by Polly Samson
As they all start back up the beach, Hal blows into his wrapper and for a split second the orange lolly smokes and freezes to his lips.
*
When you look close you can make out each individual shrimp, microscopically tiger striped and curled around.
When it is time for them to be cooked, Hal passes each little bucket in turn, so his dad can sort them all into a big sieve before swilling them under the kitchen tap. Hal watches as the water flows through them while Anna stands at the stove, heating oil in a pan. When it is bubbling, Hal cranes his neck to watch as Christopher tips them from the sieve into the frying pan.
The shrimps fall as a rain-coloured mass. There is a furious burst of sizzling and wriggling, like boiling water but they don’t look like boiling water for more than a split second.
“Ugh, they remind me of foetuses,” says Anna throwing down the spoon as masses of little bodies turn livid pink. “Hundreds of human foetuses…” Hal thinks she must have burned herself. “…eight-week-old foetuses, like that photo in Janine’s book. The one she made me look at.” Tears start to spring from her eyes.
Christopher grabs her wrist.
“Don’t start,” he hisses. She pulls herself free, her hand a fist. He grabs her again.
“Don’t ruin things, Anna,” he says.
She’s yelling, pulling free:
“You’re the one.” Yelling: “You’re the ruiner.”
Hal doesn’t know what to do. It’s like being caught in hailstones with nowhere to run.
“Anna!” Christopher shouts her name like it’s a swear word and Hal wants to scream “No!” Perhaps he does but his dad is shouting louder.
“God Anna! Is there to be no forgiveness?” There is a shrill: “Fuck you!” as someone sends the frying pan flying onto the floor, in a clatter of metal on stone. Oil and shrimps explode, something splashes up and burns Hal on the leg, a flash of pain, but he doesn’t cry.
Hal runs from the room. He buries himself under the camouflage quilt of the unmade bed. He breathes noisily into the pillow until it is warm against his face. He tries not to kick his leg where it is hurting. He rubs his fist back and forth, ear to cheek, cheek to ear, because of the pain. But it is no use.
“Some things are unforgiveable,” she is screaming.
This is when Hal remembers something from before. Even though the shouting is reaching its peak in the kitchen, something is forcing its way through all the noise, worming its way from the dark sludge at the back of his mind.
It’s the hospital. But it isn’t his dad propped up in bed in a room of blue and white and disinfectant. It’s her. His mum. Hal wants her to cuddle him but Anna’s hands rest in a knot on a fuzzy blue blanket pulled across her lap. Above the blanket, her face is as white as the shirt she’s wearing.
When it’s time, she rises from the bed, but one hand stays put, like she’s warming her tummy through her skirt, and they leave the hospital through glass revolving doors. It’s drizzling, cold. Headlamps glare from puddles all the way down the long street. His dad’s coat is hairy, rough. It’s the last Hal gets of him before he’s pushing him into the mini-cab after her. That’s when Hal sees the stain. He sees something on her long washed out skirt as it folds around her legs before she sits down. It’s just a darkening, like spilt ink where her skirt’s all creased from sitting on the bed. Anna arranges herself, carefully, and Hal is so distracted by what he’s just seen that he fails to register that his dad isn’t joining them. The door shuts with a heavy clunk and Christopher turns heel on the pavement. Hal sits beside her, but his face is pressed to the window, trying not to lose sight of his dad walking away along the wet street. The driver starts the engine and Hal continues to wave to the dismal, grey figure until he can’t see him any more. It’s only when they turn the corner that his mum tells him where they are going.
Love at First Sight
The doctor climbed the five flights to my flat, bitter with lumbago and the bloody law that demanded he climb these stairs at all. He had been summoned, despite my protestations, by the midwives: Sorry, they said. It’s an NHS rule. They were gone now, and we were three, alone; cocooned with cushions and quilts and soft shawls. We were strange and warm and new. We were waiting for the bad fairy to appear. From the bedroom, we could hear his leather trench-coat slap-slapping against his boots as he marched nearer. Charlie was snuggled, fists closed around the curls of new lambskin, the first sleep out of the womb, perfect. The doctor pushed past my baby’s father, to point a long finger at me. “You, you’re irresponsible,” he said and I thought again how much he resembled the child-catcher in Chitty, Chitty, Bang Bang.
