Free One Way or Another by Nikki McWatters

minutes.’
    My legs were placed into uncomfortable stirrups and I felt like a dartboard as Dr Whatshisname aimed his syringe and Sherilyn gave me a running commentary. First came the local anaesthetic to the cervix. It was like no pain I’d ever felt. I can only liken it to having a red-hot needle pushed though your eyeball, slowly. The rest of the ordeal was just as bad and felt more like an hour than fifteen minutes. The sound of a suction device made my skin crawl and nausea hit me like a tsunami. Cramping and stinging and feeling like a piece of meat being carved up in a butcher’s shop, I clenched my teeth and swore off sex for life. Half an hour later I was bleeding into a pad, sipping a hot cup of tea and forcing down a chocolate biscuit. I’d swallowed my Panadol and tried to focus on a New Idea magazine, to little avail.
    An hour later I was on the bus home. I’d been shunned by the pro-lifers out the front on my way out. I was beyond salvation by that stage, I suppose – a condemned murderer. Finally the coast road’s shabby shops, fibro shacks and used-car yards made way for the more cosmopolitan ugliness of the Gold Coast and I was back at the corner of Monaco Street, being accosted by a man in a chicken suit offering two cooked chooks for the price of one. I changed back into my uniform at the servo and as I headed out of the car park Chicken Man called after me, ‘Who’s been a naughty girl, then? What was more fun than school, eh?’
    I wanted to yell back, ‘An abortion, you stupid chicken-shit arsehole!’ but I just kept walking. I was tired. I was sore. I wanted to go to sleep for a very long time. My upper thighs felt like they were turning inside out and my womb was weeping painfully. I imagined this was something like what it felt like to be pack-raped. My feelings for the Poet had quite suddenly soured.

10.
    I slept and slept. Dreamless unconsciousness. Shuffling through school days like an automaton, I spent lunchtimes in the library, trying in vain to study for the end of semester exams. Sam said she was worried about me. I told her not to bother. The emotional slump demanded peace and solitude.
    The Tweed Heads ordeal had been a wake-up call. I was not playing some silly party game like Pin the Tail on the Rock God. My parents’ Catholicism was not the root of my anguish. It was the fear that I had acted rashly and hormonally without properly thinking things through. I had made the only responsible choice, I repeated to myself often. But there was something so sad and disappointing about my first brush with motherhood.
    Don’t look back. You should never look back. Yet I kept looking over my shoulder, wallowing in what might have been. What would I have called a child? Something wild, like ‘Ramone’, or sensible, like ‘Sarah’? Would he or she have had my freckles and frizzy hair or the Poet’s brown eyes and lanky intensity? Had I told him, would he have gone down on bended knee and offered me a lifetime of loyalty and love? Had I told my parents, might they have understood and supported me? I began to fear that I had, perhaps, jumped the gun. Maybe there had been other options. Lamenting my position, I flipped through countless tomes on the ethics of life and death. I tried to make peace with myself but the harder I sought it the more elusive it became.
    The doctor at the clinic had given me a prescription for the contraceptive pill and I swallowed it dutifully each morning. The pack was wedged deep inside my mattress, deposited through a small cut made with a kitchen knife. Although I swore I’d never have sex again, I still dreamed longing, lusty dreams about the Poet. When Countdown magazine ran an exclusive interview with him I let my fingers trace his handsome face on the glossy paper. He looked straight through me and I wondered if he’d given me the same generic sultry look he gave to the camera. Had he had