by Diana Evans
According to Gina Ford, the woman from Ireland who had no children, Blake should sleep for approximately two hours, between 12.15 p.m. and 2.15 p.m. It was now 10.45 a.m. Lunch was at 11.30 a.m. Due to the tremendous excitement of Baby Beat, he fell asleep in the car on the way home. He did not stir as Melissa prised him out of his car seat, nor as she removed his coat in the hallway, nor when she turned the kitchen radio up high to Choice FM, nor when she took off his socks, nor when she propped him up on the living-room rug and shook him a bit, nor when she left him there slumped against a cushion and turned on the TV in the hope that he would be lured awake by the effervescent blare of CBeebies, where a gang of talking vegetables were showing a group of children how to plant a turnip. In the end she had no other choice but to go against her mother’s staunch Nigerian conviction of never disturbing a baby’s sleep, and wake him up by blowing on his eyelashes and making spiders over his cheeks with her fingers. He was not pleased. He cried while she was pulverising, and when the food was ready he took his time eating it, sabotaging the 12 noon pre-nap nappy-change deadline. By the time she carried him upstairs it was 12.25 p.m and he was wide awake.
A different kind of Monday or Tuesday. Melissa did not board a bus. She did not put on suit or boot or ride the low black tunnels to an office far away from home and progeny. Her office was in the house, in the room at the top of the stairs off the halfway, skylit landing, lying dormant until the moment of that glorious and longed-for post-prandial nap. The nap was the holy land, the place of materialisation. When Blake finally fell asleep, with the blinds down to block out the light, and a lullaby playing in the background (if that diamond ring turns brass, Mama’s gonna buy you a looking glass), Melissa would go immediately to her desk and work for those two sweet hours, feeling reawakenings in her brain, a recharging of the mechanisms of intelligence, a mature peace borne from human fulfilment and earnest endeavour. But first there was the prelude to the nap, which stretched all through the morning and was composed of such infant delights as pop-up books, animal books and transport books read to him one after another, a circus of toys laid out on the living-room rug in a similar though less extravagant way to Baby Beat – a farm puzzle where a sheep must be slotted into the shape of the sheep and a cow into the shape of a cow, etc. Or they would play nursery rhymes, or they would play some proper music like Whitney Houston or Kanda Bongo Man and dance together in a homely, insular disco. At some point between ten and eleven, Melissa would begin to experience that dubious emotion made dubious by its association with one’s own precious child: boredom. A deadening, soul-destroying listlessness. An insistent yet involuntary closing of the eye. She would become acutely aware of the hollowness and the silence of the house, the insides of the walls, the crooked angles, so for a change of scenery they might go out to the library that didn’t understand that words had relinquished their midweek sleep, or if it was a Wednesday and they therefore could not go to that library, they might stop in the polluted children’s playground next to it, or go to some other park where other paused women walked among the trees with their prams in weekday workday hours, where they pushed their little ones back and forth on the swings, singing to them, tickling them, making faces, trying to do everything right, trying to appear as perfect, wonderful mothers.
It was so different from her days at Open, when the world had indeed been open. Every day she had been out, at a catwalk, at a launch, at the office, at a party. She had travelled the city, would go for drinks at All Bar One, go shopping on the King’s Road and buy all those swish and colourful clothes that now were hanging in the wardrobe collecting mildew and dust. Occasionally Melissa regretted her decision to change her life and go freelance. Being freelance, she was realising, meant being off, not off the hizzle but off the scene, off the A-Z, out of the game, nowhere. During her pregnancy she had pictured a blissful new life of evenly balanced and creative working motherhood, of Blake lying happily in the papasan with the sun filtering in through a window while she sat happily at her desk working. She would pick her subjects. She would go beyond fashion, into features, the arts. She could finally dig out those old poems she’d been meaning to look at. She could at last get closer to connecting with that neglected part of herself, to finding herself again, understanding herself, therefore fully being herself, more meaningful, more profound, more truthful. For there was a niggling paradox inside Melissa that meant that she was still not sure exactly which kind of person she was – did she belong to the world or the world of the soul? Was she inward or outward? Was she a poet or a hack? She had hoped that she would be able to address this paradox in this new, different, quieter life, to dissect it, but what she was finding was that two hours a day was just not enough time in which to do this.
