The Sunlit Zone
Page 2
Genetic, Robotic, Nano, InfoTech.
Whatever it was, my mother ignored it.
10
—What will be, will be, she said.
Richard agreed. Their neighbour, Jo,
was swelling with the neat bundle
of Cello Green. Feline and graceful
were Jo’s requisites, with a capacity
for turning heads. Jo left brochures
when she dropped in.
—Read these, Jo said, and rinsed
her cup. There’s a discount for referrals,
ten percent. It’s not too late for you
to select a few last minute prerequisites.
The usual small town telepathy
ensured the news was spread
that Flora had refused all tests,
even the standard ultrasound.
Jo’s brochures lay around until
my mother tossed them
in the Eco Bin.
11
By December Flora’s breasts
hung pendulous and ached.
Lettuce and spinach made her retch.
Meat gave her heartburn, and chicken.
But salty things, how she craved them:
smoked fish, olives, anchovies.
Salt drove my mother from the house
and out along the tensile wall
that held the sea’s hard logic back.
Down she went towards the shore.
The waves swirled lacily at her feet.
Craving overrode all risk. Furtively,
lest someone see (truant teens, young
retirees), she crammed kelp thickly
in her mouth, washing it down
with salt water and the tears
that assailed her in pregnancy.
12
In the new year, Flora sensed
inside a fish-like quickening.
By April she felt rapid kicks.
Her belly swelled into a globe,
perfect as a near-full moon.
Autumn swirled around the streets
with a beauty that made her weep.
By June a sentient weight
dropped down into the cradle
of her pelvis. She tried to paint
just how it felt, this quiet retreat
into herself like an anemone but
no, not quite; more like a flower
closing with the approach of night.
13
Cello was born in March and named
after the instrument her curved shape
would later imitate, her eyes a deep
cerulean, the colour of Dream Genes’
blue logo.
—Just dropping in, said Jo, her eyes lit
like a Jesus Freak’s with the drugs
she took to reduce her weight.
My mother poured two cups of tea.
—A completely pain free labour, said Jo.
Over in minutes, and no stitches!
She shifted Cello on her stylish hip
and smoothed the hair curled wantonly
across her infant’s ear. No cry ever
passed that baby’s lips or at least
Jo claimed it never did.
—Don’t let that woman in here again,
Flora said to Richard when she left.
14
Flora’s pains came four weeks early
on the hinge of winter’s solstice,
when night had just swung shut
on a dwindling afternoon.
Richard followed what he’d read
in a second-hand book on pregnancy:
went back to bed to preserve his rest.
(You’ll need energy later, it had said.)
So Flora laboured all alone, white with pain
and furious until the hospital called her in.
And this hard plank of loneliness would lie
between them for several years; my father,
after a couple of drinks, claimed Mum
fractured a bone in his wrist.
—What a load of rot, my mother said,
red spots flaring on her neck.
15
Finn was born first, in a furry caul
with a sleek seal shine that entranced
the midwife so much she ignored
the thread wound tight around
my sister’s neck, her face blue
as a forget-me-not. The nurses
swarmed like government angels,
tending to this strange infant.
But my mother continued to labour
and my father, helpless to appease her,
sank into a chair. Groaning, she was,
bear-like and on all fours, as if to shake
the thing off that was hurting her.
My crown protruded from her opening.
—Shit! said Richard. There’s another one!
Three final thrusts and out I fell
in a meat-warm heap, all slippery
with membrane and my mother’s blood.
My father scooped me up.
16
Pod-curled, we lay for twenty days
behind stern glass. Our heads
were domed, our backs soft-downed,
our lips small as the rose buds
in the vase beside us. Flora, vigilant
in her dressing gown, stayed close
until the nurses sent her home to rest.
But at home she only flitted about,
her eyes burning and pouched.
At dawn she’d drive to the hospital
while Richard was asleep, drawn
back to us by imprints more precise
than any scan or photograph.
