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I don’t know how. I have never done it. Anyway, with a thing like that – an antique – a museum piece. Imagine the kind of museum that would harbour it. Go on – laugh. Laugh, angels. Angel-makers – that’s what they used to call abortionists.

What is woman that you forsake her

To the claws of the grey old angel-maker?

That’s all wrong, of course. It’s really Kipling, about the seafarers – to go with the grey old widow-maker. I must do something about myself right now or it will be too late. How much time have I? I don’t recall what the books said. The tadpole might swim instantly to its retreat, and burrow in, for all I know.

All right. I’ve got the thing in my hands, the old crimson smelling of decayed rubber and the musty sterility of antiseptics that went down the drain years ago. I never heard my mother rise, at nights, and tiptoe into the bathroom. How silently she must have gone. And he, probably, turning away so he would not need to witness her returning. Blaming himself, or her, for something or other. Wasting everything in a regret as futile as deception.

There. I’ve got to the bathroom and she hasn’t awakened. It’s all right. Quiet, Rachel. It’s nothing. It doesn’t matter. It’s to be done and ignored. There. That wasn’t so difficult, was it?

Oh God – quick – I can’t help it – don’t let her awaken and hear. Something revolts, something revolts me and revolts in me and –

It’s over. Vomiting, I’m purged, calmer. Did she hear? I go back to my bedroom but I can’t sleep. I have to get up and take the equipment in my hands as though it were a dead foetus, something to be rid of forever. I can’t throw it out. It would be seen in the garbage tin. I climb on my flimsy white dressing-table chair and put it into the highest shelf above my clothes cupboard, among the old hats. A small pale straw hat tumbles out, ribboned with icing-sugar pink. I had that hat when I was twelve, and it’s still here.

I’ll never touch that contraption again. Never. I must do something, though. I must tell him. I can’t. What would he say? What on earth would he think, that I couldn’t organize myself better?

Women like me are an anachronism. We don’t exist any more. And yet I look in the mirror and see I’m there. I’m a fact of sorts, a fantasy of sorts. My blood runs in actual veins, which is as much of a surprise to me as to anyone.

What would become of me? I can’t believe it could happen, though. A thing like that – to grow a child inside one’s structure and have it born alive? Not within me. It couldn’t. I couldn’t really believe it could ever happen.

Nick, give it to me.

It seems four in the morning, but it’s not yet one. Prowling, I light an unwanted cigarette, and put it out again. Then, looking from my window, I can see that the light is still on, below, in the Japonica Funeral Chapel.

These stairs were carpeted the year my father died, the stairs from our apartment leading down to the ground. Grey background, and all the red roses are scuffed now from being trodden on. I can’t see a thing. I couldn’t put the hall light on, in case, but I know where the trampled roses are on each step, and seem to feel them under my feet. The carpet makes the stairs silent, but not silent enough. If she wakens, I’ll say I forgot to lock the downstairs door.

The door into the Funeral Chapel is much wider than ours. Hector Jonas replaced my father’s plain door with a shinily varnished one, fitted with wrought-iron staves and loops and swirls, so it looks like the door of a keep or a castle prison, but false, a mock-up. Ye Olde Dungeon, as in a Disney film, where even the children know that the inmates are cartoons. And yet I hesitate to knock.

Go ahead, knock. He’ll answer.

He’ll think I’m off my head. What am I doing here? I should be asleep. This is no place for you, Rachel. Run along now, there’s a good girl. This is no place for you.

Tick – tick – tick –

My fingers on the door sound like the beating of a clock or a heart. He won’t hear.