by Michel Faber
‘Teething, maybe,’ he suggested, straining manfully to meet her somewhere near where he guessed she lived.
‘Could be,’ she sighed, her eyes squinting shut against the electric proximity of the baby’s shrieking as she lifted him, swaddling clothes and all, to her breast. ‘Could be.’
In a couple of minutes she had him quiet, sucking at her. His mouthings were like soft rainfall heard above the low distant thunder of the tumbledryer. Everything was as it always was, by this time of evening. The accident was already fading in her memory, like yesterday’s news, yesterday’s grey-suited men.
Next day, Christine dropped her baby again.
This time it was not exactly an accident, although it was certainly not premeditated either. She was changing him, again, and had just got to the part where she was holding him aloft, blowing gently on his freshly powdered groin. His disjointed arm was strapped with a ribbon of gauze to his stocky torso, and tied with a bow at the back. His free arm punched the air as he yelled. She blew at a distance, taking deep breaths, keeping her face well clear of his lunging feet.
She wondered what would happen if she let him fall.
Her grip was firm; she had no intention of loosening it. Yet she was entranced by the hugeness of the responsibility she carried, and the smallness of the action that might cast a spotlight on her. A single loosening of her fingers would be enough. Even if she was startled into loosening them by the ring of a telephone or a knock at the door, she might still be dragged into the glare of public condemnation. How strange! Her own life had been pummelled into unrecognizability by her baby, she had been hacked mercilessly adrift from the life she’d constructed for herself before falling pregnant, yet no-one was investigating this enormity; there was no public outcry, no police interest, no social worker sniffing around the door. No-one seemed to think that anything untoward had occurred, despite the fact that a confident young woman with a keen wit had been brutalised into a shuffling automaton.
One of the reasons she couldn’t understand newspapers nowadays was that, even from the occasional headline she had time and energy to read, she got the impression that more and more children were being awarded large sums of money to compensate them for any unhappiness they may have suffered while in the care of grownups. The grievances ranged from sexual abuse to misdiagnosis of learning difficulties, and Christine had no doubt that some of them were awful enough to bother the courts with. But she couldn’t understand why no one ever mentioned the suffering of the carers. Tortured to insanity, they ended up with their picture in the paper, captioned THE FACE OF EVIL.
Christine was about to replace her baby in his cot when, without warning, he started peeing. His hard nub of a penis squirted scalding urine onto her breast. In a paroxysm of disgust, she let him fall.
Again, he landed on the thinly carpeted floor; again there was a snap of bone. Again, she picked him up immediately and checked the damage. There was a good deal more of it this time. He had landed bottom-first.
However, calming him down didn’t take quite as long this time. It was as though he himself could tell how badly broken he was, and was scared to make it worse. Tucked up in flannelette, he looked up at her in brute bewilderment.
‘Meh,’ he said.
Next day, Christine left her baby alone in the house while she went to the local police station. It wasn’t far away, a squat ugly prefab opposite the veterinary surgery and the Red Cross charity shop.
Christine walked in through a glass door decorated with leaflets about solvent abuse and prohibited penknives. She identified a policeman and said she needed help.
The policeman was a beetle-browed young man with greased white hair and shoulders the shape of a Pepsi bottle. There were puckered holes in his big earlobes where studs or ear-rings had once dangled. Apart from the official frills on his short-sleeved shirt, he might have been a shop assistant in a clothing store for teenagers.
Pushing her misgivings under, Christine tried to explain the problem. She was alone in the house with a baby, she said, and she was losing her mind. Could the Law help?
‘Are you afraid you might harm your baby?’ asked the policeman.
‘My baby is fine,’ said Christine. ‘It’s me who’s in danger.’
‘In danger of what?’
‘In danger of ceasing to exist.’
There was a pause while the policeman considered this.
‘Do you want to see a WPC?’ he said at last.
‘A what?’
‘A woman police constable.’
‘What difference would that make?’
He picked up a telephone and pressed one button. Within sixty seconds Christine was led into a claustrophobically small room, like a bathroom but with two chairs and a desk instead of a tub and toilet. The walls were papered with posters about domestic violence. Christine took a seat, already regretting coming. She wanted to make the police understand that if they wanted to help her they shouldn’t be going about it this way, they should be bringing her somewhere nice, they shouldn’t be enclosing her in smaller and smaller spaces. But somebody else had already started talking. A thirtysomething female in a police uniform was asking questions.
‘Are you afraid you might harm your baby?’
‘My baby isn’t the one in danger. I’m in danger,’ said Christine.
‘What makes you think so?’
‘I used to be human being. I’m turning into a machine.’
The policewoman smiled wryly.
‘I’m sure we all feel that way sometimes.’
‘I feel that way all the time,’ retorted Christine.
‘So what would you like us to do?’
‘I want you to take my baby away.’
‘You don’t feel you can care for your baby anymore?’
‘I can care for him perfectly well. It’s the only thing I can do nowadays.’
‘So what are you hoping the police department could do with your baby?’
‘I thought you might be able to organise giving him to a female prisoner in a gaol. They’re stuck in a cell all day and night anyway. I’m sure it would work out fine, with the right person.’
