Hard Word

by John Clanchy

  Mother can get like that, not just fixed in a thought, or on a word, but physically, mid-step almost, and stay there, rigid, until someone finds her, and re-activates her. And if she’s not found quickly enough, it’s not just her mind that’s frozen but her whole body, and she has to spend the next morning in physio, just getting the stiffness out of her limbs. And thinking of this, I’m aware of an anxiety that comes to me, and I have to push away more often than I care to admit. What if Miriam ever … ? One chance in five, the specialist told her. Or better. One in four. The dopey bastard. She laughed when she told me, but I know she thinks about it. And, seeing Mother – and her, together – every day, I can’t help doing the same.

  ‘Darling,’ I say now, to break my spell as well as hers. ‘A penny for your thoughts.’

  ‘Mmm?’ she says.

  ‘A penny –’

  ‘Is that all?’ She drops her leg back to the floor, and stretches, and all the muscles and tendons in her back are visible, moving, and I’m amazed, again, at the power there is in her body. And her mind. ‘I’m a pretty cheap fuck, then, aren’t I?’ she says.

  ‘Come here,’ I say then, and reach for her arm.

  ‘Philip,’ she says, and something in her voice stops my arm in mid-reach. ‘Have you ever thought …’ she starts. ‘Have you ever caught yourself thinking, what if Miriam were to get this too? What if she –?’

  ‘Darling,’ I say, and this time I do touch her. Her skin is warm. I catch the round muscle of her arm just below the shoulder, and my brain, as usual, is about to switch off completely.

  ‘No, seriously,’ she says, resisting the slight pull I’ve given her. ‘Have you ever thought about it?’

  ‘No,’ I say, and in the moment I say it, I haven’t, not for the base reason that I want to fuck her, and now, and all this is getting in the way, but because I hear the anxiety and fear in her voice, and I’d do anything I could to expunge that – even lie to her. It’s false, I know that, even as I say it. It’s establishing bad faith with her – in a way that she’d never do with me – but I don’t know what else to say. It’s all too complicated.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she says. Still not turning.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Then you’re a liar,’ she says. Not antagonistically at all. Just telling me she knows, but it doesn’t matter.

  ‘Look, darling,’ I say. ‘You’re thirty-nine, you’re in perfect health. Who knows what in God’s name is going to happen to any of us by the time you reach Mother’s age? It’s another thirty years. Thirty, darling. We’ll probably all be nuclear ash by then, I’ll have had my third triple by-pass –’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she says, and turns at last. ‘You’re off butter and cream by breakfast.’ And as she says this, and turns to me, her breasts fill my gaze – this close up, they fill my entire visual universe – and I think the magazines may be right after all. ‘Philip …’ she says.

  ‘What now?’ I say as she clambers, still naked – which is how she still sleeps – in beside me.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ she says. ‘Beforehand. Otherwise, you won’t hear it.’

  ‘I’ll hear it.’

  ‘You’ll be asleep.’

  ‘I’ll hear it in my sleep.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Stay there and listen.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. The vessels in my ears are already surging with blood, and I hear nothing but the soft swish of her legs against the cotton of the sheets. But I try, I do try.

  ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you,’ she says. And the seriousness of her voice has a sudden, wilting effect. My blood falls back, and I find I can hear again.

  ‘Ten days ago,’ she says, ‘I found something in the drawer of the dresser over there that shouldn’t have been there.’

  Oh, God, I think. What? Photos? Love letters? They must be old, because I’ve been faithful to Miriam since we married. But, even so, old things can still hurt – maybe it’s from the time we first started going out and I hadn’t yet dropped all other contacts. But I thought I’d got rid of all that. I can see her face now, her eyes and mouth, and I know this thing – whatever it is, she’s found – is worrying her profoundly. I reach out a hand to touch her face, in reassurance, but she takes and holds my palm and fingers – still away from her.

