Thing of the Moment

by Bruno Noble

  ‘Those pins,’ observed Dr Faben, standing with a full glass in front of a butterfly display case to one side of Papa’s desk, ‘with which you crucify these poor creatures, they have no heads.’

  ‘The butterflies have no heads?’ exclaimed Dr Dearman, pretending, in order to amuse me, that he had misheard.

  ‘Crucify? Hardly; impale, I think, would be more accurate,’ offered Professor Rennet. He made a jabbing motion with his pince-nez.

  ‘Mount, actually, is the term. Or pin,’ said Papa authoritatively.

  ‘They have no heads,’ repeated Dr Faben and, in a swift succession of movements, he placed his glass on Papa’s desk and lifted me up so that I too might see, his hands under my armpits; and then, with a second brusque hoist, I was sitting in the crook of his arm, his hand clasping my knees for stability and his other hand pointing indiscriminately at the butterfly display case.

  ‘I know,’ I said, a little angry at something so familiar being explained to me and yet anxious to humour my father’s colleague.

  ‘Minuten pins,’ said Papa. ‘Exactly. The intention is that they interfere as little as possible, visually, with the insect they pin.’

  ‘So they have no distinguishable head, no added width.’ Dr Faben trembled with the weight of me.

  ‘Or their head is the width of their body.’ Professor Rennet looked fiercely at Dr Faben.

  ‘Now, that’s interesting,’ said Dr Dearman, flashing his canines and moving to the edge of his seat. ‘Very.’ He lowered his head and looked around the company and asked, ‘Does it have any implication for the how-many-angels-can-fit-onto-the-head-of-a-pin argument?’

  ‘Aha,’ said Papa gravely.

  ‘Remind me,’ demanded Professor Rennet of Dr Dearman, still looking as fierce. ‘What is the argument?’

  ‘Well, well,’ mumbled Dr Dearman, taken aback by Professor Rennet’s withering look. ‘It is, it is, well, it’s just that, that question, how many angels can fit onto the head of a pin?’

  ‘Actually,’ said Papa, ‘it’s dance. Dance on the head of a pin.’

  ‘A question is not an argument,’ glowered Professor Rennet.

  There was a moment’s reflection in which Dr Dearman, Professor Rennet and Papa drained their beer glasses and Dr Faben, seeing this, put me down and did the same.

  ‘Now what do you think?’ said Dr Dearman, addressing me. I liked him for remembering to include me in their conversations, despite his eyes and his teeth. ‘You’re a little angel. How many of you could we fit onto the head of a pin?’ he asked, ignoring Papa’s correction.

  ‘I can’t fit onto a pin!’ I replied incredulously. Really, Dr Dearman was just too funny.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ said Dr Dearman, allowing himself to fall back into the depths of the Chesterfield. ‘What can I have been thinking?’

  ‘These butterflies,’ said Dr Faben, who had remained standing by the display case and who was examining the butterflies it contained very closely, ‘are very much like angels. Fallen angels.’

  *

  I dreaded falling asleep as much as having to drink. Not only recognising that I had to drink but desperate to quench my thirst at times, I rationalised that I should consume all the water I could in the mornings and none in the afternoons and evenings, so that I might have passed it all by bedtime. Sleep was a different matter. I couldn’t sleep during the day, tired though I was for having fought sleep during the night. My sentiments with regards to Papa were mixed. As grateful as I was to him for his not having revealed my dirty secret to Mama, I couldn’t help but resent his having shared it with his friends. He had on more than one occasion had Dr Dearman watch or assist him as he’d cleaned and dried me, their downstairs conversation – save for the occasional pithy but not unsympathetic comment about my predicament from Dr Dearman – carrying on in my bedroom, as though nothing were more natural than his presence by my bedside. ‘Dr Dearman is simply keeping me company,’ had whispered Papa by way of explanation for his breach of my trust, while I lay with my legs parted and my eyes open only enough to register my bedside light reflecting off the white of Dr Dearman’s nearest eye and protruding side tooth while he sat on the wicker chair in the recess between the window and the chest of drawers. When he moved in it, I feared he’d break it.

