on the table. They were all one colour and shape and with a scream surfacing within her she knew they were not what she needed. She swept them from the table in a quick frenzy, dashing them against the wall, and set out again into the night. This time, in front of the Child, she did not flinch. She set the pliers into Joseph’s abdomen, gripped the lead and prised it out carefully, trying not to let any of the Child fall to the ground – she felt bad enough violating the window without committing needless vandalism. Eventually, through the sweat that had begun to sting her eyes, she saw that she had wrung the Child totally from Joseph’s grasp. All he had left now was a gaping hole in his abdomen and the lead came like dried veins curving outwards from it. For the second time that night she pocketed the glass and the pliers and crawled along the ledge to the down-pipe. At the base of the cathedral she was consumed by a shaking fit. She squatted down in the shadows with her arms wrapped about her, flicking the darkness with her eyes as she tried to get a hold of herself. She saw the bridge opposite her and the cars upon it, ploughing on into the night, and she wondered about the drivers. Did any of them ever have such a fixation as she had now? Did any of them suspect that so close by there was someone strung out on such an obsession? If one of them knew would they try to help? Would one of those drivers walk over to her in the darkness and say, it’s OK, I’m your friend and I am here to help. Come with me and you will come to no harm. She continued to speculate like this until she felt steady enough to move off.
She is at home now, in her kitchen, and she is tempted to lay the glass pieces on the table and spend a few moments rearranging them into the image of the Child. But she cannot bear to look the Child in the eye. Besides, her body senses a nearness and has begun to cry out. She knows what she has to do. She empties the pieces into the dishcloth, lays it on the floor and begins to hammer it methodically until she has a crude multicoloured rubble. She turns the little pile into her mortar and grinds the debris until it is as fine as talc. It is difficult. Despite its lowly origins and ubiquity, glass is one of our more intractable materials. By the time she finishes her arm aches and her brow is sheened with sweat. She now has a little pile of powder in the mortar that looks for all the world like one of those similarly illicit powders that can be had for a price in the underbelly of any city in the world, patented for people like herself who have been ignored, cast out, shortchanged or are just plain unable to cope. Somewhere within herself she can hear a counterpoint to this errant thought; yes, but this is the flesh of the Saviour, the divine fix, the high without comedown. She lifts a spoonful to her mouth and something within her rises greedily to it. With a jerk of her throat it is gone. She spoons back the rest of it hurriedly and washes it down with milk. She stands still, waiting for some reaction. It does not come. She walks to her room and all the exhaustion of the evening comes to rest upon her. She falls face downwards on her bed fully clothed and already she is asleep.
In the morning she wakes ravenous. In a gluttonous frenzy she hunches over a bowl of cereal and sloughs it back greedily. She thinks of animals and eats four bowls in succession with bread and an apple and a bar of chocolate. For the first time in three days she holds the food down. It is warm and weighs like ballast in her stomach and she walks to work with a solid step. Her fellow workers comment that she is looking 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
