Sweet Home

by Carys Bray

  ‘We’ve just come to say hello,’ Dad said.

  ‘James sends love to you and his little niece,’ Mum added, as if my brother had phoned from university between every one of their visits in order to send another slice of his love.

  When the doctors first brought my baby up from maternity last week, she was lying on her front. She was conscious and her shoulder blades stuck out like tiny wings. Her skin was baggy as if I’d purposefully made it too big for her to grow into. Her arms and legs were translucent, spindling out of her prone body in capellini threads. She seemed ancient; a tiny, old woman covered in whorls of beardy hair. Now she is on her back. Floored by kidney failure. Every spare fold of wrinkly, baby skin has ballooned with fluid. She is pearly smooth, shining as she stretches. The respirator expands her pneumonic lungs with the steady thwack of a hiccough. Tubes tentacle everywhere. Emily talks to her. I can’t say anything. Shameful thoughts have been creeping around my mind all morning. If I open my mouth they might erupt into words. Thoughts like this one: although it’s written on her tags, I can’t call her by that name. It wasn’t meant for a baby like her; it’s my favourite name, and now I’ll never get to use it. Or this: I’m going to have to change banks. There’s a cashier at my bank who was so friendly. How long now, love? I never want to see him again. And this: I’ve stopped touching her through the porthole in the side of the incubator. I’m scared of her.

  While I was mooching around, swollen and smug, chatting to strangers about due dates and ultrasound scans, it was all about to go wrong and I didn’t even know it. All that benevolence and self-satisfaction, basking in the outpouring of goodwill, watching myself in shop windows, entirely unprepared for the trick my body was about to play on me.

  ‘We’ll just whizz her up to special care,’ they said after she was born. ‘Help her breathe for a bit. Give you a rest.’

  Special care, whizz … Intensive Care, rush.

  ‘She’s going to need a little bit of help.’ Shit, this baby’s even smaller than we were expecting.

  ‘Nothing to worry about.’ We’re very worried.

  ‘You can hold her in a minute.’ We’re taking her away from you.

  There is no time or geography here. The air is warm and withering, thick with beeps, hisses and whispers. There’s no window in our cordoned corner. Only the curtains hint at a world outside with air and sky and a cable ferry.

  I carried the new doll with me as we walked by the river. The afternoon hummed with heat and insects. When we reached the pub opposite the cable-ferry crossing, Dad bought a pint and two small glasses of lemonade. We sat at a picnic table. Emily and I sipped our drinks through bendy straws and watched the ferry creep toward and then away from us across the width of the river.

  I asked Dad if we could go on the ferry. In likely anticipation of bath time and the unprecedented sight of his finger-stamps blooming across my backside, he agreed. He gave Emily and me 10p each, enough for a return trip, and nodded and waved to the ferryman as we paid our fares.

  The ferry had bench seats down the port and starboard sides. There weren’t any seats in the middle, so the ferryman could pull the boat along the thick cable that was attached to a post on either side of the river. A rail tracked behind the seats, like the back of a chair, a nod to safety that seemed sufficient back then.

  We waved to Dad on the outward trip. He sipped his pint and gave a salute. I lifted the as-yet nameless doll from the seat between us and waved her too. When we reached the far bank we were stationary for a couple of minutes while the ferryman helped people alight and collected money from new passengers. Emily and I swivelled around on our seats, kneeling on the warm, soft wood, resting our elbows and chins on the slender metal safety rail.

  I have always thought that there are two types of imagination: hopeful and inoculating. Even as a child I tended to avoid the hopeful kind, as a way of dodging disappointment. I dispensed with happy daydreams out of the same superstition that causes people to sidestep ladders. I preferred to use my imagination for prevention rather than cure: a means of injecting myself with enough disappointment and terror to protect against a future epidemic. It seemed that imagining the worst might prevent it from ever happening. On that August afternoon the river was liquorice soup. As we leaned over the rail it occurred to me that it would be easy for Emily to slide under it, into the darkness. Within seconds it would be unclear where to dive, where to clutch and snatch. It would be like blind man’s bluff. Emily would sink deeper and deeper, into the black, silty bottom of the river, tangling in the tightening reeds as she struggled. A flip of my stomach warned of an imaginative overdose. Too late. Emily’s drowning face floated through my thoughts with impunity.

