They chattered, of course, as their vital force was sucked from their mammary glands by the machines. That and the rhythmic humming of the pumps were the music of milk — the music which Robert conducted from high up, in the centre of them all.

  When the first was thoroughly stripped, Robert returned to her and removed the teat cups. Pulling a round tin from a pocket in his white coat, he unscrewed the lid and dabbed a quantity of the ointment contained within onto his finger. It was a herbal salve — a homemade creation of beeswax, sunflower oil, calendula flower extract and aloe vera — which he applied to each nipple. Rubbed into the skin in delicate circular motions, it would help to prevent cracking and keep the teat sterile, forming a barrier to stop anything from getting in and infecting the nipple while it was still loose and open.

  ‘You may go now, Rhiannon,’ said Robert. Leaving her stall, the fresher followed the marked path and exited the parlour.

  It was important that each fresher was stripped of all her milk. Only then would she produce an optimal yield. Robert returned to his seat and waited for the next to finish.

  The milk was collected into stainless steel buckets. As one reached capacity, Robert covered it with a lid and moved it to the fridge that stood against the far wall of the room. Back at the house, the milk would be filtered into glass bottles to be cooled down in the freezer for an hour before being stored in the kitchen fridge. From there some of it would be drunk fresh, the rest being processed into butter, cream, yogurt, and all manner of cheeses, fresh and aged.

  Another application of salve and another bucket of milk. This fresher was eager to go, but he did not rush his work. It was imperative that the nipples were cleaned to maintain good teat health.

  Only after they had given their quantity were they allowed to see their offspring. On the other side of the parlour door — the door through which Robert permitted them to go after he was finished with them — were their babies. They had been separated all night. As each fresher left, the sound of cooing and happy murmurs coming from the other room grew louder. It was for this reason that Robert attended the more experienced in the herd last: they had developed the composure required to wait.

  In all of this, Robert was by no means dispassionate. He ran a smooth operation, humane and mindful, and as pain-free as possible. This, he truly believed. He was a father, and the husband of a mother — he understood the bond between parent and child. These creatures, however, were not the same as him. Although some of them may have felt a naive sort of love, this was a consequence of base biology that was not as fully integrated into their sense of being as his emotions were in him. Even then, he was not entirely convinced that all of them were capable of true maternal emotion — the required strength of feeling fatally undermined by moral defect.

  It was, then, of no consequence what he did to them. How he treated them. How they cried for their children in the middle of the night. How happy they were to see them in the morning. How gladly they encouraged their babe to suckle them. Any kindness he showed them was, in a sense, more for his benefit than it was theirs. The tenants of tranquil living. They were, after all, base creatures, and any pain that they felt — physical, emotional or otherwise — was superficial. A short shock that was minutely felt and soon forgotten.

  Eighteen

  The vomit was every shade of wrong.

  ‘What’d you call that?’

  Samantha looked from the bowl of the toilet to Evelyn, who was wiping her mouth with a square of toilet roll. She dabbed the corners of her lips and threw it on top of the sick.

  ‘Pregnancy,’ Evelyn said. ‘I call that pregnancy, Sam.’

  She flushed the toilet and the green and yellow flecked vomit spiralled down and away to become somebody else’s problem.

  Evelyn had been posted through the door a few hours after Samantha. Of course she was. It’s all part of their plan. Samantha had hugged her and Evelyn had held her back. The other women in the room were all strangers. Evelyn was the only one who had known her name.

  Weeks had passed before Jade had materialised. Deposited through the door by Robert, she had been thoroughly unconscious. A woman with sharp green eyes had lifted her from the floor and moved her to a bed.

  The woman with the green eyes called herself Mother. No one remembered her real name, or so Evelyn had told Samantha when she had asked her about it. She always spoke in whispers and worshipped the feminine enterprise of child-rearing. Pregnancy was divine; the doctor was doing God’s work. A veteran of the forgotten war, she had surrendered years ago.

  All of the women in the room were strange. In all manner of bizarre and colourful ways, they had adjusted to their life on the homestead. This was why Evelyn gravitated towards Samantha. I’m the only one of them who isn’t fucking crazy.

