Let’s roll forward. It’s 1990, Manchester. I am in my first year at university, not yet living in the house where I would meet the boy who’d been kidnapped by his father from his mother’s arms. I am in Fallowfield halls of residence, three flights up from the smooth walkways of campus. The Haçienda is open but I haven’t been there yet. I’m trying to fit in and forget about the boy who is no longer my boyfriend, who said when we got back from Zimbabwe, I think we should split up now. I’ve written a suicide note with no real intention of dying. I’m trying to imagine if throwing myself onto those smooth walkways from three flights up will end this loneliness. I’ve slept with other boys without asking their names for the same reason. Tonight I’m throwing a dinner party. I’ve planned roast lamb and gone to the butcher to buy it. But standing amongst racks of carcasses, the smell of sawdust and sinew, I feel faint. I think I’m going to throw up. I take the leg of lamb wrapped like a baby in paper. I run from the butcher’s, the nausea subsides, evening comes. The dinner is on, the lamb is in the oven, I’m setting the table when shock like a burst appendix but worse slices through my belly. My flatmates put me on my bed. I try and climb out of the window for real this time, now to stop a pain that obliterates the pain of loneliness like the smooth walkways obliterate the grass. My flatmates hold me down and call for an ambulance. I remember the lights flashing three flights below, I remember the siren. At the hospital student doctors are invited in to witness what is happening to me. They crowd at the end of my bed, a line of white coats and clipboards, their faces young and frightened. They are there when my fallopian tube gives up its efforts to keep itself together, sending the embryo that has been quietly growing there, free falling. In Malawi I’d gone out on a boat with a man who turned out to have no intention of fishing. I’d jumped ship and walked back to my hut to find my possessions gone, everything except my passport but including my wash bag which had inside it my contraceptive pills. I’d thought, to hell with it and carried on sleeping with my boyfriend. Now in a hospital bed in Manchester, machines beeping, roast lamb burning, student doctors taking notes, that fallopian tube is exploding. Blood fills my eyes like a cartoon. Blackout.
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Edge of my seat reading that!!
Ouch Em ouch ,in all ways