Survivor Song(72)
Ramola retracts the knife, scrabbles backward, her lower back ramming into the edge of the footboard. She screams, “I’m sorry!” and throws the knife at the wall to her right. It bounces off and clatters on the hardwood.
“Please don’t make me do this.”
Ramola paces at the foot of the bed.
“Never leave me and I will never leave you. Neither now, nor ever.”
Ramola climbs back onto the bed. She places one hand on the belly, the other holding the hunting knife. Natalie’s breathing is nearly imperceptible.
As Ramola finishes the initial incision, Natalie’s earlier groans and screams ring so clear in her head as to be happening now.
The light in the room is terrible. The clouded overhead fixture, the extra lamps, the flashlight on her phone do not illuminate enough. There is so much blood. Ramola switches out the knives. She switches them again and again and again.
Her mental whiteboard goes blank. The blankness expands, becomes an infinite void of whiteness, one in which she might be lost willingly.
She’s through to the thick, fibrous muscle of the uterus. With the mattress shaking, it’s impossible to see any rise and fall of Natalie’s chest. Has she stopped breathing even though her moans and screams continue in Ramola’s head?
How long has Natalie been dead? How long has she been gone?
How long has the four-minute clock been ticking?
Ramola works as quickly as she can. The knives fight against their usage. Her fingers tremor and cramp up.
The last of the cutting is done. The knives are away.
She reaches inside and pulls the baby out.
The baby is a girl. Her skin is ghostly gray.
Neither Ramola nor the baby is breathing.
She cries.
Postlude
No Care and No Sorrow
This is not a fairy tale. Certainly it is not one that has been sanitized, homogenized, or Disneyfied, bloodless in every possible sense of the word, beasts and human monsters defanged and claws clipped, the children safe and the children saved, the hard truths harvested from hard lives if not lost then obscured, and purposefully so.
This is not a fairy tale. This is a song.
*
Rising ocean levels conspire with a tidal surge from a storm stalled over northern England and Scotland. The River Tyne breaks over its banks and floods the Quayside in Newcastle. The low-lying area between the Tyne Bridge and the Millennium Bridge is hit the hardest, with floodwaters reaching up to five feet in height. Roads are washed out. Dozens of businesses are forced to close while hundreds must evacuate their homes and seek higher ground. Four motorists and one jogger drown in the flash flooding. It takes two weeks for the Tyne to recede from its highest level in recorded history.
While flooding wreaks similar havoc in ten-year-old Lily’s hometown of South Shields, she is most upset—in the charmingly plucky way only ten-year-olds can be—that her school trip to the Newcastle is postponed for two months. It’s not that the Newcastle Castle is her favorite castle, not by any stretch. It’s actually quite small as castles or forts go, and Hadrian’s Wall and the Roman fort Arbeia [both in South Shields] are more impressive, even awe inspiring.
It’s the creature that resides near the Newcastle Castle that Lily wants to show her snotty friend Robert. He doesn’t believe it exists.
*
Poor Mrs. Brehl and the overmatched chaperone Mrs. Budden [Gary’s fussy mum, who refers to her son as “Gare Bear”] have their hands full with the class. So, too, the uninspiring tour guide who is dressed as a Roman or Anglo-Saxon or Norman soldier, Lily is not sure which. She did not pay attention when he identified himself, and to be fair, she’s distracted by his voice cracking and the dusting of acne on his forehead, which doesn’t really lend him soldierly gravitas.
Laird and John race each other from room to room, playing a two-person game of tag. Julia spits over the edge of the railing while on the roof. Lydia throws a wad of tissue into a hidden, nonfunctional pre-medieval toilet. Andy flicks his mates’ earlobes as the tour guide drones on and pinches ankles and the backs of knees as kids walk up the stairs. Camille taps on shoulders and then jams her flashlight directly into her victims’ eyes. Even Gare Bear gets into the act and repeatedly asks the guide about a ghost named Chauncey.
The children don’t normally misbehave to this extent. The truth is, without being able to verbalize this, they are sensitive to the miasma of unease within the city. They felt it as soon as they stepped off the train: the weight and weariness of the flood and the resigned fear of more and worse floods sure to come. Being in the castle, this living bit of history, is actually ramping up this ineffable fear of the future; this structure that has survived for more than one thousand years now represents the impermanence of the city, of everything. In the face of this, the children react in the only way they can: they laugh and they fool around and they rebel because they have to live forever.
The tour ends in a dark basement with a film and presentation that is to last twenty minutes. As the teacher and chaperone are distracted with the throng of giggling and hand-fighting kids, Lily tells Mark that if the teacher asks, she went to the toilet. Then she grabs Robert’s hand. Having been in the castle before and in possession of an unerring sense of direction and place, she leads him from the basement and out of the castle. No one stops her because she walks like she knows where she’s going, which is, in and of itself, an accurate assessment.