by Lucy English
‘Just go there in your mind,’ I said to him, but he couldn’t do it.
Felix, I’m thinking about you sitting on the roof of my boat. In red trousers and with your shirt off, you are turning into autumn colours. Tawny hair and golden skin. You’re writing and when you write you grimace and bite your lip as if you’re arguing with the paper. Then you stop and look around you, and I can see your face and it’s as if everything you see is pouring into you, every tree, every cloud. Everything is pouring into you.
We came back to Bath like explorers returning from a fantastic voyage and there was Barney and Rosebud, waving when they saw us. Felix jumped on to the tow-path and hugged them. Barney looked at me and winked and proclaimed the rest of the day a celebration.
It was the equinox and there was a big party that night. The people from the other boats came along, as did Dog-ear and a huddle of protesters from Solsbury. There was music and dancing. The Bigbys kept pulling back their curtains to scowl at us. Even Jim the recluse popped out of his hatch like a nervous rabbit. Well into the night I left them to it. Felix as well. He was dancing to Paignton’s drumming, mad celebrationary dancing as if he were explosively happy.
Autumn came slowly to the canal in a soft fall of leaves on the water and mists in the morning. I hadn’t yet told Stephen about Felix. I had been up there several times to hear about their holiday in Seattle, and the wonderful coffee bars and how Judy might get a promotion and Stephen might get a larger car.
Judy wasn’t exactly living there but she acted as if she did, fussing about coffee cups and did the cushions go with the sofas. As if I cared. They didn’t ask me what I had been up to so I didn’t tell them.
It was a Sunday morning in October. I was re-tarring the roof. Felix was still in bed. Stephen was walking up the tow-path. ‘Hi, Mum!’
‘No rugby?’
‘Knee strain. We wondered if you’d like to come for lunch?’
‘Yes, why not?’ Felix would probably still be asleep when I got back.
‘Give us a coffee. It’s nippy out here.’
I hesitated. ‘I haven’t cleaned up …’ but he was already on the boat and down the ladder.
I followed him.
‘Instant coffee? Haven’t you got a percolator … I’ll give you my old one. Fresh coffee is so much better. God, look at your cups …’ He sat down. We chatted about cars, bathroom tiles and the garden. The important things.
Then what I feared would happen, happened. There was an intense fit of coughing from the bedroom and Felix stumbled out, stark naked. ‘Fuck! Is that the time! I said I would take some skunk up to Dog-ear! Oh, who are you?’
‘And who the fuck are you?’ said Stephen, staring at him up and down.
‘Felix, this is my son, Sanclair …’
‘Stephen Sinclair,’ corrected Stephen.
‘Fuck, get me out of here!’ Felix shot back into the bedroom and slammed the door.
‘Who is that?’ shouted Stephen.
‘That’s Felix, he’s my … I suppose he’s my boyfriend …’
‘How old is he, for Christsake?’
‘He’s twenty-one.’
‘Mum, he’s younger than me! Oh Christ! Mum!’ He slammed down his coffee and left.
Felix was bumping about in the bedroom swearing. ‘I’ll be back in a minute!’ I shouted to him and ran after Stephen.
I ran all the way to the house and banged on the patio door. He didn’t open it so I went in. He was in the study. ‘I don’t want to talk to you,’ he said and turned on the computer.
‘I’m sorry but I want to talk to you. I should have told you. I don’t know why I didn’t. I apologise.’
‘Thank God Judy’s not here. I keep telling her you’re not that weird.’
He still wasn’t looking at me. I pulled his chair and swirled it around. ‘Talk to me,’ I said in French. It was years since I’d spoken to him in French and he did look at me. He was angry.
‘You’re old enough to be his mum.’
‘I’m not his mum. I’m your mum. He’s my lover. Why is that a problem?’
He didn’t answer. ‘I don’t understand you,’ he said at last.
‘I know you don’t. Vivienne didn’t and you don’t. It’s nothing new.’
‘And can you understand me?’ he snapped. ‘I mean, I might sometimes like to have a mother I could introduce to my friends without embarrassment. ‘‘Here’s my mum and her toy-boy lover.’’ How does that sound?’
‘You care too much what other people think.’
