The Nest

The trees outside are heavy with summer sunlight. 39 weeks pregnant, and my body has me rooted. From behind my window, I watch a wasp dance in front of me. It tests the glass, then disappears from my sight. 

I am tricked, at first, by precipitous contractions I take for a false alarm. I realise my mistake when the bleeding starts, marbling my bath water with streaks of red. The midwife tries not to frighten me, but on the phone her urgency is clear. You should come in now, love. 

My waters break muddy green, flooding my knickers and the hospital foyer floor. The horror is momentary, overwhelmed by a need to bear down. Wheeled away, birthing mantras I’d nurtured as slowly and tenderly as my growing baby abandons me. I had prepared for long, darkened hours—swaying low, breathing in waves, easing my baby into the world. Midwives offer gas and air, water, a mirror. Do I want to see baby crowning, perhaps reach down and feel? I push them all away. 

The baby is born into bright lights, red with hasty ejection. The midwife pulls away blood-soaked towels and pushes a needle through my vulva. When she leaves, the gore is contained, tucked beneath a washed-soft hospital sheet. 

They send me home with notes revealing what I didn’t know or can’t remember: haemorrhage, meconium, stitches. They don’t tell me the noises I made, or whether I cried when they placed the baby in my arms. And now we are two, in my one-bed flat. The wasp, too, has multiplied. Its duplicates butt the window as if demanding entry. 

In infinite hours of night, I hear a scratch and pop. The wasps are building a nest. In the roof space above my flat they grow cells and chambers—pregnancy in paper. My sister visits. She scoops up the baby and sends me to shower. I run the water hot and fast, washing away the smell of blood and sour milk. I towel myself briskly, gentle with the taut skin of my breasts. I am dry before I see the wasp crawling on the still-wet glass of the shower. 

The baby has cried through every minute of my absence. Disenchanted by the romance of her visit, my sister unloads the distraught child back onto me. We watch her from the window as she leaves. 

The baby is inexhaustible, thriving on scant hours of broken rest. Only when pressed against me does she sink into a heavy slumber, leaving the whorls of her earlobe marked on my flesh. When she wakes, she demands my breast with a groping mouth. My milk prickles in answer. 

Sleep creeps onto my eyelids, my cheeks and shoulders soften. The baby pushes, trusting, into the threat of my flesh, one slowed breath from danger. I force myself awake with the light of my phone and read about the wasps. At first, the queen builds alone, scraping rafters and beams, chewing a pulp to craft her nest. But by now, my queen has a colony of workers. They are building the nest around her, feeding her as she mothers. Her nest teems above my head, wasps in their hundreds and thousands. 

Summer heat doesn’t slow the wasps. Too small, perhaps, to tire under its weight. They dart through the air outside. Every entrance is staked. 

The baby draws from me with frantic sucks until my nipples blister. Satisfied, she sinks into my pooling stomach. Sticky trickles congeal in her mouth. Even if I am hungry or desperately thirsty, I won’t move her. Disturbed, the baby wakes with a pitiable cry, and the feeding begins again. 

The wasps have grown louder. As the baby sucks, I scroll through a gallery of wasp nests. Some are a craft of many-layered pastry, others sweeping brush strokes. My own home is frozen in the last hours before child, the fresh litter of newborn life an uneasy addition. Nappies and muslins and mittens cover the surfaces like a sudden fall of snow confusing a familiar landscape. 

The baby falls, finally, into milk-drunk slumber at my side. Wired with blue light, I am seized with a need for action. I pull a shoved-through donation bag from the letterbox, billow it open, and stuff its insides with everything I no longer have a use for and cannot bear to see. The belly of my slow-brew coffee pot cracks against a candle. Sharp corners of page-marked travel books push through the thin white plastic. 

 The baby cries when she is hungry, hot, soiled, wet, and whenever I am not near. We pace the flat in naked bounce-step, slicked together with our sweat. Skin to skin, foot to foot. Outside the window, a wasp crawls on the glass, baring its hard underside as we make our laps of the bedroom. I think about crunching it, of feeling abdomen and thorax crack between my teeth. 

This torment of imagination is not new. I hear the baby cry and go to her, only to find her asleep. I startle awake in my bed, tearing off suffocating blankets, to realise the baby is safe in her cot. In the corner of my eyes I see crawling in every room. 

To hold the wasps from a wholesale breach I keep the windows closed, even as the summer bakes us. Still they discover some break in our defences. The wasps capture the flat, congregating at spills and smears, feeling their way across the counter. I can’t clean enough to keep them at bay; one inattentive hour and they are feasting. A wasp emerges, antennae waving, from the milk-beaded flange of my breast pump. 

I squeeze my breast to express, and the sac of a blister trembles on my nipple. As I knead to start the milk, the blister swells and lengthens. My milk beads; the sac begins to squirm. Alarva, yellow and translucent, falls from my breast. With every roll of my fingers the blisters multiply, oozing into grubs that push out from my flesh. I can’t stop. I keep expressing, even as the floor at my feet teems with twitching, jelly bodies. 

The baby’s cry wakes me from the nightmare. She wants my breast, but I can’t bear to touch it. I long to hear some steady voice, but no one answers their phone. I imagine the trappings of life that separate them from me – sleeping, fucking, eating, laughing. With every rung-out call, I fantasise each name in a new act of pleasure or diversion. Together, perhaps, all of them. 

I leave messages, holding the phone up to the wasps and the baby; CAN YOU HEAR THEM? 

My sister sends an exterminator who instructs me to act before the wasps damage the roof. I think about the mother and her chambers and her babies. I think about the nest growing large around her, fed and cosseted within the stolen pulp of my home. 

I flee with the baby as the eviction begins, picturing clouds of chemicals drifting into her lungs. We venture into softening sunshine, strolling the pram through the wide paths of the park. The baby stares into the trees that shade our walk, eyes wide to the shifting light that crosses her face.

Pausing on a day-warmed bench, I lay the baby on my thighs. She tucks her legs to her chest, a mimicry of life inside me. I trace the length of her nose, following the curve from forehead to tip. On the fourth pass her eyes hold mine. She fixes me with her first real smile. 

I brace myself to face the excised mass, to confront what devastation the wasps have left behind. 

The exterminator shows me the nest. It is small and brittle in their gloved palm, already beginning to crumble.