Free The Dead Seagull by George Barker

for an immortality to step into the room. Then, from the other side of the bedroom, to which she had retreated, Marsden lifted her hand and pointed to the bed. “Look,” she whispered in horror.
    The red lips were drawn back across the teeth, the face clawed, for a moment, at life; the eyes seemed to vault in their sockets, and Theresa screamed, “Oh, I have split in two!”
    *  *  *  *
    When the doctor eventually arrived, the child had been delivered. I said the child had been delivered; but I am wrong. It was not a child, it was a corpse.
    *  *  *  *
    The doctor left as the cocks began to crow and the sun came up behind the cottage. “She will rest,” he said, “but she’s very weak and I must call again this afternoon. I will tell you”—he took me by the arm—“that I don’t very much like the look of things. She has an unusually weak heart. Be careful.” He took his leave with a sort of encouraging half smile.
    Marsden stood in the door of the bedroom watching me show the doctor out. When I turned to her I saw that her face was disfigured with several streaks of blood, drawn across it, seemingly, by her tired hand. She leaned against the frame of the door and whispered to me. I suspected, for a moment, that she was in tears. I took her face in my hands and saw that instead of tears her eyes were alive and livid with sexual desire. She pressed her breasts against me and darted her open mouth over mine. I smelt the puerperal and the aphrodisiacal. “Come,” she murmured, “you’re tired. It’s time for bed.”
    *  *  *  *
    But I could not sleep. Leaving her coiled in smiles and sighs on the couch, I went down to the seashore. I found that I was carrying the body of the dead bird in my hand. I flung it far out into the flat shallows. The rippled splash, caught by the early sun, opened in a wound of roses and lips. The dead bird disappeared. I turned and went heavily back into the house. They were both sleeping.
    *  *  *  *
    Surely I do not need to offer explanations? The paraphernalia of circumstances, like penitentiaries in which the poor and the aged wait to die, concern us only insofar as people suffer within them. It is the grief and the splendour, not the time and the place, that go on. But the credentials, the elucidations, the addresses at which destiny has called on any given day—these particulars remain the concern of the police and the recording angel. I am concerning myself with the cause of the crime.
    Thus it is when we consider the promises unfulfilled, the necessary declarations never spoken, the projects unattempted, the revelations obscured, the cities still unspoliated, the valuable monsters still at liberty—when we consider the multiplicity of our omissions, then all the crimes in the calendar and on the index become instantly possible for any one of us.
    The death of my son who never breathed, spoke, it seemed to me, in the vocabulary of response; I knew that in answer to a solicitation of my being so passionate and so profound that I could never have uttered it in language, he had bowed his head and concurred and walked away. And what I had done with a desire of the body I had undone with a spiritual rejection, with a denial as the cock crew. The voice of the cock was the voice of Saint Thomas Aquinas intoning out of a cloud: “But it is best never to have been born.” At this the congregation of my body—the imagination in its sanctum, the heart in its big bed, the rational faculty in its tall tower of ivory and glass, the passions in their trick-lock cages—they lowered their heads and sighed in absolute acquiescence. “Lucky dog, lucky dog,” they murmured. And, seeking for the tears of her relief, I turned my gaze to the dying mother on her bed, since she was now going home. I looked to see her face illuminated by the approach of the sacred negation. I followed her wandering in the wilderness of her expended anguish, praying, as I believed she