Sex and Death

by Sarah Hall

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘It’s you.’ Her mouth was full, and she held up a hand to cover the crumbs. ‘Have you tried these vegan sausage rolls?’ I looked at her. ‘They’re basically rank,’ she said, laughing as flakes of puff pastry tumbled down the front of her dress.

  We talked about her teaching practice, and what it was like working with Jimmy, and the PhD I still wasn’t doing, and we kept finding more things to say. The music was loud and we had to stand close to be heard. There was a moment when she stopped talking and looked around the room, and I knew I had to do something to keep her from going away.

  ‘Do you want to dance?’ I asked her. She gave me a sideways look.

  ‘Not really, no. Why, do you?’

  ‘Should we go out for a smoke?’ She scanned the room again. She seemed to be looking for options. She nodded and led the way out to the terrace. It was quiet outside and cold. I checked my pockets.

  ‘Do you smoke?’ I asked. She shook her head. I told her I didn’t either and she laughed.

  ‘So what are you checking your pockets for?’

  ‘No idea.’ There was quiet and we looked at each other. It was cold and she shivered and stood closer.

  ‘So, what now? Do we go back inside?’

  ‘Maybe if we’ve run out of things to talk about we should do something else.’

  ‘Something else?’

  ‘Yeah. If we’re going to stop talking.’ The words fell out of me and I had no idea how they came. I was out of the ditch and walking towards the guns and none of the paintballs were knocking me down.

  ‘You’re probably right. You’d better keep talking then.’

  ‘Keep talking?’

  ‘Be on the safe side.’ She moved closer again.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to say.’ I leaned closer and kissed her and it was the first time I’d kissed anyone in years and this wasn’t how I’d had the evening planned out in my mind. It was a long kiss and there were hands and I didn’t feel cold any more.

  ‘Is that what you meant, instead of talking? Why didn’t you just say?’ She was smiling and she pulled me by the hand. We left the terrace and the wedding and we walked away. There was no hurry and no word of where we were going and the conversation went back to Jimmy and the school. She said she thought he was on top of the drinking now. She asked where I was staying and when I told her she said we’d get to her hotel first. I thought there was a catch, or some misunderstanding. I thought at the hotel entrance she would shake my hand goodnight. I thought that inside her room there would be a man with a stick or a knife who would take all my money and push me out of the door while they both laughed. She was leaning closely and matching my step and there was a smell coming off her of red wine and perfume and the chance of it seemed well worth the while.

  In the room she sat on the bed and asked if this was what I wanted. I told her it was. And as we lay across the bed I was struck by how simple it was, when for all those years I’d been making it something complex and out of reach. She kissed me, and I kissed her back. I thought of the opportunities thrown up by all those parties, all the friendships that had grown up and drifted away over the years as the social circle reeled apart under its own centrifugal force. She unbuttoned my shirt, and slipped her hand against my chest. I thought of the house on the side of the hill in Mytholmroyd with the bookcase full of Chomsky, and she wriggled out of her dress, and I thought about Tony rubbing his hands all those times and whether we might get back in touch, and then the two of us were naked on the bed and it was all so unlikely that I felt as though I was watching the scene from above. She was kissing my neck, and lifting herself from the bed against me, and I worried about all the things I might be doing wrong. I wondered about God and where he was now, what he’d told them if he ever got as far as Tel Aviv. I could imagine him talking himself all the way to Bethlehem and standing in front of bulldozers, rebuilding houses, washing teargas from his eyes. I hadn’t thought of him for months and now I missed him, now of all times. Marion was pulling my hand between her thighs, and although I felt clumsy it seemed from what she was saying that I was doing at least something right. At one point she actually said, oh, God! and it was so surprising that I almost laughed. It seemed self-conscious, the way she said it, as though she’d heard that this was the thing to say, and I realised that perhaps she wasn’t much more experienced than I was. The mechanics of the thing itself were awkward and there was a moment of confusion before we could carry on. And when I heard her call out, oh, God, a second time, more tentatively, I thought of my lost friend again, and found myself muttering his name in reply, God, and she heard me and laughed as though it were a joke, and she yelled, oh God! much louder this time and we both laughed, and it turned out that laughing during sex made it something else entirely, when I’d always imagined that sex would be earnest and solemn, and so then we were both yelling oh God! oh God! oh God! until one or other of us eventually came – this was the way I thought of it later, although it wasn’t her and eventually was far from the right word – and the two of us in that small room were soon yelling loudly enough that I imagined God himself might hear us and look up from a house he was rebuilding, in the shadow of a watchtower or beside a burntout olive grove, look up and hear our call and smile to himself and say nice one finally our kid as he mortared another breeze-block into place. And these thoughts – of my absent friend and all we’d been through together, of my years of missed opportunities, even of Marion and how there would soon come a time when I would wonder where she was and whether she thought of me at all – these thoughts all brought me close to crying, close enough to want to hide the fact by getting down on my knees and burying my face in her garden of tears, where I opened my mouth and murmured soft distractions until she pulled my hair and whispered oh God once again, as though saying it for the very first time.