  ‘Philip, when I tell you,’ she says, ‘please don’t just say, It’s up to you, it’s your decision.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re frightening me,’ I say. ‘What is it? What did you find?’

  ‘Three pills.’

  ‘You found three pills, and you’re scaring the shit out of me?’

  ‘Three Pills.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I don’t know how it happened. I’m always so careful. I always take mine out at the same time as I give Mother her night pills. But I got so tired and stressed for a week there, when we had no sitter –’

  ‘Darling, don’t blame yourself,’ I say. ‘These things happen. So easily. Christ, if I had to take a pill every night, I’d end the month with fifteen in the packet.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re a man.’

  ‘There you go again.’

  ‘Any pills you take, or don’t, you don’t have to live with the consequences in the same way.’

  ‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘what does it matter? Three Pills, so what? When you said something that shouldn’t have been there, I was thinking, Jesus, it could be anything –’

  ‘But that’s only half of it.’

  ‘Oh? So what’s the other half?’

  ‘Something else hasn’t happened that should have.’

  ‘But, darling,’ I say, ‘that could mean anything. You know that. The stress you’re under.’

  ‘Philip, you know how regular I am. I never miss. Never. Or, put it this way, I’ve missed twice in my adult life. One miss is called Laura –’

  ‘And the other Katie.’

  ‘Philip, I know I’m pregnant. I know. I even know the night it happened.’

  When she says this, I lie back and think for a moment. The heat of a special night comes back: ‘That night I returned from Melbourne?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And Mother re-discovered the beeper?’

  ‘You thought you’d lost your stroke. But you hadn’t.’

  ‘God,’ I say.

  ‘Philip? Are you upset?’

  ‘No, darling.’ And this time she does move towards me, let me put my arms around her.

  ‘So? What are we going to do?’

  ‘It kind of complicates things.’

  ‘I knew you’d say that.’

  ‘It’s just a bit unexpected …’

  ‘Yes.’

  We lie there for a moment, holding one another, her leg now laid across mine, and we think our separate thoughts.

  ‘Well –’ I say eventually.

  ‘Don’t say it,’ she says. And I feel her body stiffen.

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘That it’s up to me. That it’s my decision and you’ll support me whatever happens. I want to know what you think. What you really think.’

  Jesus, I think, this is difficult. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Mother, the problems with sitters, the stress Miriam’s under. On the other hand, Katie’s six, Miriam’s desperate for a son.

  ‘You’ve always wanted a son,’ I say.

  ‘Philip,’ she says, ‘what do you want?’

  I take a deep breath. ‘I want a son too,’ I say. ‘I just hadn’t –’

  ‘It doesn’t come gender-tagged,’ Miriam says, ‘or at least not the way we’ve done it. It may be a Cordelia.’

  ‘It’ll be a son,’ I say. I don’t know why I say this, on the basis of no evidence. It’s out before I think it.

  ‘Then you do want it?’

  ‘Darling, of course I do,’ I say. Not quite sure what the it is. But Miriam takes my words for whatever she wants, and I start to breathe again.

  ‘You hadn’t planned this?’ I sa
y jokingly, and I feel the tension going out of Miriam’s body.

  ‘No-o,’ she says, pinching the skin under my ribs. ‘What made you say that?’

  ‘All these ideas about doing something else when the term ended? Not teaching for a while, or not teaching at the college anyway. Doing something else …’

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘How things come together. No, I’d never thought of that. I was thinking of something else completely, maybe doing some private work, tutoring or something, something that would give me more flexibility. I suppose I was vaguely thinking that if I worked less, and sometimes from home, it would give me a bit more time with Mother, instead of just fitting her in. You don’t think my subconscious arranged it all, do you? Made me forget the pills?’

  ‘Do a Mother, you mean?’

  ‘Oh God,’ Miriam says. ‘I’d never thought of that, either.’ She laughs shortly. ‘It’s crazy, isn’t it? Here I am, taking away all Mother’s pills, so that she won’t forget them or overdose herself –’

  ‘When all the time you’re secretly engineering your own oestrogen rush.’

