Absolute Hush (19 page)

‘You haven't heard about the doctor, darling,' Mrs Lovage bribed. ‘He was found dead in the road this morning. Just let me in and we'll have a little ciggy and I'll tell you.'

At that very moment there sounded a baby's thin wail. Springing inside, Elizabeth slammed the door.

Sissy and George clutched each other with terror at the sounds of Mrs Lovage trying to enter. They had imagined Elizabeth waiting eagerly for the charlady: ‘You'll never guess … you'll just never guess … what those disgusting children have done … really, it's too repulsive … even worse than the five-legged kitten and the dried-up frogs …'

They heard the frontdoor bolt being drawn back, and the door opening. Then, after what seemed like ages, close again and the sound of Mrs Lovage's wheels, defeated, ousted, retreating back towards the road.

George tiptoed to the window and reported to Sissy, ‘Mrs L's shoulders are bowed as though she's sad, and she's giving the bike little shakes as though she's cross.' After a while Sissy said, ‘I'm getting hungry, George.'

‘But you had all that bread and dripping.' George had been looking forward to getting back to his whisky. ‘I'm not hungry, so why should you be?'

‘It's the milk, I suppose,' said Sissy.

‘Milk?'

Sissy raised her hands to her breast, and George saw that across the front of her nightie was a great stain of wetness as though someone had spilled a glass of Horlicks over her.

‘It's getting quite uncomfy, actually,' she said, rolling up the wet Viyella to show him her naked breasts.

George gawped with astonishment. Sissy's tiny child breasts had swelled wildly as though they had been stung by a swarm of wasps, and had become laced with wide blue veins.

Sissy gave her nipple a pinch and a burst of milk flew into George's eyes.

Screaming with laughter, Sissy fell back on to the bed, while George, gasping with shock but giggling too, wiped at his eyes with his truncated jersey sleeves.

‘Oh God, it's so marvellous,' gasped Sissy. ‘All those years with you peeing over cliffs and into bottles. Shooting your pee gun into little cracks and pointing it at passers-by while I had to squat, and now I can do it with both my breasts.'

She shot another triumphant salvo at the ceiling, and even George, who had spotted so much of the world with well-aimed golden urine, had to admire the buttons of milk adhering like perspiration to the ceiling mouldings.

Elizabeth heard the laughs, the shouts from George, as she struggled along the passage, her arms full of bedding, and, touched with hope, halted suddenly, nearly tripping over the edge of the eiderdown.

They would not be romping like that if what she thought had happened had really happened. It must all be a joke, elaborate,
silly … Oh God, had the doctor died for nothing … old fool, he should have known better than to be taken in by a pair of maniac children … and Mrs L, cycling away so bowed and sad, she could come back at once … a joke, Mrs L, one of the children's silliest sillinesses.

Elizabeth headed for the room, her lips ready to smile. Sissy was shouting, ‘I can shoot it wherever I like. Here and here, and there and there …'

Elizabeth put her head round the door, and got a jet of Sissy's breast milk full in the face.

I was fascinated by the world's babble of thoughts, desires, passions, and efforts. The pure place which had combined with Sissy's body and from which I had just emerged had none of these things so it took me a little time to adjust. At first I assumed the people of the world, and especially my own family, would understand that they had someone terribly important born to them, and would immediately forgo all other activities so as to be constantly available to attend to my evolution. But far from considering me to the exclusion of all else, I was forced to observe my mother spurting the room with the nourishment intended for myself. I had arranged to be born from a pure child, not having taken into consideration how feckless such a person might be. Luckily George said, ‘That milk's for Lump, Sis. Let the baby suck your breast,' and although the hairy petal mouldings – as well as Elizabeth's eyesockets – were dripping, because I was so small there was still enough for me. Ah, the wonderful bliss of milk. It trickles, salt and sweet and warm, against the inside of my cheeks. My tongue is soft and strong and pumps the blessed stuff ticklingly under my palate. The vessels of my stomach rise and quiver as the first limpid pool arrives. My lips press deliciously round Sissy's tightened tits and in the centre of my upper lip there is a peak so sensitive that it can even feel the goose bumps on her skin and is tickled by the little blond curly whiskers growing from them.

