Love of Fat Men

by Helen Dunmore

  I wiped the blood off her with a corner of my nightgown, then I got up although I was still bleeding and found a box of fancy handkerchiefs in my top left-hand drawer. They were fine lace and the kind of useless thing you get given and then keep by you for years without using, but they did for Annina. She looked just like a handkerchief in my hand when Matt came into the room with a cup of tea.

  ‘What are you doing out of bed?’ he asked, and set down my cup of tea in a hurry and helped me back to lie down. All the time I held on to Annina in that light way you do when you’ve got something in your hand which might break, and I prayed that she wouldn’t make a sound, though what kind of noise a baby her size might make, I couldn’t imagine.

  Of course I found out soon enough. That was the first bit of her language Annina taught me. A lighter, croakier sound than I’d thought. If I breathed in hard and groaned as if in my sleep, I could hide her cries with my own breathing. After a couple of months I couldn’t breathe any other way when I lay down to sleep. Matt said to me once, gentle and awkward, ‘I always knew you minded more than you let on. That was when you began groaning in your sleep.’

  Feeding you, Annina! Well, you made it clear right from the start that there was going to be no satisfying you on nectar and honey-dew. Cow’s milk, boiled and cooled and strained, a drop at a time from an eye-dropper. But it gave you wind and you cried for two hours one night while I shifted about in bed and wheezed and moaned to cover it. So I asked a friend who’d had a baby born at seven months, just marvelling casually at how well she’d managed and how the little thing had thrived, and she told me they’d fed her on goats’ milk right from the beginning, on her midwife’s advice since her own milk had dried up after a week.

  ‘Right, that’s for you, Annina,’ I said to myself, and I told Matt that I was going to drink goats’ milk from now on, in the hope of curing an itchy rash I’d got between my fingers. How I hated that stuff! But you loved it. I could swear now that I saw the pink flush through your skin when you had your first feed of it, drop by drop, at blood-heat. I could see your right leg kicking as you swallowed it.

  You didn’t cry much after that. Often you’d be awake, for I’d feel you moving against me in the little pouch I made for you, hung around my neck and hidden by a loose blouse. Poor Matt missed the way we used to sleep together naked, skin to skin, and make love when we were half awake and half sleeping. I think he believed I’d lost heart for making love now I’d lost the baby, even though he must have known that for me that had never been the point of it. So I made a nest for you under my bed and I would tuck you there until I was sure from Matt’s breathing that he was asleep. Then I’d bring you into the bed with me, because otherwise I was afraid you’d cry in the night and I wouldn’t hear you. And I was afraid of other things for you: wasps and mice and spiders which would be half the size of you or more. When I started to think of dogs and cats I had to close my mind and tell myself: Take one step at a time.

  We had no cat or dog ourselves, only a pair of goldfish which were like dolphins in your eyes. Do you remember how I let you swim in the tank with them when you begged me to let you, and the big goldfish hung quite still in the water with terror before he dived into the weed and lay trembling next to the china diver that had got rooted in there over the years? I told you to keep away from the weed, but as usual you paid little attention and swam in and out of it, peeking at me through the side of the tank and no doubt laughing to yourself for the sheer pleasure you were having. Then afterwards you danced naked on your towel till you were dry, clapping your hands. I can still hear your hands, clapping.

  The thing was, you were so beautiful. I was always looking for excuses to be alone so that I could open your pouch and look at you curled up there. Anybody could have pinched your life out with a finger, but you lay there so much alive with a life of your own, so much taken up with your own dreams or your full warm stomach or the feel of my skin against your hands that I could never think of you as defenceless.

  It’s not ordinary beauty I’m talking about, anyway. How could you fail to have fine features, even though you took after me with my red cheeks and my black eyebrows that nearly meet over my nose? Nothing frightened you. You hadn’t got a chance, really, if you’d only known it, but you got by because you refused to know it, and often I would just burst out laughing for joy at your boldness. What age do babies learn to climb? I suppose they don’t climb a lot, in the usual way, but you climbed everywhere. Up my openwork vest. In and out of my front-fastening bra. And my hair! – you couldn’t leave it alone. The day I made a plait and you went up it hand-over-hand until you reached my parting and you were so close to my ear I could hear you breathing hard and egging yourself on. I had a hand cupped under you all the time.