‘And you don’t care at all … Christ, you don’t care at all, do you?’
‘No,’ I said and it was true. I didn’t. There didn’t seem to be much more to say.
‘Are you going to stay for lunch?’ said Stephen.
‘Do you want me to?’
‘Not really.’ So I left. I walked down the garden and back to the boat. I was crying. When I got inside Felix had gone.
He came back in the middle of the night and I only knew he was there when he slipped into bed beside me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you were going to throw me out.’
‘I wouldn’t do that,’ I said.
‘Yes, I know that now,’ said Felix.
For Christmas it was just me and him on the boat. His mother wasn’t talking to him and Stephen wasn’t talking to me. The canal was quiet, even Barney and Rosebud had gone away. We got up on Christmas morning and sat there.
‘Let’s take the boat out,’ I said and we did. Beyond Bradford we moored by a field. Then we sang and whooped and shouted poetry and banged saucepans and made as much noise as we could because there was nobody there to hear us.
I don’t know how long it would have lasted, but we respected each other’s territory. I learned he needed to go away for days, sometimes weeks, to be wild, and he learned that there came a point when I got tired of dope parties and Barney’s half-baked conspiracy theories and the chaos and despair that accompanied their lifestyle. Sometimes I wanted to be silent.
We were a strange pair because we weren’t a pair. We were two separates, but when we were together we were ecstatic and tearful and passionate and contented and calm all within the space of an hour.
Felix, this is you and we’re in bed. When you’re naked you move with a grace I don’t see in you at any other time unless you’re dancing. Sex is like a dance for us, it involves all your body and I love this, this celebration of tongues and lips and softer parts. You’re silent when we make love.
But I love silence. I love this feeling of connection with another person. You want me for what I am. Forget age, forget differences, forget what it looks like to other people. You want me for what I am. I want you for what you are.
In February I missed a period and I thought nothing of it. I thought, I’m forty-two, this is going to happen, but in March I missed another and I thought, Oh shit. I took a test and I went to the doctor’s and took another test, but it was true. I was pregnant. I had been careful with Alan and Tony. I had been so careful, but when I thought about it I hadn’t been so careful with Felix. I suppose I thought I was too old.
He was away. He had gone to a party in Oxford. I waited. It was strange because I didn’t feel any different. Perhaps my belly felt a bit soft, that was all.
Felix came back. He was coming down off acid. The wall had split open and he had seen a door to a beautiful landscape, but everybody in the party started to look like his mother and he had freaked. He ran off and was picked up by a man in a suit who took him back to a hotel bedroom and tried to have sex with him, so Felix hit him. The man started to cry then gave him fifty pounds and said he was sorry, so Felix ran off before the man changed his mind, and he managed to hitch a lift to London where he went to see an old friend who had been a smack addict. They took some more trips, but somebody in the flat nicked his money, so it had taken him seven hours to hitch back.
This was a typical Felix story. I listened. He looked thin and hollow. I thought, how
can I have a baby with this man? He put his head on the table.
‘Why do you do it?’ I asked.
‘I want to go to a beautiful place …’ He traced the grain of the wood with a finger. ‘When I was little, the pattern on the table was an island in the sea and I used to go there in a boat and I could see the waves and the mountains. I used to go there … it was so quiet …’ I left him there.
In the morning he woke me up with a cup of coffee and a packet of biscuits. He sat on my bed. His hair was tangled and he was still wearing his coat. In the winter he wore an old, grey, army coat. It had no buttons. I was feeling queasy. I suppose those were the first signs.
‘I have to tell you something,’ I said and he swallowed. He always thought I would get fed up with him and chuck him out. Other women had done that and I could see why.
‘I’m pregnant …’
He opened his mouth and stared at me but it wasn’t a look of horror, it was of amazement and wonder. ‘If it’s a girl can we call her Inanna, or Isis, like the goddess …’
‘Hang on. I’m not sure if I want this baby …’
‘We must, oh we must … I’d love a baby … oh don’t kill it,’ and he held my shoulders. ‘The goddess has sent us a gift, can’t you see that?’
I went through all the objections. My age, low income, small boat, but he was smiling as if I hadn’t realised how simple it would all be. ‘Can’t you see, the goddess will provide.’
