Like I Can Love

by Kim Lock

  Although he was quiet now, memories of the baby’s cries from throughout the day rang in the back of her skull like an echo. The muscles up the back of her neck pinched tight. Her bladder ached. Henry slipped from her nipple. Awkwardly she slithered out from under his body and cradled him in the dent between two couch cushions, then she tiptoed across the room.

  And walked straight into Ark.

  ‘Oh!’ Jenna exclaimed, laying one palm on his chest. ‘You snuck in, I didn’t see you there.’

  ‘How could you not?’ he replied, ‘It’s not like you were doing anything.’ He glanced at Henry. ‘You shouldn’t leave him unattended on the couch like that. It’s not safe.’ His gaze slid down the hall toward the kitchen. ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t had a chance.’

  He lifted an eyebrow.

  ‘I’ve been a little busy.’ She gestured to the sleeping baby.

  ‘You’re spoiling him,’ he told her lightly, as though talking about the weather. ‘And while you’re spoiling him – you’re ignoring the rest of the stuff you should be doing.’

  She tried not to drag her feet as she followed him to the kitchen. He opened the fridge, selected a beer and flicked its lid into the bin. ‘Look, babe. This has got to stop.’

  ‘What has to stop?’

  ‘This . . .’ he waved his hand, ‘this nothingness.’ Dishes clattered as his hands raked over the pile in the sink. ‘You need to get up and start doing things. You need to motivate yourself. You’re not sick. People can’t sit around doing nothing all day.’

  ‘Nothing?’ she snapped.

  ‘The house is a mess, there’s no food to eat.’ He took a step towards her. ‘Nothing has been done.’ He paused. ‘Except the baby has been spoilt rotten. He’s got you wrapped around his finger.’

  Jenna felt her pulse fluttering in her wrists. ‘You try running on two hours of broken sleep.’

  ‘Well then, you need to get him out of our bed, and stop letting him suck on your tit all day. Get yourselves into a routine. It’s healthy.’ He sat on a stool at the bench and began marking off points on his fingers. ‘Get yourself together. Tidy up. Have a shower, maybe?’

  Jenna wondered if tomorrow she’d see these points written on the whiteboard on the side of the fridge, alongside the shopping list. Milk. Coffee beans. Tinned tomatoes. Tidy up. Shower.

  ‘You’re being lazy,’ he was still going, ‘and you’re starting to make me look bad. I bend over backwards to provide for you and you throw it in my face.’

  Jenna’s anger flared. ‘Henry is a baby. I had major abdominal surgery five weeks ago. I’m still bleeding.’

  But was she being lazy? She’d read about all the babies who, within two months of birth, were sleeping through the night, weaned from their mother’s breast and shipped neatly off to day care while their mothers went back to paid work and contributed to the household – contributed to society. Why couldn’t she get it together? Only three days ago, Ark had driven all the way to Mount Gambier to collect her favourite Thai takeaway and brought it home, wrapped in a towel on the front seat of his car so it would stay warm. Maybe he was right – maybe she was being ungrateful. She let Ark’s accusations sink home like snooker balls. Lazy. Clunk. Unappreciative. Clunk. Selfish. Clunk.

  ‘I get it,’ she said through gritted teeth, ‘but you don’t have to be a dick about it.’

  Launching from the stool, Ark tossed his empty beer bottle into the sink. It smashed into the pile of dishes. Glinting brown shards spat into the air and littered the bench and floor. ‘There’s two of us in this marriage, and I don’t want to carry you anymore. It’s pathetic.’

  And then something happened. Ark’s mouth continued to move, but no words came out. Instead, Jenna heard a rushing sound, a solid body of white noise; she saw her bare feet moving across the tiles, then the toaster was in her hands. Cord snapping tight, the plug popped from the outlet as she lifted the toaster above her, crumbs falling like brown rain.

  She threw the appliance as hard as she could at Ark’s head.

  Ark yelped and ducked as the toaster smashed into the overhead cabinet behind him.

  ‘Jenna! What the fuck?’

  Upon hitting the tiles the toaster split into a tangle of plastic and metal. More scorched crumbs burst across the floor. A smudged dent marked the cabinet door. Ark’s face was white. He stared at her as though she was a ghost.

