Rules of the Wild by Francesca Marciano

Author:Francesca Marciano [Marciano, Francesca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55949-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1998-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

I stormed into Singh’s office, without waiting for his secretary to announce me. I had driven from the lab feeling faint, my vision blurred. I had put my shirt back on inside out.

I flung open his door like a killer.

He looked startled.

I sat down across the desk from him and I distinctly remember the steady tapping of his pen on a notepad as I blurted out what had just happened. The sound maddened me to the point that I felt like smacking him.

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” I asked aggressively.

“Nothing,” he said politely. “These things happen, especially in the first three months.”

Then he lifted the scan against the light of his desk lamp and studied it carefully. I held my breath. Maybe, after all, there had been a mistake.

“I’m very sorry,” Singh said. And put the scan back into its folder.

“I haven’t done anything wrong. You said it would be okay to drive,” I said accusingly.

Yes, he had said that. But even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, still it happened frequently.

The phone rang. He spoke quietly, rapidly. The results were perfect, he said, would you come in two weeks’ time for another checkup? He then turned back to me. Unsympathetically, I thought.

I felt like a black sheep who had drifted out of his flock, and whom he no longer had reason to care for.

The technician he had recommended so highly had been incredibly rough, I complained, forcing back the tears. He had shown no tact. The baby is dead, he had said. Now, that language would be unheard of in Europe and—

“Yes,” said Singh, “you are absolutely right. That’s unacceptable and I will make sure to reprimand him about that. But now it will be necessary for you to check into the hospital. This afternoon. We must remove the—” I don’t remember the word he used, but it was a technical term. It was no longer a living being. It had become a thing.

I drove home like a stone. Like a stone I picked up my toothbrush and my pyjamas, told Wilson that I would sleep out. Like a stone I lay in my bed in the maternity ward of the hospital, took the drug, went to sleep. When I woke up an hour later, it had been done. It had been painless. It was over.

At home the phone was down, so I couldn’t call Adam to tell him. But it was better that way, because I didn’t feel like speaking to him. I didn’t want to have to say, Hold it, reverse, nothing has changed, we’re back to square one. All that future, which had stretched from now to the end of our lives, all that future which was going to make us one thing—a couple, a mother and a father—till the day we died, had shrunk back.

I was back to not knowing what would happen next, to not belonging anywhere or to anybody. I could easily get used to that again, no problem: that was the way I had felt all my life.

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