The Undertow by Jo Baker Page B

out from under the bed, and squats, naked, to urinate. The other water still seeps out of her too. She watches as the taut skin ofher belly shifts, a small angular bulge pressing out, riding along inside the skin, and then softening away.
    And then another contraction hits. It knocks the breath out of her. Makes her grab the edge of the bed and hold there, squatted on the pot, looking down, so that she can see the way her belly squeezes tighter with the pain, and the way the steam from the urine rises from the pot, and then a sudden gush of liquid from her.
    The peak of pain is gone, but it leaves a dull ache behind, like a monthly pain, like a warning.
    She drags herself up, clinging to the side of the bed. It hurts more. She can’t quite stand upright. She crawls into her dress, wads her drawers with rags. With her foot she pushes the pot under the bed. She makes her slow way down the stairs.
    The pain comes again in the street. She crumples in on herself, a hand on the gritty downpipe of the guttering. It takes her a couple of minutes just standing there, breathing, assuring herself that it is safe to move, and that she won’t just fall into a heap, before she can take the three more steps to the Clacks’ front door.
    Mrs. Clack answers with little Francie on her hip.
    Amelia can feel how strange she must look—hunched, sweating, shivering, her walk a painful waddle.
    “I think something’s wrong,” Amelia says. “I don’t feel quite well.”
    Mrs. Clack just looks at her. “You’re all right, ducky,” she says.
    “You’re going to have the baby.”
    Then Mrs. Clack reaches out for Amelia’s hand, and helps her up into the house.
    Mrs. Clack has four children of her own. She explains what’s happening carefully, not wanting to scare the girl. Still, Amelia blanches and shivers.
    “I would have told you sooner,” Mrs. Clack says. “Only, I thought your ma would’ve said something.”
    Amelia nods. When she’d first got her monthlies, her mother had told her she must have injured herself playing out with her friends. So she wasn’t allowed to play out any more. It’s not the kind of thing she could speak about to her mother, even when her mother was still speaking to her.
    “Don’t worry,” Mrs. Clack says. “It’s just like shelling peas.”
    They drink tea, and then more tea. Amelia makes her painful waddling way to the lavatory at the end of the yard. When she sits there, nothing will come but the slow seep of water—the water, Mrs. Clack said, that the baby has been sleeping in all this time. She looks down at the tight aching drum of her belly. It must be like a frog, cold and slippery, to have lived in water all this time: she hadn’t known. She thinks of what Mrs. Clack said, about it being just like shelling peas. The baby is the pea, and she is the pod, and the pod gets split in half and thrown on the midden. The pea is what it’s all about: you don’t care what happens to the pod.
    When the Clack boys get home Amelia goes back to her own house, which will be empty till the old man gets back from work. She doesn’t want to see anyone. Her unsettled, leaking, waddling state seems shameful. She climbs up to her room, and tries to lie down, but the pains make her heave herself back up from her bed, and lean over it, clenched, gasping.
    At six, the old man taps softly at the door. Mrs. Clack must have waylaid him in the street, because he already knows.
    “Do you need anything?” he asks.
    “No.”
    “Shall I go for Mrs. Bradley?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Mrs. Clack comes by at nine, after the children are in bed. By this time, the pains have subsided, and the midwife is not fetched, and Amelia sleeps.
    She presses her forehead down onto the top rail of the bedstead. The iron is cool and hard. Mrs. Bradley tells her to breathe. Mrs. Clack rubs her back and says keep breathing through it, honey, keep breathing. Amelia wants to punch her. All she can do is clamp down with the pain,