Magpie

by Elizabeth Day

He had an effortless capacity to inhabit a space. She liked the way he could have been carved out of blocks of wood.

Marisa preferred the tangibility of paper. It was a way of proving to herself that she existed; that she left a trace.

Later – much later – she learned that survivors of sexual assault talk of things being ‘snatched away’ from them – their dignity; their virginity, as in her case; even their identity – but Marisa always felt the opposite, as if something unwanted had forced itself into her, like shrapnel, and her entire self had to grow around it over the years that followed, warping the muscle and the skin out of shape until the scar became a misshapen part of her, something she simply had to live around.

Everything changed after her rape and there was no option but to accept the new reality wholesale. This she did.

Increasingly, this is what Marisa thinks politics has become: two men, overly fond of the pomp and ceremony of their own voices, talking in rhetorical non-sequiturs until one of them wins a spurious point that has vanishingly little to do with anyone’s daily reality.

He belongs to that cadre of Englishmen who have never had to worry about learning the rules because they are the ones who make them.

There is no room left for her. Marisa has become a vessel. It is her worst fear: that once she’s had their baby, she will become expendable.

She begins to think that sleep is an affectation, that she can function perfectly well without it.

Not because his death would leave an absence in her life, but because his existence had.

Outside, the sky has leached itself of colour.

They pitied the men in suits, the ‘fat cats’, the chief executives, the wage slaves, the bankers and the management consultants and defined themselves in opposition to them. Never mind that they got paid less, that they had no pensions, that their bosses used them as glorified student interns. It was the principle of the thing that counted, whatever that principle was.

But the moral worth of their work or the inherent contradictions in their position never seemed questionable as long as they voted Labour and did their recycling.

She had mistaken the bubbles of anxiety in her stomach for a simmering romantic passion, wrongly believing that love felt unsettled, like a half-packed suitcase awaiting a trip that never comes.

It was a peculiar privilege of the posh to be able to give their progeny the most unflattering nicknames and for it not to affect their life chances.

What did her own pleasure count when she was failing so conspicuously to do the thing other women did without thinking?

she would look out onto the street and marvel at the busyness of the world, at how it continued to function so easily when she could not perform the most natural biological function of womanhood.

The needles left pockmarked bruises either side of her navel like an astral map of some undiscovered galaxy.

Kate found it extraordinary how much ownership strangers felt they had over her uterus. People she had only just met would imagine they knew her age, her sexual proclivities and her maternal urges. There was an assumption, implicit in the question, that all women should want to have children and that those who didn’t were somehow lacking. It used to infuriate her. Now it just left her hollow.

She supposed she was sad, but the sadness now went so deep she had forgotten how to understand it.

they both felt the lack of that ignorant innocence the lucky ones can bathe in, the ones who get pregnant and stay pregnant and believe that’s just how it happens; the ones who never have to think of the alternatives; the ones who don’t check for blood every time they go to the toilet; the ones who take parenthood as their due, as if plucking apples from a tree that will forever grow fruit.

The grass is twinkling with dew. She breathes in the cool outside air and tilts her face up to the feeble sunshine, feeling its weak warmth graze her cheeks.

Her thoughts are so crowded with the reality of what is happening that she barely has time to think of anything other than their baby and the need to keep their relationship together while ensuring Marisa is looked after. Spending time on herself is the last thing she wants to do.

There is a muffled moon in the sky and condensation on the windscreen.

the tragic flaw of parenthood is that you equip your child to leave you.