“You wouldn’t be smiling like that if something had gone wrong,” he said. Then, he snatched up my sleeping baby and sneezed in his face. “Out,” said my boyfriend. “Get out!”
Nine months earlier, this same doctor had the strangest reaction when I informed him that I was pregnant. He said: “And what do you expect me to do about that?” When I replied that I just thought he should know, he looked so downcast that I found myself mumbling apologetically about world over-population, Chinese girls, Romanian orphans, grain-shortages, children in care.
“I see,” he said, fixing me with a disappointed eye, while I rubbed my tummy through my jeans. “But you want to keep the baby?”
I stuck to the ante-natal appointments that Doctor Child-snatcher arranged at the teaching hospital closest to my office, it worked out cheaper that way. But I was lying through my teeth each time I confirmed that I would indeed be having my baby there, in one of the terrifying steel beds on wheels that they showed me. These hospital beds were the stuff of my nightmares, the curtains that pulled right around, clattering like a brisk telling-off. And the all-too-obvious metaphor of the hospital corridor made me shiver too. At the end there’s terror and white light, bright enough to penetrate your eyelids.
In the early stages of pregnancy, I spent my lunch-hours, and then some, waiting, waiting, at the hospital, hugging myself with the thrill of deception. I sat smirking and secretive and others smiled back sometimes, their faces pale and puffy under sick neon tubes, and nothing much to look at but the gory video-loops of beached women, screaming and bloody, their babies’ heads emerging from between their legs like leaching beetroot. Later, when the routine checks became weekly, I was spared the flickering fluorescence, the blood-curdling soundtrack, and instead was back with my doctor, bringing to his surgery a sample of early morning urine. Each week when I presented him with the jar, warm from my pocket, Dr. Child-catcher would look at me over his half-moons and say: “And what can I do for you?”
As far as he was concerned, I would be going to the hospital for the birth; that was the rule then, first babies, and all that. But I was arrogant and my boyfriend had a friend who was a charismatic French obstetrician. He told me: “You will have your bébé how your mother had you.”
My mother popped me into the world at home in Crouch End in a room with a bay window to the street. One of the first things she did after the birth was to stick her maroon knitted mittens on my feet because she thought they looked cold. When the midwife finally arrived, short-of-breath and dishevelled, my mother already had me in her arms. She told the flustered midwife not to fuss because for her it was nothing: “No worse than bad constipation.”
“Well, I never,” said this midwife, who was old, and, so they tell me, almost blind. I imagine her peering close, possibly through glasses mended with plasters. “And look what she’s wearing on her feet! What were you expecting, a little monkey?”
My mother prided herself on providing a positive image of birth. She’s the sort of woman that Gauguin might have painted. Strong and dark, she looks like the sort who would squat down in the field, have her baby, and continue on her way. “And when I held you,” she said, “the waves of love were more powerful than any pain.”
It will be love at first sight. It will be love at first sight. That’s what they tell you. They tell you abou
t deep eye-contact. It will be impossible to look away, they say.
My first-born lay, bubbling with mucous, tummy-down on the bedroom carpet. The charming French obstetrician, having stayed on my sofa throughout two nights of “pre-labour” had missed the baby’s arrival by a few hours, his toothbrush packed away smartish into a natty little overnight case. “You will have to go to the hospital,” he said, having informed us, most plausibly, that he would miss his flight to Italy if he stayed for even one more contraction. “The hospital is not so bad,” he said.
But it was too late for all that: he had already told me how unsuitable hospitals were as places for birth, how interventionist every consultant, how full of germs for the new bébé it would all be. One look at my face must have convinced him that he ought to pull an alternative out of the hat.
“I know a girl,” he said, suddenly inspired as his check-in time grew closer. “Her name is Katie,” and he gave me her phone number as he flew out of the door. He was probably already speaking at his conference in Milan as my baby drew his first breaths.