You and your goddess. ‘No I can’t see that,’ I said.
‘And I will look after you.’ He held my hands. I looked into his eyes and that decided it for me, because I could see that deep down, right to the bottom of his pool, yes, he would.
The winter baby conceived in the snow and born in the frost. Not like Sanclair, made out of sand and sun and the breeze on a hot day and the patterns of light through the trees, but a water baby made out of the canal kissing my boat, turning to ice in the night and hugging it tighter.
I don’t want to write that we were happy in the spring and the summer, that Felix got a job three days a week in a pizza place. That Rosebud gave me a bag of baby clothes, a bit soiled but adequate, that I felt fit and well when I cycled to work and the people at work couldn’t believe it when I told them, because to them I was an old bat who lived on a boat and who would want to shag me anyway?
I don’t want to write that we were happy because it makes me cry.
I don’t want to write that we were happy because when I wrote and told Gregor he wrote back and said he was joyful for me. I don’t want to write and say we were happy because I went to see Sanclair to tell him and he couldn’t believe it. He said, ‘Mum, are you certain this is what you want? Are you happy?’ and I said, ‘I’m very happy,’ and he said, ‘Well, as long as you’re happy,’ and suddenly all the years just flipped away and I said, ‘You were my first baby,’ and for the first time in ages we hugged each other and for the first time it didn’t matter that I sat on the roof of my boat and listened to the water and he went to the Conran shop and bought glass fruit bowls. I don’t want to remember this.
It was early November and there was a hard frost. Like the song, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone. A grey stone sky and a cold mist over the canal. I went to the hospital for my final check-up and Felix came too. I had twinges and backache and they decided to admit me because I was four centimetres dilated. At 2 p.m. my waters broke and it had begun, starting and stopping. What I remember most is walking round and round the corridors, and blue flowery curtains (it’s odd what you remember) and the clock on the wall. Every time I looked at it, it seemed to be going too fast or too slow. After midnight the baby was showing signs of distress so I got wired up to a monitor and at five in the morning I was feeling those wrenching gagging pains I had completely forgotten. I shouted, ‘Why the fuck am I doing this?’ but Felix was sweet and held my hand.
The baby was born just after six and they put him straight on my stomach. A small baby with dark hair. Felix was saying, ‘He’s so beautiful, oh he is!’ A still baby, he wasn’t kicking and looking around like I remembered Sanclair had done. A quiet baby, he opened his eyes and looked at me and made no sound. His eyes were dark pits of silence. Then he closed them.
The midwife said, ‘He’s not breathing properly,’ and they took him away.
We sat there in the room, which should have been filled with noise but was so quiet you could have heard a leaf drop. I could hear people walking up and down the corridor. We sat there and waited, and a nurse gave us a cup of tea and tried to smile and look reassuring and we waited.
Then the midwife came in and tried to explain what was happening, but I don’t think I heard it. Felix held my hand and held it tighter. Then the doctor came in. He said, ‘I’m very sorry …’
There’s a medical name for it. The lungs don’t develop properly. They tried to operate, but his heart packed up.
A winter baby. Conceived in the snow and born in the frost. He couldn’t live in the air and the sun. A water baby.
It’s a bit blurry next. They said did we want to see him and they brought him in wrapped up in a white blanket with a white dress on. He wasn’t stiff but floppy and his feet were cold. A pale clammed-up face. Felix held him. His baby he would never have. He said, ‘I think I’ve just grown up.’ He was too sad to cry.
A dead baby is pathetic. A little floppy thing like a chick fallen out of its nest. Bluish eyelids and soft cold skin. I must have touched a fledgling when I was little and now, here was another one. A bigger one.
What do you do when your baby dies? You avoid people because the first thing they ask is, ‘How’s the baby?’ What do you do when your baby dies? You move from one minute to the next. One hour to the next. One day to the next. What do you do when your baby dies? You put all the clothes and toys into a bag and say to somebody just take them away. What do you do when your baby dies? You sit and wait for the pain to go away, but you’re not sure that it ever will.