Mrs Lovage went to the Plague House ten times that day, begging to be let in, for she had no pride when it came to Elizabeth.

She raised the letter-flap and tried shouting things like, ‘Don't worry about the baby, ducky.' She could even smell the baby, milky, earthy, a bit sour, a bit sugary.

On the second morning, when Elizabeth still did not respond, she looked into the basement and saw George sitting in a deckchair.

She rapped on the cobwebbed glass. ‘It's only me, ducky. Open the window, dear. I've got a suggestion.'

George stared frozen.

‘Come on, ducky,' urged Mrs Lovage. ‘I only want to help you.'

George came cautiously over. ‘I love kiddies, and I love little babies best of all,' soothed Mrs Lovage. ‘I'd be able to give you a hand, bath the little nipper, change its nappies, take it for walks in the pram, that sort of thing.'

A gust of hope surged through George as he got a vision of Mrs L, looking after Lump, while he and Sissy fucked.

‘Now you let me in, ducky,' said Mrs Lovage, ‘and I'll sort everything out with your dear mother. She's no need to be ashamed.' She gave George a sly wink and said, ‘And I'll find the fellow who did it to our Sissy and see he gets punished. Men like that need their willies chopped off!'

The colour faded out of George's face and, with a violent slamming of the window, he vanished.

‘Well, I never,' Mrs Lovage murmured, feeling disappointed, for she thought she'd been getting somewhere and could not understand what she had said.

Elizabeth tried to carry on as usual, doing her embroidery, listening to her records, but could not help hearing cries, grunts, even small sneezes from the Hairy Petal Bedroom.

When she heard George shout, ‘Lump's drinking really well, now. The coat'll be tight quite soon,' Elizabeth realised that the creature was not declining but thriving.

In that moment she made her decision.

She flung open the French windows, went down into the garden, and to the shed where she had locked Sissy's confiscated raft.

Elizabeth cut her hand as she dragged the plank, twine, and
bottle construction out. Cobwebs and mouse droppings clung to it.

George, at the Hairy Petal Bedroom window, said, ‘Mother is going rafting.'

‘Really?' said Sissy, craning to see over the top of sucking Lump's head. ‘How typical of her to go and do fun things just when we are busy and can't join in.'

‘I am not busy,' said George.

‘I am feeding your baby and you hanker to go boating with Mother,' cried Sissy.

‘I don't want to go at all. I want to stay with you,' gasped George. It was the sort of thing you had to say when you thought Sissy was going to get angry.

‘Go! Go, then! Fat lot I care!' screamed Sissy, bouncing so hard with indignation that the nipple popped out of Lump's mouth. Lump shrieked.

George gloomily sat down again and at once Sissy seemed to forget his presence and concentrate only on the suckling creature.

He had another peep, and saw his mother had reached the moat, ducks scattering and squawking as the clutter of tins and bottles approached.

‘I hope she knows there's a nest just where she's going to shove it,' said George.

Sissy looked up accusingly. ‘Don't tell me you've still got your attention on Mother in the raft,' she cried. ‘I'd have thought that, just for this once, you'd be concentrating on me.'

‘I am. I am,' swore George, firmly putting his back to the window so he wouldn't be tempted.

Elizabeth prised a sliver of glass from one of the broken jars and, clutching it carefully between thumb and forefinger so the sharp edge should not cut her, thrust the raft out on to the water with her toe. Then, wobbling, got on to it. She closed her eyes and lay, palms up, the winter sun's warmth on her wrists, while ducks watched her suspiciously, for not even the children had come so far into their territory before.

George, peeping swiftly, said, ‘Your raft is keeping up in the water really well, Sis, in spite of the broken bottles.'

This time Sissy did not get cross but looked up from caressing Lump's cheek with a bent knuckle, smiled brightly, and said, ‘I thought it would.'

‘Then why haven't we been using it?' demanded George with irritation.

