The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [179]
The day turned into flashes then, like the lightning that was flickering along the top of the Downs. Outside the hospital the sky was near black, the street lit with a last gleam of sunlight before the darkness swallowed it. The air was like a bath, sweat and electricity running along the nerves in my skin, which felt as tight as a tick. No recollection of asking permission to go home, though I must’ve stopped off at the office: I had my handbag, but no hat or cardigan. My belly dragged, like the baby inside had turned to a lead brick.
God knows how I got there, but suddenly I was on Drove Road, staggering like a drunk with the weight of my belly threatening to topple me. Still no one about, only the two little girls hopscotching, ignoring the livid sky. There was a blink of bright light, and I started counting, waiting for the thunder. Mam used to say if you went one a hundred, two a hundred, three a hundred, you knew how many miles off the storm was. I was up to eight a hundred and still no crack, and if it came after that I never heard because instead there was a cramp in my belly that near split me while I stood on the step fumbling for the key.
Then there’s no little girls, only the airless, silent hallway. Must’ve been stairs too, and bugger me if I know how I climbed ‘em, but the next flash comes and I’m on my bed, and counting again, but this time I’m counting the time between the cramps because I know that’s what you’re supposed to do. No question now but that summat’s coming, and I’m cursing myself for not stopping at the hospital where there’s doctors and maybe by now Cabbage, Cabbage who understands what’s wrong with me, Cabbage with his fat sausage fingers helping me down there, but then I remember there was a raid over Bristol way and they’ll all be busy with that, saving lives, doing important things for good people, stitching rips in flesh and straightening mashed bones and mopping up blood–
And there’s another flash, and that reminds me I couldn’t possibly have stopped at the hospital where people knows me and I can see their faces gawping, mouths open in shock, as they watch me writhing on the corridor floor, the monster wrestling with my body like the devil that was its father the night he caught me in the churchyard–
And now a rumble of thunder much closer and the monster’s got his teeth in me, I’m on all fours, panting like a dog, only way to stand the pain, and then comes something so strong and vicious I have to howl, only it isn’t me howling at all, it’s the Warning, middle of the afternoon, and I can’t take it in, there’s people out at work and little girls playing in the street and they’re sounding the Warning but there’s nothing I can do about it; no buggerin’ way will the pain let me off the bed to crawl downstairs to the Anderson shelter in the back garden. The bedroom’s gone black like it’s night, it’s one of them August storms that sometimes come near harvest, rolling off the Downs and flattening the corn, and there’s the crackle of electricity in the air and a burning smell and the rumble overhead–
And there’s another flash, which finally splits me open, and I’m back in the hospital but the lights have all gone out and Cabbage is laughing with his hands plunged up to the elbow in a woman’s guts and the nurse is screaming and holding a bucket out for all the blood that’s coming–
And then I’m back on the bed in my room on Drove Road, head twisted into the pillow half suffocated, and all the blood comes out of me in a gurt gush, and something else with it, slippery like a lump of greasy rubber–
I washed him in the basin but I knew it weren’t no good. When the blood and the sticky stuff came off him, he was no more’n a drowned animal, water making ripples in the fine straggly hair that was all over him like a little monkey. The Germans had hit something nearby and there was an orange glow lighting up the black afternoon, shining through the bathroom window to show me what I had in my hands. Ugly