Escape

by Anna Fienberg

  A girl.

  I raised my head but I could only see the nurse's busy back. A big green tent loomed over me, from my waist to my knees. A masked man was washing his hands at the sink. Guido had gone outside for a cigarette.

  The baby was being wrapped up like a present. A girl. Oh, please, I thought, please don't let her be like me! I must have drift ed off again, because when I opened my eyes, there was a warm white bundle on my chest. From inside there was a noise, perhaps a sneeze, soft and damp. I laughed and the baby sailed up and down with my breath like a tiny boat on the ocean.

  My baby. She was a spell I fell under. The top of her head, mussed with coppery fluff , was the softest thing I'd ever touched. She was so new, but she didn't smell new. Not sharp like car seat covers or stationery. She smelled a bit musty. Familiar. Her hand was furled against her cheek, her eyes squeezed shut. But she was not like me. She was like no one. She was herself. I knew that in the first moment. Looking at her was like falling into the pillow after the pethidine, going down, down into layers of impossible soft ness. Her eyes opened wide. There was the sky blue that would one day change to green. I loved her immediately, with the force of lightning. It made me feel strong. Magnificent.

  We floated together on that big white bed for three days and three nights. Kind women padded around chatting, taking our temperatures, looking after us. Guido visited. My parents came. I thought of my mother's 'endless fountain of love' and smiled. We inhabited our own little planet, my baby and I, and I never wanted to leave it.

  Guido didn't mind about the baby being a girl. That first hour, when he'd come back into the labour ward and leant over me, I'd smelled smoke on him but something else too, a sour odour. 'Have you been sick?' I asked.

  'No,' he said, annoyed, but I saw him wipe his mouth. His hands were trembling. He hadn't wanted to pick up the baby but when the nurse placed her in front of him, he had to take her. At first he held her away from him, stiffly, the way he'd stood at our wedding. Then he looked down at his daughter. A smile crept onto his face, slow, like a sunrise. When he looked up, he was blazing. That smile wasn't an illusion, tacked on for show. It was metamorphosis.

  Whenever he looked at Clara after that, even after she grew up, there was always the glow of that smile.

  I wish our whole married life had kept the atmosphere of that hospital room. Me feeling strong and confident, knowing that Clara was herself, untainted by me. Guido blazing with love, trusting. I wish I had done something to keep us all safe, as we were then. But I didn't know how. And I ruined it.

  The hospital was a big white noisy place, a bit like a hotel, only with guards. The brisk nurses fenced out the voice with their sensible advice and kind expressions. Later, the hospital took on the aspect of a safe house in a wild game park. And it was in the maternity ward that I met Doreen.

  We were learning how to bathe our babies. Doreen had been in the class before me, and had just finished bathing Saraah. She was patting her dry as my baby began to howl. No one else's baby was crying, but my daughter's face was turning scarlet at just the sight of water. I felt my own redden. I jiggled her and unwrapped the rug and put her over my shoulder, facing away from the water, but the crying wouldn't stop. How do you make it stop? I wanted to ask, wishing there was some button like on the vacuum cleaner or the stereo that I could press to turn her off . See, you panic at the first sign of a problem, said the voice. Heaven help you. But there was no heaven. And I was the mother. I was supposed to fix it. I didn't know how so I did nothing, standing there paralysed with my stupid feet stuck to the tiled floor.

  'Mine screamed like that for the entire bath, and now look at her, right as rain,' said Doreen. She was bracing and kind, like a summer breeze.

  That exchange set the tone of our whole relationship. Doreen was twenty-seven, only two years older than me but she seemed far more mature. She'd been married in Brisbane and had run away to Sydney with two hundred dollars in cash, an extension cord and her diaphragm, which she carried in a sock.

  'Bit late for the diaphragm,' she laughed, rolling her eyes. She had a trumpet of a laugh, decisive. There was nothing pale about her. 'My husband was a total bastard,' she said. 'At first he came on all sweet and gentle, you know, couldn't do enough for you. But when we moved in together he just sat around and smoked dope all the time. Wouldn't lift a finger.'

