Page 43 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

But then the long wait ended so abruptly that it felt like an ambush.

I was alone again sitting in front of the window watching the rain which was now falling so hard that when the lightning caught it for a moment it looked like a field of glass reeds had sprouted overnight. Digger was not scared of anything except thunder, and was next to me, curled into a ball against my thigh. as if burying her nose under her tail would protect her from the deep rumbling in the sky. I could feel her shaking under my hand, shivering in long spasms and every now and then looking up at me and panting as if she’d just finished a long run. I was busy telling her it was OK when Cat called for me.

I ran into the kitchen and found her drying her hands and grabbing the top bundle of clean rags from the pile.

Wash your hands, she said. It’s happening.

She nodded at the steamer pot I had ready for the metal things that we hoped we wouldn’t need.

Just in case, she said.

Her face was tight and tough now the waiting was done.

I’ve got it, I said putting more sticks on the fire.

I know you have, she said pulling a short sharp smile through the tension clouding her face, in a brief brave glint of sunshine. Now wash your hands.

Then, like I said, my memory is really fragmented. It’s like the black record on the wind-up record player with the scratch which makes it skip ahead just when you think you’ve got the hang of the tune. So these are just the fragments – not necessarily joined up in the right order – skipping through the night ahead.

Freya stopped talking and complaining about Storm and Cat and began a moaning that was worse than anything because those sounds came from somewhere so deep and old that it felt like something really ancient and not very kind had taken over her body.

Storm came in and caught me steaming the blades. That was bad. I couldn’t get the lid back on the pot fast enough to hide them, but she was obviously already so wrung out by what was going on on the other side of the wall that she didn’t see them. Or if she did, she didn’t have enough thinking space left in her to make sense of what they were for. She just stood there, blank-faced and limp, her hands hanging loose at her sides, as if walking through the door had suddenly wiped the slate of her mind clean.

Cat says I should wash my hands again, she said. I fell over.

I pointed at the wash tub.

Right, she said. I fainted, I think.

I watched her scrub her hands and then gave her a clean towel.

You can see the top of its head now, she said without meeting my eyes. Then I saw a shudder go through her as she looked up into my face.

She’s going to die, isn’t she? she said.

Cat won’t let that happen, I said.

And then, as if to immediately make me a liar, I hear Cat shouting for me and there’s something in her voice I haven’t ever heard before.

Mouse! she yelled. Help me!

And then, without remembering how I got there I am in the room in front of Cat and Freya and a sight that tells me the truth I will never ever forget – that birth is a wild and a bloody thing, and then I realise that what Cat is holding out to me is a baby, blue and slick as a fish and not moving at all.

Mouse! she says. Put the needles down there and take this.

And now I’m holding the baby and the baby is dead and Freya is sobbing and Cat turns back to her with one last look over her shoulder at me and she says,

Make it live, Mouse!

And then she turns away and bends over Freya, working to stop the bleeding and shouting for her sister.

Get in here! Storm, she needs you! she yells.

And now Storm is at her sister’s side and the snatched memory I have of it makes it look like she’s pinning her shoulders down and sobbing into her ear or maybe it’s Freya who is sobbing,

but I don’t have time to make sense of it because I need to make the dead baby something else,

and I look down at my hands and realise they must already have a life of their own because without my remembering to tell them what to do they are already doing what we did with the old panda bear