steaming box and laid them on the tray naming each one as he did so.
'Scalpel, refractors, clamps.' In the meantime the orderly was swabbing
the woman's belly with alcohol and arranging the sheets.
Mike filled the syringe with pentothal and held it up to the
light. He was an unfamiliar figure now; his face masked, the green skull
cap covering his hair, and the flowing gown falling to his ankles. He
pressed the plunger and a few drops of the pale fluid dribbled down the
needle.
He looked at Bruce, only his haunted eyes showing above the mask.
'Ready?'
'Yes,' Bruce nodded. Mike stooped over the woman, took her arm and sent
the needle searching under the soft black skin on the
inside of her elbow. The fluid in the syringe was suddenly discoloured
with drawn blood as Mike tested for the vein, and then the plunger slid
slowly down the glass barrel.
The woman stopped whimpering, the tension went out of her body and
her breathing slowed and became deep and unhurried.
'Come here.' Mike ordered Shermaine to the head of the table, and she
took up the chloroform mask and soaked the gauze that filled the
cone.
'Wait until I tell you.' She nodded. Christ, what lovely eyes she has,
thought Bruce, before he turned back to the job in hand.
'Scalpel,' said Mike from across the table, pointing to it on the tray,
and Bruce handed it to him.
Afterwards the details were confused and lacking reality in
Bruce's mind.
The wound opening behind the knife, the tight stretched skin parting and
the tiny blood vessels starting to squirt.
Pink muscle laced with white; butter-yellow layers of subcutaneous fat,
and then through to the massed bluish coils of the gut. Human tissue,
soft and pulsing, glistening in the flat glare of the petromax.
Clamps and refractors, like silver insects crowding into the wound as
though it were a flower.
Mike's hands, inhuman in yellow rubber, moving in the open pit of the
belly. Swabbing, cutting, clamping, tying off.
Then the swollen purple bag of the womb, suddenly unzipped by the
knife.
And at last, unbelievably, the child curled in a dark grey ball of legs
and tiny arms, head too big for its size, and the far pink snake of the
placenta enfolding it.
Lifted out, the infant hung by its heels from Mike's hand like a
small grey bat, still joined to its mother.
Scissors snipped and it was free. Mike worked it little longer, and the
infant cried.
It cried with minute fury, indignant and alive. From the head of the
table Shermaine laughed with spontaneous delight, and clapped her hands
like a child at a Punch and Judy show. Suddenly Bruce was laughing also,
It was a laugh from long -ago, coming out from deep inside him take it,'
said Haig and Shermaine cradled it. wet and feebl wriggling in her arms.