  The muscles in Jenna’s arms sang and her hearing returned; her arms were still rigid above her head.

  ‘You called me lazy,’ she said. ‘You said I was pathetic.’

  He swore again and stared down at the shattered kitchen appliance. ‘You could have seriously hurt me.’

  Jenna lowered her arms and burst into tears. Great hot sobs bubbled up as if from her bones. Her eyes dropped to the floor, taking in the slack flop of her belly, the long droop of her breasts, heavy with milk beneath her stretched shirt. Disgust curled her insides as she smelled the oil in her hair.

  Hesitantly Ark came to her, stepping around pieces of broken plastic. ‘Babe, I’m saying this for you.’ His hand cupped her chin and she let out an anguished moan. ‘I’m telling you these things because I love you.’

  She glared at him through her tears, her breath coming hard through her nose.

  ‘You know how if you’re eating at a restaurant, you’d want someone to tell you that you had spinach in your teeth? It’s like that, babe,’ he said. ‘You’ve gotta be cruel to be kind.’

  Wrenching free from his grasp, she stepped back. His eyes went wide.

  ‘You can clean this mess up,’ she spat. ‘And make your own fucking dinner.’

  She went to the bedroom; the slam of the door woke Henry but she didn’t come out.

  *

  Ark didn’t speak to her for six days. A week of cold, deliberate silence: he made her no meals, offered her no hands to hold the baby so she could shower or shit unaccompanied by a whining infant. On the seventh day she cried, and apologised. That afternoon, he bought her flowers and he cried, too.

  v

  Six months passed.

  Half a year of the same.

  vi

  Bars of soap, half-empty bottles of nail polish remover and a litter of hair ties were flung aside as Jenna rifled through the bathroom drawer, searching for a tube of lanolin. Henry was teething; her nipples stung and the cotton of her shirt felt like razors.

  She huffed and went to the bedroom. Rummaging through her drawers, through the silky maternity lingerie pushed to the back of the drawer behind the old pyjamas Ark had eventually returned. (Come on, honey, can’t you take a joke?)

  Jenna eyed Ark’s bedside table.

  The drawer made a soft slipping sound as she slid it open. Her ears pricked up automatically and she glanced at the doorway; Henry was quiet in the lounge room, the soft melody of a children’s television programme filtered up the hall. Eight months old and already she relied on the TV as a babysitter. She could almost see the aghast comments from the mummy pages on Facebook.

  Her fingers walked over a blister pack of ibuprofen, a coil of iPod headphones, letters from his mother. There was a time when Ark used to read those letters aloud to her, curled up together in bed. Statements like I miss you and Thinking of you and I’m so proud of you that Jenna would savour like treats as they rolled from his tongue. Those times, his arms snug around her, she had imagined what it would feel like to hear those words from her own mother: words of endearment, reassurances, the tenderness of unconditional approval.

  Now, she realised, Ark simply read the letters quietly to himself and folded them away.

  With care, Jenna lifted the pile of Marguile Rudolph’s letters from the drawer. As she flicked through the stack, she came upon a particularly bulky envelope. This envelope was blank, unaddressed, but its creases strained.
Peering inside, she let out a gasp.

  A thick wad of cash filled the envelope. More cash than Jenna had seen in her life. Wrapped in an elastic band, the bundle was mostly green and yellow – hundreds and fifties. Jenna had only seen hundred dollar notes once or twice – ATMs didn’t dispense them, so they only came from the bank. Where had all this cash come from? What was it for?

  She pulled off the elastic band and began to count.

  vii

  The rattle of Ark’s LandCruiser pulling up the drive startled Jenna, and she glanced at her watch as Henry crawled to the edge of the sandpit. It was a little past noon, and Ark’s arrival gave her a wash of unexpected pleasure and relief.

  The lawn was cool and dry beneath her bare feet, prickling her ankles as she crossed her legs. Henry had finished with his crackers and she crumbled a couple in her hand to toss to the few brave finches that flitted towards her across the grass while their kin twittered angry warnings from the grevilleas.

