The Birth of Love

The Moon

Professor Wilson, I have now returned to my desk, and can resume my account. The heat here is fetid, and works against the concentration. But naturally one can write a letter, even under such conditions. I believe I had described to you how I decided to return to the asylum, to seek further conversation with Professor Semmelweis. It was late afternoon by the time I arrived back at that foul place, and I rang the bell for some time without gaining a response. Finally when the door opened it was clear that my return displeased Herr Meyer. He met me in the anteroom, and there was none of his false friendliness. Rather he was intractable and surly, and claimed at first that Herr S could not see me.

‘It is simply not possible,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘He has suffered an unfortunate relapse.’

‘I would like to see him anyway, if you would be so kind,’ I said, briskly.

‘You do not understand. He is in no fit state to receive visitors. Your visit this morning induced his collapse.’ As if otherwise poor Professor Semmelweis was kept in pristine conditions, in sublime equanimity, and it was only my visit which might be blamed for any diminution in his general health …

‘Then I should like to try to help him, to revive his spirits a little.’

‘I do not think that is a good idea,’ said Herr Meyer.

‘I assure you, I have information about his state that must be conveyed to him, if you have any compassion.’

‘The man is not to be informed of anything. The man is to be restrained from harming himself and others, and to be treated as I see fit,’ said Herr Meyer. He was becoming quite agitated himself, his face glowing with something I feared was combative glee, for men such as Meyer are oppressed by various forces themselves, and if they have the opportunity they enjoy a chance to assert themselves.

‘The man is called Professor Semmelweis, by the way,’ I said. ‘He is an esteemed doctor and I suggest you show him more respect.’

‘I shall receive no instruction on how to conduct myself in my asylum.’

‘You should need none, had you any moral sense to guide you.’

*

Had one of my friends not been a benefactor of this ruinous place — a matter which has been the cause of many disagreements between us, on the occasions when I have mentioned the maltreatment which is quite ordinary in this asylum — I do believe this vicious man Meyer would have thrown me out. As it was, he really had little choice, and so, clicking his tongue in fury, and refusing to speak further to me, he conducted me along the corridor. This time, Professor Semmelweis was slumped in his chair, his chin against his chest. He was still in chains. He was wringing his hands as he had done earlier, and I now realised this must represent washing, and must refer to his former researches and to his yearning for a cleanliness which his vile surroundings denied him.

‘Herr Meyer, would you be so good as to provide this man with some hot water, and soap, and a towel,’ I said. Herr Meyer looked at me in disgust, as if no inmate of his could have any cause for such things, but I repeated my request in a sharper tone, and he retreated with a bad grace.

*

I stood there, still uncertain about how to proceed, as the poor man wrung his hands and gazed into space. Or perhaps he was fixed on a vision I could not apprehend, but he looked inert and unstimulated, and for a while I felt quite overwhelmed by his state and the hopelessness of his situation.

Then I said, ‘Herr S, I visited you this morning. I do not know if you remember me.’

There was no response, and so I stood there silently once more, watching him for a time. He seemed quite unaware of my presence. I wondered indeed if he had suffered the final Great Reversal, and would never return from his wolf-light existence again. I thought it might be the case, that he had passed to the other realm, and could hardly comprehend me at all, just as his motives and beliefs were now obscure to me. And indeed I was not sure if this was so dreadful a fate for a man as troubled as Professor Semmelweis, to lapse entirely from the world that perplexed him, though I pitied his wife and children who longed, no doubt, to see him cured.

*

I was thinking perhaps I should leave the man to his demolition of the self, and hope that he found some consolation along the journey, but then something interesting occurred. Herr Meyer returned with a bowl of water, and a piece of grimy soap and a towel that was almost too disgusting to handle, yet I was obliged to accept them, having nothing else to assist my cause. Expecting little from the gesture, yet moved to try nonetheless, I turned to Professor Semmelweis and said, ‘Sir, I thought perhaps you might like to wash your hands?’

*

At that, he looked up and regarded me with vague interest. The blankness, the emptiness of his expression, was replaced with something like recognition. He looked at the water, and then he took the soap. For a moment he paused. Then he placed his hands in the water. He shivered with relief. The effect upon him of the water was very palpable. He rubbed his hands vigorously with the soap and dipped them many times in the water.

‘You can leave us now,’ I said to Herr Meyer, and he departed with an angry scowl.

*

‘Sir, I think I understand your dreams of blood,’ I said.

‘I am afraid I do not know who you are,’ he said. He was still dipping his hands in the water, removing them to rub more soap upon them, dipping them again.

‘I came to visit you this morning. We discussed your dreams of blood and also your fears that you had committed a crime. Also you mentioned a woman with blue eyes whom you feared. Do you remember any of this?’

‘You came to visit?’

‘Yes.’ And I told him — once again — my name and the nature of my studies.

*

There was a splash as his hands entered the water again. He looked down at his fingers, moved them in the water, applied soap carefully to each finger. I pressed on, while he was relatively attentive.

‘You spoke of a man who had disturbed you greatly. Indeed the mere mention of his name caused you to fall into a sort of fit. So I shall not say it again. However, because of this name I believe I know who you are. I could tell you your name and your former profession, if you would like to know.’

I thought this would cause him to descend again, but he remained calm. He was splashing his fingers in the water, almost like a child, watching the ripples and bubbles he caused. Then he turned to me and said, ‘I believe I have already regained those details.’

‘You do?’

‘Yes, I have been thinking more clearly. I came round, as if from a long sleep. I do not know when I woke, but I was not alone. That man’ — he nodded his head towards the corridor — ‘was with me. I said nothing to him, yet I knew that something had changed. I had a kernel, just a kernel. It was as if someone had cried out to me, and they had spoken my name.’

‘Who are you, will you tell me?’

‘Of course, I have no regard for my reputation any more. It is simply not important. I believe my name is Semmelweis and I was once a doctor. I was a doctor but then I was quite rightly and justly deprived of my profession. It is right that I should be incarcerated, quite right, and better for everyone.’

*

This was a transformation I had not anticipated. Indeed I was unsure what to say for a moment, not wanting to disturb his new state. He was now almost measured; certainly there was something pensive, contemplative about him. He was splashing his hands, but there was nothing frenzied about the gestures now; he was moving his fingers quite gently in the water.

*

‘I have been thinking about Aristotle’s concept of the soul,’ he was saying. ‘That its residence is in the heart, yet it is also the form of the body. It permeates the entire body, though emanating from a single point. And somehow I remembered the beat of a heart, heard through the skin. Two hearts, I recalled, the mother’s and the galloping pace of her unborn child’s. I remembered the beat of these two points, two souls, contained within a single body. I was thinking how curious it is, that a philosopher such as Aristotle had failed to consider what it is to be a pregnant woman, who contains another life point, another point emanating life to a body, within herself. Surely this must change our notion of the human form? Surely this must change our sense of bodily autonomy, when many a woman spends decades with another self — various other selves — contained within her, as she moves successively from one pregnancy to another? And I began to remember. Myself, I remembered myself, leaning over a woman who was rounded and immense with child. At first I thought it was my wife. I thought I must be remembering the birth of one of our children, yet then I saw a number of these women, and I saw myself again, passing from one to the other.’

‘What do you think this meant?’ I said.

‘I realised I had been a doctor. That was the first small revelation I was permitted. That I had been a doctor and that I tended to women in childbirth. Then suddenly I knew my name. I heard the women saying it to me, their voices full of fear and hope. At first I could not hear them clearly, but then their words — the single word — became clear to me. They said it in tones of relief, that I had come — these women trusted that I could assist them, perhaps even save them. And all the while another voice was saying to me, “Do not approach them, do not, in your arrogance, approach them!”

‘In my vision I ignored this voice entirely, I continued to move from one to another, and gradually as I pressed my ear against the rounded mass of their bodies, I heard the hearts stop. The tiny galloping baby hearts stopped, and then the women threw up their hands and died.’

‘This is a dreadful vision,’ I said.

‘I think I have done something very grave, which is that I — in my small person — have somehow changed the course of many women’s lives, and of the lives of their children. And it is wrong for a single human to have wielded such power. Thereby I have insulted God, the ledger is marked, and I must suffer.’

‘You have done a great deal of good, I suspect.’ I said. ‘I can tell you, Professor Semmelweis, that you developed a theory about the way in which puerperal sepsis is spread. You argued that it was spread by the hands of doctors. That doctors infected women with this disease during internal examinations.’

‘Puerperal sepsis?’

I thought for a moment he would not be able to recall his medical expertise, and indeed for some time he stared at his hands, as he splashed them in and out of the water.

Then he shook himself, or shook involuntarily, and turned to me. His aspect was more animated now, and he said, ‘I forget your name.’

‘Robert von Lucius.’

‘Herr von Lucius, I must thank you. I confess I have wandered greatly in my thoughts but now everything is clearer. You have supplied the crucial element I lacked.’

‘I am sorry but I do not understand.’

‘I am Professor Ignaz Semmelweis and my field was obstetrics. You are quite correct.’

‘And you worked …’

‘I worked in the First Division of the Vienna General Hospital. For several years. I am not sure when it was. I do not know the year at present.’

‘The year is now 1865.’

‘Then it was some time ago that I arrived at this hospital. Perhaps twenty years ago. I was young and I was a student doctor. I had not chosen obstetrics as my first profession. I would have preferred to study something else, but I think my family was not a wealthy one, and I had to accept whatever position I could obtain. I was an assistant to …’ Herr Semmelweis was now rubbing his forehead avidly, spreading dirty water across his face. And I hesitated, for I suspected this must be Johann Klein, and I did not want to lose him to another fit.

‘To the head of the lying-in ward,’ I said, hurriedly.

‘That is correct. His name will come to me. It is not important at the moment.’

‘But you worked as this man’s assistant during the 1840s?’

‘I believe at the time there was a terrible epidemic — when I arrived there was an epidemic. In the First Division it raged, this epidemic of puerperal sepsis. Childbed fever, that is what the midwives called it. Naturally we thought our definition more precise, yet the women died all the same, however we defined the disease. And it was clear that they died in greater numbers in the First Division, where the teaching hospital was. The doctors worked there and their students. In the Second Division, which was staffed by midwives, and only rarely by doctors, childbed fever did not kill so many women. It was a mystery which tormented us all. The women would weep when they were told they must come to the First Division. I remember that. They knew they were being sent somewhere dangerous. They begged for their lives. The allocation was random — it depended on the day you arrived. They tried to wait, I remember. Some women would try to wait until the Second Division day before they came into hospital. Often they were too late and they birthed their babies on the streets. They brought them into the world while squatting in the gutters, but even this was less likely to cause them to die than coming to the First Division.’

‘This cannot have been the case.’

‘During times of epidemic, yes. The First Division was a charnel house. It was a breeding ground for death. It was horrible to see it. And yet now I forget the word they gave it. What was the word for this thing which killed the women?’ And he turned to me with a ragged expression. I perceived that he feared this period of lucidity might be fleeting, that he must glean as much information as possible while he could phrase questions and attend calmly to the answers.

‘Puerperal sepsis.’

‘Yes, that is it. I remember — De Mulierum Morbis — what is that?’

‘Hippocrates.’

‘Yes, that is right, and it says something, I must remember it.’ The horrible gestures had resumed, intensified by his desperation. He had become more urgent about the washing of his hands and so he had set his chains jangling again. We waited, with only the noise of the chains between us. Then he said, ‘I have it … I think … “And so Thasus, the wife of Philinus, having been delivered of a daughter was seized with fever attended with shaking chills as well as pains in the abdomen and genital organs.” It is that. Something of that nature. And Thasus suffers agonies for twenty days after the birth of her daughter, and then she dies. Puerperal sepsis is an illness which takes the form of a fever, with a chill. The majority of patients manifest signs of the disease on the third day after birth. They have a headache, and cold fits followed by extreme heat, perspiration and thirst. Abdominal pain begins as a mild symptom but becomes increasingly severe. The pulse increases in pace, and the patient tends to lie on her back and appear listless. She loses her appetite. The tongue is usually white, though it can become dark and furred as death approaches. Respiration becomes laboured due to abdominal pain and distention, and the patient is nauseous and prone to attacks of vomiting. The production of milk is suppressed, though lochia continues. A few particularly unfortunate patients lapse into delirium and mania. During an epidemic, so-called, the mortality rate might be as high as eighty per cent, as opposed to a normal rate of twenty-five to thirty per cent. It is a monstrous disease. And these are women who a few days earlier were young, beautiful, at the height of their strength, birthing a child in all their vigour. The birth might have been entirely routine. Yet in the First Division every woman in labour was examined several times by doctors and students, for the purposes of research and teaching, even if their labour hardly required it. The students were often inexperienced, and sometimes they would push their hands clumsily into the women, hurting them even as they writhed in the usual agony. Students and doctors would delve deep inside these women, and then the women would become ill.

‘They would complain of feeling a little flushed and faint, and the doctors would aim to reassure them, but often we would know anyway that the worst would soon be upon them. Every woman knew precisely the symptoms of childbed fever, and the look in their eyes when they realised they had succumbed was dreadful to behold. And beside them were their babies — these desperate tiny creatures, so plaintive and powerless, who just hours earlier the mothers had held and loved and been so delighted to see — but now in their illness these women would cry out when the babies were placed upon their abdomens, and they would speak of a pain in their bellies, and then they would vomit horribly and shudder, and cry about their babies and how they must feed them, and their temperatures would fly up the scale, and higher and higher, and the babies would cry because the mothers could not suckle them or hold them, oh these poor babies, these poor mothers — it was terrible to witness the decline of these mothers, just when they had performed this most vital act, summoning life, and when these new lives were crying out for them — yet despite this they were shivering with cold, their teeth chattering, and then they were hot and flushed, and they perspired and stank. That was when you knew their agony would soon be over — when the stink emanated from them, a smell of decay, coming from this womb which had so recently sustained life. The womb was infected, with vile particles, and these women were destroyed from within. They slipped away, no longer recognising the babies they had loved so briefly and intensely. And when they died, the babies were often left orphaned, their lives ruined too by the horrible demise of their mothers. If no relative came, these helpless creatures were sent to the orphanage, and half of them died within the first year.’

*

I sat there in silence for a moment, wondering at the change in this man. You must perceive it, Professor Wilson, even through my flawed account. Indeed to witness it first-hand was most disturbing, so stark did it seem. I had no understanding of how it might have occurred. It was rather as if Professor Semmelweis had been replaced by another man; as if the morning had presented me with an interloper, or perhaps the interloper was before me and the real, more confused and desperate Professor Semmelweis had been vanished through the twisted ministrations of Herr Meyer. Of course his appearance was the same, but the character was so very different, it was hard to understand what had occurred. I had not believed him absolutely lost to reason before, and had rather imagined — as I mentioned — that he was poised between the world we recognise and another psychic realm we generally regard as beyond our concerns, or only of concern in so far as we seek to police and restrain those who occupy this world. Yet now, as he described these unfortunate women, Professor Semmelweis was upset — the man was trembling in his grief and self-blame — and he was not eloquent in the ordinary way, but he might have passed for little more than agitated and eccentric. He would have been heeded at a supper party, though people might have said he ran on a little, lacked a sense of when to pause. And the hand-wringing, perhaps that would have attracted notice. It is true, his gestures were overblown and distracting, but, relative to the state of nerves in which I had previously found him, he was greatly changed. And though his memory was still betraying him constantly, he was picking a way through its blanks, eking out dreams and recollections. His general demeanour made me suspect his condition was one of fits and regressions, and that he might sink into an episode and then later appear relatively recovered, before descending once more. I had not previously seen an inmate who presented so dramatic an oscillation between lucidity and stupor, between his regressions and his advances, but thus I found him.

*

‘You are remembering women you treated?’ I said.

‘I killed many of them. Before I knew about the way the contagion spread. I was one of the arch murderers in the Vienna General Hospital, because I was young and eager to learn my profession and so I performed an unusual number of autopsies. In the mornings I would always attend the autopsies of women who had died of childbed fever, and then I would hurry to the lying-in wards, and examine the living. And they would grow feverish, and often they would die. Personally I infected innumerable women, and deprived innumerable babies of their mothers’ love.’

‘Is this what you have been trying to forget?’

‘I do not forget it,’ he said, sharply. ‘It torments me. Besides I think there are other crimes upon my head. These are the gravest, I confess. These must be the gravest, the successive murders I have committed. But you see, I have done something else, I know.’

‘Tell me of your theory that puerperal sepsis is conveyed by the hands of doctors,’ I said, aiming to move the discussion away from these themes which merely distressed him. But he had found his motif, and did not yet want to discard it. He said, ‘I understand now why my former colleagues have banished me.’

‘No one has banished …’ I began, but he said, ‘They fear me, because I remind them of their guilt. My very presence accuses them. These are feted men. They are accustomed to praise. And I offer them only condemnation. This is anomalous and they despise it. Fortunately for them, they are the majority, they are the respectable keepers of orthodoxies, applauded for their efforts to maintain everything, to conserve untruth and protect fiction, and so it is perfectly easy for them to dismiss me. They dismiss me powerfully, even with anger in their voices, and everyone follows them. In a sense, their anger is absurd, because how could I ever really damage their great reputations, the names they are so proud of, when I am a single voice and they form a chiming chorus? How?’ He stopped at this, and looked at me.

I said, ‘Perhaps you have worried them.’

‘They are not worried. That is their gravest crime. They are not worried at all,’ he said bitterly.

‘Tell me of your theory,’ I said again.

‘I perceive quite clearly now that I was once a fool and because of my foolishness thousands of women died. I failed to convince my colleagues. Here in Vienna, I proved my theory, but then I was secretive and reluctant to present my findings. For years I failed to communicate what I had discovered, and during these years thousands of women died.’

‘But I am told you wrote a book,’ I said.

‘Who told you that?’ And now there was his former suspicion, his tone hoarse and abrasive. I said, ‘A friend, no one you need be concerned about,’ and he seemed to accept this response. ‘I did write a book. I worked hard on it, thinking it would finally convince my opponents. And yet they massed to condemn it. The reviews were monstrous. They vandalised my argument, just to save themselves. And I became angry and lost the argument altogether. So you might say my crime is twofold. I am a murderer because of my reluctance, my secrecy. Then I am a murderer because of my anger.’

‘But I do not yet understand your theory. I would be glad if you could explain it to me.’

He said, ‘Are you a doctor?’ — by this remark he revealed that however much he had regained a sense of his own past, his awareness of his immediate environment was tenuous indeed, and I was but a shade, a presence beside him, hardly an individual at all.