“I wonder if it’s a girl or a boy?” said Katie, the more glamorous of the two midwives who, at remarkably short notice, had supported my weight, on chairs, one either side, while I crouched and pushed and shouted that I’d changed my mind; Katie and Martha now had scratches on their thighs to prove it.
“Let’s see shall we?” said Katie brightly.
I was lost in thinking about my boyfriend, about how loud I had just screamed as the baby’s head was born. It felt searing like a Chinese burn, only hotter. My boyfriend was in the next room, as agreed, but the walls were thin. Katie was prompting me to take my baby into my arms, to have a look, but I was too shocked, in fact I had started to shake all over and I thought I might be about to cry.
“I wonder, is it a boy or a girl?” she tried prompting me again.
“Bit hard to tell, really” replied Martha looking down at the baby, still lying tummy to the floor, and giving me a nudge.
“Boy or girl, bit hard to tell,” Katie repeated. The bedroom door flew open. My boyfriend stood there, crackling with dread.
“My God, please, no…” he cried staring at the snuffling baby at my feet. “Please, not a hermaphrodite!”
I was trembling and laughing, but still all I could think was: I hope my boyfriend likes this baby.
This baby was a shocker: astonishingly long, with the muscular back of an athlete. I had been expecting a mouse-sized child, a bit floppier somehow. The size of my bulge had not prepared me for a whopper: he must have been tightly packed, like a Jack in the Box. Katie measured him twice. He stretched a full twenty-four inches away from me, from the purple backs of his heels to the cap of his head which had been squeezed into the shape of a parking cone.
“A boy,” breathed his father when, finally, I brought him into my arms. My boyfriend had two daughters already, now he had a son. Had I done well? Did he love our baby? It seemed too pathetic to ask, but I was consumed with needing to know.
“Will you look at that,” said my boyfriend, grinning, crying. “His scrotum’s bigger than mine!”
Guiltily, I held my baby closer. I hadn’t imagined that he’d weigh anything, that he’d feel this solid. I was waiting for something to happen. “He looks just like you,” someone said. “He looks like you both.” He hadn’t cried yet, but Katie said it didn’t matter. I thought of Narcissus and his pond. I looked down and caught his eye. It was a bright black marble, unblinking and so penetrating that it was like staring at the sun and I had to look away.
It’s a decade later. We’re in an ambulance and I’m watching Charlie’s eyes, praying; praying to a God that my atheist parents assured me did not exist. Charlie’s pupils dilate as oxygen flows from the mask. I am assailed by a memory of my grandmother. She’s pale as wax, she’s laying her hand on her son’s coffin. “No-one should have to outlive their child,” she says. Love at first sight is mere romance compared to this.
When they loaded him onto the stretcher, after the emergency doctor - the too-young, too-pretty, hopeless, emergency doctor - had wrung her hands, unable to tell me why he couldn’t breathe, refusing to tell me that he would live, he stared at me with the same intensity as the day he was born.
The ambulance man smiles at me. We talk about Harry Potter because the new one’s due out tomorrow. I think: “Please God, don’t let him die before he’s read it.” I say: “You’ll be fine now,” and it’s hard not to look away because I don’t want him to see the doubt in my eyes.
On the day he was born, the Berlin Wall was breached. There was a big black headline on the front of the Evening Standard: ‘Great Day For Freedom, Charlie Comes Down.’ I’m boasting, ecstatic. Had the Wall remained, I explain, he would have been Moby, because that was top of our name-list, not Charlie, so, if only for that, he should be thankful for the collapse of communism.
The Registrar at the hospital had wanted to write his name as “Charles”. It’s possible to laugh now that Charlie’s been nebulized and stabilised. In fact, my husband, David, and I are verging on hysteria, everything’s suddenly so funny: the fact that the ambulance wouldn’t start, that the emergency doctor didn’t recognise a case of croup when she saw it. Charlie points to the Zed-bed set up next to his hospital bed. “Could we get a double?” he asks. “There’s no way my mum and dad will both fit in there,” and we collapse, giggling onto it.
