by Megan Hunter
MEGAN HUNTER
The End We Start From
PICADOR
For my mother and my son.
What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Contents
i.
ii.
iii.
iv.
v.
vi.
vii.
viii.
ix.
x.
xi.
xii.
Thank you
i.
I am hours from giving birth, from the event I thought would never happen to me, and R has gone up a mountain.
When I text him, he sends his friend S to look after me, and starts down the mountain.
S is scared, and has brought J.
J is also scared, and has brought beer.
They watch me from a corner of the room as though I am an unpredictable animal, a lumbering gorilla with a low-slung belly and suspicious eyes. Occasionally they pass me a banana.
They try to put Match of the Day on. I growl. I growl more and more, and finally I am waterless, the pool of myself spreading slowly past my toes.
They flap like small birds around the water, they perch on my giant head, they speak of kettles and hot towels.
I tell them I have to push, and they back away, reaching for their phones.
* * *
At first there was only the sea, only the sky. From the sky came a rock, which dropped deep into the sea. A thick slime covered the rock, and from this slime words grew.
* * *
Before I dilate, we agree: R will get his two nights in nature. He will climb and trek, camp and forage.
I am nearly as wide as I am tall. In the supermarket, people avoid me. Sometimes, in narrow hallways, I get stuck.
All by itself, the head balls into place.
* * *
We have planned a water birth, with whale music, and hypnotism, and perhaps even an orgasm.
My usual cynicism has been chased away by the fear of pain, of losing control, of all things bloody and stretching.
The moment of birth looms ahead of me like the loss of my virginity did, as death does. The inevitable, tucked and waiting out there somewhere.
Once, when I was about eight, I looked at a telegraph pole as hard as I could. I made a mind-photo, urged myself to remember it that night.
When I did, the rest of the day seemed like it had never happened. I terrified myself that I would do this at the moment of death, that I could trick my whole life away.
When I was a child I thought I had been chosen for our times. The ending times. The creeping times.
* * *
I am thirty-two weeks pregnant when they announce it: the water is rising faster than they thought. It is creeping faster. A calculation error. A badly plotted movie, sensors out at sea.
We hide under the duvet with a torch like children. I ask R if he still would have done it. If he had known. He doesn’t answer.
He shines the torch up into the duvet and makes his fingers into ducks. I decide to take that as a yes.
* * *
I am a geriatric primigravida, but I don’t look it.
We have leather sofas. R spills takeaway on them and grins: wipe clean.
I am thirty-eight weeks when they tell us we will have to move. That we are within the Gulp Zone.
I say whoever thought of that name should be boiled in noodles. R spends all night on the same property website. It is loading very slowly.
* * *
Man came from a germ. From this germ he was fashioned, from clot to bones to thick flesh. He stood up on one end, a new creation.
* * *
J phones an ambulance and S looks out of the window palely.
I gaze at the wooden floor. I have never noticed how beautiful it is before.
It is perfectly dusk-coloured, and the whorls are rising like dark little planets through its glow.
Between the waves of disembowelling wrench the world is shining. I feel like Aldous Huxley on mescaline. I am drenched in is-ness.
* * *
When I am thirty-nine weeks they tell us we don’t have to move, actually; it was all a mistake.
Pinch of salt, R grumbles, glancing at my belly.
* * *
R arrives four minutes after the boy is born, frowning and yellow, into the midwife’s hands. I am too exhausted to hold him. My eyes ache from three hours of pushing. My undercarriage is a pulp.
* * *
In the darkness demons flew. Their shapes made a fearful noise until a voice called out, and they were still, and the silence was complete.
* * *
I am in the hospital when R comes to tell me, but I already know. The reports have spread through the ward like infection.
In the bed across from me a girl possibly just young enough to be my granddaughter cuddles her toddler on one side and her newborn on the other.
Schoolboys visit her and let their eyes roam over my udders as they pass.
I am veined and topless, doing skin to skin with the boy, who is mysterious and silent. Occasionally he twitches, as though remembering something.
In the night a nurse with hunched shoulders like the start of wings comes to my bedside and lifts him to me. She says his eyes look like sharks’ eyes. They all do.
* * *
The lady through the curtain has no baby.
Or she has one, but he is upstairs in a plastic box filled with wires and tubes, and she wails out for more drugs.
Crash section, I hear the midwives murmuring. They give her the drugs.
She has a radio and doesn’t use headphones. She has her pain and no baby so I don’t say anything.
She likes talk radio mostly, interminable phone-ins in different accents that all pass through my body in the same way.
The phrases spill out, unstoppable. Deckchairs, document, pressure, response.
They seem to swell from under me like a bath filling up. Like indigestion. Like something no bad simile could ever do justice to.
* * *
I am eating lime jelly with the boy in the crook of my arm when I hear.
