‘It’s all right. I can’t do anything about it. I accept that I can’t.’

All those months swelling up, the pain and weight, and pretending it did not exist. But it had arrived and was actual. The pain had taken on a form, which cried, and dribbled from every orifice. A white hospitalized package smelling of faeces, urine and sick. Something she was expected to love. Aliens might have placed it in her, it might have burst out of her body rending her—it had done so. It had enslaved and damaged her. Now it was to rule her life. Why should she love it, this demon?

The nurses were coming with their Father Christmas sacks of snivelling and screaming babies.

‘Here you are, Emma. Your moment.’

And Emma’s unhappy face had freshened. She was not however indiscriminate. She rose and took Rachaela’s child from the nurse with a gliding ‘May I?’, a sort of sleight of hand. Emma held the baby exactly as it should be held.

‘Hallo, precious. Hallo, my sweet.’

Emma loved it. But dutifully she passed the bundle down into Rachaela’s cold white arms.

Rachaela peered into the gnomic face.

It had lived in her, used her, but it was not hers. It was theirs. The Scarabae.

She could even see it in this thing, the pallor of it, the fine dust of jet black fur. The eyes were dark already, not yet focused, but questing. No teeth yet. Not yet.

Rachaela glanced about her. The ward was full of fulfilled and cow-like women waiting to give their udders to their young. In the wings waited the proud husbands, boyfriends and parents. The nurses on the ward were strict but applauding.

The room rocked with the howls of babies now being put to the breast, stilled. Rachaela had seen. The small mouths avid, the hands punching and grabbing. Tiny vampires, all of them. But this one, this monster, would have to make do with a bottle.

‘You don’t like it, do you?’ she said to the monster as it sucked. ‘Bottle or go without.’

She hated it. When it cried she stared on it remotely. She who had been its suitcase.

The room had altered. There was a cot. She could put the baby into this miniature prison and it crawled there in the trap.

Sometimes she had to lift it out, feed it, and change its nappies, thick with excrement.

The room stank. She kept the window open and the fire on. As the weather eased she left the fire off.

Emma came in and out. She arranged the feeds, trying the temperature of the milk. She took the baby out of the pen, and played with it. She had bought it blue and pink fluffy toys. The baby watched the toys with increasingly beady eyes.

‘Isn’t she pretty?’ said Emma, perhaps to encourage.