Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback (26 page)

Chamber” by Angela Carter. It contains my favorite short story,

“The Tiger’s Bride,” her take on “Beauty and the Beast.” It’s dark and dangerous. It speaks of objectification, desire, and our true natures.

It’s important to me, not just as a reader, but as a writer. It made me pick up a pen.

So, I still love fairy tales. Not so long ago I bought a beautiful

copy of
East of the Sun, West of the Moon
, Scandinavian fairy tales collected by Peter Christen AsbjØrnsen and JØrgen Engebretsen

Moe, and illustrated by Kay Neilson. Someone I know, who will not

be named here, saw it and asked, “What are you buying children’s

books for?” If you’re reading this anthology you’re the sort of person who understands the folly of this question.

“Egg” is dedicated to my mum, Veronica Sharma. It’s a very

personal and important story to me for a number of reasons. It’s

about the difficulty of wishes. Every wish has a price. We just need to know what we’re prepared to pay.

Priya Sharma

•

• 217 •

•

I consider my egg; its speckled pattern, its curves, strange weighting, and remarkable calcium formation that’s both delicate and robust.

It hurts but I’m determined. The old hag promised. I put my egg

inside me.

Hot water soothes my skin. It plasters my hair to my scalp and runs

in rivulets down my back. I nurse the heavy feeling in my lower

abdomen with my hand. Then comes a different sort of deluge. Blood

trickles down my thigh. Water carries it away and down the drain.

It’s expected. I’ve already urinated on a stick this morning and it

pronounced me
without child
. Disappointment has joined agony and blood on the same day of each month.

I drop my towel into the laundry basket and dress.

There’s a sparrow on the balustrade. A blighted bird, one of many

breeds decimated by predators, harsh winters, and pestilence. The

public were outraged by the loss of blue tits and robins but sparrows are too nondescript to feature on calendars and cards.

Another joins it, then a third. The trio perform an aerobatic

display, as if they don’t already have my attention. A fourth, now a fifth. More and they’re a flock.

I step onto the terrace but they don’t flee. They stay earthbound

and hop around, leading me down the steps to the lower garden. Past

the tennis courts to the fresh green avenue of limes. Over the stile

• 219 •

• Egg •

and across the fields to the crumbling farm buildings at the edge of my estate.

The barn. The sparrows enter through a broken panel. The rusty

hinges whine and creak as I pull the door open.

The old hag lives on a bed of moldy hay, twigs, moss, newspaper,

and woollen tufts. She squats rather than sits. Her irises are covered with a milky shroud. She wears layers of white, each stained and torn, like a demented virgin bride.

A sparrow lands on her upturned hand. The hag brings it to her

face and peers at it with opaque eyes, listening intently, as if to a song I can’t hear, before it flies up to the beams above.

We have an audience up there. Blackbirds, starlings, jays, sparrows, falcons, and a variety of owls jostle together for space, having set aside their differences.

“Who are you?”

“That’s a rude greeting for a guest.” The hag’s voice has a peculiar melody, rising and falling in the wrong places.

“Guest implies an invitation.”

“I’m here at your request. I’m sick of you asking.”

“Request? I’ve never seen you before. I’ll have you thrown off for

trespassing.”

“You’ve been hard to ignore. You’re crying out with want.”

“I want for nothing.”

“Liar. The ache’s consuming you.”

“There’s nothing
you
can give me.”

“Not even motherhood?”

“You can’t give me that.”

“Can’t I?” Then a sly smile crosses her face. “You’ve tried the usual way?”

“It didn’t work.”

“Perhaps you didn’t try hard enough.”

I have, not lacking in partners and willing potential fathers.

“I have fibroids and severe endometriosis.” I sound bitter. My

pelvis contains a tangled mess of lumps and adherences that renders

• 220 •

• Priya Sharma •

my reproductive tract defunct. I’m still outraged by my body’s

betrayal. It’s failed in the most basic of female functions.

“Can’t the quacks help?”

“What do you think?”