And Blake did not always sleep. Sometimes, like today, he wanted to stay awake and be the same as the daylight, and he would resist with all his might as she lulled him and rocked him and paced up and down the room (as she was doing now). Or he would sleep for only a little while, and it would be time to stop working when she had only just started. She would read him more books. They would do more puzzles, more sheep-shape finding, more xylophone hitting, and she would again think of Michael out there on the outside, absent, oblivious. By one o’clock she was a little bit annoyed. She got to thinking about patriarchy. She thought about all the women who had burnt their bras and died for the vote. She thought about how the Victorian age was not really over, about the prison of tradition and how so many women over the centuries had spent their lives rearing children when they could have been so much more. She thought about Simone de Beauvoir and Lucy Irigaray, about Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis. Oh she was a failure, a coward! She was allowing herself to be oppressed. All the feminist theories of her Women’s Writing literature module came back to her. All the ferocity of Audre Lorde and Alice Walker came back, so that by two o’clock she would be floundering in a chasm of rage and depression so dark and venomous that she would be unable to smile at Blake. And even her depression would be a feminist depression. It was the depression of all women, all the oppressed women all over the world, and Michael was no longer Michael but a patriarch, the patriarch. He was no better than the patriarch of Charlotte Perkins Gilmore who had confined her to the yellow room and made her disappear. He was the patriarch of Jane Eyre who had banished Bertha to the attic and by three o’clock it would be time to pick up Ria from school, so she would push the pram up the mean, manmade street and back again, then wait desperately for Michael, who was no longer Michael but the patriarch, to get home. The real Michael was lost. That two-tone Michael was gone. That Michael who had asked her questions and walked into the sea to get her. Michael who had changed the configuration, who had changed her mind.
Melissa’s journey in love was a different story from Michael’s. If it had a song it would be Dido’s Hunter or Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. She didn’t need them. Before Melissa met Michael, her attitude towards men was one of indifference. They were strange and hungry beings. They had strange bodies. They wanted things. They wanted to stroke, pull, kiss, enter. She didn’t like the squirt and salt of their semen. She didn’t want to be a fantasy, a Coke bottle, as she had once been described. She preferred to walk alone. She was stronger on her own. Men were a distraction, a kind of erasure. It had often happened that she would be with someone mostly because of how much they liked her. There was the Irish man she had met in Paris when she was seventeen (the one who’d called her a Coke). There was the boy who had kicked her in the leg when she broke up with him. There were brown boys who wanted something pale, and pale boys who wanted something brown, and through them all she was unaffected, untouched, only physically touched (it was a thing from childhood, a father who was cruel, she had turned to stone). The only exception to this indifference was a boy called Simon whom she had met at university in Warwick. He had started off as her friend (this seemed a better way for her), he was tall, blond and soft-eyed, a London boy. They would talk for hours, lie down to
gether platonically in his room in the middle of the night, until one day she realised that she felt something. She was not quite sure it was love, but it felt like what she thought love must feel like, it had felt very close, so she’d told him that she loved him. It was as if she were saying this from a distant compartment in her brain, though, and once they were lying down together unplatonically, she realised that they’d lost something. ‘Do you think, sometimes,’ she asked Simon, ‘that people who like each other are not meant to touch each other?’
