A pound of flesh in front and the middle finger of my reflection says ‘I know this is horse shit’ in two syllables. ‘Pregnant’ or ‘baby’. Or ‘floozy’ – a word my grandmother might have christened me. I am a landscape. I am damp, stretched over rivers and valleys in this seventh month, stepping into the third tri, my belly the only evidence of an import. The girl in the mirror is sixteen, still pert, swollen, all elastic and taut. In truth, I feel older. I am growing outwards. Did I stop growing upwards yet?

Beside the mirror, next to the window, a clock to record the hours of payment and two calendars. One of them shows a wintry November scene, 1976. The other is open to January ’77. The twelfth is circled in bright red, the date of my birth.

I hear the rumbling of tyres and look out of the window, which is blinkered by red drapes, heavy and soft velvet like genitalia. ‘Royal red’ Lotte calls it. All the rooms are decked out like this – red and gold sex, plump cushions and four-poster beds. She says these men pay by the hour for us to make them feel like kings.

I see Larry pull up in the van. When he gets out he instinctively looks up at the window. We eye one another and smile. I am the first to move away. I think he is hot for me. I like him too, especially in that blue polo neck jumper, a second skin over the first that is way too skinny to support him alone. He thinks he’s Lou Reed, but that’s okay. Lou Reed is cool. Today, while he makes his deliveries I watch as two women approach. It’s only eight o’clock but wintry dark. The wind creaks around the house and the sign outside sings to and fro. I like the sign. Not the ‘Greysylph Skies’ in gothic lettering but the added red graffiti beneath – THIS IS NOT KANSAS. It’s true we’re not in Kansas anymore Toto, but then I didn’t feel much at home in the last place either. At least here the flesh is willing.

One of the women carries a bundle clutched to her breast. The other, older woman, folds her arms around nothing, to compensate, or just to keep out the cold. I watch as the women step over a wooden sign on the floor, abandoned from the last of the protesters who left before the darkness and the ghosts of the house could swallow them. I can’t read it from here but can guess what it says – ‘Baby killers’ or something just as subtle. Harsh words but it’s an invisible battle. Rumours spread fast, even out here. They stick fast in the throat but once they’re out they spread like fire. Word is that this is the hell mouth. Babies are supposedly made on the first floor and aborted on the second. Not true. I’ve even heard them say the buckets of blood, the red mesh flesh of the foetus birth is thrown from the windows for the wild dogs to devour.

The women have gone round the back. I wait for them to reappear minutes later, empty-handed as always, hair flying trinkets in the wind, faces cold, lips tight, no words to say but clocking up so many mute questions. I watch as they climb into a dark Allegro, drive away up stream in a silver cocoon, opposing the River Colne that carries mercury blood far from here. So they say.

I roll on black stockings; hold-ups as my suspender belt no longer fits. They are ripped to shreds, my contribution to the fantastic new punk scene hitting the streets. This and the black polish on my nails is as much as Lotte will allow. I tried for a studded dog collar but she said it would put the clients off, that they paid for girls, not anarchists.

I didn’t tell Lotte at first. I was so desperate for money I didn’t know what else to do. I planned to work here for a few weeks, just to sort myself out. And then one night she came up silently behind me, slid marbled hands around my belly and began to caress it. I felt her breath in my ear, her dyed black hair tickling my neck, and a whisper, “Are you pregnant, sweetie?” And after a three times denial, her smile drew out the truth. But I don’t know how she knew, because I wasn’t showing. If anything, I was under weight, skinny and ribby. Women’s intuition? Had she noticed I hadn’t bled? She squeezed me so tightly I thought I would give birth there and told me what a treasure I was. Then she told me why and for the first time in a long time I felt proud. She’s like the mum every little girl dreams of.

It is a little before nine. I make my way downstairs to await the night’s carnival.

“Hi Eva, hi June.”

I smile at the girls, they smile back, heads nod, plumes of smoke emitted from crimson mouths. There are fifteen of us here, most of who are now lounging on chairs, playing cards, dancing to The Pretenders, smoking, cursing, chatting. They are rounded, Amazonian, slim, athletic, panther-like, kittenish, anorexic, curvaceous. Some beautiful, others not. They are the girls who needed somewhere to run to, who were caught, or caught out; girls from Russia, one from Poland, five are Vietnamese. We are aged between sixteen and thirty-five. All with swollen bellies, all making a pretty penny the same as I. Lotte, who doesn’t tend to sit with us, is in her sixties. Too old to play; she’s had her time. Together we laugh, we wait. I light a Marlboro and keep an eye on the door. Above us, high on the wall, a tiger prowls in the confines of an artist’s brush strokes. Eva says it makes the place look more like an Indian restaurant than a whorehouse. But I like it, the power in its legs, the might of its open jaws.

