The pram looked almost jolly as it capered away down the slope. You could imagine the jaunty kind of music that would have accompanied it in a silent film. There was only a single pedestrian on that side of the street at the time and, when he saw the pram coming, he stepped considerately out of its way. Later, once the story was all over the news, he would wonder how it was possible that he had been so absorbed—his mobile phone close and hot on his ear—that he had failed to properly register what it was that rollicked towards him down the gradient of the pavement. He might easily have caught it, but it rolled straight past him, down towards the intersection where stopped cars waited for the green light that came at the split second the pram hopped the curb and trundled out onto the road. Baby Cleo, if she had looked the right way, would have seen a shield wall of gleaming chrome.
By the following day almost everyone had an opinion. Of the people who knew Liv, some shook their heads and said that she had always been the unstable one out of those two girls; you only had think back to her eighteenth birthday party. But others said what happened at the party was just a bit of a laugh. For goodness sake, she was young and beautiful and talented—a little wild along with it, maybe, but not the sort to harm her own child.
Every few hours in those early days after the accident, Lauren would find herself drawn to the computer screen, looking for answers in the places she had been trained to find them. On every site that her searches uncovered, the pictures were exactly the same: there was the misshapen pram, the woman driver with her big, black sunglasses and her hands over her mouth, the paramedics on their knees in the street with their masks and tubes and fold-out toolboxes. Between their bodies were glimpses of terry towelling, cotton, skin.
Beneath the pictures were the reports—the same scant details worked through in slightly different phrasing—and, beneath those, there were chat threads that went on for pages. Sceptics said Liv had staged the whole thing, childless women said she hadn’t deserved her precious gift, religious people said it was God’s will, ordinary people said poor little thing. There were calls for compassion, for censure, for wrist straps to be compulsory on prams. The only thing that everyone could all agree on was that Liv let go of the pram. As she fell to the ground, the fingers of both her hands uncurled, her thumbs unhooked. And the pram, baby tucked snugly within, careered into the late-morning traffic.
It’s a hospital bed and yet it might easily be a bier, high and white and marble. Someone skilled enough could make out of stone the kinds of clefts and rumples and creases with which the white sheets mark out the edges of her motionless body. Ignore the tubes that fed her, and the ones that take her waste away, she could easily be a dead princess: her long hair loose and brushed into waves that roll down, around and over shoulders and arms that have not yet moved, not even twitched. Her eyeballs beneath their lids do not flicker or shudder; and, although she is breathing, if anyone said they saw her breast rise or fall, they would be lying, even if out of the best of possible motives. Soon, it will be four months.
In the early weeks, June came every day to the hospital, although there were days when she didn’t make it past the lobby downstairs. Often, Lauren would find her standing there, between the vending machines and the elevators and comfortable chairs: just standing there, as still as all the other pillars holding the ceiling and the floor apart, caught—bewildered—between her daughter on the first floor above, and her granddaughter in the mortuary below. After five weeks of waiting for Liv to wake up, to bear witness, they buried Cleo anyway. They put her in the gown embroidered with grub roses at the hem, found that the matching cap was useful for covering up the worst of the damage to her skull.
Most often, now, it’s Lauren who sits with Liv, watching for signs of change. Sometimes she’s there when two nurses come with a gurney and a long, flat plastic board. They tip Liv sideways and slide the board underneath her, use it to lift her onto the gurney where she lies while they change the sheets on her bed. Afterwards they settle her back in, smooth the sheets around her, but it’s Lauren who brushes her hair so it falls just so, and Lauren who burns the scented oils, changes the CDs in the player.
A nurse hums along without appearing to know the tune of the Duo for Violin and Viola in B flat major. As she hums, she checks the drip, the tubes, the heavy plastic bag hanging by the bed.
‘I suppose you wonder, too,’ she says to Lauren, ‘what she’s dreaming about.’
But Lauren can see no signs of dreaming at all. Liv shows to the world no soft sighs, no winces of grief. Nor any secret smiles.
If Lauren were able to fit into the rabbit hole of Liv’s ear, to fall through the dark swerving tunnels, tumble past the hammering of tiny and intricate bones, crawl through the soft curling ram horns of brain, right down into the centre, then she would know that Liv is dreaming. She is dreaming of sleep, and in her dream sleep she is also dreaming, and in that dream, she dreams of being asleep. She sleeps and dreams without any intention to wake, sleeping as if between two mirrors that shrink her dreams in endless recursion to the prick of a pin: a pin upon whose head dance infinite angels, each one of them whispering ‘sleep’.
nag
The wagon rests in winter, the sleigh in summer, the horse never.
I REMEMBER HOW I rested my cheek against the seat back and gave myself up to the rattle and the hum. One stockinged foot tucked beneath me, the sole of the other flat to the vibrating floor and I was on my way. Speeding down the straights, slowing for the curves: I felt it all and might almost have swayed with the motion, except that—for now—it was only the sewing machine in the corner of the front room on a cold night in May and my mother working the treadle with a lapful of cotton, finishing off my dress on our last night together. It was 1958.
