Desolation Road

14

On the night of Friday 21st Augtember, at twenty minutes of twenty, the Babooshka leaped up in the middle of one of their interminable word games just as Grandfather Haran was about to put “zoomorph” down on a triple word and exclaimed, “Is time! Is time! My baby, oh, my baby!” And she rushed into the room where the placentory had pulsed and pumped and swelled day by day, hour by hour, for two hundred and eighty days, 7520 hours, into a great bulb of blue-red flesh.

“What is it, flower of my heart?” cried Grandfather Haran. “What is the matter?” Receiving no reply, he hurried into the room and found his wife standing with her hands to her mouth, staring at the placentory. The artificial womb was shuddering and contracting and a foul, fetid stench filled the room.

“Is time!” gabbled the Babooshka. “My baby is come! Our Baby! Oh, Haran! Husband.”

Grandfather Haran sniffed the foul air. A trickle of black fluid squeezed out of the placentory and stained the nutrient liquid. A sense of great evil clutched at his heart.

“Out,” he commanded the Babooshka.

“But Haran… our child! I, a mother, must be with my child.” She reached for the fleshy obscenity on the window-ledge.

“Out! I, your husband, command it!” Grandfather Haran seized his wife by the shoulders, turned her around, and thrust her out of the door, which he bolted behind him. Hideous beichings were now erupting from the spasming placentory. Grandfather Haran approached with trepidation. He tapped the jar. The placentory emitted a keening whine as if gas were streaming out under high pressure. Bubbles boiled to the surface of the Belden jar and burst, emitting a suffocating stench. Grandfather Haran covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief and prodded the womb with a pencil. The placentory con vulsed and, with a tearing, belching sound, spewed vile grey slime into the air. It spat a torrent of foul black fluid interspersed with stifling farts, then ripped down the middle and died. Holding his breath lest he vomit, Grandfather Haran poked about the decomposing remains with his pencil. There was no sign of there ever having been a child within. He did find some rotting black segments of what looked like mango skin. Satisfied that there was no child, alive or dead, he left the room and locked it behind him.

“A terrible, blasphemous thing has happened here tonight,” he told his wife. “As long as I live, no one will ever enter that room again.” He strode to the front door and threw the key as far into the night as he could.

“My child, Haran, my child, is she alive, is she dead?” The Babooshka swallowed. “Is she… human?”

“There never was a child,” said Grandfather Haran, looking straight ahead of him. “Heart of Lothian has deceived us. The womb was empty. Quite empty.” There and then he broke the vow his wife had made for him and went down to Tatterdemalion’s B.A.R to drink himself stupid.

At the precise moment the Babooshka leaped up and abandoned her game, Genevieve Tenebrae felt a tearing pain wrench at her. She let out a tiny, sobbing moan and knew that the time had come.

“Dearest, is there anything wrong?” said Gaston Tenebrae from his chair by the fire, where he sat of an evening smoking his hookah pipe and dreaming of sweet adultery.

Another contraction wrenched Genevieve Tenebrae.

“The child,” she whispered, “It’s coming.”

“Child,” said Gaston Tenebrae, “What child?”

Genevieve Tenebrae smiled through the pain. She had purposefully kept the pregnancy secret for nine months in anticipation of this delicious moment.

“Your child,” she whispered. “Your child, you vain idiot.”

“What?” roared Gaston Tenebrae, a thousand kilometres away, tall and futile as a wet reed.

“You slipped up, husband. Your child… you’ve denied me… and denied me, and kept… me… waiting, so I kept you waiting and now… the waiting’s done.” She gasped as a new pain gripped her. Gaston Tenebrae fluttered and flustered like a tiny, pathetic bird in a grenhouse. “Get me to Quinsana… Marya Quinsana.”

She collected her remaining dignity and walked to the door. There the fiercest set of contractions yet racked her.

“Help me, you good-for-nothing pig,” she moaned, and Gaston Tenebrae came and helped her through the cold dark night to Quinsana’s Dental and Veterinary Surgery.

Seeing it loom out of post-anaesthetic torpor, Marya Quinsana’s face looked rather like a llama’s, thought Genevieve Tenebrae. This plangent thought circled in the superconducting circuit of her mind until the gift-wrapped bundle of baby was placed in her arms and she remembered everything.

“Not that much harder than delivering a goat,” said Marya Quinsana, smiling all over her llama face. “But I thought it best to knock you right out anyway.”

“Gaston, where is Gaston?” asked Genevieve Tenebrae. Her husband’s goateed face bent close to hers.

It said to her in a confidential whisper, “I’ll speak to you when we’re alone.”

Genevieve Tenebrae smiled distantly, her husband of no more importance than an irritating fly. What mattered was the child in her arms, her child; had she not borne it herself, carried it within her for nine months, made it a part of her for almost half a year?

“Arnie Nicolodea,” she whispered. “Little Arnie.”

When the news of the surprise birth of the third natural citizen of Desolation Road broke in the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel, Persis Tatterdemalion declared drinks all round and there was toasting and merrymaking by all save Grandfather Haran, who came to realize as the night passed into morning exactly what had been done to him. He also came to realize that he could never prove anything.

“Isn’t it strange,” commented Rajandra Das, made loquacious by maize beer and wine from the hotel fermentory, “that the couple who wanted the baby didn’t get one and the couple who didn’t did?” Everyone thought that a pithy summarization.