  She didn’t bother calling out to Ark; he would find them. Soon enough he emerged from the back door, his boots thumping across the deck. Seeing her sitting cross-legged on the lawn, brushing sand from her knees that Henry gleefully flicked into the air, he smiled and waved, and bounded down the steps.

  ‘You finished early,’ she observed as he came within earshot.

  ‘I cut out of the meeting,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t wait to see you.’ The finches scattered away as Ark crouched alongside her and kissed her cheek. Magnanimously he withdrew his hand from behind his back and held forwards a metallic silver envelope.

  ‘What’s this?’ Jenna asked. Sliding her finger beneath the flap, she slit the paper open. Inside was a gift voucher from Larissa’s, a day spa in Mount Gambier. In flourished pink script the wording on the card read: This voucher entitles Jenna Rudolph to one three-hour Blissful Body Indulgence session, including eyebrow shaping and bikini wax.

  Jenna’s head snapped up. ‘What’s this for?’

  Ark wrapped her in a tight hug. ‘For being you,’ he said. ‘I can see how tired you are, and I thought you could do with a bit of pampering.’

  ‘Three hours,’ she murmured into his chest. For eight months she’d felt obligated to be with the baby, his body attached to hers like an external gestation. The idea of spending time alone, without another human clinging to her, felt like a kind of illicit freedom. But almost immediately, guilt tramped upon her, and she felt the greyness of obligation slink back over.

  Ark lounged back onto the grass. ‘He’ll be fine with me for a few hours, won’t you, kiddo?’

  Now, she thought to herself. Ask him about it now.

  She plucked a long spear of grass from the edge of the sandpit. ‘Ark?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I found some cash the other day.’

  Ark gave her a look of surprise.

  Just ask him.

  ‘A twenty you didn’t know you had?’ he said, leaning forwards to push a toy bulldozer within Henry’s reach. ‘That’s always a nice surprise.’

  ‘It was more than a twenty.’ With her thumbnail she slit the grass spear up the centre.

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Ark, there is seven thousand dollars in the bedroom. What is it for?’

  He stared at her for a long moment; she felt the skin on the back of her neck tighten.

  ‘Where did you find it?’ His voice was measured.

  ‘In one of your drawers –’

  ‘Why were you looking in my drawers?’

  ‘Why do you have seven thousand dollars?’

  They stared at each other for a long beat until Ark exclaimed suddenly, ‘Oh, that!’ He brushed sand from his hands. ‘I was just holding it for a friend. His bank was closed, and he didn’t have anywhere safe to keep it.’

  ‘A friend?’

  ‘Yes. He sold his car.’ Ark smiled.

  Jenna’s grip on the gift voucher grew clammy. Bitterness crept across her tongue as she realised he expected her to swallow his explanation. But what was the truth? He’d robbed a bank? Stolen it from someone’s wallet? Found it washed up in a bottle on the beach? Her fingers curled tighter, the voucher made a crunching noise. A whine started up in her ears, like her brain was swelling inside her skull.

  He said, ‘Babe, I’ve just given you a generous gift.’

  ‘Ark, I –’

  ‘The money doesn’t concern you, Jenna.’

  ‘But the cash –’

  ‘Is my job. Running the business, managing the finances – that’s my job. Your job is taking care of our home and our son. That’s the commitment you made, to me and to yourself and to our son. Stop stressing unnecessarily. Remember what the counsellor said about pressuring yourself?’

  ‘I never –’

  ‘Stop being paranoid!’ He rose to his feet. ‘You don’t know the first damn thing about money. I’ve just booked you a whole day on your own and you’re throwing it back in my face. Maybe I’ll take the voucher back, since you’re being so ungrateful.’ He snatched the card from her hand and stormed across the lawn, up the deck and inside the house.

  Henry began to cry. Jenna stared down into her hands; four lines of blood sprang from four stinging cuts across the soft pads of her fingers.

  Stupid. Stupid for picking at him, for nagging. She should have saved her energy for something that mattered.

  Humming white noise rushed through her like static. Jenna was on her feet, sprinting across the grass, hurling her body down the slope and into the thicket of grevillea. Birds shrieked and darted skywards. Bees swirled angrily. Barbed leaves tore at her skin and brittle sticks lashed her face. A thousand tiny rips unwrapped her skin.