  All this time you were reaching out, I was closing myself away. There was a job I would have killed for the year before, playing piano for a music therapist in a unit for handicapped children, but I had to turn it down. You were three by then, and I couldn’t trust you to keep out of sight. By four you were learning, and at five I could take you anywhere and you’d lie still against me or I’d feel your body vibrating with laughter as you peered out through the gap in my blouse. What a sight I was! Loose blouses, sensible dresses with collars and plenty of pleats down the front. My sister Claire burst out once:

  ‘For God’s sake, Teresa, will you look at yourself in the mirror? It’s the middle of July, why don’t you put on your shorts and a sun-top like you used to? You’re only thirty-one and anybody would think you were forty!’ She was quite right. I looked older. Men didn’t whistle or call after me in the streets any more as they’d been doing since I was twelve years old. I could wander along with my face up to the sun, and if my lips moved, nobody seemed to pay any attention. I think I must have had that look some women get when they’re well on in pregnancy, inward and a bit taken up with something all the time. And that’s a look which makes people leave you alone.

  Did Matt know about you, or didn’t he? Often, again and again, I’d think he’d seen you. I’d think maybe he played with you and talked to you and never let on for fear that once the whole business was out in the open we would have to do something about you. People would come to the house and tell us that arrangements ought to be made for you. You needed protection; a safe place maybe where you could be kept well away from things which would do you harm. Somewhere light and clean and airy with a spy-hole so that you could be kept an eye on. A little box for you.

  You were ten years old and five inches tall. You ran fast, and you jumped high and when you skipped your feet didn’t seem to touch the ground. Size for size, I’m sure you were quicker and nimbler than other children. When I looked closely at your feet I saw how strongly made they were, with high arches and long toes so you could climb and judge a distance and leap without ever making a mistake.

  No, of course you made mistakes, Annina. Remember when my worst fear was realized and a cat got into the garden while I had my back turned to you, weeding. And you put out your fist to it and hit it on the nose as hard as you could so that it sprang back and cowered by the bird table, but not without giving you a slash on your forearm which was like a rip in silk. And it wanted stitching, but I couldn’t think of anybody I could trust to do it, so I bound it tightly with the edges of the wound together and dressed it every day until it healed. You were lucky. It healed with only a faint white scar. Though you hated the scar, Annina, however much I told you it was hardly visible.

  ‘You don’t see it in the way I do,’ you said, and of course you were right.

  I thought the cat would have made you more cautious, but it was from then on that you began to go out on your own. You bound waxed thread around the eyelet of a darning-needle, and wore it at your side like a sword. You learned that cats would back off if you screamed at a certain pitch.

  Blaise was at college, studying mathematics. When he came home he bent down to me and I kissed his fair prickly cheek with its big pores a
nd splashed freckles and I thought of his sister out there in the jungle with her darning-needle. The bigness of Blaise’s hand as he took his cup of coffee. His huge trainers kicked off and lying like mountains on the lino.

  Annina, did you love Blaise, your brother? You knew more about him than I ever did. You stayed for hours in his room, listening to tapes with him, watching him study, hearing him talk to his friends. You knew what I didn’t know, you heard what only came to me as a drone through the walls. My brother, you always said. ‘Do you think my brother will be home soon? Are you making those sandwiches for my brother?’

  Your light clear voice and your breath at the curve of my ear. You liked best to talk perched up on my shoulder when I was moving about the house, cooking or tidying, or just sitting with a cup of coffee and an unread newspaper in front of me. And I learned to talk very lightly and quietly too, not whispering because that blurred the sounds too much for your ears. And never shouting, for too much noise made you tremble and curl up on yourself. The only thing that always made you afraid.