‘I am not,’ I said, again.

‘Well, you may know that it is not yet accepted in Austria that puerperal sepsis is contagious, that this deadly infection can be prevented by something as simple as washing the hands. Simply washing the hands.’ And now he splashed his hands frantically in the basin of water, so that most of it spilled over the sides, and he held up his hands to me. ‘A little chlorinated lime solution. A thorough wash. That is all that is required. In my native land, this theory of mine has been generally adopted for some years now. There at least my conscience is clear. But Austria and the world in general have defeated me. I have failed entirely to convince anyone beyond my own land.’

‘How do you know you failed to convince anyone?’

At that he leaned towards me, as far as he could. There was a rancid stink coming from him. Something like decay, the decay of the faculties naturally, and also a general bodily decline. The man reeked of stale blood, from the various wounds on his head and hands. He was leaning towards me, emanating these smells of disorder, as he said, ‘We must remember, it is far too late for Frau Engel, murdered by Dr Fuchs. And it is too late for Frau Adler, murdered by my esteemed colleague Dr Kuhn. Though perhaps she was murdered by his student, Herr Hirsch. Then it is too late for Frau … oh I cannot remember her name. It is in my mind but I cannot summon it. This woman was most certainly murdered by Dr Roth. You must know him. He is one of my most vehement critics, and one of the biggest murderers of them all. He moves from ward to ward, snuffing out lives. That man is Death, death to mothers. All these women, let us remember, and hundreds like them, thousands like them, had been delivered of healthy babies. So we must consider the hundreds of motherless children. The hundreds of mothers denied their destiny, to love and nurture their young.’

*

He was staring at me with awful intensity again, the dead and lonely gaze, more unpleasant to behold even than his hand-wringing and sudden surges of violent energy. Yet he did not see me, I now perceived, he saw merely the past and perhaps these ranks of women, reproaching him, but nonetheless his expression discomfited me, and I turned to my notebook, and began once more to write.

*

‘Surely you should consider all the women you have saved?’ I said, after a pause.

‘I have forgotten the statistics. I must remember them. If you would only let me think I will remember them. Your questions are so incessant, I cannot think.’

*

Thus castigated, I fell silent, and eventually he said, ‘I believe there was a colleague of mine. There was a colleague … the details are clouded by my fetid brain. He was called Kolletschka, that was his name. His first name I am trying to remember … he was a good colleague, even a friend. And what was his first name? He has been dead now many years. I was a youth when he died. How long ago is it that Kolletschka died?’

‘I do not know, I am afraid,’ I said.

‘Why? Why do you not know?’ Again the anger, the sudden flash of aggression. ‘My friend — I have forgotten his name …’

‘Kolletschka.’

‘… was performing an autopsy on a woman who had died of … of this disease … you know what I am referring to … and in the course of this he cut his hand with a scalpel and fell ill. The nature of his illness was similar to the sufferings of those women, even unto his horrible death. So after he died — I was most shocked and dismayed, naturally, and thought much about why he had died — I realised that he had clearly caught his infection from the direct contact of his blood with the infected blood of the dead woman. Or with some particles that came from her body, and went straight into my friend’s blood.’

‘So this is how you came to believe that these fevers, or distempers of the blood, were in fact transferred somehow from one person to another?’

‘By the hand,’ he said, and again he held up his raw and grimy hand. ‘By these doctor’s hands, infected with poisons from the dead, or from others who were dying, and then thrust into the wombs of mothers.’

‘So it was not merely the dead, it was anyone who had the disease?’

‘No, my friend. More even than that. And no one understood this. They thought I meant only the dead. But I meant any fetid or decayed tissue, any infected rancid tissue within any body. So there was a doctor who treated a woman with an infected cancerous breast, and then his next patient developed childbed fever. Anything! A corpse was not required! But the fools misunderstood that too.’

‘That is most unfortunate.’

‘They were too foolish to understand. And I was too foolish to explain it clearly. But I did something. I did a few small things. For a while in Vienna, before I was banished back to Budapest, I forced my colleagues to wash their hands in chlorinated lime solution, and instantly the cases of childbed fever were significantly reduced. For a full six months we had no deaths at all from the disease, an extraordinary, unprecedented statistic.’

‘But with such success, why did no one believe you?’

*

Well, that made him rage. This simple question converted him from a lucid melancholic into a frothing maniac. He lashed out wildly, and for some minutes he was bestial and appalling, shuddering and pouring his rage into the room, so it crashed against me like a sea in storm. He slammed his hands on his face, on his knees, anywhere they would fall, raving and grinding his teeth. I stood up, and perhaps I was even a little afraid. Not for my own person, rather there was something distressing about the sight itself, the spectacle of a personality unravelling, inner chaos released. For I believe that we all contain within us these unbridled forces, and yet we marshal them in our minds, somehow, and sometimes we enslave and contain them too rigidly, and either they wither and die or they burst forth like the eruption of a volcano. They are ancient phenomena of nature, these forces that course through us, and here was this man, like a tempest raging in a single human frame; it was compelling and awful to view. Indeed I merely observed him for a time, while he raged and frothed and seemed likely to be overcome altogether. Yet then, almost as suddenly as he had begun, he stopped his bellowing, and paused. He rubbed his eyes, as if he had awoken from a deep sleep. He was exhausted by his labours; his voice was trembling, and at first he could not phrase a sentence. He was trying to summon his lucid state again, I thought. ‘I … I …’ he said, ‘I … believe they have always found my proofs inadequate … Even though they were as clear as day …’ He looked weak now, ashen-faced, his mouth filmy with saliva and his skin glistening, and he wheezed as he said, ‘They have always talked to me about proof. Where is your proof of the real nature of contagion? How can you physically demonstrate the transference of disease from one body to another? I tell them — if they have not already turned away, which most often they have — that they must look at the women I saved. Aware as I was that my colleague, Koll …’

‘Kolletschka …’ I said.

‘… died of contagion, I proposed the washing of hands in chlorinated lime solution, especially after my colleagues had performed autopsies. Instantly, the rate of childbed fever was reduced. It went down to one per cent that died. Only one per cent, from the previous heights of thirty per cent. A remarkable decrease. Palpable, I thought. So when they asked me for proof, I said I had none of the real nature of the infection but I had eradicated childbed fever from my section of the hospital. Even the midwives — who you know always had lower rates of childbed fever — I had even improved on their ratio. Had they allowed me to continue, the hospital would no longer have been so greatly dreaded by pregnant women; they would have come to the First Division gladly and without foreboding. Perhaps I might have expiated my own guilt that way, so I would not now have to suffer …’

‘It is clear you have worked hard to convince others,’ I said.

‘For a time I worked hard to convince my colleagues in Vienna, but then I was banished.’

‘And why was that?’

‘I forget the circumstances of my banishment. It is a terrible thing, but they will not return to me. Perhaps there is someone who can tell me. But I know I had not resided many years in Vienna, when I was forced home again. I fled, I remember that. I had so many enemies. They conspired against me. I was weary of their conspiracies, and so I fled, perhaps that was it. Cowardice and a yearning for my home.’

‘It is a grave shame.’

He was angry once more, so his face was livid with a sort of rash, and his eyes were darting around the room, as if he was hunting out his tormentors. As if they even appeared to him — perhaps they did. I do not know what this man saw, but his thoughts were shattered once more. When he spoke again, he thrust his hands towards me, and he said, ‘I killed a woman, once, with my hands. I remember she was a very young, very frightened woman. She had blonde hair. She was very frightened and said, “Doctor, I have six children and I must get home soon to them.” And I assured her she would. But I murdered her all the same. She died screaming for her children. She was unusual, she did not forget herself. Her baby died a few months later. I murdered her and her baby. I see her in my dreams and she berates me. She accuses me.’

‘She is perhaps the woman you mentioned earlier?’

‘I see her and then in her I see the others. There are so many. They were in grave pain as I examined them. Their bodies in the grip of childbirth. And I pushed my hands inside them’ — and he made the horrible delving action of earlier — ‘and sometimes I ripped the placenta from their wombs, at the time saving their lives, yet a few days later they were dead anyway.’

‘But, sir, how can you be so certain you caused their deaths?’

‘Oh do not torment me with your foolish questions!’ he cried, and then sank into furious silence.

*

His thoughts were extreme; his accusations were extreme; yet there was a logic to his arguments. If his theory were true, then it was certain the actions of Professor Semmelweis and his colleagues had indeed killed many women. The accusation of murder was extreme, yet when he came to the matter of those colleagues who had refused his suggestions altogether and insisted on proceeding as before, one might suggest they bore a grave guilt. If his suggestions were as trivial as hand-washing then it seemed they might have simply entertained them, just in case he was correct. What did they stand to lose, by occasionally dipping their hands in a solution? I am ignorant of the discipline of obstetrics, yet I feel I might have, in their position, been moved to try this technique. If the epidemic was as relentless and inexplicable as Semmelweis proposed, then why were they not prepared to try anything, simply to ameliorate matters? As we are uncertain about the true causes of everything under the sun, why should we not experiment with theories we find outlandish at first?

*

History is full of theories which have been proffered, and self-appointed experts who have rejected them, simply because they were novel, or threatening of a general orthodoxy. Those religious beliefs which dominate in my country, and equally in yours, Professor Wilson, such as the divinity of Christ, and the truth of the Gospels, have at various points been regarded as madness and heresy and the mere expression of them has caused individuals to be slaughtered. Indeed history is a series of rising and falling so-called truths, each generation directed by certain absolutes which are most often cast off by the next. All my studies in early religions and all that I have read of scientific debate throughout the ages have caused me to become convinced that one of the most curious elements of human existence is the naivety with which we assume that now, now and never before, we have all the answers. For did we not, for centuries, believe that the sun followed the earth? And who was the crazed madman who proposed that it did not, that instead the earth ran like a child after the sun? And this man Galileo was tormented and told to abandon his claims, and he recanted in order to save his life. Yet he was right all the same, as we now know. The priests were dogmatic in their refusal of him, and punished him, just as Semmelweis’s colleagues had been dogmatic in their refusal of him. And thus suffering continues. Dear Professor Wilson, perhaps we might say the great unacknowledged evil of our civilisation is dogmatism. Perhaps this is the canker we bear within us, which taints every society we foster. But you will most likely disagree with me; I am merely rambling from my theme, to which I shall confine myself henceforth.

*

For the reasons I have advanced above, it did not concern me that Professor Semmelweis had been generally dismissed. I mean by this, that the censure of his peers did not convince me of the falsity of his proposals. I had no real knowledge of his field, and so I had no great opinion on whether he was right or not. Semmelweis himself was convinced of his rightness, and in this he was another dynamic zealot, driven to justify himself at every turn. Had he been more measured, he might have won more supporters. Yet it was also his unmeasured determination that led him to the theory, and thus his failure to disseminate it was bound up entirely in the attributes that had generated it in the first place.

*

Thinking to divert his thoughts, which I believed had festered, I said to him, ‘Professor Semmelweis, I must ask if you now recall your wife and children?’

He raised his head at this, and perhaps his anger diminished a little. He said, curtly, but more continently than before, ‘Yes, I think I have a wife and children. I do not remember them.’

‘You only remember your time in Vienna?’

‘I remember the period I spent in the Vienna General Hospital.’

‘That is only a matter of a few years, Professor Semmelweis.’

‘What is your meaning?’

‘I mean that it is a pity, that you can only regain your memories of a very brief period in your life. Your memories of this period are very clear. But the rest is lost to you, at present.’

He said nothing in reply.

*

It was strange indeed. He had been discoursing fluently on matters concerning puerperal sepsis and his attempts to disseminate his theory. He ran on, unstoppably, when he sighted this theme. But the rest of his life, the fundaments of his existence as a father and husband, had departed from him. It was as if his theory of puerperal sepsis, his struggle to achieve its general acceptance, had so dominated his mind that it returned to him when everything else had fled or faded. He was left with a single theme, an intellectual argument, yet deprived of all his ties of love and friendship.

*

At that moment — quite the worst moment for such an interruption, when everything was so precarious — we were disturbed by Herr Meyer, who had sneaked along the corridor and gained the cell before I noticed him. He stared around, in his proprietorial way, as if this was his kingdom and I was nothing more than a base trespasser. He twitched nastily and seemed to be trying to persuade me to leave then, but I stood my ground. I turned to him and said, ‘Herr Meyer, I desire a little more time with this patient.’

‘You are of course welcome to pursue your enquiries,’ he said, trying to smile, but it was a furious little grimace that made him look like a fox. ‘I merely wondered if you required assistance.’

‘That is most kind. But I have everything I need,’ I replied, casting an ironic gesture at the dank cell and its unhappy resident.

That made him bite his lip, and nod reluctantly, and then once again he greased a path towards the door.

*

Professor Semmelweis was much disturbed by the intrusion, and would not speak for some time. Indeed I feared he would return to his previous inertia. When I could tolerate the suspense no more, I said, loudly, ‘We were speaking of your work at the General Hospital, Professor Semmelweis.’ Perhaps the stridency of my tone retrieved him, for he turned towards me once more, and said, ‘Yes, I believe we were.’

‘You were telling me about the advances you made.’

‘I was telling you how I sought to atone for the slaughter over which I presided.’

‘You accuse yourself too vehemently, Professor Semmelweis,’ I said.

Herr Meyer was forgotten, as he said, his ire rising, ‘You shall not be the judge of that, however you presume to assess me. Yet I was telling you about a period of many months, during which no woman died of childbed fever. Elsewhere the disease raged. Only our ward was an oasis. The women there smiled and were glad. They held up their babies, kissed them, suckled them without fear. They were not stricken by sweats and grinding pains and the obscene devastation that puerperal sepsis inflicts. They were not drained of life, life was not drawn out of them in blood. The patients were safe. However my colleagues, instead of applauding and celebrating my achievements, accused me of missing the point entirely. They informed me that we simply needed better ventilation. That there was no proof of the beneficial properties of chlorinated lime solution. That my methods were not scientific. They despised me because I was an outsider and thought I had no place proposing such a significant adjustment to their rules. Dr Roth called me unprofessional. Simply because I proposed a theory which was not his own! Simply because I did not sit worshipfully at his feet! These doctors claim to be devoted to the pursuit of knowledge but really they are vain and seek to be revered. They want nothing more than the reverence of those they regard as their inferiors. They are boulders in the river, preventing the flow of knowledge. I sought to drag a few of them out! I tried to blast open the dam! I was unequal to the task but I laboured to blast it open anyway. They stood firm and they condemned me. Dr Schneider suggested I was inexperienced! And by then I had two years in Vienna on my record. Two years in which scarcely a woman died.’

*

‘It is most unfortunate,’ I said, because he was staring so plainly and desperately at me, clearly hoping for such a remark. You will notice, Professor Wilson, that by now our conversation had become circuitous, and though I found the recurrences of his thoughts rather frustrating I felt I must allow him to continue with his wild arcs, in case something new materialised. Besides, I was genuinely transfixed by his energy and distress, by the horrible eloquence of his recollections.

‘It is unfortunate, yes,’ Semmelweis said, ‘that I was insulted and dismissed. It is unfortunate, yes, that thousands of women have died. It is unfortunate, yes, that thousands more will die. All of this is most unfortunate, simply because of some stubborn old fools who call themselves doctors.’

‘It is most unfortunate you have become ill,’ I said.

‘Ultimately,’ he said, in a lower tone, ‘I do not matter. It does not matter what happens to me. I plead for mercy for my wife and children, but not for myself. I deserve to be punished. I was the messenger and failed. I did not transmit my message. Perhaps to the few, but not to the many. What becomes of the failed messenger? It is right, in the end, that he should be consigned to such a place as this,’ and he waved a hand, in disgust, at the cell.

‘But surely you would like to leave, and see your family again?’

‘I long to see them. I long so much …’ He stopped for a moment, overwhelmed. Then he muttered, ‘yet it is right that I should be punished. It is one thing that makes me glad, this fact that I am being punished. No doubt my family is disgraced, but then it is a disgrace to be the child of a murderer, or the wife of one. You are tainted by the murderer’s sin. It is quite right. I am not complaining of my punishment. I merely propose that some of my colleagues should be in here too. There is a professor, I forget his name. He has been murdering women for a good forty years longer than I. Before and after. Before I made my proposals and after. I only have a couple of years of active murder on my conscience and then I have all the murders committed by those I could not convince. But this man said that no doctor could spare the time to wash his hands. An imposition on a busy man! And then he said I was a disgusting fellow anyway, for proposing that a doctor would be dirty in the first place. What was I saying about my colleagues? An appalling slur on a gentleman’s reputation. Appalling arrogance, to tell a gentleman to wash his hands! He explained it all to me, one afternoon. He told me I couldn’t go around insulting other fellows like that. He told me it was arrogant and rude. I lacked decorum, you see, in my outrageous suggestions that the medical profession might — for an hour, for a day — stop murdering mothers.’

‘Perhaps because women had always died in this way, they assumed it was inevitable.’

‘But they had not always died in this way. They had begun to die in great numbers, in numbers which would be categorised as an epidemic, only when the lying-in hospitals were established, in the last century. Prior to that, there had been incidences, naturally, but nothing on this sort of scale, nothing so catastrophic. Doctors had passed from one house to another, and infected their patients, but they had not conducted autopsies and through this procedure infected dozens of women in the same day.’

‘But women have always suffered from the fear of death, as they approached childbirth,’ I said. ‘There have always been grave dangers associated with birthing a child. Does the Bible not say that woman must bring forth children in suffering and affliction, as punishment for the sin of Eve? It is regarded as the natural state of women, to endure this torment in childbirth.’

‘Yes, it is true. And the hospitals were established to end such fear and suffering. Their aims were virtuous. These aims were thwarted by the individuals who came to control them, by the murderers who called themselves doctors.’

*

He paused once more, and then he said, ‘Let them wash the blood from their own hands.’

And with an angry jerk of his hand, he accidentally spilled the last of the water from the basin onto his lap.

‘My God,’ he said, suddenly fearful. ‘And what shall we do now?’

‘Professor Semmelweis, it is quite all right,’ I said. ‘I will send for some more water. Do not distress yourself.’

But he was staring in dismay at the empty basin, and he began to mutter, so quietly and rapidly I could not distinguish the words at first. And then I distinctly heard him saying, ‘Behold I am behind thee I am thy mother for ever and ever,’ and he repeated this several times. I was not sure where this derived from, or what it meant. Then he said, ‘The woman who torments me, who comes to me and reveals to me the true nature of my sin, I believe her name was Birgit Vogel.’

