The pain builds slowly in her all afternoon. A sick, dragging feeling that comes and goes, maybe it’s gastric. She is comforted by that, by the familiarity of it, though her stomach feels heavy and tight. She cooks potatoes and lamb chops for her father and leaves them in the oven. Thinks, maybe if I can sleep. Folds herself onto the pink chenille of her single bed, closes her eyes.
Is woken by the pain grown sharper, harder, less knowable. She feels marooned by it, anchored to the mattress. She is frightened now. Wishes for someone to ask, someone who might know. It is hard not to cry.
The house is in darkness. She stands to pull back the bedspread and feels the pain bulge in her. A sound builds in her throat. She grips the windowsill, parts her lips and the sound leaks out. Ooooaaaa, oooaaa, oooaaahhh. Outside the night is ordinary in every other way, the thin summer darkness, the occasional squeal of a flying fox, and the sea, shushing them all to sleep. The pain comes and goes, comes and goes.
She is lying curled around her stomach. Here it is: sharper, harder, she hears her own voice again, Oooooohhhhh. And following it, within moments, her father’s. Abby? and his footsteps across bare boards. She jerks the covers up, turns to face the wall, makes a fist and shoves it into her mouth. The door swings open and she feels his eyes. Her name again, softer, but only just. Abby. An eternity, surely, and then the click of the door closing, and silence.
She is losing all sense of herself. She is not Abby, she is a thing, she is the pain, it obliterates her. There is only the pain, and the darkness, beating time. The urgent need to cry out. Her hand – some time, she doesn’t know when, or how – has found a thick pencil near the bed; she clamps it between her teeth.
There is no respite now, it is one long crush of muscle and bone and blood. She tastes lead as her teeth jam together. Finds she is grunting, her legs apart as if pushed by rough hands. Fear bubbles in her throat. She pants to keep herself quiet.
But she is bursting, surely her body is bursting open. She shoves her hands down to stop herself splitting, feels the utter foreignness of her own flesh, swollen and damp and open. Nausea, revulsion: she remembers the boy’s hand the first time he touched her there. Knows instantly that whatever is wrong now – if she is dying now – it is all to do with him. What he did.
Then she is squatting on the bed – it is what her body does, without instruction – and holding the bed-head for support. There is a gush of fluid, but the pressure is still there and she tries to cover herself because her insides are pushing out. Her hand feels the roundness of an orange, the softness of a peach, something hard and soft at the same time. Her lungs fill with air and now she is pushing, grunting silently and there is almost pleasure in it. And then it is over. She falls to her knees over the moving shape between them.
She is afraid to look down. For some moments she kneels there, breathing hard, her whole body shaking. Then leans back, finally, and looks. In the dull light from the window, on the bloodied sheet: the face of a doll. She knows it at once, traces her forefinger across its cheek. Its mouth and eyes are open and there is a mewling noise, like a kitten. Sshh, dolly, she whispers. Sshhh. And it does, the noise stops, though its legs jerk up and down like a puppet, up and down.
She leans against the wall and closes her eyes. Sleeps, perhaps – she doesn’t know. Knows only, when her heavy lids lift, that there, outside the window, the dark horizon is smeared apricot and pink. But it is she herself she is terrified by; what her body has done. The blood, the smell. The doll-like creature she expelled, the lumps and ropes of flesh it is attached to. A wave of nausea ripples through her.
The horizon is yellowing. The morning, her father. She moves, forcing her legs, they gush blood. But she is, once more and suddenly, no longer Abby; is a stranger to herself. But Not-Abby knows what to do.
It is half-light when she leaves the house, a shadow-figure, she watches herself from afar. Without terror now – Not-Abby will make her safe. But she needs to be fast. She hurries through the gate in the side fence and into the neighbour’s yard. There is a crepe-myrtle, just about to flower, it grows beside a high window. It is just the right tree. She makes sure the bundle is wrapped neatly; that the ground beneath it is smooth. Touches the cheek once more – it is, she thinks, like dipping a finger in water – then lifts her long skirt, her clean, clean white skirt, and runs.