His hands circle in tiny, victorious fists. I feel that I could, all things considered, conquer the world.
The news on the hour, 14th June, one o’clock. Tina Murphy reporting. An unprecedented flood. London. Uninhabitable. A list of boroughs, like the shipping forecast, their names suddenly as perfect and tender as the names of children. Ours.
Two hours later R is there, breaking the news again, lifting the boy against his shoulder. Apologizing like it’s his fault.
* * *
The hospital now seems to be a ship, a brightly lit ark housing all the new ones aloft.
We – the women in the open-backed gowns, bursting stitches in the bathroom – are their escorts.
The food becomes a lot worse.
ii.
They throw us out on the third day. I am barely intact but the boy is whole, completely made, crowned with a name that will carry him to his grave.
We nearly called him Noah, but we heard it rustling between the curtains. A popular choice.
I am incapable of original thought, so R takes it on, digs out the list we slaved over in another universe.
Tristan, Caleb, Alfred, he recites, whilst the boy sucks seriously on my still-empty breast.
Jonas, Gregor, Bob, he intones over the boy’s sludge-filled nappies.
Percy, Woody, Zeb, he sings at the window. London swims out in front of him, darkly reflective. The boy jerks his head on the last syllable, and this decides it. Z we call him, ZZZZ we hum, hoping it
will make him a sleeper.
* * *
We load Z into his high-tech protective car seat. We drive on the roads that are left.
R puts the Beach Boys on. We get around. We get out, somehow.
R learnt to drive on a farm. He finds tracks, dog-legs, narrow lanes where birds are singing.
* * *
Z sleeps all the way along the curved spine of the country, up into the mountains where R was born.
When we arrive, his mother runs from the house with her arms open.
* * *
In these days we shall look up and see the sun roaming across the night and the grass rising up. The people will cry without end, and the moon will sink from view.
* * *
R’s father N will not turn the television off. I stay in the kitchen, the only screenless room, with my smarting pulp on a cushion and the baby mushed against my breast.
R’s mother G will not stop talking. This not-stopping seems to be the first side effect.
Everything has been unstopped, is rising to the surface.
* * *
On the third day up high, R starts building. There is a shed in the garden that he says we can live in, with a few modifications.
Z opens his eyes a little more every day. I am constantly aware of the complex process of breath: how the heart has to keep beating, to bring oxygen to the blood, to power the bags of the lungs in and out. Or something. It seems that any moment it could stop. Sometimes he sleeps so quietly it seems that he has gone.
* * *
We mostly lie in R’s old childhood bedroom, now with double bed and Moses basket creaking with Z’s every move.
The news rushes past downstairs like a flow of traffic. Even our flat back there underwater doesn’t make it real.
Z is real, with his tiny cat skull and sweet-smelling crap. The news is rushing by. It is easy to ignore.
* * *
Every morning when I wake up the sheets are wet. I have wet myself from my breasts; I am lying in milk. Z tosses and the wicker stirs. R is already out of bed. If I listen carefully enough I can hear him hammering in the garden.
Words float up the stairs like so many childhood letter magnets. Endgame, civilization, catastrophe, humanitarian.
When I go out in the garden with Z he opens his eyes under the trees and they are filled with clouds. I kiss his head and we watch R together. There is only a pile of planks at the bottom of the garden, no home.
* * *
The times I like are when N and R and sometimes G go out in the car for supplies. It takes hours, due to all the queues and shortages and fights. I am exempt, due to having Z and a healing body.
Sometimes Z sleeps on me while I read or watch a film (never news), sometimes he sleeps in his buggy (donated by neighbours) and I wash his yellow-streaked babygrows in the bathroom sink.
The crap floats down the plug like tiny beasts. The water flows over my hands, it flows into the sink. Z continues to breathe. There is no news. There is no hammering. These are the times that I like.
* * *
G will still not stop talking, but she is happy. She is happier than I have ever seen her before. She keeps saying it’s like in the war, even though she has never been in any wars.
She likes making simple meals from simple things. She likes making the meat stretch through the whole week. When she says this I can only think of sinews pulled tight across the house, connecting the tap to the door handle, the chair to the fireplace.
I never used to know what to say to G, but now I pat Z’s bottom and smile at her. He has given me a purpose.
* * *
So much of life these days is spent feeling that we are on a ship. After the hospital ship, the in-law ship, and the tiny cabin that has become our world.
R is building, but the pile of planks remains.
* * *
The day they don’t come back from shopping is beautiful: sun through green leaves and the baby getting visibly fat.
I have warmed soup, and when the clock gets late I push the pot to the back of the stove.
I sing to Z. I watch the sky dim and switch off.
We go to bed. Instead of putting him in his basket I lay him next to me, and fall asleep with my nose pressed against his pulsing temple.
* * *
And on that day the wind will rush through the fields like a reckoning, and the mothers will hold their children, and the shepherds will lose their sheep.
