‘Maggie, you are the loneliest person I ever knew,’ she said.
‘Well.’ I stalled, and tried to pull away but she held me too hard.
‘You know, I am a bad choice for you,’ she said sadly. ‘We could never be anything to each other. That was never possible. I was always going.’
‘Anja. If I were you, I’d be more concerned.’
Her fingers were strong and the feel of them deep in the muscle of my hand was unpleasant.
‘I just don’t understand it. You are not so old, Maggie. Why do you behave this way?’
She flicked out the bottom of my hair.
‘You hide yourself. You could be pretty again. If you tried. Go into the world.’
I felt an awful blush spread upwards from my chest.
‘Reach out for your daughter. If Bella does not want you, how about Rose? She is not so far. Just the other side of the city. And her beautiful baby boy.’
‘What did you say?’ I asked, though I had heard her clearly.
‘Reach for her. Why do you make things so hard for yourself?’ she said, a teasing kind of scold in her voice.
She ran one hand the length of my arm and squeezed at the top. She worked the loose flesh steadily, between her fingers, like dough.
And I had hit her, a flat-handed slap to the side of her face. A clean pop of sound that split the room open. Somewhere inside it was her inhale, her shock, which is the real power of a slap.
A brief scald on my palm, the memory of the hard ridge of her cheekbone and it was over.
She laid her own hand on the place where I had struck and for a last second I felt her unreadable gaze. She thought to speak, I waited for her words, but she spat out a sound instead that I had never heard, a combination of disdain and revulsion, a perfect insult. She left me.
41
Not a long day, or a hard day. No row with my husband, nor previous sleepless night.
A slow build of frustration, then, that finally came to a head? A pad-footed despair, perhaps, at last, showed its teeth?
None of these.
I have been back and back to look for signs, but there were none. Just an ordinary day in my ordinary life.
Chris and I were neither happy nor unhappy. Nothing’s ever enough, my mother used to say, that’s the problem with you. And she was right, to an extent. There was an itch sewn into me, though I’ve long since cut it out. A certain yearning and, yes, it could flare up, but it did not govern me. I existed, still do (tragedy to one side, and I know nothing of ecstasy), within a narrow band of middling emotion. I am not, for the most part, given to extremes.
She would not eat. That was how it started. But she never ate. His mother said don’t let her get down. Mine was perplexed; she had not heard of a child who didn’t finish the plate. The book called it a question of control. Said that patience and flexibility are key. That seemed fair.
So it was not new to me to watch her spit it out, whatever I’d made; her tongue thick and muscled, expelling my food. Nor see the spoon flung to the floor, or her bowl flipped over in a caricature of disgust. I no longer dreaded the mess, wore sensible clothes and cooked enough that there was always more.
An average Saturday; we were out that night, the cleaner due in an hour to put her down. Chris flew the next day so we wouldn’t be late.
Halfway down a glass of wine placed safely out of harm’s reach. I hadn’t eaten since lunch and it sat alone and happy in my stomach.
Chris in his office doing paperwork and I could have called for him, had I needed. He would have tucked a tea towel into his collar and done his bit; bent in from a distance. But that hadn’t been necessary. It was fine.
And the meal had not gone badly; she had eaten something, enough. I held on to her chair and she clambered down, leaving a baked-bean print on her mat.
‘Yoghurt, please,’ she said, from somewhere below me.
‘No, love. Not if you don’t eat all your tea.’
‘Yoghurt, please,’ she repeated, surprised; she had, after all, said please.
‘No, Bella. Go and see what Daddy’s doing.’
I withdrew my attention. Resumed the tidying. Thought of the evening ahead or whatever played on the radio. I heard the suck of the fridge. She stood in its glow, stretching up. She saw me see her and stepped a foot inside, lunging for her treat in the last seconds before I got there. Her hand shut over a pot.
‘Give that here, please, Bella. Now. You are not to eat it.’
She held it behind her and backed away cautiously.
