by Katie Hale
‘Did you get the oranges?’
She rubs a hand across her forehead. ‘There weren’t any.’
I don’t believe her. Mother didn’t want me to have oranges. I would have walked for them myself, but she said no, so I let her go without me, and now I have no oranges.
‘Why not?’
I make a picture of the orangery in my head, filled with bright fruits and that smell of hot earth, and Mother standing in the middle of it, deciding not to bring anything back – but I can’t make the picture stick. So I make another instead, where there really are no oranges. I make a picture where the stiff glass door is open, and instead of oranges, the branches are covered with the green ends of twigs, as if more hands than I know how to count have reached up to pick the fruit and carried it away. And in this other picture, Mother goes from tree to tree, searching, touching her fingers to the green bumps on the highest, most difficult to reach branches where the oranges used to be. In this other picture, a small breeze makes Mother’s hair lift and wave like long grass, and there’s the smell of smoke from the fire by the sea.
‘Why not?’ I ask again.
She watches the kitchen fire flickering. Her hand shakes. She says, ‘I don’t know,’ but her eyes are like the stones in the field that clang against our tools and won’t let us dig past them.
Even now her words still carry lies. Mother says lies are something you can fall for, and I know what she means because Mother is empty and emptiness is something you can tumble into. She is not my creator. She is not kind. She is not even brave enough to say whether the pictures in my head are real.
I can feel myself getting angry, but I hold on. And what I hold on to are the bright thoughts of my child. I hold on to our journey to the mountain and then to the edge of the land. And I hold on to the rucksack in my bedroom.
So when Mother speaks again, when she says, ‘Monster, listen . . .’ I just shrug and turn away from her. And she knows that’s the end of the conversation, because she sits down on one of the hard chairs and closes her eyes till her hand stops shaking, and that is how Mother’s second silence begins.
*
Mother is silent for weeks. Not silent the way the mountain was silent, or the way she went silent when I told her about the Clinic. Mother is silent on the inside. I can see the silence through her eyes. She doesn’t say very much, but when she speaks it’s as if her words have nothing behind them, as if everything that was Mother has dropped away. I think what I can see in her is the emptiness.
And I’m glad I can see it, because it helps me remember that it’s there.
*
Every day I can do less before I need to rest. On days Mother goes to the City, I stay at the farm and think about leaving. I take everything out of my rucksack and put it in again in a different order.
On the other days, it’s as though one of us is the sea and one of us is the ground, and there’s always this twisting line between us. Mother digs up food from the field and plants the summer seeds, like cabbages and lettuces and other green things. More and more, she stops working at small noises, or even at no noise at all, and she looks all around as if there might be a fox or a wolf-dog coming, but there never is. Sometimes I stand next to her and pick the vegetables up from the ground or pass her seeds to plant, but mostly I stay in the yard, or somewhere else close to the house where I can hear the stream. I like how the sound of it never stops. I like how it’s as if it’s trying to speak and cover up Mother’s shaky new silence, but how it never says any actual words.
When it’s too hot to be outside or in the kitchen by the fire, I sit in the barn with the door open so I can see the chickens in the yard. Even when it’s sunny, the inside of the barn is dark and cold and smells a bit of chicken mess, even though the chickens don’t live in here any more. I like the way the dark means that I can look right at things and not be able to see them properly, but then if I look right at something else, all the things on the edges suddenly have shapes again, but not always their proper shapes, so I can make pictures in my head where everything in the barn is the shape of a baby waiting to be born.
*
In the evenings, I sit by the fire and try to feel my own bigness. I try to work out if I feel heavier than yesterday.
Mother sits on my cushion on the floor, and her body is like the string we use to tie the bean poles, all pulled tight.
*
On the afternoon that it rains, fat heavy drops splash noisily in the yard. I want to stand outside in it, with my head back and my mouth open, but Mother says no. So we sit separately in the kitchen, and I watch her fixing the edge of a sheet in the window-light. Her hands are always busy now, always making something or mending, as if they have their own minds and she wants to keep their minds distracted.
I rub a hand across my big round belly.
‘Is it kicking?’ Mother’s voice is as tight as her body.
‘She’s just getting herself comfortable.’
She looks at my belly and her eyes are like a foggy morning. She looks far away and forgotten.
For a moment I want to walk over to her, to stand between her and the grey window-light, lift up my shirt and say, Look, here it is. Here’s my belly. Here’s my child. I want her to put her rough hand on my glowing belly and I want to hold her there till the baby moves. I want to tell her, You are a part of this. I’m the soil that this child grows in, but you’re the rain and the sunshine and the coloured ribbons that flutter from the post to scare away the birds. And even though your words are empty, you’re my Mother and I’m your Monster.
But that is not the promise I made to myself, and Mother is not like Mother any more.
The baby kicks. Her kick sends that warmth rushing through me, right from my big toes to my elastic chest, up to the roots of my hair. I think it spills into my eyes, too, and makes them shine like torches, because Mother’s own fog-filled eyes turn back to her sheet.