The policewoman chewed on this for a while, then leaned forward and looked straight into Christine’s eyes.
‘Look,’ she urged, in a compassionate tone. ‘Let’s forget the sarcasm … What are you really trying to say to me?’
Christine’s heart sank. She had done her best to explain. Trying over and over again was so exhausting; surely there must be one thing in her life that didn’t have to be repeated for endless futility.
‘I used to have a life …’ she sighed.
‘The first year can be very difficult,’ agreed the policewoman. It was as if she was agreeing that the first year of being strangled could be very difficult, or the first year of drowning.
‘I need it to stop now.’
‘What do you think will happen if it doesn’t stop?’
‘It’s already happening.’
‘What’s already happening?’
‘I’m ceasing to exist.’
‘You look real to me.’
The conversation went round and round like this for three or four minutes. The urgent message Christine had wanted to put into the policewoman’s mind kept being deflected, as if by an instinct of avoidance, like an infant turning away from a spoon.
‘But I’m in danger,’ she kept insisting.
‘You think you might harm yourself?’
‘The harm’s already done’
‘You feel you’re not coping?’
‘Coping is all I’m doing.’
‘You mean you’re barely coping.’
‘I’m coping perfectly well’
‘Well … that’s good.’
‘You don’t understand’, pleaded Christine. ‘Look at you. You’re here. You’re not sitting next to a baby’s cot all day.’
The policewoman grinned.
‘Been there, done that,’ she said. No
ting the look of aggrieved incomprehension on Christine’s face, she went all sincere again. ‘My babies grew up, that’s all,’ she summarised gently. ‘They’re at school now.’
It was incredible. It was like going to the police when you’d been burgled or attacked or raped, and them telling you to forget it, because life goes on and in a few years from now, what will it matter?
‘I think you might benefit from seeing a counsellor,’ suggested the policewoman.
‘Will a counsellor take my baby away?’
‘No, no, don’t worry about that.’
Christine smiled. It seemed the only possible way to handle such a lunatic situation.
‘Where’s your baby now?’ asked the policewoman.
‘At home.’
‘Who’s looking after him?’
Christine thought for a moment.
‘The neighbours,’ she replied. In truth, she hardly knew the neighbours, couldn’t have picked them out of a police line-up.
The policewoman noticed her momentary hesitation, and sat back formally, to signal the end of the interview.
‘Well, you’d better go and rescue your neighbours then.’
‘Yes,’ said Christine.
When Christine returned home, the sound of the baby’s screaming was leaking through the four walls of the house like a muted fire siren. She looked at her neighbours’ houses on either side; there was no sign of life. Perhaps there were women in those houses; perhaps not. Perhaps there were even women with babies. The curtains were drawn, opaque as the ozone layer separating earth from space.
Christine opened the door of her own little house and let herself in. The screaming was instantly much louder, of course: there were different acoustic principles operating on this side of the threshold.
She walked straight over to her baby’s cot. He was purple from shrieking, and smelled of sewage. It was not his normal bad smell, but something aggressively more evil.
Christine began to undress him, but the stink pierced her sinuses like a needle-thin skewer. Her baby’s eyes bulged as he screamed, as if in outrage at her idiocy in imagining she could make things better for him. Christine refastened the press-studs on his jumpsuit, sealing up the poisonous nappy while she considered what to do.
She picked her baby up and held him above her head, high above her head. She stared up at him.
His body was a black mass against the electric light bulb, a squirming eclipse of this indoor sun. She held him there for a long time, staring up at his dark howling face and his loose broken limbs dangling so close to her face.
Then, with all her strength, she threw him across the room, bouncing him off the wall with a plasticene thud.
As before, she immediately went to retrieve her baby. It was important that there should be no delay between action and reaction. As long as you responded at once, things would always be OK. In a flash, she crossed the room to where her baby’s body lay and scooped it up in her arms. But there was something missing, she could tell.
Her baby’s head had come off from his body. Christine dropped to her knees, still hugging the loose _imbed torso to her breast with one arm, and scanned the carpeted floor from wall to wall. She spied the head at once: it had rolled underneath a table.
Gently Christine laid her baby’s body down on the carpet and crawled over to the table in question. She retrieved the head (too big for one hand: she had to use both) and squatted to examine it. She flipped it over, exchanging the hairy back for the fleshy front. Cradling the baby’s face in her hands, she turned it clockwise until its knitted brows were parallel to hers.
Her baby looked at her as though for the first time. He uttered no sound. An expression of dawning human intelligence replaced his customary look of animal cunning. His lips twitched, as if he might have something to say to her at last.
Then, after two languorous blinks, his eyes fell shut like a porcelain doll’s. Drained of the ruddiness of fury, his skin was pale, like the skin of the glossy babies in glossy baby magazines.
Careful to move smoothly, Christine carried the sleeping head to the sleeping body and reunited the two.
From this day on, Christine’s baby was never any trouble. He kept to himself in his cot, making no demands. Nature had taken over, as the policewoman had hinted that it would.
