JOANNA HAD WANDERED THE STREETS OF Woodstock in the evenings, trying to keep limber. She wore an enormous floppy hat that she had hoped would seem arty, but instead made her look like Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. If I only had a brain, she said to herself, and snorted. Pregnancy could disable you permanently, she’d noticed in some of the other couples they saw. The women wandered around in a daze, or else they were always scratching through perennial nappy bags as if the material was sewn with itchy powder.
The men, ag, the men! Joanna missed being looked at, around the braai and in the streets, something she had never, ever thought would happen. She had welcomed the idea of being less attractive. It wasn’t about the way you actually looked, or what you wore, or the vibe you gave off: some of the worst insults she’d endured were hurled at her when she was in her black poloneck. But that slow, speculative look a friend of Jan’s would occasionally send her way – usually after a six-pack of Windhoek Draught – was not exactly comfortable, but comforting.
Joanna’s real friends were in other places – places like New York or London or Sydney, where they were writing successful novels, or making documentaries, or working for the UN in some undisclosed but vital capacity – and she found that she had no one in Fish Hoek that she felt comfortable talking to. But so what? Stop whining, Jo-Jo-Bean, she told herself. It was her mother’s voice, fair and square in her head. Pick that lip up off the floor. She resolved never to say that to James. It made her think of people in the throes of religious ecstasy, naked to the waist, their faces pierced with steel hooks, their lips skewered together with rods sharpened at both ends.
Pregnancy made Joanna feel ignorant. She hadn’t expected the onslaught of female hormones – oestrogen, progesterone – that made her body smooth and full and hairless. They erased her. She felt sleek, a seal, an odalisque. Joanna couldn’t conceive of what it must have been like to do all that research. She had lost her procedural memory: she had forgotten how to type. If she sat down at a keyboard now her hands would have turned into paws, her claws sliding and clicking over the keys like a cat on a piano.
She thought about all the books she would have to skim, all the sites she would have to trawl, and she felt heavy. There was so much that could go wrong; there was so much she didn’t know. She took to wishing on things the way she had when she was little. If I reach the traffic lights before they go red, then the baby will be normal. Joanna knew the magical thinking for what it was. It made her feel better anyway.
She had begun by reading all the books on pregnancy that she could find, marvelling at the red spidering out of her flesh into another form, loving its horror. Flesh of my flesh, she whispered as she turned the pages in bed at night, spilling biscuit crumbs under the duvet as Jan swore under his breath and swiped at the sheet. Blood of my blood. It gave her the same feeling she remembered as a teenager, reading Dracula and then working her way through her father’s Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazines when she should have been asleep.
But then she had come across a Swedish book in the library, a heavy hardback with corners that were crumpled from the pressure of being borrowed, being dropped. There were colour plates of the foetus at every stage of its growth.
She nudged Jan from his history of the Boer War. “How did they get in there to take the pictures?”
He looked over at her. “Which pictures?”
She lifted the book and waved it.
He hefted it from her, flipped through a few pages, considering.
“Do you really want to know?”
“That’s why I’m asking. Was it a tiny camera? An intra-uterine thingy?”
He handed it back to her. “Joanna. These babies aren’t alive anymore.”
“I don’t know. Obviously, they’d be grown-ups by now. This book was published in” – she turned to the imprint page – “1982.”
He looked carefully at her to see if she was joking.
“What I mean is, these babies are dead, Joanna. They were probably aborted. Or they were stillbirths, or something. That’s how they took the photos.”
She threw the book away from her stomach as far as she could, feeling blasphemous. It landed on the carpet with a hollow gong and flapped open. Joanna rubbed her eyes viciously.
“That’s horrible. And pregnant women look at them! It’s a, a, curse.”
Jan kept watching her, trying to read her, probably wishing she also came with a manual. He hadn’t looked at any of the sections in the books headed “For the Father”, even though Joanna had stuck torn-up Post-Its on the relevant pages and told him to. She wanted him to learn the language so that she could talk to him. More and more she felt that he had no real idea of what was happening. He looked to her for signals to show when to be excited or happy or impressed: Joanna was doing the work for both of them. He had come to the first appointment with her and then, before the next one, asked, “Look. There are going to be lots of these things, right? Do I have to come with you every time? Can’t you go alone?” And she had.
“No more books,” said Joanna. “I don’t want to take it back to the library. I don’t even want to touch it again. It’s bad luck.”
He stretched his arm awkwardly behind her back, bumping her head. He doesn’t even know how to touch me, thought Joanna. What is going to happen to us? Who will be the grownup? We’ve made a baby! It suddenly appalled her. What had they been thinking? Babies were such weighty little packages, those hitchhikers, those thumb-suckers. Their tissue was so dense, multiplying itself out like sums on a blackboard: plus chalky fingernails, minus vestigial tail.
She had seen an exhibit once, in a Museum of Natural History in a long-ago African town: elephant foetuses, one for every stage of the gestational period. Maputo. That was it. Some of them were too big for their cases, as if they’d outgrown their surroundings. The flesh of one pachyderm was pale and pressed against the glass, like a drowning victim. They all looked like they had been swimming against some awful current, trying to get away. Joanna dreaded seeing the same stillness on the monitor at The Foetal Assessment Centre. She had made sure to have a cup of coffee and a doughnut just before their first appointment.
When the time came the doctor smeared the cold gel on the small mound of Joanna’s stomach, apologising. And then they were connected, she and her son, like two old-timers on the telephone. James just appeared. They saw the waving hands of the conductor, heard the hoofbeats of the highwayman. Joanna counted, spiked with every whitish button of his visible spine. Then the little body was bucked in a seizure of hiccups on the screen. She was shocked. She had only then realised that she was carrying another person, one who was thinking and feeling, in the same way that she, herself, thought and felt.
Afterwards, the doctor confessed that he was trepidatious whenever a patient sat down in front of him and told him happily that she was pregnant. He refused to rejoice before he saw the seven-week scan, he told Joanna. “I know that out of every ten women, I will have to tell one of them that her baby is dead.”
But hers was alive. He was alive and he was normal. What were the chances? Genetics and fortune, nature and nurture, had conspired to make a new creature. And now it was up to her, wasn’t it? Joanna kept thinking of the eternal duty of Saint Christopher, bent unbalanced against the weight of bearing the child across water, the tiny hard heels drumming against his clavicles. Things were moving, were transforming themselves, and she could only watch, remote in hand. Afterwards she took to slowing the rollercoasting panic alone in the Woodstock house, while Jan was on location far away. Lying on her side, she ate banana bread and biscotti and rusks, falling at last into a comforting carbohydrate coma. (Don’t lie on your back, said the books. There was supposed to be an enormous artery running all the way along the spine. You could cut off the supply and starve your child of the blood.)
“You don’t really need the books, I suppose,” said Jan. “You know what you’re doing, don’t you?” She felt his voice reverberating in the cave of his sternum. He was whole, and he was here, beside her in the bed. Who cared if he didn’t read the books?
“I do,” said Joanna. “Of course I do. Women have been doing this for centuries.” She hid her shudder and turned over on her other side.