good, though god knows what good will come of it. But don’t think you’re going to sit around the house all day soaking up the sun, my friend. I’ve had enough with useless men. You’ll learn a trade. I haven’t raised you to be a good-for-nothing.
So Felicity Murphy had searched around and pulled some strings, people she knew who’d once known her convivial husband, places likely to take a high-spirited, independent-minded boy, if that’s how they could be persuaded to see it.
And so Mark was launched into the whaling business on the Bluff as an apprentice fitter and turner. For three years he learnt how to make machine parts and to repair engines. But not only in Durban, my china, more often on the move, sailing with the merchant marine far across the open seas.
Entrance
Under Nora’s skin a shape moves – heel, hand. She knows what is being formed, but even after all these months cannot accurately judge. The baby is yet a jut into the unknown.
Nora rests a palm upon her taut egg, incubating. It takes so long. For months you hardly show and then bam, you’re nothing but a belly. Sometimes, teetering towards the future, Nora wishes it would take longer, but knows she has no say and that she cannot procrastinate. It will come when it comes.
Beneath her hand she flinches as a limb shifts, stretching her already tight skin. The discomfort! She is being elbowed aside from within until surely this must burst. She must. She’s bursting to wee. Again.
And as she sits, releasing, she follows the outline of the hidden child, the skin losing the last of its elasticity, thinning to a substance like hard, sheer plastic.
A sharp knife held firmly against the dome, the slightest of pressure could cut it, this stretched material, without either much blood, or pain. Just slice and peel. This is what she thinks.
The foetus pivots again with a heavy, rolling pressure, so acute against her intestines that Nora winces. When she worries about how big she’s getting, the clinic sister shrugs. You girls . . . What did you think? It goes in, it comes out. And it’s got to come out the same way it went in.
Which wasn’t really an answer. Though it’s true Nora’s own questions had been implicit.
Young as it is, a foetus knows that life means more than itself. That making ready to be born entails links and ligatures and dependencies. That life depends, because the thread is thin.
It may be that the cord is tough as old boot leather, and would take some gnawing if a knife or scissors were not to hand. That it can strangle a baby, this slippery loop of flesh. Which only means, again, how fragile a thread it is. Think how often such a cord is severed, though the cutting release a child into god knows what.
For now, the mother eats, drinks, worries, reads, and all is food for thickening and thought, pumped and channelled and sifted, growing the new beginning that is starting to become a being to be born.
Inside her mother, the mind’s eye followed traces of worlds. Call them eidolons or phantoms, sensory flashes, maybe just the growing fruits of a wild imagination as the embryo grew into charmed and chary life . . .
The busy cells burgeoned forth to some lost port of call. Schooners, ruggedly rigged, fore and aft, and clinker-built clippers, clenched with copper nails, the air aclank with the rattling of rigging. Everywhere were loud male voices, carried on the wind with wooden crates and roped bales swinging from winches, a vessel about ready to sail. And, inside, a huddle of dark shapes that might be animals, or . . . people? The stench ballooned, but within earshot was only the lap and thump of fluid life, the harbour of a mother’s heart.
Sometimes, hosed out by coiled water, the stink of rotting flesh dispersed, the melancholy clamour abated. Then in the stillness the foetus felt itself a waxing moon, gathering amid the austere, intangible silence of stars. And suddenly an eruption and a rictus a black hole a meteor shower that seemed to ricochet from a sundered earth with all the force of a volcanic belch. The cramped body cringed, finger buds flexing, but no, it was nothing intended to cause distress. Merely the inner workings, an undigestible rocket uncoupling its supernumerary parts, debris jettisoned and harmlessly atomised in the hold of the astral atrium.
Occasionally, in the confined, overgrown intestinal tracts, there broke an erratic, veinous path which gave onto riddling vegetation, the forested tracks of men and animals. From the heights and depths of its short-lived experience, the baby saw elephants rolling like slow, unstoppable boulders, behind them hunters tusked with guns. Through the bush they tasked, big feet and small, over ridges and rimous rifts, down to a red-strewn lagoon in which another body already lay, the waters washing over the felled mounds of meaty rock. Slowly, logs loomed onto shore, dragging chunks of feast into the motherless murk.
This, the baby saw within, is what people did. Men took their spears of fire and went out hunting, carving graveyards of memory. Some disappeared, though there were always more that remained. A few, impressionable, made pens, flighted from dead wings, unfolded pieces of leafy parchment and nibbed the hunting into feathered homesteads. For this, women were gouged upon the ground into red furrows, and rows began to sprout, faces turned towards the sun, their endless needles piercing in, and under, and through, stitching it all together.
Spirals of time turned upon the balcony of this hiding place, the baby lying inside her mother as the woman lingered, sometimes facing seaward, determined to be pleased to have found her place.
Though under the sea lay lagan; a wreckage of goods and timbers awaiting retrieval, no easy foothold on the human world.
Nora’s first child is born at Mothers’ Hospital, with its curled foetal apostrophe. Mothers’ is run by the Salvation Army, and the winged badge which heads the birth register bears the motto Blood and Fire. Which seems about right.
The labour is as considerate as the current medical conventions allow. No superfluous extras in the theatre, which includes the father, and in the interests of hygiene would include the mother too, were this possible. Parents can look forward to a whole lifetime ahead of them with their child, so why they must be so watchfully present from the beginning it is difficult to understand.
The nearly new mother, never so naked again until the next time, is exhausted, her body at the mercy of senses which amp between numb obliteration and a fierce, sharp branding. She is held at the end of the waiting iron, and it does not withdraw until the burn between her lips reads ‘mother’. It is redder than a violent wound, heavier than a slaughtered ox, and bonds her to this child.
Aaaggggh! she mutes a blur of pain, Does it have to be so sore?
The doctor, though, tells her it cannot possibly hurt that much. It’s merely labour, Mrs Murphy, not much different from freight-forwarding. Around the world, across the face of the earth, there are women having babies every second, so she must stop making a fuss. Your baby will come, he says smiling, All in Mother Nature’s own good time.
Which will also teach her about being more careful, he is maybe thinking. And about her relative privilege. About what it means to be a woman.
When the baby eventually presents, the twisted purple cord a limb attached to her bloated belly, the deliverer slaps the slippery little body upside down into the world. Which would have been a useful lesson, if only she’d remembered.
The mother, though neither cut nor torn, lies like a carcass. The business done, the room buzzes, busy with this and that. It might be blowflies that surround her, though they are nurses. Steaming, swabbing, sips of water raised to a parched mouth, until she is wheeled away on a gurney to recover in