‘I mean it. Give it here now, please. I don’t want to have to take it off you.’
She wore a curious look; an animal look. All pupils, eyes locked on mine. I had the idea that if I snatched for her food, she might bite.
She reached the wall and pushed her pelvis forward to make room for the yoghurt she hid. There seemed to be a taunt in it.
‘I don’t know why you’re doing this. It’s very silly and very naughty. You’re going to be in a lot of trouble soon.’
A sudden flurry of anxiety that didn’t reach her. She watched me steadily.
This scene was a new one, she had not done this before, this level-eyed defiance. But isn’t each new phase, every new behaviour, good or bad, in your child’s life, strange? When they are everything, something different becomes huge, a devastation. And why does a mother, why did I, feel it as an affront? It’s not all about you, after all, as they say.
I could have diffused it, I see that now, in any number of ways. The subtlest cue of retreat; a straightening, maybe, for I had bent, poised for what was coming. I would not let her pass.
She bolted and I caught the top of one arm, and was pleased when I did.
She bent her face away from me as far as it would stretch. There was the sideways L of her jawbone, the impossible peach of her cheek. Still I heard her say, ‘Get off me, Mummy.’
Her other arm was outstretched. She squeezed the yoghurt and it burst, a great dollop travelling over the edge, on its way down to the floor.
‘Give it to me. That’s enough.’
‘No,’ she said.
‘What did you say, Bella?’
Louder. Emphatic. A little elongating of the N.
‘No.’
And then she tried to get away. She was strong, pulling with everything she had. She tugged her arm out of my grip but I snatched for her and caught her wrist, just.
She heaved against me, arm taut, feet scrabbling for purchase as she put all of herself into resistance.
She was making me ridiculous and I wanted it over.
I lunged for the pot, and she saw that she could not win, that I was simply too big. And so she chucked it, not back into the kitchen, even, but out into the hall. We both watched as an arc of artificial pink splattered the carpet and the pot came to rest, crumpled, dripping thickly. She looked back to me and she grinned.
My feeling for her was buried by the anger that shot the length of me and I saw her plainly, as if a stranger’s child. She was limp now at the end of my arm, dangling, done with this game and the effort of supporting herself and I saw her open pleasure in her win.
And so I yanked her, pulled myself up to my full, adult height, and brought her upwards too. Did she have the chance to take her weight into her feet; to stand, as surely I had intended? I don’t know. But it didn’t happen, and I felt it as more refusal.
So I let go, a deliberate action; opened my fingers starfish wide and dropped her, pushed her, even, and she fell, and her outstretched arm hit the floor at its joint with the hand. There was the moment of impact; a static moment when I saw that her arm should have bent, but instead stayed stick straight. Her fingers tweaked towards me and she toppled to one side, her arm laid out elegant across the floor. A ballerina’s tension and grace.
I felt confused and distant, my brain overloaded. Chris was there.
‘I saw that. For fuck’s sake, Maggie, why did you let her go? What were you thinking?’
He spoke the w
ords ahead of him as he rushed to her. I stayed where I was.
I believe that had he not left his office, had he not appeared in that second, the whole thing could have become something else. In the space of that pause, in the second or two before he arrived, my brain had been rearranging events to fit the shape of an accident. Not a lie, as such, not a conscious deceit, but a matter of interpretation; of survival, of sanity. For everybody’s good. I think I would have come to believe it myself, over time, had he not shown up.
But it was witnessed, and, in being so, my act named for what it was.
He got to her but she did not cry. Shock had bleached her face. She was perfectly still except for her eyes, pinned wide, which followed me as I paced the edge of the scene. Then she spoke, called my name, ‘Mumma’, and I knelt to her. Chris phoned for the ambulance.
‘What happened?’ they asked, when they arrived.
‘She fell,’ we said.
‘From where?’ they wanted to know.
‘Just standing. I had her hand. She slipped,’ I told them.
‘That’s good,’ they said. ‘No distance.’