‘She was a patient of yours?’

‘Yes, I think it was at a time when I was not quite certain of my theory. I could have been careful and I was not. I did not bother to wash my hands thoroughly, I merely dipped them in the solution and she became very ill with puerperal sepsis and died a few days later. I think it is that … And because of the death of Birgit Vogel, my own mother died.’

‘What do you mean by this?’

‘No sooner had Birgit Vogel died — and she died in horrible agony, and her little baby — a beautiful blond-haired boy — was taken from her as she shivered and screamed, and his wails were drowned out by her own — than I received news from Budapest that my poor mother had died. For the death of Birgit Vogel, I was summoned to account. So in a sense, I am also responsible for the death of my mother.’

*

This seemed to me highly significant. Not that there was any provable truth in his sense of causality, but rather it was significant because Professor Semmelweis had created his own symbolic universe and in this symbolic universe he was guilty of matricide and therefore he was condemned to eternal suffering. And yet also, he was the wounded god, rising from the corpse of his mother. He was sinner and divine king, combined into one person, and the confusion of these roles was probably the cause of much of his perceived insanity. For if we regard such mysteries with a literal mind, then they will indeed perplex us, and Professor Semmelweis was a doctor and thereby, originally, an empiricist. No doubt he had resisted, at the time, any sort of symbolic interpretation of the death of his mother, and had instead marked it down to awful timing, fundamental bad luck, and had suppressed his fears and the irrational terror the bereavement had caused him to feel. And it had festered, for years it had festered, even as he was ostracised by his former allies, and indeed I suspect he, in one sense, wanted them to ostracise them. He incited them to annihilate him, so he might atone for the death of his mother and so he might rise reborn, like the Phoenix from the ashes, Christ from the tomb, Osiris from the casket. Professor Semmelweis had become tormented by these suppressed symbolical demons, and all his endeavours had been undermined by the confusion he refused to acknowledge. He had destroyed himself, I was quite sure of that, in order to rid himself of guilt. Yet in so doing, he had burdened himself with a further form of guilt, for all those women he had failed to save. In casting himself and his theory onto the pyre, hoping the flames would be purgatorial, he had dragged thousands of women with him, suttee-like, and it was only now that he realised what he had done.

*

I was rather revising my theories, as I perceived that it was convenient for Professor Semmelweis to see himself as the innocent victim of a conspiracy, as the genius who had been ignored. Because he had denied the reality of his urges for so many years, he had persuaded himself — he had been obliged to believe this, for the reality was so much more disturbing — that his colleagues had waged a war against him, and after many years destroyed him. Rather, I was beginning to surmise that in two years, from the death of his mother, which was almost the same time that he developed the theory, to the point that he fled from Vienna — and he was confused about the circumstances of this flight, and could not remember anything after it — he set about ruining himself. As I was able to assemble a sense of chronology, from his words and those earlier of Professor Zurbruck, he had refused for many years to publish on his theory; he had published nothing of significance at all from the late 1840s when he developed the principle of hand-washing until recently when he had finally written his rambling account, an account he hardly thought — I suspected — would convince anyone. He cast off his supporters. He ran back to his native land. He ran back to the motherland, though his mother was no longer there. Everything was in turmoil for this man, who had been taught to believe that reason must prevail. He tried for years to reason through his actions, and because they were driven entirely by the unreasoning elements of the psyche and were unknowable by reason itself, he drove himself into a collapse. His reason had frantically rejected everything it could not assimilate, and he had slipped into a state classified as lunatic. He had placed himself beyond the understanding of his family and friends. He had exiled himself, so he might die alone. Birgit Vogel haunted him through his lunacy, because he had locked her away for so many years, he had confined her to a dusty recess of his thoughts, and now she had burst out and consumed him. I am meandering once more, Professor Wilson — I fear this will be what you are thinking. To be plain about the matter at hand, to strip it of my theoretical ornamentation, it would seem that Professor Semmelweis developed an idea about the causes of puerperal sepsis and though by proceeding in line with his theory he reduced incidences of the disease significantly, his colleagues did not support him for one reason or another. It may be that they were ashamed of themselves and conspired to destroy him for this reason. Or it may be that he goaded them and goaded them, for his own psychic reasons, and this, combined with their own shame, caused them to reject him. There, that is as simple as I can make it, and now I will leave you to reach your own conclusion.

*

We had little more conversation, I am sorry to report. I asked him if there was anything I could do to help him, but he shook his head. Sadly and slowly. He was losing energy, that was evident. He had raged luminously, like a star in its final burst of glory, before it is consumed by darkness.

‘Could I not contact your wife? Perhaps she does not know you are here?’ I said.

He did not respond.

‘Are there friends you remember? Could I contact any of them? Surely you would like to leave this place?’

‘Like any prisoner, I dream of liberty. But I do not deserve it,’ he said.

*

And he would not speak again, and sat there rubbing his hands. I stayed for some considerable time, but I could not rouse him at all. I lingered, even after Herr Meyer slithered along to fetch me. I stood there — under the disapproving gaze of Herr Meyer — and watched poor Professor Semmelweis muttering to himself or to the shades that accused him. Yet he had his head down and he did not acknowledge me again.

The Empress

‘Hello, Margaret,’ Patrick was saying to Brigid’s mother.

‘Hi there big guy,’ he said to Calumn, kneeling to kiss him.

‘Did you get delayed in the traffic?’ said Brigid’s mother.

‘It was pretty gruesome, as usual.’

‘Dadadada,’ said Calumn, rubbing Patrick’s face, pressing his cheek to his.

‘Where’s Brigid?’

‘In the garden,’ said Brigid’s mother. She screwed her mouth up and whispered through her teeth, ‘Very bad.’ Then she turned to Calumn with a vivid smile and said, ‘Now, darling, do you want to come and read a book with Grandma?’

Calumn was shaking his head, reaching for his father’s hand. So Patrick took it, like leading a pet monkey, he thought, his adored heir and pet monkey, and they walked together, father and son, through the kitchen.

*

Naturally it was very bad, he thought. Brigid was in labour. The pain was shocking, he remembered. Last time she raved and talked about her dying father. Would this time be worse? He had been the helpless witness to her agony, dismayed by his impotence and later disturbed — though he never told her — by the viscera, and the violence of it all. He had been impressed by his wife’s endurance, he wondered how she was able to stand it at all. Yet, he had acknowledged — guiltily he had acknowledged the fear he felt, the sense that reality was being overturned. He didn’t like it. He was moved but he didn’t like it all the same, the bizarre vision of a miniature human emerging from the body of his wife, followed by a stream of blood, as if Brigid was being disembowelled in the process. He had been mesmerised and disturbed, and afterwards he banished it all from his mind, gladly, thinking it might never happen — to them — again.

*

Patrick walked through the kitchen to the back door, his son trotting alongside him, despite Brigid’s mother’s cries. ‘Oh Calumn darling stay with me, stay with your gran,’ she said, but Calumn went along behind his father anyway.

‘Euuurssschkkkad,’ he said.

‘Yes, absolutely,’ said Patrick. ‘Just today and possibly for the next couple of days, we have to remember that Mummy’s having a bit of a difficult time. She’s very tired because of all the work she’s doing, to make your new brother or sister. You know, she’s been making a new brother or sister for you, and this is the final part, where it gets to be very hard work. It’s not terrible in any way, it’s all good, but it’s hard work. Like running very fast, like when we run in the park. We get tired and we have to sit down. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Mamammam,’ said Calumn, and nodded his head. Who knows what he understands, thought Patrick. They had been trying to prepare him. Reading him appropriate books, at one point they had even tried to interest him in a doll. But how could you really prepare a child for the shock of finding a new baby in his home? For himself, it had been different. He was the last child of three. There had always been others, and he had never — that he could remember — questioned the presence of his brother and sister. But Calumn, they had always treated Calumn as a miracle child, as if he was the only child Brigid would be able to conceive. When she became pregnant for a second time, they were overjoyed but stunned; they hadn’t expected it at all. Poor kid, you just don’t know what is going on, thought Patrick, looking down at the shuffling sweetness of his son, his chubby hands, his long eyelashes, his unruly hair. An amazing little boy, he thought. My little boy.

*

Through the window he made out the lumbering form of Brigid. She was standing in the rain, her clothes soaked and clinging to her great belly. She was turning slow circles, holding her belly as if that would help her. Then she would stop and breathe, gulping down air. It was moving to see her there, stooped under the rain, nearly broken with the weight of their child and the pain of labour. All day he had been dogged by a sense of guilt, that he wasn’t with her, that he was indentured and had to stay at his desk. Brigid had told him she would try to cope without him. ‘Perhaps the labour will go on for hours,’ she had said, and he heard the strain in her voice. ‘My mother’s here,’ she said. ‘I can call the midwife. Stay if you have to.’ So he had stayed, but everything was shadowed by this image of her, in pain and waiting for him to return. He had been unable to concentrate. He spoke on the phone, he smiled and shook people by the hand but he could only think of his wife. He had scarcely attended to the talk around him. Now he stood silently for a moment, held by the graveness of her struggle, as if he shouldn’t disturb her. Then he saw she was grimacing as she breathed, and that made him open the door. Calumn wanted to run outside, but he tried to hold him back. ‘It’s raining sweetie,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to run out in the rain.’ But he couldn’t stop him anyway. So he held his hand and they went slowly down the steps.

*

‘Brigid,’ he said, more loudly. ‘What should I do?’

*

She was grimacing horribly and then she saw Calumn. ‘Oh good, you’re here,’ she said, brightly, but it was forced. She was trying to sound matter-of-fact, because Calumn was running towards her. ‘Mamamama,’ Calumn said, squealing his delight, and she smiled down at him. ‘Hello darling boy. Have you been having fun with Grandma?’ Calumn nodded, doubtfully. ‘Good, how good. Well, and now Daddy is here, isn’t that nice?’

‘Dah,’ said Calumn.

*

Brigid turned away, pulled her lips into a silent howl, tried to breathe, and Calumn stared up at her back, looking uncertain and slightly sad. Naturally he knew something was happening, thought Patrick. He was still a baby, still bound up with Brigid’s emotions, her shifts of mood. And this was far more than a mood shift, it was like colliding with something enormous and unyielding, and this garden was full of pain, and violence scarcely controlled; even Patrick felt it. Calumn made a tentative move towards his mother, patted her leg a little, and she — with a tight smile — leaned towards him and kissed his hair. She said, ‘Darling, Mummy’s very sorry she’s so tired and can’t pick you up. Mummy loves you very much. Daddy’s here now and Daddy is going to get you some juice. Aren’t you Daddy?’ Then she said, speaking quickly so Calumn wouldn’t understand, ‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘You said you’d call if …’

‘I thought you’d come back anyway, once I said …’

‘I didn’t know …’

She smiled again at Calumn, not wanting to disturb him. ‘Never mind,’ she said, firmly. ‘Could you sort out Calumn’s dinner?’

‘Of course,’ said Patrick. ‘Just tell me what to do.’

‘Mum brought some food, speak to her.’

‘Yes.’

‘It must be late. Is it late?’

‘It’s not very late. I’ll ask her if she can stay. She can deal with Calumn while I help you.’

Brigid nodded quickly, and tried to kiss Calumn again, but the attempt was clumsy, hindered by her vastness and her pain, and Calumn was turning back to gaze at her as Patrick drew him inside. ‘It’s all wet,’ he said to his son, aiming to distract him. ‘All wet outside isn’t it? How funny that Mummy is standing in the wet.’

*

But Calumn was silent, confusion in his eyes; it was impossible to know what he was thinking, impossible even to imagine how his semi-verbal brain marshalled events. Something was wrong, that might have been the thought, had he possessed the words to formulate it. He was uneasy and he clung to Patrick’s hand, following along because he was thirsty and wanted some juice. ‘And then Daddy must get you some dinner,’ said Patrick. ‘It’s dinnertime now isn’t it Calumn? Soon be time for bed.’

Determinedly, Calumn shook his head.

Brigid watched her son and husband going inside, into the ordinary world of the kitchen which had somehow repelled her, so she had fled into the garden. She was an outcast, excluded from normality by the tearing pains within her. She had been raging at Patrick, focusing all her rage on him, and now he was here — she watched him bitterly, as he opened the fridge, and she imagined Calumn below him, too small for her to see, trying to grab at some fruit, or holding out his eager hands for a packet of juice. She felt cast down, by something like mingled concern for her son and the mounting unstoppable pain. Calumn seemed so lost and small and deprived of her — she was troubled by a premonition that this scene would become habitual, once she had a newborn to deal with. Calumn would be the mournful interloper, escorted away from her by helpful adults. And their relationship would never be the same. Brigid was thinking how sad it was, that she and Calumn would no longer be so closely bonded, so nearly sealed off from the rest of the world, when the pain began again and she turned and started walking slowly round the garden, smoothing back her hair, the rain falling hard upon her.

*

Breathe, breathe, breathe. You must breathe. This new surge of pain was rising within her. The pains began slowly, just a suggestion, a dark promise. They rumbled faintly, and then the progress began, the relentless escalation, until you thought something must break, it should break, but now this pain was growing greater and more violent every second, and every second still stronger, and she gasped and tried to breathe.

Breathe, breathe breathe. Reeeee-lax … Reeeeee-lax.

Reeeeee-lax. That was something she had read. In one of those cheerful and now redundant pregnancy books. Never mind, that was all it really said. Nothing bad will happen. Reeee-lax. The body responds to thoughts. Think positively. Never mind the pain, never mind. Yet she was compelled to mind. The pain rose and all she thought was pain, pain and I am pierced by pain, and she was rigid with agony and no longer breathing in the advised way, rather holding her breath and far from relaxed, until it broke. The wave broke — she imagined it curdling and frothing onto the shore.

*

At the door, there was Patrick again.

‘Everything OK?’ she said, tersely.

‘Everything’s fine in here,’ he said. ‘You just worry about yourself.’

She nodded. Grim-faced, thought Patrick. She looked drawn and pale, as if she was shocked all over again. He wanted to hold her, but she looked somehow contained by her state, distinct and apart from him. He couldn’t understand her, so he smiled at her, said, ‘Let me know as soon as you need me,’ and she nodded and turned away. And he went inside and didn’t know what to do. There was Calumn, expectant and uncertain. His son, holding a cup of juice and waiting for his father to reassure him.

‘Sweetie, drink your juice,’ said Patrick.

‘Uuughaughhhhh,’ said Calumn.

‘I agree. That’s absolutely true, but you should still drink it.’

‘Bhaltabish.’

‘Yes, that’s quite right. Your point is well made. Now let’s have a swig. Can Daddy have some juice?’ And Calumn offered him the cup with a baby swing of his arm.

‘I can make dinner,’ said Brigid’s mother, in the background. She was hovering, in that way she had. ‘Let me help.’

‘Well, if you don’t mind, that would be great,’ said Patrick. ‘Then I could go and give Brigid some support.’

‘Of course. I made some pasta sauce. It just needs heating up. And there’s homemade bread, and soup.’

‘Well that sounds perfect. Of course, have whatever you’d like yourself. There’s white wine in the fridge. Open some red if you’d prefer it.’

‘What about you and Brigid?’

‘I’ll ask Brigid what she wants, if she wants to eat. Don’t worry about me, I’ll eat later.’

‘You should keep your strength up.’

‘Really, I’m fine.’

‘OK little Calumn my darling, we’re going to have a lovely dinner, aren’t we, aren’t we going to have a delicious scrummy dinner?’ said Brigid’s mother.

‘Neaaaar,’ said Calumn, shaking his head.

*

A mixed blessing, thought Patrick, grabbing a handful of peanuts from a bag in the cupboard. Hiding them from Calumn, who coveted foods he couldn’t have. Yes, Brigid’s mother could make dinner and maybe even put Calumn to bed. But later, what would they do later? Surely she wouldn’t stay to the end? The final gore? Last time Brigid refused even to tell her mother she was in labour. She refused to tell anyone. ‘Our private affair.’ Her private pain. Now her mother was here, in the kitchen. Helpful, of course. Irreproachably helpful. It was unfortunate, but he didn’t want her there. With her, he had to play the part, the courteous son-in-law. It was quite impossible to relax with her; she was so determinedly remote herself. Remote from him, not from Calumn, and certainly not from Brigid. It was just with him she was so formal and polite. Perhaps he had just never tested her, and she, too, had been trapped in her guise. But he shook his head, because he didn’t want to think about her.

*

In the garden he stood in front of his wife, and she placed her hands on her hips and leaned forward, so her head was almost touching his chest. He recognised this as a sort of reconciliation. She needed him, however hopeless he was, it was that sort of weary acknowledgement.

‘How bad is it?’ he said, putting his arms around her.

‘Quite bad. It’ll get worse.’

‘How often do they come?’

‘Quite often. But not so I need to count.’

‘Let me know when you want to count.’

‘I will.’

‘I love you. You’re doing brilliantly.’

She didn’t reply. Her face was twisted and he thought another contraction must be starting. She lowered her head and breathed. She breathed like an asthmatic, gasping for air.

*

For a minute they stood, Brigid drawing in air and Patrick trying to think what it must be like for her. A deep pain in the centre of your body. He had been in pain in his life, but he had no real recollection of it. He once broke his leg skiing and he told everyone that the pain had been monstrous, as if something was gouging a hole in his thigh. Yet he remembered only the words he had used to describe it, not the pain itself. His body had rejected the real memory of the pain, as soon as he recovered. Just as you couldn’t really remember the precise sensation of sexual ecstasy, once it had passed. You knew you had enjoyed it, acutely, just as you had acutely despised intense pain. But all the real sensation was gone, there was something you couldn’t quite regain.

*

He was kissing Brigid’s forehead as she stood there, trying to protect her. The silence extended around them, until she sighed deeply and said, ‘That was a bad one.’

‘It’s very wet in the garden,’ he said.

‘It is wet,’ she said.

‘Do you like it?’

‘I did but it’s getting a bit cold now.’

He took her arm and began to lead her along. She was elephantine and fragile, a great round egg cracking open.

*

They both went inside and Brigid kissed Calumn as she passed him. ‘Darling boy,’ she said. He raised his hands to her, he wanted her to hold him. She kissed him as he sat in his high chair, her mother spooning food into his little mouth. He babbled into her ear. ‘Eeeerrrrugggcscckkkbelowbleoble.’

