NAMING RIGHTS

Elizabeth Flux

‘Have you decided if you’ll be wanting the gas or an injection?’

The nine-month ward is clean and peaceful, even though I never have it to myself. The other Marys are mostly quiet, wrapped up in their own preparations. For the first time I find myself enjoying the outdoors, counterintuitively liking to walk further and further even though my feet get so puffed up I’ve been forced to buy slippers because they no longer fit into my one pair of lace-ups.

Meals here are carefully planned; in the one- and two-month wards I grew fed up of the taste of ginger. ‘It’s to help the nausea,’ the group nutritionist had said, coming round to make sure we’d all finished our meals. I hated the sugary taste of the crystals we were given in the morning, the strings that would get caught in my teeth. Whenever I could I’d spit them into a serviette, getting rid of the evidence in the garden, wondering if new ginger would grow from my discards, twisting their way into life as a direct result of my disgust.

Some of the girls wake up screaming in the night. You get used to it quickly. There is always a nurse on hand to whisper a soothing word. ‘It’s alright, Mary,’ he’ll say, before handing over a glass of fleeting joy and liquid sleep. I don’t get the nightmares, but sometimes I pretend. The drink is delicious and the silence more so.

Every so often they wheel out the projector and run us through the familiar lessons. We laugh at the old-timey pictures, even though we get scolded for acting like children. ‘Look at the cut of that dress,’ said the tallest girl at last night’s session. She giggled nervously. ‘S’pose it has to go out like that to fit over those big hips.’ We all snickered and the Mary with the freckles put two hands up her own shirt in mockery of the big-busted ghosts on the screen.

With four weeks to go I requested a book on plants and carried it with me all around the garden. I learned the different names but hated them all; they sounded wrong. Clinical. Devoid of life. The tree at the centre of the garden is mine and I call it Alpha Centauri. Every day I sit at its base, feeling the thick vines press against my back, its curves fitting around my own. Alpha Centauri is the closest visible star to earth – four-and-a-half light years away. Except it isn’t just one star; it’s the light of two blurring into one. My tree looks strong and thriving; it’s tall, and its fronds favour one side, drooping its leaves almost to the ground. Encircling the trunk are vines, some as thick as my wrist. They look like scaffolding, holding everything together, but the truth is they don’t belong. They’re called lianas, and they spring from the earth, small and vulnerable, and invite the other plants to dance. They spiral and swirl and hold on tight, unable to make it alone. Trees are kind; they pull the vines up with them, and their reward is a slow death by strangulation, their skeletons providing a home for their killer.

The Parents started to visit us around five months. The girl with the bed closest to the door always fidgeted excitedly in the hour leading up to a visit. Her couple were young: a brown-haired man and a green-eyed woman who were kinder than they needed to be. They perched at the end of her bed and always brought chocolates, even though they weren’t supposed to. Sometimes she managed to hide them before they were confiscated, and we shared them in the dark during shift change. ‘It’s bad for the baby, you know,’ the freckled Mary would say in the voice of our much-hated dietician. ‘I’ve got a very specific schedule of how much fat you girls should be taking in for optimal frontal lobe development.’

The first one of us to disappear was the girl from the bed next to mine. She had the misfortune of a brusque Mother and downtrodden Father – on their first meeting, before even saying hello, the Mother had shot out a hand possessively towards the girl’s swollen belly, causing her to recoil in shock. The woman was visibly affronted, and at the end of her visit disappeared into the nurses’ station in a storm of whispers.

The following week I heard her ask, ‘Is it supposed to be kicking yet?’ and watched as her hand roamed a bit too roughly. ‘Yes,’ replied the nurse to whom the question had been directed. ‘But you have to be lucky to feel one.’ My neighbour sat, eyes fixed on a place between her knees, ignored. Her panties were showing where the Mother had forced her gown up to better feel for movement, and we all pretended not to see.

The week before she went, the little man in the grey hat came to take her measurements. Across the shoulders, neck to feet, jotting down the figures in a little notebook. My hands briefly moved to my own hips, before drooping back down.

Gas or injection.

With two weeks to go, those of us who remained had woken up to a screaming different from the kind we’d all become numb to. When the light snapped on we could see that the Mary was unusually pale under her freckles, her colour perhaps having drained into the pool of blood that now stained her previously white sheets. I felt a sharp kick in response to my shock and I immediately filled with hatred. Nurses descended, and with a series of well-practised manoeuvres the girl was bustled onto a gurney and wheeled out of the room. ‘Go back to sleep,’ the rest of us were ordered. The taste of metal and failure lingered in the air for days.

My couple are nothing much, really. She can never look at me properly, her gaze alternating from my forehead to my right cheek. His eyes also rarely make it to my face, boring into my neck before indulging in the occasional glance downwards even though my gown goes all the way up to my neck. In their most recent visit I took them for a walk through the garden and told them about the lianas. On the way back they slipped into the habit of talking about me not to me.

We are given naming rights, though the nurses try hard to steer us. There is a book listing thousands of options, but many are crossed out and a lot of pages are missing. In the final weeks, you can almost calculate the amount of money furtively slipped from Parent to nurse by the number of times a particular name is dropped into conversation. It never works. I go to the ‘ten-month ward’, just for a visit, even though it’s strongly discouraged, and all the names are ugly. Hollow compensation and misdirected anger. Leaves blow at my feet, and I wonder if any of them come from my tree.

We shower all together so that the temperature can be carefully controlled, our exposure to heat and cold carefully calculated. There are no mirrors except for one another, and I run my finger down the line that has slowly been darkening beneath my navel.

My tree has dropped its leaves, and I put my hand around one of the vines and squeeze, wondering how it feels to have the tables ever so briefly turned. I gather up some of the dead leaves and take them to the ‘ten-month ward’ as a gift for the successful Marys.

In the last days I lie on my back in the darkness. They’ve told us not to, but I am filled with spite and laughed when they told me it could cut off my blood supply.

The morning that my hope spills out on the floor I am rewarded with warm congratulations and paperwork.

Gas or injection.

The small man already has my measurements, and my date of birth and real name have already been printed onto a marker. I’ll be in the ‘ten-month ward’ by the end of the day and apparently you can’t just have row after row of Mary.

I want to go to the garden but am not allowed. Every few minutes a nurse comes over to check on my progress, to thank me, to say congratulations, to hurry me along.

On the sheet I circle ‘injection’, even though it doesn’t really make a difference and the only thing left to fill out is her name. The tree is just visible from the window.