  10-ITEM EDINBURGH POSTPARTUM

  DEPRESSION SCALE

  Claire Vaye Watkins

  1.Since my baby was born, I have been able to laugh and see

  the funny side of things.

  •As much as I ever did.

  Not quite as much now.

  Not so much now.

  Not at all.

  2.I have looked forward with enjoyment to things.

  •As much as I ever did.

  Not quite as much now.

  Not so much now.

  Not at all.

  My husband beside me in the waiting room, reading over my shoulder, frowning. That’s rather evasive, isn’t it? ‘As much as I ever did.’

  You think I’m being dishonest?

  No, but.

  But what?

  This should be short answer, not multiple choice. He rocks the car seat with his foot. Short answer or essay. Don’t you think?

  As much as I ever did.

  It becomes our inside joke, the answer to the questions we’re afraid to ask.

  1. Since my baby was born, I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things.

  We try to find you a nickname in utero but nothing fits so well as the ones we have for your father’s scrotum and penis, your brothers Krang and Wangston Hughes.

  An app dings weekly developmental progress and fruit analogies. Every week we write our own.

  This week your baby is the size of a genetically modified micropeach, which itself is about the size of a red globe grape. Your baby’s earholes are migrating this week. Your baby can hear you and may already be disappointed by what it hears.

  This week your baby is the size of a medjool date knocked from the palm and left to soften in the dust. Your baby is now developing reflexes like lashing out and protecting its soft places. It is also developing paradoxes, and an attraction to the things that harm it.

  This week your baby is the size of a navel orange spiked with cloves and hung by a blue ribbon on the doorknob of a friend’s guest bathroom. Your baby is developing the self-defeating emotions this week, among them doubt, boredom, self-consciousness and nostalgia. It
may even be besieged by ennui!

  This week your baby is the size of a large, thick-skinned, inedible grapefruit. Your baby has begun to dream, though it dreams only of steady heartbeats and briny fluids.

  2. I have looked forward with enjoyment to things.

  Sushi, beer, pot brownies, daycare, pain-free BMs, getting HBO, my in-laws going home.

  Erica visits and asks, Does a person really need a doula? No, I tell her, not if you have an older woman in your life who is helpful, trusted, up to date on the latest evidence-based best practices and shares your birth politics, someone who is nonjudgemental, won’t project her insecurities onto you, is respectful of your boundaries and your beliefs and those of your spouse, carries no emotional baggage or unresolved tensions, no submerged resentment, no open wounds, no hovering, no neglect, no library of backhanded compliments, no bequeathed body issues, no treadmill of jealousy and ingratitude, no debt of apology, no I’m sorry you feel that way, I’m sorry you misunderstood me, no beauty must suffer, no don’t eat with your eyes, no I cut the ends off the roast because you did, I did it to fit the pan.

  Erica says, So it’s basically $750 for the mother you wish you had.

  3. I have felt scared or panicky for no good reason.

  There are little moths drifting twitchy through our apartment, sprinkling their mothdust everywhere. I cannot find what they are eating. I brace myself each time I take a towel or a pillowcase from the linen closet.