‘I know sweetie, I know,’ she whispered. ‘Mummy loves you. What delicious food you have! What a lovely dinner!’ And she nodded towards the bits of pasta, laid out before him. It was bad, she thought. She was being stretched, drawn out on a rack. She pulled her hand away from her son’s clutching fingers, because she could feel a contraction rising. She kissed him again, ‘Mummy loves you, darling boy,’ and turned away. She was forced to ignore his protests, the way he held out his arms to her. Trying to bring her back. In the living room she sat on a rocking chair. Patrick had put Bach on the iPod, hoping it would calm her. Brigid was aiming to focus on the soft arpeggios, and perhaps as she focused the music calmed her a little. Not enough really; she needed much more than Bach.

*

In the background she could hear Calumn and her mother, Calumn still whining a little, not entirely placated, and she remembered how it had been with Calumn, how finally after all the false alarms she had fallen ill, a horrible stomach virus which made her feverish, and she had been stricken with anxiety because she assumed this would hurt the baby. So she agreed to everything, when they said she must be induced. They took her into the hospital and controlled the contractions with a chemical drip, oxytocin she thought it was, so when they wanted them stronger they poured more oxytocin into her, and when that became too much to bear they stuck a needle deep into her spine and numbed her entirely. Chemicals were flushed through her system, and her body was subdued by them, her responses dulled. And there was a graph beside her, constantly monitoring the baby’s heart rate — she could hear the scrape of a pen on paper, and something beeping regularly, a falsetto pulse — she was rigged up to lots of machines, and the midwife told her she had done the right thing, ‘for you and baby’, she said.

*

Perhaps that was true, even though she was numb and powerless. She had to grab her legs to move them at all. When she wanted to piss, she had to be helped onto a bedpan, and then she barely squatted, could hardly keep herself in position, as she tried to eke out some piss. She was moved — briskly, practically — from side to side by the midwife, and some doctors came and peered inside her. She couldn’t feel their hands at all. They broke the membranes with a hook, ‘a big bag of membranes, hanging down’, they told her, and she couldn’t imagine what it must look like. When the membranes broke, the bed was soaked. So much fluid — the midwife had to change all the sheets, drop them in a sodden pile onto a trolley. She only felt the dampness when it reached her lower legs. The rest of her body was unfeeling, unknowing. Even so, she didn’t think of it as a bad birth. She wasn’t traumatised. She didn’t really understand when friends talked about being disappointed by their birthing experience, as if they had hoped for something else. Everything had been managed, and she had been flooded with chemicals, and all the machines had whirred and beeped efficiently and in very little time, her baby had come. She didn’t even know he was coming, she was still pretending to be pushing. The first she knew about him was when they landed him on her belly — a great — it seemed to her — wet thing, his mouth wide open in a scream. ‘Fine set of lungs,’ said someone — a nurse, or maybe the midwife. ‘A beautiful big boy,’ said another.

*

Now Brigid was rocking herself in the living room. She had been determined this time to experience the birth — this phrase she and her friends bandied around, meaning to experience it with a minimum of interventions, or chemicals. This time she wanted to stay at home, to avoid the bleeping and lights and the midwives moving her body around. She wanted to be active, to control the pain herself. She had all these phrases in her head, and she wondered if they would help. She was trapped between two forms of fear; she feared pain, of course, but then she was afraid of those long days and nights in hospital — once you were in there, you had to stay, and more and more things happened to you — and she thought perhaps it was better to endure the finite horrible pain of labour if that meant she escaped all the stitches and scars and bruising which last time made her limp for weeks. Last time the really insidious pain had come after labour, when the drugs left her system and her body finally realised what had happened to it. She was in agony for weeks, and then it took months before she felt anything like normal again. Perhaps this would be better; she hoped it would be better. Pregnancy was an exercise in optimism; having children was an eager assertion of optimism against all the dangers inherent in life, the tragedy which lurked constantly, at the edge of joy. So now she was trying to sustain this perilous optimism, clinging to a sense that things should be well.

*

She was swinging backwards and forwards, trying to focus her mind on this repetitive motion. When Patrick came in and said, ‘What would you like?’ she said she wanted a hot-water bottle and her TENS machine. Before, the rain had helped but now she needed warmth around her lower body; she wanted to be wrapped in warmth. He made her take off her clothes, and dressed her in things he had found in her labour bag. Even as he pulled a sweatshirt over her belly, she felt another contraction rising within her, this questioning, insistent pain. Her body was signalling to her, in these surges. Had she been more instinctive, she might have understood them better. They were becoming more regular and she thought she should time them. ‘Can you get me my phone?’ she said to Patrick, who was gathering up her wet things. When he gave it to her, she fiddled around to find the stopwatch setting, and pressed Go. She kept her eyes on the seconds passing, as the pain gripped her. It was like a crocodile, tumbling her in a death roll. It had trapped her, it was her. There was no escape, until these pains forced out the child. The seconds were moving, time was passing, and still the pain rolled through her, and she saw a minute had elapsed. Then she pressed Stop.

*

‘Every five minutes, lasting a minute,’ she said to Patrick when he came back. He was fixing pads on her back, for the TENS machine. She was wired up to a little box; it was something about an electrical pulse which clouded the brain. The brain couldn’t recognise the real pain beneath the prickling discomfort caused by the TENS machine. It was better to be pricked by a thousand tiny needles, that was what it felt like, this electronic buzzing on her back, than to feel the pure delving stab of her contractions. Voluntarily, she pricked herself, it was strange. It was counter-intuitive, but this dancing of needles on her back started to help. Underneath, she could feel the pain, as another contraction surged and broke. She timed it again. ‘Another one the same,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps a little shorter.’

‘I’ll time them too,’ said Patrick. ‘You just tell me when they start.’

*

It was a different enterprise altogether. A nervous experiment. They were amateurs at this; Patrick with his stopwatch, timing her to the finish. Perhaps they could stay like this until the baby came, she thought. It was consoling to be at home. Around her, the ordinary objects of their existence. The corner of the room, filled with toys. Some plastic trucks. A pile of wooden bricks. A drum and a xylophone. Her mother had tidied, of course. She had stacked things in her own way, so everything looked slightly different from usual. There were books on the coffee table; Brigid couldn’t imagine she’d ever read them. It seemed impossible that she, in this immense pain-filled body, had once sat quietly. Yesterday, though she could barely remember it, she had been sitting in this room, in relative comfort, drinking a cup of tea, smiling at her son as he pushed a plastic truck around. It seemed impossible that she had been sitting there with a book and flicking through the pages, idly and as if she had infinite time. Now she was being seared by the minutes and seconds. She had four minutes to recover. To breathe deeply. She thought she should try to focus on something, a point in the room — the glare of the lights above her, halogen bulbs twinkling from the ceiling. She stared at a point and watched light fill it and dissolve when she blinked, then fill it again. The pain sounded its first notes. She said, ‘Start now.’ A minute of pain. It was possible to endure. And then she was busy with the TENS machine and the rocking chair, feeling the warmth at the base of her spine from the hot-water bottle, and the crackling of electricity on her back. Patrick was staring at the phone. He looked crazy, like a workaholic, unable to take his eyes off the job. For a moment she tried to focus on that, but this thought too was dispersed by the mounting severity of the pain. There was a blank, filled only with pain and her desperate attempts to neutralise it, until finally it receded again. Dwindled and died. ‘Stop,’ she said.

*

‘A minute, after five minutes,’ said Patrick.

‘Quite regular then.’

‘Do you think they’re strong enough to get the midwife?’

‘They said only call the midwife when you’re not coping with the pain.’

‘Do you think you’re coping?’

‘Do you think I’m coping?’

‘I don’t know. It has to be your call.’

*

From the kitchen, there was a wail, an escalating cry from Calumn. Thwarted or genuinely upset, Brigid couldn’t tell. The wail was too muffled, and there was the sound of Bach above it.

‘What’s going on with Calumn?’ she said. In the intervals between the contractions she was comfortable. During those intervals she could hardly accept that she would soon have to bow her head again, that the pain would once more come to ransack her body and she would be able to think only of the TENS machine in her hand and the prickling on her back, and how many seconds more until she was released.

‘Shall I go and check?’ said Patrick.

‘Yes.’

*

So Patrick went out, as the cries became more desperate. She heard his voice in the kitchen. The higher pitch he adopted with Calumn. He was an affectionate, patient man. Her friends told her so, and she knew it anyway. He tried hard, though Calumn usually wanted her, would even push his father away when she approached. She knew that hurt Patrick, but it had been going on for so long now, it seemed impossible to change. She couldn’t remember when it had started, because at first they had been allies, equally shell-shocked and excited, taking turns to rock Calumn when he cried, changing nappies, laughing together about the debris and chaos of it all. Slowly things had shifted. They needed money, one of them had to work fulltime. Brigid could claim maternity pay, so she stayed with Calumn, while Patrick trudged back to the office. He had been sad about it, she knew; he called her up, wanting news from home. Gradually Brigid became the one who consoled Calumn, who woke with him, fed him, bathed him; the one who was always there. When Calumn was ill, when he was feverish at night and could not settle, it was Brigid who went to him. Patrick tried to help, but Calumn wouldn’t stop crying until Brigid came. And because he worked on the other side of London, because they could not afford to move, Patrick could never take Calumn to the crèche. So Brigid drove there two mornings a week, watched Calumn cry inconsolably in the arms of his ‘key carer’, then she dragged herself away and went home. Often she was in tears in the car. When she got back she had three hours to work and she sat there determinedly at her desk but really her work suffered and she was inefficient, slowed by a sense of heaviness and mental fog. She knew things weren’t easy for Patrick either. He was hardly having a luxury time of it, commuting in London and sitting out the hours in his office. Sometimes she longed to trade places with him, and yet she knew he envied her, on the days when he returned and found her and Calumn huddled together over a book, content in their enclosed world. Another relentless rising pain and she could hear Patrick’s high-pitched comforting voice, though she couldn’t distinguish the words. The crying stopped. She imagined him holding their son, stroking his hair. The pain and breathe breathe breathe. The TENS machine buzzing at her back. The buzzing was superficial, but somehow it heated her belly. It heated her through and slightly assuaged a pain she felt mostly at the front of her body. She thought of her confused brain, tricked by this electrical buzzing. Then she breathed more easily as the pain crashed and dwindled again. Patrick was constantly loving and patient with his son. She should be more grateful and praise him. With the second child, she would be more realistic. She was taking three months off. She would try not to work at all during this time. She would simply enjoy her children. Patrick would go back to work after two weeks, and she would get to know her new baby, and help Calumn to adjust.

*

That was if the baby came, she thought, gripped by superstition and not wanting to plan. She heard Calumn crying again and assumed Patrick was trying to leave the room. He wanted reassurance. Naturally he couldn’t understand why they were closeted together. Something he couldn’t see. She heard the voice of her mother. Then Patrick came in again.

‘He’s fine,’ he said. ‘Just a bit tired. He’s got some milk now. He ate a good dinner.’

‘Did he? Lots of pasta?’

‘Yes. An entire bowl, and then he had nearly a punnet of blueberries.’

‘Good.’

How much time passed like this, Brigid wasn’t sure. Perhaps an hour. Nothing changed except the pain. The pain was developing, aiming to surge beyond her attempts to contain it. She had grown accustomed to one sort of severity, but it — this presence, moving within her body and precipitating every surge of pain — wanted more. It wanted her raging, blind with agony. It seemed to Brigid as she rocked herself that a TENS machine and a hot-water bottle would soon fail against this pain. She would have to submit in the end; she would be torn apart. She did feel angry too, now that the pain was mounting constantly, with so little regard for the bounds of her strength. Always Patrick was at her side, timing everything, and they were mostly silent together. She would say ‘Now’ when a contraction started and ‘Stop’ when it ended, and he would tell her how long it had been. And there were dark intervals when he went to find her food, or water, or something else he thought she might need. She would hear him in the other room, talking to her mother, or was it Calumn, and now she remembered Calumn was in bed. Patrick had taken him, because he wouldn’t go upstairs with her mother. She thought of her son, asleep in his little room, wearing pyjamas with birds on them. Small and beautiful and made from her. That had to console her, though she was growing desperate with the pain.

*

She was rocking herself quite dementedly now, because it helped a little. Patrick renewed her hot-water bottle, pressed it against her back. The heat made her wince, but it was soon eclipsed by another contraction. The buzzing of the TENS machine. She needed to be constantly inventive, to find new ways to evade the pain. ‘Perhaps you could massage my back,’ she said, and Patrick went off to get some oils. Obligingly, he kneaded her skin. That diverted her briefly, but not as much as she had hoped. ‘Would you like a bath?’ he said. ‘Isn’t that meant to help?’ but she couldn’t imagine lowering herself into a bath, wallowing there as the water cooled around her. ‘I think I’ll stay here,’ she said, and then another contraction came.

*

Patrick saw his wife and wondered what it was to be her, gripped by this agony, which had to be endured, and for some reason — he couldn’t understand — she was embracing agony, clutching it to her, though there was a hospital nearby, with a cache of analgesics. They had argued about that, because he didn’t understand her decision to stay at home. He thought it was arbitrary masochism, but she said she was being pragmatic, because her body took so long to heal last time and she had learned from her experiences. She couldn’t cope with Calumn and a new baby, in the state she was in last time, she had argued. And it was true, her recovery had been torturously slow; he remembered it well enough. This time, she said, she would annihilate herself during labour, in order to improve her chances of a quick return to health. It seemed a crazy gamble, but he didn’t know. In all of this, he was adrift, seeking guidance from her, her instincts. He believed there must be something within her, telling her what to do.

*

Brigid heard her mother at the door, and wondered how much more time had passed. ‘Can I do anything?’ said her mother.

‘No, but thanks so much for looking after Calumn,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind, perhaps you could stay here tonight. Just in case we’re in the middle of things and Calumn wakes up.’ It was such a funny euphemism. The middle of things. The splitting of the body. They called it parturition but really it was blood and wreckage. Just in case we’re drowning in blood, she thought, that would be closer to the truth. Her mother was agreeing. ‘Of course, I’m glad to be useful,’ she was saying. ‘I might just pop back for my night things.’

‘Yes of course. We’ll be fine for a couple of hours, I’m sure,’ said Patrick. ‘The midwife is coming, and Calumn is fast asleep.’

*

The midwife was coming soon, said Patrick when Brigid asked again. But it seemed a long time had passed. The evening had been fractured, and she understood minutes only in terms of focused agony or fleeting respite. She waited — urgently — through the pain and then she waited for the next surge to begin. ‘Where is the midwife?’ she said again. She wanted someone to tell her what the pain meant. It was too lonely now, this amateur divining with their mobile phone stopwatches and their nervous scraps of paper.

5 minutes then a contraction 1 minute

4 minutes then a contraction 55 seconds

5 minutes then a contraction 1 minute 10 seconds

6 minutes then a contraction 45 seconds

4 minutes then a contraction 60 seconds

4 minutes then a contraction 60 seconds

3 minutes then a contraction 1 minute 10 seconds

Hours they had annotated in this way. But she wasn’t sure what it meant, despite the care they had taken, marking it all down.

‘On her way,’ said Patrick. Then there was another span of time, just pain and then a respite, and then pure pain again. Over and over. Her mouth was dry, but Patrick was there, holding a glass to her lips. It was the interval that made each contraction bearable, she thought. Without the knowledge that it would soon end, you couldn’t endure it. At its height it was as if she was being run through with a spear. A terrible delving stab, so she thought it must destroy her, and then it receded again.

*

The midwife had arrived, with her practised manner. She was called Gina, and she said, ‘Haven’t you been doing well? Decided to stay at home, did you?’ and then she sat on the sofa near to Brigid’s chair. ‘Do you want to try some positions?’ she said. ‘They’ll help with the pain,’ but Brigid didn’t want to move. ‘I want to stay on the chair,’ she said. ‘I’m so tired.’

‘Of course you are,’ said the midwife. ‘You just do what works for you. Would you like a cup of tea?’ and that sounded so incredibly quotidian and reassuring that Brigid said yes, even though when the tea came she found she couldn’t drink it.

‘Let’s have a listen to baby’s heart rate,’ said the midwife, putting a machine to Brigid’s belly. In the room, suddenly, the eager sound of the baby’s heart. Gina smiled and said that was all normal. Then she fixed Brigid up with a gas pipe, and Brigid was so grateful for the relief it offered that she found she was breathing in desperately, ravenous for gas. For some time she simply inhaled gas. She knew she was meant to inhale before the contraction, then take her mouth away and breathe normally, but she was too afraid of missing her cue, leaving herself gas-free for the next surge of pain, so she just kept her mouth over the pipe and breathed in nothing but gas. The sickly sweet taste didn’t bother her, she just wanted to reduce the pain. She was rocking frantically and in one hand she had the TENS machine — her fingers still desperately twiddling the dial — and in the other she had the gas pipe. She hardly spoke any more; she was too fixed on breathing in gas. And breathe, and breathe, she was inhaling as much as she could, gulping down clouds of gas. She imagined it as yellow, a yellow cloud moving into her lungs. It was amazing how quickly it became a prop. Sometimes she dropped the mouthpiece and then there was a desperate rush, Patrick and the midwife fumbling around to get it back to her.

*

Breathe breathe breathe, she thought, and the gas made her dizzy. After a while she felt as if she was very drunk and in a room full of sober people, trying desperately to conceal her state.

*

‘How are you feeling now?’ said the midwife, and Brigid muttered something. ‘I feel as if I am at a cocktail party and I just want to take my clothes off,’ she said, or something like that. ‘Are you too hot, darling?’ said Patrick, not really understanding her, and Brigid said, ‘No no, not too hot. A bit cold, in a way.’

*

He went to get her some socks. She was still wearing her tracksuit and her T-shirt. Perhaps she was still wet from the rain, or was it sweat? She wasn’t sure. Then she remembered Patrick had changed her clothes. So she had sweated her clothes damp. ‘My son is called Calumn,’ she was saying to the midwife. ‘How lovely,’ said Gina.

‘You know, he’s just upstairs. It’s so strange he’s just upstairs. Asleep through all of this,’ and then the pain began again so she became disciplined, serious, her lips tight around the gas pipe, breathing in hard, trying to draw down gas.