  ‘What will you call the dolly?’ Emily asked as the boat began its return trip.

  ‘Not telling,’ I managed, blinking the fabrication of her struggling, waterlogged features away.

  ‘She has to have a name.’

  Emily let go of the rail and reached for the doll on the seat between us. I grabbed it with one hand and seized Emily’s arm with the other in an attempt to force her elbow back onto the rail. Emily wobbled. There was a splash.

  ‘It’s very sad.’

  I don’t realise that Emily is talking to me until she says it again, ‘It’s very sad.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Me too,’ I say, as if I am a casual observer. As if I am watching the news or a documentary about neonatal care.

  ‘Very sad.’ She looks as if she might cry. If she cries she might leave. She might need to get tissues or a cup of tea from the canteen. And I will be alone.

  ‘Look at the curtains,’ I say.

  ‘The curtains?’

  ‘Look. They’re like a map. See the cable ferry?’

  She shakes her head at me.

  ‘Remember that summer …’ I stop talking as she stands.

  ‘I’m going out for a bit,’ she says.

  ‘Don’t—’

  ‘I need to,’ she says and swishes the curtains open. ‘You should be sitting there.’

  She points at the chair and then closes the curtains behind her. The empty chair gapes accusation at me, so I sit down. When we were small and we got tired and upset Mum used to say, ‘You’re beyond’. I’m beyond; pushed further than the limits of my imagination. I tried to vaccinate myself against something like this. As a teenager I read Dad’s embryology text book. It was locked in the glass cabinet in the lounge next to The Body Book with its well-thumbed central pages: line drawings of a man and a woman jigsawed together in what seemed, back then at least, like a progression of intricate exercises. The embryology book was Dad’s from university. He said it was in the cabinet because it was upsetting. I spent many immunising hours examining the magnitude of human deformity: a baby with his insides out, another with a nose in the middle of its forehead, fists without fingers, supplementary limbs, partially-formed genitals, and polycephaly. I thought it was enough. Prematurity and multiple organ failure weren’t in the book.

  She’s sedated. Not in pain, they believe. I haven’t asked if pneumonia is like drowning. They can’t say when, but the swathe of the curtains suggests that there won’t be a tomorrow for us, suspended on the third floor of the hospital. I open the porthole in the side of the incubator and fold my fingers around a swollen arm: Jennifer’s arm.

  I let go of the doll. At that moment it seemed the most heroic of gestures, the doll instead of my sister, a choice that had to be made in an instant. Let the doll drown, let it not be Emily.

  Splash.

  The ferryman slowed his pulling, but the momentum of the boat pushed us past my bobbing doll. ‘On the way back, sweetheart,’ he said to me. ‘On the way back, I’ll see if I can’t just scoop her out.’ But everyone could see that she was drifting in the lazy current, downriver, towards the weir.

  ‘What was her name?’ Emily asked rubbing her arm where I’d clamped it tight.
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  I leaned close to her ear and whispered it there.

  Dad was waiting on the bank. He looked like he was going to say something, but he stopped as he registered Emily’s misery-pinched face. ‘What a day,’ he said wearily. ‘The sooner we get home the better.’

  He set off at marching pace. Every so often he stopped and turned around. ‘Come on,’ he called. ‘Hurry up.’ He broke into a run as we neared home and saw the ambulance outside the house. My brother had been born while we were out. James – 7 pounds 3 ounces, Dad wrote later on a piece of paper that he taped to the front door.

  But even the sight of the ambulance couldn’t hurry Emily. She dawdled along the road, nursing her upset. And all the way to the front door, her sombre lips mouthed, ‘Poor, poor Jennifer.’

  Under covers

  Carol’s bra is spread-eagled in the hedge like a monstrous, albino bat. The wind has blown it off the washing line and tossed it onto the wispy fingertips of the leylandii, where it reclines in a sprawl of wire, hooks and corralling lace. Despite her best efforts, she can’t reach it. Her washing basket is full of dry laundry. She has removed the pegs from the line and placed them in their little bag. But she can’t go back indoors until she has retrieved the fugitive bra. People might see it.