  Papa always entered my room with a drink in his hand. If I was awake, he’d raise the glass to his lips and whisper, ‘Sweet dreams!’ If I awoke to his ministrations, I’d see the empty glass on the chest of drawers, always just out of reach of my doll’s clutches.

  I lay on my back feigning sleep as Papa dried me. It saved his and my embarrassment that way. I must have actually fallen asleep because I woke with a start to light from the landing and Mama’s grotesque, bulging silhouette in the doorway to my room. Lit directly from behind by the hallway’s hanging light bulb, her phosphorescent hair lent her an otherworldly look. She appeared in outline, a warrior in a golden helmet carrying a large shield before her, a Valkyrie come to my aid. My relief at my finally being able to share my shame with my mother was as great as the shame itself. Mama looked from me to Papa who handed me my nightie and helped me tug it over my head and down. He pulled my bed covers over me and made a show of gathering wipes, tissues and cotton balls that he held up by way of explanation to Mama who shook her head unceasingly and who, I could see as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, was pulling hard, up, on her distended stomach with both hands.

  ‘Mein Gott!’ Mama had found her voice. ‘What on earth is going on?’

  Papa huffed, ‘Well, we hadn’t wanted to tell you – had we, Isabella? – so as not to worry you but’ – and his voice dropped a register – ‘Isabella has been wetting the bed.’ He bent his head and sent me a look as if in apology for having our secret forced from him.

  ‘Unsinn!’

  ‘Oh, she has!’ said Papa defensively, but not altogether convincingly.

  ‘Nonsense!’ There was pain in Mama’s voice.

  Papa attempted to invest his voice with some authority. ‘It’s a well-known thing, you know. Attention-seeking first-born resents the intrusion of the younger sibling into the family nest and all that.’

  ‘Yes. After the younger sibling is born. Not before!’ Mama’s voice quivered and rose while she teetered and slumped, steadying herself against the doorjamb. ‘Get out.’

  Papa protested ineffectively.

  ‘Get out! Get out!’ Mama made no attempt to get out of Papa’s way so, having switched my bedside light off, he had to squeeze sideways around her, the hand that carried the tissues and wipes held high at her eye level either to make a point or to distract her from the other hand, held by his side, that carried his empty glass. Mama made as though to step into my room and then groaned and leant against my bedroom door.

  ‘I must lie down,’ she said, as if to herself, and then, more loudly, ‘Are you alright, Liebchen?’ She managed a smile. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  With some effort, she pushed herself off the door jamb and staggered her way to her bedroom without once having seen Dr Dearman seated in my wicker chair, nervous grin at the ready with, no doubt, a convincing reason for his presence in my bedroom should one have been needed. An eye and a tooth winked at me, in pale reflection of the landing light. I closed my eyes in the hope that when I opened them again Dr Dearman would be gone and when I did, in the morning, he was.

  *

  Mama was rushed to hospital in an ambulance.

  Papa and I followed by bus.

  A doctor knelt to look me in the eyes and said, holding my hands in his, ‘Don’t worry about Mummy. She’s going to be all right. And – who knows? – she might even have a gift of a baby sister or brother for you tomorrow.’ There was something reassuring in his manner, in his white coat, in the parade of coloured pen tops that lined his breast pocket. I wished Uncle James were with us. The doctor placed one hand on my shoulder, in part as a pat and in part to steady himself as he stood and said to Papa, ‘Sh
e’ll be fine. False starts are frequent. It’s back to the starting line and on your marks all over again. Still, best to keep her in. We’ll keep her under observation. She’s clearly a bit stressed. The second should be easier than the first. We’ll expect you tomorrow morning and will call with news if we have any.’

  Papa appeared preoccupied. He held my hand across the road and didn’t let go. He walked us to the bus stop and past it without stopping. Halfway home, he paused, as if only then realising we’d had a bus to catch, and shrugged and we carried on, still hand in hand. Mama and I would play a game in which we held one hand high, above our heads, and the other one low, by our knees, and then compared them to see which hands had lost and gained the most blood, which were the paler and the redder. Mama would say that I won because I had the best circulation and, indeed, the contrast between the colours of my hands was the greatest, as one would appear to have been drained of blood and the other dark red with it. To Papa’s irritation, I insisted on swapping hands with some regularity as we walked in order to ensure my hands benefited from an even blood supply, an explanation that he found more aggravating than informative.

