The heat wave warnings sent my phone vibrating across the hardwood floor the morning I had the first scan. The warnings came in German, and often came in the form of videos, also in German—charming clips of weathermen standing in front of illustrated boards in a newsroom, the whole country divided into icons of blazing sun and strong winds, nearly all of it alarm-red. I found the weather videos vaguely old fashioned and somehow redolent of the sober and predictable weather reports of childhood, although I could rarely understand what they were telling me.

Neel was already out of bed, gone to work, the apartment empty, the balcony door and all the windows open to let the slack breeze in. I turned the radio on. We had it programmed entirely with stations based in the countries where we had lived: 3RRR in Melbourne, WFMU in New York, ABC Radio National Sydney. This morning, BBC 6. The half-hour news was full of people collapsing from the heat all over Europe. Electricity grids shut down, wildfires spreading across drought-dried grasslands. Children in Paris excused from school.

I rolled my eyes. Nobody let us out of school in Sydney when it was over 35 degrees, we still had to sit through Maths in puddles of teenage sweat. I said this aloud, forgetting for a moment that Neel wasn’t there. In the night, my screaming had woken him. I had been a child in my dream, and somebody was coming. That was all I remembered. After holding me, calming me, Neel had said that the screaming was frightening. Shrill peals of terror. Someone was coming, I repeated, before falling back to sleep. Now, on my phone, I could see he had messaged to ask if I’d slept okay in the end, and to let him know how the scan went.

*

By 11 I was sitting in the office in Moabit, tastefully decorated with a six-foot-tall light sculpture of a luminous naked woman, as if to present us with an ideal to aspire to. She was perfectly proportioned but somehow solid, a distinctly German vision of femininity I recognized from Nazi-era photography and the GDR-era statues decorating the lobby of the pool where I habitually swam. A woman waiting for her blood to be taken was red-eyed from weeping. Another jiggled her foot against her knee. She was wearing pants; a poor decision. My name was called. When I stood up, I checked the chair beneath me, finding a stripe of sweat demarcating where the skin of my back had rested on the black plastic, and another smear on the seat, advertising the wet space between my legs. I wiped hurriedly at them with the skirt of my dress, and left the waiting room quickly, afraid of catching someone’s eye.

The Frauenärztin was brisk. She confirmed the date of my last period and asked me to undress. Underwear off, shoes off. I sat myself in the chair, put my feet in the stirrups, pulled my dress up to my waist, and breathed deeply when she told me to relax. She pushed the ultrasound wand into my vaginal canal and up to my cervix.

See that, she asked, pointing to the screen that was flickering to life in greyscale abstraction. There was a black oval on the screen, with a grey and white smudge floating inside of it. That’s your baby, she said.

She rotated the wand with her eyes fixed to the screen, and then pointed to the pulsing white dot in the middle of the smudge. That’s the heart, she said. It is, and she paused, trying to think of the word in English. It is flimmering, she said. Yes.

I didn’t even think to correct her. It was obviously, in that moment, the most perfect and most beautiful word for the action of a heart.

She had me dress, then sit opposite her. Everything looked perfect, she said. I should come back in two weeks, make an appointment at reception. She advised me not to spend time with cats and said the fatigue and nausea I’d been experiencing were common and to be expected, but told me to keep an eye out and let her know if they got any worse. She said she would prescribe me custom-made compression tights for the long-haul flight I would need to make to Australia the following month. She handed me a printout of the sonogram, the tiny smudge more like a mollusk than a baby. I beamed at it, and as she opened the door to invite me to leave, she warned me about the heat. It can be dangerous in pregnancy, she said. Be careful.

Out on the street, in the blazing sun of the bus stop, I sent a picture of the sonogram to Neel, then looked around at the other wilting commuters. I so deeply wanted to reach out to one of these strangers and show them the picture of my mollusk. But we were not telling people, not yet. We had four more weeks to keep it secret.

*

In the middle of the night, I woke up crying. This was not something I had done since childhood, when I would often wake up sobbing and calling out for my mother. In the dream I’d been having, Neel was calmly telling me we would need to be apart for the next six months because he had work to do. He was cold, distant, and indifferent to my pleading that I did not want to be alone in pregnancy; utterly different to the man he was in real life. His alien attitude in the dream was part of the shock and was what provoked the sobbing. I woke up to Neel with his hand on my shoulder, asking if I was okay. When I eventually told him through wet, ragged breaths that I was, that it was just a bad dream, he exhaled. He had thought, when he first heard my crying, that I was having a miscarriage. A swell of guilt poured through me, and I apologized, turning over to put an arm around him. I listened to his breathing become deep and slow again, while I lay there, the standing fan blowing stale air towards my feet, all the blankets kicked off. I lay awake for some time, reading news on my phone about the heat wave in Europe, the floods in the U.S., the winter storms in Australia, tingles of itching beginning to bloom under my left arm, across my lower back, and over my right hand, before finally falling asleep with the dawn.

