by Heidi James
The key slides into the lock. The door opens easily. There is no trickery. The postman has been. Bills and catalogues litter the mat. She bends to pick them up, walks with them in her hand through to the kitchen and places them neatly on the counter for her husband. Summer is over. The catalogues have models in winter clothing on the covers. Time passes. She performs the correct duties. The children are safely at school. All is OK. She is not what she once was. She changes. She has changed, continues to change. She longs for permanence. Standing in the shit of her shame she behaves like her old self. She flicks on the kettle for tea. She turns on an appliance. She begins to put away the clean crockery from breakfast. She repeats. She performs. She slides about the kitchen on putrid rotting limbs. She is the sickness in the house.
The boy will forget today. He is six; today will fade into the happy pile of Christmas, birthday and holiday memories. She cannot forget. She has failed. She undoes her shirt and reaches into the cups of her bra. The clamps grip her in silent contemplation. She is too much for them. She pulls them off without loosening them. No real harm done. Flesh does not resist. It obeys. She will be better. She will find a way. She will learn to show love. She will learn patience and kindness. She will teach herself and if that doesn’t work she will be taught. She drops the clamps in the bin. They clang against the metal, tolling like a bell just once as they land.
It is all unnecessary. She could pack a bag and leave. She could up and go. That is possible. She could do what men do and turn tail and run. Not think twice. She could hide in a bed-sit and work as a barmaid. She could fuck strangers for fun. She could travel the world. See the sights. He would marry again, a lovely kind woman who would love the children. Who might have some of her own. They could have more together, increasing the joy, doubling the brood. She could travel light, free as a bird, but always scarred, never able to deny their existence. Her body would always mother them. The two children. Her eggs, his fluids. The transformation. The unbearable explosion of her belly. She would never be able to deny them. No matter how far she went. Worse, they would come looking for her. She would be hunted, a fugitive from maternal duty.
She folds a tea towel. The light is beautiful in the kitchen at this time of day. She stirs sugar into her cup. Milk. She sits at the table, the cup between her hands. The wounded finger has begun to heal. She feels no pain. The body is miraculous in its ability to mend itself. Soon she will almost be intact again. Only small marks will remain. Small reminders. History recorded on the body. Her body is a text. She still smells of dog shit from earlier. She will never forget what she is. She must be punished.
I’m jealous of Patch. My own son. The way you look at him, hold him. I am jealous of Patrick. There. That’s my guilty secret. I hide it and I live with it and I know it’s immature and I love him. I love his sticky little hands, and his bright little smile. I love the way he rakes through his Lego as if it were a percussive instrument when I’m trying to watch TV and the way he curls in my lap for a cuddle. I sometimes just stand outside his bedroom door listening to him playing with his toys; to the conversations he has with his imaginary friends and the battles he sets up with his toy soldiers. You see, I do love him. He is my boy, my son, and yet…
I envy your relationship with him. I envy the easy closeness you have, the intimacy. Your love for him. Everyone knows a mother and son have an infrangible bond. It began of course when you were pregnant with him, before he even really existed. Except of course, that he did exist for you, he was absolutely present for you, but for me he was entirely abstract. A pulsating mound in your belly. The two of you tied together as one. You feeling his kicks first, his somersaults. I know you said it hurt and that you didn’t like it, but I think you only said that to make me feel better. To include me in some small way. So that we’d take sides together. You said it was like carrying a battering ram inside you. I appreciated that you tried to draw me in, to share the experience, but I was completely shut out. Your body was no longer about the two of us. It was about the two of you. Then you began to close down. I felt the shift of your love from me to him and then of course to Jessica. I don’t regret the kids. God no. I can’t imagine life without them. I just wish that I still mattered, that there was enough space for me. Too late. It can’t be too late. I want you to see me again. I don’t want to be just an extension of the children. Their father.
I remember walking into our bedroom, we were still in the flat then, we moved when Patch was two, didn’t we? And you were standing in front of the mirrored wardrobes in just your knickers, crying. More than crying, you said you couldn’t take it anymore. You’d been watching him move under your skin. You thought you looked ugly but you didn’t. You were beautiful, I know that, all pregnant women are beautiful: it’s one of those clichés that happens to be absolutely true. You hated that your breasts rested on your stomach and that you couldn’t reach down to tie your shoes. You hated not being able to sleep; you said it frightened you feeling him move, autonomous, inside you. That you felt possessed by a demon, just silly hormonal talk I thought and I told you so. You needed to be treated gently and with patience, my own father had warned me about that, in fact all the books you’d bought and read from cover to cover had pretty much said the same thing. That you must be cared for and watched tenderly. And I did my best.
My sister said that it’s hard to predict just how a woman will respond to the challenges of pregnancy, but most love it, all get over it. I knew that deep down you would be fine. That mother nature would step in and you would blossom. And you suited your face looking rounder, you had hips and tits. You were really sexy. I wanted you more than ever, though I understood you needed to be left alone, I guess that didn’t help how I felt though, pushed out, rejected. In all these things, there is no room for a man, for the father. Your job is done except for fetching and carrying. Other women close ranks around the new mother, it is entirely esoteric, unfathomable. My mother and sister fussed around you, sending you vitamins and support tights and all these other strange things that a man can’t even begin to imagine you might need. Your mother knitted tiny clothes with antique names, booties, bonnets and matinee jackets. Your friends bought you special foods and magazines and body lotions and brightly coloured babygrows that were impossible to fasten properly. I was taken by complete surprise by it all. By its complexity. How could something so natural, so animal, be so difficult, require so much equipment?
