Chapter 19
5.50 p.m.
Dear Baby,
Waiting. The most excruciating pain. It ripples through my shoulder blades, rattles around my rib cage and ties itself to an invisible string. Your umbilical cord. That experienced torturer, Time, grabs hold of this agony with two unyielding hands and tries to pull it through my intestines until everything between my heart and thighs throbs – aches – waits.
Interminable nights, tossing and turning on top of the yellow bedspread with its huge dirt brown dandelions making me feel sick. Too hot to lay quietly and rest. Instead, cramp attacks my calves and gorges on the rest of my pain for a short while. But even it spits the pain back out again, indigestible as it is. Suffocating days, unable to focus on books, coloured blurs in a shoal of leather bindings.
