Nutshell

by Ian McEwan

It’s a person! Instead: It’s a girl, It’s a boy. Pink or blue—a

Only two sexes. I was disappointed. If human bodies, minds, fates are so complex, if we are free like no other mammal, why limit the range? I seethed, and then, like everyone else, I settled down and made the best of my inheritance. For sure, complexity would come upon me in time. Until then, my plan was to arrive as a freeborn Englishman, a creature of the post English-as-well-as-Scottish-and-French Enlightenment.

A social-media site famously

proposes seventy-one gender options—neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr. Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there’s cause for celebration. A

I’m shrugging off the caul, my first experience of undressing. I’m clumsy. Three dimensions seem three too many. I foresee the material world will be a challenge. My discarded shroud remains twisted round my knees. No matter. I’ve new business below

my head. I don’t know how I know what to do. It’s a mystery. There’s some knowledge we simply arrive with. In my case, there’s this, and a smattering of poetic scansion. No blank slate after all. I bring that same hand to my cheek, and slide farther along the muscular wall of the uterus to reach down and find the cervix. It’s a tight squeeze against the back of my head. It’s there, at the opening to the world, that I delicately palpate with puny fingers and immediately, as if some spell has been uttered, the great power of my mother is provoked, the walls around me ripple then tremble and close in on me. It’s an earthquake, it’s a giant stirring in her cave. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, I’m horrified then crushed by the strength that’s unleashed. I should have waited my turn. Only a fool would mess with such force. From far away I hear my mother call out. It could be a shout for help or a scream of triumph or pain. And then I feel it on the top of my head, my crown—one centimetre dilated! No turning back.

She recovers and says in a level voice, “Then you’ll have to be the midwife.”

“Not my baby.” “It’s never the midwife’s baby.” She’s frightened, but she can terrify him with instructions. “When it comes out it’ll be facedown. You’ll pick it up, both hands, very gently,

I travel a section where I know a portion of my uncle has passed too often the other way. I’m not troubled. What was in his day a vagina is now proudly a birth canal, my Panama, and I’m greater than he was, a stately ship of genes, dignified by unhurried progress, freighted with my cargo of ancient information. No casual cock can compete. For a stretch, I’m deaf, blind and dumb, it hurts everywhere. But it pains my screaming mother more as she renders the sacrifice all mothers make for their big-headed, loud-mouthed infants.

My father was right, it is a lovely face. The hair darker than I thought, the eyes a paler green, the cheeks still flushed with recent effort, the nose indeed a tiny thing. I think I see the entire world in this face. Beautiful. Loving. Murderous. I hear Claude cross the room with resigned tread to go downstairs. No ready phrase. Even in this moment of repose, during this long, greedy stare into my mother’s eyes, I’m thinking about the taxi waiting outside. A waste. Time to send it away. And I’m thinking about our prison cell—I hope it’s not too small—and beyond its heavy door, worn steps ascending: first sorrow, then justice, then meaning. The rest is chaos.