She was alone after that, for long enough to learn that she was capable of loneliness. Then came Michael. He was kindness, heat, persuasion, something unexpected and idiosyncratic. He wore glasses and bright silk tops and various adornments incorporating the Jamaican flag – wristbands, caps, tracksuit stripes. There was a strange combination in him of sloth and quickness, he flicked when he moved but there was a laziness to it, his hands were the fastest thing about him, they scissored the air when he talked, danced and dropped and sprang up again. He was no Tyrese. He lacked the musculature of D’Angelo. But what he did have was more valuable than these shallow things: he was kind, both in the face and in the soul, he was supremely sensual, and he had a way of looking at her that made her melt inside. She liked his questions, that first time in the Montego deckchairs, leaning into her with his very white teeth and looking square into her face, hungry, but for knowledge of her, of what was deepest within, beyond the flesh. It allowed her to still hold herself close, while also trickling out towards him, trickling in the blue Jamaica heat, towards his heat. She came to discover that there were two sides to him, two tones, the boy and the man; he was juvenile and stallion, clown and lover. He was her secret, her eventual beauty. Through Michael, Melissa finally came to understand what all the fuss was about, the thirst for the stroke, pull, kiss, enter. The way he touched her, his smooth and lengthy hands, the sparks they made within. That look in his eyes, the way he laid them on her. She would lie on her back and let him do everything. He was the master, his energy boundless, his long arms disarmed her, he was everywhere, all-encompassing. ‘You’re like an octopus,’ she said, succumbing to him again and again and again.
Yet despite such rightness, not everything about them was right. Sometimes she felt that he wanted her to be more Nubian, that she was too English for him, had too much of white. He wanted her so badly to understand the anger that charged out of him at random moments, at the police, for instance, at passport control, at anyone or anything that seemed to pose a barrier because he was black and male. And she did understand, but not all of it, for their lives had been different, their early terrors different. It was hard, she found, blending with someone in this way, no longer walking alone, and taking these differences into your mind. It made her feel cluttered inside. She did not want to blend. She did not want to be two. Yet she wanted Michael, or the part of Michael that was the same as her. Even now, she thought as she rocked Blake and paced up and down with him, as one lullaby ended and another one began, even now, in some way, Michael still had that power to persuade her, to change her mind. But it was fainter, getting fainter by the day. Now she went with Blake out on to the landing and into the red room, the master court, to change him again. He was another body of awareness as she walked, she was thinking twice, beyond herself, his helplessness added to her, while she was being erased she was also being extended. She lay him down on the mocha bed. This is how it happens, she thought as she did her best to smile at him. This is how you get from ‘I miss my mouth in your pubic chin’ to ‘bog roll pls’ no kiss, and Blake was smiling at her nevertheless, waving his legs in the air, pulling her out of the shadows, a small face looking out of light. She turned away from him for a second to get the Vaseline –
When she turned back, Blake was no longer smiling. He was staring, pointedly, amazed, at something over her shoulder. His eyes had widened. He was struck still, frozen, like an animal stiffened by a sudden glare.
‘What?’ Melissa said.
She was standing again by the window, that window. Babies, Alice had always maintained, could see night things. They were in the same world. He continued to stare, and she looked behind her to see. She could feel it, the stillness, the cold, detached watching. Again, there was nothing.
‘A night thing? Now?’
In the next moment he was back. Waving his legs in the air, shining from the inside out, released from the grip of whatever it was he had seen. Melissa kept looking behind her and around her as she carried him out of the room on to the landing. A flash passed through her mind of Lily standing beneath the skylight that day, the sunlight balancing on her white-blonde hair. In the second room she tried again to get Blake down. He still resisted, cried when she left him, stopped when she came back. Only when she paced with him and rocked him through the entirety of one more lullaby did he let his muscles go loose and his eyes go heavy. She lay him down in the cot for the last time, and he finally fell asleep, holding a Smurf.
