Tom Parker, an illegal Dutch immigrant who became his manager and mythmaker. (Translated, from the Danish, by Martin Aitken.Elvis had Col. I am an implement, a sweeping brush, who remembers the other child. The trees blossom in the street and I look at them through the window. m., confused by the light of the sky, as if the spring night concealed a day. There was a strange sound, a gasp as I searched myself for the right feeling, but it was like clutching running water, and I realized then that I was laughing.Įvery year, when May comes around, I wake up at about 4 a. But he hadn’t noticed anything, he didn’t know the child and couldn’t see it was the wrong one. My husband came in, carrying the child in the car seat, and I looked at him in fright. When we got to the house, I went straight upstairs for something to drink. “You’ve lost a lot more blood than we’re happy with,” the doctor said, but released us nevertheless. He emptied the waste bin, gathered up the laundry bag, and took it away. That he was surely dry on the outside, and inside, too.
#WILD CRUMB SKIN#
It struck me that his skin required lotion. I saw in my mind the unholy mess of their untidied rooms. “Did you see my kid?” It was the woman from the kitchen.Īll of a sudden I thought about my husband at home, the boys. I fell, and was covered in the slimy milk of lime and blood. More than once I staggered, wiped the sweat from my brow. A strange fog came down around the gable end, whose maintenance was our responsibility. The red and the white couldn’t agree, wouldn’t mix, but wove together in long marbly rivulets. Blood ran down our legs, soaking our saggy hospital socks and mingling with the white liquid on the ground. Scrupulously we worked, the milk of lime splashing our faces. The gable end we were working on was enormous, with a single window high up the wall. The other women had already started, so we picked up brushes, some of which had long handles, others short, and began whitewashing the wall.
Other buckets also containing milk of lime had been put down all around us. I realized now that the bucket was filled with a dull, white liquid, and I put it down. The bucket was heavy and the thin metal handle dug into my fingers. We came to a tall gable end of the hospital where the others had gathered. Between the low hedges I saw several other women, bandy-legged, in the same hospital gowns, their laborious way of walking revealing that they, too, had just given birth. The messy-haired woman was still ahead of us. My fellow-pursuer slipped through the crack, and I followed, taking the bucket with me so that the door could close. We came to another door, this one held ajar by a bucket. The paint was flaking off the walls like skin. It, too, was empty, though narrow and winding. The woman we were chasing threw open a door and went through it. But there were several floors down there that had been constructed to withstand a nuclear blast. I hadn’t known that I’d given birth underground. When I was taken upstairs from the delivery room back to my own room, the porter had told me that I’d given birth in a part of the hospital that was built during the Cold War. The light of windowless hospital corridors. At strange zombie speed, with strange zombie steps, we went in pursuit. In the kitchen I drained the carton of juice in a single gulp. With some difficulty I cleaned myself up, using the handheld showerhead, and changed my sanitary towel. As I straightened up, the blood ran again I felt it trickle down my leg. Once she was sleeping soundly enough I put her back in the cot. Outside, the trimmed hedges looked like a stupid poster.
The white curtains poured more and more of their bleach onto us. She fell asleep at the breast and I sat with her like that. She sucked eagerly, a few drops of colostrum. “There’s a nub, you see,” the midwife had said during the ultrasound scan when I was pregnant with my first son. She’d soaked her diaper and as I changed her I tried to avoid looking at her strange little girl-penis.
The child stirred, sniffing the room like a small animal. Birds began to sing, so I knew it was around 4 a. Gradually, the morning emerged outside the window. Yet the long white curtains seemed to glow with a sinister light, like two cylinders of glass filled with bleach. “You’ll have your hands full,” she said, now on her way out. “No, I think not,” she replied, and undid the nappy so that I could see my daughter’s penis and scrotum.
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