Garbage Man by Joseph D'Lacey Page B

it has crawled into the furnace to extinguish itself forever. Either that or to live in the most intense agony it could find. Surely the furnace was the worst torment of all in this damned and forgotten building.
    Then she looks down and realises she can’t see her feet. At first this makes no sense to her. She looks and looks, not understanding what she sees. There’s a misshapen lump of flesh in the way. She steps to one side and the lump comes with her. It’s attached somehow. She still can’t see how or why.
    Something moves within her. Deep inside her abdomen. Buried there.
    No wonder the shape makes no sense. It is the flesh of her belly as she has never seen it before. She is pregnant. The bone-baby is inside her. Her shape is unrecognisable because it is her once-smooth, naked belly-flesh stretched over the now foetally-coiled baby with all its wounds. Razors and knives and shattered glass and fractured bones made one with her. Already, its points and breaks, its shattered edges and grimy barbs are tearing through the walls of her womb. She can feel the bone-baby feeding off her insides, draining her strength. She is suddenly exhausted.
    The first contraction is a mind-ripping shock. Enough to send her insane in a moment. She understands now what this will do to her. Her uterus shrinks, gripping the bone-baby, trying to force it out. Instead of beginning the baby’s journey through the birth canal, this clenching forces the baby’s weapons of self-harm into her body. Her liver, spleen and kidneys are skewered in the first few seconds of labour. The amniotic sac is punctured in many places and the fluid washes her legs in a shower of watery gore and mucus. The damage of its downward passage will be her destruction.
    The bone-baby has completed its search. It is ready to be born.
    And she will be the one to bear it.
    ***
    Tamsin wakes, sweat-soaked, two fists pressed deep into her belly, biting back the scream. There is warmth and wetness between her legs. She puts her fingers there and brings them to her eyes expecting to see the dark signature of blood. Instead she smells urine.
    7
    The binoculars were handy but she didn’t always need them.
    Many of the things Mavis Ahern saw happened right outside her house or across the street. Sometimes it was necessary to pretend she was on her way to the paper shop in order to find out where people were going. That kind of surveillance was tricky. She knew she already had a reputation as a meddler. When she followed someone, she had to be absolutely certain they either didn’t know who she was or didn’t know she was there. She was God’s eye in the Meadowlands Estate; she couldn’t afford for His eye to be put out through her own carelessness.
    The Smithfield girl was up to something. It was obvious to Mavis if not to anyone else. Three times now - each occasion was clearly marked on the Agatha Smithfield record sheet, pinned to the fridge with a suffering Christ magnet - the girl had walked alone along Bluebell Way, passing Mavis’s house on the opposite side of the street. There was nothing in that direction worth walking to as far as Mavis could tell. The recreation ground was the other way. The post office, co-op and chip shop were on the far side of the rec. Even The Compass pub, where the youths bought and sold their drugs in the car park, was back past The Smithfield’s own house.
    Following the girl was impossible; Aggie would notice her immediately, especially after their last encounter. The best view she would get if the girl came past again would be from around the side wall dividing her property from the next door house. She glanced at the times of the sightings; all three were Sundays, one mid-morning when Mavis had not long been back from church, the other two shortly after lunch. It was simple then; the following Sunday, she would be ready. She would devote the day to this one matter. There had to be a way to