You were this private space, a walking intimate zone of just you and him. You had to eat certain things, sleep at certain times, he kicked you so much you had heartburn and piles and your breasts changed size and shape and colour and your hair got thicker and you even smelt different; everything changed. Everything. And I was so sure I’d be a great father and a good husband, I thought I would be great at it, but how could I be when I resented my own child. I was scared and ashamed, with no one to talk to. Sometimes I’m so lonely and you’re right there in the room with me. But I can’t tell you this. How can I tell you all this? You’d leave me and take the children and then I’d be nothing.
Then you went into labour with a trickle of water like you were peeing yourself. I’d imagined a great gush and then pandemonium and drama. I didn’t expect the slow, agonising wait, of going back and forth to the hospital while your body slowly opened up to let him out. The packing and repacking of your bag, with baby clothes and sandwiches and ice water and nipple cream, scented candles, CDs, a TENS machine with tangled wires and sticky pads and on and on with all these things that myriad experts told us we’d need. Things that the pile of magazines and books that sat by our sofa had decreed were absolutely essential to a balanced, joyful birth, which was essential to a healthy, happy baby. Our lives were being directed by all these so-called experts, but where did we fit in? Where did I fit in? Where was the promised joy?
That final day, when you were taken in after three days of the back and forth, they hooked you up to a monitor and the small birthin
g room was filled with the strange metallic beeps of Patch’s heartbeat, while a machine scratched out the rise and fall on a long sheet of paper. It was taking too long. You tried a warm bath; you sat on a huge bouncy ball and circled your hips. You stood up and leant against me, moaning. And you cried and cried. You refused drugs, no gas and air, no injection, nothing.
Nothing I said or did helped. It was as if you didn’t see or hear anyone, you were so far sunk down inside yourself. I was the intruder. I had no place there in that shabby room. You had the midwife and the doctor; you didn’t need me. Eventually they made you lie down on the bed and put your feet in the stirrups. They gathered between your legs, dressed in their strange blue outfits and stood watching as you tried to push him out. You strained so hard a blood vessel in your eye burst and you looked like you’d been punched for days after. Then finally the doctor eased the huge metal forceps inside you and pulled that blue-skinned little creature out as you screamed. Patrick. And I loved him on sight. I loved him so much it almost hurt. You were exhausted, so they wrapped him up and handed him to me. There was blood and fluid everywhere. It was like a battlefield. No one prepares you for how violent it all is or how shocking. I’ve caught and killed and skinned rabbits but nothing prepares you for the gore of childbirth.
But in my arms was this damp little thing, looking barely human, his face all squashed and smelling oddly of you and blood. Our son. I thought everything would be all right from that moment. They stitched you up, your poor body, while I cradled him, you too tired to even look at him for very long. He lay there in my arms, snuffling, his tiny face screwed up against the light. His very first moments in the world, just lying there, in my arms, breathing. I was so proud of you both.
The weeks following zipped by so fast; the flat was teeming with visitors and flowers and balloons. They drank champagne brought over by my father; I drank sparkling water with you, so you didn’t feel left out. Both our mothers seemed to be permanently with us, washing something or making tea. You sat serenely in the middle of it all, Patch in his cradle next to you, mewling for milk. Everyone said what a good baby he was, sleeping so much so early. He looked just like me, even then, though I think he has your personality, your quiet self-possession. Sometimes I catch the two of you, staring ahead, daydreaming, with exactly the same expression on your faces. We were never alone those first weeks. It was relentlessly busy. Then suddenly they were all gone, Patch had become just a normal part of our life, and we were left to cope.
I’d go out to work in the morning after kissing you both and return later to find you both still in the same clothes and the flat smelling of sour milk and baby shit. It sounds awful, but I remember it as being a blissful chaos, baby clothes and discarded nipple pads, muslins crusted with milk and baby sick everywhere. I would clean the kitchen before putting one of mum’s frozen meals in the microwave for our dinner. I bought you flowers and a diamond pendant because someone in the office told me it was tradition to buy your wife a diamond after every baby. I never minded the expense. I imagined that you needed me, that cleaning and cooking connected me to the two of you – the two of you in your blissful, crooning bubble. I belonged with the two of you.