  Our baby is born runty and jaundiced. We wrap her in a hot, stiff so-called blanket of LEDs, to get her levels right. She’s at twelve, they tell us, without saying whether the goal is fifteen or zero or a hundred – not knowing whether we are trying to bring them up or down. I don’t know which way to pray, your dad says. Little glowworm baby, spooky blue light-up baby in the bassinet, hugged by this machine instead of us, a gnarly intestine-looking tube coming out the bottom. Jaundiced and skinny skinny though neither of us are. Failure to thrive, the diagnosis. In the car we agree that a ridiculously lofty standard. Haven’t we every advantage – health insurance and advanced degrees, study abroad and strong female role models? Aren’t we gainfully employed, and doing work we do not hate, no less? Didn’t we do everything right and in the right order? And yet, can either of us say we are thriving? We remind ourselves it’s not so bad, the jaundice, the smallness. Erica says, I was little and look at me! We remind ourselves of the Nick-U and paediatric oncology, which we walk past on the way to our appointments. I remember the apparatus we learned about in breastfeeding class that the lactation consultants can rig up for a man: a tube from a sack at his back taped up over his shoulder and to his pectoral, to deliver imitation milk to the baby as though through his nipple. I comfort myself with the dark, unmentioned scenarios wherein that would be necessary.

  A box on the birth-certificate paperwork says I wish to list another man as the baby’s father (See reverse). I see reverse, curious what wisdom the hospital has for such a situation, what policies the board has come up with to solve a clusterfuck of such magnitude, but the reverse is blank.

  My husband has hymns and spirituals, but when I sing to the baby I can only remember the most desperate lines from pop songs. If you want better things, I want you to have them. My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me. Tell me, where did you sleep last night?

  Q: Do you think having a baby was a good idea?

  A: As much as I ever did.

  4. I have been anxious or worried for no good reason.

  Erica says, Your phone is ringing.

  What’s the area code? There are certain area codes I categorically avoid.

  What about home?

  Especially home.

  In my Percocet dreams our blankets are meringue but quicksand thick, suffocation heavy, and the baby somewhere in them. From the toilet I shout it out.

  She’s not in the bed, my husband says from the hallway.

  How do you know?

  Because she’s in the bassinet.

  But how do you know she’s in the bassinet?

  Because I’m looking at the bassinet and I see her in there.

  But, I want to know, how do you know that you are really seeing?

  5. I have blamed myself unnecessarily when things went wrong.

  A postcard arrives addressed to both of us but meant only for my husband: Funny how some people feel like home.

  Q: Do you still want to be married?

  A: As much as I ever did.

  The world slips out from under us approximately every hour and a half.

  6. I have been so unhappy that I have had difficulty sleeping.

  Over Skype people say things about the baby I don’t like – she seems small, she seems quiet, she’s a princess, she will be gone before we know it – and I slam the computer closed. After, I send them pictures of the baby and small loops of video, to prove I am not a banshee. I am a banshee, but cannot get comfortable with being one, am always swinging from bansheeism to play-acting sweetness and back. I cannot play nice and don’t want to, but want to want to, some days.

  7. I have felt sad or miserable.

  I can hear the whispers of my own future outbursts: I wiped your ass, I suctioned boogers from your nose, I caught your vomit in my cupped hand and it was hot! I cut the tiny sleep dreads from your hair and blew stray eyelashes off your cheeks. I can feel the seeds of my resentment as I swallow them. When you couldn’t sleep I lay beside you with my nipple in your mouth. For hours I did this!

  I can feel lifelong narratives zipping together like DNA, creation myths ossifying. You would smile but only if you thought no one was looking. Your hands were always cold, little icicles, but pink and wrinkly as a man’s, little bat claws, little possum hands. Your dad cut the teensiest tip of your finger off trying to cut your nails, and after that we let them grow. That’s why you have socks on your hands in all your pictures, to keep you from scratching yourself. When we took the socks off you had little woolly worms of lint in your palms, from clenching and unclenching your fists all day. We had a machine that rocked you and another that vibrated you and another that made the noises from the world you’d never seen – breakers and birds, rain on a tin roof – but they soothed you anyway. Robo-baby, I worried you’d become, since you liked the machines so much more than me.

