I see their faces when I go to bed at night. Old, young, desperate. I see the queue of them standing outside my place of work, the Grantham Women’s Health Centre, a brutalist building on the wrong side of Glasgow. In my memory they almost look like figures in a Munch painting; tall, drawn in, grey. I see their eyes when I close mine. I hear their voices, their desperates pleas. This can’t be happening, they’d say, and I’d laugh it off in the staff room with the nurses and the receptionists. That’s what they all say. I knew better than them. I had letters after my name and they had needle marks up their arms.
The first girl was young. Eighteen or so. I can’t tell you her real name, so let’s call her Kourtney. She stunk of tobacco and her clothes looked unwashed. There were bags under her eyes and scars from a bad bout of acne. She lay in the bed staring up at the ceiling light. There were no tears as I gave her my conclusion, just quiet determination.
“I can’t be.” She said, resolute. “You don’t understand… I can’t be pregnant.”
I rolled my eyes as I swivelled around to type my report. I could see the track marks on her arms, small half-healed dots and dark yellowing bruises.
“The tests are quite clear. You have options and I can provide you support regardless of what you choose. You are quite early. Termination is an option and at this stage would simply be a few pills. There is also the option to keep the pregnancy and from there you have other choices too, becoming a mother or seeking adoption.” I told her. “Whatever is best for you-”
“You don’t understand. I’m a virgin.” She stood to her feet. “The tests are wrong.”
“I can only tell you what I know to be true. All tests show that you are pregnant. The HCG, the ultrasound, I can see the embryo.” I said as gently as I could muster. She looked as if I were the class clown. “Is it possible that anything happened when you were unaware? Perhaps… intoxicated?”
Her face went red and she stormed out of my room. I did not ponder then, the indignity I had done to her. She came in next week for her termination. Drug addicts were humans too. It’s easy to forget when you sit on a little perch high above them. I found it all too easy to feel superior. If I had looked at them… truly looked at them, I might have seen my own reflection in their faces. We all have our addictions.
The second girl was older. Let’s call her Kim. She was a regular at the clinic. I had treated her for herpes, gonorrhoea and a rather severe case of genital warts. I had a suspicion that she was a skin peddler. When her hcg test came up positive I was not at all surprised, yet Kim was. Her face scrunched up, as if she were a slug and I’d poured salt all over her.
“I ain’t. You’ve got my test mixed up with someone else’s. I can’t have babies.” She said with a casual tone. Her dyed black hair was tied up into a perfect little bun and it struck me, in the cold blue medical light, that she was rather pretty. “Been trying with my man for ten years. He shoots duds. I can’t be pregnant.”
“Perhaps it may have been someone doing the…. Uh… shooting then.” I said and her face went red and she stormed out of my office too.
Kim decided to keep hers. She came back every other month to see the midwives, her belly a little fuller each visit. She didn’t come with her man. I wondered if he’d done a runner because of her apparent infidelity.
The third woman was when I started to think something was amiss. Let’s call her Kris. She was fifty-two and a primigravida. She was already showing when she came into my office and was rather insistent that she had a tumour, not a baby. Her skin was marred with wrinkles and lines and she was determined that she was going through her menopause.
“I can do an ultrasound, just to settle this if it would reassure you?” I said to her, I had one of the ultrasound girls come in.
The room was silent as she scanned. She found the baby with no effort. It was approximately thirty-three weeks in gestation. Kris gazed at it with narrowed, bewildered eyes.
“I’m a widower.” She said, taking a long drink of uncomfortable air. She ran a hand up her arm. She didn’t look like a drug addict, yet I could see them, small little track marks, all that unified these poor, desperate women.
Then it happened. The image on the screen shifted, the swirling mass of black and grey, contorted and for the smallest of moments that baby did not look like a baby at all, but something else. It’s arms were long and coiled, like tentacles on an octopus. The eyes… black hollow pits two times as large as they ought to have been. The ultrasound tech jerked and I recoiled. The woman looked terrified.
An illusion, an odd assemblage of shadow and light. It was easy to dismiss when it was a picture on a screen.
Kylie was next. She was somewhat of a well-known face around the clinic. She would come in twice a year for an abortion. She’d fill her bag with condoms, yet they never seemed to work. Perhaps her husband didn’t like wearing them, so many men claim the same. She wasn’t at all surprised to be pregnant. She was three months along and asked for an abortion. She was too far along for the pills so she lay back on the bed as I prepared to begin her termination.