A window opened in Christine’s existence, inviting her to look through. She hesitated, unsure. Her soul was so tiny, a shrivelled little thing which trembled inside her massive swollen body like an escaped laboratory mouse in an abandoned, echoing research institute.
Experimentally, Christine at last resumed doing something she’d done habitually in a previous life: she began reading a book. It was a hardback novel from the bestseller lists, brought home to her by her husband several days before. Since taking shy possession of it, she had read only a few pages, tiring quickly of the unaccustomed mental exercise. But it seemed good so far. It was what her fellow grownups were reading, right now, everywhere across the country, perhaps even the world.
Her husband stood at their baby’s cot as she turned the pages.
‘How’s my little man, then?’ he murmured, not daring to touch. ‘Very quiet today.’
‘Yes, he’s a good boy,’ agreed Christine. ‘Isn’t it time for the news?’
ALL BLACK
‘Are we there yet?’
My daughter’s head stirs on my shoulder. Lulled by the thrum-da-dum-dum of the train, I have been dozing too. Daydreaming of John stroking the small of my naked back, his middle finger straying into the cleft of my bottom. I blink against the reality of this long journey away from him.
‘Let me see my watch,’ I say, shrugging at my right arm under the weight of her warm little body. She moves just enough for me to get my wrist into view.
‘Ages to go yet,’ I say.
‘But it’s dark.’
‘It just looks that way, ‘cause the lights are on and the train windows are tinted.’ It’s an authoritative, grown-up explanation, but inside me I have my doubts. It really does look quite dark out there. I wonder if my watch is wrong.
‘Are you hungry?’
She doesn’t reply. Asleep again. My forearm has pins and needles now; I flex my hand, but carefully. If I move too much, my daughter will get irritable and shift her head from my shoulder to my lap. I can’t afford to be seen with my daughter’s head in my lap, even by total strangers on a train. If my wife heard about it, she’d accuse me of paedophilia, incest, child abuse, whatever. My access rights are hanging by a thread as it is.
Looking sideways, across the aisle, at the man flicking through the free railway magazine, I manage to read the digital numbers on his wristwatch. They’re the same as on mine. Yet outside, it looks like sunset.
I rub my eyes with my left hand. My eyelids are still sore from all the crying. I am in transit between two people who are furious with me. I am travelling two hundred miles only to exchange one tantrum of hysterical jealousy for another.
My wife can’t talk to me for two minutes without letting me know how much it hurts her to live on the same planet as me. We’ll start off talking about Tess, what our daughter has or hasn’t had to eat or drink, and almost immediately my wife will be shrieking, weeping, threatening, invoking the name of her lawyer. Weeks pass without me seeing Tess, and I have to get the woman at legal aid to write a letter for me, so that my wife doesn’t bin it unread. Then finally we come to some arrangement. I can take Tess to McDonalds. Or the zoo. Or the movies. Two hundred miles’journey, and I pay to sit in a dark cinema with my daughter as she watches sentimental heterosexual garbage from the Walt Disney corporation.
When Tess is with her mother, which is almost every minute of my life, my partner John is happy. He doesn’t mention her, pretends she doesn’t exist. He sucks my cock as if it’s never had any biological purpose except to give him pleasure. He revels in the freedom of unsafe sex with me, secure in the knowledge that I’m no risk. It’s as if he’s encoded my ten years of faithfu
l marriage as some kind of pre-sexual state, a miraculous virginity preparing me for him. All we have to do is be inseparable from each other, and the plagues of the world can’t touch us.
But when I talk about how much I miss my daughter, his face darkens. In a manner of speaking. John being black.
This visit, the first time Tessa came to stay a weekend with me in my new home, has been hell. Hell for me, hell for John. I don’t know what Tessa thought of it all. John didn’t mention her name when he was shouting abuse and recriminations at me, as I was leaving. He was at least mature enough not to do that. He’s growing older too, little by little. Soon –if we can get over this – the age difference between us will matter less and less.
Something is wrong with the train. It’s slowing to a halt. The sky outside is grey, as if overcast, even though it’s cloudless. The train stops.
‘Are we there yet?’
‘Nowhere near.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘I don’t know.’
The train starts moving backwards, smoothly and quietly. Tess sits up and presses her face and palms against the window, watching the trees and electricity poles going the wrong way.
An announcement comes over the PA. There is signalling failure up ahead, and the train is going back a few stops, to Perth. From there, passengers for Edinburgh and beyond will be conveyed by coach. Apologies, unavoidable, every effort being made, make sure you have all your personal belongings with you, don’t lumber us with your luggage.
‘Are we going back to John’s house?’ Tessa asks, frowning.
‘It’s not John’s house,’ I retort without thinking. ‘It’s my house.’
She is silent. My claim is nonsense to her: how can a house that doesn’t have her and Mummy in it be mine? I am sick with misery. The greatest victory my wife can win is for every truly happy memory I have of our daughter and me to be locked in the past – the straight years. I’m not allowed to have any happy parenting memories that don’t have my wife in them, as if all the wonderful moments (chasing the squealing toddler Tess around the garden with the watering can, balancing her on her tricycle, teaching her how to put new laces in her trainers) were only possible because Heather was standing by, approving.