  8. I have been so unhappy that I have been crying.

  Ours is not even a bad baby. She sleeps so much I have to lie to the other moms, pretend to be tired when I’m not, commiserate lest they turn on me. In truth ours sleeps through anything, even two adults screaming at each other, crying, saying things they can’t take back, making up, and screaming again – our baby sleeps through all of it, waking only when we stagger into our own bed.

  When her cord stump falls off I put it in the pocket of my bathrobe. I don’t cry until the robe is put in the wash.

  Creation myth (his):

  He broke his collarbone falling off a fence. He was trying to get to the neighbour girl.

  Creation myth (hers):

  When they brought her baby sister home from the hospital she tried to deposit the bundle in the trash.

  Q: Do you still love me?

  A: As much as I ever did.

  9. The thought of harming myself has occurred to me.

  And also the profound pleasure of sitting in the back yard on the last warm day of fall, the baby and her dad on a bedsheet on the grass, me in a lawn chair because I cannot yet bend in the ways that would get me to and from the ground, in my lap a beer and a bowl of strawberries.

  Q: Do you appreciate being alive?

  A: As much as I ever did.

  10. Things have been too much for me.

  On Christmas Eve the upper-class grocery store is a teeming jingle-bell hellscape. I decide to play nice for once, an exercise, my Christmas gift to the universe. I strap the baby to me and do not pretend not to notice when strangers gape at her there. I stop and let them say oh how cute and even oh how precious and when they ask if the baby is a boy or a gi
rl I do not say, Does it really matter? nor A little bit of both! nor You know, I’m not sure, how do I check? And when they ask how old I do not say, Two thousand eight hundred and eighty hours, nor A lady never tells. Instead I round up and say four months today! I wag the baby’s hand and make the baby say hi and bye-bye. I spend too much money on stinky cheeses and chocolate coins, stovetop popcorn, armfuls of cut flowers, muffin tins I will never use, pomegranates that remind me of home. I do not use self-checkout, the misanthrope’s favourite invention, and when the nosy checker asks me to sign my name on the electronic pad I do not write 666 nor draw a big cock and balls and instead I sign in elegant cursive the baby’s name. And outside I do not look away when more lonely people ask me with their eyes to stop so that they might see the baby and touch her and instead I do stop, in the fresh snow falling and padding the parking lot, let them hold the baby’s hand and let them tell me how I will feel in five years or ten years or twenty years or at this time next year, let them tell me where I will be and what will be happening and how I will cherish every minute.

  REVERSIBLE

  Courttia Newland

  London, early evening, any day. The warm black body lies on the cold black street. The cold black street fills with warm black bodies, an open-mouthed collective, eyes eclipse dark. Raised voices flay the ear. Arms extend, fingers point. Retail workers in bookie-red T-shirts, shapeless Primark trousers. Beer-bellied men wear tracing-paper hats, the faint smell of fried chicken. There are hoods, peaked caps, muscular puffed jackets. There are slim black coats, scarred and pointed shoes, red ties, midnight blazers. A few in the crowd lift children, five or six years old at best, held close, faces shielded, tiny heads pushed deep into adult necks. New arrivals dart like raindrops, join the mass. Staccato blue lights, the hum of chatter. They pool, overflow, surge forwards, almost filling the circular stage in which the body rests, leaking.

  A bluebottle swarm of police officers keeps the circle intact, trying to resist the flood. Visor-clad officers orbit the body, gripped by dull gravity; others without headgear stand shoulder to shoulder, facing the crowd, seeing no one. Blue-and-white tape, the repeated order not to cross. A half-raised semi-automatic held by the blank policeman who stands beside a Honda Civic, doors open, engine running. His colleague speaks into his ear. He is nodding, not listening. He looks into the crowd, nodding, not hearing. Blue lights align with the mechanical stutter of the helicopter, fretting like a mosquito. Its engine surges and recedes, like the crowd.