Spirit of Progress by Steven Carroll

start again, as she has in her mind time after time). Always the same.
    So as much as she might have been thinking about bombs falling on them at any minute back when the war seemed as though it would never end and her imagination ran away from her the way it always has, she was also looking at the world through the eyes of a young bride asking herself if she will bloom or wither, like all those withered lives around her. Now she is about to become a mother and the question still hangs in the air. At the moment the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’ are not so important, for she is about to take the next step. This is the step, she tells herself, that she has been preparing to take all her life.
    But as much as she tells herself that her body was born to be round, and as much as everybody tells her — the doctors, the young wives of the street, the old women whose children have long gone from them — that her body was born to be round, and as much as they tell herthat this body of hers has a memory that goes back a million years and knows exactly what it’s doing, there is also a part of her that is convinced that her body is different, that it was not born to be round, that it does not have a memory that goes back a million years, and, unlike all the other bodies of all the other young wives, this one doesn’t really know what it’s doing after all. For just as the words ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ do not fall naturally from Vic’s lips, the feeling of being round and heavy and the idea of being a mother do not come naturally to Rita. Her body, she is sure, has a poor memory. And, unlike all the young wives she sees (and she sees round young wives everywhere now), she is convinced that she will have to learn to be a mother more than the rest. That it will not come naturally and that the words ‘Mother’ and ‘Mama’, ‘son’ or ‘daughter’, will ring strangely in her ears as will ‘Father’ and ‘Dad’ in Vic’s.
    It was one thing that united them both before they ever married, this business of fathers and absence. For Vic’s mother, who lives in a country town not too far away, had come to visit Rita’s mother before they married to unburden herself of her shame. The shame that nobody spoke of, but which was unburdened that Sunday afternoon. And Rita’s mother had told her that she was not alone, that Rita’s father, too, had one day stepped out the front gate of their house in a cloud of pipe smoke and never come back. The two women had nodded to each other in a way that suggested there is a lot of that about. But what Rita’s mother didn’t add was that this absent father never returned because she told him not to. Life,she decided long ago, would be simpler without a drunk drinking all their money away, and so he was dispatched into the realm of the ‘absent father’. It was one of the things they discovered about each other and which drew Rita closer to a ‘yes’ rather than a ‘no’ whenever she posed herself the question of whether she would do it all again. That and the feeling that the past, with all its secret guilt and shame, might now end with them, and that the child and this world they were creating could be the clean start for which they were all searching.
    And although these thoughts occupy her mind, it seems to her, every moment, every tick of the day, she is, nonetheless, happy to be distracted this evening. For there, spread out on the kitchen table in the afternoon newspaper, is a photograph of Vic’s Aunt Katherine. Her left arm is raised. Whoever it is — some journalist — that has come to visit, for whatever reason, Aunt Katherine is having none of it.
    Aunt Katherine frightens Rita. She has always frightened her, from the night she’d told Rita she was a fool to be marrying Vic because Vic was a drunk who would let her down the way drunks always do, and that her life would be a misery because Vic, for all his looks and his charm and his big laugh, was one of those who