  Annina, you know and I know that I could go on writing to you for ever, just as I could have listened to you for ever as you tucked your right arm round a curl of my hair and leaned yourself comfortably into the shape of my shoulder and told me things I had never seen and would never have been able to imagine. For we didn’t really live in the same world, even though we shared house and home and bed and you shared my body as much as you needed it.

  You went away and I have no one else who can talk of you. No one else knew you, no one else misses you or grieves for you. No one else would even believe in you.

  You were so sure there were others like you, right from when you were a little girl.

  ‘Have you ever told anybody about me?’ you demanded. ‘Well then! Nobody does! They all keep it secret, just like you do, for fear of what might happen. We need to find each other. How can I stay here knowing that somewhere in the world there are people like me, people of my own?’

  You were like me, Annina. You looked like me. I think even our skins and our hair smelled the same. But that was no good to you, and even though I longed for you to stay more than I had ever longed for anything, I made you a pair of trousers and a jacket from buckskin I got from a child’s cowboy and Indian outfit, and I bought thermal silk for your leggings and vests, and you made your own shoes as you had had to learn to do, for I could never get the stitching small enough, and it bruised your feet.

  My son went to college with a trunkful of books and a cake I’d made and a letter a week and a telephone in his hall of residence. He went with a bank account and the name of a doctor and his dental records up to date and his term’s fees paid. He went with a pair of National Health glasses for reading and vaccination marks on his arm. He went with both of us waving from the station platform and his father slipping him a fiver to get himself something decent to eat on the train.

  It was no good giving Annina money. Where and how could she spend it? My daughter went with a backpack on her back which we’d designed together after hours of thought and cutting the silk into the wrong shapes. Light and tough, that was what she wanted. She went with food and drink and I have to say she went with a great gift for stealing, which I hoped would stand her in good stead when she grew cold and hungry out in the world. She went with her darning-needle sword at her side, and a sleeping-bag filled with the finest down which I’d snipped from duck breast feathers. My daughter went very quickly, slipping through a hole in the fence, following a map of holes and gaps and secrets and hiding-places which she knew and I did not.

  I’ve learned your language, Annina, and now I’ve no one to speak it with. So I’m still talking to you, wherever you are. It’s all right to listen, Annina, for I’m not saying any words that might weaken you. I’m willing you on, Annina, morning and evening. I’ll never so much as whisper ‘Come home.’

  The Ice Bear

  The spicy heat of Stockholm station café knocked her out. She went limp and drunk. She’d been travelling a long time, coming home the awkward way through north Germany. Ferry across the Storebaelt, train, another ferry across from Helsingør, train across Sweden. Now she was here, still feeling the bump and rise of travel in the soles of her feet. She’d worn the same light cotton drawstring trousers all the way from Yugoslavia, and now she was itchily cold and her tanned feet looked yellow, not golden any more. There were three hours to go before the last ferry, the ferry home, sailed from Stockholm harbour across the Baltic. She could get a hot bath here, she knew, and wash her hair and strip off her dirty underwear and change the flimsy trousers for a pair of jeans.

  But she’d been wrong. Things had changed over the summer she’d been away. They’d closed the bathrooms for renovations. Only a few showers were working, and as soon as she’d paid her money and was naked and streaming with water and shampoo, she’d seen that the floor drain was blocked in some careful fashion which meant that water had seeped out into the fresh clothes she’d laid on the tiles outside the shower cubicle, into her towel and her dirty underwear and even into the lining of her canvas boots. Everything was sodden. She wrung out the towel and wiped the water slowly and carefully off her shivering body, and then wound the towel around her head. She had no more clean pants. The dirty ones felt unpleasantly smooth and loose against her skin. She eased herself into her jeans and they gripped her damply at waist and crotch. She’d worn nothing heavier than Indian cotton for weeks, shirts and trousers and wrapover skirts which now lay rolled into faded dirty balls at the bottom of her rucksack.