As I lie in the dark, too rich in adrenaline for sleep (in any case they’re still checking Charlie’s blood pressure every hour), I think how I have slept in hospital, with both of my younger sons (each on their day of birth, but only once on purpose) but never before with Charlie. I can hear a baby crying, inconsolably it seems, further down the corridor. Charlie, awake again, turns his head on the pillow, and, whispering, asks me whether I really would have been so cruel as to name him Moby. “It was either that, or Fin,” I say, biting my lips, trying to contain my mirth. I tell him how his father and I didn’t know that he would be a boy until he was born. When they did the scan and we tried to see, not wanting to see, but trying all the same, joking and high at the first sighting of our baby, the scan-operator snapped: “We’re not here to make pretty pictures for you, you know.” I tell Charlie what his name would have been had he been a girl. “Ugh,” he says and I remember my cousin Melissa having much the same reaction. “Ugh, not Delphi,” she said. “Sounds like a feminine deodorant.”
It was different with David, when our first baby together was scanned. Things had moved on, ante-natal care seemed kinder somehow. Maybe it was just because it was a different hospital and Dr Child-catcher was nothing but a bad memory. Maybe it was because Charlie’s father and I had something about us that shrieked “irresponsible”, like a bubble over our heads announcing that we’d break apart before our son’s first birthday. Maybe everyone could see this bubble - Dr Child-catcher, the scan-nurse in the hospital, the woman who looked at me with sad eyes in Mothercare - who knows?
As David and I marvelled at the sight of our twenty-week-old fetus waving at us through a snow-storm, Bill, the scan-man, asked if we would like to know the sex. “Yes,” said David. “No,” said I. We decided that Bill would write it on a piece of paper to allow time for democracy. We could always destroy the paper if David could be persuaded not to cheat fate. Of course, the moment I hopped out of the car to buy milk on the way home, David peeked, and the moment I returned, I could tell that he had, the sneak.
“Sonny” that’s what Charlie wanted to call the little boy that everyone now knew we were having. I remember him, jaw set with grim determination, as he said: “If you won’t call the baby ‘Sonny’ he’ll have to be ‘Dead Salmon’.” At five years old the apple of my eye was finding it hard to adjust to the idea of a little brother.
“Come in and meet baby Joe,” we said when Charlie arrived at the hospital, clutching a fruit cake which had “Congratulations” piped on the top in icing. Joe was a little sleeping Buddha at my side. I hoped that the tu
bes that stretched from my arms to the drip wouldn’t give Charlie a fright. They looked like red liquorice bootlaces. I had to lie still and could only look at Joe from the corner of my eye.
“Hello little baby Dead Salmon,” said Charlie.
Joe had been born the night before, at home, and with such ease that Charlie, asleep upstairs, had not been woken. Until the sudden medical emergency, my concerns were that my new baby was rather fat and pink. “Do you think he’s lovely?” I whispered. “Are you pleased?” With echoes of Charlie’s birth, I was waiting for my husband’s rapture before I was free to focus on the love that I had once again failed to deliver at first sight. As it turned out, that was the least of my problems that night.
“You have a heart-shaped womb,” the consultant had told me when I came round from the anaesthetic on a hospital trolley.
“Thank you,” I said because there’s something about being told that you have a heart-shaped womb that makes it seem like a compliment. How romantic! Better than a kidney-shaped womb, or an ordinary round one, like a balloon.
“That’s why the placenta got stuck,” he said, and he explained that I’d lost almost five pints of blood before I’d reached the hospital.
I remembered him from the night before, from when they wheeled me into the operating theatre; new baby Joe somewhere else, not with me. The consultant’s face was looming and blurred then, close to mine then far, far, away, masked, only his eyes showing.
“Tell me I won’t die,” I had said, and his reply: “I’m not God.”
“Remember, there is no God.” My grandmother often told me about coming to see me on the day I was born. My brothers were there, leaning over the carry-cot, repeating the Mantra: Now Polly, Remember, There is no God. It was this Mantra, my brothers’ boyhood voices, that I heard as I sank into anaesthesia.