The Three Button Trick: Selected stories. Nicola Barker

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СКАЧАТЬ Inside, she saw her foetus, floating in brine. ‘Hello,’ the foetus said. ‘Could I have a quick word with you, please?’

      ‘This is incredible!’ Martha exclaimed, closing the zipper and opening it again. The foetus put out a restraining hand. ‘If you’d just hang on a minute I could tell you how this was possible …’

      ‘It’s so weird!’ Martha said, dosing the zipper and getting dressed.

      Martha went to Tesco’s. She picked up the first three items that came to hand, unzipped her stomach and popped them inside. On her way out, she set off the alarms—the bar-codes activated them, even from deep inside her—but when she was searched and scrutinized and interrogated, no evidence could be found of her hidden booty. Martha told the security staff that she’d consider legal action if they continued to harass her in this way.

      When she got home, Martha unpacked her womb. The foetus, squashed into a corner, squeezed up against a tin of Spam and a packet of sponge fingers, was intensely irritated by what he took to be Martha’s unreasonable behaviour.

      ‘You’re not the only one who has a zip, you know,’ he said. ‘All pregnant women have them; it’s only a question of finding out how to use them, from the outside, gaining the knowledge. But the World-Soul has kept this information hidden since the days of Genesis, when it took Adam’s rib and reworked it into a zip with a pen-knife.’

      ‘Shut it,’ Martha said. ‘I don’t want to hear another peep from you until you’re born.’

      ‘But I’m trusting you,’ the foetus yelled, ‘with this information. It’s my salvation!’

      She zipped up.

      Martha went shopping again. She shopped sloppily at first, indiscriminately, in newsagents, clothes shops, hardware stores, chemists. She picked up what she could and concealed it in her belly.

      The foetus grew disillusioned. He re-opened negotiations with his social worker. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know something about the World-Soul which I’m willing to divulge to my earth-parent Martha if you don’t abort me straight away.’

      ‘You’re too big now,’ the social worker said, fingering his letter of acceptance to the Rotary Club which preambled World-Soul membership. ‘And anyway, it strikes me that Martha isn’t much interested in what you have to say.’

      ‘Do you honestly believe,’ the foetus asked, ‘that any woman on earth in her right mind would consider a natural birth if she knew that she could simply unzip?’

      The social worker replied coldly: ‘Women are not kangaroos, you cheeky little foetus. If the World Soul has chosen to keep the zipper quiet then it will have had the best of reasons for doing so.’

      ‘But if babies were unzipped and taken out when they’re ready,’ the foetus continued, ‘then there would be no trauma, no memory loss. Fear of death would be a thing of the past. We could eradicate the misconception of a Vengeful God.’

      ‘And all the world would go to hell,’ the social worker said.

      ‘How can you say that?’

      The foetus waited for a reply, but none came.

      Martha eventually sorted out her priorities. She shopped in Harrods and Selfridges and Liberty’s. She became adept at slotting things of all conceivable shapes and sizes into her belly. Unfortunately, the foetus himself was growing quite large. After being unable to fit in a spice rack, Martha unzipped and addressed him directly. ‘Is there any possibility,’ she asked, ‘that I might be able to take you out prematurely so that there’d be more room in there?’

      The foetus stared back smugly. ‘I’ll come out,’ he said firmly, ‘when I’m good and ready.’

      Before she could zip up, he added, ‘And when I do come out, I’m going to give you the longest and most painful labour in Real-Life history. I’m going to come out sideways, doing the can-can.’

      Martha’s hand paused, momentarily, above the zipper. ‘Promise to come out very quickly,’ she said, ‘and I’ll nick you some baby clothes.’

      The foetus snorted in a derisory fashion. ‘Revolutionaries,’ he said, ‘don’t wear baby clothes. Steal me a gun, though, and I’ll fire it through your spleen.’

      Martha zipped up quickly, shocked at this vindictive little bundle of vituperation she was unfortunate enough to be carrying. She smoked an entire packet of Marlboro in one sitting, and smirked, when she unzipped, just slightly, at the coughing which emerged.

      

      The foetus decided that he had no option but to rely on his own natural wit and guile to foil both his mother and the forces of the After-Life. He began to secrete various items that Martha stole in private little nooks and crannies about her anatomy.

      On the last night of his thirty-sixth week, he put his plan into action. In his arsenal: an indelible pen, a potato, a large piece of cotton from the hem of a dress, a thin piece of wire from the supports of a bra, all craftily reassembled. In the dead of night, while Martha was snoring, he gradually worked the zip open from the inside, and did what he had to do.

      The following morning, blissfully unaware of the previous night’s activities, Martha went out shopping to Marks and Spencer’s. She picked up some Belgian chocolates and a bottle of port, took hold of her zipper and tried to open her belly. It wouldn’t open. The zipper seemed smaller and more difficult to hold.

      ‘That bastard,’ she muttered, ‘must be jamming it up from the inside.’ She put down her booty and headed for the exit. On her way out of the shop, she set off the alarms.

      ‘For Chrissakes!’ she told the detective, ‘I’ve got nothing on me!’ And for once, she meant it.

      Back home, Martha attacked her belly with a pair of nail scissors. But the zip wasn’t merely jammed, it was meshing and merging and disappearing, fading like the tail end of a bruise. She was frazzled. She looked around for her cigarettes. She found her packet and opened it. The last couple had gone, and instead, inside, was a note.

      Martha, [the note said] I have made good my escape, fully intact. I sewed a pillow into your belly. On the wall of your womb I’ve etched and inked an indelible bar-code. Thanks for the fags.

       Love, Baby.

      ‘But you can’t do that!’ Martha yelled. ‘You don’t have the technology!’ She thought she heard a chuckle, behind her. She span around. On the floor, under the table, she saw a small lump of after-birth, tied up into a neat parcel by an umbilical cord. She could smell a whiff of cigarette smoke. She thought she heard laughter, outside the door, down the hall. She listened intently, but heard nothing more.

       The Butcher’s Apprentice

      If he had come from a family of butchers maybe his perspective would have been different. He would have been more experienced, hardened, less naive. His mum had wanted him to work for Marks and Spencers or for British Rail. She said, ‘Why do you want to work in all that blood and mess? There’s something almost obscene about butchery.’

      His dad was more СКАЧАТЬ