  But at least her leather jacket had stayed dry, hung on the back of the shower-room door. She put it on over her bare breasts and zipped it up to her neck. The springy curls of its sheepskin lining closed over her like home. She was safe again. She started to pick up her strewn dirty possessions. Well, naturally the bath-woman broke into a temper. She was trying to keep these shower-rooms nice for all the passengers, didn’t Miss understand. God help us all, she would have thought that anyone would have had the sense to see the drain was blocked and not to use this shower. There was a bell over there, look, with CALL FOR ATTENDANT printed underneath it. Amazing these students, with their university educations, not able to read a simple notice. And it was no good Miss bursting into tears. That didn’t help anyone.

  The bath-woman bent down from her hips and swabbed the floor with a yellow cloth. She didn’t have to do that. She didn’t have to present her long-suffering backside to heaven as evidence. She had a perfectly good long-handled mop. But she just knew how bad it would make Miss feel to see the spread of the fat round her back as she bent, and to see the cloth stabbing into the corners of the bathroom, picking up soap scum and long dark hairs and globs of spilled shampoo. The bath-woman knew Ulli’s sort. You called them Miss to be civil. Jeans so tight she must’ve poured herself into them, or else a bit of skirt like a dishcloth showing everything she’s got. And then she wonders why she gets herself into trouble.

  The café was filling up. Ulli twisted a corner of tissue into a wick to draw up the last of her tears. It was no problem really and anyway she was all the better for crying. She would hang up her wet towel and wash out her bra and pants in the Ladies once she was on the boat. Or why bother? She was nearly home. Three months ago the towel had been striped in dark pink and French navy, but the colours were faded now. She had dried the towel in the air of so many countries. She kept a length of string with her and she could quickly make a line under the luggage racks or across the window of a train compartment. She did not get in anyone’s way. She ate garlic sausage when it was offered to her, and she passed her bottles of mineral water and wine from mouth to mouth. She ate heavy yellow Spanish bread, puffs of brioche, black pumpernickel which reminded her of home, and drank milk cow-warm from a high, green, wet Bavarian pasture where a woman milked her two cows in a shed. Ice-cold or cow-warm? the woman asked her. There was a bucket of the morning’s milk chilling by the stream.

  There were Bodensee
apples and split figs from Dubrovnik market. On the Austro-Hungarian border there were baked ears of sweetcorn and tomatoes hanging on shrivelled vines, but no one to sell them. A white dog lolloped through the fields and licked Ulli’s feet. A poor skinny creature with yellow teeth spotted brown at the roots, and a healed gash on its right flank. A poor creature but scrabbling and close and companionable. It grinned as Ulli bit into the flesh of one of the tomatoes, as if it wished her well in drawing nourishment from something it could not eat.

  At night Ulli rolled up her towel into a pillow and pressed it into the back of her neck as the Japanese do, so that she slept deeply. Very often she did not feel the formal pressure of the customs officer’s hand on her shoulder as the train went through some frontier in the middle of the night. She was too deeply asleep to hear voices calling up and down the train asking for papers, or to hear the compartment doors banging open as the frontier guards scanned faces shrunken with sleep. Tanned guards who wore their uniforms easily, boys with good homes near by perhaps, bored but attentive. Sometimes, by the time Ulli woke, not only the customs officials but several other righteous people in the compartment would be calling her through the noise of trains and dreams: MISS, MISS, MISS …

  So now she had got rid of her tears. She sat in the upstairs café with enough Swedish money to buy herself two coiled buns scented with cardamom, and her own individual pot of coffee. Now a young man came to sit at her table. He glowed in his dark yellow waterproof jacket and over-trousers and his warm, silly cap which must have been knitted by someone who loved him. Or else why would there be so many changes of colour and so many different stitches in one cap? It would have been made by someone who loved him, making work for herself. He took out a book and glanced at her as if he wanted her to register the fact that this was a serious book and that he was reading it. Or perhaps there was more to it. Perhaps he had written it himself, she thought. It had a flat grey cover and thin papery leaves like slivered almonds. It looked as if it came off a small press powered by enthusiasts.