  At times, as we threaded our way along residential streets, our steps the sutures that stitch our selves to the towns and cities of our past and present, it felt to me as though I were leading him rather than he me and, at others, I had the sensation that no one else existed other than the two of us; and, yet, the most persistent though faintest of feelings I had was the one of my being alone as I watched, from some distance behind, a father and a daughter walking along a pavement that became a path in a wood that became a tunnel in which only they were lit, that became a vast sky at night in which the stars were, at close inspection, not stars after all but butterflies. I looked at Papa, certain that if he was seeing what I saw, it would be reflected on his face in smiles and joy but, if he were, he gave no indication of it.

  Papa said little all afternoon and spent most of it in his study, occasionally popping his head into the kitchen where, glad of the warmth, I read, did my homework and made ‘Welcome Home’ cards for Mama and a baby. Papa made me tea, as he called it, or supper, as Mama called it, and told me not to worry. He, too, noted that I drank little, but then occupied himself with encouraging me to look forward to having a baby in the house, not in the spirit of family love and affection that so clearly filled Mama, but as a parental reflex, as though he had hit upon this notion as being something a parent should promote. Papa’s newfound concern was touching and trying in equal measure. Really, what did adults fear? That older children would eat their baby siblings? My mind, as Papa and I sat across the kitchen table from each other, kept drifting from what he was saying. It occurred to me that I had never heard him talk so much with me as his only audience, and then that he was doing so to mask his anxiety, his concern and love for his wife and as yet unborn child. This moved me, and he mistook my tears for tiredness; and all of a sudden I was tired. With a voice that quivered with what I assumed was the repression of a yawn, Papa suggested bed. He supervised my brushing of my teeth, my getting undressed and dressed for bed and, having run his trembling hands through my hair, he rested one on my bedroom light switch a moment and wished me a good night.

  My first thought on waking was that Papa must have finally lost his patience. He was being rough with me. Having removed my nightie to better clean me, he turned me over and pulled me down the bed, neither of which he had ever done before. My second was that his shushing me in response to my mumbled, repeated apology was quite unnecessary: there was, after all, no one in the house for us to disturb. My third was that the bed wasn’t wet. I felt all over it for a wet patch and couldn’t find one and went from begging forgiveness in a half-waking state to attempting to inform Papa of his error, but too much was happening for me to find the words to do so. A multitude of thoughts then came and went indiscriminately. I considered my pillow, out of my arms’ reach at the very top of the bed and reflected that that was a very pointless place for it when my head was halfway down the bed. I couldn’t understand how Papa could hope to clean me in this way. Having pulled me well away from my pillow, he was attempting to push me to it while preventing me from reaching it, an unusual form of punishment for my misdemeanour. With every push, he pressed down with one hand on the small of my back and pulled my bunched hair with the other. I wanted to tell him to stop pulling my hair, to stop either pushing or pinning me down. Papa’s hands on the small of my back hurt. His entire weight seemed to be concentrated there. The tops of my feet rubbing on the carpet at the foot of my bed hurt. Feeling the carpet with the tops rather than the soles of my feet was confirmation that something was wrong. If I lifted my feet, my legs hurt. The bed headboard banged against the wall in metronomic keeping with Papa’s pushing. I wanted to apologise to Papa but had lost the power of speech; I had to concentrate all my energy onto holding onto the bed covers. I felt that it wouldn’t do to fall off the bed, that I would be letting Papa down even more if I fell. I wanted to comfort him, to let him know of the tremendous guilt I felt at having driven him to such levels of voiceless, panting desperation, to let him know that I knew that I deserved my punishment fully. And, yet, to beg him to stop, to stop, please stop. The weight of him on his hands on my back. I lost all sensation below that point. He pushed. The caterpillars pushed. The purple-tip larvae pushed and pushed, arching their backs, they pushed. They pushed each other and they pushed me. Of course! They were eating one another. Papa was eating me. There was to be another mouth to feed. Papa was eliminating the competition for scarce resources. Eleanor and Deborah stood by the side of my bed, watching impassively, peering closely at my side, hands on knees, not without some element of curiosity. Theirs was disinterested, scientific observation. He’s kissing, he’s pushing, he’s eating. Of course! That’s the proboscis causing the stabbing pain, furling and unfurling, breaking and entering, sipping and sucking, sipping and sucking. Confirmation that I had been consumed from the waist down. I felt nauseous from the incessant, rhythmic shaking and confused by the extraordinary images that I couldn’t shake off, visions of millions of caterpillars on beds and of caterpillars with proboscises. I felt ill and opened my mouth to beg forgiveness, to say I understood, to call Mama, to scream, to be sick – oh, how I wished Papa and the caterpillars and the butterflies would stop thrusting and probing! I opened my mouth wide to emit vomit, a cry, a request and Mama opened wide and Papa pushed, pushed, pushed and Mama was told to push, push, push and Mama and I were open wide and my mouth was open wide and out, having started as a flutter in a copse in my heart, emerged a butterfly.