It went swimmingly. The foetus looked a little strange, larger than it ought to have been and mottled grey in colour. At this point they aren’t really babies, that it looked so inhuman, was not at all surprising. The octopus-like suckers on it’s frail, silvery flesh, was utterly unnerving however. I felt the hairs on my arm stand alert. I did not let Kylie sense my unease. I slipped it into the medical waste bin and shivered when I heard it writhe around against the clear plastic bin-liner.
Something was wrong.
I sent her home and kept it to myself. I had nightmares. Every woman that came through my door, every termination I conducted, I was terrified of finding the same, slippery mass of inhuman flesh. More girls came. One as young as fourteen. I’m not pregnant they’d insist, with their track-marks and their pupils that filled their irises. I’m a virgin, my husband’s infertile, I use condoms, I have the coil… their excuses were endless, and utterly unbelievable.
“There’s something wrong with Kim’s ultrasound Doctor.” The new radiographer said to me in the hallway. She was green and looked utterly terrified. No doubt she was scanning an ovary or a bladder and not the poor woman’s womb.
Kim was laid back on the bed, looking rather uncomfortable. She did not look at all happy to see me, yet she kept her tongue from wagging. I headed over to the ultrasound machine and slowly began to scan her. My heart stopped.
It wasn’t right.
Tentacles. Wriggling snakes all coiling around eachother. A giant mass of blubbering flesh. I squinted my eyes and tried to find a baby in the shadows but could not see it. This wasn’t… this couldn’t be. I thought of Kylie and the odd assemblage of particles that had come from her womb… that twisted rotted thing, grey and covered with suckers.
“We… need…. We… need.” I spluttered out, considering for the first time in my professional career admitting defeat. “A second opinion.”
Kim looked terrified and I put a comforting hand on her arms as she rubbed at her bulbuous belly. I found Dr Wright in the staff room and pulled him in. His eyes widened like saucers. A third opinion, he said, and so we found Dr Auld, who did not condemn us to a cycle of shocked and confused doctors.
“We need to call the centre for disease control.” He said. Dr Auld was older than the building and he looked grey with fright. We called them and they agreed to come, we kept Kim in until they arrived. There were men in hazmat suits and men in black suits and bright red tape was pulled across the entryway. They whisked her away on a trolley and into a black van with blue lights.
One of the men in black hijacked a computer from the receptionist, whilst another gathered all the doctors including myself into a room. We were awe-struck, confused, and when a sharp-looking man in a grey tweed suit came in with a stethoscope around his neck we were reassured to see another doctor.
“I’m Professor Sharpe. How many women have presented like this?” He asked, his hand outstretched to meet us.
“Like what?” Dr Wright said, his jaw scraping the floor.
“Pregnant despite proclaiming it impossible, ultrasounds similar to Kim’s, ill-shaped foetus’ and embryos?” He said with his notebook and pen.
“A great many women around here proclaim it impossible for them to be pregnant.” I said with my arms crossed, still refusing to believe what I had seen. I cleaved to the possibility that it could all be reasoned away with science and hard-fought hypotheses’ “We have a lot of… drug-users in our practice.”
“Yes. Track marks up their arms. You assumed it was drugs, you did not care to ask them if they partook, you doubted them, judged their clothes, their class, made your assumptions.” Dr Sharpe said. “They came here for compassion, but found none. They found judgement, doubt, they were not believed. We ran a toxicology test on Kim, it might interest you. Clear. She’s not a drug user. There is something far worse haunting these women, It’s happening in small pockets all over the country. Grantham is only the most recent. You will see more like her and you will send them to me. Their irises will be large, there will be track-marks on their arms and they will be pregnant, often beyond reason. I’ve had eighty-year olds.”
“That’s impossible.” Dr Auld let out a breath.
“What exists beyond the limits of our understanding is not impossible, just unknown.” Dr Sharpe said. “The building blocks of life are innumerable and unknowable, there is more to this universe than we, more to life than what is taught in your books and crowded lecture theatres. There is life, bubbling under the surface of reason, glinting out from beneath the stars.”
Shaking their heads, Dr Sharpe and Dr Wright left. Professor Sharpe walked toward me before I could leave and his hand wrapped around my wrist. My eyes flitted shut and open and for the briefest of moments the hardened flesh of his hand was slimy and grey, and little suckers stuck fast to my sweaty skin leaving little dots on my flesh as something sharp pierced me. Track marks. He smiled at me, his irises black and his teeth, parted to smile, yellowed grey. Terror set in my heart and I felt goose pimples spread across me like a rash.
“It’ll be alright. We are everywhere all at once, we wear your faces and sing your songs.” He said. “It’s only nature.”