  'But the baby is his?'

  'Yeah. Saraah. Cute name, isn't it?'

  'Biblical, like mine. We haven't come up with a name for ours yet.' I was thinking about telling her what a burden a name could be, and maybe she should investigate what kind of saintly woman Sarah was supposed to be in the book of god, but she went on talking.

  'I'm putting two a's in there, Saraah, so it's individual, you know, more modern.' She tossed her thick bouncy brown hair. 'So anyway, there's Dale loafing around on the sofa all day and he didn't change one iota when I got sick after our holiday in Bali. I got this damn tropical ulcer, really painful, and I couldn't walk for a while. The last straw was when he said all that pus was the evil coming out in me. He was probably stoned but I left anyway, wouldn't you?'

  No, I thought. I would have believed him.

  'It's your turn to bathe her now,' said Doreen.

  'But she's still crying.'

  The nurse was standing at the bath, gesturing at me. I felt like a pulled thread, my stomach bunching and twisting as Clara wailed.

  'Do you want me to stay while you do it?' said Doreen.

  So we bathed the baby and eventually, when she was being towelled dry, the crying stopped. She was as right as rain. 'Crying never killed anyone,' said Doreen.

  For years afterwards I repeated that sentence of hers to myself. Doreen had a way of making statements that allowed no space for a different point of view. I tried to use her tone, with the full stop at the end louder than the sum of the words.

  On the last day in hospital Guido came early, bringing a dress I'd worn before my belly had swelled. I knew I couldn't get into it yet. I had thought my stomach would deflate immediately after the birth, like a pricked balloon. It was depressing the way I still looked eight months pregnant, the small hill spreading under my gown hardly dented at all. But I tried to smile at his thoughtfulness, and put the baby on my mound with my knees up to cover me.

  My parents and Joanna Mulgrade were seated around the bed, discussing the crisis in Nicaragua. Guido sat down on the edge of the bed. He was gazing at the wall opposite, his eyes unfocused.

  'I've been thinking about the baby's name,' I said loudly.

  He looked away from the wall, at the baby.

  'What about your aunt's name?' I suggested. 'Clara? I think that's lovely.'

  Guido reached out and took the baby's foot in his hand. He touched each of the tiny toes with his finger, like a blessing. When he looked up, there was that sunrise smile on his face. 'Sì!' he said. He leant over and pinched my cheek. 'Mio amore.'

  But then I had to go and spoil it. A nurse bustled in and said cheerfully, 'Well, soon you'll be at home with your little one. Going home today, aren't you?'

  I looked at the baby so small and vulnerable, her new navel still blue and greasy-looking, at Guido's expectant face and the dress he was holding in his lap. It just didn't seem possible, so soon, to be going back to that house where there was no one but me to look after her. She was too perfect, a wonderful, inappropriately expensive gift that I didn't deserve. She was far too exquisite for someone like me.

  'Oh no,' I said, stupid with panic. 'I love it here, I never want to go home!'

  There was a short silence in which my words resonated around the room. Guido got up and went outside. The sunrise smile had gone. He left the dress swinging over the back of his empty chair.

  At home the baby cried every morning, and then every afternoon from five until eight. The sound of her cries set me off like a car alarm. Red waves of scream pooled out from my heart. Wah, wah, wah! I wanted to fast-forward her life like a video until she could talk,
until she could tell me what was the matter. What was I doing wrong? Oh poor helpless innocent child, why was she born to someone as hopeless as me?

  Guido stopped sleeping in my bed and the baby slept with me until we got a cot. She was usually exhausted after all that crying and finally, after a feed, she'd fall asleep by 8.30. This was the best time of the day. Asleep she didn't seem to be in pain. I could almost fool myself everything was all right. I'd get into bed beside her and the warmth of her little body, snuggled into my belly, brought a cosy safety like when I was pregnant. I could take my time looking at her. There was her tiny nose, the shells of her fingernails, the smell of the top of her head like just-baked biscuits. With my arm around her, cuddled-up close, we made a circle.

