Free The Cleft by Doris Lessing Page B

There was one place of movement and noise, which sounded like a protest. The babe that Maire had borne not very long before … and here was another new thought. How long ago had she given birth to that babe over there, who was, and there could be no doubt about that, half-Monster, even ifshe was a Cleft? What need had there ever been to define time? It was such a time ago, we did this then … when … but everybody knew the times of the moon, sometimes large and round, or like a slice of pale fingernail, with sizes between. Everyone knew the correspondence between the red flood that matched the red flow from The Cleft, and the moon being fat and bright and close. But when had that babe been born, because it was clear there was a correspondence between that and its relation with the Monsters (or people) over there in the valley.
    A slow sleepy scene, with one agitated babe, Maire’s child, and the two could see that the Cleft who held the child was annoyed and impatient. Babies did not complain and agitate and become nuisances and flail about. Who behaved like that, all movement and energy, if not a Squirt?
    The babe’s minder was sitting on a rock at the very edge of the waves, and it would be easy to let a little thing like that slide into a wave and be lost. Who would notice? If anyone did, the move to save it would be slow and lazy. Lazy and languid … and into the minds of the two females, for they were that whether they knew it or not, or felt no need to think it, came a surely new emotion. It was disgust. No, not new, for disgust was what used to be felt when they saw a newborn Monster, with his ugly parts. No, disgust was not new, but to feel it when looking at the old females, the Old Shes, yes, that was new.
    Immediately in front of the two girls was a large, flat, comfortable rock where the old Clefts lolled by the right of long use. Large, flabby Clefts, their flesh all about them in layers of fat – there they lay with their legs sprawled, and their clefts were fatty and full, with pale hair growing over tongues and pulps of pinkish flesh. Ugly, oh so ugly, thought these girls who had shuddered at the little Monsters’ pipes and bulges.
    And the general look of them … at the same moment into the minds of the two came the idea of sea slugs – there they were in the sea now. It was as if water had chosen to be enclosed by skins of jellified water, large loose shapes, that were not shapes, since they changed and with every wave and inside these sacs of transparent skin were the faint outlines of organs, of tubes and lumps of working matter. And each vast shapeless Thing had two little eyes, just like the tiny eyes of the old Clefts there, lost in the loose flesh of their faces, old Clefts sprawling and dozing on the warm rocks, and the thought in both girls’ minds now, and perhaps it was the first time it had ever been thought in that long-ago time such ages ago, came: ‘I don’t want to be like them’… the idea that had made revolutions, wars, split families, or driven the bearer of the idea mad or into new active life … ‘I won’t be like them, I won’t .’ Maire and Astre were shuddering at the horror of what they saw, horror of what they might become. And all the while the sea shushed and lolled about and lazed, murmuring its sibilants, and it was not, could never be, still, unless it whipped itself into a storm. Thesound of the loving lazing sea, which had been in their ears always, all their lives, but over the mountain where the sea shores were a good way off the sound was absent. The wind beating about in the trees, yes, or the cry of the eagles, the splash of a great fish in the river, which rushed past, but never this enervating lulling, lapsing and whispering … the babe was trying to stand in the nurse’s arms. But it was not old enough yet to want to stand … what sort of a thought was that? Babes nursed and