  Earlier on, she hung the little peg bag from the washing line and listened to the pegs crackle as she slid it along. Some people place washing on their lines in an untidy jumble, without even pairing the socks, but Carol hangs things out in an orderly manner, beginning at the far end of the washing line with undergarments and tights. These are followed by blouses, skirts and cardigans, and finally larger items, such as sheets. Sheets are her favourite. They wriggle and flap, squirm and wave until they are marinated in the season. Summer sheets are best. Their dusty warmth reminds Carol of sandy beaches and she brims with nostalgia, recalling the selected highlights of seaside trips with her sons. Sandy sandwiches, sun burn and fear of death by drowning have been consigned to the dustbin of memory.

  Carol looks around the garden for something to help her reach and dislodge the bra. The tools are locked in the shed, and she doesn’t want to go back into the house while her bra is exposing itself to the neighbours. Her happiness is stacked in slender, ordered discs, like a packet of Rich Tea biscuits. Unexpected events upset her. Every day she does a wash. There is always plenty to fill the machine because almost everything in her house is covered in washable fabric. The toilet roll is masked by a knitted pig, the toilet lid is embraced by a cross-stitched cover and the bottom of the bath is concealed by an antibacterial, machine-washable, anti-slip mat. The carpet in the lounge is hidden by a beige rug, the dining table lurks under a daily rotated cloth and the sofa is veiled by a patchwork throw. Hot-water bottles are wrapped in furry animal cases, hard-boiled eggs wear knitted warmers and even her occasional bottle of wine must get dressed in a seasonal sweater before standing on the table. Plates are buried under lacy doilies and the teapot is insulated by a cosy, while Carol’s arms and legs are consistently wrapped in cardigans and flesh-coloured tights. Today’s wash is white, full of underwear and table cloths. It has dried quickly in the wafting breeze, a fact that would usually make her happy.

  Next door, Sophie and Louisa lie on parallel beds, Swiss-rolled by duvets and yawning like lions. They’ve slept through breakfast and lunch, and landed somewhere in the middle of the afternoon. Louisa unravels herself and kicks her duvet away. She knuckles her eyes and remembers the whispered conversation that kept them awake so long. Her friendship with Sophie is new and needs the reinforcement of disclosure. Last night they exchanged confidences like gifts, feeding each other small nibbles of truth: ‘I used to fancy Matt Jones’, and ‘I used to suck my thumb’. Louisa hasn’t told Sophie about what happened with Matt Jones, yet. She hasn’t said anything about following him into the garden at a party, about the way his tongue slugged in and out of her mouth, the way his spit dribbled down her chin. She hasn’t talked about not knowing how to breathe or mentioned his busy hands, patting her down in a way that reminded her of the time she’d been body-searched at the airport. Eventually he uncoupled himself with a great slurp. ‘What’s up with you, then?’ he said. ‘You frigid or something?’

  Louisa kneels up and crawls to the end of the bed where she can lift a small corner of curtain to eye the weather. Outside, April is blustering about, swiping at trees and giving her mum’s washing a walloping. ‘Come and look at this, Sophie,’ she giggles.

  Sophie is lost in the swirl of a chasmal yawn. Her hair orbits her head in an orange cloud. She waves a hang-on-a-minute hand at Louisa.

  ‘Come on. Quick! You’re going to miss it.’

  Sophie gets out of bed and shuffles to the window.

  ‘Look!’ Louisa points. ‘It’s Mrs Evans from next door. Her bra’s blown away. It’s stuck in the hedge.’

  Sophie crouches next to her friend so as not to be seen. The tips of her bright curls tickle Louisa’s cheek. They stare at Mrs Evans for a moment, watch her reach up and fall short.

  ‘Look at the size of it! It’s enormous,’ Sophie giggles.

  ‘She’s got massive bazongers, that’s why.’

  ‘Bazongers?’ Sophie laughs.

  ‘Bazookas, hooters, knockers!’ Louisa sniggers. ‘Tits, baps, breasts!’ She can feel herself beginning to unravel; a coil of Matt Jones-related worry starts to spin out of her chest like cotton from a bobbin. ‘Airbags, torpedoes, jugs!’ she continues. ‘Boobs, melons, speed bumps.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Sophie gasps. ‘I’m going to wet myself.’