  ‘Let’s get you to the sofa,’ Samantha said, wrapping her arm around her friend’s back and guiding her away from the toilet. Evelyn placed her head on Samantha’s shoulder.

  The foetuses in their wombs now eleven weeks old, Evelyn had vomited every morning without exception for several weeks. Sometimes the nausea stayed all day. Such days left Evelyn exhausted, her body racked from the constant seizing of her muscles, her stomach sore and dry from having expelled impossible quantities of liquid. The past week, the nausea seemed to be abating, Evelyn’s vomit now having the decency to keep to an early morning schedule and show mercy to the rest of the day.

  Fortunately, Samantha had been spared morning sickness. Her breasts, on the other hand, kept her up all night. They felt tender and bloated, sometimes agonisingly so, and her ultrasensitive nipples rubbed against the fabric of her smock as she tried to sleep. Even so, and irritatingly, she had come to appreciate the dress Robert had given her: it kept her cool as her core body temperature rose and gave her breasts plenty of room to swell.

  ‘I assume it gets worse than this,’ Samantha laughed, trying to be lighthearted. Eyes closed, Evelyn breathed heavily and rested her head against the back of the sofa.

  When Samantha thought about it — which, generally speaking, she tended to avoid doing — the thought of giving birth terrified her. One quiet evening, she had asked Evelyn about it. Another time, whilst eating breakfast together, Jade had gifted her a graphic description. Other women in the room had each shared their experiences of the process. As natural as it was supposed to be, Samantha couldn’t help but conclude that her body simply wasn’t capable of the feats the women described. Vaginal tears and catheters. Fuck no. There had to be a way out of this.

  Evelyn placed a hand over her ever-so-slightly-protruding abdomen. ‘Tell me about what you did before this.’ She opened her eyes and looked at Samantha. ‘If it’s not too painful.’

  Samantha shrugged. ‘It’s a pretty short story.’

  Evelyn smiled. ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Really, there’s not much to tell. Just hangovers, bad decisions and a lot of wallowing.’

  Evelyn shifted to get more comfortable. ‘What did you have to wallow about?’ she asked.

  A thread had come loose on the arm of the sofa and Samantha picked at it with her nail. ‘How shit I am,’ she said. ‘How shit everything is.’

  Eyes closed again, Evelyn’s eyebrows raised. ‘I don’t think you’re shit,’ she said.

  Samantha laughed. ‘That’s awfully nice of you to say, but, considering where we are, I think your judgement’s screwed.’

  Evelyn laughed too. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  One of the women in the room, a second trimester brunette called Beth, passed by the sofa. She stopped to ask Evelyn how she was feeling. Samantha picked at the thread some more. Next to her, the two women exchanged brief conversation.

  ‘So, why are you shit?’ Evelyn asked Samantha after Beth had walked away.

  Samantha turned and laid her head on the back of the sofa next to Evelyn’s. ‘I was a liability. On my dad. On everyone.’ She didn’t blink and neither did Evelyn. ‘It’s like I wasn’t even there. Wasn’t in reality. Just fuck around now, think about it later.’

  ‘That hardly makes you shit.’

  ‘Try telling that to whoever’s in control of all this.’ Samantha gestured lazily to the ceiling.

  Evelyn’s eyes narrowed. ‘You can’t think you deserve this.’

  Samantha shrugged. ‘Don’t you?’ Evelyn didn’t say anything. ‘Even if it’s bullshit, sometimes you must wonder if you’re being punished for something.’

  ‘I think,’ Evelyn began, ‘that the people in control of this are just people. Sick, disturbed people, but people nonetheless. Being negligible, especially when you’re young, is hardly a mortal sin, Sam. And,’ she paused to lick her lips, ‘even if it is, who are these people to dole out punishment?’

  ‘So you do think you’re being punished, then?’ Samanath asked.

  ‘Punished suggests we’ve done something wrong. I’ve just said you haven’t.’

  ‘But what about you?’

  Evelyn laughed. ‘Why? Are you looking for evidence to suit your theory of divine justice?’

  Samantha itched her neck. ‘Just answer the question.’