Globules of reflected light began to bob on Elizabeth's closed lids. ‘I will pull this sharp glass lightly across my wrists,' she whispered, and the sound of her breathed sentence sent a water rat, with a soft hiss, paddling back among the rushes.

‘Blood will flow. Life will run out of me. It will all be over. I won't have to think any more.'

It is, she supposed, the thinking that people want to escape from when they try to die. But then she found herself forced to wonder if she would really stop thinking. Suppose she didn't. Suppose the thinking became even worse when your body was … my God … rotted away. She, who had always been so gracious and slender and had planned to be beautifully old. But then she visualised the slobbering monster for ever in her house, growing, spilling over the sides of the bed, letting out horrid sounds that the people of the village would hear and comment on, needing things, vast cobbled dishcloths to encase its bumps in, having to boil gruel for it herself because, as with the rabbits and the puppy and the white mice, the children had grown tired of it and stopped feeding it.

The raft stopped and juddered and the water rat regained its confidence and came close again.

She realised that she had never, in spite of all her hysterical protests, really thought of dying except in a being alive way. Until now, in her mind, even after death she continued to experience and benefit from other people's compassion and guilt, but she now saw these were only available to the living. When she was dead, she thought, the world would cease to exist and there would be nothing to give pain or joy as far as
she was concerned. She would be like … then the idea came into her mind, ‘like the Lump before it was conceived.'

For some reason, instead of depressing her, this idea made a warm feeling start to grow in her, and she began to feel lazy and slow and wondered if perhaps she had aleady slit her wrists and the life was now flowing out, for she had read somewhere that the last moments before bleeding to death were warm and comfortable. But when she raised her arms she saw that the skin of her wrists was whole and unsullied.

She fell into a dreamlike state in which she began to feel like a cold cup being filled up with golden liquid, and, inexplicably, the knowledge came to her that she was experiencing the prebirth sensations of the Lump. She gave her body a shake in an effort to stop its dwelling on the disgusting thing but still the feeling, like someone else's memory, persisted. She tried to put a stop to this crazy thinking, to bring herself back to the nasty facts of the present and of Lump, but still, deliciously, the golden sensation lingered.

George, looking from the window, said, ‘The ducks and the willow trees have all gone a golden colour, Sis.'

‘Oh,' said Sissy.

‘Mother's turned sort of shiny,' said George.

Sissy said nothing.

The lethargy that pervaded Elizabeth's limbs and the feeling of warm honey running through her veins made her incapable of action and she drifted over the moat with the weak sunlight on her skin feeling like the kiss of a lover. She sighed and for a while seemed to be alone with herself, not resting on anything, not doing anything, feeling that at last she had understood the meaning of life. Being.

After a while the thoughts came seeping back, gentled in some sweet way by the deep suspended experience she had just undergone, and she became once more aware of the dagger of glass shining in her hand. Opening her fingers, she let it slip into the water. It was swallowed by the mud without a sound.

She was disturbed by a sudden shout and the rat and the ducks
and the dragonflies went scuttling floating flapping squawking away.

‘Yoo hoo! My dear! You are sinking!'

A splash, a surge of water as though a body had dived into it, water sliding darkly over Elizabeth's face, dribbling into her mouth, stopping up her nostrils, hands on the side of the raft, tilting, a wild, excited face, with round blue bulbous eyes and dishevelled grey hair.

‘The bottles are cracked and they've filled and are sinking you,' said Beattie.

Beattie pushed Elizabeth all the way back to the bank, shoving the raft ahead of her like a butler carrying a tray, and wading thigh deep.

When they reached the side, Beattie bent over, put her arms round Elizabeth's body, and lifted her off the raft. Because Elizabeth was so full of the sweet gold kiss she expected to be very heavy, but Beattie seemed to have no difficulty. Beattie carried Elizabeth up the muddy bank and on to the lawn and putting Elizabeth down, said, ‘Pity about Sissy's raft not being seaworthy. If it had been strong enough I'd have come on with you. But anyway I've got the pony cart tied in the front. It's a lovely day for a drive. Let's go, shall we?'

‘Mother and Aunt Beattie are going for a drive in the pony cart together now,' said George, looking from the window.