The door swings open; we all prick up our ears, in competition with one another, without ever saying so. It is only Larry. He looks nervous.

“Hi,” he says to me, with a wave of his hand. No one else is privilege to this acknowledgement and I feel a little superior. He disappears into another room, hollowed out and confessional behind a pair of curtains we are never allowed to part. For a twenty-something male, he really does get nervous in a room full of barely-clad pregnant women.

There is a loud bang from behind the curtain. We look at one another. Lotte storms out, pencilled eyebrows fierce. Larry follows, lap-dog willing.

“Larry,” I hiss. He comes over. The girls pretend to busy themselves with not listening. Lotte storms outside.

“What’s going on?”

Nervously, fingers plucking at his gold-speckled beard, he looks around, then fixes his gaze on me. He stares at my eyes as though to let his guard down would mean to wander his sight over my body. It gives me a thrill.

“There’s been an accident,” he says. “Joe smashed the van into a tree. He’s okay; he’s on his way now to Devon ‘til it blows over. But the consignment is… The back doors of the van flew open and most of it was lost. The rest were pretty broken, probably all dead now.”

“You mean he didn’t stay? He didn’t even check on them?” I feel sick.

“He wasn’t going to stick around when the police turned up wanting to know why there were thirty dead babies scattered around a tree like bloody Christmas presents.”

Thirty? “I thought...” I decide not to finish what I was about to say. Not now. But I thought they took a couple at a time. To America, to Europe, to anywhere the babies were needed.

“Shit,” says Maria. The girls are crowded round now, anxious, the babies inside them kicking, sympathetic.

“What about Lebovitch?” I ask.

“He doesn’t know yet. But when the shit hits the fan…” He nods to finish off the sentence. I understand.

“What’ll happen?”

He shrugs and Lotte enters. We all shrink back, waiting for an explosion. Larry smoothes his trousers, looks at his feet. One lace trailing. I stroke my bump and sing inside my head.

“I’m sure you’ve all heard,” she says, one hand on the wide hip of her corseted hourglass figure. “Whatever happens, we carry on as normal. Okay? There are thirteen pregnant girls here. There is a constant supply of unwanted babies out there. This is a setback, but I will talk to Lebovitch and he will sort things out. Okay? And one more thing. Appointments only, ladies. No more drop-ins. We don’t want the police sniffing their filthy snouts around here, do we?”

She points at me. “I have one for you.” He must have asked for a young one, I think. Shit, this is the last thing I want right now. Visions of limbs, trunks like insect thorax, bloodied heads, tiny hands, nails, toes. I have to look up to stop the tears falling. Larry watches me sadly as I go out the door. Sometimes I feel that he wishes he could ‘rescue’ me. Fool.

I lead my client up the stairs; close behind me his hands on my hips. The first thing he noticed was my bump. The first thing I noticed was his, in his too-tight trousers.

“Can you still do it like that?” he asks, pointing to my heavy flesh as I shut the door behind him.

“Oh yeah, it won’t hurt the baby.”

But it’s not the baby he’s worried about. “I didn’t pay to get crushed. I paid for a school girl.”

“School girls get pregnant too, you know.” I say it under my breath. I hate him; he has no respect. I wonder how many children he’s spawned, but keep these thoughts to myself as I slip on a white shirt and struggle with a tie. He has stripped to his Y-fronts before I have stepped into the grey pleated skirt. Damn thing doesn’t fit. I can’t even pull it up to where my waist used to be. It’s been a while since anyone asked for the schoolgirl thing. He is stretched out on the bed, waiting. Forget the skirt, he’ll be too busy to notice anyway. I dab some perfume between my breasts and stride over to him. Sitting on top, a leg on either side of his girth, is like sitting on a horse.

That’s when it hits me. The pain. A great heaving pain that locks me inside myself and makes me double over. My client jumps out from under me. I remember this much. He runs faster than a roadrunner, grabs his clothes and is down the stairs screaming blue murder while I am doubled up on the floor, clutching at myself, thinking this is the worst ache I ever felt.



Noises are a quiet hum of a fluorescent light that pinches at my eyes as I try to open them. The room is white. I am in a white room. The woman beside me might be my mother. She is squeezing my hand and reading a magazine she has laid out on my stomach beneath blue sheets. She is looking down. She doesn’t know I’m awake. I guess I make a sound because she looks up then and it’s Lotte who I remember as a kind of mother, and she strokes my chin and says, “How do you feel?”

I am wearing some kind of gown with a label that itches my neck. I feel sore. This is a single bed in a single room, with double doors at either end. Somebody comes in through one set of doors and the leaves that sweep in with him show me the outside world.

“How is she?” It’s a man. It’s Larry. I smile when I remember and everything kind of feels all right.

