Read The Ice is Singing Online
Authors: Jane Rogers
The Ice is Singing (16 page)
Sally recognized that this was not an immature longing; she was twenty-eight. She had a satisfying job, friends, commitments. She knew she was not seeking a baby to define her own individuality.
She already was, and knew what she was. No, she wanted a baby because she was a woman – it’s a natural desire. And it made her glad, and proud in a way, that her personality could
embrace not only feminism and her work commitments, but also the desire for self-expression through motherhood. It made her feel almost superior to those women she knew who renounced it, who found
it necessary to deny part of their own natures and physicality so vehemently.
She discussed the matter with her friends – at her women’s group, at home, and in the shop. Most women she knew with children had had them young, and brought them up either separate
from, or despite, men. Most were married, or pregnant by accident. Very few had chosen, deliberately and singly, at a sensible age, to breed. Sally established that the women she lived with were
eager to share childcare and would love a child as much as she would.
Sally decided to have a baby. She was an organized woman, and set about the task efficiently. To begin with she read everything on the subject she could find. She read about times and positions
most favourable for conception (and with some scepticism, about methods for securing the conception of a female). She read about exercises, herbs and foodstuffs most helpful for the development of
a healthy foetus and a relaxed supple womb; the stages of pregnancy, the stages of birth. She read women’s descriptions of the births of their own children; she read about hospital
mismanagement of childbirth, and the intrusion of technology. She read about the hormonal changes which affect a pregnant woman, the increased progesterone levels which flood her with calm and
well-being. She read about the importance of relaxation, and she read about natural childbirth.
Then she prepared herself for the conception, as a boxer gets into training for a big fight. Her carefully balanced vegetarian diet was adhered to even more strictly than usual. Sally had been a
vegetarian for years, ever since leaving home. Eating meat was unnecessary and unnatural, injurious to health. She disapproved of it on humanitarian grounds too, being opposed to factory farms and
the slaughter of animals; she was also politically opposed to the guzzling of first-class protein in the Western World, when the Third World was starved for lack of the second-class protein which
was used to fatten the Westerners’ meat. And then there were the health hazards caused by growth hormones being pumped into cows and sheep . . . Sally could not understand how anyone could
eat meat. Especially when she passed a butcher’s, and saw it on the slabs: the swollen ripe livers leaking blood, the small barrel-hoop curves of lambs’ ribs, with thin red flesh
clinging to them. And the implements, long knife and axe to chop through bone. She averted her eyes and walked past quickly. The smell . . .
As well as yoga, she took up jogging and swimming, so that her physical fitness would be at its peak. She laid in supplies of homoeopathic substances such as
caulophyllum
to improve the
muscle tone of her uterus. She made careful selection of a mate, from the three candidates within her circle of acquaintance whom she thought might oblige her, and decided on Alistair after a
detailed scrutiny of his family’s history and health records.
She was going to have a home delivery, assisted by her friends Mary and Sonya, and a midwife. She would not need any drugs or medical interference. Childbirth was a natural process, and Sally
was going to do it naturally.
For Sally it is a nice clean modern word, ‘natural’. She eats food that is full of natural goodness, and wears clothes made from natural fibres. Natural now is
brown bread, organic vegetables, bio-degradable washing-up liquid. On the telly it’s a girl with blonde hair in a field of daisies in the sun, and she recommends a tampon or a low-calorie
yoghurt. Sally thinks natural means good.
And so it does, my dear. But more than good. It meant a bigger stronger more powerful kind of good altogether, when the word was young.
NATURAL: as occurring in, sanctioned by, Nature. Right. Sweet-smelling. Morally acceptable. Knowing its place in the world. Loved by God.
UNNATURAL: against Nature. Vicious, evil, perverted. Artificial, rejected by God.
It meant order. The cosmos was a neat construction, each man and woman had a station in life, ordained and blessed by Nature. The rich man in his castle, the poor man at
his gate. But once it meant order, it had to mean the opposite too. Don’t you see?
Oh Sally, I learned them at school, the meanings of ‘natural’. I learned from Perdita, whose noble birth shone through her shepherdess’ rags. And I learned from Edmund,
bastard son, spawned by a natural lust. He knew his place, he called it natural. ‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess! . . . Now, gods, stand up for bastards!’
Nature in conflict with civilization – which can sanction lust only within the bounds of holy matrimony, can recognize the rights only of those born within wedlock. But Edmund was a
natural son. Born of that tendency and desire within nature to proliferate, to procreate, to increase in abundance through fair means or foul – nature rampant. For civilization’s
sake he had to be labelled unnatural, the evil bastard who turned on his own blood, both father and brother; who forgot his place and grasped at a kingly crown. Terrible nature; the same stark
Darwinian nature that menaced Tennyson with its bloody red in tooth and claw. Living nature which says eat or be eaten: rape: breed: kill: survive.
I had a rabbit when I was little. She was put with a daddy rabbit and I knew she was going to have babies. One day when I went into the shed where she lived, she was having them. Two tiny
bedraggled creatures lay in the straw, and another with blood and stuff was hanging out of her. I went out quickly because I’d been told I mustn’t disturb her.
When I came home from school I ran to the shed. She was sitting at the back of her cage, ears flat along her back. There were no babies. Nothing, not so much as a drop of blood on the straw.