I make myself remember the top of the mountain, how the world from up there was so big that I could explore it all and never run out of new things to know, that feeling that without Mother I could fly across it like a bird or walk on quiet paws like a wolf-dog.
But there is one thing I still need her for: ‘Mother? What happens when the baby’s ready to come out?’
She looks up, the fog clearing a little, as though she’s found a way back through to the sun – my sun.
I try again. ‘What I mean is, how?’
Mother lays down her sheet so all her attention is on me. For a moment it’s like it used to be, when she would teach me words and how to peel and boil potatoes and how to eat with cutlery and wash myself. Then the fire spits and Mother makes a small jumpy movement at the noise.
‘You’ll push the baby out,’ she says, and she isn’t looking at me but at the bit of wall behind my head. ‘It will come out of your belly through your vagina.’
It isn’t a word I know – it sounds soft and flabby, like a flap of plastic blowing in the wind.
‘The bit between your legs.’
The bit between my legs – where the shiny woman looked at me, where I pushed the seeds to plant my child inside me, where my child will squeeze out of me to begin her life by my side. All the things that pull me apart from Mother. All the things that make me different. I didn’t know it had a name, but I suppose everything has one.
I put my hand there. It seems too small to let a child pass through.
‘Will I die when the child comes out?’
Mother says, ‘No,’ but she says it quickly, like she’s trying to stop another word coming out instead.
I pick and pull at the hole in the comfy chair.
‘I’ll help you. I won’t let anything happen to you.’ She does this little smile that’s more sad than happy and doesn’t really unfog her face. ‘You’re a survivor, Monster.’
I decide Mother is telling the truth. What I mean is, I think she’s saying that she hopes nothing bad will happen, and that she’ll try to
help me as much as she can, even though she doesn’t know how much that is.
‘Will it hurt?’ I ask.
‘Yes.’
‘OK.’ I look back at the fire, trying to imagine the kind of hurt that comes from a child pushing through the space between my legs.
Mother has a thing she sometimes says, which is, ‘No pain, no gain’, which means if you want to make something, you have to be OK with it hurting, like when we had to rebuild the chicken shed and everything ached at the end of the day.
So I’m glad that it’ll hurt when the child comes out, because it means I’ll be creating something all of my own. It doesn’t matter what Mother says – I won’t just be a survivor any more, I’ll be a creator. I’ll be a Monster and a Mother, both at the same time.
I sit apart from Mother and think these silent thoughts to my baby.
*
Whenever Mother goes to the City, she likes to pack her rucksack the way she taught me, with the things she needs closest to the top. But after I went away to the mountain and then came back again, I learned to pack all the heavy things in the middle, so the rucksack fits against my back and doesn’t pull as much on my shoulders. What I mean is, I pack my bag by weight instead of by need.
I come upstairs one night and the rucksack under my bed feels wrong. When I put it on, it drags and rubs against the bottom of my back. Even before I open it, I know Mother has been through it. I make a picture of it in my head, of the rucksack open and all the things inside it laid out on top of my blanket, and of Mother’s big hands moving across them.
I watch Mother’s hands chopping carrots with the small knife while I peel the skins from three onions. Her fingers are bony and covered in small marks. She doesn’t look up till I’ve finished cutting the onions into small pieces on my own board, and even then she only looks as far as my hands.
She waits. Then she reaches across and takes hold of them.
Mother’s hands feel rough in mine, like something from outside. She is here and not here, like the clock when the swinging metal circle gets stuck, and the quiet it makes by not tickerting is just a different kind of noise, the way not speaking can sometimes be just as loud as saying words. Mother has mostly been not speaking since she came back from the orangery.
‘It’s all changed,’ says Mother, in a quiet voice that makes me think of ash settling in the grate. She says it to my hands, as if my hands aren’t part of me and might have changed things by themselves. Then she goes back to chopping the carrots, slowly, with her hard, grey hands.
*
Later, Mother sits on the cushion against the wall with her arms folded and face crossed and her eyes almost closed. I watch the shapes in the kitchen fire and think about the soft woman. I try to push at the edges of what I remember. I think about the emptiness inside Mother, and I concentrate on the thought of her not being there.
The back of my neck prickles like wolf-dogs are watching, but I’m ready for it so I can ignore it. I make a picture in my head of me standing on the bridge with the soft woman, before she puts me on the railing. In the picture, we’re inside the circle which is inside the fog, and the fog is all around us. Then I screw up my eyes and try to make myself see through the fog because then I might remember what comes before this. What comes before the railing and the bridge and the soft woman and me? I try and try, but the fog just gets thicker, till it’s almost solid like the windows we sometimes find in the City, made of glass but painted white so we can’t see through.
Mother’s breathing gets louder and slower as she falls asleep. A log tumbles in the grate, sending up sparks.
I shut my eyes and make another picture, of the circle in the fog and of me sitting on the railing in the middle of it, alone, after the soft woman has fallen.
The bridge and the railing are bigger without the soft woman, and the me in the picture is smaller. The railing is cold and my hands hurt from holding onto it so tightly. I sit there for a long time, with a lump of something in my throat like I’ve swallowed without chewing, too afraid of falling to try to get down.