*

Rock rock rock, breathe breathe breathe, and her head was swirling and the rocking was making her sick, or was it the gas, certainly she felt nauseous to a degree, and when Patrick came back with the socks she found she couldn’t bear him fiddling with her feet, though she had to submit because she was cold. ‘Breathe,’ he said to her, though that was all she could do anyway. She had her head down, because she was trying to turn the dial on the TENS machine and hold the gas pipe. She had them both constantly in view, she moved her eyes from one to the other, in case anything happened to them. Without both of them, she thought, she wouldn’t survive. She would be consumed by pain and fear. And beyond her, beyond her oversized form, rocking insanely and puffing and breathing, were two people who felt no pain at all, lived in a parallel world in which they could move freely and without agony.

*

‘Just keep breathing, darling,’ said Patrick. ‘You’re doing wonderfully well,’ and she thought how odd it was, that he felt this urge to keep talking, to fill in the silence of her pain. When he wasn’t talking to her he was aiming words at the midwife, making awkward small talk, as if they really were at a cocktail party and Brigid had been taken ill, and he was obliged to chat away to someone while he looked after her. Brigid wondered if it would help if she thought of herself as someone who had become drunk and disorderly, who had been confined to a room upstairs, with her husband and someone else looking after her. And that’s what they call visualisation, she thought — but she decided it wouldn’t help her much. Her imagination was not forceful enough to counter the insistent agony of her body. Always it was insisting. It was terrible how shrill her body was, how it sought to overwhelm her spirit, or mind, or whatever she possessed that wasn’t her body — and she wasn’t sure if there was much left; her body had taken everything over. Now she tried to think of Calumn, and wondered what this second child would be like. She pictured her son peacefully asleep, she knew precisely how he liked to sleep, curled on his side, one arm flung across the other, and he would be holding his elephant, and perhaps Patrick had given him a dummy, because although they were trying to wean him off such things they had failed entirely. She thought of him breathing in his soft way, making his sweet little moans, and all the time she was trying to birth this other, this child she had no sense of at all, no real love for yet. It was undergoing its own unknowable process, a relentless tightening of the walls around it, something which might seem as bewildering as labour on the outside, labour in the world. She hoped this baby wasn’t too uncomfortable, too frightened, in this dark womb with the walls tightening around it.

*

There was some more pain and then Brigid found she was lying on her back on the sofa, the midwife’s fingers deep inside her. ‘Dilation,’ the midwife was saying, and Brigid clung to the word while she endured a vicious contraction, one which tore at her, and she said ‘Oh no, oh no.’ She wanted to push the midwife away, but then she wanted to know how much longer she had to endure, so she submitted and tensed her muscles and tried not to cry out, and the midwife finished what she was doing and said that the labour was progressing. ‘You’re five centimetres dilated, so you’ve done very well.’ But Brigid wanted to cry. Only five centimetres! She wanted to rage at someone, though she couldn’t think who was responsible for her state. She had been too inert. She had been sitting down for hours. She should have moved around more, but then it hurt to move. ‘But that’s only halfway,’ she said to Gina.

‘Yes, well the later stages should go a bit faster than the earlier stages did. If we can just move things along then we’ll see some progress. You will have to climb the stairs, for example. And a few other tricks of the trade. But I’ll be here all the time and so will Patrick.’

‘I don’t want to climb the stairs.’

‘Just one at a time. If it will make things go faster,’ said the midwife.

‘Will it really make a difference?’

‘It certainly will. Come on you brave girl. Let’s get you climbing those stairs.’

*

She saw Patrick nodding reluctantly, and he put out his arms and lifted her from the chair.

*

Slowly, she gained the length of the hall. There were the stairs before her. This was a vile pain. Perhaps the worst she had ever known. She had been forced to relinquish the gas pipe, so now all she had was her TENS machine, the pads curling away from her sweaty skin. When she put a foot down, she felt as if a spike had been rammed up her leg. With each movement she demolished herself. And within her, she could hardly imagine what it was within her, what made the pain so horrible.

‘One step at a time. Just think you have one step to do, and focus on that single step,’ said Gina. Patrick was behind her, and Brigid knew he would be hating it all. She couldn’t see him, but she knew he would be anxious and wanting it to end. So she raised a foot, and placed it on the first step.

‘Good girl.’

Her belly was aflame, it felt as if she was burning inside. There was a fire in her belly, and she had been spiked and held in the flames. The spike had stopped her, she couldn’t lift her leg again, because the spike was holding her down. She stood with one foot on the step and found she couldn’t move the other. It was absurd, at one level she knew it was absurd that she couldn’t move, because she was so afraid of pain. It is only pain, she thought. A bodily sensation. Transient. It was not fatal. She would not die of pain, surely. Not in this century. Anyway the body was designed to endure it. For millions of years, perhaps, humans had given birth without gas, without epidurals; they had given birth screaming and writhing, but they had managed to do it. She had been making these arguments for months, to herself or Patrick, or anyone else who cared to discuss it. The body was meant to withstand the pain of childbirth. It was designed for the trial. So why was she standing there, unable to move? If she lifted her left foot she would run down the spike altogether and hang there, she thought. She would be hanging there as the midwife said, ‘Good girl.’

‘Come on Brigid, the faster you do it, the quicker it will all be over, and then you are all the closer to meeting your lovely baby,’ said the midwife.

So Brigid moved her left foot. That rearranged the pain, drove it further inside her. Trying to gain momentum, she forced herself onto the next step. Two steps, she thought. And there were — she counted them quickly — ten more. A sixth of the way. How she was trying to calibrate her agony, to make it scientific and thereby acceptable.

‘And another one,’ said the midwife.

‘Well done, Brigid,’ said Patrick. ‘You’re doing really well.’

But he hated it anyway, she knew.

‘The sooner we get this moving along, the sooner you can start to push,’ said the midwife. That just filled her with further dread, the thought of having to flex her muscles through this pain. She was trapped. If she didn’t move, she would just prolong it all; she would be in labour tomorrow and perhaps beyond that. It was unimaginable. Yet her body was stubborn and rebellious. And there was her hopeless sense of outrage, that she alone was in pain and the others were just pretending to her, claiming a sympathy they didn’t really feel. They congratulated her, but it was hollow. They couldn’t understand what was happening to her.

Brigid lifted her leg again, dragged it off the spike. And then she held it in mid air for a moment, unable to force it down again.

*

‘Go on, Brigid, put your foot down,’ said the midwife. Brisk and practical. A sadist, thought Brigid. A deep dark ravenous sadist, trying to torture them all. She put her foot down, surrendered to the agony, and then moved her other foot. Another step gained. Another. She was on the sixth step, in tears now, but they were desperate solitary tears, so she wasn’t sure Patrick or the midwife — behind her, exhorting her all the way — noticed them at all. And even if they did, there was nothing they could do. She had to impale herself over and over again. She was battling onto the eighth step, crying quietly as she moved, when she looked up and saw the moon through the landing window. It was a full moon, so huge it was barely contained within the window frame. She looked up at it and paused. It was so round and large. It was somehow comforting, though she didn’t know why. It looked solid, though it was an immeasurable distance away. Immeasurable to her. For a moment she just looked at this moon, and then she moved again.

*

Down onto the spike she went. Impaled thoroughly. She cried out, and she heard Patrick saying, ‘Does she have to do this?’

She wanted to wail now, though she was trying to be quiet because of Calumn. Still, in some weary smashed-up portion of her brain, there was the image of her son, peacefully sleeping. Then the contraction came and she bent over and gripped the banisters. Nothing could help her now. She had lost the gas and she hardly bothered to turn on the TENS machine. She just bowed to the agony, let it rage through her, and she opened her mouth wide as if to scream, though no sound came.

‘Can’t she go back to the chair?’ Patrick was saying. ‘This is ridiculous.’

‘Just a couple more stairs,’ said the midwife. ‘Let her get through this contraction.’

*

She was bent double and clutching onto the stairs and her mouth was hanging open. Her body demanded certain postures. It had an idea of how to minimise the pain, though it was only a faint improvement. She clung to this anyway. She had her mouth open and she was trying to breathe, though all she wanted to do was rail against the midwife and tell her to go. She wanted to blame her.

*

When the pain receded she moved up two more steps, because she didn’t care how much worse things got. ‘Well done, excellent,’ said the midwife. ‘That’s really wonderful, Brigid. Can you do just one more?’

‘Hasn’t she done enough?’ She could hear from this that Patrick had already condemned the midwife. As if to show him it was OK, she lifted her leg again. It was the shrillness of the pain which was so shocking. You could only think, how shrill. How I have never felt pain like this. How I never will, unless I give birth again. How I must not. How I must never do this again.

*

‘Well done,’ the midwife was saying, patting Brigid gently on the back. ‘You did brilliantly. You were very brave. Patrick, can you carry Brigid downstairs?’

*

And Patrick, glad to be able to do something, took Brigid in his arms, and kissed her. ‘Was that horrible?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

He was wiping tears from her cheeks.

‘My poor darling. I’m very proud of you.’

The next hour was confused. There was a sort of acceleration. She lost control altogether. She was back in the rocking chair, and the gas had drawn her under. She felt as if she was dying, with the gas pipe in her mouth. She imagined this must be what it was like to die. This merging of the mind and body, this realisation that the two were inextricably bound together. The mind dwindled as the body faded, she had a sense of that, and she imagined her eyes must be glassy already. And then the gas made everything like a vision, or a nightmare.

*

So she shut her eyes and thought for a moment that she was running through her house, trying to find Calumn or her newborn child. In this imagining, or hallucination, whatever it was, she had already birthed the baby, and yet she couldn’t find it. She kept flinging open doors, and each one would open onto the same scene — a woman squatting in childbirth, semi-naked, screaming out her pain. And each time the woman would stop screaming and look at her. Brigid would stand there for a moment, held by this stare, then the door would slam shut. All these rooms, with women squatting in them, crying and screaming. Some would die, perhaps, and some of their babies would perhaps die with them. That made her shake, and she opened her eyes again, but she couldn’t focus on the faces of the midwife or Patrick; they were too remote from her, contained entirely apart from her, and she breathed in gas and murmured — Patrick bent down, but couldn’t understand her — and she saw the women again.

The midwife examined her, and her fingers were like shards of glass, and Brigid imagined her interior as a ragged hole, ripped apart by all the pain. The midwife was grave now, something had changed. Six centimetres dilated, she said. Six centimetres was nothing, for all these hours of pain. They had told her the second time was easier, and yet they had lied, or she was the exception. Hours and hours; it must be late, and she was lost and fumbling in the dark. Patrick was beside her. She was holding his hand; his skin was very damp and warm. She was sweating and she had heated his hand. Escalation, that was what was happening. Something she couldn’t control. She no longer tried to breathe deeply. The contractions seemed to be constant, or the intervals were too brief for her to recover from the lancing pain. There was no respite. She felt water at her lips, and she realised she was thirsty. But she couldn’t swallow.

*

‘You must drink,’ said the midwife. ‘You mustn’t get dehydrated.’

A cold flannel on her face. That helped briefly. And she had forgotten to twist the TENS machine. She had forgotten but it didn’t matter any more. She ripped off the pads, scrabbling with her fingers at her back. Her back was burning, she felt as if she had been branded.

‘You want to take it off?’ said Patrick.

She couldn’t reply, she just scrabbled with her fingers, and so he helped her. He ripped off the pads and rubbed the sore skin.

*

Into this nightmare of gas and pain came the voice of the midwife. As if from very far away. She was infinitely far away, in the world of non-pain. Patrick was there too, and Calumn and her mother were in the house but elsewhere and she could hardly remember them now. This too was death, losing any sense of your family, finding they had faded from your mind. She heard a voice, the measured tone of the midwife, and now she tried to turn her head towards it. It was saying, ‘There are things we can do to help the labour along, but you will have to move again.’

‘I don’t want to move,’ said Brigid.

‘I am afraid you will have to. We will have to change your position. It’s simply not going to happen otherwise.’

‘I can’t move any more,’ said Brigid. Her voice was only a whine. She shook her head. She thought of the hospital, the tower across the river, and how she had wanted to avoid it. ‘It’s too much.’

‘You must keep trying,’ said the midwife.

She had been defeated, that seemed clear. Flayed and torn, and now she was searching for an escape route, or if not escape then something she could endure. ‘I want to go to hospital,’ she said, because she knew it was the only way she could reduce the pain. The pain was the unbearable constant, and her body was piteous and amoral, desperate for a release. ‘I want an epidural,’ she heard herself saying, and she was trying not to cry.

‘Are you sure?’ said the midwife. She sounded disappointed. ‘It’s your choice of course, but equally I can sit down with you and your husband and discuss some other options.’

‘No,’ said Brigid, and though she was weeping now she was quite resolute. ‘I want to go to hospital.’

‘Shall I drive her?’ said Patrick.

‘No, she should go by ambulance,’ said the midwife. ‘At this stage, she can’t go by car.’

Now Brigid stopped rocking herself, she just let wave after wave of pain grip her and toss her around, as if she was driftwood on an endless ocean, while Patrick stroked her hair and kissed her, said kind words she could hardly disentangle. Her face was greased with tears. She could barely lift her head and take a breath before the next contraction came. And she was weak from trying to stay afloat, from trying to ‘manage her pain’. ‘Manage your pain.’ ‘Stay in control of your pain.’ Well, she had failed in all of that.

‘Fine,’ she said, not caring any more, and then she bowed her head as another contraction swept her under.

*

She was under for a long time, and her thoughts were just of blackness.

*

‘Darling.’ That was Patrick’s voice. Somewhere else. She heard it above her, or maybe she was above it and he was trying to call her back. ‘The midwife has called for an ambulance. It will be here very soon.’ There was a why in her mind, but she couldn’t express it. She didn’t understand. She could hardly even think of the baby, she was just thinking of her body and how she was drowning in pain and how pointless this pain was — she had forgotten it had a reason. It was her natural state — she had always been in pain, would always be — she was in a new world, in which pain was continuous and unceasing and there would only ever be pain. Patrick said to her, ‘Darling it will be OK,’ and she thought he meant the pain, and that he was lying anyway, the pain wouldn’t end.

‘They say we will be picked up very soon,’ said Patrick.

Patrick watched his wife, he saw her neck drenched in sweat and her body hunched, and the terrible fear in her eyes when a contraction came. Mostly he wanted to be sick. He was in a vile state of panic; he understood how powerless he was, to help her or their unborn child. Even the midwife seemed worried. On the phone to the hospital, she sounded urgent, not professional at all. ‘Come as soon as you can, she is no longer coping with the pain,’ she said, but softly so Brigid wouldn’t hear. Brigid had her eyes shut and he couldn’t imagine what she was thinking. Everything had failed, all their optimistic plans, and he felt a grave sense of pity for her, that she had been trying so hard and yet it had stalled anyway. The midwife was gathering things together. Her gas pipe. Her birthing ball and her aromatherapy oils. Redundant, all of them. It was unfair to blame her, this benevolent practical woman, with her short brown hair and her open face. It wasn’t her fault, he tried to think. They were unlucky, that was all. But he was too panicked to be clear at all.

*

‘You’ve done everything right,’ the midwife said to him. ‘Brigid is just very tired. I suspect baby is in an awkward position. So labour has been particularly slow and difficult.’

‘What would happen if there wasn’t a hospital, if no hospital existed?’ said Patrick back to her, when Brigid was distracted, clenching her teeth and writhing through another contraction.

‘Well, that’s hardly relevant,’ said the midwife, and for a moment she looked irritated.

‘But just can you speculate? Just out of interest?’

‘No, I don’t think I can,’ said the midwife, and Patrick had to desist. He couldn’t interrogate her. He was angry with himself too, because he had failed Brigid.

*

‘I just want to see her before she goes,’ Brigid’s mother was saying, and Brigid looked up to see her mother in the doorway.

‘Where’s Calumn?’ she said to her, she thought she said something like that, though her words were slurred.

‘He’s fast asleep. He’s been such a good little boy.’

‘OK. Is he OK?’

‘He’s fine, dear. We’ll be fine until you get back. I hope it all goes well for you,’ and her mother came over and kissed the sweaty brow of her daughter, and stroked her gently on the cheek.

Brigid waited until her mother left the room and then she began to cry again. She couldn’t restrain herself at all, she sobbed and Patrick put his arms around her.

*

As they took her into the ambulance, Brigid, prostrate and no longer able to care about her state, perfectly supine, looked up and saw directly above her, hanging above her, like an improbable stage prop, the moon. This full moon, so vast and white; she was mesmerised as she lay there. As they adjusted elements around her, clipped one thing and unclasped another, smoothed blankets over her, as Patrick held her hand and stroked her hair, Brigid stared up at the moon.

The Hermit

The moon hung above Michael Stone as he stood in the garden of a Hampstead house. It was a handsome garden, abundant in flowers and gnarled old trees, candles sputtering on the terrace. ‘This is Lucy-Rose Simpson, editor of the Weekly Review, and her partner, James McIntyre, whose poetry you have doubtless read,’ Sally had said, as they arrived. ‘Thank you for inviting me,’ he said, and they laughed generously, as if he had been witty. Lucy-Rose was saying to him now, ‘Do you have everything you need?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, gesturing with his glass at nothing. ‘Thank you.’

‘My pleasure,’ she said. Her voice — husky and compas-sionate — was familiar; he had heard her often on the radio. She reviewed books of the hour; she was decisive, but seldom rude. In the flickering light, Michael noted her round eyes, her cropped hair, stained bronze, and into the round-eyed compassion of Lucy-Rose, he said, ‘An amazing moon.’

She looked up and said, ‘Of course, you like moons.’ She laughed towards him. ‘It’s very full isn’t it? You can almost imagine you’re standing on the shore of the Sea of Tranquillity.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m so glad we’re all out in the garden,’ said Lucy-Rose. ‘It rained so hard earlier, I thought we’d be shut up inside.

So much nicer, in the summer, to stand in the garden, even when everything is wet to the touch.’

*

Then there was another person beside them. A poet, saying how much he admired the book —‘the book’ — that was how they flattered him — and Michael said, ‘Thank you very much. I appreciate your support.’

They had introduced him earlier, this man, Dougie Ascherson, that was his name. Winner of the Hodgkinson-Healey prize, they added, and Michael murmured his congratulations. The Weekly Review was all poets, Sally had said. ‘Bad breath and horrible clothes,’ she laughed. But they weren’t like that at all. Everyone was smooth-skinned and charming, far from seedy.

‘I’m just glad it’s seen the light of day,’ said Lucy-Rose.‘That we can raise a glass to your published work.’