  ‘Philip,’ she says, and my chest tightens involuntarily, ‘you do think it’s a good idea? To go on with it, now it’s happened?’

  And I want to say to her – Well, as you said yourself, it’s the woman who’s got to live with the consequences – but I choke the words off and think, what the hell anyway. It’s what Miriam wants.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I do.’

  She says nothing for a moment, but her arms tighten around my ribs. ‘Philip,’ she says, and her voice is changed utterly. It’s arch now, and seductive. ‘It doesn’t matter any more.’

  ‘What doesn’t?’

  ‘When we do it, or how. It’s decided. We can forget the Pills. Now.’

  ‘You don’t think you should get a test done first?’

  ‘There’s no need,’ she says. ‘I know.’ And she rolls over on her back, drawing me on top of her.

  ‘You haven’t …’ I say, kissing the lobe of her ear. ‘You haven’t been so keen recently.’

  ‘I am now,’ she says.

  Later, as we join, her heat is intense, and I imagine, as soon as I enter her, I touch the egg already swelling inside her.

  ‘A son,’ she says, uncannily guessing my thought. ‘Don’t you feel him?’

  Laura

  I was angry as hell at Mum at the start when I asked whether Philip – that’s my Philip – could come to the barbecue, and she said no, she really wanted me to meet these women and she didn’t want me just standing about wrapped round Philip and looking like a barber’s pole.

  ‘Barber’s pole,’ I snorted back, but of course I knew what she was talking about. She’d seen me kissing Philip the day before when he called in after his cricket match and was still in his whites, and at the time I did have one leg curled around his and was wearing my red jeans, and to someone just going past my door it must have looked –

  ‘Peppermint stick, then,’ Mum said in her bright voice. ‘If you prefer.’ But I could tell from the way she was belting the cushions on the sofa – she wasn’t just plumping them or anything, she was really pulverizing them – that there was no way she was going to change her mind. ‘The point is,’ she said, ‘today’s one day I’m really going to need your help, darling. And I can’t afford to have you –’

  ‘Vanishing –’ I say it for her. ‘Skiving off.

  ‘Every time my back is turned.’

  And her back is turned right at that moment, so at least I can feel better by poking my tongue out at it.

  Although right now, the way this barbecue’s turning out, I’m actually glad she made the decision she did, and Philip couldn’t come after all.

  Mum, of course, has been racing round like a headless chook since about fourteen hours before dawn, getting everything ready, and you learn to keep right out of her sight at times like this because otherwise you find yourself mowing the carpet till the threads show through cos every time she passes you – even if your arms are already falling off and you’re deafened by the Hoover and won’t ever be able to listen to music properly again – she sees all these spots and bits you’ve missed and you have to do it all over again …

  And this goes on till you think you can see the floorboards rising up through the carpet, and even if you finish it and empty the Hoover and sneak it back in the cupboard when you know she’s just dashed out to the Mall for another hundred loaves of bread, when there are only fifteen people coming anyway, hoping she won’t remember you were even hoovering in the first place – ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ as Grandma Vera used to say when she used to say things you could understand – then it hardly matters because she’s got you rushing out to the yard to make sure Philip’s arranged the drinks, and all kinds, not just punch and gin and wine and beer like he likes but juices and things because most of them won’t drink alcohol – and that he’s not just standing over the smoke of the barbecue and dreaming. And while you’re at it – ‘Lau-ra – going to find out where Grandma Vera and Katie are, and what they’re up to, and why they’re being so quiet and helpful instead of messing everything up as usual, and does that mean that, if they’re not now, they will later when it really counts. So that by the time the barbecue starts and people are arriving, you’re exhausted and only want to go and lie on your bed and sleep, and never go to another barbecue in your life. Or not one run by your mother.