  Mrs Evans reaches up again and both girls are mesmerised by the scalloped sway of her upper-arm flesh. Louisa glances at her own, tightly wrapped arms. ‘I am never going to have arms like that,’ she announces confidently.

  ‘I bet it’s the first time her underwear’s ever been in a hedge,’ Sophie says.

  And they burst into a fresh whirl of laughter.

  A long time ago, before bras were allied to absence and excavation, Carol might have been amused by runaway underwear. Back then, she used to read romantic fiction. It was a habit that began when the boys were small and there seemed to be more ever after than happily about her life. She would pop into the charity shop on London Street and buy the second-hand romances for a few pence each. Then she would lose herself in an exciting world of millionaire business men and exotic holidays. She didn’t tell anyone about her romance habit. She was embarrassed of the stories’ heaving bosoms and thrusting manhoods. She hid the books in the bottom of her wardrobe and, after a while, in bin bags in the loft. She was more bored than unhappy. There was only so much housework she could do, and as the boys got older, they required less and less mothering. She filled the gaps with romance.

  Boris was a good husband. He was kind, straightforward and a hard worker. But he referred to making love as ‘how’s your father’ or ‘slap and tickle’, and he would say ‘wey hey’ and ‘phworrah’ if he happened upon her in her underwear, even after the boys had left home. He commentated on their sexual relations like a football pundit until she told him not to – his Yorkshire accent stopped her from pretending that he was sheik of an imaginary country in the Far East or an Italian Count – and he had to be content instead with a post-match report, sitting up in bed afterwards like Des Lynam, smoothing his moustache and reviewing his selected highlights. Sometimes she enjoyed going to bed with him, but she always felt shy about it afterwards. The next day she would watch him glugging soup at the dinner table and remember his enthusiastic harrumphing, the meaty, schlepping report of his penis, and it all seemed rather ridiculous.

  Once he said, ‘Kiss me like you’ve never kissed me before – go on, say it to me.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she replied. ‘Kiss me like you’ve never kissed me before.’ She closed her eyes and waited for his kiss. A tiny part of her imagined the possibility of being swept into his embrace, stretched over his arm and kissed with a passionate but tender fury she had only read about. But h
e clamped his mouth around her nose and wormed the tip of his tongue into her left nostril. She pushed him hard in the chest and he stepped back, laughing.

  ‘Bet you’ve never been kissed like that before,’ he said.

  Occasionally he did something romantic. Once he copied ‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?’ into a greetings card and wrote, ‘That’s you that is!!’ underneath. A week before she had her left breast removed, he wrote her a letter. She keeps it in the drawer of her bedside cupboard. When she reads it, she can’t help but picture Boris; the idiosyncratic underscores sit like moustaches underneath the words he chose to emphasise.

  Dear Carol,

  On the radio this morning they said that no one writes love letters any more, so I thought I’d have a go. Even with one headlight out, you’ll still be smashing. You keep everything so clean. Your Yorkshire puddings are the best I’ve ever tasted. When I come home and you’ve been baking, the house is warm, you are in the kitchen and your face is a bit pink – it makes me want to kiss you.

  Love,

  Boris.

  After the surgery she stopped reading romantic fiction. And she stopped taking her bra off in front of Boris. The usual ‘how’s your father’ forays occurred, but she always kept herself covered. Perhaps it was around that time that she started covering up other things too; it helped to keep her crocheting, knitting, sewing hands busy. She got used to the scar and the rucked-up pucker of her freshly-soldered skin. It was the other breast that bothered her, dangling jollily, as if it didn’t know yet; it left her feeling unbalanced, it was about as much use as a solitary shoe and, although she tried not to, she wondered if there were lethal secrets concealed in its ducts and lobules.

  Boris retired a year after her operation. Not long after, he booked a surprise, off-peak break in Cornwall. On the last evening they went out to dinner. Carol wore a pretty, halter-neck dress with a mohair cardigan to ward off the chill of autumn. Afterwards, they drove to the coastal path at Gunwalloe. It was a dark night. The moon was covered by a constellation of cloud, but the walk was an easy one, down narrow lanes, tunnelled by tall hedges.