Nicola Barker: Heading Inland

Martha’s social worker was under the impression that by getting herself pregnant, Martha was looking for an out from a life of crime.

She couldn’t have been more wrong.

‘First thing I ever nicked,’ Martha bragged, when her social worker was initially assigned to her, ‘very first thing I ever stole was a packet of Lil-lets. I told the store detective I took them as a kind of protest. You pay 17½ per cent VAT on every single box. Men don’t pay it on razors, you know, which is absolutely bloody typical.’

‘But you stole other things, too, on that occasion, Martha.’

‘Fags and a bottle of Scotch. So what?’ she grinned. ‘Pay VAT on those too, don’t you?’

Martha’s embryo was unhappy about its assignment to Martha. Early on, just after conception, it appealed to the higher body responsible for its selection and placement. This caused something of a scandal in the After-Life. The World-Soul was consulted — a democratic body of pin-pricks of light, an enormous institution — which came, unusually enough, to a rapid decision.

‘Tell the embryo,’ they said, ‘hard cheese.’

The embryo’s social worker relayed this information through a system of vibrations — a language which embryos alone in the Living World can produce and receive. Martha felt these conversations only as tiny spasms and contractions.

Being pregnant was good, Martha decided, because store detectives were much more sympathetic when she got caught. Increasingly, they let her off with a caution after she blamed her bad behaviour on dodgy hormones.

The embryo’s social worker reasoned with the embryo that all memories of the After-Life and feelings of uncertainty about placement were customarily eradicated during the trauma of birth. This was a useful expedient. ‘Naturally,’ he added, ‘the nine-month wait is always difficult, especially if you’ve drawn the short straw in allocation terms, but at least by the time you’ve battled your way through the cervix, you won’t remember a thing.’

The embryo replied, snappily, that it had never believed in the maxim that Ignorance is Bliss. But the social worker (a corgi in its previous incarnation) re-stated that the World Soul’s decision was final.

As a consequence, the embryo decided to take things into its own hands. It would communicate with Martha while it still had the chance and offer her, if not an incentive, at the very least a moral imperative.

Martha grew larger during a short stint in Wormwood Scrubs. She was seven months gone on her day of release. The embryo was now a well-formed foetus, and, if its penis was any indication, it was a boy. He calculated that he had, all things being well, eight weeks to change the course of Martha’s life.

You see, the foetus was special. He had an advantage over other, similarly situated, disadvantaged foetuses. This foetus had Inside Information.

In the After-Life, after his sixth or seventh incarnation, the foetus had worked for a short spate as a troubleshooter for a large pharmaceutical company. During the course of his work and research, he had stumbled across something so enormous, something so terrible about the World-Soul, that he’d been compelled to keep this information to himself, for fear of retribution.

The rapidity of his assignment as Martha’s future baby was, in part, he was convinced, an indication that the World-Soul was aware of his discoveries. His soul had been snatched and implanted in Martha’s belly before he’d even had a chance to discuss the matter rationally. In the womb, however, the foetus had plenty of time to analyse his predicament. It was a cover-up! He was being gagged, brainwashed and railroaded into another life sentence on earth.

In prison, Martha had been put on a sensible diet and was unable to partake of the fags and the sherry and the Jaffa cakes which were her normal dietary staples. The foetus took this opportunity to consume as many vital calories and nutrients as possible. He grew at a considerable rate, exercised his knees, his feet, his elbows, ballooned out Martha’s belly with nudges and pokes.

In his seventh month, on their return home, the foetus put his plan into action. He angled himself in Martha’s womb, at just the right angle, and with his foot, gave the area behind Martha’s belly button a hefty kick. On the outside, Martha’s belly was already a considerable size. Her stomach was about as round as it could be, and her navel, which usually stuck inwards, had popped outwards, like a nipple.

By kicking the inside of her navel at just the correct angle, the foetus — using his Inside Information — had successfully popped open the lid of Martha’s belly button like it was an old-fashioned pill-box.

Martha noticed that her belly button was ajar while she was taking a shower. She opened its lid and peered inside. She couldn’t have been more surprised. Under her belly button was a small, neat zipper, constructed out of delicate bones. She turned off the shower, grabbed hold of the zipper and pulled it. It unzipped vertically, from the middle of her belly to the top. 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, closing 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.’