Motherhood changed you. Not just in the obvious ways, but something unseen. I would watch you feeding Patch, his clean little mouth sucking on your breast and you made a circle together. It was a continuation of the isolation of pregnancy, you only existed for each other, and nothing else was real for you. You would stare into space, lost in thought as you detached him, tucked your breast back into the feeding bra and switched sides, exposing the other breast and bringing the baby to it, it all seemed so natural to you, as if you did it on autopilot. You belonged together. It was like watching an animal, where everything is instinctive, nothing learnt. I said that to you once, remember? And you laughed at me; you said ‘I had to learn. I had no idea what was expected of me, what the child would want. I had to learn’. That was a surprise to me. The way you were, I didn’t imagine there was any learning involved. It’s gotten easier, I was able to get more involved with him, he began to walk and talk and play and then Jessica came along. I began to belong to them, they began to reach out to me, call for me, were soothed when I picked them up; those sort of things, I love playing with them, listening to them as they chatter away. Holding their little bodies close, making them laugh. They are my life. I do my best to be a good father and husband, but still you never came back to me. Our family’s complete: you, me, our two beautiful children, and nothing has been the same since.
She felt like she’d been beaten up. Done ten rounds with Mike Tyson. Her whole body soured by pain.
The head, the heaviest part, was cradled in the nook of her elbow. The predictable trajectory of light sliced through the peace in the little room, the blue light binding; without it they wouldn’t exist. Her back ached. Warmed air was pumped from vents around the room, a careful temperature to ease and comfort. She was too hot, damp under her arms, her cheeks a pinched red. The baby, a perfect mouth encircling her nipple, like a snare, reached tiny fingers to her breast and clawed at the soft flesh; its translucent fingernails sharp. Its hunger drove an infant violence, like a kitten, a scrap of cute death, the child struggled, its legs drawn up in protest. It gulped, its tongue scraping at the nipple forcing a bloom of milk, the binding flow, but also the firm suck brought blood, a blister. She was completed, reduced. Shrunk to this flow. This pain.
It gorged, first one breast then the next and when finished, belched up the excess, including a spot of her blood, trickling from the corner of its mouth. Its unfocused eyes blinked, lizard-like, and it curled up on itself and slept. Her breasts, heavy with milk, leaked droplets of pale thin liquid; she wondered how such pallid looking fluid could nourish anything. She cupped them in her hands, taking the weight for a moment, she didn’t recognise them, large and blue-veined with the nipple grown bigger and darker. She didn’t recognise herself.
Her body colossal with its new role, wounded and tentative, she moved carefully. Her hands, restrained by nervousness and fear, folded tiny woollen items into quarters and put them away in her bag. Home soon. Perhaps the next day. She sucked in breath through her open mouth. Everything would be fine. The baby was neat in his transparent crib. Drab towelling encased the fragile weave of his flesh; he was clean and tidy, perfumed and scrubbed by the capable nurses. Cora had watched them bathe the baby, tucked like a parcel under the nurse’s arm, his papier-mâché thin head cupped in the palm of her hand. The nurse tested the temperature of the water with her elbow and then washed the baby’s head, careful around the pulsing gap in his skull. All the while talking, explaining, soothing. Not once flicking a drop of water in the baby’s face. She immersed his body in the water, supporting his head. The baby completely safe and relaxed.
‘Ah! A water baby!’ the nurse said. ‘What a precious little man!’
Later when Cora tried to bathe the child he screamed and thrashed his arms even though she did her best to replicate the nurse. She gave up and wrapped him in a towel and laid him on the bed, away from harm. When her husband visited the baby snuffled, fed, and delighted with his clucks and coos, pursed lips and involuntary frowns. Her husband filled the tiny room with his pride, holding his son to his chest, smiling shiny-eyed at Cora. Nurses moved in and out of the room at hourly intervals, taking measurements, checking rhythms, outputs, inputs, encouraging sleep, encouraging gentle exercise, encouraging. Checking up on her. Perhaps she can’t be trusted? Cora wondered. Is she getting this wrong?
The shocking red oval of the baby’s cry flung itself around the room, against the sealed windows like a trapped bird. But mostly he slept and the room vibrated with his unrehearsed breaths as she watched him, unsure what else was required.
When other babies cried, their wails drifting in from the ward outside their room, she was unmoved. But her child’s cry seemed to penetrate to the core of her self, controlling her, moving her limbs
and setting the pace of her heart. Instinct has keen senses. The nights had changed, like lovers she and the child were getting used to their relationship, gazing at each other. No longer blurred by wine or sleep concealed, the night was sharp-edged in her wakefulness, with the child stirring needing to be fed. Its mouth closing around anything offered, the tiny jaw working back and forth.
Finally, she got dressed; the maternity clothes loose over her smaller self. She pulled them on carefully over bruises the colour of oil. The baby, distinct and separate, no longer a part of her, no longer just hers to experience. She was empty, rejected by the child in its quest for life, shrugged off like an overcoat in a hot room. What had been an idea was now real, finite, able to die. She feared the baby’s inevitable death, even though it was likely she would be dead herself and oblivious, but still she couldn’t stand the idea. Everyone congratulated her on the new life she had brought into the world, but all she could think was that she had given birth to the potential for death. She leant over the sleeping form and felt for breath with the back of her hand. So tired… she longed for sleep. The feelings would come soon enough. When she had slept. Then the love she’d been told about would overwhelm her and everything would finally be alright.
Her parents visited, with flowers they weren’t allowed to leave in case of infection. Her mother picked up the baby, her deft hand sliding under his head and supporting his whole body. Her father peered over his wife’s shoulder gazing at his grandson.