Our Hideous Progeny

by C.E. McGill

for if there exists a way to respond to condolences that does not feel like ripping open the stitches of a wound with one’s teeth, I have not yet found it.

The whole place had the feel of an aged actress – once grand, but now past her prime, trundling her way to a lonely old age.

THEY SAY THAT shame can be a living thing. That it gnaws at you, lives in you, lives with you; that it makes you hard and withered, wearing you away day by day until nothing remains.

I read as a drowning man gasps for air, as if by filling my head with words I might also fill the hole Catherine’s absence had left in me – as if I might make myself un-notice the fact that, though I had written to her twice already, she had sent no reply.

Henry had been quite outraged to hear Professor Ellis’s words – that science was a matter of politics and spectacle, rather than truth – but I could not find it in myself to feign surprise. The truth was unappealing, after all; ugly and complex and inconvenient. Truth had never opened anyone’s heart – or purse strings – to a cause. It was no wonder that most preferred a spectacle.

Still relevant

The doctor who had been with me during my delivery had said something similar. When I had begged for morphine or chloroform, he had only laughed – pain brought moral fortitude, he had told me. Moral fortitude; if sinking a knife into the doctor’s chest then would have ensured my own child’s life, I would have done it. If it would have brought me but five minutes’ relief, I would have done it. It hadn’t made me stronger or brought me closer to God, my brief experience of motherhood. It had made me sour and hateful, a bone that had not healed right.

In that dark bedroom of hers, in this lonely corner of the country, she salvaged small scraps of joy wherever she could. It was a learned thing, I think, learned for the same reason that every rabbit can run and every mouse can hide – if she had not done so, she would not have survived.

Water under the bridge. Henry had never used to be a water-under-the-bridge sort, at least not when we first met. While others pled civility, he would stand his ground. ‘I cannot abide people who persist in holding idiotic opinions,’ he’d said to me once, and I’d taken comfort in that. But somewhere along the line, he’d changed. Or maybe I had simply never realized that by ‘idiotic’ he meant ‘those who believe the Iguanodon stood upright’, and not ‘those who believe my wife to be, by the very fact of her birth, a lowly, worthless thing’. I thought again of what Mr Jamsetjee had said to me, years ago: ‘One cannot afford principles, if one is trying not to drown.’ But it didn’t seem to me that Henry was drowning badly enough to forsake such an affordable principle as that.

I LOVED IT. From the moment I first met its strange and terrible eyes, I loved it. Perhaps it was hypocritical of me yet again to love such a thing when I hadn’t truly loved any of the others – not even that first, ill-fated mouse – but I could not help it. As I sat and felt the thrum of its frantic heart beneath my fingers, the weight of its life in my hands, I nearly wept with joy. It was a wonder. It was a monster. It was alive.

No, that wasn’t right. I did care. I had always cared, so much so that it was like a splinter in my chest. For years I had poked at it, pulled at it, reminded myself over and over of all I did not have. But perhaps, I thought now, if I simply let it be, let the simmering die down, the ache would one day go away. Perhaps if I pretended for long enough that I did not care, it might eventually come true.

‘Do you know what I did?’ she said quietly. ‘Just there, with Henry? Lord, you’ll think me such an idiot, but I . . . I pretended I was you. I would never have talked to Henry as I did just then, but you would. I have always thought that if I was simply . . . simply good enough, or nice enough, and I acted as if everything was behind us, then he might be good to me in return, or at least be less of a tremendous ass, but—’ She swiped a hand across her eyes, her voice tremulous. ‘It’s as if he doesn’t even notice. He doesn’t really see me. I’m so tired, Mary, so tired of being his stupid little sister.’

What did surprise me, perhaps, was the hollow pang I felt at the news; though it was not for my grandmother precisely, but rather for what she might have been. That old, familiar ache of the mother-shaped hole in my heart.

Sometimes, when one reaches a conclusion one does not fancy in the least, one does not jump on it straight away; rather, one circles it, like a starving cat around a rat that is past its best, weighing one undesirable option against the other.