I quickly pulled up my trousers then ran to my room and lay on my bed, wondering how the hell I came to be bleeding.

That was five hours ago and I’m still here. The pain in my stomach has got worse and I feel hot and heavy, like there’s a big stone wedged inside me. Sarge came in earlier and said he’d made some scran but I said I was feeling ill and couldn’t face it. He muttered something about it being a waste of food but I think he could tell from the look of me that I was telling the truth.

Now it’s dark and I’m lying here thinking. This is how it begins. Maybe this is how the dead mother in the desert went. I think back to what Sarge said about the war. ‘There was all this blood. It was everywhere.’

As I write this the pain is getting worse and I imagine the blood getting heavier and heavier until it fills the bed, the room, even the lake. I need to sleep now, need to stop writing, stop thinking, because it’s making me feel even more scared.

I hope you’re listening to me, dead mother, and that you can hear my voice. If you could just look after me for one more night. Make the bleeding stop. And don’t let me die.

15

Lisa

Warm air drifts through the room as I lie curled up with Joe beneath clean blankets. My hair smells of orange blossom, my teeth are clean, my breath is fresh. It feels like I’m dreaming but the weight of Joe in my arms proves otherwise.

We’ve both had warm baths. Our bellies are full. These are things most people take for granted and yet just a few hours ago I was panicking that I wouldn’t be able to feed Joe. I watch him sleeping, his soft skin pink from the warm bathwater. If Isobel hadn’t turned up this afternoon he would have gone to bed cold and hungry. I don’t know what I would have done without her.

After locating the tin bath in the old outhouse we spent the next half an hour or so heating up kettle after kettle of lake water to fill the bath.

While we were doing that, Joe sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. Every time I tried to talk to him he would bang his fist on the table and demand that I take him back to Daddy. Isobel didn’t say anything as we scurried back and forth between the stove and the tin bath that we’d set up in the front room but she must have wondered what was going on. She didn’t ask any questions though, which I was thankful for.

After I’d spent the best part of forty minutes wrestling a kicking and screaming Joe into the bathtub Isobel was waiting in the kitchen for me with a cup of tea. While I drank it, she showed me how to use the stove, preparing the wood carefully so it catches and doesn’t burn out quickly. Then she went out to the car and came back with clean blankets from her house and a cardboard box full of groceries.