  Unused to walking on six legs, I stayed motionless on the bedsheet a moment, looking back at me, my body, basking in its hot, gasping, shuddering breath, flexing and drying my wings, inflating them with blood. I looked at myself, face pressed to the bedsheet, eyes looking back at me in wonder and love and joy and I opened my wings wide and drifted, up, up to the curtain rail where I rested a while and then, feeling stronger, around my room and, more confident yet, beyond and out and up and up. I flew above the house in which Eleanor, Deborah and their mother slept, the sisters sharing a room and their mother in a double bed although all on her own, above the hospital where Mama lay exhausted and content amid a profusion of sheets, watching a midwife in a crisp nurse’s cap that contrasted with her soiled apron clean Cosmo and place him, exhausted too, in a linen cloth on Mama’s chest, above our house where Papa buttoned his trousers, gathered me in his arms, sat me wordlessly in my wicker chair and covered me with my blankets. In the light from the landing, he stripped my bed of its puke-puddled sheet and fetched a clean sheet from the airing cupboard on the landing. He made my bed and lay me back on it and cleaned me, as tenderly as he had formerly done, he apologising to me as I did to him, me assuring him that I understood that that punishment had been my due and he telling me no, not at all, it was just one of those things and begging me to shush. He fetched me a clean nightie and helped me into it and fluffed up m
y pillow and placed it beneath my head. He gathered my sheet and nightie that were destined for the wash and left my room.

  Sharon

  I shone at school. Miss Crossbank praised me. I did well in all subjects. I excelled at sports. I loved the stage and the stage loved me back. The looks of others defined and shaped me, they gave me substance, meaning and colour that would have drained out of me by the end of my walk home that was all downhill.

  On the last day of my last term at primary school I returned home with a school report that was so good that I considered it impossible for it to be overshadowed by Seamus’ and Sherah’s reports. That evening, as Mum was cooking and Dad had their reports out on the kitchen table, I pirouetted around the kitchen and read bits of my report out to them.

  ‘Very good,’ said Mum distractedly, over the noise of the extractor fan. She had her hair up in a bun when she cooked and wisps of it were being drawn up by the draught of the fan when she leant over the hob, as though she had an electric current running through her, and her top-lit head gave her sunken eyes with big shadows.

  ‘Sherah, your report is the same as last term’s that was the same as the term before that,’ said Dad in his exasperated tone of voice. ‘Sharon, pipe down! I can’t hear myself think in all this racket! And stop prancing around – you’re making me dizzy!’

  ‘It’s no worse than Seamus’s,’ said my sister, chewing on a strand of hair so curly that, extended, it was three times the length it appeared. ‘In fact, it’s probably better. Must try harder – his report is full of must-try-harders!’ And she pulled the report out from under Dad’s nose.

  ‘Give it back,’ said Dad, snatching it, and added, ‘Seamus responds to gentle encouragement whereas you –’