I am often left alone during my waking
hours. The bevy of nurses coming and caring, caring and going bewilders me. A
clock ticks loudly and inevitably, striking the feeding hours and reminding the
tardy of the swift passage of time. I miss the warmth of my cocoon and the
gentle thud of Mama’s heartbeat. The effort to get into the world may not have
been worth it after all. My twin sister, the disembodied one, is now so far out
of my reach that I can hardly believe she ever existed at all. My sense of loss
is deep, painful, and enduring.
I scream as loud as I can, so that my
voice carries to the far corners of the ward.
Supposing my twin were among those
other babies, her spirit born to someone else, and unable to recollect what has
happened to her? Who are the others? Where have they come from?
The other new-borns do not react. Their
utterances are as incomprehensible to me as mine are to them. We are all
trapped in a Tower of Babel. We scream for attention until attended to. We are
visited at regimented times by regimented visitors who coo and caw over us like
visitors to the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. We are wonders of
creation and the source of hope and inspiration in a world of strife. Our purpose
in life seems to be tied to the identification parade held by those speculating
about whose nose, eyes, ears or chin we have inherited, though at this tiny age
we look pretty much the same with our blue eyes, pink skin and stubbed noses,
which might explain why we are all carefully labelled. The snippet of pink
ribbon tied around my wrist reveals that I am a girl and which of the women
gave birth to me, but otherwise there is nothing much remarkable about me,
except that I am declared to be the one with the loudest yell ever heard
between those walls.
Very few fathers find their way into
our nursery, apart from my father, who is excused from fighting because he is
hard of hearing and would be the last to detect impending danger and is
therefore useless to the universal cause of fighting for peace. Most of them
are risking life and limb, fighting against other fathers and sons. They have
no choice. Many of them will never see the progeny they have spawned.
Soon, we new-borns will go our separate
ways and are unlikely to meet again, though we have spent our first earth-hours
together in this no-man’s land, in this microcosm of the unfriendly world
outside.
"That child’ll burst a blood
vessel", someone says. "See what she wants."
Rough, cold hands snatch me up and glare
me into submission, pushing the teat of a feeding bottle between my gasping
lips. Thirst suppresses all other sensations. I suckle and try to focus my eyes
on the woman in the stained white overall who is pushing the fragrant, warm
liquid at me and sniffing because she has a chronic sinus infection. It could
be Mama, I suppose. But this woman is not even looking at me while she feeds
me. She is comparing notes about last night’s bombing raid. Surely Mama would
look at me, even though she would like to forget all about me.
How can I escape, if not by dying?
"Pity about her mother,"
Sniff remarks.
I stop suckling. If she isn’t Mama, who
is? What about Mama? Why isn’t she here to look after me? Where have they taken
her?
"The poor soul’ll be all right,
though. They usually are, given a bit of peace and quiet."
The poor soul. The poor soul. We are
all poor souls in this place. This is a factory for poor souls. I feel guilty
about the ordeal I have put Mama through. The poor soul. Giving birth to me has been a terrible ordeal. If there had
been two of us, we might both have disappeared into the ether. My twin sister
is the clever girl, I am thinking. And I am the stupid one. I recognise the plodding feet and raucous voice of the
smelly midwife, whose grasping fingers so recently jettisoned me out of that
small, warm prison into this big cold one. She is nothing if not competent,
though there is no tenderness in her face or her hands or her voice.
"The hole in that teat is too
small. Can’t you see she’s not getting enough?"
She takes a safety-pin from the collar
of her blood-stained overall and pushes it through the brownish rubber until
the warm, creamy liquid squirts out.
"That’s better...“she says with a
satisfied nod. If only all problems were so easy to solve.
Sniff takes up her pet theory again.
"The trouble is that these women don’t want babies in the first place.
Then, when they arrive they get hysterical and develop convenient symptoms that
free them from having to behave like mothers, at least for a time. Some even
prefer to die to avoid their responsibilities."
These words carve themselves into my
consciousness. My twin sister was right on every count. She couldn’t face being
a child of this mother; she had chosen not to, although she risked a worse fate
in doing so. You could only make that choice during the first few weeks. After
that, your destiny was almost certainly sealed, barring accident or error.
I am weeping now. Different tears.
Tears that burn red streaks into my cheeks and make my eyes sting. I am sobbing
out my grief and pain and anger and desperation. And I am listening to my own
heart-beat pounding away in my own panting breast.
"It’s as if she understands
everything we say," Safety-pin remarks.
"Go on. Pull the other one!"
Now Sniff looks at me long and hard,
screwing up her eyes and sniffing even harder, as if that could help her to
discover something hitherto hidden from human view.
"She can’t be hungry," says
Safety-pin. "She drank more than her share a few minutes ago."
Sniff jerks up, and the bottle falls
out of her hand. She is indignant. No one shall dare accuse her of not doing
her job properly. Before Safety-pin can teach her any more about her job, she
tips me up and sniffs vigorously at my rear end.
"And she’s clean and dry, too. I
saw to her a minute ago."
The indignity of this treatment causes
me to burp loudly.
"Drat it. Now she’s brought it all
up again!"
"No wonder,” snorts Safety-pin.
"I would, too, if someone chucked me around like a sack of potatoes."
If there had been two of us, we could
have united our will and strength. We could have triumphed over all odds. But
there is only me. I stayed the course, not wanting to disappoint the gentle man
who fathered us. He would want me. He had wanted us. I remembered the day they
had been told there were twins. He had been overjoyed and she had been
horrified.
"It’s all right for you," she
had moaned. "You don’t have to drag them around inside you for nine
months."
"But I would, if I could," he
had replied. "I’d do anything to relieve you of that burden."
"Well, you can’t, can you?"
she had retorted, and the awfulness of her impending motherhood became an
obsession with her.
She hated the very idea of having
children. She wanted to be childless. She didn’t need anyone else. At long last
she had found a soul-mate, and now she would have to share him not just with
one, but with two intruders. But most of all, she wanted to forget the pain of
her own childhood, the years of suppression, abuse and neglect, all of which
she denied in retrospect, but which were nevertheless etched into her
frightened blue eyes and confirmed by the nervous little cough which warned us
constantly of her impending arrival and whose pitch and tempo reflected her
current state of mind.
My twin had hated these negative
vibrations. Her soul was stunned. We were like the two sides of a coin. She was
the side face down in darkness, and I the one facing the light.
"I’ll be with you in spirit,"
she had promised. "And one day we shall be reunited. You must believe
that."
When, weeks later, our parents were
informed that it was only one baby after all, she had rejoiced and he had wept.
I had tried to comfort him, to reach out somehow and console him and assure him
that I would soon be there to be wanted and loved. But the iron curtain of
mother’s cruel triumph was impenetrable.
One day, shortly before I was born, I
had the sudden inspiration that my twin was somewhere near.
"I will never be far away," I
felt her say.
"Tell me how!" I pleaded,
hoping against hope that her presence was not just my imagination.
But before she could answer, the sirens
screamed across the countryside, and the air was saturated with the negative
energy of enemy planes transporting bombs across Europe to wreak havoc on
Liverpool.
A few days after my birth, while the
villagers who couldn’t be bothered to hang the blackout curtains over their
windows were now counting the bomb craters in their fields and their lucky
stars that they still lived to tell the tale, my father fetched me home. He nourished
me on boiled cow’s milk and water sweetened with honey and nursed me tenderly,
helped by my cousin Jack and a long list of does and don'ts compiled by Aunt
Jane, who is Jack's mother and my father's favourite sister.
I can only speculate on where Mama is. Nobody tells me
anything. They think I won’t understand.
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