In the morning, the itching remained. More alarmingly, the scars on my right hand—which had faded away over the last months—were back. An inflamed web stretched across all four fingers, extending down the bone of my middle finger’s knuckle to neatly trace the tentacles of the jellyfish which had stung me two months earlier. Now, the wound was once more raised, and red, and terribly itchy. 

There had been something poetic about the jellyfish sting when it happened that spring. Like a rite of passage that leaves a person with a mark or tattoo or piercing; this one bestowed on me by the sea. But I had not expected it to be permanent.

Look, I said to Neel, standing in the breezeless kitchen making a salad for his lunch. I held out my right hand to show him.

He peered over, his hands still slick with tomato seeds and balsamic, then he started. Why, he asked, would they have come back?

*

In 2019 a man had asked if I wanted to get coffee, and I suggested a drink. He was visiting the city with his mother and sister, lived in England, and he had the same name as somebody who had once presented on the alternative Australian radio station I listened to in high school. I wasn’t sure it was the same man. He had come into my orbit on social media, making jokes with me about Rachel Cusk’s coldly brutalist house, and asking what I thought about Ingeborg Bachmann. I wore a blazer to meet him because I thought it made me look serious. It wasn’t a date; I was married to somebody else.

I met him at a bar, sat down, took the blazer off, and he bought me a glass of wine. When he first began speaking, he sounded straightforwardly English: he said that as soon as he’d left Australia, and the radio station, his accent had changed. But the longer we spoke, the more we drank, and the more the evening began to take form as a date, his accent slipped. It was as though Neel were mirroring my own stubbornly Australian intonations, the dropped terminal r’s and the long vowels of my speech. This I experienced as a gesture of his attraction, as intimate as when he reached across the table, finding a reason to take my hand. 

And then, as his accent changed, a memory surfaced. His voice threw me back in time and hemispheres.

A decade earlier:, January 26, Australia Day, which I had spent at Gordon’s Bay with friends. It was the most adult of Sydney’s swimming beaches because, being very rocky and without significant sand, nobody ever brought children there. The alternative radio station had a longstanding tradition of holding a countdown of the most popular songs of the previous year, and listening to it was as much an Australia Day rite as temporary tattoos of the Southern Cross, Invasion Day vigils, and cricket. On one side of Gordon’s Bay that year, a party of people had erected boomboxes and were blasting the radio station so loudly you could hear it echoing off the rock cliffs from anywhere you sat. My friends and I poured Passion Pop into orange juice, ate sandwiches, and swam. By mid-afternoon we were drunk. Made bold, a friend and I swam over to a rainbow-print floatie somebody had abandoned in the bay and hopped on. It was a figure in the shape of a human, designed so that one sat in the man’s torso, embraced by his buoyant limbs. We were sharing so I took his legs. We sat back-to-back, chatting as Florence and the Machine finished, Jay-Z began, and then the radio presenter took over, hoping everyone in the country was having a great day.

Then I felt a pain so intense that I screamed. Extending from my knee and up towards my hip, the tentacles of a bluebottle were turquoise against my skin. The creature was caught between the leg of the floatie and my own, and because I was drunk and moving slowly, I let it keep stinging me. I capsized our floatie and swam towards another friend on the shore, this one in medical school, who was wearing a parka over a bikini, and swinging a half-empty bottle of Passion Pop by her side. I asked her what I was meant to do for jellyfish stings. She shrugged, before suggesting that I piss on it.

In that moment in the bar in 2019, when Neel’s accent changed, I remembered. It had been his voice speaking on the radio when I was stung a decade earlier, his voice indelibly bound to the purple tentacle marks that traced my thigh the length of that Sydney summer. The memory of the sting had never been especially meaningful, but now it was. Suddenly the Australia Day bluebottle sting took on all the significance of prophecy.

For a long time after that first night in the bar, when I was falling in love, then breaking up my marriage, then disassembling my life to be with Neel, I took to telling the story of the bluebottle sting quite often. It had something of the “fated love story” about it, and also captured something about the complete fluke of it all. You were stung then, one friend said upon hearing the story, and you’re stung again now. It got you in its tentacles. I ignored the fact that a bluebottle is not a “true” jellyfish.