  Eveyln paused then said, ‘I think I’ve suffered enough at the hands of others to even begin to think I deserve this.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Evelyn rolled over. Her long hair crinkled against her smock as her chest rose and fell. Samantha waited for her to speak.

  ‘I was with someone,’ Evelyn said, almost too quiet for Samantha to hear. ‘We’d only known each other for six months when I moved in. Two weeks,’ she breathed deeply, ‘two weeks of living together was all it took for him to hit me.’ Her voice wobbled. Samantha reached across for her friend’s hand.

  ‘Sometimes he would go weeks without doing it,’ Evelyn continued. ‘It was easy for me to pretend that it — violence — was not who he was. That it was a one-off, a fluke, a bad day at work.’

  ‘But it wasn’t,’ Samantha said under her breath.

  ‘No,’ Evelyn nodded. ‘It wasn’t.’ Samantha watched as a tear rolled down her cheek. A single bead, it caressed her skin and dropped, without sound, off the edge of her jaw and onto her smock. ‘The smallest thing would set him off. I don’t know what I was thinking, staying with him, but I did. And he was smart — always careful to hit me where it wouldn’t be seen. My escape was working at the art gallery. The paintings always seemed so—’ Evelyn sniffed and wiped away a tear, ‘they were so romantic. I deluded myself into thinking that one day I would be okay, and I’d have that romance for myself. That was what I deserved.’

  Samantha swallowed the lump that had formed in her throat. Her own eyes had started to leak.

  Evelyn took a breath and carried on. ‘One day, he beat me so badly there was no hiding it anymore. I had to leave.’ She turned to Samantha. ‘I tried to manage by myself. But, I had no resources. No one I could fall back on. My parents—’ She paused and caught her breath. ‘And then I found out I was pregnant.’

  Samantha was listening and nodded for Evelyn to continue.

  ‘I couldn’t have his baby, Sam,’ she said in a whisper. ‘I would have got rid of it in a heartbeat. I had done it before. But, this time it was too late. Too late for an abortion. So, I went to a women’s shelter. A safe place,’ Evelyn paused and then said, ‘or so I thought.’

  Samantha asked her what she meant.

  ‘That was where they took me,’ Evelyn whispered. Her pupils grew large and seemed to cloud over with terror.

  Samantha recoiled. ‘What the fuck, Evelyn.’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘What the fuck are you saying?’

  ‘The woman, the doctor’s wife,’ Evelyn explained in a low voice. ‘She was at the shelter. That’s how they brought me here, Sam. I pretty much gave myself to them.’

  Samantha was still shaking her head. What the fuck. What the fuck.

  Evelyn continued. ‘When they took his baby out of my body, I was glad — actually glad to have what he had done to me taken away.’ Evelyn dropped Samantha’s hand and instead held her own stomach. ‘Of course, that was only to begin with. I howled when I was parted from her.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Samantha. It was all she could say. She knew it was a pathetic response.

  ‘That was years ago, but I’ve never forgotten,’ the other woman said. ‘Not her, not him, not my second child, not any of it. That—’ she paused and looked at Samantha. ‘That is how I know I don’t deserve this.’

  Samantha reached across and touched her friend’s cheek, wiping a tear away with her finger. ‘No, Evelyn, you don’t deserve this.’

  The other woman breathed. ‘I cry now, not so much because of what he did to me, but because of how his actions led me to them — led me here.’ She closed her eyes and breathed again before continuing. ‘Don’t ever forget.’ Evelyn took Samantha’s hand and squeezed it. ‘I know it’s difficult — this place. This Hell. But you mustn’t forget who you were before. Even if you were shit,’ she laughed despite the tears. ‘You were you, and you still are you. A survivor, not a liability. Don’t become like them.’ She nudged her head to the side, gesturing to the rest of the room. Across the way, sitting in a chair by the door which opened onto a small enclosed garden, a woman held her swollen stomach, caressing it as she mumbled sweet things to her unborn child. She was about two months away from delivery and glowed with contentment.

  ‘She was never free,’ Evelyn said to Samantha. ‘A native. Born and raised here — a product of this place.’