* * *
In the morning things are empty and strange, like camping used to be. I have started to think of myself as a bear, with my young clinging to my neck, when I hear the car.
R and N climb out slowly. There is no G. They come into the house like soldiers, like fading people from an old photo.
No G.
* * *
A tea towel in the back of the car, a crumple of pastel birds. One of her favourites.
A few ashamed-looking packets in the boot, lying at angles, their sides touching, just.
* * *
R and N sit in the house like they’ve never seen it before. I prop Z on my shoulder, and make tea like you’re supposed to. I stir piles of sugar in.
Too many, R says. Too little.
Pandemonium, N tries, syllables spilling onto the table.
G is nowhere, and the kitchen is full of her, her face shining out from the kettle, the shape of her waist wrapped around jars.
They stare at the tea. R blows his. Neither of them drinks.
iii.
Z has learnt to smile. He has cracked with it. The smiles built up inside him, R and me smiling madly into his face until it couldn’t hold any more. It cracked and out came his smile, urgent, almost demented.
Almost, I say, because he catches my eye like a real smiler, like the first person who learnt to smile. Or cracked with it.
R meanwhile has learnt not to smile. The smiles have sunk down further than we can see. He has also stopped hammering.
* * *
In the ancient times the ocean rose until it covered everything in sight. It covered the trees and the beasts and even the mountains, and ice drifted over their tops.
* * *
Now I have N to baby, as well as Z, and R stays under the duvet. He does not make his fingers into ducks, even when I use him as a cushion for the baby. He does nothing as Z turns towards him, mouth open, looking for milk or salt.
I take the baby away. He smells like his father.
N can get out of bed, sometimes, and dress himself. He can wash himself, occasionally. He cannot cook. G did all that.
They always had a retro relationship, R used to say. Like a beaded purse or beards or big round glasses. Vintage.
* * *
I do what I can: cook pasta and tip tinned sauce over it. I eat more than I need. If I don’t, I might float away. There is only Z holding me to the earth, and he is still so light.
I strap him to my body in the complicated carrier we bought before. He hates it. His body arches like a magic flipping fish.
He insists that I carry him as though I am rescuing him from a fire.
* * *
On the sixth day of all this I go to the garden with a hammer. I look at R’s progress but it means nothing to me. I hit one nail and it goes through the wood at an angle. I do it again. It is satisfying, like sex or murder.
Z watches me from his blanket on the grass. He flinches with every bang. I stop.
* * *
N doesn’t listen to the news any more. Or watch it. No one does. This is how we don’t know for so long. This is how we do it.
There is a channel that only screens talent shows. This is N’s favourite now. He turns it on in the morning, when they have the compilations.
Z enjoys the shows too, and I cannot deny there is something moving about them. Person after person, stepping forward and singing as though it mattered. Crying. Begging for mercy.
We start to eat in front of the TV.
* * *
In the first light of dawn, a black cloud grew from the sea. They saw the shape of the storm coming towards them, taking up the whole of the sky.
* * *
R gets up sometime in the third week. He has decided to be a man. He turns off the talent show. N complains, but R throws the cupboards open dramatically and rummages until they look almost empty. He turns on the news.
It is bad, the news. Bad news as it always was, forever, but worse. More relevant. This is what you don’t want, we realize. What no one ever wanted: for the news to be relevant.
See? R shouts, pointing at the TV. Z starts to cry, right on cue. I pick him up and jiggle him. I whisper-sing in his ear.
* * *
Panic. Crush. G. Panicked. Crushed.
* * *
Z likes it when I sing pop songs, lively ditties about dancing and broken hearts.
Just before he was born, there was a tune everywhere. It wafted from summer cars, steamed from the pavement, snapped out of cereal.
I hum the tune into Z’s balloon cheek: he remembers, I am sure.
We dance. My hands under his loose armpits, his unfocused eyes meeting mine, rolling away.
* * *
Full of him, I used to take the train to work. The tune trailed over my domed self, budded into my ears.
They never announced the platform until the last possible moment. I focused on details to make time go faster; a man’s arm hair wisping from under his watch strap, the crocodile gleam of a woman’s green shoes.
When the number came we arrowed onwards, aimed ahead of each other, all the details lost in the push.
Once, someone knocked me over. An accident, I presumed. He didn’t look back.
* * *
We sleep together now. Every time taking care not to squash the baby, not to suffocate him under our dreams.
At night, more words surge out of R. His version of news fills the square room, the light around the curtains.
The crowds flatten the pillow, they crush the sheets into the crest of a wave. They carry the night away, hour by hour.
When R shouts, Z turns, his downy brow wrinkled towards the noise.
* * *
In the mornings, R has replaced hammering with digging.
We are growing our own vegetables, we are dig-for-victory, we are eco-sustainable heroes.