Lace

Prelude

Paris, 1963

Scrape... scrape... scrape.... The cold, hard metal dug deep into the child's body.she forced her knuckles into her mouth and bit against the bone as hard as you could to fight the pain with pain. She didn't dare scream. Just mumbled," Jesus, Jesus, Jesus" as she bit her hand.
Tears ran down her cheeks and onto the paper pillow. Her body was trembling and clammy with cold sweat. I'll text you could hear the cheerful noise of the busy Paris Street,but in this small brown room there was no sound except the scraping and her mumbling and the occasional clink of steel against steel. She would count to 10 and then she'd scream! Surely it couldn't go any higher, whatever was he pushing up inside her? It felt like a dagger persistent, cold, merciless. She wanted to vomit, to faint, she wanted to die. She couldn't bear it to go on and on and on.....
The man was intent on what he was doing as she lay on the hard table,Ernie's Forest high in apart by this steel surgical strips. it had been horrifying from the moment she entered this place, the dark brown room with a hard, high table in the middle. A line of silvery instruments and if you are shaped bowls and another table; there was a camp bed and a cloth screen in one corner of the room. A white apron the woman had pointed to the screen and said,"you can take off your clothes behind that." Naked, she had shivered behind the screen, not wanting to leave its protection, but the woman had taken her briskly by the wrist and tells you to the table in the center of the room. She had been positioned on her back so that her narrow hips rested on the edge of the table, while her legs were pulled apart by the woman and lifted into the cold surgical strips. the shivering child felt unbearably humiliated as she gazed into the powerful overhead light.
There had been no anesthetic. The man wear a crumpled green surgeons gown. He muttered some instructions to the woman and then he had inserted two fingers into the child vaginal canal;he held the cervix with his fingers as he placed his other hand on her abdomen to feel the size and position of her uterus. Then she was swapped with antiseptic, and he pushed in a chill speculum shaped like a duck's bill which she kept the walls of the vagina apart and enabled him to see the opening of her uterus. The speculum didn't hurt, but it had felt cold and menacing inside her small body. Other instruments were also inserted and then the pain started at the cervix was open slowly with the stainless steel dilators until it was wide enough for the operation to start. The man picked up the curette-a metal loop on the end of a long thin handle-and the excavation begin. The career moved in and around the uterus, scraping the life out of her; it took only two minutes, but the time seemed endless to the suffering child.
The man worked quickly; occasionally he muttered to the woman who was helping him. Harden though he was, he carefully avoided looking at the child's face;her little feet in the stirrups we're approaching enough as he swiftly finished job and removed each bloodied steel instrument.
As the uterus was empty it gradually contracted back to its original size, but the child's body was jerked with agonizing cramps until the contractions stopped.
Now she was a wailing like an animal, gasping as each new pain clawed her. The man abruptly left the room; the woman swabbed her; the cloying smell of antiseptic filled the air. " Stop making such a noise," hissed the woman." You'll feel fine in half an hour. Other girls don't make such a fuss. You should be grateful that he was a trained as a real doctor. You haven't been messed up inside; he knows what he's doing, and he's fast. You don't know how lucky you are." she helped the thin, 13 year old girl off the table and onto the camp bed in the corner. The child's face was gray, and she shook uncontrollably as she lay under a blanket.
The woman gave her pills to swallow, then she sat and read a paperback romance.for half an hour there was no sound in the room except for the child occasional stifled sob. Then the woman said," You can go now." She helped the girl to dress, gave her two large sanitary towels to put in her pants, handed her a bottle antibiotic tablets and said," Whatever happens, don't come back here. You're not likely to hemorrhage, but if you start bleeding, call a doctor immediately. Now get home and stay in bed for 24 hours."for one moment the woman's carefully controlled and personal toughness weekend. " Pauvre petite! Don't let him touch you for at least a couple months." Awkwardly she patted the child shoulder and letter through the passage to the heavy front door.
The child pause outside the stone steps, wincing in the sharp sunlight. Slowly, painfully, Lily walked along the boulevard until she came to a small Cafe where she ordered a hot drink. She sat and sipped it, feeling the sun into the warm steam on her face as a jukebox pumped the new Beatles hit,"She Loves You."