Extract from ‘Rapture: A Girl Story for Kiki Smith’

‘... Persephone and her friends are playing in the meadow all in flower; around them, ladies’ bedstraw, love-lies-bleeding, lords & ladies, orchids and asphodel, all in furls and spathes, with nectar-laden pistils, honey cups. Sky-blue buttons of scabious for staunching wounds, wild violets to give comfort (heart’s ease), comfrey and balm and shabby dock leaves to soothe angry itching, as well as pharmaka which cooks use to season – parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, like in the old song. Are the girls singing? A few lines of a love song. There’s wild jasmine in clusters of white stars on one side of the field, and tufts of shrubby lavender in spires beside the papery rockroses growing out of glinting schist of the mountain slopes that rise above the meadow. They are telling one another things they’ve heard about… older people, and especially about men doing things to women. They’ve picked up odds and ends mostly in the family kitchens, from household servants who are even older than the grownups they’re most curious about. They’ve learned about the body’s holes, their variety and their uses and some of the bits that fit into them. There’s some disagreement, however, about their number:
‘Two ears.’
‘One mouth.’
‘Two eyes.’
‘This part’s easy.’
‘Two nostrils…’
‘No, that’s really one hole.’
‘It’s not.’
‘It is when you’re dead.’ This is Lydia; she is playing to her reputation for dark thoughts.
‘We’re not dead, so it’s TWO nostrils, silly. We’re not counting inside stuff. Insides are different.’
‘Makes six so far.’
‘Plus one pee hole…’
‘Then the other hole…’
They start all over again, clutching one another to stop bursting from the excitement.
‘Don’t forget your tummy button,’ says Chloe, lifting her top to stick a finger in her navel. ‘Makes me feel sick.’
‘That’s where you come out of your mummy,’ says Thaisa.
‘Ugh, right, disgusting,’ says Mintha, ‘ If you poke about too much, the knot’ll come undone and you’ll spill out of yourself all over the place.’
‘No, stupid,’ says Persephone. ‘It’s the other way round. YOU come out of your Mother’s bottom, and …’ (to the sound of protests, even howls of derision, she goes on, ‘and you’re still attached to her by a long thread so you can’t get mixed up with another baby when you’re born and your mother is really so tired she can’s keep track of everything that’s happening and every one else is so busy they get a bit absent-minded.’
Her gang grows a little quiet and thoughtful. Each one is wondering, Did the system go awry in my case? Have I been tangled up with another baby, another girl child? Then, for one or two, the hope arrives on spread wings, Am I in fact someone else? Someone far more everything than what I now seem to be?
‘No, no’, says Chloe. ‘You’re not connected for long at all. Kittens come out of their mothers’ bottoms too, I’ve seen them, and their shadows too come out after, a big red lump of stuff to start with, but it turns black and flat.’ At this, Chloe looks a little uncertain and comes to a sudden halt in her report.
‘The lump’s eaten. It’s not a shadow at all.’ Thaisa is definite. ‘Animals eat theirs.’
The group fell silent. It was a puzzle.
‘That’s how babies get out, but how do they get in?’ Mintha frowns.
Lydia speaks up softly: as she reads the most, the gang listens. ‘It’s very easy and so you have be very careful. A baby can get in if you sit with your legs apart or if you sleep with your mouth open or if you stop to talk to a stranger and he gives you something to eat. You open your mouth…’ (she demonstrates, closing her eyes.) ‘He pops something in…’ (she made as if savouring something mysterious, delicious, and pantomimed gulping it down. ‘He could be popping a baby between your lips …’ She screws up her face and spits. ‘Ugh, yuck, yucky...Too late!’
‘But you can stop the baby getting in,’ Thaisa declares firmly, for Lydia is playing too central a part in the conversation, ‘ I’ve been told how and it’s true.’ Her informant was Photis, daughter of her parents’ cook. ‘Photis says her mother has a sponge she puts inside her. She says it blocks the way at night and babies who are looking for somewhere to come and hide have to go somewhere else.’
The girls look about: there are flecks of light in the afternoon sun, motes in sunbeams, every one of them a miniature soul, waiting for flesh, expecting to grow full size, human scale.
‘No, the right person has to breathe on you,’ says Persephone. ‘Cows stand with their backsides to the wind and lift their tails and try and trap it inside them.’ Her hand flies up to her mouth. ‘I didn’t say that,’ she says. ‘You didn’t hear me say that.’ Her eyes are shining with mischievousness.
‘And it has to be at the right time,’ Chloe adds, not picking up on Persephone’s antic mood, for she has walked in on her mother and found her sitting down on the floor with a bloody cloth between her legs and crying that the new brother – or sister - that she wanted to come hadn’t.
Persephone nods to her gang, announces with finality. ‘Yes, it’s not that easy where we’re concerned, in fact. We’re not like dogs or …’ her eyes looked away, to the slopes beyond the meadow. ‘Or goats. Or cows. Girls like us have different bodies…’ again she looked about them. ‘No, even more than different. My mother says it’s complicated….’ And she began to laugh as she listed all the most complicated phenomena in the world … They included wind and water and meteors and rainbows: unpredictable motions, mysterious relations, changeable temperatures, calibrated connections…oh, Persephone was shiny-eyed and intoxicated on the possibilities, and her friends listened to her, twisting their hair round their fingers and biting their lips as they followed her excitement and tried to imagine what they could not imagine. But they were full of love and envy and joyfulness and all these feelings were pouring into the mixture of possibilities for girls like them, girls like us ...’

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