Chapter 15
Expulsion: How four didn’t become five
It was a day of thunder and blood and screaming and it was a day of sadness and anger and happiness, and it was a day of miracles and curses and a shocking surprise.
It was also a day with a lot of fear and a lot of shouting.
It was a day with death always in the background, haunting the shadows in all of our minds, once we knew what was going on.
It was the day that the population of our little world increased, but it was also the day when I think each of us in our own different way never felt more alone.
Cat, once it was over and she had washed the blood and smell of fear off her as we stood in the rain in the dark, taking a shower like in the days before the pale girls came, said to me that she had never felt so lonely and forsaken, so without her mother, not since our parents died, not since that first night when she carried me away from the house full of coughing and sat in the dark knowing we were alone now, maybe for ever.
It’s just so tiring, Mouse, she said as we lay in the dark together afterwards. You know what I mean. It’s tiring being the adult. Being the adults. Especially when you don’t feel like you really are one…
I never really heard her complain like that, but after the long day I knew what she meant.
I also knew that I’d never seen her be more brave and more decisive.
I know she had probably been braver when she rescued me, but I’d been just a baby then, too helpless and unable to remember it.
Until the day of blood and screaming I’d never really thought about babies, about how powerless they are.
Or how tragically vulnerable. Or how noisy.
Cat, as a child, must have helped me through so many dark nights as I whined and wailed with no one to tell her what to do or that it was going to be all right, that she was going to succeed in keeping the little crying blob of me alive long enough that she wouldn’t have to be alone in the world, that she and I would grow and become each other’s only-ones.
Cat was always my hero, even before I had words to say it to myself inside my own head.
But, like I said, she never seemed so courageous to me as she was on the day of blood and thunder.
It wasn’t that we hadn’t tried to prepare for it.
We’d watched Freya’s stomach get bigger and bigger, swelling like the wild pumpkins around the vegetable patch.
She never let me see it up close, but Cat told me it got so swollen that it was as tight as the skin on those pumpkins at the end of summer, and that she was worried that the baby was too big for Freya.
I asked what she meant, and she whispered that she thought it might not be able to get out when the time came, and that she didn’t know what to do if that happened.
Which didn’t actually mean that she or I did not know what the options were. We did, though I wished that I didn’t.
What Cat meant was that she didn’t know how to choose which option, or how to do either of them at all safely.
The reason we knew was because we’ve made it our business to do so.
We read and reread the chapter in First Aid and Safety for Dummies until we both knew it by heart.
We tested each other on it. We even had a system planned, of who would do what if things went normally, and what we’d try and do if they didn’t.
That part of it all terrified me. It probably terrified Cat as well, but I never saw her show any fear.
As usual, a lot of the equipment the books suggested was just as available to us as the “Emergency Care” it advised us to seek and wait for at almost every turn.
Clean plastic sheets, sterile gloves, a turkey-baster (whatever that was) and – of course – the book’s all-time favourite: pillows.
The couple who wrote the book really liked pillows.
Maybe in the time before the world ended, everyone lived with lots of spare pillows just in case they needed sudden first aid and safety.
We didn’t have spare pillows, and certainly not clean or sterile ones.
The book was absolutely definite about the need to keep everything about the birth clean and sterile.
I said that I suppose that made sense, as the baby wouldn’t have any experience of dirt and so would be vulnerable to it.
Cat said it was probably more for the mother in case she had an open wound that got infected.
I asked what kind of wound, and she said a cut, and when I said what kind of cut, she said I didn’t want to know.
And then she said no, she was wrong and that even though I might not want to know, I should know, just in case I had to do it instead, and she told me the two things that might happen that involved cutting which afterwards would leave wounds that should be kept sterile.
So then I knew what she knew, except I also knew I’d never be able to do it, not least because one seemed to be a way to kill Freya quickly, and the other was so likely to become infected that it would be a way of killing her just as surely, but more slowly.
It might not happen, Cat said. But think about it properly, Mouse, we don’t want not to know what to do when we have to decide if we need to do it, do we?
So preparation wasn’t just cleaning and collecting stuff.
It was also sharpening things. That was something I could do.
But mainly it was cleaning. And one thing we did already know how to do was keep things clean, because we had the knack Cat had learned before the strangers came, the secret of making soap.
So we made more soap, and even showed Storm how to do it as we did so.
Freya of course wasn’t interested. As we made the soap Cat tried to talk privately to Storm about what might go wrong when the time and the baby came, but Storm really did not want to talk about it.
All she did was tell Cat not to tell Freya.
She’s scared enough, she said. Don’t push her over the edge, you know.
Cat and I did know. We knew there was an imaginary edge, and a very real one. We were both thinking of Freya at the quarry.
Storm looked from one of us to the other.
Exactly, she said. Bad choice of words, but exactly.
Cat and I practised what to do to revive a new born baby with an old panda bear toy we found, chafing it or holding it upside down and swinging it by its ankles to clear the airways.
We stopped doing that because Digger thought it was a game and would happily jump at the toy, trying to catch it.
We also practised swaddling the bear, and I made it a special warming baby-hat by cutting the toes of an old pair of ancient woolly socks.
We didn’t let Freya see us doing any of this.
We boiled a lot of rags and kept them in sealed metal boxes we’d also washed so we’d have supplies ready.
We also kept them out of Freya’s sight so as not to trigger one of those plunges into her special dark place, the gloomy retreat out of which it was getting harder and harder to coax her.
I was the worst of us all when it came to trying to cheer her up.
I once tried to tell her how brave I thought she was being, carrying the baby and holding a new life inside her.
I still have the small scar on my head from where the chopping board she threw at me hit.
She didn’t seem a bit alarmed or apologetic about the blood that began streaking from my temple as she coldly asked me why I possibly imagined she gave a flying fuck what I thought about what she was doing, let alone why.
You’re just too stupid to understand, she said.
And I suppose she was right about that.
Another thing that made the waiting worse was the second medical instruction book we read.
The truth is we forgot we had it until Storm found it in the library bunker that we also used to store things like firewood and tools and stuff we might find useful one day.
The library was made up of a complete mishmash of mismatched books that climbed the walls in rickety towers with no rhyme or reason to their order.
There were picture books with no writing and philosophy books with no pictures and everything you could think of in between those two extremes: atlases, cookbooks, stories told in drawings where the people spoke in little white bubbles that came out of their mouths on a spike, or thoughts that hovered over them in a different kind of bubble shape like a cloud.
There were big books like dictionaries and encyclopedias, and books of every shape and size going on down from there.
We had books you could use as a tabletop that two people could eat off, and others so small you could hide them in your hand if you made a fist. The second book was on the small end of that scale – tiny enough to slip in a pocket – and it was wrapped in a plastic cover that had become brittle and mostly flaked off.
I think it had that cover because a doctor or maybe a nurse would have carried it in a pocket in case they needed it as they worked.
Even the paper it was printed on was thicker than normal book paper, as if it was made for rougher handling.
It was called Nursing and Health – Labour Midwifery Skills – Survival Guide.
It’s a reminder book, Cat said after she had thumbed through it for the first time. For nurses who helped people have babies.