Chris looked at everything but me.
The fracture was in the bottom of the radius, the big forearm bone, where it met the wrist. They X-rayed her in the hospital and showed me the faint white line that was the break. The commonest type.
Later on, a nurse checked Bella for bruises, efficiently and without apology. Chris and I stood at a distance, in terror, both of us; I could feel it pulsing out of him. She worked carefully, running her hands over Bella, limb by limb. My daughter shivered at the touch.
‘What happened, sweetie?’ the nurse asked, sat on the end of her bed.
‘I fell,’ Bella said, with a spacey grin that ended on me.
It was her left arm, thanks heavens – not that she wrote, she was just three – but she loved to draw, the same picture always. Gardens full of human-faced flowers. I found a pen in my bag and started a version on her cast as we waited, and another, changing the shapes of the petals and the aspects of each face. When she lifted the load of her bad arm across (it broke my heart, this effort), she gasped.
Someone brought us a mug of felt-tips and we drew for another while, her awkwardly, at an angle, me increasingly fluent. I recall this hour with a pleasure so acute it rips the breath from me.
The lady at reception said, could she try one too? And next a man who sat by, one leg raised in his wheelchair, his ankle huge and waterlogged. His drawing was wild and jungly and Bella asked if he would do her some more. When we were finished, it was beautiful. She cried, a month later, when the cast came off and begged to keep it, an artefact, a discarded limb. She laid it on a shelf by her bed; a constant rebuke.
I wondered what she remembered. I asked her in the following days: ‘Tell me, sweet, about the day you slipped.’ Always the same. ‘I fell, Mumma.’ Nothing more. I wanted to push, but didn’t dare.
‘I’m so sorry, darling,’ I said, again and again, and held her face, too hard, in my hands and looked down into her, deeply, desperately, but there was nothing to see, just the quiet smile of a child.
Did she know what I had done? Did she forgive me?
All I know is that I would have forgiven my own mother anything, except the act of abandoning me.
I have a temper. My mother’s temper. But that?
Well, yes. There is no denying it. I did a bad thing, the bad thing. I hurt my child. I broke her arm, an accident of course, but for that sliver of second in which I wanted to hurt her. I wanted her to fall – I must have done, that is why I let her go. And when the day was over, and she lay upstairs bandaged and sleeping, this knowledge doused me in terror. And from then it was always there; it lived at the fringes of everything.
I had done it once; how could I know I wouldn’t do it again? It had come upon me quickly. No warning. Nothing that I could recognise, should it threaten to strike. No alarm to send me racing to my bedroom, hand trembling at the lock, until the urge – was that what it had been? – had past.
There remained just the moment. My decision, though it was all too fast, perhaps, to name it as such. The impulse, then. Some structural weakness. Not that it matters, my reason or the words I choose to describe it. The act alone is what endures. Or rather the outcome, and I bet her wrist still stiffens in the cold and she twists it, first one way and the other, to ease it, as she began to when the weather cooled that year; an action that, every time I saw it, stopped my heart.
I swore to myself, for there was no one else, that I would never do it again.
And I did not. I never raised a hand to Rose. Or anyone, until that day. Until Anja.
42
I saw her one last time. She came to me four days later, on a Tuesday, at eight o’clock prompt – the time that we had once arranged for her to clean. She knocked instead of using her key.
‘Hello, Maggie. Can I come in?’ Eyes that wouldn’t meet mine.
I am at a disadvantage first thing. I suppose everyone is, but at my age it takes time for sleep to leave my face and a dressing-gown is always an encumbrance. I had drunk too much the night before and when I finally got off, my dreams were fitful. All of this showed; I glanced into a mirror on my way to the door and noticed deep creases lining one cheek.
‘Of course,’ I said, and stood aside.
She lifted a new bike across the threshold, grimacing at its weight. I followed, watching the wheels spin pointlessly and shed tyre-tread lattices of dry mud onto my floor. She hit a door frame as she passed, and chipped out a deep cleft of wood. I found the piece – jagged, glossy with paint – and toed it against the wall. I refastened my belt. Wrapped myself up a bit tighter.