*

Michael had been drunk after lunch, and in his drunkenness he had become aware that the hours were passing slowly, that his mood had tottered and then descended still further. Sally had arranged this launch party, a robust celebration, and so the evening was shaded in, everything was planned. During the intervening hours, he had tried to stay busy. He read through the reviews, received their barbs. Now he had their phrases in his head, despite Sally’s exhortations. All afternoon he watched the clock slide onwards, as he drank one Irish coffee after another, until his throat was dry. The working day dwindled towards its close. It was an anti-climax. He had been expectant for months, because this was the day he would be judged. He had imagined it would be swift and decisive. But still everything hung in the balance. It would be weeks before the reviews all came in, Sally told him. She added, ‘Anyway, it really shouldn’t matter to you. The important thing, for you, was to get your work published. And you did.’

*

He couldn’t believe her. Instead he drank coffee and thought of his errors, the things he should have revised while he had the chance. That narrator, why did I let him run on so much? Why did I allow him to be so muddled, so vague in his assertions? He had sacrificed so much and even then he had written a bad book, and if he had the chance again he would destroy it. He never had much of a sense of loyalty to his books. He finished them with pride, thought them perfect for a day, a week perhaps. Then he lost faith, by degrees. And yet this book — he had hoped this book was his best, and Sally had said so too. He had called it The Moon, thinking this was a clever title at the time, but now he wanted to tear his book to pieces, because of what they had said.

*

At 3.00 p.m. the phone rang, and Sally said, ‘I forgot to remind you about the radio programme tomorrow. At 9.00 a.m. sharp. You might want to get everything ready before you come tonight. It’ll be live.’ That made Michael feel quite sick; he swallowed carefully.

‘I’m not sure … I don’t think I really should …’

‘Michael, I know. You are very reserved. But this is the only radio interview the publicity people could arrange for you. Katherine Miller is the presenter, and she’s terribly good. She’ll just ask you a few gentle questions about your book. It would help enormously with gaining an audience.’

‘But …’ he said.

‘Now, let’s think about this evening. You should come up to Hampstead for around 7.00 p.m. The launch is a bit of fun. No need to worry about it.’

‘Perhaps I should just stay here, prepare myself for the radio …’

She dismissed his words, before he could finish.

‘Nonsense. There’s something very irritating about writers who don’t go to their own launches. Come out, just for an hour. It’ll cheer you up.’

*

So Sally and good sense had prevailed, and Michael put the reviews on his desk, covered them with a piece of paper, and then he showered and found another shirt. He opened a bottle of wine because he was afraid of sobering up. Standing in his boxer shorts so as not to further crease his suit he gazed out of the window at the current far below and the current seemed more furious and driven than before. He was dependent on the judgement of strangers, on their opinions about him. He would be consigned to something or other, and then they would all forget him. The flood was passing, even as he watched it from his window.

*

He was drunk and calmer than before, when the phone rang. He assumed it would be Sally, or perhaps the publicity woman who had said she would call. Yet it was James again.

‘Ah, you’re still at home,’ he said, in his clipped and chilly way.

‘No, no, back at home,’ said Michael. ‘I was out earlier at a …’ but that sounded defensive, so he stopped.

‘I won’t keep you,’ said James. ‘I wanted to speak to you because I have just been to see our mother. I told her that you were launching your book. One speaks even though she doesn’t really understand. Normally she says very little, or what she says is incoherent. Yet today’— his brother’s voice was softening a little, registering surprise, or something else — ‘well, she nodded a little as I spoke. A reflex, perhaps. When it was time for me to go, she scrabbled with her hands, she wanted to write something. I couldn’t find a pen, so she said I must wish you luck. Then something else, which was garbled. About a story you once wrote for her. He is always writing little things for me, she said — because of course she is confused, she is half in the past, more sometimes, and she asked where you were …’

The taxi was outside, and Michael had to go.

So she clawed his day apart. His small moment, torn to shreds. It was melodrama, possibly, but he was trembling as the taxi conveyed him through the streets, as the driver turned the wheel and spoke loudly on his phone. When they pulled up outside the house he lingered by the door of the cab, unable to shut it. The driver looked at his watch, trying to hurry him away. Yet Michael was thinking, if he got back in, told the driver to take him to King’s Cross, he could be there in a few minutes. He could press his lips against her dusty hand, beg her forgiveness. He could say he was sorry, even if he wasn’t sure he really meant it.

But he paid the driver, and slammed the car door.

At the house he knew it had been a terrible mistake to come. He was welcomed by Lucy-Rose, Sally hovering in the background, trying to orchestrate his entrance, conducting him through the kindly nodding hordes and into the garden. His coat was removed, and someone brought him a glass of wine. He admired the walls covered in elegant prints, the shelves full of interesting books. He thanked everyone; he was indiscriminate.

*

Standing in the garden he saw them assembled. He wasn’t sure who had rallied them, but here they were, vivid in the dusk. Lucy-Rose was saying, ‘A few people couldn’t come, but they said they had heard good things about your book.’

Michael nodded and then, to change the subject, said, ‘Is that an aspidistra?’ and pointed at the flowerbed.

‘Yes,’ said Lucy-Rose. ‘We have a man who does the garden. He cultivates the most extraordinary flowers.’

‘It’s very fine.’

‘Michael, I have to leave in a second, but I wanted to say a brief hello before I went.’ There was a publisher at his shoulder. Martha Williams. She had once rejected a book of his, but now she was here.

‘I do hope things go well for you,’ she said, briskly. When she rejected his book she had written to Sally: ‘Dear Sally, further to our conversation on the phone I wanted to repeat how sorry we are that we could not accept Michael Stone’s novel. We are happy to take commercial risks if we really believe in the quality of the work but somehow we didn’t believe enough. I wish you and Mr Stone all the best in finding a suitable publisher.’ She had dashed that off in a second or two, to soften the blow, or to avoid offending Sally who had been at Cambridge with her. He had read it once and thrown it away. Still he remembered every word. Now she was speaking, in her brisk and terrifying way, her hands moving, her form shapeless within a billowing coat; but he couldn’t follow her words. He nodded as she said something about how she hadn’t had a chance to read his book but she looked forward to doing so, how she had heard something and something else, and he nodded and said, ‘Yes, it has all been … very … surprising.’

*

She shook his hand suddenly, before he had time to wipe it, said, ‘I wish you the best.’ Then she swept away, silk flowing from her ample shoulders. She had a coat the colour of the moon, he thought.

*

Here were more people he didn’t know. They were different from the lunchtime people, different in their particulars, though they were just as bold and loquacious, just as able to hammer out glinting phrases. To him they seemed perfect, some of them in shirts and slacks, and some wearing suits, recently arrived from their offices. The women well into attractive middle age, elegantly dressed, smelling of perfume. They mingled, the perfumed women with their flowing skirts, and the men in their slacks, and they smiled and kissed each other on the cheeks.

‘More wine?’ said someone, and he held out his glass.

*

‘Michael Stone,’ said someone else. ‘I just wanted to say how much I admire your book. I was trying to review it, but alas they had already sent it out.’

‘That’s a shame,’ said Michael. ‘But thank you.’

‘I’m Paul Ardache. I’ve written a few novels.’ And the man held out his hand. Perhaps he was forty, perhaps older. He had thick black hair, but his face was creased and folded. Like a much-used handkerchief. He was lean and he looked as if he smoked. And he was producing a cigarette packet now, offering it to Michael.

‘No thank you.’

‘How disciplined of you,’ said Paul Ardache.

There was a pause while the flame was kindled. Paul Ardache breathed in deeply, exhaled. ‘Ah God, I always chain-smoke my way through the launch of a book. But I lack self-control. Anyway,’ he began again, ‘I liked the way you wrote about this solitary man. Furious that he had been forgotten. Railing against everyone.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And I was moved by the story of those poor women, their sacrifice.’

‘You’re most kind.’

‘Then there were these strange moments, when I felt something else was coming through. Were you conscious of it, I wonder? I am fascinated by the elements we cannot control, the narratorial elements which somehow inveigle their way onto the page, seem inevitable to us but then strike others as peculiar and intriguing. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I am not sure.’

‘Well, for example, that ghost-woman Semmelweis saw. Is that documented, did he really see her?’

‘No, I must confess it isn’t a fact. I imagined he might …’

‘And what was her name again?’

‘Birgit Vogel.’

‘Of course, that’s it, Vogel the bird. A bird of peace, or a bird of prey, one wonders?’

‘I just wanted a German name. And not Busch or Fischer.’

‘Yes, well, that is interesting isn’t it? Still, of all the other names you could have chosen, you chose Vogel. The pecking beak. Like something from a Freudian nightmare, do you not think?’

‘I … I don’t know …’ He was stumbling, he wasn’t sure he liked what the man was saying to him. But Ardache was courteous and insistent.

‘You mean you do not know, or you are not sure this has any relevance to your work?’ he said.

‘I think … perhaps … such questions … these things … should remain unanswered … If we are not to delude ourselves …’

‘Of course, these matters are ultimately beyond our power to comprehend. The mind falters, and so on. I just wondered what you really thought. One thing I felt about your book was that you were a veiled presence. You were holding your cards close to your chest. What does the author actually feel about all of this, I kept thinking. The narrator is a study in irresolution, of course. He mustn’t become an ideological tyrant himself, that would defeat the purpose of your book. Sometimes he gets carried away, but he always tries to check himself. “Professor Wilson, I’m rambling on,” he says, and what he really means is, “I must squash my inner ideologue,” does he not? But what about the author, I thought. I felt you wanted to conceal yourself. You were modest, or like Joyce’s conception of the artist, you were indifferent to your creations. Paring your fingernails.’

‘No … it wasn’t that … I wasn’t aloof … At least, I didn’t intend to be …’ said Michael.

‘Perhaps you were forcing your emotions down,’ said Paul Ardache. ‘As if you thought that, unrestrained, they might carry you off.’ And now he inhaled again. He was not aware of the significance of his words. How he was making Michael want to cry and shake. Ardache was simply trying to find something to say, to show he had read the book, engaged with it. Yet suddenly it was very clear to Michael that his book was tactless, quite appalling — he had not thought carefully enough, had been in such a hurry to finish it — but he had inadvertently revealed the fury that drove him on. Ardache was saying, ‘Anyway, perhaps you are just a Blakean at heart. A Blakean trapped in modernity. The birthing of life — the human form divine. The terrible divinity of nature.’

‘I don’t really think … in the way you are proposing,’ said Michael. He was aiming at a lie, while he tried to calm his nerves, slow his heart. ‘I don’t think very clearly … I am not clear at all … But even then, isn’t it rather that we never really get to the heart of any matter, in the end? We get captured by convenient metaphors, or clichés, by other people’s modes of expression … Our real intentions, or thoughts, are lost …’

‘I don’t agree,’ said Paul Ardache. ‘I think it’s amazing how frequently we do manage to say what we mean, or something roughly commensurate. Somehow our words resonate to others, even though they are inaccurate. Something gets through, for all the static and distortions. I find it quite moving, how people do understand, despite our flawed efforts.’

‘In that case, they know it anyway … they don’t need my rambling prose to tell them.’

‘Ah, so are you the narrator? His rambling prose is your rambling prose?’

‘Oh, no, I’m not half as … determined as he is,’ said Michael. He thought he felt better now. When someone poured more wine into his glass, he gulped it down.

‘You mean you are even more rambling?’

‘Quite possibly.’ They were smiling vaguely at each other.

‘Ah, you see, you are an archetype yourself. The humble man,’ said Paul Ardache, flicking the end of his cigarette into a nearby shrub.

‘No, no, but I am not humble … No no, not it at all … I don’t believe … well, no writer is humble, surely.’

‘Well, I know I’m not. But I am handing you the accolade,’ said Paul Ardache.

‘That’s kind of you … But it isn’t true at all.’

They were looking at each other with a kindling of interest; perhaps they might even become friends later, thought Michael. He was wondering if it might be possible, to befriend this interesting man, and then someone else arrived.

‘Mr Stone,’ said this someone else. A boy, not more than twenty-five. Perhaps he was an apprentice, or a prodigy. He was so young, wearing a jacket that looked too big for him, and he said his name was Alistair Madden. ‘I designed the cover for your book. I hope you liked it.’

Michael, who had not particularly liked the cover, smiled and said, ‘I liked it very much. Thank you.’

*

Behind the boy, he saw Paul Ardache grimacing towards him. Michael had a sense that Paul Ardache perceived his discomfort, and his desire to be grateful nonetheless. He didn’t want to look churlish so he said thank you again. And Paul Ardache nodded towards him, and lit another cigarette.

*

It wasn’t much later, but Michael found he was leaning against a wall. He had felt his way towards it, and rested against its solidity. Still he had the stem of a wine glass between his fingers, as if it was attached to his body, the surgical addition of recent days. He was thinking about what Ardache had said, and how he had put his mother in his book, without realising. He had convinced himself he never thought of her and yet she was there, plain for all to view — and he wondered if it could be true, that she was mortal and afraid, that she would die.

‘Are you feeling ill?’ Sally was saying into his ear. He realised he had bowed his head, screwed up his eyes.

‘I think … perhaps … I think I should go.’ If he went now, he could be there in an hour. He could go to her and say …

‘Now? Already? But you’ve hardly arrived.’

‘A taxi,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I could …’ He felt as if a weight was pressing on his lungs.

‘Naturally, if you are ill, I will drive you home,’ said Sally, sternly.

‘Is Michael ill?’ said someone, overhearing and looking concerned.

‘No no, not ill,’ Michael was trying to say. ‘Please, I don’t want to inconvenience anyone … I just need a taxi.’

*

Is Michael going to leave?

The party had heard he was leaving early. After all the rain it was such a beautiful clear evening, with the lovely garden glistening and the daylight ceding to this lustrous moon. Lucy-Rose had just been remarking to herself on the success of her gathering when she received the rumour.

‘Already?’ she said.

‘He’s exhausted, apparently. Looked quite ill, said Maggie.’

‘Poor man,’ said Lucy-Rose, feeling irritated nonetheless.

‘Has no wife or family.’

‘An eternal bachelor, says Sally. Very nervous.’

‘But can’t we persuade him to stay?’ said Lucy-Rose.

*

From his corner, Michael heard the general murmur. He imagined what he could not hear, and anyway phrases kept floating towards him, like petals. The garden was full of drifting petals, and each one was about him. ‘A sudden turn … Too much strain … Impossible … But really … ill? Did someone get a doctor …?’

*

Then Sally was saying, ‘The thing is, Lucy-Rose invited the literary editor of the Observer. And she may be coming. It’s surely worth waiting if you possibly can.’ She was standing very close to him, nearly whispering in his ear. ‘Perhaps — I know it’s a big ask, but these people have gone to a lot of effort. Lucy-Rose has gone to a lot of effort. Perhaps you could lie down in the conservatory for a short while, then you might feel better by the time she arrives. You just need a rest.’

‘But I think it might be better just to go,’ said Michael. ‘Though I don’t want to make a fuss.’

‘Michael,’ Sally whispered. ‘Don’t be absurd. This party is for your benefit. It’s your party. You are quite entitled to make a fuss.’

‘Then I think, much as I appreciate all the …’

‘Perhaps the best thing to do would be to lie down briefly. Take it from me. I’m an old hand at this game. You’ll feel much better when you’ve had a little lie down.’

‘Of course,’ said Lucy-Rose, stricken with relief. She almost put an arm round the author, but she sensed he was one of those who dreaded social touching, however well-intentioned; so she held back and said, ‘You’re welcome to lie anywhere. Anywhere you like. Go into one of the spare rooms, have a sleep. We can wake you in a while.’

‘Just a quick rest in the conservatory,’ Sally was saying. ‘That would be fine.’

*

Defeated by them all, a hostage to their kindness, Michael lay in the conservatory, a pitcher of water on the table beside him, and a copy of Dougie Ascherson’s latest collection of verse by his arm. A blanket over his legs, though the evening was still warm. Below he could hear the rise and fall of voices, undulating tones; the drift of petals.

*

‘Naturally reclusive …’

‘Did he leave?’

‘I don’t know …’

‘No, he’s just upstairs, lying down.’

‘Sally says he’ll come back later …’

*

He was in here, as they cast petals on him from the garden. The drowned man in the conservatory, he thought. What came after death by water? He couldn’t think. They would come later, perhaps if the literary editor arrived, and they would fish him out. They would get him on a hook, and then they would reel him in.

*

He should fling open the window and issue a general announcement. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you for everything. But I simply have to go. Goodbye.

There was a bellow of laughter. Staccato hoots. Inside the conservatory it was cool and quiet. In a corner, ivy climbing a trellis. Some gardenias in a long pot. He had always wanted a garden. Or a conservatory. The concrete tower he called his home was one of a formidable series, standing like battlements, defending the north from the south. From his outpost he could see the river like a silver serpent and the miles and miles of sprawl. At the base of his concrete tower was a concrete yard, with space for parking. A wall around it, to repel burglars, then a main road and the Victorian terraces, squat and defeated. No room for a garden.

*

It was important to remember, thought Michael, that no one had begged him to do this. No one had approached him on bended knee, pleading with him to become a writer. No divinity had alighted from a cloud and commanded him to go forth and write. His parents had certainly condemned him — severely, for his own failings and by comparison with his gainfully employed, affluent brother. It seemed absurd now, that he had persisted, all these years, in hating them. He had worked so hard to prove them wrong. And yet now …

*

The moon was shining through the glass. In the moonlit room, Michael knew that it would pass; things — everything — would change and change again. There would be a point when this would be long gone, a past he no longer had to consider.

*

Time passed.

Lucy-Rose, in her serene vitality, would pass.

*

Roger Annais, Peter Kennedy, Arthur Grey, Martha Williams, would all pass. Sally Blanchefleur would pass.

*

And the people who had discouraged him, over many years, and those committed people who had been forced — briefly — to consider him; they too would pass. Even these ideas they were debating, their beliefs in a certain sort of world, all this would most likely pass, as so much before had passed and faded altogether. For who worshipped Ishtar any more, or Attis? Who quaked at the thought of Zeus or the judgements of Osiris? Who invoked the virtues of Cybele or Artemis?

*

Yes, it was quite certain Lucy-Rose would pass, and so would her garden. Her garden would stand neglected, the wind ruffling the aspidistras, the sun cultivating weeds in the once-manicured flowerbeds. The walls of her house would crumble though tonight they looked sturdy and imposing, and earlier he had leaned against them.