  Anyway, it’s a lovely day, the sun’s shining and all that blah, and actually I’m pleased for Mum because it obviously means so much to her, though I can’t understand why because these are only her students, and if one of our teachers ever gave us a barbecue – joke! – we’d get there and they’d say, here’s a glass of milk and a biscuit and go and stand over there in the corner of the yard and don’t talk and while you’re there, you can start on those weeds, and if you behave yourself and weed the whole garden – which’d be about forty acres – by the time it’s dark, we’ll give you a cold sausage to eat on your way home …

  But it does – mean a lot to Mum, I mean – and she’s as nervous as if she’s going to have a baby or something.

  The first two people to arrive are this beautiful Indian lady in a sari that’s as red as red, and she’s got this red spot on her forehead as well, and I could die just looking at her, and I’m going to drop piano and do that Indian dancing where you learn to turn your fingers back on themselves so you can almost scratch the back of your wrist without using your other hand. Mum says her name is Shamila, and she just smiles and looks at me, and that makes me feel just soo -, I don’t know.

  And next to her, who’d driven her, is this other lady, who I really like too, only she’s a bit weird – and she’s pretty and that, and she’s dark like an indian, that’s with a small i, but not beautiful like Shamila who’s a proper Indian – and she goes … and I swear this is the way she speaks, like she’s a policeman or a general or something:

  ‘This,’ she goes, ‘is my daughter.’

  And she means me, and Mum just breaks into peals of laughter, but the woman – and her name’s Maria – she says to Mum, ‘No, I am serious. When I go home, I take this girl with me.’

  ‘Okay,’ Mum says, ‘sure, you take her.’

  And then this Maria, who comes from Chile, says to me, ‘Come here,’ and the real Indian woman’s still just standing there, smiling, beside us, but so perfectly still that she takes up no space at all and almost isn’t there, if that makes any sense, but Maria, when I get near her, she grabs me – and all the other women, when they come, do the same. All these Turks and women in scarves and headdresses and things, all amazing colours – ‘Festival best,’ Mum whispers, and ohs and ahs over each of them as they come in, and I can see she’s thinking she’s spent so much time on ordering Katie and me down the Mall and back, she hasn’t thought about her own clothes but just put on a clean white shirt and her blue slacks and gold sandals and no make-up – when did she start we
aring no make-up? – and now she’s wondering if she’s under-dressed, and will they be offended cos they all look as though they’re expecting Princess Di, if she wasn’t already dead, to show up but all of them do the same thing – to me, first, and then even to Grandma Vera and Katie when they come out of Grandma’s flat to see what the noise is all about – and that is, they grab hold of you and feel and poke you all over, I’m not exaggerating, like you were a chicken in the supermarket or an avocado and they couldn’t decide if you were a bit too hard or a bit too soft and had to explore every bit before they decided.

  And they don’t just go for your arms and neck and face and things. The first woman who did it – Maria – I thought she must be blind or something the way they put their fingers all over you, and they’re going coo coo or tt-tt as they do it, and two or three at a time when the women in scarves did it, and they are like a lot of budgies or doves or something, and cooing Isn’t she? and Isn’t she? and nodding and agreeing but never saying Isn’t she what –? and one of them, I thought she was going to put her fingers in my mouth and feel my teeth for a moment. And then they nod at each other again, and look at my legs and walk round me like I was a racehorse and they had to see if my fetlocks would last or something, and even then they don’t let go but just stand there talking to someone else as if they’ve forgotten you even exist for the moment, but will get back to you later when they’re ready, and in the meantime you can just stand there, and sometimes two of them have got hold of you at once, one by each hand, and you’re taller than them already anyway but they’re much heavier, and you start to feel like Samson between two pillars and try and make yourself smaller by bobbing down a bit, except you know Mum will come past and say, ‘Stand up straight, Laura, it’s not good for your posture to slump.’ And you can’t win, and give up.