My specialist had stressed that my conditions were benign but I

couldn’t see the benevolence in what’s caused me so much pain and

robbed me of a child. My own salvaged eggs, fertilized and implanted, failed to take as if they’d fallen on stony ground.

“Adoption?”

I shake my head.

The hag must be able to see with those white eyes. She counts

something on her fingers and calculation done says, “I’ll help you,

but there’ll be pain.”

“Childbirth?” I ask hopefully.

“Much worse. Children drag you down and break your heart.”

“No,” I refute her jaundiced view of parenthood, “they lift you up

and give you love.”

“A survival trick of the young and vulnerable,” the hag talks over me.

“You’ll love them and it’ll kill you when they don’t need you anymore.”

“I’m strong. I’ll take that pain.”

“There’ll be sacrifice. Your dreams will be subject to their needs.”

“I’ve already achieved all I wanted to and more.” Except this.

“Such success for one so young, but everyone looks at you as if

you are unnatural.
Not having children is the price you’ve paid for
having a man’s ambition
.”

This rankles.

“I’m every inch a woman.”

“Of course you are,” she tries to soothe me. “I just want you to

think this through. Children demand everything, even your name.

You’ll be mother first and last.”

“And I’ll be glad of it. I’ll pay whatever it takes. I have the means.”

“You will, never fear. There’s also the thorny issue of expectation.

You must love her for who she is, not who you want her to be.”

“She?” I’m already enamored of the notion.

• 221 •

• Egg •

“A daughter.”

“What will she cost me?”

“We’ll negotiate later.”

“I don’t do business that way.”

“I won’t ask for anything you can’t give.”

A reckless trade. I consider the depth of my desire.

“How?”

The hag shifts on her nest, reaches under her and pulls something

out. She offers it to me in her scrawny, reptilian hand. I take the egg.

It’s warm.

She leans over me.

“May I be godmother?”

“Is that part of the payment?”

“No,” she sniffs, sounding hurt, “I just thought it would be nice.”

“No child of mine will be baptized.” I want to laugh. I’m clutching

an oversized egg, having accepted help from a mad squatter, and am

rejecting religion as a fiction.

“That’s probably wise, all things considered. Now, this is what you

must do.”

I consider my egg; its speckled pattern, its curves, strange weighting, and remarkable calcium formation that’s both delicate and robust.

More conundrums are hidden within. Viscous birth fluids

designed to be consumed. The yolk, rich in unfulfilled life.

It hurts but I’m determined. I put my egg inside me. Its tip nestles into my cervix. Not for nine months. That would be ridiculous. Just

long enough for my trembling DNA, fearing extinction, to permeate

the shell and scramble the genes within.

Once retrieved I hold it up to the light but can’t see the outline of a child inside.

Egg and I embark on a course of antenatal education. I read her

Machiavelli and Chomsky. I play her Debussy and Chopin. We watch

French films and listen to Cantonese language tapes. Egg will be

more equipped for life than I.

• 222 •

• Priya Sharma •

Then finally.

Here she comes.

The shell cracks, the tiny life thumping its way out. Fragments

come away, tethered by membrane. I pick up my featherless chick,

who’s pink from her labors. It
is
a girl, goose-pimpled skin as if plucked. I rub her and swaddle her in a warm towel. Her ribs are

exquisite curves. Her nails miniscule and pliable.

Small for her age. Little Chick.

The hag’s right. She said I’d have a mammalian response. My

breasts engorge and leak. Chick’s mouth puckers as she tries to

plunder nourishment but she can’t latch on. I prepare formula milk

in a flap, fearing she’ll starve. It dribbles down her chin as if it would poison her to keep it in.

I sit through the night, exhausted, waiting for the flood of love, the tugs of blood that will sustain me while she cries with hunger, but

nothing comes.

Chick has dark, bulbous eyes. Her hands are drawn up before her

like useless appendages. I cry as I hold her, this culmination of all my wishes, and I know that she’s not right.

I go back to the hag.

“You lied.” I’m not so astute. I’ve been duped.