“I’m fine,” I say, and he takes my other hand and squeezes it.

“It was hit and miss there for a while,” says Lotte.

“Am I going to be okay?”

“Not you, the baby.” Oh yes, the baby.

“Is it…?”

“It’s a boy.”

Again I feel tears in my eyes, a lump inside; not a living body but an emotion I haven’t felt before. My hard shell is broken, my attitude shed like the leaves from the trees outside. I am maternal after all.

“Will he be okay? Will he be looked after? Will there be a couple waiting somewhere to take him and love him and…” I can hear myself getting kind of hysterical and Lotte is hushing me, calming me.

“He’s on his way now, to a couple in the Houston. He’ll be loved, don’t you worry.”

I am not listening now. I can hear voices, bass, underwater muffled coming from the other side of the other doors. But before I can ask or say anything, Lotte has risen, “I’ll be back to check on you later.” She kisses me on the cheek and then she and Larry are gone.

I close my eyes. I can get through this. It’s just the hormones. I’ve read books. It’ll pass eventually. The voices are louder, shouting. I can’t sleep. Two men, speaking in tongues. Vipers. They may be Russian. And then it stops, a door slams, silence. And curiosity gets the better of me.

The doors swing open at a touch and I glide into the darkness, edging against the wall, like they do on TV, like they do in films. I am small, though my flesh feels too big; I am quiet; I know I shouldn’t be here. I just want to know what the shouting was about, what I have missed. My fingers find the light switch and I illuminate the room.

What I see will give me nightmares for a long time to come. Until the sense is talked into me, until I become numb like the rest. What I see shocks me in that instant, so I fall to my knees and begin to sob. What I see is row upon row of incubators, a lab, a surgery. Eleven sets of eyes blink open at the white light disturbance. And twelve mouths open to cry; except that I don’t hear a human sound from inside those tiny glass boxes. I hear only a gasp, emitted from myself as my hand goes up to my mouth.

I lift myself up, two hands on the wall, and move my heavy feet, take steps towards the babies and I think, ‘Is mine here?’ Is he really on his way to some poor, barren couple with a ready-made nursery? Or is he here, with these other poor souls in some kind of purgatory. I spot an incubator separate from the rest, far out in the corner under bright lights, and I know he is mine.

Walking between the beds, uncovered babies, writhing pink worms with tiny arms and legs and… appendages. I dare myself to look closely into one, a brown baby, a mass of black hair on his head, and from his body, just above the clipped umbilical, I see another head, squashed kind of face on the front, wiry black hair on top, a neck, shoulders, one arm, ribcage… all protruding from his, or her, brother. Its eyes are closed, gluey liquid around the lids, a frown above, its nose hardly there and dark lips open to a pink mouth just enough to let the air squeeze through. I back up, there is a smell of something clean, sterilised, baby talc and iodine, bandages; and beneath it all, fresh wounds, old putrefactions and a green kind of coppery smell that clings to my throat. Lining the walls are typical surgery implements, heart monitors, drips, tools to measure this and machines to regulate that. I sidestep to the next crib. No, its head is enormous. Its egg yolk body too small for this huge head attached by a thread of a neck. The baby in the next has sewn up eyes, black cotton like long eyelashes joins top eyelids to bottom, her mouth is open, she breathes peacefully. In the next I can hardly see the baby mass for the equipment around it, droning and pulsating, as though this baby is part human, part machine. I am going over to my boy, slowly, half wanting to cover my eyes. He is tiny, jaundiced and tiny, with tubes going up two nostrils the size of poppy seeds and a square plaster in the crook of each elbow. ‘What have they done to you?’ I think, and I begin to pound on the glass. He wakens, he doesn’t see me, only begins to scream. And his cries can be heard, not like the others. He screams and he screams and then the door opens and two men come dashing in.



September, 1977. I am painting Venka’s nails a bright post-box red. Larry is in the kitchen making us coffee. We are kind of ‘together’ now. It was inevitable. Maybe we’ll get married one day. I have a studded dog collar round my neck and a poster of the Pistols in my room. I have been treated carefully since last year. They see me as an expensive vase, perhaps an ugly vase, but expensive all the same, and belonging to someone else. So they have to take special care of me. I am treated to things, things I wanted but was never allowed before. Things to keep me quiet.

I am six weeks pregnant; Venka gave birth two weeks ago. She asks no questions, is told only lies. I have been told many different stories since my last birth. Stories of experiments, DNA, cloning, genetics. These are words that float over my head. I really don’t know what happens to them, the babies we make, the others we buy, but I have been told that their welfare is of paramount importance to ‘the people’ and that is something I choose to believe. So, now I have a client to see, I have a job to do. If you’ll excuse me, I must go get changed, he wants the mother/baby thing.