by Katie Hale
When I breathe in, the air is thin and wet. It smells like the ground. I close my eyes and go on breathing it until it feels like Mother is a long way away. I think I fall asleep. I don’t know what dreams I have, but when I open my eyes the sky looks grey and everything inside me feels flat and shaky.
*
I grow even bigger. I grow till I feel as if I’m too big for my own skin, and everything feels too heavy. My belly and chest grow rounder, like they’re trying to fill the space that Mother’s emptiness has left behind.
My baby moves and stretches as if she can feel the edges of her little world, as if she’s decided it isn’t big enough and she needs to be outside.
Mother says it won’t be long now. She says it in the same hidden voice she used when she told me the oranges were gone, which says she doesn’t want the baby to come but knows there’s nothing she can do to stop it.
I pack more food into the rucksack hidden under my bed, then I take it all out and put it back in again. I spend my days fidgeting, counting each one off on the tally on my wall.
They’re long, these days. Long and empty, and they prickle at me like wearing too many blankets. My skin is always hot and itching. I start to understand why waiting has the word weight in it, because it’s heavy, this long time of nothing happening. It takes a lot of effort to move, as if my arms and legs are made of blocks of wood too fat to lift. I wait. I weight.
*
It starts like this.
I’m getting ready for bed, washing my face and under my arms with the warm water from the wash bowl. The baby’s kicking, but the water feels smooth and soft, like a blanket after I’ve slept in it all night. I wash twice, to feel that soft water again, and as I rub my face in the towel to dry it, that’s when my body kicks back at the baby.
I drop the towel and grab the big roundness that’s now my belly as it kicks in at the baby again.
‘Mother!’
Her feet are up the stairs, fast, and I can feel my heartbeat right through me, fast to match them. Mother’s in the doorway. She looks at me once and says, ‘Downstairs. Now.’
I’m heavy with all the days of waiting, and so close to curling up in my comfortable little bed and letting myself sleep.
But Mother grabs the blankets and bundles them up in her arms. ‘It’s starting. Come on.’
So we go downstairs, Mother in front to keep me from falling, both of us stepping one careful step at a time.
I’m standing in the kitchen, now, just inside the door. It’s warm and yellow. The fire’s still flickering in the grate, and it almost feels as if everything is normal. I try to think these thoughts to my baby. I spread my hands over my belly and make pictures in my head of warmth and fire and comfy chairs. Then I try to think of these pictures flowing like the stream in summer, quiet and calm, from my head, down through my neck and shoulders, along my arms to my hands, and then into my belly so they can be pictures inside my baby’s head, too. Like this, I tell her, ‘It’ll be OK, it’ll be OK, it’ll be OK, it’ll be OK.’
‘Monster.’
My trousers are wet. I feel all the wetness fall out of me like blood. It soaks down the insides of my legs, and I want to tell Mother that I’m sorry, I didn’t need the toilet, I don’t know what happened, but she’s already bent in front of me, helping me peel off the wet clothes, till I’m standing in the kitchen wearing nothing, and even with the fire and my belly still hurting I feel cold.
‘Here.’ Mother helps me into a big T-shirt, then leads me to a space in front of the fire, where she’s pushed back the chairs and made a kind of bed out of a pile of blankets on the floor.
As soon as I lie down the kicking at my belly starts again, harder and harder, till it’s not like kicking any more but like the baby’s grabbing the bits inside of me and twisting and tightening and I cry out, and Mother kneels down beside me with a small towel which she dips in the wash-water on the stove and dabs against my forehead, but the water’s been on the stove too long so it burns and I jerk away from it.
I don’t know how long we stay there.
Mother puts more wood on the fire to keep it burning. The pain in my belly comes and goes, and all I want to do is sleep. But the floor is too hard, and if the baby’s going to come out then I can’t sleep, so I just lie there trying not to cry out every time it hurts.