*

He would pass too. And the mother who had birthed him. Paul Ardache was right: he had untied himself from every knot of obligation or necessity. He would have no wife, no lover, no family. He had fled from so many people who had approached him. Prospective wives, prospective friends, people who simply stopped to pass the time of day; he had fled from them all. He had been left cut off from everything and mistaking this detachment for strength. And what was it he had feared? That someone would need him, that his purpose would be diluted by the demands of others. He had feared all his life that someone would make a claim on him, ask him to live for them as well as for himself.

*

So he had come to despise his parents, perhaps because they offered him complexity, the confusing array of emotions he experienced when he saw them, love and bitterness and even pity sometimes, as they grew older and more shambolic. He had been dutiful but entirely distant and his mother had set herself against him, told him he had failed, that he was wasting his life. Her questioning of his life, her anger at what he had not done, had seemed to him a dreadful liberty, an intrusion on his immaculate retreat. Really he had failed her, not even because he had been rude, not even because he had hated her, but because he rebuffed her every attempt to know him.

*

Then he fled from every woman who approached him, when all they offered was love or friendship. He thought of these kindly women, shyly proposing dinner and finding him tickets for concerts and trying to involve him. He thanked them for their labours, perhaps he had gone to a concert or two — but then he departed. With a wave, politely but firmly.

*

‘Are you actually happy?’ his mother once said. He thought she was judging him again, finding him wanting in some further way. But he had not seen the truth behind her words. He had hazy images of her, smiling down at him, benign and loving. Showing him dinosaur skeletons in a museum or taking him to play in a park. Lifting him in her arms and kissing him when he cried. Holding his hand as they walked, telling him to mind where he stepped. And when he became an adult and his happiness was no longer within her jurisdiction, she merely asked — had the life she created for him been a good one?

*

He had turned away as if she had offended him, and he had established his hiding hole, his flat, four walls between him and the mass of desire and love and hatred and confusion. Monastic and — he thought — safe. And he wrote his pompous little books — now he thought they were pompous, as he sat there tracing patterns on the blanket, the moon shining on his hands — they were pompous because they were so preciously sterile, they were the products of his determined sterility. He generated nothing, caused not a ripple, except in writing his books.

*

All of this sequestering, for his art — as he had called it — and now Michael saw what a flimsy thing that was anyway. Why had he thought he must be pure, untrammelled, in order to create it? How could you communicate meaningfully with others, if you understood nothing of their fears and desires anyway? Because the conditions of life were so unclear to him, he decided to refuse them. He would not muddy his hands until he understood all things, the meaning of all things. The world had found him out, and come to rave at him. They had scaled his fortress and flung open the gates. For if thou openest not the gate to let me enter, I will wrench the lock, I will smash the doorposts, I will force the doors. So said Ishtar, thought Michael, and he shivered, though he was warm under the blanket.

In the garden, the rise and fall. The literary editor had called to say she could not come. Michael heard the murmur, and now Lucy-Rose was saying, ‘She’s just rather busy with the Lamott story …’

In the balance, Michael thought, the things I have done weigh heavily against me. Or the things I have not done. The love I have failed to return. The approaches I have fled. The four white walls of my monastic cell. The locks on my door. Now he was standing in the open air, deprived of his bolthole. And he thought that the years behind him, the years yet to come were inconsequential, in balance with this moment, this moment when the world — in all its imperfection and madness — had turned its eyes upon him. He had been observing it, surreptitiously, secretively, peering out from his hiding place. And now he had been forced to show himself.

*

Tomorrow, he thought, I must go to her. I will not tremble and complain. I will meet her eyes. Really had I done this earlier, things would have been easier. I would have been less unhappy, and more grateful to those who have tried to help me. Perhaps it was not my brother who ruined this day, perhaps I ruined it myself. Because he saw that the unease he felt about Arthur Grey and Sally Blanchefleur and Lucy-Rose was a response to their engagement, the fact they cared so much about things including him. He could only squint at them through his own personal fog, struggling to discern them.

*

I have been wrong, he thought.

*

He should go back into the garden and he should say to them all, ‘You must understand in a sense I am guilty. In a sense I am guilty of a crime …’

The Tower

Transcripts of interviews with members of the anti-species conspiracy of Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424

Part 2, 1.45–2.45 p.m. 15 August 2153 Interview with Prisoner 730005

At time of commencement the prisoner will not disclose his real name.

Prisoner 730005, your co-conspirator Prisoner 730004 has confessed to everything. She has supplied a very full account of your activities. You will understand that we want to verify her account and to ask you some further questions. For your own protection and that of the species. Your other co-conspirators will shortly be interviewed too.

I have no co-conspirators.

Prisoner 730005, you are aware that, with your co-conspirators, you stand accused of the capital crime of conspiring against the Genetix and thus against the survival of humanity?

I have not conspired against anything or anyone.

You are not here to express your opinions about the justice of the Protectors, Prisoner 730005. The Protectors are very disappointed in you. They fear you have behaved in a manner dangerous to all. What do you say to this?

It hardly matters what I say.

They regret to inform you that while they seek to assess all matters reasonably and dispassionately, your case — and that of your associates — must be considered a crime. We are appointed to discuss with you the precise nature of this crime and to relay information to the Protectors. Do you understand?

It hardly matters if I understand.

It matters to the Protectors, Prisoner 730005. And it matters to us, on behalf of the Protectors. Can you firstly explain to us how you came to be living in the Restricted Area?

I went there when I left Darwin C.

Why did you leave Darwin C?

I can barely remember what I thought at the time. My life in Darwin C has faded from my mind, like a malevolent dream. I only really have clear memories of life on the island.

Correction, Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424. We do not believe that you have no recollection of your life in Darwin C, Prisoner 730005. Please apply yourself to the question.

It’s something about … I think it was boredom, in the end, a lack of anything — meaningful or joyful. I think the years I spent in Darwin C were so lacking in love, or despair, or any extremity that makes you feel you are actually here, on the planet … that they have been effaced by my experiences since then. I just see myself as this distant figure, a nervous man, running through the glass tunnels, processed from place to place, breathing in processed air, glancing up at the dangerous blue skies from time to time. It is as if I am seeing myself from a great distance.

How did you leave Darwin C?

We all left Darwin C. We were a group of friends and we left together.

Who were your co-conspirators?

I told you already, I have no co-conspirators. I am not part of a conspiracy.

Prisoner 730005, we must explain to you on behalf of the Protectors that you are advised to co-operate with our questions.

I will co-operate, but I am not telling you who my friends are.

Ah yes, the pact. Prisoner 730005, we must advise you that your co-conspirator Prisoner 730004 has not been so mindful of the pact and so withholding further information is irrational and futile.

In that case, if this poor prisoner has not been mindful of the pact then you do not need me to tell you who the others are. You can allow me to maintain my sentimental allegiance to our pact.

There is no place for sentimentality here, Prisoner 730005. We will return to this question later. What was your allocated role in Darwin C?

I was an engineer, dealing with environment conditioning units. Your sector?

Sector 1127.

How did you meet this woman they call Birgitta?

When we were in the crate, leaving Darwin C. I met her then.

You had not met her before?

No, I had only heard of her.

You had heard what about her?

That she would be a mother.

Correction, egg donor. You also adhere to this delusion that Birgitta was carrying a progeny of the species?

It is not a delusion.

On behalf of the Protectors we are obliged to advise you that such words constitute a grave threat to the survival of the species and cannot, for the common good, despite the generosity and forbearance of the Protectors, be permitted.

I do not mean to threaten the species. I am merely telling the truth.

This selfish anti-species delusion was shared by all of your group?

They all saw Birgitta give birth, with their own eyes, yes.

Prisoner 730005, we must warn you again.

I understand your warning. Yet you have also told me to cooperate. So I am trying to co-operate by telling you what I saw. Are you claiming that you left Darwin C, risking everything you had, casting away the life that the Protectors in their infinite generosity had bestowed upon you, just because you heard a story, a mere myth? This is not logical, Prisoner 730005.

It is not logical, I agree. I was not behaving logically at the time. I had found that logic only worked up to a point. But there were some other factors too. Though I don’t think they were very logical either.

What were these other reasons?

Well, the most significant among them was that I had a dream. I dreamed of blood, and drinking blood. Swimming in blood. That is one of the few things I remember clearly from Darwin C. When I woke I realised I had to leave the city.

You attached significance to this random twitching of neurons?

Yes.

You did not seek chemical therapy?

No.

Were you regularly seeking sexual release?

Occasionally.

Not regularly?

I don’t really remember. Such loveless liaisons seem tawdry and irrelevant now.

Did you go to the same Sexual Release Centre as Birgitta?

Yes, I went to the Sexual Release Centre where she worked. Did you seek sexual release with her?

No, I did not.

We will check the logbook, Prisoner 730005, so you should be honest.

As I said, my recollection of Darwin C is tenuous, but I am quite sure about matters concerning Birgitta.

How did you find out about the conspiracy to leave Darwin C?

There was just a morning. A wonderful, extraordinary morning. A friend told me that something had changed and we could never be the same again. I did not understand at first. Then I heard someone talking about an old, neglected idea, the Magna Mater.

What do you mean by this?

We are not entirely sure. But it is a force flowing within everything there is.

Everything there is where?

Everywhere.

You will explain yourself in plain speak, Prisoner 730005.

It is not my place to explain the life force.

What do you mean by the phrase you have just produced?

Which one?

You know precisely what we mean, Prisoner 730005.

I’m really not sure I do.

On behalf of the Protectors, we must warn you against such refusal to co-operate with our inquiry. Do you admit you have desired the ruination of the species? That you have favourably contemplated societal collapse?

I do not desire the ruination of the species.

By leaving Darwin C and going to the Restricted Area, are you saying that you did not desire the ruination of the species?

I did not. I think life is an extraordinary thing. Even in our despairing times, I am grateful to have lived. But my thoughts and desires are not important anyway.

Who is Birgitta?

I do not really know who she is.

You have already confessed that you met this woman. Do not try to deny this now.

I am not trying to deny it. I met Birgitta. I was on the island …

Correction, Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424.

… with her for many seasons. I know her. But I do not entirely understand who she is.

Prisoner 730005, you will explain yourself in plain speak.

I cannot be plainer, I am afraid.

Do you know this woman called Birgitta?

Yes, in some ways I do.

Who is she?

I cannot tell you precisely.

Why not?

Because it is beyond my powers to comprehend.

Prisoner 730005, you are not co-operating and this will only worsen your position. For your own protection, let us try to understand matters more thoroughly. Your co-conspirator tells us this Birgitta worked at the Sexual Release Centre. There is no one called Birgitta on the data records of this centre. Several women disappeared from the Sexual Release Centre at the same time. We are happy to assume each one of these women is Birgitta and, as we find them, which we shall, deal with them accordingly. For their protection and for the protection of the species. But it will help us, and help these other women too, if you tell us now what Birgitta’s real name was.

I only ever knew her as Birgitta.

You are saying you left Darwin C for a woman you had never met and whose real name you did not know?

Yes.

You clearly do not understand how grave the situation is. We are trying to help you, on behalf of the Protectors. But you must be more forthcoming. Tell us about your departure from Darwin C.

I just remember a long journey, and everyone very silent and afraid, and then the sea. The sea, I remember that very clearly. The smell of salt and air.

Who was directing you to Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424?

Our guides.

Who were they?

I do not know.

What did they look like?

I cannot remember. I never saw their faces.

How many of them were there?

There seemed to be many. But perhaps there were not so many after all. It was a very small boat.

Can you be more precise, Prisoner 730005?

I am afraid I cannot.

The Protectors, via us, assure you that it is categorically in your interests to co-operate fully.

I understand that is one way of looking at it.

What do you mean by this?

If I wished to survive and go back to Darwin C, then I suppose it would be in my interests to co-operate. Otherwise, it is not in my interests.

The Protectors will decide what your interests are, and how best to protect you and more importantly the species.

I am sure they will decide for themselves. But I think my interests must be very different from those they decide for me.

Prisoner 730005, we must warn you that such remarks are not appropriate.

I am sure you think they are not.

We know they are not. Where are your co-conspirators?

If you mean my friends, then I do not know. Are they not all here? Have some escaped?

You are not permitted to ask questions. Why will you not tell us, and thereby the Protectors, precisely who was living in the Restricted Area?

I cannot. I promised.

Yes, your pact again. This counterproductive allegiance to an obsolete agreement.

I do not understand what you are saying.

Who was Birgitta’s egg donor?

I do not understand this term.

You understand it clearly, Prisoner 730005. Who was Birgitta’s egg donor?

I do not know what you mean.

What did you do on Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424?

We lived. We worked. We waited for the birth.

Some of your number died?

Yes, they did.

Who were they?

I cannot tell you.

On behalf of the Protectors we are obliged to warn you again that such a failure to co-operate will stand against you in the ultimate verdict.

I understand. As I said, I am not sure it matters much to me.

We think you will find it does. How did you live?

Those of us that lived, farmed and foraged. It was a hard life but a better one, infinitely better, than the lives we had in Darwin C.

Your egg and sperm donor were from Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424?

My parents, yes.

When did your egg and sperm donor leave?

When they were forcibly taken away.

No one was forced. The arguments for the necessary action to save the species were compelling, Prisoner 730005. You know this, you have had it explained to you many times.

It is what I was told when I lived in Darwin C, yes.

Who is Birgitta?

I already said, I do not know. She is an ordinary woman but then she must be something else besides. Or there is something else working within her. There may be some who have more developed notions of what she is but I do not.

Who are these people who know who she is?

They do not know. They simply have their notions. No one on the island told anyone else what to think or feel. There were no laws that governed our thoughts.

You are mistaken. We live in a universe governed by laws.

The Protectors marshal these laws for the protection of the species. Without these laws, we perish. Will you tell us who Birgitta is?

I can tell you she is a woman from Darwin C. I never knew her real name. I can tell you she has long hair. Or she did, I don’t know if she still does. I can tell you she sings beautifully. I can tell you she raises her hands when she laughs. I can tell you her skin is pale and threaded with delicate blue veins. I can tell you I love her. Is this what you want to know?

On Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424, was Birgitta one of your partners in sexual release, Prisoner 730005?

No.

Then why do you speak of her in this way?

Because I miss her. Because I cannot believe it is all over. It is destroyed utterly. The community we established, which we worked so hard to establish, which was founded on love and solidarity, has been burned to the ground. I will never see it again.

Where is Birgitta now?

I do not know. I lost sight of her, among the flames. I cried out to her. But she was gone, and then they seized me. They smashed me around the head and I knew nothing else, until I woke up here, in a cell.

Do you believe that Birgitta escaped?

I only hope she did.

On behalf of the Protectors we must ask you if you want to be allocated another role in the struggle for the survival of the species, Prisoner 730005.

It is not important whether I live or die.

Transcripts of interviews with members of the anti-species conspiracy of Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424

Part 3, 3.30–4.30 p.m. 15 August 2153 Interview with Prisoner 730006

At time of commencement the prisoner will not disclose her real name.

Prisoner 730006, you are aware you stand accused of the capital crime of conspiring against the Genetix and thus against the survival of humanity?

Yes.

The Protectors are very disappointed in you. They fear you have behaved in a reckless manner, dangerous to all. What do you say to this?

I hope they will one day find true understanding and this miasma that surrounds us will be banished. I hope this for them as I hope for it myself.

They regret to inform you that while they seek to assess all matters reasonably and dispassionately, your case — and that of your associates — must be considered a crime. We are appointed to discuss with you the precise nature of this crime and to relay information to the Protectors. Do you understand?

I understand the plane of existence you are summoning me to recognise and I recoil from its every element.

Your co-conspirators have made full confessions. They have pleaded for clemency from the Protectors. There is a chance this clemency may be granted to them, and to you also, if you all co-operate. Do you understand?

I understand this is what you are saying to me. Whether it has any relation to the truth, to the reality of all things, I do not know.

You will find that we speak truth, for the protection of the species, Prisoner 730006. Can you explain firstly how you came to be living in the Restricted Area?

I was sent there.

Sent there? By whom?

By a force beyond my comprehension.

What force?

I do not know precisely what it is but I believe it drove me out of Darwin C.

You had lived in Darwin C all your life?

Yes, my parents …

Correction, sperm and egg donors.

… were sent there from their home.

Correction, Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424. How did it come to pass that you left Darwin C?

I was driven out of the city. My longing for something else — I was not entirely sure what it might be precisely, but I sensed I must search for it — caused me to leave. I began to realise that we had fallen somehow, that we had lost everything that mattered. But I did not know whether I might regain anything; I just felt I had to get out.

How did this so-called realisation happen?

I do not know. There was a day — I was working as usual …

Your allotted role, Prisoner 730006?

The nurture grounds, sector 1127.

You worked with Prisoner 730004?

I do not know anyone of this name.

Your area of specialisation?

I cared for babies.

Correct ‘babies’ in the usual way for the record. Had you been harvested as legally required?

Yes. At the age of eighteen like everyone of my generation I was stripped of my biological right and deprived of joy.

Correction, the Prisoner was harvested and her womb was closed. How did you meet the other members of your anti-species conspiracy?

The process was very slow. Of course, we had been taught to think in an entirely different way, and so we had to unlearn the previous ways and gradually intuit another sort of understanding. At first we did not really know what we craved. We were only able to define our desires negatively. We knew what we did not want. That was everything around us, everything we had ever known, and so it was hard to imagine what we did want. If it even existed on the planet. If it remained to us — some of us remembered aspects of our early childhoods, and they were a source of inspiration, these shared memories of something else. But we were fumbling in the dark.

You had been taking the advised doses of hormone readjustment?

Of course. No one has any choice about this.

You are arguing that you felt like this despite taking the advised daily dose?

Yes.

We assume you attended Species Survival Courses A, B and C?

Naturally. No one has any choice about that either.

So you were fully aware that your thoughts and subsequent actions worked directly against all the emergency measures currently in place to protect the species?

I was aware that if I was found out I would be condemned, yes.

And you understood that it was necessary for you to be housed in Darwin C in order for as much land as possible to be used for mass-scale farming to support the species?

Yes, that is what I had been told.

And yet you continued with your course of action anyway? It was as if I was being directed by something beyond me. Stronger than me. I could not resist this direction.

How was your group formed?

Somehow we were drawn together. There was never a point at which we were a group. We were not a society, there was nothing formal. We never met together until we were in the crate. First there was someone and then another, and then someone else and then another. We recognised something in each other. It was an accumulation, a burgeoning of spirits.

How many were you?

I cannot tell you.

