August 19, 2009

Fiction

Tasting the Apple

Bella Trix

London, 1879

I must not think about it.

I must not, must not, think about it.

And yet I cannot help but think about it.

At night, after Edward has finished and gone to sleep, I lie awake and remember.

But I must stop this. I must. It is not virtuous. It is not wifely. Poor Edward is such a loving husband. He deserves better from me.

I have thought, at times, that if only I could tell all of this to someone, it would ease the pressure of it a little, and I would be able to stop remembering. Yet who could I tell? My mother? She would be horrified. Edward? No.

So I will write it down, now, while Edward is at work and Mary Jane is on her afternoon off. I am alone in the house. No-one will find me writing. I will tell to this paper what I could not tell to a living soul, will spill onto its clean whiteness all the filth that clogs my mind. And maybe that, at last, will leave me pure again.

It was after God took the child. I was ill for some time after that. And then I was better, but not myself. That was what Edward said. “You are not yourself, Alison.” And he took me to the doctor.

The doctor sat behind a desk of polished wood. Edward stayed with me, holding my hand, telling the doctor what was wrong. The doctor listened to Edward, and looked at me, and nodded.

He asked Edward a few questions. Then he looked back at me.

“How have you felt since the miscarriage?” he asked me.

Miscarriage. Such a cool word. Almost peaceful. But it was not peaceful. The baby came out in a rush of blood and it tore me, it tore me inside when it came out, and I will never have a baby now.

I opened my mouth to answer, but I couldn’t say anything. Then I started to cry. And when I had started, I couldn’t stop. I just sat there, with the doctor looking at me, and cried and cried and cried.

The doctor grunted. “Hysteria,” he said, looking at Edward. “Don’t be concerned. There’s a simple treatment. You will have to bring her back next week.”

So the next week, Edward took me back. This time, we were shown into a different room. This room was full of women, sitting in upright wooden chairs and waiting. All women. No men. I walked in on Edward’s arm, and they all looked at me. It made me want to hide.

Edward led me to one of the chairs, and put me into it. He told me he would come back in an hour, and then he left me there.

There were two doors in the room: the one Edward and I had entered by, and another door. Whatever was going to happen, whatever the treatment would be, it would be happening behind that door.

I made myself turn my gaze from it.

They were all looking at me. All the women. There was something in their eyes that I couldn’t understand, and it made me afraid. I stared down at my hands in my lap, so as not to have to look back at them.

The waiting went on.

It went on forever.

I began to feel as though I would like to leap out of my chair and start screaming. Was that hysteria? Was this how hysteria felt?

Then the other door opened.

A young woman stepped out of it, followed by an older one. The older one looked . . . strange. Her face was red, her chest heaving. She walked through the room without looking to left or right, and stepped through the door to the outside world, closing it behind her.

The younger woman stood in the doorway and looked around at us all, all the waiting women. She was perhaps just a little older than me, and she had shining chestnut hair coiled in a braid around her head. “Mrs. Brigham?” she said.

A woman across the room from me got up. “Come through now, please,” said the woman who had spoken. Mrs. Brigham went across the room, through the door.

I sat and waited. The other women had stopped staring at me now. But I still looked at my hands. It seemed safer.

From behind the door, I could hear a noise. It sounded like a cry of pain.

I watched my hands fold themselves into tight fists. Mrs. Brigham had looked like a quiet woman, self-controlled.

What was happening to her?

I waited.

At last the door opened and Mrs. Brigham came out. Like the first woman, she walked past us all without looking at any of us.

Then the woman with the chestnut hair called my name.

I stood up. I followed her through the second door.

Behind it was a dimly-lit room, with no furnishings but a high, narrow bed.

“Please lie down,” said the woman.

I stayed where I was, standing against the door. “What is going to happen?” I asked. I could hear my voice coming out thin, reedy, afraid.

The woman looked at me. “Is this your first treatment for hysteria?” she asked me.

I nodded once.

“Please don’t be frightened. Just lie down on the bed.”

I could not make myself move.

The woman took a step closer to me. “I will do nothing that you do not consent to,” she said. “Do you understand? You may leave at any time. If you wish me to stop then tell me so. But please lie down now.”

I took a jerky step forwards. Then another.

And then I was standing beside the bed, and she was helping me to lie down on it.

I lay and looked up at her. Her face in the dim light was gentle and kind.

