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hall, ever so quietly, I might be able to see the moment. Get it clear in my head how this strange women’s work got the baby out.
    â€˜I’m going up to look,’ I said.
    â€˜You mustn’t,’ said Harriet.
    â€˜They won’t even know I’m there. I’ll only peep through the door.’
    â€˜Truly, Kate. Think of Mrs Jackson. She’d be mortified.’
    â€˜She’ll never know I’m there.’
    I stood up and moved towards the kitchen door. The grunting rose and fell, and I heard my mother’s voice again.
    â€˜One more. Hard now. I’ve got the head but the little one is tiring.’
    Behind me, Harriet insisted. ‘Don’t you do it, Kate.’
    But I was on my way. I crept up the hallway to where a faint light fell through the open wedge of doorway. Shadows moved across the walls in there, giant and grotesque.
    â€˜Bea,’ Mrs Walker murmured to my mother, ‘I don’t like this colour.’
    I wondered what colour she meant as I inched ever closer. I tucked in the shadow next to the doorframe and stared into the bedroom.
    Mother and Mrs Walker had their backs to me as they crouched at the foot of the bed. And Mrs Jackson: well, Harriet needn’t have worried she would see me, for all I could see of her were her knees high and naked on the bed and beyond that her white face pressed sideways into the pillow, looking away from me.
    As my mother and Harriet’s shifted in the low light, I saw what it was they concentrated on. The gaping space between Mrs Jackson’s thighs. A space that, even from my hiding spot, I could tell was grotesquely rearranged with a bloody white circle at its centre.
    I squeezed my eyes shut, but an unearthly moan caused me to open them again. I watched as that bloody white circle grew larger, and I wondered how Mrs Jackson could be still living and have this thing coming out of her … from there!
    Then in a great rush a small body sluiced out in a bloody mess, and Mother grabbed it and held it over her arm and appeared to push and push against its back.
    Mrs Jackson asked, ‘What is it? Why doesn’t it cry? Where’s the baby?’
    Mrs Walker hurried to hold Mrs Jackson’s hand and smooth back her brow, and my mother kept pushing against the baby, all mottled white and blue, as she held it over her arm.
    â€˜Come now, come now,’ Mother mumbled and pushed again and again.
    After a time, Mrs Walker came to my mother’s side. She laid her hand on her arm and said, low and gentle-like, ‘No more, Bea.’
    My breath seized in my throat.
    Mother pushed once more and then bowed her head. She whispered a prayer. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace …’
    I slipped back to the kitchen and to Harriet’s wide and questioning eyes.
    It was impossible to get to sleep that night. Everything I’d seen swirled in my mind, and I was sick and sad and guilty all at once.
    I could not ask Mother as she ushered me home to our cottage and to bed, for her face was closed and blank, and she did not, of course, realise I had witnessed the shocking scene. But I heard her as I tossed and turned and tried to get to sleep. She was weeping. Thinking, I suppose, of Mrs Jackson’s babe who’d been lost before he even took a breath. And thinking, too, of her own boy, her baby once.
    The next week, as we trod quietly around the Jacksons and their awkward sadness, the pounding in my head and deep throb in my centre revealed itself as the brown heavy blood of my first curse. I was shocked, but then pleased.
    In truth I had been wishing for this, ever since Harriet had told of hers twelve months back. I had sulked for a time that she would get it before I did, even though I knew full well that she had no control over such a thing at all. It seemed to accentuate the gap in our ages, which had hardly ever mattered at all. I wondered if this blood would mark the same change in me that I had