I think about the mountain, how the silence at the top of it made it as if time didn’t exist. This is the same, lying here, even though there’s the fire-crackle noise, and me, and Mother, because there’s no time now, just hurt and wait and more hurt and weight until the baby’s ready to force her way through me into the outside world.
*
‘Push,’ says Mother.
I say, ‘Fuck.’
*
‘Push!’
‘Fuck.’ I spit the word out like a sharp stone, like Mother when she’s angry but worse. I spit out this word of Mother’s and I’m claiming it. I’m owning it, sharp and brutal, feeling it through every little bit of my body. ‘Fuck!’ I scream. ‘Fuck fuck fuck!’
‘Push,’ Mother urges.
I push. I push so hard it feels like my body’s going to rip apart.
‘That’s right,’ Mother says.
I push.
I push till I don’t even know any more if I am pushing, if I’m doing it myself or if the whole big round sun of me has vanished and now I’m just outwardness, I’m everything pushing and reaching – I don’t exist any more – I’m just push and force and pain, and when I scream Fuck! again and again I don’t even know if I can hear it, if it makes a sound or if my voice has been pushed out of me and there’s none of it left. I’m a tree, my thick branches are pushing up, my roots reaching down, all pushing out and I’m empty inside, there’s nothing there. I’m a kettle, I’m steam and it’s hot and it hurts and I’m an egg exploding and Mother’s hands on my arm aren’t there any more or if they are I can’t feel them. I’m smoke, I’m water, I’m a thing that can’t be held, I’m all force—
‘Push,’ says Mother, and I scream, ‘I am push!’ or at least I think I do, I’m not sure, and I turn myself into everything straining, like a fire trapped in a grate, like pushing up a chimney, I push and I feel the toilet parts tumble out of me and I think is this it, is this my baby, but it isn’t, and then the smell reaches my nose and it’s rich and sour and suddenly I know I’m still here, still human and not one of the dead people, I can feel my body again and the baby still inside me.
And Mother says, ‘Push,’ and I push and it hurts – fuck it hurts – and it’s out, or I think it’s out – but Mother says it’s just the head and for a second I think she means my baby’s just a head with no body, but then she says, ‘Just one more push,’ and I do, even though I think I can’t any more, I push and my baby is born.
My baby is born.
My breaths are short and loud and everything hurts, but I have a child, and I’m trying to sit up so I can see her between my legs, but Mother’s there, she’s in the way, she’s already a bridge between us. Then Mother picks up a knife and sticks it in my baby and I scream.
She’s holding my baby – there’s blood, they’re covered in it – and I think I might still be screaming, but then I see the red stub at my baby’s belly, which is what Mother must have cut, because my baby’s small face is screwed up and it’s her who screams. She opens her little mouth and she lets out this big scream, and it’s like she has claws, and with that scream her claws take hold and she pulls me towards her. And I want her, I’ve never wanted anything more. I want to hold her and press my nose to her and learn every little bit of her.
‘Here,’ Mother says, and she hands my baby to me. ‘It’s a boy.’
For a second I’m distracted by this new word. ‘A what?’
‘A boy. A baby man.’ She places my baby in my arms, so my hand is behind her small head, like the baby’s head I picked up in the City but softer, warmer, mine. There’s a little flap of skin between her legs, and she has
a wrinkle at the top of her nose. Her tiny fingers and toes curl and uncurl against my T-shirt. When her eyes are open, I don’t know if she’s looking at me or past me, but it feels as if she’s looking at me, because everything in me goes warm and happy, even the tired parts and everything that hurts.
Mother lifts my T-shirt so I’m holding my baby against my chest, and she helps me move so my baby’s mouth is next to the red-pink bump there, which Mother says is how I’ll feed her, the way the sheep fed the lamb.
‘When?’ I ask.
‘When he’s ready.’
I try to make sense of these words that are different for a baby man.
Mother watches my baby’s mouth making bubbles against my chest. ‘What will you call him?’
He. Him.