I put on the kettle and pushed some bread down to toast. I could hear her struggling with the French doors but didn’t offer to help.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I called.
‘No, thanks,’ she said.
‘Do you mind? I was just about to shower.’
I was down in ten minutes, and found her where I had left her.
‘Maggie,’ she started. ‘I didn’t mean to bring you trouble.’
Her apology landed on me with a terrible weight.
‘No. Anja. You didn’t. God, don’t think of it that way. If anything it was the other way round. And I am so sorry. Sincerely sorry.’
‘It’s OK. Really.’
She blinked her relief at me, which was even worse.
Her hair was high and her face blemish-free. My slap had left no mark. She wore heavy mascara, a different look, which had clumped her lashes, and ear-rings in more of her piercings. The uppermost had reddened and I wondered if she had boiled the pin before she opened it. She looked fierce, a touch worn. Younger too. I wondered where she had slept.
‘No. It was horribly wrong. What I did. And I’m sorry. It’s not OK,’ I said. ‘Don’t ever think it’s OK.’
She gave a wry little smile and I felt shame.
‘Look, seriously, Anja. I want you to.’
‘Please, Maggie. Just don’t. Will you please just leave it?’ she asked.
I said nothing. It seemed the least I could do.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘And by the way, do you have a tissue?’
She pulled a funny face and pointed at herself. Sure enough, two fat black tears had started down the gullies either side of her nose.
I ripped her a square of kitchen roll and she folded it and seesawed under her eyes. She handed it back to me, streaked, and I felt her brief dry touch.
‘Anyway. I have come to say goodbye. There is a coach tonight,’ she said.
Her voice was calm but I felt the shift between us; her caution, her sense of my volatility, and would have done anything, anything, to go back.
‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘I’m so glad you did. And do you know yet? Where you’ll be going?’
‘I have some plans but I don’t want you to have to lie if they ask so –’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I un
derstand.’
I bent across the sink and looked up, trying to find the weather. The sky was a milky blue. Somewhere in Queen’s Park the sun was shining but it would be hours until it reached down into my own shaded space.
‘It looks all right out there. If you want to, you could spend the day with me? If your coach isn’t till later?’ I said.
‘Yes! Of course!’ she said. Her old smile back.
‘Good. Brilliant. But first, we eat.’
There was some bacon in the fridge and enough eggs. I had the idea of pancakes. We had eaten them every weekend for a while, after Chris brought back the notion from New York, but I couldn’t remember the recipe, so Anja found one on the computer and I cooked off instructions on the screen.
No maple syrup, but the golden type did fine.
They were delicious; Anja loved them. Like me before her, she had imagined the combination strange until she tried it. Simple delight; that’s what I saw.
We decided on a final walk and I told her I’d take her somewhere new. We used the car, which hadn’t been out for months. My door was stuck and the air inside stale, but we opened the windows and the day rushed in. Buster, on the back seat, head between us, stuck out his tongue to taste it. We set off in the blinding frozen sun and I asked her to find something on the radio, and she did.
We walked in Richmond Park with takeout coffee and a muffin between us. She marvelled at the deer and tried to tell me a story about a dog she’d seen chasing them on YouTube, but I wasn’t paying attention. The day felt suddenly perfect and I had the rarest sense of inhabiting it. She babbled away happily.
We stopped for lunch in a pub and sat outside, to save shutting Buster in the car. They thought us mad, but gave me a tray and I carried out our cutlery and a bunch of red paper napkins. The dog lay patient between her legs. I drank a glass of red and treated Anja to a beer.
I told her I had drunk through both of my pregnancies; that we hadn’t known any better in those days.
‘Was it ever OK, Maggie? With Rose’s father? Can I ask?’ she said.
‘Of course it was.’
‘In the early times?’
In My House Page 21