“What I am about to do may seem strange to you,” she said. “But it is the standard medical treatment. And I am a doctor.”

I half-sat up, and she put a hand on my shoulder, pushing me softly back down. “A doctor?” I asked.

“A fully-qualified doctor. I studied under Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, if the name means anything to you.” She paused, looking at me. “I see it does not. Never mind. I have been taken on at this practice mostly because of the large number of hysterical women being treated here. Many women find the treatment for hysteria distressing, when applied by a male doctor. I tell you this so that you will understand: I am here to make this easy for you. And it will be easy.”

Her voice was soothing. I closed my eyes, fighting a sudden absurd wish to lay my head on her bosom, as though I were her child.

“Now relax,” she said, “And remember, if you wish me to stop, tell me so.”

Then she took the hem of my skirt, and turned it back to show my petticoats. I half-sat up at that, and she looked at me as though she were asking a question with her eyes.

I lay back down.

She began to turn back my petticoats, one by one. I lay quite still. There was no sound in the room but the rustling of cloth.

Then she took my last petticoat, and turned it back. Except for my boots and stockings, I was naked below my waist.

As naked as Eve, before she tasted the apple and knew shame.

My hands were shaking, and I pressed them hard against the bed to still them.

“Relax,” she said.

And she put her hand between my legs.

Her fingers touched my secret place.

I felt as though I had been galavanised, as though a rush of electricity had swept through me. Edward had told me once that electricity will make a dead frog kick its legs as though it lived. I felt like that. If I were dead and cold, still I would have felt her fingers touch me there.

She moved her hand upwards, to a different part of the place between my legs. And then it was no longer electricity: it was lightning.

And now her fingers were moving again. Down, and up. Down, and up. Over and over.

The lightning was inside me. Trapped inside me. It was trying to get out. It was seeking an exit from my body. I could feel myself shaking.

This was a medical procedure, she had said. But I had seen the faces of the women leaving the room. Now I knew what had made them look so.

This was not medicine. Medicine could never feel as this felt.

This was sin.

It was sin, and I knew it.

Stop, I said in my mind, I want you to stop. But it was only my thoughts that spoke. I said no word to her. I let her continue. I let her hand move and move in my secret place.

My sinful place. The place where sin happens.

I could not make myself speak. I could not even make myself wish to speak. I knew it was wicked, and I said nothing. I knew it was wicked, and I wanted it to carry on.

The lightning was strong and great inside me. For a moment, I thought it would kill me when it came out.

For a moment, I wanted it to.

Then she moved her hand a little more, a little faster.

And the lightning came.

I think I cried out, like Mrs. Brigham. I know I wept.

She took her hand from me, then lifted me up until I could lean against her shoulder, and let me weep on her bosom, as I had wanted to do. Her hand, that had been touching me, was close enough to me that I could smell something upon it. It was sharp, half-spicy. So now I know, I thought, what the scent of wickedness is.

But I still did not pull away from her. I let her soothe me. I leant against her.

After a long while, I had wept all the tears that were in me. I lay still against her for a while, then I made myself sit up.

My skirts and petticoats were still turned up. I smoothed them back down. My hands hardly shook at all.

Then I left, the same way that all the other women had left. Walking through that room, not looking to left or right.

I walked all the way back to the house, not remembering that Edward had told me to wait for him at the doctor’s surgery, not remembering that a respectable woman should not walk the streets alone. When Edward found out, he was angry. He said I was not to have that treatment again, if that was the effect it had on me.

And this is the depth of my sin: I was sorry. If Edward had said that I should go again, I would have gone. I would not have told him about the wickedness. I would have gone again, and sinned again.

I have been saved from that.

I try to be glad.

I pray, sometimes, at night while Edward is sleeping, for that gift: to be glad that I have been saved from sin.

Or at least, to stop remembering it. To stop wanting to touch my own self in the way that she touched me. To stop dreaming of it in the nighttime, and thinking of it in the day.

But I am not answered. God leaves me alone to struggle with my wickedness. His arm does not save me. And can I, who am weak, save myself?

But I must try.

I must not think of it.

I must not.

• • •

Bella Trix an ex-journalist, ex-performance poet, now working in the charity sector and writing in her spare time. She lives in London, studies Krav Maga, and likes mashed potatoes with plenty of butter.