Over the years since I had met Neel, I developed a fascination with jellyfish. I read books about them, listened to audio documentaries about their strange place as one of the few creatures thriving under the conditions of climate change, and bought an old scientific print from a Berlin flea market which illustrated their luminous waving tentacles, hanging now over our toilet. I could tell stories about fishing trawlers capsized by the weight of sumo-wrestler sized jellyfish caught in their nets, about nuclear plants shut down because a bloom had clogged the intake pipes. And how nothing could repel them, neither electric shocks nor chemical agents, because they were creatures subject only to the drift of ocean currents. Acoustic shocks didn’t work either because jellyfish, not being in possession of a brain, were not afraid of noise. They were perfect metaphors, I thought, although I couldn’t have defined exactly what I thought they represented. I often quoted to myself a Mark Doty poem, in which the speaker watches a bloom of jellyfish floating in the shallows of a bay “elaborate sacks / of nothing.” They are “balloons,” they are “breathing hearts,” “a plastic purse swallowing itself.” Never stable. “Sheer ectoplasm,” the poet said, “recognizable only as the stuff of metaphor.”

*

It only made sense that the jellyfish would come for me again when the time was right.

By the spring of that year, we had been trying to get pregnant for five months, and I was beginning to worry. I had been working non-stop, often traveling for weeks at a time, and our lives had begun to feel circumscribed by the tedious time-keeping of period trackers and ovulation windows. It was grey and cold; we’d barely seen the sun in months. We needed to get out of Berlin. It was a blessing, we said, that my parents were coming to Europe to visit, and instead of staying in grey springtime Germany, had elected to rent a holiday apartment in a town along the French Mediterranean, to the east of Marseille, where the four of us could stay for a week.

The week we arrived was the week the heat began. The sand was roasting but the water was still ice-cold. Neel and I took to swimming in the evenings, when the water had been warmed by the sunshine. One evening I spotted a gorgeous pulsing orb, mostly transparent but flushed in places with luminescent pink. I couldn’t see tentacles, and didn’t know if they stung, but I called out to Neel, shivering and steeling himself to swim, and warned him to watch out.

The morning we decided to hike into the calanque, the air was already hot and thick before the clock had reached 9 am. Neel had packed a bag full of supplies, and tried to get us out the door earlier, citing the Saturday crowds, but I had dawdled, chatting with my mother, and by the time we got to the trail I was sweating and a long line of hikers was coming up behind us. The path quickly became steep, often slippery at spots where decades of footfall had worn down the limestone. The pressure of the relentless crowd on the steep and slippery trail began to make me panic. We rounded the first beach, but Neel wanted to push on to the second, and so we began to ascend once more, all around us fallen pine needles baking on the stone. Neel said it was the last day before the park rangers could shut down access to the national park if they thought there was a fire risk. There was no breeze, no fire risk, but I could see beads of sweat dripping from my forehead onto the path, dotting it like the raindrops that wouldn’t fall for many more months. We were not even halfway to the next beach. I did not think I could make it all the way in this heat. I wanted to turn back. On the verge of tears held back by the weight of my shame, I nodded when Neel tried to console me by saying we could swim at the first beach, the one we had already passed, on our way back.

The water was a gorgeous turquoise. I stripped down to my underwear and then swam out, far past the children and paddlers, into the deep water. I heard a man with a Midlands accent call out something about a jellyfish. I was watching out for translucent orbs with shades of pink. But not closely enough. My arms were mid breaststroke, my body loosed of the panic of the hike and the alarm of the heat. And then I felt a sudden sharp pain in my right hand. It jolted through me like electricity. I screamed. My heart was pounding, the beat loud in my ears. I raced to the shore, where I sat in my soaking underwear on a towel, watching the white welts bloom on my skin, while Neel Googled what to do about a jellyfish sting. Don’t piss on it, he said.

By the time we got back to the holiday apartment, the welts had turned red and showed neatly and precisely where the tentacles had caressed me. Over the following weeks the red marks became itchy, raised, blistered, broke open and bled. It was around then, when the wound broke open, that my period was first one, then five, days late. I went to the pharmacy, bought a test, waited over its upturned face on the edge of the bath, and saw the word Schwanger staring steadily back at me.

*

In the weeks since the spring, in the first months of pregnancy, the mark of the jellyfish sting had disappeared. But now it was back. The welts suddenly raised again, red and endlessly itchy. The nausea faded as the first trimester came to an end, as the heat of the summer prolonged itself and occasional fire warnings were issued in Brandenburg. But I lay awake at night itching, sliding my finger along the bumps and ridges of the scars, wondering if they were permanent. Had pregnancy reawakened them? Had heat? Was it some kind of eternal return of the repressed? Dangerous, I thought, to have encountered my own personal metaphor in the flesh. I could make of the jellyfish what I might, but the scars on my hand were unequivocal, literal. Heat can be dangerous in pregnancy, the Frauenärtzin had said. I was meant to be careful.

