Читать книгу Puffball - Fay Weldon - Страница 7

The pain Liffey felt was nothing to do with Tucker’s kicking of the puffball. It was a mid-cycle pain—the kind of pain quite commonly, if inexplicably, felt by women who take the contraceptive pill. It is not an ovulation pain, for such women do not ovulate. But the pain is felt, nevertheless, and at that time.

Liffey, on this particular September day, was twelve days in to her one-hundred-and-seventy-first menstrual cycle. She had reached the menarche rather later than the average girl, at fifteen years and three months.

Liffey’s mother Madge, worried, had taken her to the doctor when she was fourteen-and-a-half. ‘She isn’t menstruating,’ said Madge, bleakly. Madge was often bleak. ‘Why?’ ‘She’s of slight build,’ the doctor said. ‘And by and large, the lighter the girl, the later the period.’

Liffey, at the time, had no desire whatsoever to start menstruating, and took her mother’s desire that she should as punitive. Liffey, unlike her mother, but like most women, had never cared to think too much about what was going on inside her body. She regarded the inner, pounding, pulsating Liffey with distaste, seeing it as something formless and messy and uncontrollable, and being uncontrollable, better unacknowledged. She would rather think about, and identify wholly with, the outer Liffey. Pale and pretty and nice.

It was not even possible to accept, as it were, a bodily status quo, for her body kept changing. Processes quite unknown to her, and indeed for the most part unnoticeable, had gone on inside Liffey since the age of seven when her ovaries had begun to release the first secretions of oestrogen, and as the contours of her body had begun their change from child to woman, so had vulva, clitoris, vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries, unseen and unconsidered, begun their own path to maturity. The onset of menstruation would occur when her body dictated, and not when the doctor, or Madge, or Liffey felt proper.

Her menstrual cycle, once established, was of a steady, almost relentless twenty-eight-day rhythm, which Liffey assumed to be only her right. Other girls were early, or late, or undecided: trickled and flooded and stopped and started. But as the sun went down every twenty-eight days, from the one-hundred-and-eighty-fourth calendar month of her life, Liffey started to bleed. Being able so certainly to predict this gave her at least the illusion of being in control of her body.

Liffey never enquired of anyone as to why she bled, or what use the bleeding served. She knew vaguely it was to do with having babies, and thought of it, if she thought at all, as all her old internal rubbish being cleared away.

The mechanics of her menstrual cycle were indeed ingenious.

Lunar month by lunar month, since she reached the menarche, Liffey’s pituitary gland had pursued its own cycle: secreting first, for a fourteen-day stretch, the hormones which would stimulate the growth of follicles in Liffey’s ovaries. These follicles, some hundred or so cyst-like nodules, in their turn secreted oestrogen, and would all grow until, on the fourteenth day (at any rate in the years she was not taking the pill) the biggest and best would drop off into the outer end of one of Liffey’s fallopian tubes and there, unfertilised, would rupture, allowing its oestrogen to be absorbed. This was the signal for the remaindered follicles to atrophy: and for Liffey’s pituitary to start secreting, for a further twelve days, a hormone which would promote the formation of a corpus luteum which would secrete progresterone and flourish until the twenty-sixth day, when the pituitary withdrew its supplies. Then the corpus luteum would start to degenerate and on the twenty-eighth day be disposed of in the form of menstrual flow—along, of course, with the lining of Liffey’s uterus, hopefully and richly thickened over the previous twenty-eight days to receive a fertilised ovum, but so far, on one-hundred-and-seventy occasions, disappointed.

The disintegration and shedding of the uterus lining, signalled by the withdrawal of oestrogen, would take three days and thereafter the amount of blood lost would gradually diminish as the uterus healed. On this, the twelfth day into Liffey’s cycle, the seventy-seventh follicle in the left fallopian tube was outstripping its fellows, distending the surface of the ovary as a cystic swelling almost half an inch in diameter—but owing to the fact that Liffey had been taking the pill, her body had been hoodwinked so that the ovum would have no time to actually fall, but would merely atrophy along with its fellows.

Did a tremor of disappointment shake Liffey’s body? Did the thwarting of so much organic organisation register on her consciousness? Certainly she had a pain, and certainly Mabs’ eyes flickered as Liffey winced, but that too could be coincidence.