She saw us twinned but different,
as the land crab differs from its ocean
cousin. I slept and fed, legs fattening,
while Finn fretted and wailed thinly.
Presentiment entered my mother then
on dark and silent paws. The house
held in its breath, waiting.
17
It was my mother who first noticed
the small wounds in my sister’s cheek
like gills that neither healed or festered.
The doctors crowding around our crib
made her wish she’d never said anything.
But no scans of the internet or experts
called from overseas could explain
the phenomenon and after a while
no one mentioned it.
18
Richard was a comfort, but a man
no more or less. When our mother’s milk
came in she weepily attended to the factory
of her breasts. My father lacked the dexterity
of other husbands, or so it seemed to Flora
as he hovered outside the nursery.
—Where the hell is he? my mother said.
The nurse who poured her tea said
—Pick your battles, and nodded sagely.
Meanwhile, my mother’s milk did for me
what rain does for seeds: unfurling towards
light what’s packed within. I drank milk
with animal exigency. But Finn refused,
her face scrunched in an angry fist.
19
At last our parents brought us home
to 68 Shale Road. Just one month old
but being prem, we were subtractions
/>
still, zeros. Our official birth date was
tomorrow. Flora watched our father
carry us in, no bigger than kittens
in our swaddling. And she laughed
at last though not too hard, feeling
twin tugs: of memory and her labour
stitches. The first tug raw, the second
unhealed. An earlier memory cleaved,
of Richard carrying her over this same
threshold like an armful of fresh flowers
and how they had made love for hours.
20
I soon outgrew the nurse’s scales
but Finn did not. Her bird shape
on the metal tray made my mother
wince, the contrast in our weights.
We were zygotic twins, not identical.
My crown was a mass of dunnish curls
while Finn was bald and veined, a mist
of pellucid skin, ethereal; the small cuts
in her cheeks no longer raw but resolute.
My sister screamed all night and nothing
worked: hypnosis, music, a hefty dose
of Baby Winks. Our mother erupted
over little things.
—Flora, your milk! Richard hissed,
both of them frantic with fatigue.
My skin grew dimpled and fat-creased.
I favoured the left breast with copious feeds
as my mother showed me in later years;
the nipple tea-coloured and malformed
beside the other’s florid peak.
21
My mother sewed Finn’s caul
into the silk hem of a blanket,
where it gave off a scent most like
the acrid smell of chicken flesh.
My sister’s cries tore at Flora’s sleep
as stumbling, milkfull, she ran across
the hall to find I’d pulled the blanket
with its caul right off my sister’s back
and cocooned myself inside it.
Flora scarce noticed how winter
unfurled into spring, or that my father
resumed wearing his cardigan to work
instead of the jacket she preferred him in.
Cello Green walked at seven months
and not long after began to talk.
Inside my mother there swiftly rose
a river of unhappiness that overflowed
when Jo Green’s tulips won first prize
at the annual Bayside Garden Show.
22
Finn was fractious until dawn.
Our mother felt herself dissolving,
the lines around her ragged
and unfolding with the approach
of morning when my sister fell
at last into dreams half spent,
her eyelids flickering and bruised.
Our mother slept vicariously,
rocking the cradle beside the bed.
—Something’s not right, she said
as Finn screwed tight her eyes
with the effort of her cries.
I slept on.
23
Flora woke one night, her face wet
with a long pearled string of tears,
her breasts leaking, her nipples cracked
and sore; the pain like needles no one else
felt, of course. Not Richard who snored,
oblivious, until she woke him, unable
to bear the stone weight of her thoughts
alone. He rubbed her back and yawned.
She felt him, then, rise hard and urgent
against her thigh. Her shoulders bristled
with hostile wings, feeling invaded
as the enemy poured in. One hand
on the cradle rocking, rocking.
24
When Cello Green turned one
in March, Dream Genes gave her
a fancy party. Flora ignored it.
