Free The Elusive Language of Ducks by Judith White Page B

morning. Sheila just let herself in through the front door and they could hear her pounding towards them up the stairs. Hannah flung herself onto the carpet between the wall and the bed, lying under a tent of blanket. She didn’t move for the next hour, as Eric sat in his dressing gown with Sheila drinking coffee downstairs at the kitchen table, talking about boyfriend trouble. Hannah was forced to evaluate her life and her marriage and the choices she had to make. She was forty years old.
    Six weeks later she discovered for certain that she was pregnant.

FOETAL POSITION
    When the cramps and the bleeding started, she knew what was happening. There wasn’t enough room in this body for one more. Is that what it was? Not enough room in this marriage for an intruder?
    It was a Friday afternoon and she’d just arrived home when the pain in her stomach started to take her breath. She welcomed it; willed against it; was relieved; longed for it not to be true.
    She took herself to the shower, shuffling, kneeling on the floor of the shower as the pain intensified, leaning over the plastic stool she’d grabbed for support. The water soothingly hot on the small of her back. She started to bleed heavily, the liverish clots swirling by and slithering under the elevated plug cover, and down the drain. She was a concertina, wheezing out a long groan as her muscles determined to squeeze from her the darling little one. Then she was sure, almost sure, absolutely certain, that she saw him, or her. She saw the lump of different blob hesitate as it was caught for a second at the stainless steel plug cover. She dived to retrieve it, pulled the plug from its place, but he or she escaped, and down it went, down the drain. It was just having a wee pause to peek at her before it left. We could have had fun together, she thought it might have been saying.
    And yes, she told it, I love you already.
    Had she rejected it or had it rejected her? The little boy or the little girl, the little musician or ballerina, or writer or magician or brain surgeon. Already she’d started making plans, had been fantasising that Simon could be overjoyed. Unlikely. And still the cramps and the bleeding continued on and on, gradually diminishing until she was able to force herself to her feet. She turned the tap off. She dried herself, wrapped herself in pads and a towel and crawled into bed, and she had nobody to talk to about it. Nobody. That was the trouble with secrets. She wanted to tell Eric that she had lost their child. She remembered her desperate search for her keys at the door of the motel unit. They were in her pocket all along. And this wee one had been waiting all along, too. She wanted to rush next door and have another try, but of course she couldn’t, and five days later Simon returned.

Chapter 7

OTHER DIMENSIONS
    They lived near the sea. From her window, Hannah could see the mountain lazily swooping up from the ocean, beckoning her to walk through the streets and onto the sandy beach. On this particular day she watched a seagull floating on the water. It seemed content just to
be
there, bobbing on the swell of ruffled waves, succumbing to the action of the water. Like a duck.
    The only water her duck had experienced, apart from occasional rain, was confined to a drinking bowl, handbasin, or a cluttered shallow pond.
    That night, instead of bathing the duck in the handbasin, she put him in the bath. He eyed the white shiny enamel, and then looked at her, then at the froth of tepid water pelting from the tap. He tried to escape, but the sides were too high. The woman cooed reassuringly at him. He slurped some water. She fed him torn shreds of lettuce. He nibbled and gulped, then sucked up another drag of water. As the level rose, he started to walk around on tiptoes. Little dainty prances. Then he was afloat. He was incredulous. He gave the side of the bath an elegant push and there he was, gliding to the other side. She turned