In the morning in the hospital. The same day? The day after? We’re in a quiet room far away from happy mothers and crying babies and a nurse brings me a cup of tea. Felix has fallen asleep on a chair beside the bed and his head’s thrown back and his arm’s flung out as if he’s just been dropped there. ‘Would your young man like one too?’ My young man.
On the boat. It’s so quiet I can hear a sparrow chirping in the trees. Felix is sitting by the stove warming his hands. I can’t work out what sound is missing and then I do. There’s no sound of water. The canal is frozen.
Stephen’s come to see us. He’s dressed in an expensive jumper and green cords and Felix is unwashed and dishevelled. We sit round the table, not talking. Stephen flicks back his hair.
He says, ‘Look, I’m really sorry, I really am,’ and suddenly he jumps up and hugs Felix and Felix hugs him back. They keep on hugging and I let them. Two young men who have never spoken to each other but who have loudly voiced disapproval about what the other represents. I let them.
I love them both.
What do you do when your baby dies? You make all sorts of ridiculous plans about going away, to Spain, to France, to India, but you go nowhere. You sit and wait for the pain to go away, but it doesn’t.
It was December and a week after my birthday. The frost had gone and then come back even harder. I felt cold right through to my bones. We had been together for over a month and the strain was showing. I needed to curl up and be quiet and Felix needed to run around and be mad, but neither of us could separate. I could see the strain on his face of being caring and responsible when he wanted to be neither of these things. I wanted to hear him laugh, more than anything I wanted to hear that. A wild whoop and a giggle of joy because I couldn’t laugh.
I said, ‘Why don’t you go and see Dog-ear?’ because Dog-ear wasn’t at the camp anymore, he was in a van near the gasworks in Twerton and Paignton was there too, and there was a pub round the corner they all went to. Barney told me. Felix looked at me and I knew
what he was thinking. I said, ‘I’ll be fine. I will. I’ll go and see Stephen.’
Felix said, ‘I won’t go for long,’ and I said, ‘I’ll be fine, I will.’
He was wearing his brown jumper and red jeans. He put on his army coat. He kissed me goodbye and I watched him walk up the tow-path, his hair bouncing, his coat flapping.
But I didn’t go and see Stephen. I walked as far as the bridge. The world was white but not sparkling. The sky was white and the trees were white. There was a light fall of snow. The water hadn’t frozen but it was as grey as slate. I walked back. My head was full of whiteness like the clouds and as weightless. I lay on my bed and slept.
He didn’t come back that night but I wasn’t worried. Or the next day but I wasn’t worried. It was so still I could hear myself breathing. I could hear every creak in the boat. It got colder and started to snow and the canal froze. I thought I could hear it, the sigh of ice like a dying baby.
In the night I was so cold I curled up tight to keep warm. I thought, come home now, Felix, come home now and keep me warm.
I woke up and I heard the police radios. They were talking to Barney and Rosebud. I thought they were being busted. I put my coat over my pyjamas and opened the hatch. It was late morning. Barney was holding Rosebud and she was crying. There was a group of students from the other boats all talking together and pointing. Pointing at me.
A bundle in the water. A body in the ice. A young man found this morning. With a grey coat and red jeans and a brown jumper.
An inquest, a coroner’s report and a funeral in January. The beginning of a year with no hope, and I felt nothing. When people talked to me it was like they were behind a screen. I hated the funeral. Felix’s relatives, his mother and aunt at the front. Stern, smart women, and us at the back like beggars. Barney, Rosebud, Dog-ear, me and Stephen. Paignton didn’t make it, he’d been on a bender ever since they’d been tripping the night Felix fell in the canal. And he did fall in. I never believed he killed himself because he was depressed, like his mother believed, or like Barney believed he was pushed in by some police-informer anti-road protester. I suppose you have to believe something. I talked to Paignton. They had been in Dog-ear’s van off their faces and Felix started talking about France, saying he had to get back and tell me we had to go to France, and he ran off into the night. I know what happened. He was running on an icy tow-path, he just slipped and fell in the dark, in the tunnel, and I know what it’s like when you plunge into icy water. It takes your breath away. And what you see underwater, the curling changing shapes. Underwater in the dark, he just turned round and went down following the darkness of his own imagination.