I didn’t want to cause her any hurt, and I wouldn’t, I thought, just so long as I kept from smiling on the outside of my face and just so long as I didn’t lean in to the bends. That way there would be no need for my mother to be sad, or even to know, that in my heart I was already on tomorrow’s train, upright through two days and a night with the other girls, all of us speeding west, away into new lives. I looked over at my mother where she sat in the yellow flood of the standing lamp, a row of pins in her mouth like a half crown of thorns.
I don’t suppose my mother had any way of knowing, when I was born—the last of her children—how gently she might have handled me and yet still have me turn out the same. She’d been trained on my brothers, six of them in all, and so, at long last when I came along, she was already, what you might call, a bit hard in the mouth. Another woman might have given up after three sons, or four, but my mother wanted her girl. Nanna said, as a child, my mother would spend hours dressing her doll, changing its name every time she changed her mind about what she would call a daughter once she had one of her own. I have that doll still—her china fingers chipped, her scalp covered with hard dots of glue and matted wisps of her once glorious chestnut hair—although I don’t know if she was ever called Stella, like me.
It is a responsibility to be wanted in that way, and I sometimes wonder if it was the depths of my mother’s wanting that moulded in me the heights of my eagerness to please her. I think this is what must have happened before I was born, because I came out that way, a pleaser—just the fact I was a girl was evidence enough of that. My mother wanted to be a nurse. When I told my father I was to start my training, he said, ‘Nurses are whores’, without looking up from his paper. I know my mother would have liked a starched white veil and a watch pinned to her breast and to walk in white shoes the length of a corridor knowing that all was right in the ward because she had made it so. Of course it was always going to be my mother who put the idea of nursing into my head, but it wasn’t anonymously the way she thought. Perhaps when I was younger she had sneaked all kinds of thoughts of her own like cuckoo eggs into my mind but, by the time I decided to go nursing, I was much too old for that.
On our last night together, I had already been living aw
ay from home for the two years of my training and my mother hadn’t minded. The boarding house by the hospital was not so very far from our house by tram, and my mother knew that if Matron and the landlady between them could not keep me out of trouble, then the punishing hours of a trainee nurse would do the job. My mother had never imagined, though, that when my training was complete, I might take a job so very far away: on the other side of the country which was also the other side of the world for all the difference it made, the distance was so great.
The whirring of the sewing machine was a purring in my blood. Backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards. Snip. The seam was done and my mother looked at it critically before turning the dress right side out, shaking out its gathers, picking at some loose threads. And now I could smile, at the dress supposedly. The fabric was a soft green with bunches of large blue flowers of a kind that I’d never seen grown in a garden.
‘Let’s have a look at you, then,’ my mother said, and I put aside the crochet blanket and stood in my bra and petticoats in front of the empty fireplace. That fireplace was like a small black mouth turned downwards at the corners but, although I was cold, I didn’t complain. The fabric had come at the cost of the coal. My mother bunched up the dress and pulled it down over me; she pinched and primped and pinned, but I knew how to stand so the points of the pins didn’t prick.
My mother stood back then, and looked at me hard. For all of that night I had been waiting for her to say something, but so far there had been nothing, or at least nothing of the sort I had been expecting. Perhaps it was coming now. A sermon could not go for nineteen years, surely, without its conclusion, without one final flourish to pull together its themes? And if not a culmination, then there ought at the very least, I thought, to be a summary, one last run through of just the most important points. But which would they be?
I had the whole thing by heart, chapter and verse (on no account spend more than you earn, frugality is freedom, avoid men who drink, do not drink yourself because women who drink are vulgar, avoid men who gamble, gambling is a sign of degeneracy, waste not: want not, a lady does not discuss politics, religion or money, people with thin lips are invariably cruel, turn the other cheek, practise the Golden Rule, never leave a party before the guest of honour, a lady is known by her fingernails and her shoes, bright lipstick is vulgar, never brush your hair in public, there is nothing attractive about a skirt worn above the knee, marry wisely and not for love, and not exactly for money either, but make no mistake about it that marriage is a business, mend your clothes before you hang them on the line and not afterwards, never be seen eating or smoking in the street, a pair of rabbits will feed you for a week if you are careful with them, but you—yes, you—with all the opportunities you’ve had, let’s hope you never have to be as careful as I have had to be . . . and so on) and yet there was a part me that wanted to know which parts would, on a night like this one, be uppermost on my mother’s mind.
Still she said nothing, not even when she was looking at my face instead of at the dress which she’d made to be just like I was, full in the chest and nipped at the waist, flat in the belly but flared in the hips. This was to be the best of my four dresses: I’d wear a third petticoat beneath it for dancing.
‘Righto, lovey. Hem,’ she said. So I got up in my stockinged feet onto a straight-backed chair and turned slowly around while she fussed and folded and pinned. I put my arms out like a ballerina.
‘Down you get,’ she said, when she was done. ‘And make me a cup of tea, will you?’