She’d eaten them – every scrap. She’d licked the straw clean.
Sally should have known about Edmund, or the rabbit.
The business with Alistair was embarrassing and felt quite awkward. Sally’s period arrived on time after the first attempt, so in the next month they had to try several
times. Sally remained anxious, feeling sure that she would know (as she had read some women do) the moment conception was achieved. But her fears proved groundless, she was pregnant this time. And,
leaving no room for doubt, nausea and vomiting began within the fortnight.
Sally knew about morning sickness. She knew it begins soon after conception, and generally ends at about twelve weeks, and that it can vary in severity. She knew that for most healthy women it
is no more than a minor inconvenience, often averted by the precaution of eating a dry cracker in bed before getting up.
But Sally’s morning sickness was not like that. She was ill. She was sick not only in the morning, but at noon and night – whether she had eaten anything or not, whether she got up
or not. She was sick approximately twice an hour. She could not go to work. She felt constantly nauseous, dizzy and faint. She lost eight pounds in the first week. After consulting books and making
her sample a variety of herbal and homoeopathic remedies, Sonya and Mary called in the doctor. He was sympathetic but unhelpful. He told them that there was no need to worry on the baby’s
account, since a foetus is a perfect parasite and will take whatever it needs from the mother – only the mother’s health will suffer. There was nothing he could safely prescribe, since
there were claims that Debendox was linked with foetal deformity. The safest course was simply for Sally to rest as much as possible, take plenty of fluids, and wait for the sickness to pass. If
she suffered a more serious weight loss she would have to go into hospital and be fitted to a drip, to feed her intravenously. But since this in itself would prove strange and disturbing, he
preferred to leave her at home for a week or two to see if she would settle.
Sally was not used to being ill. She had never in her life felt as awful as she did now – and the sickness was unremitting, it would not even let her sleep. The days passed excruciatingly
slowly, in exhausted dozing, vomiting, and tense sipping and nibbling at a wide range of drinks and foods, all of which proved equally unacceptable.
In the middle of the second month of her pregnancy Sally was taken into hospital and put on an intravenous drip. Her weight was down to six and a half stone. She lay on her back with quiet
hopeless tears trickling from the corners of her eyes, hating the hospital, hating the foetus, hating herself. Having babies was not a disease – why did this have to happen to her? Her
mother, who had not been informed of Sally’s great decision, came to visit her and nearly cried at the sight of thin pale Sally; asked her if she had considered an abortion.
They kept her in hospital till her weight stabilized and crept up to seven stone. Back at home she continued to feel nauseous, but gradually the sickness decreased and her appetite returned. She
was very tired – more tired than she had ever been before, and after attempting a couple of full days at work she could hardly drag herself about. She still hadn’t regained her normal
weight, so Martha suggested that she should work half days, until she felt better again.
‘It’s not an illness,’ Sally told her. ‘African women work in the fields up to and including the day their baby is born. Pregnant women are often more robust than those
who are not; pregnancy is a healthy, natural state.’
‘You’re not African, and this isn’t a field. You look awful. Go home, have some food, and go to bed.’
Examining herself in her bedroom mirror one night Sally was shocked to notice sudden changes in her body. Her small breasts were swollen and heavy, her waist was disappearing. She knew, of
course, obviously, that her body would change shape. But the speed of the metamorphosis took her by surprise, made her feel slightly panicky, as if things had been taken out of her control.
Her plans for a home delivery were being threatened, both by the GP who had visited her, who refused to allow any first babies to be born at home (‘especially to women as old as
you’) and by the hospital, who now had her on their books, and summoned her for four-weekly checkups. A friend introduced her to a midwife who was in favour of home deliveries, and they
agreed that the best way to manage the whole business now was probably to pretend to go along with what the hospital said. When labour started, Sally would simply stay at home. Nadine, the midwife,
would be called, and the doctor could be informed afterwards that the baby had been born before Sally had time to get to hospital.
When she was four and a half months pregnant, Sally, who normally slept well, woke up in the middle of the night and could not go back to sleep. This happened four nights running. She went for
long walks to tire herself out, even went swimming though she hardly had the energy for it. But she woke again next day at 2 a.m. Lying in the darkness puzzling about what was waking her, ears
peeled for cats or footsteps or distant sirens, she suddenly felt an awful sensation in her belly. A sort of scramble, a shuddering shivering slither, as of something furtive and formless trying to
escape. She lay still, the instant sweat boiling out of her skin, rising up in hot bubbles through her pores. It was as if her flesh were crawling – inside.
The Quickening. At four to five months, the mother-to-be first feels her baby kicking or turning. Sally recalled word for word the descriptions from her books. ‘Some mothers have described
that first miraculous sensation of baby stirring as being like the delicate brushing of a butterfly’s wings.’ As she lay paralysed and sweating on the bed, it moved again; she felt a
thing that was not her shift in her belly. She shuddered involuntarily. She tried to imagine the gentle flutter of a butterfly’s wings, and visualized a butterfly trapped, in there,
surrounded by the folds of red meat – fluttering in a panic like a trapped bird, smashing its wings to sticky dust against the thick wet walls. She ran to the bathroom and vomited.
