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“You’ll get contractions.” Since yesterday I’ve been waiting, doubled over, watching for the first signs. What exactly will it be like? I only know it’s dying little by little, petering out, drowning in little pockets of blood, oozing slowly out of me . . . I only know it’s going. That’s all. My head pressed into the smell of the blanket, the sun beating down on me from my wrist to my knees, a warm tide inside me, not a wrinkle visible, everything is taking place in folds and crevices miles below the surface. Nothing like the diagrams you see. I could stay all day just as I am, in a sort of yoga position. The sun would move across my body, melting down flesh and muscle into a pulp that would trickle gently through the tube . . . No such luck. That’s not how it’ll go. Stop hurrying things, move my legs off the wall. Do some work on one of our assigned texts perhaps. Victor Hugo or Peguy. I feel sick at the thought. They have nothing to say to me, there’s nothing there that corresponds to how I’m feeling now, nothing to help me with what I’m going through. There is supposed to be a prayer to suit every occasion, for birth, marriage, dying, they should come up with prayers for everything, there should be one for a girl of twenty who’s just had a backstreet abortion, what she thinks as she comes out, walks home, and throws herself onto her bed. That one I’d need to hear over and over again. But all the books keep quiet on that. A beautiful description of the tube inside me, lyrically transfigured by a metaphor . . . the medical dictionary I borrowed from the girl next door is crammed with gruesome details and sinister innuendoes. They love to frighten you, you can’t die with a little puff of air. And yet you can make frogs burst with just a straw . . . Better to die than flounder in vomit, stale sickly smells, food that suddenly seems foul, dreaming about miles of salami, colorful things to eat in every shop window. In two months, I’ve become a quick-scented bitch always vomiting out the lousy food . . . rotten green of spinach, Mercurochrome-red of tomatoes, suspicious bits of burnt steak. A constant taste of rancid Bovril, you’d think it was turning into a stomach ulcer. Reading makes me throw up. I play at being a student, take notes, try to listen. I’m nowhere. To think I once wanted to be a professor, a critic, or a journalist. I probably won’t even pass the exam in June, or in October . . . It might all go wrong . . . What’s the point of working? “Who will do the talk on Gide?”

Bornin looks around the lecture room. I couldn’t string three lines together if I tried, I have nothing to say about Gide or anything else for that matter, I’m a fake, fluted bottles in my parents’ window, Bornin’s a fake too, mincing his words, a shapeless shriveled penis, he gesticulates in front of me, he must know, the fat, sleazy egghead, he looms out of focus, I’ve got the rancid Borvil taste in my mouth, I grit my teeth, if I’d left, everyone would have known I was pregnant. A disaster. Sooner die.

A shooting pain, the first one, zigzags through me and bursts into a myriad of soft specks. Quite a firework display going on inside me, in glorious Technicolor no doubt. Suddenly I don’t feel hot, nothing, a sort of exquisite pleasure. Maybe I’ll never have an orgasm again if my insides get torn apart. Just what I deserve. If they could see me now . . . “You’ll wind up in trouble.” I don’t remember when they first uttered the well-worn threat. A month ago I nearly screamed at them I was pregnant, just to see the look on their faces, to see them turn purple, choke, holler hysterically, looking like martyrs, while I would shout with joy and rage that they had caused it, that it was because of them I’d done it, useless, pathetic philistines. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything like that. The thought never entered their heads . . . after all they’d done for me . . . Dinner, as they call it, on a vinyl tablecloth with daisies all over it, chicken, and the best garden peas, she said let’s go and see what they’re building at the Cedars, shops going up, boutiques opposite, it’s competition, he says he doesn’t give a shit and they quarrel. It’s just as if I were there, I don’t want to think about them and their grocery store. I can’t see the link between them and the clean, brand-new walls of my room, the stainless steel washbasin, the bookshelf. Here I’m not the Lesur girl, I’m a college student. Lots of trees on the campus, rustling, dazzling, along the paths, the cars parked alongside the fence. It looks like a Monticelli painting. Some notions of culture linger, fine art in the last grade. I was completely ignorant, just pictures out of Reader’s Digest. I’d like to run and squelch through the leaves, the rays of the sun through the trees cutting transversely across my path, gasping in the sharp air to get rid of the rancid taste. But I’ve got to stay on my back, on my stomach, spread my legs, push up, squat down, pre-abortion gymnastics. How he’d laugh, the rotten little bourgeois jerk . . . Feel my stomach, imagine how it’ll feel when it’s set off, like a shell exploding, a balloon at the fairground or a popping geyser.