  And when she was done, the roaring white noise stilled, she heard a sound behind her on the lawn.

  Henry was laughing at her.

  viii

  Under the stream of hot water from the shower, Jenna’s body ached with mastitis.

  All day her skin had flushed hot and cold, burning where Henry grabbed at her; her head felt fragile and strained. Alone, she had forced down a one-handed dinner of toast and butter while Henry threw his own onto the ground and cried.

  Henry wanted to breastfeed, but Jenna refused. A desperate need for her body to be hers alone clawed at her. He had butted her with his head and screeched with fury at her refusals to lift her shirt. Her muscles clenched each time a hand mauled her, wanting, needing. Leaving her hollow. And now her inflamed breasts ached, crass globes of milk, and the fever simmered along her skin.

  Ark was at a friend’s house fulfilling a month-long promise to help set up a home theatre system. Hours of poker and rum would undoubtedly follow, and Jenna expected Ark to stay out well into the night. Is that where he was getting his cash? Poker? Gambling? Jenna blinked water from her eyes and gazed down at the cuts on her fingers, the raw scratches across the backs of her hands and wrists, washed red from the hot water.

  Towelling dry hastily, she anticipated the soft sheets of the bed with longing. Henry was splayed across one side of the mattress as he simply wouldn’t sleep well alone. The only chance she had of getting a few hours of sleep was with him in bed. With her. With them. Ark would be irritated at the sight of Henry between them on the mattress; he’d accuse her of spoiling the child. But on the occasions she left Henry in his room, crying out into the night, Ark would toss and turn and growl at her to do something.

  Shivering with fever, Jenna clutched the towel tightly across her shoulders and snapped off the ensuite light.

  ‘Hey, babe.’

  The voice gave her a fright. Dressed only in his boxers, Ark swayed with one hand on the door frame. He tottered across the room and wrapped his arms around her, pressing his body into hers as he ran his hands up her back.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ Jenna admitted, keeping her voice low. She glanced uneasily
at Henry. ‘The mastitis is still bad, I’m going straight to bed.’

  ‘Bed sounds great.’ He grinned and made a grab at her towel.

  Henry snuffled and tossed an arm.

  ‘I’ve finally gotten Henry to sleep.’ She smiled weakly, gesturing towards the bed. ‘I just want to go to sleep myself.’

  Threading his arm around her waist again, Ark pulled her back to him and pushed his hand up the side of her throat. His palm rested heavily on her cheek. Gripping her chin between his thumb and forefinger, he pulled her face close.

  ‘Aw, come on, babe.’ His breath was syrupy with rum. ‘Don’t you love me?’

  ‘Of course I love you,’ she answered, carefully pushing his chest. ‘But I’m unwell. I think I’m going to need antibiotics.’

  ‘Always excuses,’ he muttered, sliding his free hand under the towel. ‘Come on.’ His fingers crawled across her inner thigh. ‘It’s been ages. You mustn’t love me anymore.’

  ‘My skin hurts if anything touches it,’ she told him. ‘My head is pounding. I can’t get warm. I just want to go to bed.’ Muscles quavering, she pushed his chest again but he held her firmly.

  ‘Please, Ark.’

  He stiffened, then dropped his arms to his sides; his palms slapped against his thighs. He took an exaggerated step back.

  ‘Is this far enough?’ he demanded. Backing unsteadily further, he stepped into the ensuite. ‘How about now?’ He held up his hands. ‘Better yet, why don’t I move out? Move to Spain? Would that be far enough?’

  Jenna gritted her teeth. ‘What are you talking about? And please,’ she warned, shooting another panicked look at Henry, ‘please keep your voice down.’

  Giving a short groan of disgust, he returned to her and laid his hand on her upper arm. Her skin burned beneath his fingers.

  ‘It’s been ages,’ he said again, furrowing his brows. ‘Months.’

  ‘Come on, Ark.’ She hated the plea creeping into her voice. Her legs felt heavy; the bed was so close, but she wondered how long before she’d be able to lie down. ‘It hasn’t been months. Maybe a couple of weeks. Everything is okay. I’m not feeling well. You know that.’ Looking him directly in the eye, she added, ‘Please.’