Why not?

Numbers no longer hold any meaning for me.

You all had a tenuous link to Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424?

It was our home, yes.

You felt this, though you had never seen it?

Yes.

Who was it that devised the plan to abandon your posts and desert to the Restricted Area?

No single one of us. As I explained, we were drawn into this course of action, by this unfathomable power, this force around us.

You are not being honest, Prisoner 730006. On behalf of the Protectors, we must remind you how important it is that you are honest and precise.

I am telling you the truth as I experienced it. We did not have a leader. No one directed us. Gradually we found a way. We came to understand that we would do these things, that we would risk our lives. As I said, it was as if a greater something was directing our behaviour. It is not precise and certainly it is not like anything I was taught in Darwin C. It was not provable by experiment and it did not conform to any of the established scientific arguments. I am afraid it was all irrational and perhaps absurd, if you subscribe to the worldview of Darwin C and the Protected Area. But that was the thing. We no longer subscribed to this worldview. I cannot be more precise than that.

Prisoner 730006, who is the Magna Mater? Is she this woman you call Birgitta?

The Great Mother …

Correction, egg donor.

… of the world.

Prisoner 730006, can you answer the question clearly?

She is … Well, there is something I remember. A song the guides sang. When we took the boat across the sea. I remember it so vividly, though events of that day are otherwise confused in my mind. Somehow the song imprinted itself on our memories of that strange day and then later we sang it on the island.

Correction, Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424.

Then a storm arose in fury,

From the East a mighty tempest,

And the sea was wildly foaming

And the waves dashed ever higher.

Thus the tempest rocked the virgin,

And the billows drove the maiden,

O’er the ocean’s azure surface,

On the crest of foaming billows,

Till the wind that blew around her

And the sea woke life within her.

And the sea woke life within her …

What do you mean by this, Prisoner 730006?

It is an old song. I do not know how old.

Where does it come from?

I do not know. As I said, our guides sang it as we crossed, and then we remembered it and sang it later.

Who were your guides?

Well, they seemed to be people, ordinary people wearing rags or tattered clothes but there was something luminous about them, as if they were possessed with unusual grace. I could not see their features because their faces shone. But perhaps I was unaccustomed to the sunshine, the broadness of the sky, the wide-open sea.

Prisoner 730006, we advise you for your own protection not to insult the Protectors with such responses. How did you get from Darwin C to Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424? Please be very careful about how you answer this question, Prisoner 730006.

The mechanisms were not important. The momentum was incredible. When I saw the sea I understood it more clearly. It was like being washed by a tidal surge. A surge of energy and love.

Once more your answer is meaningless. You understand our questions, we assume?

I understand the individual words but somehow the way they are combined is obscure to me.

What do you mean by this song you sang?

All I can express to you is ambiguity. Gaps and the unknowable. The ancient beauty of things. For me, the song explained some things I had been unable to understand for some time. Or not really explained, perhaps that is overstating it. I never had a sense that anything was truly explained to me. It was all vague inference, suggestion, half-heard harmonies, resonating within me. Something chiming with something else.

This is not a clear answer.

I fear I have lost all this so-called clarity you admire.

What do you mean by this, Prisoner 730006?

Life is very mysterious, to me.

Life is not mysterious. We understand very well how life is generated. This knowledge is central in the struggle to protect the species.

You are wiser than I am.

Of course we are. We speak on behalf of the Protectors, who are most just and wise. Do you also adhere to the delusion of your group, that this woman Birgitta birthed a progeny of the species?

Birgitta brought life onto the planet, yes. It was magical to behold. Impossible, but there before us. Defying everything we had been taught.

You are all deluded. You are suffering from a collective delusion.

Perhaps you are right. It is true, we have no proof, except the evidence of our eyes and our shared experience. And the beautiful miraculous baby who was born to her.

Correction, progeny of the species. There was no such thing, Prisoner 730006. How long has your state of delusion lasted?

My state of joy has lasted for many phases of the moon.

How many years and months?

I do not know.

How long were you living on Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424?

I do not know. I no longer thought in hours or even days or months. The moon waxed and waned. Then again and again. The tides rose and fell. There were hot phases and less hot phases. Occasionally a cooling breeze, those were the most wonderful times of all.

What did you do there?

We lived naturally and so sometimes this stripped us of dignity and hope, as the natural world does, and sometimes we railed against elements we could not control. A storm which ravaged our crops. Rain so hard and thick it swamped the soil. Or the blistering sun, which threatened everything we had worked so hard to cultivate. We suffered, but we were permitted to survive. Something perhaps took pity on us. A reprieve was granted to us, a sort of desperate victory. Imperfect as we were, we were allowed to exist on this beautiful island, and the soil sustained us. Even now, though I know I will never see that island …

Correction, Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424.

… again, I spend each night looking up at the sky and thinking that it is the same sky, or nearly enough, that hangs above us all. That the ancient rocks and trees, the beautiful mountains sliding into the sea, the fragile mosses and the swirling birds, are all still there, under the sky. That the land will endure, somehow, even as the species fades from the planet.

Prisoner 730006, you are aware that it is a crime to predict the destruction of the species and on behalf of the Protectors we must warn you instantly to desist from such remarks.

I am aware that we are not permitted to contemplate the natural end of the human race.

Prisoner 730006, do you accept that your actions are reprehensible? That such selfish resource abuse cannot be permitted if the species is to survive?

I can be certain of no such thing. I live out my small allocation of years. I love the planet and the circling progress of darkness and light. But I have no knowledge of how my actions will affect anything.

Then you must be guided by the Protectors who act to protect you and the species.

I understand that I must be punished. Within the system established in Darwin C I am a criminal.

Correction, you must be allocated a new role in the struggle for the survival of the species.

I do not mind that. I do not mind dying. Perhaps I wish I was dying among friends and not in this place. But I have lived more fully than I could ever have imagined in Darwin C. Even now I know I have been fortunate. I saw the birth of Birgitta’s child.

Correct ‘child’ for the record. Why do you maintain this delusion that Birgitta produced a progeny of the species?

I saw the birth.

On behalf of the Protectors we must advise you to struggle against these delusions and overpower them.

Why must I?

You are not permitted to ask questions.

Then I cannot understand why I must try to convince myself that something I saw was not the truth.

You did not see it.

You were not there.

We do not need to have been there. It is not possible for a closed womb to be fertilised. We are certain of this.

I do not know what is possible in your world. It is possible in mine.

Our world is your world, Prisoner 730006.

I know that is not true.

It is true. On behalf of the Protectors we ask you again, who is the Great Egg Donor?

From the sea her head she lifted,

And her forehead she uplifted,

And she then began Creation,

And she brought the world to order

On the open ocean’s surface,

On the far extending waters.

Wheresoe’er her hand she pointed

There she formed the jutting headlands;

Wheresoe’er her feet she rested,

There she formed the caves for fishes;

When she dived beneath the water

There she formed the depths of ocean;

When towards the land she turned,

There the …

Prisoner 730006, you are insulting the Protectors with this nonsense. Will you answer the question plainly?

I am sorry but I can be no plainer.

Why are you singing?

Because my heart is full of life. Even in here, my heart is full of life and my head is full of memories of what I have seen.

Prisoner 730006, we repeat so you understand. You are accused of the capital crime of conspiring against the Genetix and thus against the survival of humanity. You are aware of this?

Yes.

And yet you are singing?

Yes.

Do you want to be protected?

It is not important what happens to me.

Are you a member of a primitive death cult which despises the species and wants to destroy it?

I would never consider myself in this way, though I perceive this is the charge you will use to condemn me.

Once more we must caution you, Prisoner 730006. The Protectors hope to understand your actions more thoroughly. However we cannot afford to be sentimental in our dealings with cases such as yours, lest we imperil the majority. This is a question of billions of lives.

Billions and billions of lives. You are right. There are so many living on the planet. And yet is it not strange that lives commingle, that patterns form, that humans love each other even now, even here. I find this so wonderful. It fills my heart with this absurd and incongruous joy, I cannot suppress it.

You insult the Protectors and all who work to save the species with your words.

Perhaps humanity will cease. Perhaps all the species of animals and plants currently existing on the planet will cease. Yet I believe that life continues. The life of the planet. The life of the universe we still know so little about, for all your assertions. Generation and growth. Whatever you do, something will resist, something will not go to plan, and thereby the cycle begins again …

Prisoner 730006, you must be aware that your words constitute a capital crime. We cannot let you continue, for your own protection. Can you answer directly, who is Birgitta?

She is the mother …

Correction, egg donor.

… of a son …

Correction, progeny of the species.

The power is everywhere. That is what the guides said. And they sang:

Any leaf swallowed, any nut,

or even the breath of a breeze,

may be enough to fertilise

the ready mother …

Prisoner 730006, why were you on Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424?

Because of Birgitta. Because I could not have been elsewhere. Because even in this world you have tried to strip of mystery, something occurred that was inexplicable and I was drawn to follow it. Because I longed for a true home, a place I could feel — well, like a human, a true, flawed, ravaged, urgent, desiring human. I think that is why but there may be other reasons I cannot comprehend.

Prisoner 730006 will be taken back to her cell. She needs the attention of the Corporeal Scientists.

They can drug me all they like but they cannot change what I have seen.

Transcripts of interviews with members of the anti-species conspiracy of Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424

Part 4, 4.45–6.00 p.m. 15 August 2153

Second interview with Prisoner 730004, after first phase of rehabilitation treatment

Prisoner 730004, we hope you are feeling better after your treatment.

My mind is deadened and I cannot think clearly. I trust this is the intended effect.

We are working to ascertain your real names and identity numbers and soon we will also know the true identity of Birgitta. With these facts we can better protect you and protect the species from the consequences of your selfish species-endangering activities.

I cannot entirely understand what you are saying. My head is swimming in chemical filth. You have poisoned me. Before — there was a before, I know, before this place. Something before — fresh air. The sea. The great ocean. I remember that. There was something — the island …

Correction, Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424.

Yes, that is what you call it, isn’t it? As if by categorising everything, giving it a number, you can erase the destruction of the planet. It is too late. The Arctic is destroyed, however you number it.

You are wrong, Prisoner 730004. You are ill and tired. You have been starved for some time. During the time you existed in your primitive death cult, you were starving.

I was not starving. I had an abundance of things to eat. My body was enriched by my existence on the island …

Correction, Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424.

I am sick now, it is true. They have dosed me so I cannot think. If I could only think — what was it?

Prisoner 730004, do you want to live?

On the island …

Correction, Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424.

… Yes, if you call it that. On this island you name and number …

Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424.

Will you never let me finish?

We are interested in anything you say.

On this island …

Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424.

It is impossible to speak! It is impossible to think. My brain is doused. This is what I escaped from! I escaped this deadening of the brain. I did escape, didn’t I? Or did I dream? I dreamed of so many things. Was everything a dream? Was Birgitta merely a dream? I think this was her name.

She was not a dream but a real woman who was bound up with your delusions. Birgitta is not her real name but we will shortly trace her and then she will be captured.

My memories are fading in this fog. Where will I be sent now?

You are not entitled to ask questions, Prisoner 730004.

Entitled? What does that mean?

You are not entitled to ask questions. Now we ask you, who was on Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424?

I told you, I would not — I cannot.

You are sick. We accept your words earlier were a product of your sickness. Now we are healing you. It will be better for you if you co-operate.

But you told me you knew. You already know. Did you tell me that? My head is …

We will soon know. We are offering you the opportunity to be helpful. The Protectors are inclined to favour those who acknowledge their mistakes and seek to rectify them.

The Protectors. The Protectors are inclined. The Sexual Release Centre, I remember it said, ‘The Protectors offer you sexual release.’ The Protectors themselves, I used to think. I went there sometimes, when I was young. Of course I did. Everyone goes there. And everywhere, ‘The Protectors offer you food and drink’ at the dining centre, and ‘The Protectors offer you a good night’s sleep’ above your bed and ‘The Protectors offer you an allocated role’ above your desk and ‘The Protectors offer you a crucial role in the battle for species survival’ when you were harvested and closed.

Once again on behalf of the Protectors we must explain that such digressions are not required. Now tell us clearly, who is Birgitta?

In Darwin C she worked in the Sexual Release Centre. She was fucked twenty times a day. Twenty-five-minute sessions, five minutes to wash herself between each person, ten-hour days. A rest day every week. One hundred and twenty fucks a week. No one must see her more than ten times consecutively, lest an attachment develop. She had been working there all her adult life. Her routine was very precise.

Why are you using these base terms, Prisoner 730004?

I was not aware they were offensive to anyone. This is what she did.

We are aware of the procedure at the Sexual Release Centres and how some individuals are allocated roles in this aspect of the struggle for the survival of the human species. We do not require your explanation, unscientific and deliberately emotive as it is.

When we took her away and gradually as she opened up and told us about her work, it became apparent that she was subjected to what — in the old days — might have been called horrible degradation and assaults. That anything was permitted, so long as the client felt sexually relieved by the end. That she was often torn and beaten. That she was not permitted to set any limits at all, because everything was justified as necessary for the survival of the species. For the heightening of morale through sexual release. An important role to be allocated, I believe.

These are lies. The workers at the Sexual Release Centre find their work fulfilling. This has been extensively proven and calibrated. They are aware that the sexual instinct is a basic human urge, and that if it is not required for procreative purposes then it must be fulfilled somehow, and the Protectors in their generosity understand this. The suppliers of sexual release are performing a useful function in our battle against species extinction, as they know. This enriches their work.

I am sure you are right. Perhaps Birgitta secretly enjoyed being ritually raped and abused …

Correction, deployed in the battle against species extinction.

… Perhaps she felt that way she supplied more sexual release than in other ways. Perhaps she felt that way she could best serve the Protectors. Anyway that’s all I know about Birgitta before we escaped together. That she was raped many times a day.

Correction, supplied sexual release.

We do not know which of the rapists …

Correction, seekers after sexual release.

… impregnated her.

Prisoner 730004, it is unfortunate that your delusions have proved so resistant to treatment.

You will not find the drugs to rid me of this conviction.

What is Birgitta’s real name?

I do not know.

You are aware however that Birgitta is not her real name?

Yes.

But you do not know her real name?

No, I do not.

Why was she given the name Birgitta?

She took it from an ancestor of hers. Her great-great-great-grandmother …

Correction, egg donor.

… was a woman called Brigid. So she became Birgitta, to us. Brigid was the earliest ancestor she knew of. Those who lived before are no longer known to us. The name of her great-great-great-grandfather, Brigid’s husband, has been lost.

Correction, sperm donor. Where was this DNA relative Brigid from?

I believe she lived in the former city of London, but that is all I know.

So how did this egg donor’s DNA relatives end up in Lofoten 4a, Arctic Circle sector 111424?

Birgitta’s great-great-grandfather, who was I believe called Calumn, went to the Arctic sector when the climate evacuation protocol was announced in London. He was one of the last to leave the city, before the borders were closed. He was an old man by that stage, and Birgitta’s mother remembered him weeping quietly as they left the house, which they knew would soon be destroyed. He had lived in the house when he was young, and had moved back in there after the death of his parents. Birgitta’s mother told us many stories of how it was to leave London — she was only a small child when they left, but she said the experience was scored across her memory …

We are not interested in these stories. Correct instances of ‘parents’, ‘great-great-grandfather’, ‘mother’, ‘child’ for the record. Once more on behalf of the Protectors we ask you to confine yourself to the facts, Prisoner 730004.

Who are the Protectors?

You are not entitled to ask questions.

I am confused and ill but now I wonder — who are the Protectors?

As we said, the nature of your position makes it entirely inappropriate for you to ask such a question.

But if I had another position?

Your meaning is unclear.

What sort of position would I need … my head … I wish I could clear my head … What position would I need before I could ask such a question?

As before, we must emphasise that the nature of your position makes it entirely inappropriate for you to ask such a question.

But I cannot understand. Why are we all here, you too? When we have passions and old desires and once we had lovers …

Correction, partners in sexual release.

… and families …

Correction, DNA relatives.

… parents …

Corrrection, sperm and egg donors.

… we loved, children …

Correction, progeny of the species.

… we loved — we were protected by our parents …

Correction, sperm and egg donors.

… and we protected our children …

Correction, progeny of the species.

… we would have died to protect our children …

Correction, progeny of the species.

… and now we are dependent for protection on — I cannot think it through, it is too clouded … These drugs make me spill out words, and some of them I do not want to say, some of them are drawn from me by your drugs, but others — these others — what is it you are so afraid of, that we must speak your language? That everything must be processed in these phrases. ‘Sperm and egg donors’. What are you afraid of? What menace do the old words hold for you? Why will you not let me use them?

Prisoner 730004, we have explained to you that you are ill and delusional and we are trying, on behalf of the Protectors, to help you, but we cannot permit you to ask questions.

I am merely wondering, though my head hurts and I think they have killed me, have they not poisoned me fatally, it feels as if something is slowly stopping my heart, but I am wondering just why we have to look for protection to these Protectors we do not know and cannot see, who do not hold us or kiss us or tell us they love us they simply offer us protection and a place in the battle and sexual release and food and drink and this is our life this is meant to be a life. Who are they?

On behalf of the Protectors, we assure you that such questions are not appropriate and will not be answered.

Cannot be answered. You do not know. I begin to think you do not know who these Protectors are you work for. You have never seen them? I think — yes, I think it must be true that even you have never seen them. Have they seen each other? Are they bodies and humans or something else? My head, I think you must have killed me. Am I dying and is this where I must die?

On behalf of the Protectors and for the protection of the species, we must advise you that unless you cease such unscientific talk we will be forced to commit you to an Institution for the Improvement of the Reason.

But I have never thought more clearly. Suddenly I see it. All this, everything you believe, it is just a gauze, a film separating you from the real forms of things, and if you could only see, like I am seeing … I am seeing something, I am not sure, but it is so beautiful … If you could only see it … You would understand … You would understand you are deluded and you have never thought clearly yourselves. And perhaps you would despise these Protectors, whoever they are. Whatever they are … You would understand that there was a time when love was the generating spirit of humanity — I believe it, though you have changed everything — that children were birthed in — through — this prevailing love. And you would perceive what is at least clear to me, that the Genetix is an atrocity because it cannot love and deprives every human born on the planet of this love …

Prisoner 730004, for your own protection and on behalf of the Protectors, you must be returned to the medical section and treated.

I no longer care what you do because though I am dying my head is finally clear and …

Take her for her treatment. She will be returned later for sentencing. We do not need to speak to her again.