  The woman was young and her hair was arranged on her head prettily. Two thick, rich, chocolate-coloured plaits crossed over each other in an elaborate coil. By contrast, Samantha’s hair was a rancid mess — half blonde, half her natural brown, and matted in at least forty different places. She hadn’t brushed it for weeks and no longer gave a fuck about it. The woman with the nice hair was humming.

  ‘How can she be like that?’ Samantha asked.

  ‘She doesn’t know any different.’

  ‘Ignorance is bliss, I guess,’ Samantha muttered.

  Evelyn shook her head. ‘Ignorance is ignorance. Use what you know, use what you feel, and maybe — one day — we just might be able to get out of here.’

  Nineteen

  It had all started over a towel.

  Nathalie was certain that she had left hers hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Ladybird was equally certain that it was she who had left hers hanging there. Nathalie’s was blue. Ladybird’s was also blue. Beth’s was blue as well, but no one cared what Beth had to say as her role in this was irrelevant.

  ‘How’d you know it’s yours?’ Ladybird shouted across the room.

  Nathalie, fist clenched, held the towel out in front of her and shook it. ‘Because I Goddamn know!’

  ‘Probably because of the obvious smell of skank,’ said Jade. She stretched her legs and placed her feet up on the coffee table that stood between the two sofas. Sitting next to her, Samantha dropped her head into her hands.

  ‘Fuck you, Jade!’ Nathalie shook the towel again.

  ‘Just give it to me,’ Ladybird said. She walked over to Nathalie and went to snatch the towel out of her hand. Nathalie pulled it away from her just in time, and the two women’s bellies contacted each other. Ladybird screamed, ‘Give it to me, you whore!’

  The women reached for each other. Clutching her stomach in one hand, Ladybird slapped Nathalie on the arm with her other. The towel was dropped to the floor and Nathalie tore at Ladybird’s hair. Clearly, she had not had the foresight to tie it back before approaching the other woman. Ladybird screamed and cursed as Nathalie yanked several strands from her scalp. Ladybird kicked. Nathalie launched a globule of spit into her eye. Beth, seizing the opportunity, scuttled from the other side of the room, crouched down and inspected the towel on the floor. A stray foot nudged her in the bottom and she fell face first onto the carpet. She elbowed the responsible leg and found herself a part of the scuffle.

  ‘So many hormones,’ Jade said from the sofa. She reached for her glass of water and took a sip. Samantha’s head was still in her hands. Now in the seventeenth week of pregnancy, hers was a pathetic existence.

  Someone stirred from the armchair behind them. A green-eyed woman approached the three brawling pregnant women. As more strands of hair were tossed into the air, she raised her hands out in front of her. ‘Ladies,’ the woman whispered, her voice barely audible.

  On the floor, the women stopped. Ladybird released Nathalie’s leg and Beth pulled her teeth away from Ladybird’s arm.

  The green-eyed woman crouched beside them. ‘This is not befitting behaviour, is it?’ Her words were slow and delivered with care.

  ‘No, Mother,’ the three women said in unison.

  It was eerie, but of all the things Samantha had seen and experienced over the past few months, the dominance which Mother exerted over these women was far from the strangest. She had flowing grey hair and was surely too old to be able to conceive — or at least, conceive easily — but carried a foetus inside of her the same as all the women in the room. A natural matriarch, perhaps. A damaged lunatic, most certainly.

  Mother beckoned for the women to come closer. She held out her arms for an embrace. Beth was the first to move. Abandoning the other women, she collapsed into Mother’s arms.

  Here we go again.

  ‘Oh, Mother,’ Beth cried as she clutched the older woman, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay, my child,’ the green-eyed woman whispered. ‘Hush now and come to Mother.’

  Nathalie and Ladybird threw themselves at Mother’s feet and oozed remorse.

  ‘My children,’ Mother said, touching them both on the head, ‘come now, sit up.’

  Nathalie and Ladybird sat up. Jade moved to the sofa opposite and strained over the back of it to get a better view.

  ‘Cooperate, do not compete.’ Mother paused to kiss Beth on the forehead. ‘Receive your celestial mission as friends, not enemies. This time is a blessing.’