I hadn’t thought about how I would have to give my baby a name. How can I name her when I don’t know what she’ll be – what he’ll be?
I look down at this tiny person I’ve created. This baby man. This him.
I want to give him something, so that even though my baby’s now outside of my body, even though I won’t always be holding him like this, he can still have something from me to keep us connected. I think of the blanket I made, with all its tiny pieces, but wrapping him in it feels like putting a layer between us, and not the right gift. I think of the rucksack under my bed. I think of the smoke next to the sea and the other not-dead people who might be there, who we might be able to find. I make a picture of them and suddenly in the picture they have big hard hands, and their hands are covered in little black hairs and they’re holding my baby so tightly and pouring their strange unconnected words into him the way Mother poured her not-true words into me – and there are wolf-dogs in a circle of fog all around us, and the strange words are a layer between us even thicker than the blanket, thicker than the fog, and they’re so thick in the picture that I can’t even see through them any more to my baby.
My baby wriggles a bit in my arms and I cuddle him closer. His little mouth finds the red-pink bump on my chest and he closes around it and sucks, and I can’t help smiling. It’s as if this is his way of talking to me, not through Mother’s words or these new him-words, but through his mouth and my chest, as if every suck is telling me he wants to stay here with me, to keep being a part of me, no words, no other people, just my big sun-body and my baby’s tiny fragile one. The warmth from his sucking spreads through me like an egg yolk on hot toast, like we’re sinking into each other or rising around each other, and I don’t know where we separate, because for the moment we don’t. And the moment feels like it could go on for ever, like it doesn’t have any walls or fences around it, it just is, and nothing outside of it exists.
Me, sitting on a heap of blankets in front of the fire. My baby, his mouth pulling me out of myself through my chest. This is everything I need, everything there is.
I hold his small weight against my skin and the journey disappears. The rucksack under my bed shrinks till it’s just a picture in my head, and then isn’t even that, and the men on the bridge in the circle of fog are a long way away. I look at my baby’s wrinkled face, at the creases across his tummy, and wonder how I ever thought that I would need to leave.
I look across at Mother, sitting apart from us against the comfy chair, and I smile, because even though she is still empty, that doesn’t matter when everything else is full. I think about how I am a creator now, how I wanted my baby and so I made him become real. But then I remember how I thought pushing him out of me might turn me into one of the dead people, and how maybe it would have if Mother hadn’t helped, and I know I am also a survivor. We are both survivors, Mother and me, and we are both creators. Really, I think that Monster just means Monster and Mother just means Mother. I look at her, and my head is filled with pictures of my baby’s scrunched-up eyes, his delicate body.
I say, ‘We’re going to stay at the farm.’
We will stay here, all of us. There will be the farm to keep us safe from the other not-dead people, and there will be me and Mother to keep my baby alive. We will be the same and not the same, Mother and me, like we are two separate sides of a gully and there’s no bridge to separate us. Instead there’s my baby, filling the gully up and joining our two edges together.
I try to think this to him, through my chest and his small pink mouth. He doesn’t have any words yet, so I send him a picture of the Clinic where the seeds were stored, and the carrots in the field, and of things growing. I send a picture of the farm filled with people, and the City filled with people. Not the other not-dead people who made the smoke, or the men in the circle of fog on the bridge, but me and Mother and my baby and maybe new people. My people – mine because I will know them, because I will create them. This is what I’m going to give you, I think, except I try to think it in feelings not words – a feeling of pushing outwards and overflowing like a full cup.
Everything, I think. Everything.
*
Light comes slowly through the kitchen window. There is another day, a day for me, and my baby, and for Mother.
I am not afraid the way Mother is always afraid, of things which might or might not be there, or of things which are there but we can do nothing about. I know what is outside the farm and the fields and the City, and I just decide to leave it there. I smile again at Mother, and Mother half-smiles back at me. Already the gully is less deep.
My baby’s eyes start to close. He breathes small breaths that make his whole body move.