The fog disappears. The me on the railing is trembling right through my body, and the me by the fire is too, because even though I know there are no wolf-dogs watching, it still feels as though there are. The back of my neck is prickling and I can hear my heart thudding like a gate in the wind – and then there’s a voice, deeper than my voice or Mother’s voice. A man’s voice. I don’t know how I know it’s a man’s voice, I just do, the way I knew about the sea and the Clinic, but it says some things I don’t understand, and the picture-in-my-head me tries to speak. I open my mouth and my spit makes a gargling sound at the back of my throat and I can’t think of any words to say so I shut my mouth again, and I don’t open it, and I can feel my words leaving me already – though maybe that is just the memory and not how it really was.
Two hands grab my chest. They lift me up off the railing. Suddenly I’m hanging over the gully and it’s too far down even to see where the soft woman landed, and the hands are going to drop me but they don’t – they lift me back over the railing as if they’re going to put me down on the bridge, but they don’t do that either. The hands pass me to another pair of hands, and these ones are bigger than the first pair and harder and covered in thick black hairs. The hands are tight around my chest and I want to wriggle away but I don’t want them to throw me over the edge and my voice has forgotten how to shout. Then the hands become arms and the arms are around my middle and squashing me against another chest, and this chest smells of sweat and not washing and something sharp like chicken mess, and everything inside of me is wriggling and I can taste something like sick that I force back down – and the second man says something and laughs and the chest and the arms around me rumble like thunder and my heart is thudding thudding thudding and I think the men are wolf-dogs and I can’t speak and I don’t think I can breathe—
I open my eyes. I stare at the shapes in the fire till my head hurts from the brightness of it. I make a picture of the bridge over the gully covered in fog, so all I can see is the clear circle where the men are holding me. I try to push the men out of the circle so they’re back in the hidden part of my head, but they won’t go. I try to pull the fog in so that it covers everything in the picture, but I can’t do that either. I don’t know how.
I sit for a long time, watching the flames.
I think about how they took my words away, how the soft woman fell from the bridge and my words fell with her, or how maybe the men squeezed them out when they grabbed me with their big hard hands. There must be so much I don’t remember. Maybe it’s like when we killed the sheep, and Mother said we had to not let it see the knife, so it wouldn’t be afraid. Maybe it’s better I don’t remember, because I couldn’t change it anyway. But even when the sheep couldn’t see the knife, it still knew what was going to happen and it was still afraid.
I think instead about my baby. I think about her growing in my belly like a carrot seed in soil. I think about the small circle of her world, how that is all she needs for now. I think about the bigness of everything outside of her, and I put a circle of fog around us.
Mother is still asleep on the cushion on the floor. I look at her and then I look away from her. The fire is quieter now, but I can still hear the clock tickerting and even though it’s not any louder than it was yesterday or the day before, it won’t leave me alone. I feel like I’m inside a snail shell and the clock is one of the small birds picking me up in its beak and bashing me against the window-shelf over and over, and even when I put my hands over my ears I can still hear it, like it’s inside my head with the picture of the men holding me in the circle of fog on the bridge. And suddenly I know what Mother means when she looks at the clock and says the time is wrong, because the clock keeps on saying its small noises as if time is always something to talk about, but sometimes time just is, and there are no words to fill it with because sometimes it’s better to leave a circle empty.
I get up from my cus
hion and walk over to the clock. Inside its glass cupboard, the metal circle is swinging from side to side to side to side. The noise over here is even louder, as if it’s supposed to stay inside its little cupboard but somehow it’s managed to get out and is shouting about it as loudly as it can.
I reach up to the little people on top of the clock, the man and the woman that look as though they would snap if I dusted them too hard. I pull at the little man figure, but the wood must be thicker than it looks, because I can’t break it. I open the cupboard door and grab the metal circle. I push it backwards into the hole it sometimes gets stuck in before Mother sets it going again, and I shut the cupboard door.
The noise when it’s not tickerting is even louder than when it was, but it’s a different kind of noise. It’s the kind that’s so loud it lets my head feel empty, like I don’t have to make pictures to fill it with. I sit back on my cushion and let this new loudness sit inside me, like it’s growing strong and beautiful in my head the way my baby is growing strong and beautiful in my belly. I watch the fire without making the shapes in the flames into pictures, and I think about the top of the mountain. I put my hands on my belly and feel my baby moving inside me.
*
The sky is bright and dry, but the sun isn’t burning as hot today. I take the blankets outside to sit on the big rock at the edge of the vegetable rows and watch Mother work.
She looks small against the huge field. She’s all angles and thinness. When she bends over I can see all the bumps of her backbone through her jumper. I never noticed her getting smaller. I wonder if she’s always been like that.
I stretch my hands across my big thighs and press into them. If I do this it stops them hurting so much. They don’t hurt like a sudden hurt, like cutting my thumb on the knife or banging my foot. It’s a quiet hurt, one that’s always there now, like the quiet that now lives in the kitchen where the noise of the clock used to be.