  But she didn't seem to like sleeping. And when she did, sleep lay too thinly on her, covering just the top of her little body. She seemed to be on guard under her closed lids, her eyes springing awake at the call of a bird, my hushed footsteps on the carpet in her room. She had caught my anxiety, I was sure, the red scream inside me oozing with my milk into her veins.

  Guido, on the other hand, seemed to be asleep all the time. In his own room, he slept sometimes until noon unless he was working at the typewriter. He had moved the desk into the living room because the sunroom was 'small like a jail and hot like a sauna'. I had to be very quiet when he was at the desk but it seemed there was always something noisy or urgent to do, like the vacuuming or walking the wailing Clara. 'Maybe you should take your work into your bedroom,' I suggested.

  He looked off ended, but he did.

  When the cot came I made sure it had wheels and when I put Clara down for her nap I rocked it back and forth, singing 'Rock-a-Bye-Baby'. I always choked on that last part. 'When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall and down will come baby, cradle and all.' What kind of a rhyme is that?

  When I discovered that Doreen lived just two blocks away from us in St Pauls Street, I prayed to God, thanking Him. I hadn't done that since sixth class, when Susan Summers chose me for her basketball team.

  Almost every day I rang Doreen, around ten o'clock. I'd have some news item prepared, like the interview with the prime minister I'd heard on the radio, and I'd rattle on about that before I got to the real reason I'd called. I didn't want to sound too anxious, because Guido said that was bad for the baby. He said if I never relaxed, how could my baby? I began to think of my anxiety as a kind of disease that could be passed on. When I rang Doreen, though, she would listen to me and explain how she'd handled a similar problem with Saraah, and even if I despaired that I would ever be as capable as she was, just the sound of her voice with its sturdy punctuation silenced for a while the terrible doubts hovering thick as the dust motes in my patch of kitchen sun.

  When Doreen sat in my kitchen with a cup of tea and said, 'Love makes the world go round,' and told me my baby was 'pretty as a picture', I felt a deep calming gratitude. She brought centuries of female companionship with her and gradually, as she talked, the kitchen would resonate with the quiet, wise authority of women. The reason clichés became clichés, I told Guido when he sniggered at her after she'd gone, was because they expressed an idea or experience so completely that there was no need for any other. And anyway, Doreen was studying to be a nurse, so she should know all about babies and their health. She'd completed one year of her course and soon she would go back to finish it.

  I wish I could have enjoyed my baby. That's what you're supposed to do. But I didn't. It wasn't because I didn't love her. It was just that she was so perfect, with her transparent skin and apricot ears and her own little heart beating inside her chest. A brand new human being, clean like a blank slate. How could I be trusted to keep her alive? Undamaged? Me? I felt like a scar on that perfect skin.

  The crying got worse.

  Every morning a wattle bird shrieked me awake at 4 am. It was like a siren, signalling catastrophe. That shriek meant I had to take up position on the front line. I was armed now, bristling with Strategies, but how was I to know which were the right ones? It was like being stuck in my dream, condemned to observe and suffer, and never act.

  I wish the magnificent feeling had stayed and the anxiety hadn't crept in. The anxiety was like monsters in the night, carving up my peace, and always their dark, pointed questions. Why is she crying? Why won't she settle, where is your milk? They let themselves in slyly when we took the baby home and I was alone. Then they cruised around like gangsters, taking over the place. Home invaders come to stay.

  How absurd can you get? said the voice. Do something.

  But it never said what.

  There had never been a more terrible sound in the world. It meant there was a little person in pain right next to you. Someone who couldn't make themselves understood. How did people hear a child crying and just go on with their conversation, as if there was no war going on?

  'For heaven's sake, it's just the baby's way of telling you she wants something,' said Doreen. 'It's really just like anything else – there's a problem and you try out a number of different strategies to solve it.'

  'But what if none of them work?'

  'Something works eventually, you know it does,' said Doreen. I heard her sigh, too. So I didn't protest that even if a strategy was successful for half an hour, the crying started again, and the house didn't feel like a house any more but as if we were both trapped in this long black tunnel like caves under the sea, and we would be condemned forever to make our way through them, just the baby and me, scuttling along in the dark like beetles with never the hope of any light at the end. I didn't say that. I got up and made Doreen a cup of tea instead. I was so grateful she was there.