I tell them, ‘There will be so many days.’
*
My baby sleeps, and wriggles, and sucks milk from the red-pink bumps on my chest. The parts of me where I pushed him out start to hurt a little bit less.
Mother says I’m healing. She says this means getting better, like when my bedroom door handle broke and she fixed it to make it the way it was before. But I’m not going back to the way I was before, and anyway I don’t think that’s what healing really means, because Mother says her wolf-dog bite is healed, but she still has pink marks on her leg, so maybe healing really means making something different. Maybe getting better doesn’t mean going back to how it used to be, but moving forwards instead – like when Mother taught me how to build up the walls around the field or how to look for tools in the City, and I learned more and more till Mother said I was better at it.
I want to explain this to my baby, but even if he knew what words meant, he could never understand healing because there was never any before for him, so how can he know what I mean by after? So I show him the things that are now instead. I show him things that are here.
*
Mother goes to the City to collect more food. I stay at the farm and feed my baby. Every day he gets a little bit bigger. He makes small noises. His tiny fingers learn to grab and hold on.
*
I stand in the yard with my baby wrapped in a blanket and held up against my chest, and I show him the chickens and their scratting. I make clucking noises in his ear. He looks across my shoulder and I show him the barn, where in the winter we store food and sheep. The days are already getting shorter and colder. I cuddle him close and teach him about warmth.
In the kitchen, Mother is making something she calls an automaton, where she’ll be able to turn a handle and a little model of a chick will peck at a little model of a seed. She says she’s making it for my baby.
I put my face to his neck, where he smells of me and milk and sour things. I lean him back so he stares up at me from my arms. His eyes are warm and deep like full cups of tea. Ever since he was born, I’ve felt like I’m falling.
*
‘Look,’ I say, as I show him the place by the fire where Mother kept us alive as I pushed him out of me and he became not just a picture in my head. ‘This is where we made you real.’
Mother looks up from her tools and painted bits of wood. She looks at me and she looks at my baby, and her face is a bit less like crossed arms. I smile. My baby’s lips make bubbles and his fingers curl at the bl
anket.
He makes me think of the mountain – how the noise stopped and there was no start and no ending, but just one big everything and being able to see right to the edges of the sky. How I could go anywhere but at the same time be happy right there. How there would always be more time.
‘I’ve thought of a name for you,’ I tell him.
My voice is quiet and at the same time is the only thing in the room.
He looks at me till the words disappear because between us we don’t need them, because words can be empty and everything about my baby is full. I look at him and he looks at me, till we grow into each other and then out, till there’s nothing but my baby and my baby is everything, the farm and the fields and the City, and Mother and the sea. He goes right to the edges of the world, and the world keeps on going for ever.
I say, ‘I’m going to call you Silence.’
Acknowledgements
There are so many people flitting invisibly through the pages of this book, and huge thanks go out to all of them. To Lucy Luck at C&W, whose unfailing energy and positivity have kept me writing: thank you. Thank you to Jo Dingley at Canongate, for having faith in Monster and in me, and to Megan Reid for insightful comments on the manuscript. Thank you also to the rest of the Canongate team, for supporting me and making me feel welcome right from the start.
The creation of this book has been a journey which I would not have set out on without the support of Penguin Random House and the WriteNow scheme. Thank you to Tom Avery for seeing the book’s potential when it was still just a sliver of an extract, and to Siena Parker for supporting my development as a writer. Thank you as well to Jacob Sam-La Rose at Flipped Eye for first flagging up the opportunity.
My thanks go out to the rest of my WriteNow family, for the shared joys and for the support during moments of midnight anguish. Thank you to Nelson Abbey, Nazneen Ahmed, Charlene Alcott, Emma Smith-Barton, Christine Brougham, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Manjeet Mann, Emma Morgan, Rebecca Pizzey, Geraldine Quigley and Ben Wilson. Thanks also to Polly Atkin, for her willingness to celebrate good news over drinks and a pizza.