“You wanted a child. I gave you one.” She peers into the bundle of

blankets in my arms as if to see if Chick is a child after all.

“What’s her name?”

“Eloise.”

The hag makes a noncommittal noise.

“She’s not . . . ” I struggle with the word
normal
.

“Life’s a lottery,” she shrugs, “you can’t swap her.”

“I can’t bring up a child like this.”

“One that requires sacrifice?”

The clouded corneas don’t conceal the mockery in her eyes. I can’t

stand her crowing and I won’t concede defeat to a mad old crone but

something makes me swallow my indignation.

• 223 •

• Egg •

“Help me.” I hold Chick up. “She won’t feed.”

The hag beckons me over with a curled talon.

There’s nothing for it. I cradle Chick in one arm and dig with my free hand. My manicured nails break. Earth clogs my diamond rings.

I hate worms. Eyeless, skinless, boneless, they inch along the

ground. My excavation brings one up. It writhes in protest, clamped

between my thumb and forefinger.

The longer I look at it, the harder it becomes. Chick’s screams

have faded to a mewl. She’s fatiguing without food.

I put the worm in my mouth. Then I’m sick. I find another, this

time gagging as it flails against my palette. I manage to keep it in despite the spasms of my throat. I chew.

I put my mouth to Chick’s and drop the masticated mess in. Her

eyes brighten with excitement. She all but sings.

More
.
More
.
More please, Mummy.
Chick gulps it down, her mouth open straight away in readiness the next portion. She won’t be tricked by anything mashed up with a fork. It must be from my lips. I search for the bugs sheltering between the stones of the garden wal s, for

earthworms hiding in the flower beds. I hunt by torchlight for slugs that brave the paths by night. I retch and vomit. My little gannet’s insatiable.

“Where was your daughter born?”

“Abroad.”

The new pediatrician seems satisfied with this answer.

“How old is she now?”

“Seven.”

“And she doesn’t talk at all?”

“No.”

“Toilet trained?”

Couldn’t you have read her records before you cal ed us in?
I want to snap at him for his indelicate questions but I’ve resolved to be less prickly. He’s here to help. Allegedly.

“No.”

• 224 •

• Priya Sharma •

Chick trembles as I undress her. The doctor measures her height,

weight, and head circumference, and then plots her poor development

on a chart as if it wasn’t self-evident.

“I see that no one’s been able to identify Eloise as having any

particular syndrome.” He flicks through her file.

“No, but don’t say it too loud. I haven’t told her yet.”

That makes him look at me. Chick, defying diagnosis, has been

reduced to a list of problems in her medical records.

Poor growth. Mental retardation. Microcephaly.

“Pop Eloise on your knee.”

Chick doesn’t like to be held, even by me, but faced with a stranger she tries to hide her head under my arm. The doctor runs his hands

around her rib cage to the hollow depression at the center of her

chest.

“Eloise is more than pigeon chested. Come and see.”

Chick’s chest X-ray reveals the white lines of her ribs sheltering

the shadow of her heart and the dark hollows of her lungs beneath.

“Look at this.”

“At what?”

“A furuncle.”

“Pardon?”

“Here.” He points with his pen. “Her clavicles are fused together.

They should be attached to either of her sternum.”

“In English, please.”

“She has a wishbone. Perhaps you should make a wish.”

Then he looks at Chick, who’s hiding under his desk and flushes.

I make up a porridge of oats, seeds, and rice milk. Chick still gorges on worms but I’ve coaxed her onto other things, although there’s still an exhausting list of what gives her diarrhea, tummy pain, and hives.

Chick plays around my feet.
Play
is an exaggeration. She’s not interested in toys. Not alphabet bricks, not the puzzles in bright

plastic that are waiting to be solved, or her menagerie of stuffed toy animals. She wanders, unoccupied, then comes to stand beside me

• 225 •

• Egg •

when she needs reassurance. Her tongue clicks when she wants my

attention. Click, click, click. I hear the sound in my sleep.

Chick doesn’t like cuddles. Once I thought she was trying to kiss