One morning, on the phone to my mother, she advised me to get my blood checked. Years earlier, in my adolescence, she had needed a blood transfusion, but her body had rebelled. The doctors discovered antibodies which caused her to reject regular transfusions. She would need to receive filtered and triple-washed blood instead. The doctors told her that the antibodies were likely acquired when she was in labor with me, and, as a consequence, there was a good chance I had acquired the same antibodies in the process of being born. She was telling me now, so that the doctors could test me, in case I should wind up needing a blood transfusion during childbirth. I made a note to ask the Frauenärtzin. But for the rest of the day, an unsettling image stayed with me. My mother’s blood, her body, producing my own, a body which was in turn creating another body, building spines and stomach acid and vocal cords. Women building women building women. I saw myself suddenly as unbelievably, terrifyingly porous. Full of antibodies to contaminate the baby’s blood, microplastics to float down her umbilical cord, jellyfish venom drifting through my body, right—I’d done the math—when this flimmering thing that I would one day call my daughter was in the process of dividing and implanting herself into my uterine wall.

The night after I spoke to my mother, I woke Neel again with my screaming. He shushed me and stroked my arm and told me everything was all right. When he asked what had happened, I was still half asleep. Tentacle, I said. Just the one. It curled itself around my waist like a lasso, and was dragging me down, rendering me immobile. All I could do was scream. Not because I was drowning, but because it had me by the stomach, because its stingers, though not stinging yet, were so very close to the bump that was beginning to protrude from my belly. When I was done telling him the dream, I began to laugh. I guess that one’s not hard to decipher, I said. 

No, my love. None of them are, said Neel, before turning over and falling back to sleep.

The heat did not abate for weeks, and the jellyfish scar remained red and raised, as though suggesting that it was staying, as much a part of this pregnancy as anything else. 

*

On the morning of the second scan, Neel was the only man in the waiting room with the luminous woman-shaped light sculpture. He read the scattered coffee table material on Schwangerschaft while I peed in a plastic cup and left it, as instructed, by the sink in the blood-taking room, alongside three other waiting cups of variously yellowed urines. When I was called in, we both followed the Frauenärtzin along the hall. This time I lay on the table, my skirt unbuttoned and tucked into the top of my underwear, my shirt pushed up, grateful that there would be no vaginal examination, at least not this time. The cold gel and then the ultrasound wand was pressed into my belly, Neel sitting in a chair beside me and holding my hand.

There it is, she said. And there it was. Two legs lunging down and springing up as though using the amniotic sac as a trampoline. The creature wiggled, then moved a hand to scratch its nose. I gasped. I turned to Neel to see his face. His enormous eyes watching the screen, holding tightly onto my hand. No mollusk anymore, but a tiny human being, 70 mm long.

When we were done, I wiped the gel off my stomach, buttoned my skirt, and prepared to ask my questions. We’ve already tested for antibodies, the Frauenärtzin said, when I told her of my mother’s warning. You don’t have them. She pointed at a booklet in front of her, the Mutterpass, to a sticker I couldn’t entirely decipher, aside from the word Negativ. The doctor handed the booklet to me and said from now on, I would need to carry the Mutterpass everywhere I went.

Just to doctors’ appointments, right? I asked. Not to the grocery store? I was half-joking.

But she was not. Yes, she said, absolutely to the grocery store. There is vital information in there. You cannot go anywhere without it. 

I pictured myself collapsed in the cereal aisle, arm stretched out across the scuffed resin floor, the booklet clutched in my fist.

Anything else, she asked. 

I showed her my hand. This jellyfish scar, it’s come back, I said.

She nodded, unconcerned. You can see a dermatologist if you want, she said. It could be the weather, the heat. But weird things happen in your body during pregnancy. It’s normal for things not to be so normal.

Out on the street, Neel clutched the new sonogram picture in his hand, grinning. He did not notice a man and his dog approaching, the dog panting in the morning heat, trying to get into the building’s front door which Neel was blocking with his tall frame. Dogs, too, were subject to the extremes of the weather. Neel was looking down at the photograph of the human-shaped sea creature, many months away from real life. When I tugged his elbow, he laughed. It must be so strange to live in this building, Neel said. You’d have to get used to couples standing outside and smiling. 

Or crying, I thought. They must see couples crying, or shellshocked, punching the wall. Right here on the cobblestones, under the sunburned linden tree. Living out the kind of nightmare I felt, even with the photograph Neel held, was not so very distant. The nightmare could come from nowhere, and without warning the sea creature in the photograph would disappear; an elaborate sack of nothing. There were still so many weeks, months, for us to wait through. ♦