  'Why don't you ask your mother for help with the crying?' said Doreen.

  'Oh yes, that's a good idea.' Privately, I thought my mother had had enough crying in her life. There had been the distressed orphans with their drunken fathers and drugged-out mothers, their broken bones and spirits and their endless, shattering needs. And then there was my father. I didn't want to bring more tears and anxiety into my mother's house.

  But my parents did valiantly come to visit and hold the baby. They brought provisions and kindness and the good ordinary smell of Ajax. Mum put down her bunch of keys with the enamelled red peace sign on the big oak desk. The keys looked so comforting lying there, certain. I was so fond of those keys – they looked as if they had come to stay.

  I breathed deeper when my parents sat on the brown couch next to me. My milk would flow, sometimes it would even spurt and make wet circles on my blouse and I would make the most of it and fetch the baby, nuzzling myself into her. Sometimes she actually smiled. She would lie on my knees and smile at me, at my mother. But then sometimes I would watch them bringing out the pie for lunch or putting the milk in the fridge and there'd be the strange sense of unreality and the vertigo. It was like looking at a movie with benign characters doing reassuring lovely things but knowing that after two hours it would finish and they would disappear. I felt as if I was behind glass. My breath made Rorschach shapes on the cold surface and I tapped and tapped but no one could hear. My poor baby was trapped behind the glass too, through no fault of her own. Just because she happened to be my baby.

  Guido usually went out when my parents came. He said he was 'leaving me in good hands' and off he'd go to get the milk or the bread. But sometimes he came home without them.

  When I visited my parents in Cuthbert Street the baby cried much less. Sometimes she even went to sleep. If she cried when she woke I'd swoop her up and take her out to the garden. I'd pace up and down, swinging her lightly from side to side, singing a rhyme. I tried to make my voice merry and confident, as if I knew what I was doing. Because what, after all, did I have to be so afraid of? There were no wild drunken fathers waiting for us back home with a length of garden hose in their hands. My husband was a reasonable, stable man who would never harm me. You're damn lucky, said the voice, and not a little spoilt compared to so many other women in the world! Wouldn't a wo
man in Zambia swap places with you in a second!

  But my anxiety seemed to make Guido angry. Sometimes it was he, now, who set off the car alarm inside me. 'What are you doing?' he'd snap. 'Stop that frown on your face, fold those nappies later, the baby's asleep, come here.'

  Now he wanted me to read his poems. And the sources of his references. He wanted me to sit for hours, absorbed by his words and what he was thinking. But I couldn't concentrate. I didn't have time. And the alarm turned into an air raid siren.

  Just before I went to sleep at night, I'd think, now there is time. It was only early in the evening after all. Some people were probably just starting dinner. But it felt to me like the middle of the night. There was something else, too. Something besides the tiredness that stopped me going out into the kitchen and putting my arms around Guido. There was the hard little lump of resentment lodged in my chest, in the place where my curiosity and excitement used to be.

  In the fourth month my milk dried up like a puddle in the sun. When I took Clara to the baby health centre, the nurse told me she had lost weight. Could my baby actually be starving?

  I was advised to put Clara on a bottle. What did you expect? said the voice. You can't breastfeed like a real woman. Think of all the antibodies she'll miss out on. You'll be depriving her of the best start in life. She'll always be the weaker one in the pack, just like you.

  I wrote to the Education Department and told them I needed more leave. If I'd been busy before, now it seemed I had ten times as many things to do.

  Guido didn't smile fondly when I measured the formula scientifically, as he had in the past when I was cooking. He just clicked his teeth with irritation and said, 'Will we have dinner next year?' But at least the formula was something I had control over. If I took enough time, concentrated properly, sterilised and cleaned, Clara would get enough food. And no matter how high my level of anxiety soared, it would make no difference to her diet. There would always be milk, and its supply would not be affected by how I was feeling. My baby would no longer be poisoned by my panic, and surely that was a positive.