Even the air in the kitchen felt full of the fact of my leaving, its motes thicker or more numerous, slowing me down as I boiled the kettle and made tea. I remember how I reached down that yellow cup, its fellows all lined up perfectly on the middle shelf of the dresser, each one upside down on its saucer. I remember how carefully I noticed the cool of the lemon yellow glaze against my fingertips, how I watched the milk detonating deep in the dark water of the tea (girls with class put their milk in last). Where was my father that night? Not in the kitchen. Maybe my mother and I were up late to finish the dress. Perhaps he’d already gone to bed.
I set my mother’s cup on the sideboard. She’d pushed her chair away from the sewing machine and was doing the hem by hand. It must have been late, and she must have been tired, because why else would the needle have slipped and gone into her fingertip? She made a little yip of pain and I saw the dark red of her blood, a blob of it like an upside-down drip from a tap, a swelling droplet almost ready to fall. But that wasn’t what made me rush at her, to go down on my knees the way I did. What made me do that was the pained way her face was shaping up, when I knew perfectly well that the needle’s prick wasn’t enough to hurt her—not a woman like my mother who’d given birth seven times and chopped off the top of her left little finger with a meat cleaver that time my second oldest brother banged into her as she was quartering a chook.
There was only one other time in my whole life that I’d seen my mother cry and that was when Nanna died. She hadn’t done it when the phone call came from the hospital, or even at the church or the graveyard afterwards. She waited until we’d washed up all the cups and saucers and the big oval plates that had held the sandwiches. Three of my brothers were still at home then, and she waited until all of us children had gone to bed, and then she sat down in the front room with a hanky. I heard her from my bedroom and I came to the doorway of the front room with the intent to comfort her, but the sight of her hunched over and heaving by the fireplace—her mouth all out of shape with the middle of her top lip curving down into the cave of her mouth—frightened me back to bed.
Now she cradled her stuck hand high to her chest. In the corner of her eye there was a tear and it looked big as a whole world, but I had a hanky tucked inside my bra. Of course I did. I was my mother’s daughter and the hanky was fine and small and white with a small lacy square of crochet in one corner and a picot edging all around. I pulled it out, quick as a coward surrendering, although I hardly knew where to aim it. She looked at me then with that strange, terrible downwards curve to her mouth and I was glad when she took the hanky and pressed it to her eyes, then sobbed through her nose so that the horrible mouth closed. And even then she didn’t say anything, but after a while folded up the hanky and gave it back to me, damp, with a little red smudge on the lacework.
I wish I had a photo, or better yet that I could take you there. On the platform, I’d have you stand up on tippy toes and press your nose against the round-shouldered windows and watch us as we walked down the tunnel of the train, looking for somewhere to sit all together, the four of us. There I am in the dress my mother had hemmed the night before, and my hair was dark like yours is now: thick and matte, near black, with a wave. It was good hair, except for how quickly it got greasy between washes. That day I’d pulled it into a bun, used a tiny brush to make an extra margin around my lips in a shade called Sky Blue Pink.
We were going so far west that we would cross almost the entire country. Isabel and Kitty would get off first; they were going to a mining town that was dirt-red, famous and full of men. Reggie and I were heading further still, to a district hospital in the farming country on the desert’s other side. On the platform were all our mothers, some sisters and a little brother or two, but not our fathers; it must have been a weekday, the day we went away. But look at us, the four of us, at our serious gestures, the way we hold our elbows in tight to our bodies as if we’re out for tea in company. Frowning and offering suggestions, pointing with gloved hands, taking careful steps in our heels, keeping in check arms and legs that have only just lately been tamed down from cartwheels and handstands. We’re working so hard at being grown-up that we’re even convincing ourselves, and yet, look: all you’d have to do is smirk or tickle any one of us and we’d giggle, give ourselves away as the oversized girls that we are.
Only a month earlier we’d been plain-faced and in our uniforms—blue dresses, white caps—standing in the corridor outside Matron’s roo
m, waiting. We’d shined our brown shoes, checked for each other that the seams of our flesh-coloured tights were dead straight up the backs of our calves.
‘Avery,’ called Matron and it was as if a gun had gone off, I jumped that quick away from the wall.
Matron’s room was small and windowless but she’d set out a doily on her desk with a little glass vase and a posy of the marguerite daisies I recognised from the park that we all ran through every morning on our way from the boarding house, still sticking pins in our buns as we went. I never knew if it was the same for the other three still outside in the corridor, but I saw a different part of Matron that day. I felt that she let me see it, too, quite deliberately. It was as if there was a ripped seam down the wide, white side of her uniform, from armpit to hip, and that she herself held the stitches apart for me to get a look at the soft stuff within.
Matron wished me well for my future and handed over a letter she had written. It was in an unsealed envelope and she nodded that I should open it, clearly pleased with herself, as if it were a gift she had taken time and care in choosing. I didn’t see all the words, but I saw the important ones like eager and willing and diligent, each one of them a big, fat, blue rosette I could take home and pin to my proud mother’s chest.
Mothers Grimm Page 13