That left fifty-five minutes in which to materialise, to reawaken in the holy land of work. Melissa went immediately to her office, where her desk was waiting like an abandoned ship, and sat down in the velvet chair. She stared at the screen, which contained the first two sentences of her Open column, this one about the resurgence of the colour yellow. The sun shines on catwalks this season, it began, which was lame. She tried to think of other things associated with yellow, buttercups, mustard, but it was hard to concentrate, the day seemed already defined by something else. Taking a deep breath, forcing herself into the zone, she brought her hands to the keyboard, was about to write a word, to begin a new, better sentence, when there was a knock at the front door. At first she thought it was a knock on the door of the sentence so she ignored it. Then she realised that it was an actual knock on the actual front door of the house, but she still ignored it because it was probably just a gas meter-reading person, a loft-insulation person, a replacement double-glazing pusher, a karate-club canvasser or a door-to-door organic-vegetable supplier. She held on to the hem of the yellow sentence. It wanted to get away. There came another knock, and she threw back her chair and went to answer it. Standing on the front path, holding a black canvas bag, was a large, pear-shaped man in a red and grey anorak and woolly hat. He had a square moustache and a small British smile.
‘Rentokil?’ he said, tipping up his badge.
Melissa looked surprised, then blank. He was waiting. She remembered. Monday, 2.15 p.m. Rentokil. Mouse. Under the bath.
‘Oh. Yes.’
‘Ah,’ he said relieved, and filled the hallway with his bulk, setting down his bag. ‘It’s very chilly out there today, isn’t it,’ he remarked while taking off his gloves. ‘Nice and warm in here, though. Very inviting to the mice also, unfortunately.’ He smiled, without it taking up very much space in his face.
Housewives, Melissa remembered at this point, in the films, offer tea to visiting handy persons. It was her responsibility to offer this man some tea.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she said.
‘That would be marvellous. I’m white, two sugars.’
He bent down and started unpacking his equipment from the canvas bag. In the kitchen she found him a mug. She searched for the sugar, which was at the very back of the tea cupboard. No one in this house took sugar. Housewives, though, have a supply of ordinarily unneeded groceries in the kitchen in order to feed and provide refreshment for passing workers like this. There were no biscuits. She should but could not offer him a biscuit, just the tea, which she stirred for quite a long time, as if the spoon had its own will, and placed on the dining table. He did not say thank you.
Proceeding to business, his clipboard ready, he said, ‘So when and where did you catch sight of our little visitors?’
She realised that he was talking about the mice. She had not had a bath since the sighting, only showers. She had been picturing a village of mice living their lives under the bath, playing violins, going to school, having dark picnics. �
�It was just over a week ago,’ she said, showing him to the bathroom. She described how the mouse had crawled up the side of the bath into the gap at the top.
‘Just one?’ he said.
‘One what?’
‘One mouse.’
‘Well, I only saw one …’
‘Hmm,’ the Rentokil man tapped his clipboard with his pen. Their voices were echoing in the cold generator of the bathroom, the extractor fan was on. ‘Hmm,’ he said, ‘they do tend to like bathrooms, especially in the winter when they’re trying to get warm. The last place you’d want them, though, eh?’ and he gave a little chuckle. ‘Have there been any other sightings anywhere else?’ Had they put down traps? Had she noticed any food eaten into? Melissa said no, lamenting the loss of her sentence, aware of the minutes passing. Then he started talking shit. Droppings, he told her, were the best indicator of a mouse presence. They were unmistakable in appearance, small brown pellets the size of a Tic-Tac but obviously less appetising. He spoke of mice as though he was a friend of their families, empathic yet grave, a kindly executioner.
‘They’re incontinent, you know,’ he said. ‘The average mouse releases about eighty droppings a day.’
‘Really?’ Melissa was horrified. She wondered how he knew that. Did he surf the Internet for information? Did he have an office? A mouse hut? A rodent encyclopaedia? Here I am on a Monday afternoon talking about animal shit, she thought. What is the bright side? Well, it is better to be a housewife than a mouse. I have my human dignity. I know how to use the toilet and I can stay dry. Plus no one is trying to kill me.
‘… sometimes even more, with the larger ones,’ he was saying ‘a hundred, a hundred and twenty. And don’t forget they’re constantly urinating. Movement is pee, as it were. Have you seen any droppings?’
‘No,’ she said. Or had she? Had she mistaken one for a clove? A raisin? And eaten it? Or fed it to Blake? The matter of the mouse extermination was taking on a heightened urgency.