blind person. She feels like prey.

      In the cathedral car-park there is a crowd. Busy mothers and fathers fuss over children, straightening ties and fixing veils over angelic faces. Today is Confirmation day and these kids have come here to sign up as soldiers of Christ, new recruits in His massive conscript army serving under assumed names. Standing on the edge of the crowd she notices that the Christ Child in the window has not been replaced. Part of the window has been blocked up with plywood from within. Earlier in the week she read in the local newspaper how the police are mystified by the breakage and how they have no clue whatsoever. She remembers the lines – At this time we have neither suspect nor motive and we are led to believe that it was an act of wanton vandalism. We are looking for anyone with information, no matter how small, to please come forward.

      She stands in the car-park long into the evening and long after the crowd has gone, her hands clasped over her stomach. She has the same wish for herself; would someone with some information please, please come forward.

      I would like to think that from the beginning I put up a fight. Not some token gesture of disaffection with my terrible predicament but a full-blooded resistance. I picture myself rising to my knees in the after birth, eyes open and sharp – there is nothing of the doe-eyed lamb about me this time – my nose sniffing the air. And do I imagine it or is my slimy hand already reaching out to grasp some weapon? I see myself dark and primitive, grasping it by the hilt and marking a slow watchful retreat. I am not so much a child as a beleaguered rat. But my mother’s legs are closed now and I am cut off, left stranded. Alone again. Just for that I wish my entrance had been marked by some carnage. I would give much to be able to say that on entering the world I killed my mother. But I cannot. Therefore did I hang my head and weep in despair. I did not. I filled the room with curses, dark occult sounds that shrieked out at the wretchedness and misery of it all.

      Of course it was nothing like that. Instead, I lay stranded on my back choking in the amniotic fluid, my hands rising to my eyes to fend off the light. A nurse upended me with a quick slap across the arse and I drew some foreign but dimly remembered element into my chest, something upon which my young lungs scrabbled for foothold and having found it I rose quickly into myself with a wail. I was immediately aware of the hostile atmosphere, the uniforms, the searing lights, the physical abuse. Oh yes,

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