I wanted to scrub myself forever. I wanted to flay the skin from my bones. A clean skeleton, washed pristine by the tides, and brought forth onto the shore. Those are pearls that were her eyes.

He shuffled to the bathroom. I laid my cheek on the scratchy sisal carpet and watched his feet retreating down the passage. Swish pof, swish pof went his sandals. His ankles were thin and brittle, tendons jutting, bones stretching the skin thin. I saw age in my father. At sixty-eight, he wasn’t all that old, but there was mortality in the papery skin and angle of bone.

He will never recover from this, I thought. I have tipped my father over middle age and sent him rolling towards death.

I heard the pounding of water filling the bath and saw steam billow into the passage. Good. The hotter the better. Let me boil myself. No trace must remain. The steam had an acrid smell that tickled my nostrils and caught at the back of my throat. It got thicker and thicker until I couldn’t see down the passage. Yes, good. A cauldron to cleanse myself in.

The steam coalesced into a darker patch. My father burst out of the murk.

“Fire! Fire!”

Yes, fire. A cleansing fire.

“I thought there was time, but there isn’t. We must go now.” Go? Go where?

His hands scrabbled at my shoulders, plucked at my neck.

“Get up, child. Get up. The house is burning. We have to go.”

I want to stay. He can’t lift me. I’m too heavy. He will have to leave me here. The fire will cleanse me.

But a thousand red devils roared into the room and I was on my feet, clutching the blanket around me, running for the life I thought I no longer wanted.

CHAPTER 4

Nothing is ever all bad, not even rape.
A few weeks later, I missed my period. I had always been irregular, so I didn’t think much of it. Then coffee started to taste like metal and my sense of smell heightened to the point of pain. I could smell layers of odours everywhere, always with an underlying stink of rot. My stomach was unsettled most of the time. I didn’t throw up, but I wanted to.

I missed another period. And another.

At four months, I went to have it confirmed. The obstetrician squirted jelly on my slightly protruding abdomen and slid his sensor over it. The monitor leaped into life. For a moment, it looked like a pot of thick marmalade boiling on the stove. Then the image resolved itself into a hydrocephalic baby.

Of course, the child of such a coupling would be a monster.