—Too exhausted, she said, and sat
instead breastfeeding at a window
that looked out onto the street
where Cello, infant prodigy, rode
her tiny bike along the concrete.
Such acceleration of motor skills
in early years led to delinquency.
That much she knew.
—That child’s a freak, our mother said.
—Now, Flora, said Richard, but gently.
25
My mother turned to the spirit realm;
to psychics, palmists, astrologers
and one of these aligned Finn’s birth
with a star linked to insomnia.
But I was also born that day.
—And yet North sleeps! said Richard,
his arms raised in mock disbelief.
Evenings after work he dandled us
upon his knees and watched the news
on iTV while dusk fell on Flora
like an iron curtain. She chopped
the vegetables and grilled the meat,
feeling a hardness in her jaw set in.
26
Fatigue wore Flora down, and fear,
the way wind wears down stone
relentlessly. It made her grasp
at anything: crystals for our cot,
star charts for breastfeeding,
potions on the stove that reeked,
spells she muttered to make Finn
sleep. Richard scoffed, wondering
when all of this was going to stop.
But in the lonely hours such things
staved off the darkness lapping at
the lamplit circle where our mother sat
with Finn, who screamed upon her lap.
Sometimes she managed to draw
a few, half-formed ideas on scraps
of paper but she often lost these
amongst the debris of baby gear.
Richard bought her a white sketchpad,
a box of charcoal and grey leads.
—You’ll get to them.
—Thanks, love, she said, thinking:
bullshit.
27
I was the good child back then;
a seraph twin who slept the night
and grew plump at my mother’s breast
while Finn remained coat-hanger thin,
a gunmetal tint to her papery skin.
My mother likes to remind me
of this: my angel-child status
ambivalent.
—You sucked me dry, she often says.
But you never woke at night like Finn.
It’s like you stole your sister’s sleep.
Yes, I think that’s what you did.
28
Certainly Finn spent life quickly,
her heart tympanic and bird-quick.
Nothing calmed her or made her sleep
till Flora, risking water fines, ran a bath
and rocked her in it. At last my sister fell
silent, save the steady click-click of her gills.
In the too quiet house my father woke,
stumbling to the bathroom for a leak.
—Shhh, Richard. Look! said Flora.
The first sketch that my mother did
since we were born was of this scene,
a simple line drawing in fine black pen.
29
That winter was dry.
Two residents in Shale Road alone
; were arrested by the Water Police.
Finn and I turned one in June
with a fanfare of toys and a pink iced
cake our father baked. Our mother
at last felt her energy quickening.
The frayed rope of their exhaustion
ceased tugging. On weekends, they
strolled together with the pram
beside a grey expanse of sea.
Even their love making resumed
a gentle rhythm; my father’s urgency
almost forgiven.
30
In the evenings Flora settled us
in a shallow bath on a floating mat,
and there she rocked us off to sleep.
Jo Green heard tell of the bath
somehow and leant across the fence
one day, her mouth a slash of red.
—What if they fell or rolled? she said.
What if the dog—
But according to Flora, we never rolled,
lulled to sleep by the bath’s warm stirring.
And our feet nudging the porcelain rim
reassured us of the world’s limits,
that we’d not disappear or drift forever.
31
It was not long after this
when Flora made a discovery.
Jo was on the phone to her, again.
An eco-luncheon. Could she come?
Light strummed a peeling window sill.
I remember that. Flora tells the rest.
How she said yes to Jo, and mmm
at intervals while breastfeeding. How
as Finn wriggled, Mum took her feet,
caught her fingernail on a flap of skin
and found between my sister’s toes
thin webs, shell-pink and delicate.
32
—Webbed feet, my mother murmured,
drowsy now from the milk’s letdown
as we suckled at her breasts.
—Webbed what? said Jo, pressed up
so close to the phone Flora heard
the scrape of her pearl-encrusted ear